Being Creative

A gentle bit of chit-chat

What an absolutely glorious day it is today. The sun is shining, the horribly cold wind that we have been having here recently has gone and I have my fingers crossed that Spring has arrived at last. Of all the days to start sniffing, coughing and sneezing it just had to be today! To be fair, it has been coming on for a few days but I am very intolerant of cold bugs - both in myself and in my family - and I thought that if I ignored it it would go away. Yesterday, although the weather was lovely, I wrapped myself up in hat, scarf and fleece and sowed two rows of broad beans on the allotment, thinking the fresh air would do me good. By bedtime it had not done the trick and this morning I was not at my best. So I have declared today a 'dog and blog' day. The boys had nice walks in the sunshine earlier and now that they are sleepily ensconced on their respective sofas, I am able to sit in the warmth of our south-facing sitting room and type away at the keyboard to my heart's content.

With the wind being so bitter last week, I tended to hurry with any activity that involved being out of the house. Consequently, I didn't see many people to talk to and it got me thinking that I would like to get to know more people, more specifically, others who have downshifted like myself. Being a long term reader of Country Living magazine, I put a post on their website forum, and I have been really heartened by the response. Not only have I had encouraging replies - thank you so much, emjay53, juliey and Gilly FB - but the number of people visiting my blog has mushroomed. I'm even getting listed on Google now. Wow! Do please feel free to leave comments on what you think of it. It's not nearly so rewarding if I think I am only talking to myself! It's a funny feeling knowing that so many people are reading my blog. It's rather like expecting visitors at home where you whizz round with the hoover and want your house to look at it's best. I will be casting a very critical eye over my punctuation on all my existing posts and pages later, whilst wearing my 'best' fleece to type my entries! Gilly FB, the violas at the top of the page are for you, so that you know that I am thinking of you.

Although Saturday dawned bright and breezy it rained heavily in the afternoon, so I used the time to make three banana and walnut loaves. I'd bought the bananas in a big bag for a pound at the market on Tuesday and still have a lot of walnuts left from those I collected last autumn. Once the loaves were cooked, I found there wasn't really enough room in the freezer to get two of them in, so, having removed a box of blackcurrants to make space, I made a batch of jam. In case anyone is worried that I am setting myself up as some sort of superwoman, it did take me until nine at night to get everything finished, washed up and put away.

Yesterday, we celebrated our seventeenth wedding aniversary. When we got married we lived in a hamlet in mid-Devon and Carrie, my eldest daughter, wore a little turquoise dress with a straw hat and carried a tiny basket full of wild primroses we'd collected from the hedgerows. The photo above was taken at the cemetery where my dad is buried and I'm really pleased to see that the staff who tend it are allowing these wild plants to flourish and multiply. We also had our annual general meeting for our allotment association yesterday and Si' and myself have taken on the secretary and treasurer's roles jointly for the forthcoming year. It makes sense for us as I am about more during the day to show prospective plot holders round, etc. Si' has been tremendously effective at letting our vacant allotments in the last year and our aim is to let the remaining ones in the next twelve months. We are getting to have a good mix of older and younger plot holders now and and it is developing into a nice little community with a shared interest in common.

I want to end this post by going back to it's title. When I was really busy with my former job, I would see people I might not have seen for ages in the street and apologise, as I passed them, for not having time for a chat. We were always going to catch up at some unspecified time in the future. It's a sad fact of life, then, that those opportunities are missed so, knowing that I would be finishing work, I made 'making time to chat' my New Year's resolution for this year. I'm happy to say that I am still sticking to it; even the dogs will lie down beside me on the pavement if they sense that the conversation will last more than a few minutes! We always made fun of my dad for bending people's ears but, my goodness, I've lost count of the number of people who tell me how much they miss those chats now. Me, included!

My cup(cake) runneth over...

We awoke early on Easter Sunday morning, thinking that we might brave the big car boot sale locally but instead of Easter sunshine outside we were greeted with four inches of snow. My heart went out to the poor Easter Bunny, whose job is already made difficult enough these days, what with Staffordshire bull terriers lurking in many a garden and children clamouring for more chocolate eggs every year! She must have been chilled to the marrow once she'd finished her deliveries and in need of a cup of hot chocolate to warm her up again. I am proud to say that I did not buy a single over-priced, over-packaged, shop-bought egg this year. This is partly because I had planned to make my own chocolate eggs but I didn't get round to ordering the mould until the last minute, so it hasn't arrived yet.It's also because Lucy still has a lot of chocolate from her birthday last week and one person can only eat so much (can't they?). I still intend to make an egg or two once the mould arrives - hopefully today - so watch this space for an update.

