Cornflower

The Art of Eating

 

 

  Thanks to a most thoughtful and generous friend I have a subscription to the very distinctive food periodical, The Art of Eating, and my first issue has just arrived. This is excellent stuff - enthusiastic, informed, passionate - and a delight for anyone with a deep interest in the subject. Refreshingly free of adverts, it is decidedly non-glossy, illustrated in the main with black and white photographs and drawings, and alongside its book and restaurant reviews, its wine column and readers' letters are the feature articles and recipes, helpfully with both US and metric quantities.

   The focus of this issue is cooked charcuterie, but there's a piece on growing mache ("Mache is like a woman", says a farmer, "you're attracted to its beauty, then you find out it needs an extra bit of care"!), and one on blackcurrants - that got my attention because when I posted about a blackcurrant and almond cake, American readers mentioned that many of our soft fruits were hard to come by in the US, and now I learn why: the cultivation of many berries in the genus Ribes was banned for almost fifty years (and even longer in some states) because of "concern that the plants might host white pine blister rust, which could have devastated the logging industry".

I'm pleased to read that American growers speak highly of our Scottish varieties for their depth of flavour.
   But back to the magazine as a whole - it's just making me hungry!

A word about knitting

    Thankyou to everyone who left such kind and complimentary comments on the knitting. I must stress that I am not an accomplished knitter at all. I have tackled a few things, learning as I go, and the results have been good enough to push me on to the next project, but sometimes madness takes hold and I get above myself. That's what happened with the Bohus hat - I'd been planning to learn stranding and begin on a small Fair Isle piece. That would have been sensible as there'd have been only two colours per row, thicker yarn, bigger needles and less cost involved if it had all gone wrong. But no, I went instead for the complicated, finicky Bohus - hundreds of tiny stitches, often three colours per row, purling here and there, and the potential for an expensive mistake (which it may yet be).
    But, so far, so good. I am not fast. I haven't grasped the efficient way of holding the yarns so you don't have to keep dropping one and picking up the next, as I do. I have to consult a book every time I need to start a new colour to make sure I get the join right. But despite the degree of ineptitude, it is working and I'm pleased and I'd urge anyone who calls themself a beginner and thinks they couldn't do something more advanced to have a try (not necessarily on the like of this but anything 'difficult' they've had their eye on) because it's not so hard and you work it out in the making. Truly, if I can do it, you can, too.

Seeing spring

    In a friend's garden today I was struck by both the obvious signs of spring, and the 'bare bones' of plants, the structures which are always there but more difficult to see when they are clothed in foliage and flower. The rapidly changing light accounts for the near black and white effect in some of the shots, which were all taken in full colour.
    I find I notice much more when I am looking through the camera lens; my wander round the garden would have been much shorter had I not had that particular focus, seeing things I wanted to record (and seeing them in a particular way) rather than just admiring them in a general sense. We can't always have a camera with us, of course, but it does seem to keep the eyes open!

Knitting slowly

The hat is growing slowly as all the increases have been done so I'm now at the maximum number of stitches (312) per round, and working often with three colours at a time doesn't make for quick progress. But as with so many things, rhythm is everything, and once I've got the 'beat' of the stitch pattern for the current row in my head, I can speed up a bit.

The colours are so close in value (is that the right term?) that they are hard to differentiate in the pictures; there are four here - duck egg blue, sage green, taupe and grey - apart from white, but soon the darker ones will start to appear and that will set off this lighter section.

Apart from the colours themselves, the stitches add to the overall pattern with all the purled ones creating almost a quilted effect. Despite/because of (delete as applicable) requiring a lot of concentration this is very pleasing to do!

Coming up for air

     I am still here, but the comparative lack of posts recently is down to ten days of concentrated reading and time for little else, which has left me needing some fresh air! I have read some excellent books though, chief among them this one, so I'm not complaining. I've even managed to progress the knitting a bit during breaks; and all this activity is apparently good for the brain.

Houses - 2

     I've just added a new link to the "Places to visit" list in the sidebar. If you click on Ardgrain you will find all sorts of things from barn owls to Virgil to local history, but it's the house itself that is of particular interest to me. The Discover Ardgrain pages will tell you more about the 17th. century building, "one of the crispest, sparest and most truly Scots houses in the north-east", which happens to be where my great, great, great grandparents lived.
      In the way that one thing leads to another, when I was reading this book (which I can thoroughly recommend, by the way) I was looking up its main location on the map and realised that it was set just a short distance away from the area of Aberdeenshire which I knew my forebears came from. I checked the notes I'd made when we researched that part of the family tree a few years ago and, just for fun, googled the name of their farm to see if anything would come up. I was thrilled when the Ardgrain site appeared, and thanks to Rae who lives there now, I have confirmation that it is the very house the family lived in in the latter part of the 19th. and early 20th. century.

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Later: nothing to do with the above but I've just realised that this is Cornflower's 1000th. post!

Houses

You remember this house? It turns out I had 'the real thing' here in a book all along.
The House Book (which is a fascinating mini architectural digest) lists this fisherman's "penty" as a typical Breton style: "The word penty today means cottage, but it used to refer to a labourer's or fisherman's one-roomed dwelling, often attached to a larger property.

