Being Creative

Currant thoughts

Here we are at last. If you have been calling back to Being Creative in the past two weeks, wondering when this post would finally materialise, then thank you for your patience. In the dry months of April and June I had feared that we would have a very meagre harvest of all our crops this year but it just goes to show how impossible it is to predict, as everything has arrived in abundance. And once it has arrived it needs dealing with - in one way or another - asap. I want to write about the growing part in my next post but - suffice to say - this summers bounty, whilst providing me with food for thought (and body), has contrived to keep me away from the computer!

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I am very fortunate in that I inherited most of my currant bushes with my allotments. They are easy to grow and require very little in the way of maintenance. Unlike seeds - which we tend to fork out for on an annual basis - you only have to pay for them once and they will give you a return on that investment year after year. Blackcurrants, redcurrants and white currants are rarely offered for sale and when they are the cost is usually prohibitive; at last months farmer's market, our local fruit farm were asking £2.50 for half a pound of blackcurrants. Sadly, with 2lb needed for my jam recipe, preserving them at this price would be just too costly to contemplate. In their defence, they have to pay someone to pick them and they are quite time-consuming to harvest. However, I find picking my own currants to be the perfect excuse to sit outside on a sunny day - on an upturned bucket, cushioned with a kneeling pad - and letting my thoughts wander whilst systematically stripping each branch of ripe fruit. After several years experience I have found this method to be much kinder on the back than picking them standing up!

Each year I pick about 20lbs of blackcurrants. I thought it would be less this year, as I'd pruned the bushes quite heavily in the winter and because of the lack of rain after they'd flowered, but they still yielded just over 21lb. For the first few years we didn't bother to net the ripening fruit but the rise in the pigeon population over the last couple of seasons has made it something of a necessity. We've knocked in posts around each group of bushes with horizontal crossbars nailed on and these form a permanent structure. Then, once the vulnerable period approaches, we only have to tie the nets in place to protect the crop and remove them again after harvest. I'm always very aware that birds and other small creatures can easily become tangled and perish in netting so we try to get it as taught as possible - by weighing down the bottoms with heavy objects or tent pegs -  and we also check it regularly. The fruit is ripe when it gives a little when pressed. Most of my blackcurrants have quite a dull, black appearance when ripe but the later ones are quite shiny. I can't recommend a variety, as I didn't plant mine originally, but if you're considering growing them yourself you can extend the season by having early, mid and late season varieties, just like apples.

I first picked blackcurrants when they grew in our our garden in Devon and I made my first ever jam from them. They are very high in pectin and are brilliant for first time jam as it is pretty much guaranteed to set. The sharp flavour of the fruit gives a jam that is not too sweet and it is always the one that earns the most praise. As I've mentioned before, I prefer to freeze my blackcurrants after picking and make my jam when the kitchen benefits from a good warming and not when all the windows need to be wide open and the smell beckons every wasp in the neighbourhood! I never bother removing the remains of the flower from the top of the currant and if you're careful when you're picking them you can pull them off the bush without any green stalk attached either. I wash mine before freezing, let them drain for a while in the colander and then turn them out onto trays lined with old tea towels. Don't use your best tea towels as the juice stains badly. Then I open-freeze them on flat baking tins lined with greaseproof paper and, once they're hard, pack them into boxes, label and return to the freezer. If you'd like the recipe I use for Blackcurrant Jam, you can access it by clicking on the title or I've added it to the recipe section in the right-hand column above. Blackcurrants also make very useful additions to smoothies, as they are high in vitamin c, but do use them sparingly as their strong taste can overpower.

