What Are You Looking At?

Well I was looking out over the view  .....

... Rosy was convinced there was something just through the fence that divides Chicken World from our bonfire area on the edge of the woods, I couldn't see or hear anything.

Meanwhile in the henhouse Mother Goose who is broody again, sits looking at the inside of the nesting box all day and all night unless I lift her out and make her go over for something to eat.  Then she takes the opportunity to have a go at all the other chickens.

This seasons chicks, Jack and Jill love that their Mum is once again sat on a nest and cuddle in with her every night, she doesn't seem to mind this extra feathery warmth at all.

Suky as usual is looking at the inside of her eyelids ... she sleeps so well.

And in a rare turn of events Ginger and Rosy are looking at us ... from the same bed!!

What are you looking at ?

Sue xx

Oooh ... New Books and Free Seeds

Two new books made their way into the house last month.  I meant to blog about them as they arrived, but harvesting and jam making got me distracted  :-)

The first book is by Blogging Buddy Suzy Bowler of Sudden Lunch fame.  It's full of amazing recipes and ideas for that old favourite the Scone, and believe me it is a favourite in this house.  Sweet scones, savoury scones, no matter how you say it whether it rhymes with stone or gone they taste delicious.  I like a good old cheese scone (we say it to rhyme with gone), so does Lovely Hubby sometimes but he likes a cheese scone with jam, I prefer it simply with lots of lovely Lurpak butter.

This book is just what I had been looking for to give me more inspiration to try other flavours.

I really recommend this one  :-)

In the same parcel came this book, written by Sophie Thompson who won last years Celebrity Masterchef.  

This is not just the usual 'churn a book out quickly and make some money' type of book that normally follows this kind of programme, it is a delightful glimpse into her own unique kitchen and has lots of firm family recipes spanning four generations of her family.

The illustrations are brilliant ....

... but it's the recipes with their family anecdotes that are the main, and best part of the book.

I'm about halfway through this one at the moment, it's my 'upstairs' book, downstairs I have Alys Fowler's 'Abundance' on the go.  It's getting confusing and I am trying not to dip into a third book although I am sorely tempted by my new Jamie Oliver book.

This excess of new  books will be grinding to a halt in a couple of months with the start of my 'no new purchases' year, can I really do it I'm asking myself at the moment ... a whole year of not buying a single book!!

Last month I also bought this magazine with it's packet of free seeds.

 I very nearly didn't buy it as I hadn't completely read through my subscription magazine Kitchen Garden, and with only one free packet of seeds on the cover thought perhaps I should just save my money, but I'm so glad I did.  I read this one from cover to cover and it had so much useful to me at the time information in it, it was worth every penny .... and I've got a packet of Swede seeds to add to my collection for next year.

Sue xx

Chilli Peppers

This single Chilli Pepper plant that I confess to buying ready grown from the garden centre back in May of this year has been worth every penny of it's £5.99 price tag.  It has given us such a huge crop of chillies both to eat over the summer finely sliced in lots of dishes, and also to freeze and have in store over the Winter.

I pick them off every time I see that at least half of the chillies on the plant have turned red.  I usually get a mix of teeny tiny ones and some real whoppers.

To freeze I simply wash and dry them and then put them in a single layer to open freeze, once frozen they are simply tipped into a ziplock bag and placed back in the freezer.  When you want to use one they thaw in minutes or can be sliced while still frozen or just thrown whole into any dish that you might want to fish it out of before serving.

This is how the bush looks this morning, once again ready for another harvest .... but if the truth were told I always leave them a little too long on the plant just because they just look so wonderful.  I don't like chilli that much but a few little red flecks in many a dish bring a warmth and a treat for the eye, so I am learning to ... bit by bit.

I've looked after the plant and it has been fed along with the tomatoes all through the growing season, now I'm wondering if I can slow it's growth and nurture it through the Winter months by bringing it into the house.  Has anyone else successfully done this with a bought in plant?  My chilli seed packets seem to think that a homegrown plant could be nurtured this way, so I'm hoping unless they brought it on too quickly and too early I should be able to do it with this little goldmine of a plant.

Sue xx

Rhubarb and Ginger Jam

Now all the building work is finished we are taking time to make our land look a bit softer, neater and hopefully eventually, take away some of the hard lines and industrial look that has been created thanks to the planning department in their wisdom specifying that in order to do as we wanted to make our entrance safer for all users, we had to have a huge turning area within our gates.  

