Don't mention the lettuce.

I planted lettuces in the ground for the first time this year and was astonished by how much better they grew than in pots or grow bags. Flushed with my success and thinking of salads to come I re-sowed under the bean tripod when it went in, thinking to transplant the seedlings into a new home when they came up. Except they didn't come up.

Undaunted, I assumed that my slapdash sowing style (chuck 'em at the ground and sprinkle some seed compost over the top) was the cause of my woes. I drilled a dutiful little line next to my radishes and carefully sprinkled seed down it, taking care to cover the seed and to dampen the soil afterwards. I waited a week or so, watched the radishes come up, but no lettuce emerged. Tant pis, I decided, guessing that the seed I had been using (different from my original sowing) was out of date and past it in the germination department.

A week or so on, I decided to make my third attempt. This time I used the newer seed, and I decided to sow into seed trays. I even labelled them. Imagine my delight when I returned after a damp week away to find that the little gems were coming up and that the dazzle (it's a red little gem) was on it's way too. It was a little late for a continuous crop (the original lettuce is mostly gone or bolted), but I was going to have lettuces eventually.

This morning I checked my trays. There is no lettuce. My normal snail-foiling method is to keep vulnerable plants on the garden table (it's a bit hard to eat in the garden as a consequence) but some evil mollusc has obviously made it to my high rise nursery and has hoovered up my beautiful lines of seedlings like snail cocaine.

How the hell did the first lot survive? It's a mystery. They were sown direct into the ground, right on snail level. To say that I am sulking would be an understatement. I'm so pissed off I'm not even putting a picture.

bread of heaven

I really really like making bread. I should do it all the time. I should give up my day job and become a baker. Or possibly I should just make bread more. I had a shitty day today but at the end of it there is crunchy chewy home made bread, so life ain't all bad. Even if the above picture *is* mainly out of focus and I deleted all the others.

This is rye bread which is denser than straightforward bread due to its lower gluten content. The up side of this is that it needs less kneading and only one rise, so it's a bit quicker. Plus it tastes of rye which I happen to think is delicious. If you don't like the taste of Ryvita then you should probably give it a miss.

10 oz rye flour
10 oz white bread flour
1 tsp salt
20g fresh yeast
1 tbsp sugar
14fl oz warm water
caraway seeds (optional)

• measure out the flour, pour it onto a clean worktop and make a hole in the middle.
• add the yeast to the warm water, then stir in the sugar until it dissolves (or alternatively forget to stir it like me and resort to scraping it soggily from the bottom of the jug and mixing it into the dough later)
• pour a little of the yeasty water into the hole in the flour and combine with the flour.
• continue like this until all the water is mixed with the flour. The dough will be sticky and wet.
• knead for about 5 minutes .The dough will get more manageable and less sticky but it won't really go all stretchy like normal bread dough does.
  
• shape the dough, cover and leave until the dough has roughly doubled in size. Mine took about an hour and a half.
• sprinkle caraway seeds on the top in the certain knowledge that they will fall off and go all over the kitchen floor (a bit of milk would stick 'em on).
  
• Cook at gas mark as hot as possible for 10 mins, then reduce the heat to about 7 and cook for a further 30-40 minutes, until you can knock on the bottom and it sounds hollow. My oven always takes at least 40 mins, which may be due to the gaffer tape holding it together.
• Resist the temptation to eat the entire lot in one day.
  

And relax....

Following two days racing around frantically trying to get my classroom ready for next year (with ever-increasing inefficiency) I've done a bit of weeding, I've baked a loaf of bread, and I've made an almost completely unnecessary list of items we mustn't forget to take to the Cambridge Folk Festival. I think I might now be ready to start enjoying my holiday.


Thank goodness. Gin and tonic, anybody?

In praise of pink things II

Another vegetable I don't exactly yearn for, I bought the beetroot seed on the basis that a) it grows in shade b) it was 38p. I then proceeded to drop most of the packet when I was trying to sow it, so that far more got planted than I was planning. It has grown well enough under the mini fruit trees and the pink-ribbed leaves are pretty, and edible. I am told that when you have beetroot with leaves on you should remove the leaves as soon as possible as they draw moisture from the root. As you can see from the photo my beets are tiny (about 1.5 inches long). This may be due to the shade or it could be my desperation to pull them up and see what they look like.

A couple of weekends ago I mentioned the beetroot to P's mum. Her immediate reaction was 'You can make Prickley salad!' Cool name, I thought. The only thing I can actually remember from her list of ingredients is sultanas.