Redcurrants are equally easy to grow but if you want to harvest any crop at all from your bushes it is imperative to net them as soon as the fruit starts to swell, never mind turns to red. I think it's possibly blackbirds that love them so much but in their eagerness to eat them most fruit falls to the ground. We have one bush that we continually forgot to net as it is the only currant planted amongst several gooseberries. This year we got the net on just in time and harvested several pounds from that one bush alone. They are fiddlier to pick than blackcurants as their skins are softer and burst much more easily. They grow in clusters - like the blackcurrants - attached to long 'strings'. I pick them by the string, wash and dry them as for blackcurrants, and then open freeze them with the strings still attached. Once solid, you can strip them easily of the strings, without bursting them, before returning to the freezer in boxes.The taste of red - or white - currants is not as strong as that of the black and they can be eaten raw as well as cooked. If I have some particularly large and beautiful strings of berries, I leave them on the strings and use them for decorating pavlovas, or ice cream, as shown above. They are easy to eat then, straight from the strings and they do look wonderfully opulent! If you are using them to make redcurrant jelly, then you don't need to bother about stripping the stalks as they get left behind in the sieve/jelly bag along with the fruit pulp anyway. One of my favourite recipes for this soft fruit is Redcurrant Ice Cream (click title for link). It produces an ice cream with the characteristic dry aftertaste of redcurrants and, to me, it epitomises summer. You can use this recipe both with or without an ice cream maker and you can use the same recipe - with the same quantities of fruit - with either blackberries or raspberries, though I haven't tried either of these myself yet.

Redcurrants are rich in pectin and their juice can be used to help jams to set that are low in acid/pectin without detracting from their flavour. For maximum effect, it should be added before the fruit is cooked and at a rate of 150ml of redcurrant juice per kilo of fruit. Redcurrant jelly can be served with greasy meats like lamb or duck  or it can be used to add a glaze to fruit tarts for a professional finish. I also think they make a good alternative fruit to blueberries in the Very Wonderful Blueberry Muffin recipe. 

I haven't got a whitecurrant bush myself but was given these by a friend on the allotment. Don't their translucent skins make a wonderful contrast with the opaque ones of the blackcurrants? I think I may invest in a bush for their stunning visual quality alone! 

Using my loaf

I find it an interesting concept that when I was working full-time, one of the most cherished of my - largely domestic - fantasies was to have the time to bake my own bread. Even then, I had long since given up on the cheap supermarket sliced loaf in favour of something we sliced ourselves that tasted better but with being out all day we wasted a lot of part loaves that went stale in our absence. There are only so many times that one family can enjoy bread-and-butter pudding to use it up! More than that, I was concerned about what we were asking of that bread: to look appetising, yet sit on a supermarket shelf for a couple of days and what extra ingredients had to be added to enable it to do that. In my grandparent's day - and still, very largely, in continental countries I've visited, like Greece or France - bread was bought, or made, fresh every day. My mother's generation were encouraged to leave behind the domestic drudgery of preparing three meals a day and to pursue full-time employment outside the home as a form of liberation. Labour saving gadgets -  like the huge chest freezer that lived in our garage - were purchased with that extra income and could be filled with a week's worth of 'economy white sliced' until the next big shop. Taste and quality were exchanged for the cheap and expedient. One of my fondest memories of visiting my grandfather's house as a child was that he still bought proper Hovis loaves - with the name on the side - which tasted delicious! So although bread can still be bought for a song, it is rather like the jam I mentioned in my previous post, Jam today. If you want to have the best quality, it is cheaper to make it yourself than to buy it. Speciality rye bread in Tesco costs £1.38 for a 400 gram loaf. I reckon I made two 500 gram loaves at home, with a greater percentage of rye flour and including cooking costs, for less than the price of one of the Tesco loaves. You also have the added benefit of knowing exactly what has gone into it. We ran out of home-made bread on Sunday and bought a loaf of the said rye bread from Tesco to tide us over. As we were eating it for our lunch, I noticed it had a much stronger flavout than the home-made sort I was becoming used to and I asked Si' what he thought made it so strongly flavoured. I expected the reply to be something like the inclusion of more caraway but his answer was that it was probably sugar. It really put me off my lunch.

