We have it, I just don't know how to pronounce it.

A little over a week ago Mark bought ingredients for pesto and focaccia, intending to recreate the food we had on holiday. Then he didn't actually get around to it while I was obsessing about promised Italian food, so I ended up making them. (Never, ever proimise me cheese, Italian food or trips to New York and fail to deliver - I will obsess about them at the slightest opportunity).

Focaccia needs baking at a very high temperature. This is how I discovered our 23 year old Samsung oven no longer heated up past 140 degrees, and produced very, very bad focaccia.

The oven had been limping along for years; the door wouldn't shut entirely so it's lost heat for at least 6 years, probably more. Last month I discovered only half of the grill worked, but as we have an air fryer, that seemed manageable. 

After some very scientific research and testing (I read Good Housekeeping's recommendations, then I went to John Lewis to open and shut doors and twiddle dials) we decided on our oven. Wanting one that would last pretty much forever, we bought a Miele.

The difficulty in ordering one in person is that no one seems to know how to pronounce it. There was MEE-leh, my-EL-eh,  my-EL, MEE-lay, MEEL, MEE-luh. Each person I spoke to said it differently. In the end I was basically just pointing. "I want that one with the actual buttons, please."

It arrived promptly enough, but there were complications. We'd gone down from a double oven to a single, so Mark needed to build a shelf for it part way up the larger cavity left by the old one. This does mean we have space for an extra drawer, though, which is great.  Also, it needed wiring it. These felt a bit of a faff, so to be perfectly honest Mark procrastinated a few days before doing it just before Bonnie and her friends arrived for the Easter weekend.

There was a hitch - no power. Mark uninstalled it, connected the oven to a plug and turned it on, which showed the oven itself was fine. So it seemed to be the wiring. 

I'll be honest, mid afternoon before a 4 day weekend when you're feeding 7 people is a sub-optimal time to discover you need an electrician.  

I hit all my local WhatsApp chats is an urgent plea for a good electrician but the recommended tradesmen were either busy or on holiday. Mark finally found a bloke at 3:30 on the condition that Mark went to fetch him as his son had taken the car keys. 

 David the Sparky was very lovely. He explained the wiring was just fine but had been over-tightened, leading to a dodgy connection. He fixed that, tested it and put it back in place and was driven home clutching half a dozen fresh eggs as well as his fee, with about an hour to go before the young people arrived.

This morning I thought I should get to know the oven - technology has moved on a lot in 23 years! So first I made a dozen carrot and pecan cupcakes using the Hummingbird Bakery recipe at 2/3 proportions, then a batch of dark chocolate and orange cookies from BBC Good Food. Seeing as it is Good Friday, I've got dough for hot cross buns proving as type. You know me - go big or go home.

HAPPY EASTER - but Zach ate the A cupcake from Happy so I improvised

The new oven is amazing - it gets to temperature extremely quickly,  has a myriad of setting I don't yet understand and probably will never use, has a self cleaning function and can be operated remotely by my phone. What a marvellous modern world we live in, as Captain Jack Aubry says.

 I did the cupcakes on Conventional and the cookies on Fan Plus, and think I'll try Intensive Bake for hot cross buns, and see if I can find a difference in them at all.

 As for the name - I think I'm going with one online suggestion -  Miele rhymes with Sheila. 

 

NB - Mark more than redeemed himself for procrastinating three days with the oven by mowing the lawn today while I baked. First mow of the year! It all looks lovely.

Sort your (life?) fridge out

I absolutely love Sort Your Life Out on the BBC. Dilly, the organiser, is my hero and I go around labelling things like a fiend - my chest freezer is awe-inspiring, I promise you. However, I'm not exactly living up to the decluttering queen's standards day to day. Quite frankly, I'm very messy and fairly lazy. 

With my knee pain worsening over the past two months, the kitchen has descended into chaos lately (along with the rest of the house, god help me!) I though I'd best  have a bit of a sort out. In doing so, I found an awfully nice lunch.

Zach says that to have an ADHD diagnosis, your quality of life has to be suffering because of your struggle to concentrate or remember things. We decided that means I have Mark's ADHD.  He's vague and drifts off to something else partway through, but I'm the one whose life is affected. The number of unlocked doors, cupboard doors left ajar, half-done tasks is substantial and I have permanently bruised shins from walking into whatever drawer he's left open.

So while it's great that he thinks "I'll put that leftover lemon juice from the cocktails in a little tub in the fridge to be used up later," the system falls down because he doesn't label it and he forgets about it entirely the second he closes the door. (See also tins of baked beans, sliced tomatoes, mashed potato, gravy, ready sliced cheese for burgers). 

Mark had put a third lemon juice in the fridge while the previous two were going manky, so I figured a proper sort out of the fridge was overdue.

I chucked a bunch of mystery items (seriously, LABELS, dude!) and checked the many (so, so many) pickles and condiments (entirely my fault)for Best Before dates and emptied out the meat and vegetable drawers to check  the state of things.

I noticed the spring onions were looking a bit pathetic and the lettuce had seen perkier days so needed using up. There were three tubs of mashed potato, and in the meat and fish drawer was a tupperware with some salmon I poached a couple of days ago and didn't need all of.

Hurray, free lunch! I mixed the salmon flakes with some of the mash, finely chopped spring onions and a tablespoon of capers - I like putting capers in, it's like including tartar sauce.  I separated an egg, adding the yolk to the bowl and whisking the white. 

Giving the contents of the bowl good mix, I formed four patties. These were dipped in the beaten egg white then into a bowl of the sourdough breadcrumbs I keep in the freezer. (Every time I get to the nub end of the loaf it's usually going a bit stale, so I put it in the blender to make breadcrumbs and add it to the bag. It's very handy)

Spring onions at 1 o'clock, capers at 7

 I put the fishcakes in a hot frying pan with a bit of vegetable oil and fried them for about 3 minutes on both sides, flattening them a bit to be sure they'd warm through.

I shredded the lettuce, and using the most recent lemon juice, did a quick vinaigrette. It was really tasty - a 10 minute lunch for two using up odds and ends. It was very satisfying.

OK, not elegant but very tasty

 

I needed a nice and filling lunch because I was going to have some rather unpleasant dentistry that afternoon and who knows how long until I'm on solid food again! It was the nicest part of my Monday, other than Mark very kindly buying me flowers to cheer me up after the wisdom tooth came out.

 It was nice to feel I'd made at least one small area of my chaotic house tolerable - especially as Miss B is coming home for the Easter weekend bringing two friends to stay, and we are going to need to fit a LOT of food in that fridge. 