While we do this this we are repairing the damage that has been done to various parts of the place by large numbers of big booted workmen and big machinery in wet weather.  So a lot of this has involved sowing grass seed.  It would have been horrendously expensive and time consuming to turf everywhere so we bought half a dozen big boxes of grass seed, and Lovely Hubby has made it his mission over the last couple of weekends to make new grass beds where only rubble once lay, to fill in gaps  and dips with sifted soil, raking it smooth and into the contours of the hillside and then scattering the seeds. Some of which took on a green tinge within days, thanks to this wonderful early Autumn sunshine and the rainy Welsh nights.

Just before he started on the area in the photo he cleared around the Rhubarb patch with his strimmer and decided to bring me all the remaining rhubarb.  In total there was just over two kilos, so out came the recipe books and I quickly found a recipe for Rhubarb and Ginger Jam.

As it called for 1kg of Rhubarb I just doubled everything up and used up all the rhubarb in one fell swoop.  I got eight full sized jars and a handy little taster in my mini enamel mug.  Which gave us enough for a crackerful each to test the jam .....

... and a lovely dollop with some natural yogurt for my breakfast the next day.

Once cooled and labelled .....

... they neatly slotted into the 'Preserves' shelf of the tall cupboard in the kitchen which is filling up nicely with all this jam-making and pickling.

I've got a little list in the cupboard so I can see exactly what we have in store ready for a big food stocktake in a couple of months before the Challenge starts.

I'll put the Rhubarb and Ginger Jam recipe on my recipe page for anyone interested, but I found it in this book if you already have it.  I'm currently making another recipe from the book also using ginger but this time it is cooked with Marrow as I still have a few of my enormous courgettes to use up  :-)

Sue xx

Mavis

There's been a few of you who have asked about Mavis recently, so I thought a quick Saturday post all about our lovely wayward terrier would be the order of the day.

For those of you who don't know Mavis's story you can catch up Here and then her second 'rescue' after she went missing for almost five months last year Here ....... and then a funny incident Here

Physically she's doing well these days.  She will never be back to the condition we got her to after her first 'rescue' but she is lithe and healthy.  She only weighs in at 5.7kgs which is light, but not too skinny for her lightweight bone structure.  She is best friends with Ginger and they are usually to be found curled up somewhere together ....

... here Ginger is the beauty between two Jack Russelly thorns.

And 'thorny' is how I would describe the relationship between these two .

At times they can be great together, eager to see the same things and be with us, but now that Mavis feels a little more confident in herself she challenges Rosy's idea of her own leadership time and time again.  With little Charley here to act as mediator and break up these confrontations, pushing her sweet little body between the aggressors and immediately diffusing situations, things worked out, since we so sadly lost Charley at the start of this year there is no one that they will accept as mediator so things escalate into full blown doggy fights which we deal with as and when they happen and have managing techniques to keep them as infrequent as possible.

I have tried doing extra training with Mavis but she cowers and retreats to her scared ways with any formal training, so I am gradually and almost imperceptibly teaching her things without her realising.

For instance as the only dog out of the three that must always wear a lead when we are out of the house, she tends to get her long extending lead wrapped around things, in fact she's a master at making a 16ft lead end up tying her directly to the clothesline pole so she can't move!!

So I taught her 'round'.  While we are out walking if she takes a different path to me and ends up on the other side of a pole or tree if I say "round" she will back track her steps and end up on my side of the offending object, she can even weave a double 'round' if I say it again.  As this is one command the other dogs don't know I think she is a clever little darling for learning it.

It's little things like this that make life easier for us and make her feel special ... because she always gets praise for doing it right.

Mavis even did her own blog post this time last year  HERE, it's got one of my favourite photos of her in it looking up at me with those gorgeous eyes of hers, so I'll link to it again.

How can you not praise a dog that looks at you with eyes like these :-)

She brings madness and chaos to our lives, but when she curls up in the crook of your arm while you are watching television, or takes to bed with whatever dog or cat will allow her to cuddle in with them,  you know that all is right in Mavis's world, and if it's alright in her world .... it's alright in ours.

Have a good weekend.

Sue xx

End of Summer Soup

One at a time please!!