I decided that if I was going to go to the trouble - as I perceived it - of making my own, then I was going to invest in top-quality ingredients. We are lucky to live within striking distance of two windmills that produce stoneground organic flour. One is at Tuxford, in Nottinghamshire, whose flour we've bought at Retford farmer's market and the other is Mount Pleasant Windmill, at Kirton Lindsey in North Lincolnshire, that we buy from the mill itself. It is also available by mail order and is on my list of Sites to Inspire, Inform and Delight. The miller at Kirton Lindsey is very knowledgeable about what he produces and has been very generous with his advice, when we've sought it. I'd struggled to get my head round the best time of day to bake, that wouldn't compromise my daily routine. His suggestion - which has worked amazingly well for me - was to bake in an evening. I start mixing the ingredients and kneading the dough before starting on the dog's tea, so at about five o'clock. I then put it in our rear attic - which is warm and draught-free - to rise, whilst I start our own meal and Lucy and Si' walk the dogs. By the time we've finshed our meal, it has usually risen enough to be knocked back and placed on it's baking sheet, or in a tin, to rise again. I either wash up, water the garden, or both, while this is taking place. It goes in the oven whilst I read, or catch up with stuff on the computer. The miller said he left his out, to cool, overnight, ready for the following morning but I find it depends on the type of loaf and that some can dry out a little much on the crust for our liking. I tend to let it cool and bag it up to keep the moisture in. I've also gleaned a lot of useful information from three books I ordered through the library, Bread, from ciabatta to rye by Linda Collister, Dough, simple comtemporary bread by Richard Bertinet and The Handmade Loaf by Dan Lepard. I have found the first of these most useful for getting started and have only used it's recipes thus far.

The other two seem more advanced but I have adopted some of their tips. Richard Bertinet suggests weighing your water as it is more accurate than measurement alone. I'd wondered why my first wholemeal loaf was so dry and when I weighed the water subsequently, found my plastic measuring jug to give a wholly inaccurate reading. Always on the look out for a bargain I bought this book, which contains an accompanying DVD, from The Works, for £4.99, a quarter of it's original price. As I don't have access to fresh yeast, I bought the Dove Farm dried quick yeast from Tesco. You mix it in with the flour and salt, before adding the liquid, and it's worked really well for me; much better than I ever achieved by starting dried yeast in water first. For a while, I toyed with the idea of getting a breadmaker but what I really enjoy is the kneading, so I decided against it. Kneading dough can be very energetic and is certainly less costly than the gymn for improving the muscles in your arms! I also find it therapeutic, working away the stresses of the day as the dough comes together to become springy and elastic. Apparently, it's not necessary to chuck loads of flour in with dough whilst kneading; as it's worked, and the gluten develops, it will stop being sticky of it's own accord. This gluten allows the dough to expand or stretch during fermentation and to trap the resultant gases to create a lighter loaf. The first bread I made was New York Rye with caraway seeds in it which gives it a lovely flavour. I was thrilled to bits when it rose to resemble those in the book and had great fun slashing the top of the loaves with a sharp blade to produce the slits in the crust. Being used to shop-bought bread, I initially thought it lacked enough salt but it provided the perfect foil for smoked salmon or toasted with slightly salted butter. My white bread looked as if it had spent time on a sun bed, being a slightly golden colour. This was because the flour is unbleached and it certainly made very tasty sandwiches with some boiled ham from our local butchers. Yesterday, I tried The Grant Loaf, invented accidentally by one Doris Grant in 1944. Linda Collister recommends it as the first recipe in her book to try as it requires no kneading and only one short rise in the tin. It uses more water than most recipes and in mixing it I was reminded of the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby from my childhood. Each time I tried to mix it with my hands, the mixture stuck more and more firmly to them! Eventually, I managed to get it into the tin but the recipe said to leave it to rise for longer than the suggested 25-35 minutes if dried, rather than fresh, yeast had been used. I went to look after 40 minutes and it had risen clear out of the tin and had begun to casacde down the sides of the tin. To make matters worse, the cylinder had run out for our gas oven and I'd already had to ask my mother to pre-heat her oven, to cook it, in readiness. I decided to trim off the surplus dough and keep it back for a future sourdough starter.