Bringing The Holiday Home With Me

 

 Obviously one of the many reasons to holiday in Italy is the food. What's not to love? Seafood, pasta, pizza, risotto... the whole country is awash in marvellous things to eat. It would be daft not to make the most of it.

Inspired by my very excellent mate Kirsty's habit of going to a cooking lesson when she's on holiday, I booked Mark and I a morning of making the traditional Ligurian pesto and focaccia in a restaurant in the stunning town of Sestri Levante, a short ride on the local train from our hotel in Rapallo. 

Lovely restaurant in Sestri Levante

Yes, I've made pesto before, but it was just more fun doing it with the local ingredients - a scant tablespoon of pine nuts, mounds of fresh basil from Pra', Ligurian olive oil from cold pressed Taggiasca olives, and their preferred a mix of parmesan and Sardinian pecorino. Of all the things we ate in Italy, the warm focaccia lavishly coated in freshly made pesto was pretty much the best thing, and believe me there was some fierce competition! 

All the essential supplies

The charming  Davide insisted that a glass of wine was a very necessary part of making pesto. I remember my Dad saying something similar in Canada in the 1970s - if he didn't have a cold beer in one hand, the barbeque just wasn't going to cook properly. I wasn't entirely convinced that was true for pesto being made at 10:30 in the morning, to be honest. Breakfast Wine is not something I want. However, Davide said wine was what powered the pestle and mortar - without a sip of wine to keep you going as you pound away, you won't have the oomph to make a smooth and delicious pesto.

Like I say, he was a very charming fella. 

See? Charming!

 I was very surprised how little salt and pine nuts went into the recipe. It was maybe half a teaspoon of coarse salt with half a plump garlic clove and the pine nuts that we pounded into a cream to start with. Then it was picking the leaves off mounds and mounds of basil, thumping the bejeesus out of it in a big heavy mortar with a marble pestle, and then thumping some more. The grated cheese was added a tablespoon a time with yet more pummelling in between. If I did this often I'd have muscles Rosie the Riveter would be proud of. Three or four tablespoons of cheese later and we were finished.

Davide said the oil must never be added to the mortar because the marble (or stone) is porous and will absorb it. We scooped all the paste onto our pestles like a glowing green basil gelato cone and put it in jars to be topped by olive oil. Apparently, the pesto is mixed with the appropriate amount of oil when it's going to be served. Otherwise, as long as it was covered with a layer of oil to prevent oxygenation, it was fine as a fairly stiff paste.

Having a brilliant time 

 
When we got home I was keen to try out making pesto - nearly as keen as Zach was to eat it! I have a very small Mason and Cash pestle and mortar I use for crushing spices,so I had a go with that.

Nightmare.

The bowl was far too small and the pestle far too light to crush the leaves thoroughly. It took muscle power to break it down, and muscles aren't what I'm known for. I'm more of a limp noodle than a powerhouse and it was absolutely exhausting.  I am never doing that again.

Luckily there was a very big stone pestle and mortar in the sale due to one of Amazon's spurious reasons for an event (I can't even remember what that one was called, but it wasn't Black Friday) so I bought myself that enormous thing* and had another go.

Seriously enormous, weighs a ton

 

However, all that weight means the heavy pestle does a superb job of bashing the poor basil into submission.  It took less than a third of the time of the small one and was a great deal more fun. It was also rather intimidatingly loud, for which I probably owe my neighbours apologies. And poor Luke who was nearby and nearly jumped out of his skin.

Having tried pesto with the traditionally shaped Trofie pasta (very narrow twists) and with breadsticks and focaccia, I fancied a go at trying to replicate a delicious lunch I'd had in Santa Marguerita. It was big billowing sheets of fresh pasta with loads of pesto on top. It looked messy and awful, but it was so light and delicious. 

Least appetising, most delicious

 

I've not made pasta with 00 flour before, but as I was trying to do it all with the proper Italian ingredients I bought flour to have a go. Bloody hell, that stuff is so much harder to work with than plain flour! It was so very stiff I wondered if I'd got the proportions wrong. I was using Angela Hartnet's 400g to 4 large eggs and a tablespoon of olive oil. I rolled half of it out to thing, long lasagne sheets ribbons and cooked them for around 3 minutes.

I'd been a bit overly free passing homemade pesto around my friends and neighbours to have the quantity  the restaurant served on the pasta, but it was still absolutely delicious. The pasta was light and silky, the pesto was strongly herby with just a gentle kick of garlic and it all felt like a bowl of happiness. Z and I agreed we'd definitely have it again, although with regular flour next time unless I take up an interest in weight lifting in the meantime.

There was the other half batch of pasta dough left over, so a couple of days later Zach and I had homemade tagliatelle with a puttanesca sauce, one of our favourites.  It normally takes less time to make the sauce than the pasta takes to cook, but that isn't true when cooking fresh pasta -  fresh pasta is done in two to three minutes. It's still a ridiculously quick sauce and punches far above its weight in the effort vs flavour ratio. We enjoyed it very much. (Mark, the Philistine, chose fried chicken tenders and chips instead. There's no accounting for taste)

I love puttanesca

*If I am ever found dead in my kitchen, there's a fair chance it will be because I dropped this damned thing on myself when trying to put it away. It weighs a ton and could probably fell an elephant. 

When In Rome

When I was a teenager I believed I'd been born in the wrong place.

I believed in souls and bodies in the Cartesian dualism mode back then; that souls were slotted into bodies as if they were assigned dorm rooms. What can I say? I was a teenager in the 80s; I believed a lot of stupid stuff. Particularly things could be used in a romantic narrative of soul mates, miracles and true love. If a story was beautiful enough surely it must be true. 

I was born in Chester to a family living in North Wales and I grew up living in a small town in Southern Ontario. This was clearly an error on the part of the universe. I didn't like small towns. I was supposed to be going to theatres and ballets and live in a major city because everything good about the world could be found in a city. I was supposed to be French, ideally. I was meant to be eating amazing food and within reach of great art and inspiring architecture. 

When I moved to the U.K. in my late teens I made getting to Paris my main focus, and I went as often as I could: 7 times in 6 years.  Finally, I was visiting a place that spoke to my soul. I loved Paris, but I wasn't sure it loved me. I was too noisy and uncool.

And then, 9 years from arriving in the U.K, I had a long weekend in Florence. Oh. My. God.

My soul wasn't French, it was Italian. Loud, messy, demonstrative, passionate, food-obessessed - not to mention holding a full motorbike licence for my Vespa. Obviously I was Italian! 