P did a bit of googling, and found a recipe which I proceeded to almost completely ignore, leading to the following:

Prickley Green Beetroot Salad*

1 raw beetroot, grated (or chopped small if you prefer to avoid the pink splatter factor)
a couple of delicious spring onions
a handful of sultanas
Chopped beetroot stalks (if available)
a slosh of vinegary salad dressing (I used half vinegar half oil: will try lemon juice another time.)
half a tsp cumin seeds

Combine the ingredients in a bowl and leave for 15 minutes for the sultanas to swell and the flavours to combine. I'd have served it with some fresh coriander on top, had I had any.

The earthy sweetness of the beetroot and sultanas are nicely balanced by the acidic dressing and spring onions. The cumin was a last minute impulse addition but I thought it worked really well.

*why on earth is it called prickley and green when it is neither?!

In praise of pink things

Let's get something clear. I do not like spring onions. I hate the way that hours after eating spring onion I can still taste spring onion. I will expend a decent amount of energy extracting spring onion from any salad including this evil alium.

In which case it was foolish to plant them in the garden, but the vegetable strips at my local garden shop were on three for one and I wanted the golden courgettes having failed to get seed in time. I must've wanted those stupid round carrots, too. Don't waste your time on round carrots my friends; they are merely foolishly short carrots with no point.

Anyway, spring onions. I don't like them, but I bought some. I may have been seduced by them being bright pink, a colour that I used not to realise was my favourite. I planted a few in a window box, and a few amongst the strawberries and lettuce (I love polyculture: thank you Alys Fowler and your endearingly tussled hair).

A couple of weeks ago we pulled one. Oh my. These spring onions are delicious. They taste sort of like a super-charged chive, but the taste does not linger. They grew brilliantly in a window box: better than the ones in the ground (my neighbour reports that his spring onions grow better in a pot too), and they are pink!


A note for other (shop bought) spring-onion haters: if you griddle them they go soft and sweet and do not repeat. I would go so far as to say that cooked that way they are actually nice.

A funny thing happened on the way to the kitchen..

As we approach the end of term and the possibility that this blog will awaken from its lengthy slumber I present to you for your delectation a comedy carrot:

Exciting or what?

I have a few carrots in a pot this year, and they are doing far better than last years which never grew beyond 5cm long. They are a heritage variety and are supposed to be purple, which explains why this carrot has attractive pink legs. I did pull one the other day which was truly purple (and truly carrot shaped). They taste really good and I may make the effort next year to grow a useful amount of them. The only thing is that that would take up a large amount of space, which I don't really have.


This year's major success is lettuce. I've been trying to grow it for a few years and finally realised that they do best in the ground. Pots and gro-bags have only ever resulted in sad looking lettuce-ettes for me. We have been eating exclusively garden grown lettuce for a month or so now, and should be able to continue I hope throughout the summer. The only drawback to home grown lettuce is that the kitchen seems to be permanently dusted with soil from the roots, but this is a small price to pay for fantastically fresh and crispy lettuce.

UFO Attack

I have a confession. I am currently suffering from the terrible inability to actually finish anything. Fortunately this doesn't extend to cooking (getting to eat is always an excellent motivator for me), but in the knitting department? Oh my. I am hoping that a confession will cleanse my soul.

Here is the list of unfinished object shame:

1. Lacy scarf. Abandoned because of my complete inability to follow the simplest lace pattern. Seriously bad for the ego, that. This scarf comes from a book called 'Knitting in No Time'. The book completely fails to mention that you have to actually knit to complete anything. Swizz!

2. Sock(s). I have about one and a half inch of sock. I can't get the bloody thing to knit up without a ladder up the side and have you seen the size of those stitches? Tiny. I know socks are supposed to be quick, easy and addictive but frankly they sell very nice socks at Uni Qlo which will not take me 300 years to finish and probably never fit, and I don't need to swear and throw them across the room (unless the cat does something particularly irritating).

3. Log Cabin blanket. Admittedly, I'm still thinking I might finish this, but that's mainly because I am clearly bloody delusional. I've knitted one peasly square of it. I don't much like the colour of yarn (I know: why the fuck did I buy it?!) which doesn't help as I'm not dreaming little dreams of putting a finished browny-orange blanket over anything (cat, for instance).

4. Black cowl. This will definitely (eventually) get finished, as I have promised a lifetime's supply to a friend who is going to GIVE ME his DSLR in return (I LOVE him). Guilt is almost as good a motivator as food (not as fun, admittedly). Still, it remains unfinished as it's a wool cashmere blend and a winter garment and it just seems wrong to knit that sort of stuff when it's (theoretically, at least) spring. That's the excuse, anyhow.

As well as the above four, I owe one knitted/crocheted baby gift and have one pending. I may be forced to visit Mamas and Papas. Have you seen the price of their crocheted blankets? It's enough to make me start something else.

I'm not even going to mention the sewing.