September 2013

September 12th:
The perils of food growing: most of the nearly-ripe tomatoes, plus a couple of the still-green ones, have split because of this week's rain. C'est la vie.

September 11th:
Saw what we think is a hornet in our front garden.  Never seen anything like it before. It's quite large, about as wide as a honeybee and maybe three or more times as long, with a bright yellow end, and a burgundy colored thorax. The first time I saw it, about a week ago, it seemed to keep bumping against one of our rosemary plants, which are not in flower at the moment. Scary.

September 6th:
It seems that traditional French milk producers are just as beleaguered as their English counterparts.
Here is a link to a campaign to save traditional milk production, http://sauvonslelait.fr/ and an appeal set to music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guMYOFphto&feature=youtu.be
which I came across via a link from Clotilde's blog, Chocolate and Zucchini.

September 1st:
At last the tomatoes are starting to go yellow.  They are a yellow variety from the Heritage Seed Library, Scotland Yellow.
Hopefully they will ripen before blight sets in, otherwise I have a recipe for Green Tomato Curry from Floyd's India. Last year's attempts to grow tomatoes were a total disaster.

Found some fresh pistachio nuts in the shops. They have a thin leathery outer skin, pink to black in colour. When you peel that off you get the hard shell that we are used to seeing on pistachios. The texture of the fresh pistachio kernels is similar to that of fresh hazelnuts.

Bought some Turkish-style ice cream, dondurma. Ice cream is made in Linton, Cambridgeshire. Contains salep, and doesn't seem to contain cream, so maybe a low-fat type of ice cream. The color was very white, unusual for cow's milk ice cream, and more like some goat's milk ice cream that we had at a Food Festival in Hyde Park in the early '90's.

August 2013

In the photo:
Greens that I have been growing, with seeds from Garden Organic's Heritage Seed Library.
Left to right: top row - Asparagus lettuce (celtuce), lettuce var. Liller, lettuce var. Amish Deer Tongue,
lettuce var. Bath Cos,  bottom row - chrysanthemum greens, turnip var. Nabica (grown for the leaves),
callaloo (amaranth) var. Mrs. McGhie.


August 17th:
Bought some Iranian ice cream in a Turkish food shop. Ice cream is made by the Village Bakery in East Finchley. Decorated with pistachios and flavoured with rose water and salep,
tastes like Turkish delight, unusual and very, very nice.

August 10th:
Bought some green olives to cure. Apparently they come from Cyprus. Surprised to see green olives in August, I thought they were supposed to arrive in October, and was surprised last year when I found some in  the shops in September. Attempting to cure them in 20% brine. Hopefully that will stop them growing moulds.

Went to see a play in St. Leonard's Church, Shoreditch. I  think this is the church in the Oranges and Lemons rhyme, as in "When I grow rich say the bells of Shoreditch.''

August 4th:
Tasted white currants possibly for the first time. Taste not as distinctive as that of blackcurrants or redcurrants.

Spring at last

It's been a long hard winter, and it seemed like it was never going to end. The first daffodil in our front garden finally bloomed on March 10th, several weeks later than usual, and it was so cold they kept going until about the 23rd of April, by which time the tulips were nearly ready. The cherry plums that normal bloom in early to mid-February were at least a month later this year.

But over the last 3 weeks or so, the daytime temperatures finally climbed above 10 degrees celsius, and we've also had several sunny days, and nature has fast-forwarded. The lilies of the valley were barely breaking through the ground a few weeks ago, but they've nearly got to full-size, although this year they weren't in bloom on May 1st, the flower buds aren't ready to open yet.

But the red camellia across the street suddenly put on a spectacular display, with all the flowers opening at once. The magnolias flowered, and all of the ornamental cherries. Today I noticed that the cherries with the  large pompon-like pink flowers are in full bloom. Our Morello cherry is also in full bloom.

Our rhubarb, which I usually reckon is big enough to eat around Easter, is nearly there, and I'm planning to cook some of it over the weekend.

And so we have fast-forwarded to the first bank holiday of the summer. It's been obvious that we're marching towards summer since the days are much longer and the sunlight wakes me at 5 am,
but since it's been so cold and gray, and all the spring flowers were behind schedule, it was difficult not to feel that it was still winter.

Old World Rye Bread

D has been on a bread-baking kick the last few weeks, since he discovered that Sainsbury's no longer seemed to be selling the organic wholemeal loaf that he likes.

I thought I would take advantage of his current enthusiasm for bread making and get him to bake a bread recipe that I had bookmarked a while ago but not got around to baking yet. This was the Old World Rye Bread recipe from Dolores Casella's A World of Breads, which I came across on Natalia's blog
Gatti, Fili e Farina. The recipe was also blogged about on the One Perfect Bite blog.

In the photos the bread looked like a lovely black loaf, similar to the Pumpernickel Bread from The Good Cook: Breads which I had made years ago, but without the fuss of having to boil potatoes and prepare polenta.

We made a few minor changes to the recipe:

D used 2 teaspoons of active dried yeast intead of 2 Tablespoons,
1 Tablespoon of caraway seeds instead of 2 Tablespoons,
Just slightly more than 1 teaspoon of salt instead of 2 teaspoons,
and white bread flour.

He used American Grandma's molasses because we happened to have some on hand. In the absence of American molasses I would probably use a 50:50 mixture of black treacle and golden syrup.

The result was a loaf with a wonderful rich dark brown color and a great flavour, which we will definitely make again.

May Bank Holiday Weekend 2012

Bank holiday weekends have a reputation for being washouts over here. We get few enough sunny days, but it's almost like you can bet that the weather isn't going to cooperate when you have a long weekend.

This one is no exception, but not only is it grey, it's freezing cold, with a maximum around 9, and the weather forecasters yesterday saying that it had been warmer on Christmas Day!

I told people last week that we were planning to have our bank holiday picnic/barbecue indoors. I have been trying to conjure up the image of blue skies and warmer climes by playing my Compagnie Creole tape that I bought when I was in Paris in the '80s.

Sour 'Green Apple'

I bought this sour green fruit in the Whitechapel Market several weeks ago. I don't know what it is, but it looks like a large green apple with a thick stem, and has a very sour lemony taste when cooked.

From left: Sicilian blood orange, small green citron, unidentified sour green fruit.

Indian Sweets from Brick Lane

Clockwise from top left: almond barfi, plain laddoo, chumchum.