I don't believe in souls and duality anymore. I'm resigned to being a Canadian/Yorkshire woman in her mid 50s. I've been through enough with this body to know it is me and I am it, we aren't separate. But I still think Italy is pretty much the most wonderful place I can think of, other than my own garden. Florence, Rome, Venice, I adore them all.

There was marvellous story on the BBC News website this week that reminded me why I love Italy so damned much and why it's such a good fit for me. It gets worked up over the sort of tiny details that I also get aerated about.

There was a recipe on the BBC Good Food website for Cacio e Pepe, that most Roman of pasta dishes. This recipe caused a Roman restaurant committee to write a letter of protest to the British ambassador. The recipe described Cacio e Pepe as "a speedy lunch", which was felt to diminish this deceptively simple classic, but most egregious of all it included butter and parmesan.

Cacio e Pepe is spaghetti, pepper and pecorino cheese. Here's what the Italians said:  

• "We are always told we are not as good as the BBC*... and then they go and do this. Such a grave mistake." 
• "What Good Food published with butter and parmesan is called Pasta Alfredo. It's another kind of pasta." 
• "You have to yield to Caesar that which is Caesar's." 
• "Our tradition is based on food. So if you touch the only thing that we have..."

A letter to the British Ambassador. I am not kidding. God, I bloody love the Italians.

In remembrance of trips to Rome over the years and to correct our country's offence against Roman culinary history, last night I made Zach and I Cacio e Pepe the Roman way. That is to say, correctly. (Or at least I sincerely hope so)

Cacio e Pepe for 2

Put a kettle on to boil water for the pasta and then add it to a pan with a hefty dash of salt. Only fill the pan about halfway. The trick is to not use too much liquid as you want to water to get a good amount of starch in it. 

Add spaghetti or linguine or similar to the pan, stir to prevent it sticking and cook it for 3 minutes less than the instructions on the packet. It will finish cooking as the sauce builds.

Finely grate about half a wedge of pecorino romano, so probably 60g to 80g for two people.  It does need to be finely grated; regular grating is prone to get clumpy when we hit the emulsifying part. Put it in a bowl with plenty of room for stirring.

Grind a lot of black pepper - about 1.5 - 2 teaspoons full. Toasted that in a dry frying pan over a low heat until it releases its fragrance but take care not to burn it.

While the pasta cooks, add several tablespoons of the pasta water into the pepper and swirl it around a bit, then another few tablespoons. Once the pasta hits that 3 Minutes To Go point, do not drain it. Use tongs to lift the al dente pasta into the frying pan and toss it about in the pan, coating it with the pepper and starchy water, which will emulsify into a creamy start of a sauce. 

You need to guess a little about the amount of water, but go for less rather than more. It's easy to add a couple of tablespoons to a thick sauce before serving but not to thicken a thin one.

Add several tablespoons of the remaining pasta water to the mound of finely grated pecorino and stir it until it makes a thick smooth paste. Take the pasta frying pan off the heat and let it rest a moment to lose a little heat. If you add the pecorino paste while at simmering temperature the sauce more likely to split or get claggy, so do take that half a minute or so.

Using the tongs to toss the pasta and pecorino paste together in the pan until glossy and coated in the silky sauce. Serve with a little extra ground black pepper on top.

It really is a very easy and straightforward pasta dish, but tastes so much more than the sum of its parts. And of course anything that makes me think of Rome is a good thing. 

Ciao, amici miei!

* although the BBC got the blame because of the domain name BBCGoodFood, it actually sold off the Good Food site a couple of years back so it's not actually the Beeb's fault.

Celebrating Mum's birthday in Rome in 2008

Beets me

 One of my favourite experiments in the veg patch is growing something we think we don't like. 

My reasoning goes that if you can taste something picked at its best, prepared freshly and still dislike it, you've given that food every chance and you never have to try that thing again... but you might be surprised.

I used to think I didn't much like sprouts until I grew them and harvested them myself. Peas got a lot more interesting to small children who could eat them fresh out of the pod. Somehow red currants off the bush are vastly nicer than those in a supermarket. In fairness kohlrabi remained boring and salsify just wouldn't grow so there's not always a success, but it's a game worth playing. 

In my opinion, the worst family of vegetables is that loathesome Clean Dirt masquerading as food, beets and chard. There's no faster way to destroy a salad than to add some baby chard leaves, or that duplicitous, misnomered leaf Perpetual Spinach. Aside - It's not spinach, it's a chard. The name is to make it sound good when it's actually dreadful. Just accept that spinach bolts and sow it successionally.

Worst of all is the Root Vegetable of Doom, beetroot. 

I've had it grated raw in salads, pickled, roasted with other veg, added to hummus, as a so called crisp, ruining added to a smoothie  and god knows what they do to the weird vacuum sealed stuff in the supermarket, but I've had that too. All tasting like a mouthful of earth. At least the pickled one was dirt with added vinegar. 

I'm not alone in this. When my Dad did a bit of vegetable growing in a corner of their herbaceous garden, he was delighted by the success of his beetroot crop. My Mum actually had nightmares about him force-feeding it to her. 

A few years ago I blew a moderate fortune on booking 6 months ahead to take Mark to Tommy Banks's restaurant The Black Swan at Oldstead*. Don't get me wrong, it was money well spent, it was the meal of a lifetime! What I didn't realise was that one of the signature dishes is a slab of crapaudine beetroot cooked for 5 hours in beef fat or olive oil. Yikes!

It was absolutely delicious.

With that in mind, this year I decided to give beets a chance**.

If Tommy Banks goes to the hassle of growing 14th century French heritage beets, and I really want to give beetroot the best go at being acceptable, I thought I should probably do the same. Crapaudine means toad, a reference to the rough skin on these unusual beets. Only specialist and heritage growers sell the seeds, but there are lots of chef-type recipes specifying them in recipes so I figured they must be worth the hassle.

Looking a bit moth eaten by October

Germination went quite well. I sowed the seeds direct in May, with a second, less successful sowing in late June. The leaves looked like pretty much standard beets but the root itself is more like a fat parsnip shape than a globe. I wasn't expecting that. Unfortunately, the same problem as I've had with both carrots and parsnips happened with the beets - they hit an obstacle in the soil and split. I had a nice thick cylinder for the top few inches of root, them they split into useless leggy strands.

Slightly deformed beetroot

Still, I had some healthy looking plants, so was free to experiment.