I sprinkled the top with sesame seeds, which gave a lovely nutty flavour, but you can use whatever seeds you have to hand. Once in the oven, the dough rose over the edges once again, making it very difficult to remove from the tin to see if it was cooked. Luckily, I managed to remove it in one piece and the resultant loaf was like nothing I'd seen before in wholemeal bread. It was well-risen and light but more than anything it was thoroughly moist. Having had so many problems producing it, I was going to warn readers against it but I must say it is thoroughly worth the effort. I think next time I will put the dough into two 2-pound loaf tins, rather than one, as the recipe suggests. It is still wondeful this morning and I am toying with the idea of some toasted for my breakfast, smeared with the new batch of gooseberry jam. What better way to start the day?

Spring food

Years ago, when our children were young, we lived in Wales and kept a small flock of sheep. From the beginning of March onward, they would start to lamb and this meant visiting their field every three to four hours during the day, starting at about six in the morning, with the last visit at ten at night. Many gave birth perfectly well by themselves but the shearlings - those ewes lambing for the first time - or those with difficult presentations, often needed our help. Since we never knew when these difficulties might occur, these frequent visits were, indeed, necessary. Three to four hours does not, in itself, sound too taxing and if we got down there and nothing was happening, we were back up the lane in no time. But if you'd only rolled into bed, exhausted, at 2.00a.m., after helping with an awkward breach birth, you still had to go and check on the rest four hours later. Two or three nights like that on the trot and you were definitely in need of the proverbial matchsticks! Having said that, lambing was my favourite part of the shepherding year and the thrill of helping to deliver a lamb safely was beyond words (even for me). Our chidren, on the other hand, were not quite so impressed. Yes, they loved seeing the fluffy little lambs gamboling in the fields and each year we usually had a bottle lamb for them to help feed. What they really hated was the food, or rather, the mundane repetition of quick meals. Food shopping became very hit and miss as the nearest supermarket was seven miles away and you had to make a quick dash between rounds, hoping that nothing was amiss on your return. Equally, you couldn't plan to cook anything that took very long to cook, or that needed constant attention while doing so. Sod's Law determined that you would be called away to an urgent case in the middle of preparation, and it would never make it to the oven, or else your meal was cremated because you couldn't be spared to go home and turn the oven off. So meals, at that time, consisted of a lot of dishes made with eggs - we had our own hens then, so didn't run out of those - or something 'on toast'. Over the years, the children coined the phrase 'Spring food' to refer to any kind of dish that they were forced to consume during lambing time and offers to serve it up at other times of year were met with howls of injustice. It has taken quite a number of years for them to get over this but Carrie's quick tea of choice, if she calls in unexpectedly, is two 'dippy' eggs with toast fingers, so I feel that I have not inflicted lasting psychological damage. The phrase, however, remains firmly embedded in this family's vocabulary!

