It was a gorgeous summery morning yesterday. Many of the trees in our forest garden were looking gorgeous. Also the sound of the birds was incredible. We could hear grasshopper, sedge & willow warblers and chiff-chaffs back from their foreign trips. The insects were enjoying the tree flowers. So I decided to take a few pictures to show you the beauty.
Please click on the picture to see a full size one. And please let me know what you think in the comments below.
People have enjoyed the luxurious taste of asparagus for millennia. The Ancient Egyptians ate it. And it appeared in The Roman Cookery of Apicius in the late 4th & early 5th Century CE.
Asparagus seasonal right now but only for a short period. Also in season is the wonderfully aromatic, anise flavoured french tarragon. As with many things that are seasonal at the same time, these two ingredients make perfect partners. We grow both of these ingredients on the smallholding, so I had a ‘free’ meal in the making when paired with eggs from our chickens.
In this recipe I complemented these ingredients with some wonderfully sweet and full tasting, 24 month’s old, piave cheese. This is a cow’s milk cheese from a small area in Italy with the same name. I was lucky enough to receive some from my Twitter friend in Rome, Carla Tomasi.
The finished tart tasted really smooth, rich and special. The fragrance of the shoots, herb and cheese was subtle: our senses were gently stroked. We had the tart with new potatoes lightly dressed in wild garlic mayo and steamed brassica shoots the first day; and with lemony cous-cous and tarragon marinated tomato salad the next.
If you’d like to know how to make this tart and see some tips for how to grow your own asparagus, please read on…
Snowdonia was beautiful wreathed in snow this morning as I travelled into town. So I stopped to take some pictures with my iPhone. The panorama extended all the way across Cardigan Bay down to mid-Wales. Glorious and another bonus after yesterday evening’s crepuscular ray sunset.
Today started with high winds and snow. Nasty north-easterly winds that are not usual. So all sorts of things are blown into odd positions. After a few days where we did loads of work outside in shorts and t-shirts, it’s a bit nasty for the plants. In particular we have almond, buckthorn and peach blossom that may not survive to become fruit. We shall see.
Anyway, we were rewarded with this fleeting sight. A gorgeous sunset with crespucular rays. It really is beautiful here, and we really do appreciate it.
In my goody box from Anne at the Felin Ganol Mill was some wholemeal rye flour and chopped rye berries. Along with some sunflower seeds, these are just what you need to make this delicious, hearty & earthy bread.
The result was fantastic and we ate it with some very special cheese. The soaked rye chops help keep the bread wonderfully moist. Those and the sunflower seeds mean it also has a nutty texture.
The bread is easy to make as long as you do not expect the same feel and process as making bread with wheat flour. Rye doesn’t have the same gluten development as wheat, so you don’t get a big rise. The dough starts, and remains, sticky and so you have to handle it sparingly with wet hands.
It’s also best to ‘age’ the bread once it’s made for 24 hours or more so that the crumb can develop the proper characteristics.
If you would like to make this bread, read on… Continue reading »
This meal started off as one of those: “What do I do with these?” scenarios.
Debs had made a gorgeous parsnip, cinnamon and lemon cake with some of our over-wintered parsnips. It was delicious. I had one parsnip left that Debs had not been able to use.
And I had cleared a space in our big polytunnel for a new kiwi ‘Jenny’ and for our tarragon. (How posh is that, to have a big and a little polytunnel?) The space for these had a huge clump of chickweed in it that we’d been harvesting for ages.
And, of course, it’s wild garlic time.
So I thought that the parsnip would make a really intense sweet/savoury mash with potatoes and wild garlic pesto. It did.
I gave the chickweed a good haircut. Then I just washed it, gave it a good shake and wilted a 2 litre pan full, covered and shaken for 2-3 minutes. I dressed it with my normal vinaigrette.
I brushed the seafood with a little harissa and griddled it on a very hot ridged griddle for about 4 minutes. I then turned the heat off and covered with a saucepan lid to leave it to cook in the residual heat and steam.
The whole recipe took less than 30 minutes to prepare and had a lovely contrast of colours, flavours and textures.
So the only thing for me to add is a recipe for wild garlic pesto. Read on… Continue reading »
The first nettles of the 2012 season for us.
While the spaghetti cooks, gently fry garlic & anchovies in extra virgin olive oil. Then add nettles to the pan and cover till they wilt. Season with salt, ground black pepper and lemon juice. Mix through lightly drained spaghetti with a good handful of finely grated Parmesan cheese. Delicious!
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Romeo, the hate I bear thee can afford
No better term than this,—thou art a villain
Now why would you name a wheat after someone who would say that?
I think this Particular Tybalt, unlike Romeo’s assailant, is more fiery in name than in nature.
This is another test bake of one of the flours I received the the Felin Ganol Mill. This particular flour is a fine grained white flour. I decided to use is as part of my normal bake of 2.7kgs of sourdough along with some Felin Ganol wholemeal spelt. Anne & Andrew say on the packet that they recommend it is mixed with 30% strong white flour. What I did was replace some of my usual strong white bread flour with the Tybalt.
Here’s the formula I used… Continue reading »
I promised some more salad dressings when I wrote the Vinaigrette recipe the other day. I really looked forward to doing this post because mayonnaise this way is so simple and so spectacular. You’ll have great mayo in less than a minute. I hope once you have made this the first time, you will not feel the need to buy mayo ever again.
What’s more, it gave me an excuse to make a food-related video to show you how easy it all is. So it was lucky I needed some mayonnaise yesterday. It was to make into a wild garlic mayonnaise to go with some juicy prawns grilled with breadcrumbs and parmesan. I’m afraid there’s no picture of the finished dish because we ate it!
If you want to know how make this, wild garlic mayonnaise or tartar sauce, please read on… Continue reading »
It’s very funny how life works.
I nearly met Anne & Andrew Parry from Felin Ganol Mill last year. We were temporarily in the same room and then I had to leave the next day. That was at an ‘international’ meet up of bakers in Bethesda, North Wales.
Love of bread (and food in general) led me to become online mates with Azelia Torres-Martin. If you look at her blog, you’ll soon find out that Azelia is a bit of a flour geek. Azelia came across the Parrys through her flour researches. She introduced me to them virtually (over t’internet) because she thought we had similar values and ideals about life.
And after a brief email exchange with Anne, I now have a big box of different flours to try from Anne & Andrew’s beautiful mill. That says a lot about their approach to life and to their craft. In exchange for some free flour, they asked for feedback about it from someone who bakes a lot and knows a bit about what they feel & taste. Now I’ve not achieved the levels of geekery that Azelia has, but I do bake quite a bit and enjoy the challenge to learn about new flours.
This is a review of the first flour I tried. It’s milled from a 100% ‘Amaretto’ wheat variety grown by Howard Roberts in Hammonds End Farm, Harpenden. It’s at 70% extraction, which in baker speak means it has only 30% of the wholemeal bits removed. The flour is from the 2011 harvest and has a protein content of 12.3% for those that are into such things.
Leaving some of the bran etc in the flour makes baking a good loaf slightly more difficult. This is because the solid particles break into the strands of protein (gluten) which hold the gas produced by the yeast. So the loaf may not rise as high and the crumb can be dense. I’m sure you’ve had wholemeal ‘bricks’ of bread too. As you can see above, the flour performed very well for me. To find out what I did, please read on… Continue reading »
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