First I tried the baby leaves, which I'd been told were good in salads. Nope, they taste exactly like chard and are horrible. The hens were extremely grateful to my picky tastebuds as they got loads of nice leafy treats. Personally, I'd rather go hungry.

Next, I tried one of the tiny beetroots raw after I'd thinned the row a bit. Dad said they are particularly nice when young. Nope, still like willingly eating dirt. 

When it came to cooking them, I decided on a split approach. I would drizzle some in oil and salt and roast in a tinfoil parcel, and the other I would try approximate the Tommy Banks approach by cooking it on a very low heat in olive oil on the hob for a few hours.

The latter didn't work at all. Even on the lowest setting on the smallest gas ring, the oil cooked too vigorously. I ended up with a weird halfway house of boiling olive oil then turning the heat off, back and forth for about 2 hours before I abandoned it. I think I should have removed the beetroot from the oil at that point but I let it cool down first.

The second worked really well! I couldn't justify having the oven on for a couple of hours for just beetroot, so I also baked a gluten free lime yogurt cake for my Very Excellent Mate SJ, then one of my favourite easy meals, confit tandoori chickpeas from Ottolenghi. 

To serve it, I meant to have nice seeded flatbreads with Abergavenny goats cheese and walnuts. As it turned out, the shop didn't have any flatbreads and the walnuts in the cupboard were stale, so we went with just the beetroot and cheese.

The attempted confit beetroot was a bit oily, but other than that they all tasted pretty much the same. Remarkable sweet, a smooth texture and yes, a little bit like Clean Dirt but only a tiny bit, and it complemented the cheese. I think the walnuts - or a bitter leaf like radicchio - might have improved it by cutting through the sweetness but it was still more of a success than I'd anticipated. 

Mark's verdict was Absolutely Delicious. Mine was Not Bad, Actually.

I don't think I'll be rushing to buy great bunches of the stuff, but as an occasional thing, slow roased beetroot is a nice surprise. 5 months from garden to plate, but I don't garden hoping for fast food.

A small plate for such a long project

As I have been putting away gardening things for the winter, I see I still have half a packet of crapaudine seeds. I might even plant them next year. 

Maybe.

* It was later voted best restaurant in the world, and I believe it. If you should ever stumble across a giant wad of money, I heartily reccomend spending it there, or Roots in York by the same team.

** Apologies to John and Yoko

Beanz Meanz Happiness

One of my very favourite moments in the veg patch is when the borlotti beans are ready to be picked. For weeks I've watched the pods grow and swell, become mottled then a deep satisfying scarlet. They are lovely ornaments dangling down, gently swaying in a breeze. They draw the eye, only to taunt me with Not Yet.

Not quite ready

It's when those pods are drying and dull that the fun starts.

I love the feeling of splitting a leathery pod down its central seam to reveal the cream and purple jewels inside. It's incredibly satisfying. Each bean is a beauty - even the occasional pale green under-ripe ones are pretty. Before long the mound of pods is replaced by a bowl full of plump borlotti beans ready to become that most wonderful of soups - or is that stews? -  pasta e fagioli.

Pasta e fagioli just means pasta and beans. If you're Dean Martin and come from Naples stock*, it's pronounced Pasta Fazool, which conveniently rhymes with "when the stars make you drool," which is why I sing That's Amore every time I make it.

There are probably as many different Correct Recipes as their are Italian families, but this is how I make mine, showing off the borlottis at their finest.

Pasta e fagioli

• Large bowl of fresh borlotti beans
• 3 medium onions
• 2 large carrots
• 1 small head of celery
• bay leaves
• stalk of rosemary
• sprig of thyme
• stalks of parsley tied together
• 2tbs olive oil
• 2 tins of tomatoes
• salt
• pepper
• lemon juice

then, later, 

• macaroni
• water

First, cook the borlotti beans until tender:

In  a good sized pot, tip in the beans and cover with plenty of water. Cut in half one each of the onions and carrots and add them and 4 stalks of celery (including leaves if present) to the pot along with the bay leaves, rosemary and thyme. To make life easier for yourself later, tie the parsley stalks together so you can fish them out easily at the end.

Bring to the boil and skim off any froth, then simmer until the beans are completely tender. This is generally about an hour - do keep checking the beans aren't boiling dry as the liquid will make our soup stock.

Leave to cool, then remove and discard the vegetables and herbs. They have both infused our beans and flavoured the stock, and have little goodness remaining.

Chop up the remaining onions, carrots and celery and fry gently in the olive oil until tender. Add the tinned tomatoes and cook until they've broken down a little.

Depending on which pot is the biggest, either add the beans to the vegetables or the vegetables to the beans and stock. Bring to a boil and season generously with salt and pepper, plus a healthy slosh of lemon juice to brighten the flavours.

At this point, I usually let it all cool and portion it into tupperware or ziplock bags, labelled E Fagioli because they haven't got the pasta in yet. The pasta tends to keep absorbing water and becomes unpleasantly over-floppy if it's kept for several days, in my experience, so is best added when you're going to eat it. I pop the various containers of soup in the fridge and freezer - they defrost just fine, and we have a very quick dinner whenever we need it.

The Pasta bit:

Put as much of the soup in a saucepan as you need for the number of people you are serving. I find a big heaped ladle per person is about right, maybe one and an half if you're greedy me. Add a small handful of dried macaroni per person and some cold water - probably 125ml per portion. Bring the soup to the boil and simmer for around 8 minutes. Top with some grated parmesan or pecorino if you like.

The borlotti beans really are next level delicious. They elevate this from a basic vegetable soup to something rich and nourishing and ridiculously moreish. I highly recomend growing them, they are an absolute doddle.

Buon appetito!

  

*yes, a terrible soup pun. I'm not proud.

oh, Canada

Yesterday was Canada Day. For me it's a chance to mess about making food from my childhood and think about all friends who would share that food with me over those years - a very personal reason to celebrate.  Normally in Canada it's a celebration of nationhood, of who we are and where we came from. Flags, songs, fireworks. Not this year.

The horrifying revelations about the Indigenous Residential Schools and the number of bodies buried there, nameless and abandoned, has shaken Canada's vision of itself as The Nice Place. We need to look clear-eyed at the atrocities of our past, acknowledge our complicity in a society that not just allowed but encouraged this to take place, and to mourn with those who lost their families and their culture. So this year, Canada Day is a muted occasion tainted by the shame of what the state did to vulnerable and disempowered people it should have been protecting and nurturing.