I'm using the term 'Spring food' here quite differently and also somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as the food I'm about to describe is not really meant for Spring at all, but for the summer, when the hot weather we've been having recently usually arrives! We began making souvlaki after visiting the beautiful Greek island of Crete, on holiday. When we first saw them, we recognised them as what we traditionally thought of as 'kebabs' - meat grilled on a skewer - but kebab is the Turkish word, and as Crete was occupied by the Turks for centuries and there is no love lost between them, they would like to use their own word now, thank you! You can use chicken, pork or lamb equally well but I find that pork tends to become dry and that lamb - even in such small quantities - is prohibitively costly. Chicken breasts are not cheap either, so I wait until I see them on the reduced counter in Tesco and stockpile them in the freezer for the warmer weather. They need cutting into one inch chunks, for marinading; this is all very well, you might say, if chicken breats were square, but what about the thinner bits at the edges? I usually cut those a bit longer and then double them over as I thread them onto the skewer. To get the best tasting souvlaki - and to keep them moist under the grill - it is essential to marinade the meat for a few hours first. I've done a bit of reasearch into this and most souvlaki marinades consist of oil (preferably olive), then a pick and mix approach with ingredients such as garlic, lemon, white or red wine and wine vinegar. Herbs, such as oregano, mint and thyme are included in all recipes, as is black pepper. Olive oil is one of those subjects that 'foodies' can sometimes get a bit sniffy about, so I'm going to stick my neck out and say that I buy my oil for cooking from Lidl. It's a brand called Iliodor, is extra virgin, comes in 750ml bottles and costs just over £4.00. Best of all - and we discoverd this quite by chance - is that it comes from the Chania area of west Crete, where we used to visit, so we feel a certain sense of loyalty in buying it. Sniffy, but financially-strapped, foodies can console themselves with the fact that this means more money left over to buy smaller quantities of more expensive oil for salads! Lidl frequently have special offers on their fruit and veg, so you could stock up on your peppers, cherry tomatoes and button mushrooms for your souvlaki while you're there. I'll be putting a recipe on the Tried and Tested page in the next few days, as soon as I have a minute spare, aside from the current extensive Growing programme. When I grill the souvlaki, I find it helps to keep the meat from burning if it can sit in a little marinade as it cooks. This means either using a double sheet of tinfoil, or, I suppose, you could sit them in a shallow baking tray on top of the grill pan. They need frequent turning, as the veg cook more quickly and can burn, but you get to enjoy the heady fragrance of the herbs as they cook. We eat them with whatever bread we have to hand but pitta bread, served warm, is a traditional accompaniment. A Greek salad, topped with some nice crumbly feta cheese is also ideal.

The lemon ice cream, that we had for pudding, came about when I needed to use up some cream - that was originally intended for a birthday pavlova - and the lemon curd that our friend, Ivy, so kindly gave us. The recipe is from Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries and if you haven't got a copy, but enjoy lemon recipes, get it ordered from the library double quick! (There's even a second recipe called Lemon Ice-Cream Tart with Gingernut Crust, that sounds equally delicious and doesn't need lemon curd. Must try that next). When I costed the lemon ice cream recipe out this morning it came in at just below £3.00, not counting the lemon curd, which was free. It did include two thirds of a pack of M&S meringue nests, though, included for their crisper texture, rather than my own whose forte is their gooey centre. However, it does make enough ice cream to serve six people generously - or an endless number of ice cream cones - compared with a small tub of Ben and Jerry's at £3.95, which would be lucky to serve two! The recipe says to stir occasionally, as it sets, but I forgot until it had gone too hard and it didn't seem to suffer for it. You will be relieved to know that we didn't actually eat the narcissi pictured with it above. That was just included to bring out the colour in the photo. We did, though, eat the lemon zest and the sprig of lemon balm, which surprised me by tasting just like it smells. Sounds like just the thing to include in ice cubes to go with lemony summer drinks.

My personal recipe for today is to plant my courgette seeds in pots, to give them a head start on the slugs, and another health-promoting bout of digging in readiness for my sprouting dahlia tubers. Thank goodness the weather is cooler!

Some I made earlier

Sometimes, I think it takes a bit of experimenting to find the right recipe. Recipes that work perfectly well in one oven can be a complete disaster in another and it also comes down to personal taste; what one person finds too sweet, another will not find sweet enough. I suppose, then, that when I'm trying recipes out, I'm looking for one that cooks well and on which we have a consensus, as a family, that it is worthy of a repeat performance.

Blueberries are a fruit that take up rather a lot of space in my freezer. This is because they were on offer at my local market some weeks ago; I think it was two punnets for £1.50. I can't remember the punnet size - we did weigh them at the time - but I do recall that we ended up with about 7 pounds weight, in total. Since that time the search has been on to find blueberry recipes, in particular, the perfect blueberry muffin. I don't like most of the muffins bought in shops; they are far too sweet, even for me, and I consider myself to have a sweet tooth. The only exception is the lemon and white chocolate variety from the shop with the persuasive television advertising but at 79p each they are  beyond my pocket now. A few weeks ago, Lucy and I tried a recipe from a little booklet that came free with a cookery magazine. The actual recipe was for blueberry and white chocolate, which sounded really tempting, but ended in resounding disappointment. They were very hard on top - too long at too high a temperature in our oven - were dry, and tasted of nothing in particular, apart from the odd hint of white chocolate. I'd defrosted the blueberries first, which was a mistake as they then began disintegrating in the mixture, even though I stirred them as gently as I could. As we put them on to the wire rack to cool, I noticed that each muffin left behind its own little ring of congealed fat in the tin - totally unappetising!