This believe it or not is a Courgette, well in its opinion it's a Marrow.  I have lots more like this still in the Veggie Patch so my challenge to myself at the moment to use them up while I can.  The recipe books are out in force for ideas of how to use them all up in different ways, I just get a bit waylaid reading other things in them while I should be perusing the squash sections  :-)

But this one I decided on Wednesday was to become a pan of soup, with no recipe needed.

I chopped it up and added it to two thawed out packs of Veg Hash and then threw in some old carrots I found tucked at the back of the bottom drawer of the fridge ....

... seriously old carrots!!

And they were fine, once washed, peeled and topped and tailed they went into the pan.

Then I added all the odds and sods that I had harvested from the hillside during last weekends marathon tidy up session.  Four heads of sweet corn, lots of little cauliflowers, just all the little bits and pieces that by themselves would not have added much to a meal.

Once it had been simmering away for a couple of hours in the bottom oven of the Aga it was gloriously rich looking and smelled wonderful.

I left it to cool for half an hour while I walked the dogs around the paddock, bowl in hand to get the last lot of Blackberries I was allowing myself to pick.  Tradition says that you should never pick them after the last day of September as the Devil pees on them in October, so I got them just in time.  I think this was started to stop little children picking them when they are starting to go old and damp, and of course so that there are always some available for the wildlife.

This last 200 grams brings our blackberry harvest total to three kilos, a brilliant amount and looking at mysupermarket.com for a price comparison it shows that I have saved at least £30 by gathering in my own.  This latest little picking were open frozen and then added to last weeks berries in the freezer.  One and a half kilos ready to use for whatever we need them for.

After my picking session I whizzed up the soup with my stick blender and had a small bowl of  'End of Summer' soup as it was christened, with a dollop of yogurt ...

... and the rest of it, apart from one bowlful for the next day,  very appropriately went into yogurt pots and was placed in the freezer for future consumption.  So a grand total of two bowls and three kilos of 'End of Summer' soup.

This harvesting lark is keeping me very busy at the moment, but it will all be worthwhile in a few months, when we can tuck into all the goodness of Summer on a cold wintery day.

Sue xx

Conkers, Sticks and Blackberries

Something I posted about HERE this time last year was conkers, on 8th October so just one week later to be exact ... where did September go to!!    It was all about how having a conker on each of your windowsills will keep away spiders.

For the sceptics amongst you it really does work, and this last two weeks have been a testament to that.  As the weather turned cooler and the nights drew in spiders had been making their way into the warmth of the house at an alarming rate, well alarming to me ... fun for the dogs who love to chase the big, hairy long legged beasties when they run across the floor.

There was nothing for it but to go out conker hunting ... so we did!!

We walked along the river bank in Llanrwst with the dogs then Lovely Hubby had a fun filled half hour chucking sticks up trees and diving out of the way before they came back down on him,  the dogs thought he had gone mad and would have nothing to do with this vertical stick throwing and kept well out of his way, as did I only rushing in to help pick up the bright green prickly balls as they landed.

So for the last week the conkers have been back on all windowsills except one, the one Mavis and Rosy can get onto .... and they love eating conkers ... and for the last week there has not been a single spider sighting .... PHEW!!

In other news ....

We went out picking blackberries again and managed to get just over 1.3 kgs of luscious large berries.

Last time I made Apple and Blackberry Jelly so this time I decided.to make Apple and Blackberry Crumbles.  Seven for the freezer and one we ate the same night as a treat for all the painful picking we had endured .... boy do those scratches tingle when you get in the bath later that night and have just about forgotten about your battle wounds.

I say crumbles, but in fact I have frozen these as just apple and blackberries that have been cooked together, so they can be used as crumbles, pies, cobblers or even thawed and added to a sponge mix  to make a delicious cake or pudding, very adaptable.  I keep my basic crumble mix in a big tub in the freezer and use it as it is or add extras to it such as oats, nuts or dried fruit depending on the mood we are in and what the kitchen cupboards demand we use up.

I'm busy reading my way through one of my favourite books again at the moment for more processing and preserving inspiration.  Alys Fowler is one of my gardening heroes and she writes extremely well.  I love the pictures in this book of the things she is doing, her home and Isabel, her lovely Jack Russell dog.  We chatted about our Jack Russells amongst other things over lunch at Yeo Valley Organic Gardens a couple of years ago when we met HERE it was a brilliant day.

I'm off for a bit more inspiration now, it's a hard job but somebody has to do it  :-)

Sue xx