Reading the news, I wondered whether it would be more respectful to call off having our neighbours over as planned. I decided to go ahead, partly because it would let down to very special little boys, and partly because my cancelling my one day of being Canadian for the year doesn't do anything to support the First Nations. A hair shirt gesture by me helps no one.

So we went ahead.

Seeing as the handful of people who read this blog all know me anyway, you will not be surprised to learn I went a bit overboard. What started with a plan to bake butter tarts turned into a 5 hour session in the kitchen, including some rather mixed successes in cheese-making.

The crux of the thing was how to try recreate poutine in the UK, and make it suitable for vegetarians.  Poutine is chips and fresh cheese curds liberally doused in (usually chicken) gravy. It turns out the UK doesn't generally have cheese curds and my usual onion gravy isn't the right kind of gravy. Clearly experimentation was needed.

In the end I pretty much cracked it.

Vegetarian gravy:

1 onion, diced

1 handful dried porcini mushrooms

40g butter

handful of plain flour

500ml double strength vegetable stock

20ml soy sauce 

Cook the onion on a low heat in the butter, stirring occasionally until it starts to caramelise - probably around 20-30 minutes. Meanwhile, pour 500ml boiling water on the dried mushrooms and leave to steep. 

When the onions start to colour, add the flour and stir, making a roux. Once the roux has cooked off and is starting to stick, gradually add the vegetable stock (I use those Knorr stock pot things, but whatever you prefer) and whisk it smooth each time. Tip in the mushroom stock, rehydrated mushrooms and soy sauce. Leave to simmer for 10 minutes or just before it's needed.

Pass the gravy through a sieve; it should be smooth and glossy and a good pouring consistency. Add a dash of hot water if needed. Pour generously over your chips and cheese curds.

The creation of real, squeaky curds for the poutine is something I still have to master, but the compromise of my (initially futile) cheese making still tasted great with chips and gravy.

Cheese Curds:

1 litre of full fat milk

one entirely pointless phial of vegetarian rennet

generous slosh of lemon juice

slightly too much salt.

Following the instructions that came with my mother-in-law Marion's cheese making kit, I heated the milk to 28 degrees and added drops of the rennet diluted in a bit of water. I left it for the maximum suggested time of 60 minutes, and came back to a pan of warm milk. In fairness, the rennet instructions did say to store it in a cool place and it's been in my (very warm) kitchen or Marion's (very warm) conservatory for 6 months, because the instructions about keeping it cool were inside the kit. 

On the assumption that if it works for paneer, it can work for this, I warmed the milk slightly once again and added lemon juice. The milk curdled satisfactorily, so I put cheescloth in a collander and drained the whey off. (I actully used some of it for the vegetable stock in the gravy)

Mixing the drained curds with some salt, I put them in a container in the fridge until needed. 

Other foods I associate with Canada are Grandma Curl's potato salad, chicken wings (our family had weekly trips to Mellows in Main West, Hamilton for wings night) Nanaimo bars and really good grilled cheese sandwiches. Obviously there's Kraft Dinner too, but since they removed all of the dangerous and probably toxic additives it's no fun anymore.

Pearl Curry, grandmother to our childhood best friends Darrin and Kirsten, made the best potato salad in all the world. As her grandchildren struggled over Grandma Curry and her first name, she was Grandma Curl to everyone. 

Grandma Curl's Potato Salad:

Cold cooked potatoes cut into dice (I like Charlottes)

1-2 hard boiled eggs

1 green pepper

1 onion or several spring onions

Hellman's mayonnaise (Grandma Curl was very insistent on this)

Chop up the hard boiled eggs, onion and green papper as finely as you can - not much bigger that breadcrumbs. I slice finely then go to town with a mezza luna until they are  chopped into tiny pieces. Combine the spuds, egg, pepper and onion to a large bowl, mixing gently. Add mayonnaise a dollop at a time, as you don't need as much as you might think. Taste and adjust seasoning to taste. To go the full Pearl aesthetic you can top it with a generous sprinkling of paprika.

Proper Grilled Cheese Sandwiches:

Butter

White bread

Grated extra strong (Canadian) cheddar

Grated Mozzarella

Mix the cheeses together. Thickly butter the slices of bread. Put it butter side down in a frying pan, griddle or panini press. Top with plenty of grated cheese (cheddar for flavour, mozzarella for texture) and the second slice of bread, butter side up. Press down with a fish slice, and when nicer crisp and browned, turn over carefully and repeat.

Make more than you think you'll need because they do get eaten quickly.

It was a laid back affair. Not really a party, just a get together between neighbours. The girls played games with our 5 year old neighbour and Luke kept soon-to-be-3 neighbour entertained for ages with the help of a stick, a leaf and the pond. We chatted, swapped tales and generally had a lovely relaxed evening.

It was wonderful to share the food of my childhood home with the ace people in my life now - I think North Leeds is ripe for converting to the joys of a butter tart and a bowl of poutine.

Let the festivities begin!

 As warm autumn days get rarer and we're all confined to barracks for a month, it's time to think of the future and start preparations for whatever level of Christmas we're able to have. Early November is the ideal time to make mincemeat for this year's mince pies.

In my experience, there's a hierarchy of mince pies. At the bottom is shop bought, obviously*. Next is a jar of mincemeat and ready roll pastry, which gives a pleasing feeling of accomplishment. Only slightly more work than that (so VERY slightly) is making your own mincemeat and using ready roll pastry. I cannot stress enough how much of a difference this makes. It's streets ahead of the stuff in the jars, and is the work of about half an hour. Even better is fully homemade. The greatest of all is homemade by somebody else - no mess, no work! Sadly I rarely come across those.

The wonder of homemade mincemeat is that you can tweak it to your tastes.  Use the booze of your choice, go teetotal, alter the spice mix, add chopped nuts or be nut-free, use vegetarian suet if you prefer.

My recipe is based on the one in Rachel Allen's excellent book, Bake.

• 3 large or 4 small cooking apples
• 2 oranges
• 2 lemons
• 250g suet
• 825g of mixed dried fruit (see note 1)
• 125g mixed peel
• 650g brown sugar 
• 2-3tsp spice (see note 2)
• 150ml dark rum or brandy or whisky or more orange juice
• optional - chopped almons or pecans

Peel, core and chop the apples then simmer with a splash of water until cooked down to a pulp.

In a large stock pot or truly enormous bowl, mix the zest and juice of the oranges and lemons with the suet, dried fruit, mixed peel, sugar, spices, alcohol or juice and nuts if using. Add the cooked pulp, mix thoroughly and put into sterilised jars.

Leave to mature for 2-3 weeks. Easy, right?