So it was back to the drawing board, and I found a recipe that I'd torn from a copy of Easy Living magazine quite a while ago. This recipe uses buttermilk and I knew I'd used that before in a recipe for something else, quite successfully. I got mine from Morrisons, priced at 31p for 250g, actually 9 fluid ounces. I added a bit of ordinary milk to bring it up to the 10 fluid ounces the recipe requires. The oven temperature for it was also cooler. You need bigger paper cases for muffins than for fairy cakes and these are readily available from supermarkets, online or at sugarcraft shops. You also need a muffin tin. I bought a non-stick one from Ikea for under a fiver. You can put the mixture straight into them, or use cases as described. This time I used the blueberries straight from the freezer and I did use butter, as opposed to Flora which I use a lot for baking, as that is what the recipe recommended. All muffin recipes will tell you not to spend much time stirring the wet (and melted) ingredients into the dry and that the mixture is meant to be rather lumpy. Really, you could get away without using an electric mixer altogether for most muffins, just whisking the wet ingredients together with a fork, or hand-whisk. Being on the cooler side, my oven took an extra 5 minutes or so to cook them but we were really impressed with the results.

As you can see from this picture, they were golden on top and rose properly - none of that 'sinking- when-you-take-them-out-of-the-oven' malarkey. Inside they were quite light and the blueberries had stayed whole during cooking. The finishing touch was sprinkling demerara sugar sparingly over the top just before putting them in the oven. It gave an extra bit of crunch when you bit into them. I got 16 muffins with the mixture, rather than the 12 suggested, filling the cases two-thirds full. They are best eaten on the day they are made, according to the recipe, but ours were fine two days later, having been stored in an airtight tin. I'm awarding top marks to Easy Living for another great recipe (the meringue one on the Recipe page is theirs, too). So where is the recipe, then, I hear you say? On the Recipe page, I reply, as fast as my little fingers can type it up! If you haven't got blueberries, you can also use raspberries, blackberries or strawberries. It's drizzling again today and Lucy is on holiday from school, so we're going to try blackberry this afternoon, another soft fruit that's not in short supply here!

Jam today

If you have read the tips on my Home-Made page about making preserves, you will have noticed that I encourage people to have a go at making their own jam and chutney on the grounds that it is both enjoyable and that "jam and chutney making can be cost effective if you buy fruits in season or when you have a glut of your own produce". I've recently been reading a copy of 21st Century Smallholder by Paul Waddington and was interested to see what he had to say on the subject of preserving, or, as he prefers to call it, 'making delightful things'. Although he acknowledges that these processes are easy and the results long lasting, he also states, "It's not particularly cost-effective, as both products are commercially cheap to buy and you'll need a lot of sugar and a bit of time to make your own". I think he is misleading his reader here as he is not comparing like with like. Yes, you can buy jam from the supermarket for less than fifty pence a jar but if you were to compare the taste of it against that of home-made there is simply no comparison. This brings to mind a piece I read in Gardener's World magazine recently, which refers to the dissimilarity between 'municipal' daffodils and the more subtle forms of the species, as being "the difference between an oboe and a kazoo"! To get something even approaching the same league, you would be looking at the Bonne Maman range. At our local Tesco, a 350g jar (or 12oz, in old money) costs between £1.79 and £2.29 depending on the variety of fruit it contains. I would need to get a full-time job again if making my own jam cost as much as that! Even the cost of cooking it is not particularly high as all the softening is done at the lowest flame setting on my gas ring, with the heat only being turned up at the end for 10-15 minutes to reach setting point. To get the cost of sugar into proportion, I buy mine in 10lb bags to keep the cost down - and this will make a cupboard full of jam - for less than the price of one portion of fish and chips. A similar case can be made for chutney, particularly since it uses less sugar and includes vinegar, instead. Cheaper than chips!