Back to Easter Sunday. The snow had all but melted by the time we walked the dogs - though Hector loved shovelling the last bits with his nose - but the wind was still icy. Not the sort of day for tackling outside jobs at all. So, with a heavy heart (not at all, I was delighted) I decided to test out a few new recipes in the warmth of the kitchen. Early last week I'd ordered the book, Cupcake Magic by Kate Shirazi, from Amazon Marketplace and it arrived on Saturday morning. I'd read about Kate in Country Living magazine. A former nurse and health visitor, she now makes brilliant cupcakes from home, using eggs from her rescued battery hens, and posts them out all over the country (the cupcakes, not the hens). Each book sold includes a donation to the Battery Hen Welfare Trust and as free-range eggs are a cause close to my heart I decided to invest in a copy. I was not disappointed. As well as including a wealth of recipes, Kate writes with wit and perception about icing, ingredients, hens and hyperactivity! I have made cupcakes before but they always sink when I take them out of the oven and require a lot of sickly icing to fill in the 'dip' in the middle. Kate's 'basic no-mucking-around cupcake' recipe really works, with flat, golden tops just begging to be iced. Well they did when I followed the instructions. The recipe said to put a heaped teaspoon into each paper case and that the mixture would make about 12 cupcakes. Once I'd filled 12 cases with a heaped teaspoon there was a lot of mixture left, so I added a bit more to each one. This was a mistake as the cupcakes either rose clear of the paper case on baking and/or assumed an alarming slope on top.They were golden alright but not good for icing. Having made a lot of cupcakes in her time, Kate probably suggested the heaped teaspoon to leave a little room for the icing on top. Batch number two were, as we say at our house, just 'baby bear' (whose porridge, chair and bed Goldilocks found to be 'just right'). To see how the professional (Kate) does it, click here to see her cupcakes "in all their glory"!

If you make these yourself, ignore the Supercook liquid food colouring in the supermarket and invest in some proper sugarcraft paste/gel colours. It is nigh on impossible to put the Supercook colouring in one drop at a time and, as the nice lady in the sugarcraftshop told me yesterday, "once it's in, you can't take it out again"! The Sugarflair ones are very longlasting, can be mixed together and you only need a tiny bit, added with a cocktail stick. Our weather forecast is for rain after today so I can see myself having plenty of time to experiment with colour and cupcakes quite soon!

As Si' was cooking our leg of lamb for dinner, I had already decided on a strawberry mascarpone tart for dessert. It was really to use up the left-over strawberries from Lucy's birthday pavlova and yes, I do occasionally buy imported fruit, out of season, so shoot me! In my defence, I bought them from the local market, walked to fetch them and carried them home in a basket, instead of a plastic bag; the green tops went in the compost and I've washed the container to re-use. The recipe is a Nigel Slater one, from his book, The Kitchen Diaries, and in it he suggests a sweet oat biscuit base. Making a batch of biscuits helped to keep the kitchen warm so I felt I was killing two birds with one stone. He suggests a long rectangular tart tin, with a removable base but I found a cicular nine inch version of the same did just as well. I didn't have enough strawberries in the end so added a few frozen raspberries about an hour before serving. The end result was both fragrant and delicious and would have been quite quick to make if I'd had the biscuits made in advance. I'll be adding the recipe to my list of strawberry ones before I return the book to the library. So we might have been chocolate-free for Easter but we certainly enjoyed the home-cooking!

             

Good Friday

I haven't just had a good Friday today but a really rather excellent one. Si' was on holiday, so we didn't have to get up quite so early, and after breakfast we went to show some prospective new starters around the allotments. Si' is the allotment secretary and he has been very successful at letting some of the overgrown vacant plots in the last couple of years. Can you believe that in other areas there are waiting lists for allotment plots? Anyway, the couple seemed very keen and wanted to get started right away. Then we took the boys for a windy walk in the sunshine, up through the cemetary and saw our first green woodpecker of the year, with his startling blood-red cap. On returning, I donned my apron for my annual Good Friday ritual of making my own hot cross buns. I've done it every year since we got married, except for last year when the reminder that I'd always taken one across to my dad, as they came out of the oven, was too raw to bare. We really find the shop-bought variety too sickly to stomach and I enjoy marking the season by making them myself.I had some organic stoneground strong white flour to use up that I bought from Mount Pleasant windmill in the autumn. I got it originally to make bread with but my hands crack terribly during cold weather and I'd not managed to co-ordinate bread-making with a warm spell. Once I'd made the dough, and it was smelling good and yeasty, I put it to rise in the sunny front window before nipping into town. As I returned the sun had gone and it was trying to rain. The dough had not risen as much as I'd have liked and the strong wind kept causing our central heating boiler to cut out, which didn't really help. So I knocked the dough back, divided it up onto greased tins and set them on the hob of our gas cooker, with the oven turned on to create some warmth. Within the hour they had risen beautifully and the oven was nicely pre-heated to cook them in.