Note 1: Rachel Allen had 275g each of raisins, sultanas and currants only.  Personally I think currants are nasty, gritty little things, and I like a touch of sharpness to cut through the sweetness. My prefered mix is  about half sultanas and the rest a mix of cranberries, sour cherries, apricots and prunes; I dice the larger fruits to similar sized pieces.  Dried fig, glacé cherries or tropical fruits can also work - pick whatever combination apeals to you.

Note 2 - Allen goes for 2tsp of mixed spice.  I grate half a nutmeg with a scant teaspoon each of ground cinnamon, ginger and cloves. I love nutmeg in Christmas food. Just use what you like, ditch what you don't. 

If you're going all out and making shortcrust pastry from scratch, my absolute favourite recipe is from my Sugarcraft tutor at college: German Paste. It's one part sugar, two parts fat, three parts flour and an egg to bind it.  Judith liked Trex or margarine for a crisper pastry, I prefer the flavour butter provides. Or go half and half, which is a great compromise. 

• 200g sugar
• 400g butter, Trex or combination
• 600g plain flour
• 1 large egg or 2 small, beaten

Put the sugar and flour in a food processor and gradually add the fat, followed by the beaten egg. Mix until it just comes together. Bring it into a ball, wrap it in clingfilm or a substitute and leave it to rest in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

For the thinest, crispiest pastry, roll it out very thinly between two sheets of clingfilm or nonstick sheeting rather than on a floured surface and floured rolling pin. Cut out the circles and peel them off the clingfilm to put in a well greased tart tray. Add a heaped teaspoon of mincemeat and top with a pastry star. Wash with beaten egg and bake for 12-15 minutes.

The mincemeat recipe does make gargantuan quantities, so if you aren't planning to give it to friends or bake a zillion mince pies, you might prefer to halve it.  I once put out a plate of 8 that I took through to the living room while I washed up the baking tray, and when I went through with my cuppa 10 minutes later, Mark and Zach had polished off the lot. We go through a lot of mince pies.

*The exceptions to that hierarchy is Betty's of Harrogate mince pies - which are divine - and people who can't make pastry, who should stick to the ready roll rather than make tough pastry. The more you work it, flour it, roll it out, the tougher it gets. Like with scones, Less Is More for pastry.

And treat those two imposters just the same

This is a story of hubris, preserves and living in a sitcom.

The first thing I did after breakfast on Saturday was to water the poly tunnel and harvest some of the produce. The first batch of tomatillos were ripe, there were 17 jalapeños ready, some dwarf cucumbers and courgettes ranging from acceptable to giant marrows.

After chucking the marrows to the hens (chickens love them) I laid my haul on the garden table. I called  to Mark, "behold, I have a crop of finest Green!" in a daft pompous tone. The photo went to friends and family, Facebook and Twitter; I was extremely satisfied with the fruits of my labours. Downright smug even - look at the Earth Mother growing her veg and making preserves and pickles! How very Good Life. 

I wasn't far off the mark, but not in the way I thought.

The next thing I did was tackle the overgrown raised bed to remove some of the giant courgette leaves, the borage that had collapsed in the high winds and was drooping across the path and remove the bits that were rotting or dying back.  It's a job I'd been putting off because they are extremely prickly plants. Despite long sleeves and gloves, I had the raised bumps and  rashes I always get from the many bristles poking into me. My forearms were covered in them. I hate that job.

Mark and the kids were doing errands in Zach's car (Mum's aged Polo) so I messaged him to ask he buy a big bottle of white vinegar so I could do the pickling in the afternoon. We usually buy the glass bottles with a screw top. This time he bought plastic bottles with the small hole in the stopper (like you use for putting vinegar on your chips) because he thought I might need lots and it was cheaper. This will matter later.

I was looking forward to making the salsa verde with the tomatillos. You can't buy them easily in the UK and they are delicious. We love  Mexican/Central American food in general, really - hence the jalapenos! 

The counter was *covered* in stuff because I am a slob who lives with slobs. I couldn't be bothered clearing it all properly. I knew I could clean down a working area and ignore the rest - to Mark's horror I can do this perfectly happily. For reference, here's how it looked last week when I was making a curry:

Yes, I am ashamed. Mark can't work in this chaos because he's normal but as long as I can clear and clean a small space I'm good to go. 

First, I peeled the papery cases from the tomatillos, washed their soapy residue off, halved them and roasted them skin up in a very hot oven for 10 minutes.  I'd then pop them in the blender with half a chopped onion, a big fistful of coriander, a garlic clove, 3 chillies and the juice of a lime. Whizz it up, salt to taste, and there you've got a fantastic salsa that lasts about a week in the fridge or several months in the freezer.

Spot the food blogging in the anecdote; I'm content-rich, me.

While the tomatillos were cooling, I started on the pickling liquor for the jalapeños.

My preferred recipe is 250ml water, 250ml vinegar, a teaspoon or sugar, a tablespoon of salt and a few garlic cloves simmered to boiling, to which I  add the sliced chilli peppers off the heat and leave them to infuse/gently cook for 10 minutes before putting in a jar. It's very good, I heartily recomment it.

(See - content! Two recipes already)

I tried to prise the stopper off the vinegar bottle with the edge of a spoon so I could pour out 250ml, but it wouldn't be shifted. Damn it.  I squeezed the plastic bottle into the measuring cup.

I squeezed a bit hard.

The stopper came off with a POP and vinegar poured out at force, covering everything.

Everything.

Veg, cooking equipment, papers, a book, bowls, fruit, phone, floor, me.

I found every single scratch I got pruning back all the prickly stuff this morning. Ow.

It took me 40 minutes to clear up: wash everything down, mop the floor, rinse the fruit and veg and leave them out to dry, bin the butter in the butter dish, wash the pasta jar, lay out the papers and novel to dry, change clothes, wash up the crockery I doused.

 I was knackered and sweating. 

My (freshly washed) hair and face got covered to. I sweated VINEGAR into my EYES.

I smelled like a chip shop.

I want to be an Earth Mother type, whereas I am in fact in a slapstick sitcom or a Carry On film.

It was the hubris particularly.  “Look at my amazing monochrome veg harvest. Isn’t it gorgeous! Aren’t I such a great example,  growing and preserving things?” to a Joni Mitchell Ladies Of The Canyon soundtrack. Me in my maxi dress and wellies, tending my crops and preserving my veg.

Fast forward to vinegar drenched train wreck.

I did get a happy ending - see the jars below. 