He then adds, rather lamely, I feel, "but your own is somehow always best". Damn right, it is! Your fruit has been carefully sourced, even grown yourself - in which case you know if it has been sprayed or not and have also limited it's food miles. Your own preserves only include the ingredients needed to make them, without the use of additional thickeners or preservatives and you will have a lot of grateful friends and relatives who will make a point of telling you how much they enjoyed consuming it. As for time, you can waste an awful lot of it standing in a supermarket queue waiting to pay for your pots of cheap stuff, without the benefit of a fabulous treat to come. Going back to yesterday's post about wasting food, I bet lots of cheap jam gets tasted then wasted. Stick it in a cake or dilute it with water and use as a glaze for fruit. You've then got another empty jam jar for your home-made preserves!

It's alright, Paul; you can come out from behind your potting shed. I've put my soap box away now. As for anyone reading this, have a go yourself and make up your own minds. I'm going to enjoy a cup of tea now with my (home-made) jam sandwich, thank you, Paul!

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!

             

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!                                                                                                                            

Marmalade Days

Once Christmas is out of the way I look forward to glimpsing the first Seville oranges in our local greengrocers.They are only in season for about a month and you either buy them then or go without until the following year. I bought quite a lot from there and then the fruit stall on the market was selling them at three pounds (weight) for one pound (money) so I bought another six pounds! Needless to say it has taken me until now to turn them all into marmalade. I use Delia Smith's recipe, which is available on her website ; I find it sets reliably using two pounds of fruit per batch.

I don't actually like the taste of marmalade - though my husband and mother are big fans - but I really enjoy all the processes of making it. I find the repetition of squeezing and chopping strangely therapeutic and it warms my kitchen up a treat on the very cold afternoons we've been having until recently.

Although I don't like eating it I think the colour of the finished marmalade is beautiful. Looking at it reminds me of sunshine or the glow of a warm fire. When photographing the finished product I couldn't resist this close up shot of the light coming through this jar.

My family like thick cut marmalade best. I used to use a sharp knife to cut the peel into shreds but have found it more comfortable to use a sharp pair of kitchen scissors. Of course the advantage of doing it yourself is that you can cut the peel just as you like and you don't have to stick to Seville oranges, either. In How to be a Domestic Goddess, Nigella Lawson gives a recipe for Pink Grapefruit Marmalade, which I want to try next, and I have had great success with marmalade made from clementines with a measure of Cointreau added just before potting. Most of the latter was given away at Christmas as presents.

If you start making a lot of jam and marmalade you will go through a lot of labels. They can be quite expensive to keep buying and I came up with the following idea after Zephyr, our lurcher, decided to eat the remainder of a box of labels from Lakeland that I'd carelessly left unsupervised on the kitchen table.

I remembered that I'd got a box of plain white labels, the sort that have addresses printed on them to stick on envelopes, and I was just going to write on them as they were. However, in the same drawer as the labels was a paper punch in the shape of a dog's paw print. It seemed very apt that since it was the dog who had eaten the initial labels these labels should bear a doggy logo and I punched a dog paw at each end of the label. Even better, once they were stuck onto the jars the colour of the jar contents showed through and made my efforts look really professional. I haven't bought a pre-printed label since and have gone on to make lots of different punched designs. If the punch pattern is quite detailed you just have to be careful when peeling the backing paper off. I buy my labels from Wilkos but you should be able to find something similar from any stationers; I find the 9x3.5cm size ideal and I get a roll of 250 for less than a pound. I also find them much easier to remove from the jars afterwards than conventional labels.

Now I just need a few calligraphy lessons to tidy up my handwriting....