After ten minutes I take them out of the oven, briefly, to glaze them with a little sugar dissolved in milk. Just after they'd finshed cooking, and I was easing them off the tins, the sun came out and I whizzed them onto a plate to take this picture. We ate them for tea with lots of butter and they were delicious!

Just as I was about to download the pictures onto the computer, I noticed that the daffodils I'd brought back as buds from the allotment on Wednesday had opened, presumably in the morning's sun. They are a mixture of yellow ones I'd planted in the autumn, for picking, and some that are orange and pale yellow that I'd inherited with my allotment. They had been sitting in the window but I'd moved the vase next to the computer whilst photographing the hot cross buns. I'd mixed them with some dogwood stems, with pinky-tipped leaves just emerging, and I was quite overwhelmed with what a bright splash of spring colour they made, especially as the sun had disappeared again. I never think of daffodils as having a strong scent but these smell lovely, even sitting two feet away from them as I am now.

So today has been full of lots of little treats which were all about noticing and appreciating and none of which involved a shopping bag. Perhaps when Lucy, her boyfriend, Siffy, and myself make Easter nests tomorrow, I will be able to think of it as 'even better Saturday'. I hope so. Enjoy you're Easter holiday, whatever you have planned!

My Other Half

Today it is my husband Simon's birthday and I feel it is quite apt that he should be the subject of my first post in the 'Inspiration' category as he inspires me every day. We are totally different in temperament; he is the chalk to my cheese. I am small and full of beans, keen to tackle everything all at once and wearing myself to a frazzle in the process. Simon, on the other hand, is tall, much more laid back and measured in temperament and often possessed of patience and perseverance of saintly proportions! Whilst I ranted and became disillusioned with the teething problems of this blog, Si' systematically tackled each one as it arose, calmly and without fuss.When my father died fifteen months ago, Si' was a source of gentle light in the darkness that was bereavement. He also has a very kind heart which, now and again, a foolish person mistakes for meekness. It was he who first suggested I might give up my job some months since, for the sake of my health and - knowing me better, perhaps, than I do myself - he was absolutely right. Although different in disposition, we share a love of such a diversity of things and I see that as being our glue when times get tough. He's gone off to work today in his zingy orange Ted Baker tie with a box of home-made ginger biscuits under his arm to share with friends. Happy Birthday, darling; you are the icing on my cake!

Digging for Dahlias

This week I have ordered my dahlias. If you have read my Growing page you will understand that this will cause a certain amount of trepidation on my part, so this afternoon I am going to clear their intended patch on the allotment and dig in plenty of nourishing home-made compost in readiness. Since I won't actually be able to plant them out until the risk of frost has passed at the end of May, I am considering growing some green manure on that patch first. This would prevent weeds growing on the prepared bed, prevent nutrients being washed out of the soil in the meantime and improve the soil structure for the dahlias. The idea then is that you dig the green manure into the soil a couple of weeks before the dahlias go in, to give it chance to break down into the soil. I buy my green manure seeds from The Organic Gardening Catalogue, the retail arm of Garden Organic (formerly HDRA).

A visit to the National Dahlia Collection, near Penzance, last summer persuaded me that I really must bite the bullet with dahlia growing this time, lest my garden should remain bereft of these brassy blooms forever!

Meringues for Mother's Day

I love making meringues. They are quick, easy and taste a million times better than anything you can buy in the shops. Also, as Nigella Lawson will tell you, "people really do seem far more impressed by a home-made pudding, however simple, than they would be by the most lovingly produced main course". For years I thought they were difficult and the preserve of 'good cooks' but I've found that if you can wield an electric mixer then you can make your own meringues. I buy free-range eggs, from the greengrocer, that come from a village on the edge of town (so are low in food miles) and I find I get much better results with these than supermarket eggs. Nothing is wasted, either. The egg whites go into the meringues, the dogs have the yolks with their breakfast and the shells and cardboard box find themselves in the compost bucket. I keep meaning to make an egg custard with the yolks instead but have not quite got there yet. My mum loves meringues and so last night I made her a batch for Mother's Day.

The meringues in the photos are, in true Blue Peter fashion, some I made earlier (in the week). On the same day, I bought some lovely primrose plants for the front garden in a multitude of gorgeous colours. Since I had the camera out to capture the meringues, one thing led to another and soon the upstairs sitting room had been transformed into a makeshift photography studio full of food and flowers. First I snapped the meringues, then took some shots of the primroses that I'd picked and arranged in tiny containers. Inevitably, I began experimenting with taking photographs of the two together.

 

I spent a very happy hour snapping away until the light began to fade and Lucy arrived home from school. Once the meringues had served their purpose as photographic props we felt quite justified in eating them.... 

As for the primroses, I have spent a most contented Mother's Day afternoon planting them into our tiny front garden to compliment the miniature daffs that are already in bloom. Massed together, they look almost good enough to eat!