This morning I resolved to have a less farcical experience. I went down the garden to sit in my new swing/hammock chair and read a novel. Swaying gently in the sunshine enjoying a favourite book I was feeling at one with the world.

Until the hook holding the chair gave way.

Cue title sequence.

P.S. No, I'm not kidding, yes, it hurt and I'm on painkillers and yes, it did look ridiculous and yes, I was flat on my back like an upturned tortoise.

That's amore

When the moon hits your eye...

PIZZA, baby!


Because I had the good luck at 17 to meet the best person I'll ever know (although granted, he was well-disguised as a scrawny self-important teen with a prog rock fascination I will never understand) AND the good sense to stay with the ornery cuss for 33 years, I am in the fortunate position of living with someone who loves and knows the very soul of me. As a result, his gift selection is brilliant.

I was dreading Christmas this year - the first year without Mum and to a large degree without Dad too because he needed to ignore it all for his own wellbeing. Mark found things to rekindle my excitement and engagement in the world. The man's a magician.

First amazing gift was from my parents-in-law at M's suggestion. They got me a wildlife camera so we can see who and what visits our garden at night. I'm absolutely delighted. I know we've had some hedgehogs over that past 2 years and that foxes visit to hope for a wandering hen (never mind the rodent corpses our cats thoughtfully provide) but actually seeing what comes when, and how it behaves is very exciting.

I've spent my Christmas money from my brother on a large charger and lots of rechargeable batteries so I can run the camera down the bottom of the garden. My plan is to move it every few days until we discover where we are most likely to see our nocturnal visitors.

The next brilliant gift was my own personal Springwatch experience.

I love Springwatch. I love Chris and Michaela and poor deposed Martin and I'm bearing with Gillian hoping she finds her feet as a presenter eventually but above all I love Iolo Williams. He's the lanky Welshman who bubbles over with enthusiasm and delight at all wild encounters in this tiny but remarkable country. Iolo's the reason we went to the Farne Islands and why I wanted to see a murmuration - I didn't know such things existed and he inspired me with a desire to seek them out.

He's doing a talk at a centre near my Dad for a local wildlife charity. Mark's got tickets for Dad and me and a copy of Iolo's book about UK wildlife so I can get it signed. I'm beyond delighted.

So far, so middle aged twitcher. Which is an identity I am proud to acknowledge, by the way.

But the third gift...

That's the "yeah, great, thanks for the two scented tree resins, Caspar and Melchior, but where's Balthazar with the gold?" gift.  Not just ace but brilliant.

A pizza oven.

assembled inside, but for OUTSIDE use only

I know it's a fairly shameful claim, but we eat more pizza than any family I know. Luke would eat pizza for every meal of his life if he could. I love Roman, Neopolitan, Chicago style -  all of it. I remember my horror moving to the UK in 1985 and seeing the ghastly cardboard discs passing as "pizza" here, and my cousins' bemusement at my disgust. (Britain, I love you but your food prior to the 90s was a damned disgrace). I've experimented with lots of different dough recipes, various cooking techniques, bought pizza tins, stones and peels. Ever since my Very Excellent Mate Nic talked about how she and Ady built a cob pizza oven on their croft on Rum I've been trying to persuade Mark we need one.

The Ooni 3 is a work of genius. Like my beloved Eglu did for hen-keeping, it makes wood-fired pizzas a doddle in your back garden. It's portable, it takes 15 minutes to heat up rather than the 4-6 hours of a cob oven and the pizzas cook in under 2 minutes. They are beyond anything -
I can't recommedt them enough. I made around 8 of them today, I think, maybe more.

The dough recipe I used was a very simple one - 500g strong flour, 300g water, 7g quick acting yeast and a heaped teaspoon of salt. I put it in the kitchen mixer for 10-15 minutes then moved it to an oiled, covered bowl in a warm spot in the kitchen. The first batch was done while the kitchen door was open and it was really cold so I popped it in the Instant Pot on the "yogurt making" setting for 90 minutes. The second sat in a sunny window.

Each dough batch made 5 balls weighing 160g. After a second prove I kneaded and stretched each into a 24-30cm circle (this is a lie, they were weird splodges). I put flour on the peel (official name for that metal flat thing that gets pizzas out of ovens) and plopped carefully placed the dough on it. 2 spoons of pizza sauce, a scattering of olives/pepperoni/nothing, a generous sprinkling of mozzarella and a quick shimmy to get it from peel to oven.

The thing cooks unbelieveably quickly. I charred the first one because I couldn't believe 30 seconds was enough before turning. (it was)

in which we learn 60 seconds a side is too long

Using the peel, I pulled the pizza out every 30 seconds or so and rotated it 180 degrees. Within 90 seconds to 2 minutes (depending on the temperature of the baking stone at the heart of the oven) each pizza was perfectly cooked.

one of many misshapen but delicious pizzas

I had a brilliant time. I was supposed to be making dinner for everyone but I got overexcited and made pizza for a late lunch first. This was serendipitous, as trying to use an unfamiliar cooking technique with FIRE and at up to 500 degrees Celsius in the dark would have been a nightmare. I did have a second batch in the dark but it was much harder to see whether things were cooked/burnt/undercooked so in future I'll stick to cooking with actual visibility.

It was wonderful to find things that are fun and exciting, especially when I'd anticipated this season with a fair amount of dread.

If you need me, I'll be pitting olives and sourcing 00 flour online for the foreseeable future.

Happy New Year, and may the coming decade be kinder than the last.

Dear Zoo

Happy Birthday!

I've passed my half century, along with my First Ever Best Buddy Beth, Cerys Matthews of 6 Music, and the Open University. Balloons and cake to us all!

Like your typical eight year old fifty year old, I made the excellent decision to take a picnic to the zoo.  I say zoo, I mean the Yorkshire Wildlife Park in Doncaster which is a friendly and excellent place.  It functions partly as a normal zoo and partly retirement home for animals no longer in the zoo breeding programme. It's one of my favourite places and somewhere all five of us enjoy.

Feeling pretty lazy, I bought a pack of fondant fancies to serve as a mini birthday cake. Feeling hungry, I made spanokopita to take with us on the picnic.

Leeds used to have a place called Salt's Deli, and their spanokopita was to die for. They vanished some years back and I really had a hankering for the lovely spinach and filo pie. As usual, I turned to Felicity Cloake of The Guardian for recipe advice. I roughly followed her recipe here.

I reduced the spinach from 1kg to 750g and would recommend increasing the feta to 350g. Chopping and massaging a tablespoon of salt through the fresh spinach did work, but I had to put it in a colander with heavy weights on to help remove the excess liquid.

It was a pretty easy recipe and I highly endorse it - it was delicious and kept me in lunches for several days. My VEM Kirsty had a taste and went home to cook it herself.

We had a brilliant time at the Wildlife Park. The baboons were busy with new babies, and freaking out about a male mallard that was somehow terribly threatening as he swan serenely around the pond. There were fights over a stick, brawls over getting too close to the babies, sibling jealousy, male posturing and female impatience with all this crap.  Pretty much like the rest of us. Except for the mallard phobia, obviously. That was just weird.

The painted dogs were remarkably laid back in the face of their neighbours' noisy chaos. I'd swear one of them was rolling her eyes, but anthropomorphising is too easy. 

One of my great delights is visiting the polar bears in their 10 acre playground. Polar bears are HUGE. Really, really huge. Not "gosh, that's big" type of beast, more "Holy Geez, look at the the size of him!" It's hard not to want to go in and give them a cuddle, even if they'd eat you - they are gorgeous and hey, a bear's got to eat. You don't get to be the world's largest land carnivore without a heck of an appetite. This is beautifully demonstrated by the sign on the staff entrance to the bear enclosure "Do You Know Where The Bears Are?"

Victor is my favourite. He's a behemoth of a bear - old, wonderful, father of 10,  grandfather of many. He had a lovely swim in his lake and spent a lot of time blowing bubbles because he can.  

I love the capybaras and the maras; if a rabbit and a deer had babies, they'd be maras. For my 40th birthday my Best Woman SJ bought me a hutch and two guinea pigs (Lola and Lotta because they were small and very funny) and it's hard not to see the capybaras as giant free-range guinea pigs, happily bimbling around and dozing in the sun. They *definitely* want a cuddle and a scratch on the back.

Guinea pigs on steroids

We were delighted to see the tiny baby anteater, Licky Minaj, having a cuddle with her mum then having a little wander in the outside world. She's ridiculously cute. Top work crowd-sourcing the name, YWP. No Anty McAntface for you.

Our big surprise of the day was discovering that armadillos go jogging. Watching them trot in opposite direction around their well-worn circuit had us transfixed for ages. Sure, the marmosets were cute, and it was exciting last time when they escaped, but jogging armadillos are adorable.

After our picnic, a visit to the tigers and giraffes, total failure to find the Amur leopards and a pause to admire the black rhino standing to attention, we met with Elvis the Emu. Elvis is under the misapprehension he's an ostrich. No one wants to hurt his feelings, so he lives in the African enclosure and hangs out with the female ostrich who's too polite to say anything. Maybe it's in the name.  We adopted a hen called Elvis from my good friend Lisa recently. She and her lads all refer to Elvis as "he" despite Elvis laying eggs daily.  Emu, ostrich, boy hen... Live your best lives, Elvis.

It was a lovely day spent with my best people. Dinner at Salvo's and home again to indulge in another birthday treat - watching the live-action Peter Pan from 2003, which remains one of my favourite film.

Over coming weeks I've a series of workshops, courses and performances to enjoy as I continue my bid to make this a year I look outwards rather than in. Textile printing, glass work, sewing garments, seeing ballets and shows... 50 has a lot to look forward to.

I'm handsome and I know it

In a pickle

One of the things I missed most when I moved to the UK as a kid was the lack of dill pickles. The lack of good food generally, come to think of it. Sure, the chocolate was better and you get a lovely cup of tea, but the food was almost uniformly lousy, the pizza were appalling and you couldn't even get a nice crisp dill pickle to liven up your sandwich.

The North Wales culinary landscape was pretty miserable in 1985.

Things are much improved. However, I still find the dill pickles a bit hit and miss. Too sweet a lot of the time, or too floppy, or just a bit 'meh'. So I'm making my own.

As I'm not sure how they will turn out, I'm starting with two different recipes.

My new friend-of-a-friend-via-Facebook, the very ace Lisa D, suggested this particular recipe. She's an ex-pat Canadian with excellent taste in many things (i.e. we agree with each other) so that's my first attempt.

Refrigerator pickles aren't proper preserves; they are only good for 2-3 weeks. I'm not sure how many pickles I'll need in that short a time, so I'm only trying one jar for this one. What I have in the cupboard is a much smaller jar than the recipe uses so I've halved the amount of vinegar. I'm using a generous sprig of fresh dill, a peeled clove of garlic (because I like it) and a teaspoon of sea salt. I've sliced the pickles about pound-coin thickness because I prefer them thicker than her wafer thin style.

It takes about 3 minutes to do, and is an absolute doddle.  If these are good I'm going to be delighted.

I liked the idea of longer-lasting pickles too, so I'm doing a more traditional recipe with the majority of jars.

Unlike the massive farms these people seem to have, producing kilo after kilo of cucumbers that require industrial scales of production, I have one plant that escaped the slugs. Downsizing needed.
I swapped the unit of measurement from 1 cup to 1/4 of a cup, and kept proportions the same. so: 1/4 cup table salt, 1 1/4 cups of water, 2 3/4 cups of white wine vinegar, simmered for 10 minutes to dissolve the salt. I put a large sprig of fresh dill, peeled garlic and one fresh chilli pepper (also from the garden) in each jar before stuffing them as full of cucumber as possible.
Because my cucumbers aren't a specific "for pickling" cultivar, they do have more seeds than is usual for dill pickle.  I'm doing some jars with slices and some with spears that I've trimmed the seeds from to see if that keeps them crunchier.
I also read on a number of recipe sites that the blossom end of the cucumber contains enzymes that make it go floppy, so I followed that advice too and trimmed the ends off.

To allow the pickles to last long term, I put all the jars on a folded tea towel in my big stock pot, covered them with boiling water and simmered for 15 minutes. The Internet assures me that will work just as well as a pressurised canner (and obviously the Internet is always factual - ha!) so that's what I did.

Don't worry, I did add more water

When I lifted the jars out (carefully) I could see one wasn't sealed properly so we'll not store that one and eat it soon. The other 4 looked much better, bulging because of the heat, contracting to a vacuum seal as they cooled. They are the duller green I associate with pickles, and I'm very much looking forward to trying them! A shame I have to wait about a month before opening them - I promise I'll update you.

Having been away for 12 days, I had rather a glut of produce to deal with.  I have now washed, trimmed, blanched and frozen over 4kg of French beans, swapped 2 dozen quail eggs for courgette to make fritters, and enjoyed salads of tiny tomatoes with red onion.

I know I say it a lot, but I really do love my garden.