"This penty's pleasing cubed proportions are typical, the steep roof-slope suggesting an earlier tradition of thatch. Slates, not used until the nineteenth century, though available locally, usually came from neighbouring Anjou. The loft, lit here by two dormer windows, was used for storage of crops or tackle; the floor, by tradition, would be beaten earth. Breton granite is usually grey, but here it is a rosy pink peculiar to Brittany's north coast."
So now we know!

        

Now there's a funny thing

     It appears that on the odd day when I don't post here (or on the sister site) I get more visitors than when I do. If I shut up completely, or drastically reduced my usual frequency of posting, would my statistics soar to stratospheric heights, I wonder.
    Also, I'm told by a reader that they couldn't access Cornflower in their office yesterday as it was blocked because of 'content'. What can this mean? Are my adventures in knitting and baking likely to provoke 'lewd and libidinous desires in the minds of the lieges'? Are my flower pictures just too....much? Am I in some way a subversive or corrupting influence? Hm.

(There might be another post later if I can sneak it past the filters.....).

Yes she can!

She can knit with three colours at once!
(I know there are four in the picture but one is waiting to come in on the next row).

With the camera battery dying fast I snapped a few less than perfect shots of progress so far on the Bohus tam which, to my utter amazement, I am managing to do. I can follow the chart, I can keep the yarns separate and untangled, the pattern is emerging looking right and I am so pleasantly surprised - for I'd feared a nasty, expensive mess - that this post is by way of saying, if I can do it, anyone can, so if you've wanted to try stranded knitting, then have a go!

I know this is child's play for many people who visit here, but it's a first for me, and a new skill acquired. Better pictures soon, I hope, though with masses of reading to do this week, the knitting may have to be put to one side - pity, as I'm enjoying it so much.

Books and cakes - 14

    Here's a book by a Frenchman and it is disappointingly lacking in food! We are told often enough in Alain-Fournier's The Lost Estate that people are sitting down to eat, but no details are given - except at one point where Francois has a burnt griddle cake - so I had to extemporise for this month's Book Group afternoon tea fare. With a very weak play on the name of the lost estate itself, Les Sablonnieres, I've made a variation on (the equally accentless) petits sables, short biscuits which can rely on their butter content for flavouring or have spice added, as here.

I whizzed everything together in the food processor, mixing 2 oz. caster sugar, 6 oz. plain flour, and the ground seeds from four or five cardamom pods, then adding 4 oz. butter and 1/2 tsp. vanilla essence. I chilled the dough for 20 mins. before rolling, cutting, and baking for 9 mins. in total (I put them on the lowest rung of the Aga baking oven for 7 minutes and moved them to the floor of the roasting oven to brown for a further two, but gas 3 or the equivalent for say, 10-12 minutes should do nicely - it depends how well-fired you want them. Leave them to cool on the baking sheet.
 If you feel they need a bit of decoration, you could use icing sugar ....

.....well, it is Valentine's Day, there's a character in the book called Valentine, and on p. 156 of my edition, "... Meaulnes was writing, dipping his pen deep into an old-fashioned porcelain inkwell in the shape of a heart."

(You can read what we thought of the book itself here).

Re. searching

    Here's another batch of the search terms which bring people, fruitlessly, to these pages. I do find them amusing, not that they are necessarily funny in themselves but that the way search engines work offers this site as a source of what they seek.
    For instance, I wasn't aware that Cornflower had turned into 'lifestyles of the rich and famous', but it  is here the world comes to find out about "Clementine Churchill's favourite flower", "Burne-Jones' Broadwood piano", "Daniel Barenboim suffers from gout" and "Margaret Atwood's baked lemon custard"  - if she's offering the recipe I'll give it a try.
     I haven't done a post on "artwork to hang in a cloakroom", and as to "where do I keep my Labrador when I go to school?", the answer is only in the nicest, warmest, comfiest place where they will not be lonely and sad without you.
    Next, health matters, and yes, we do do a lot of baking here, but I was surprised at searches for "cornflower cholesterol" and "cornflower fat content".
     Fictional characters come up from time to time with, lately, "Mma Ramotswe dessert" - she is a lady who enjoys her food - and "intentions of the woman in black", which I assume means this book, though maybe not. Then, although I haven't a clue as to "poisons in detective fiction", the excellent Flavia de Luce would be well worth reading for that.
    Lastly, and with Valentine's Day almost upon us, I'm afraid I can't help with "love poems in Swedish", nor even "seduction styles". Sorry!

Fine knitting

    This feels like knitting with cocktail sticks! These are 2mm needles (circular) and there are 154 stitches on their 40cm length. I'm a slow knitter, so a round takes me a good 15 minutes and I reckon on needing 28 rounds to complete this section (I've done 21 which amounts to 1.5"). It is the ribbing for the tam I mentioned the other day, and when that's finished we go up to a whopping 2.5mm circular to start the colourwork pattern - which is where I may come unstuck - but here is Her Majesty on a 5p coin to give an idea of current scale:

Despite the slow progress, I like the fineness and delicacy of this, and the yarn (50% merino/50% angora) is soft and lovely, so although it feels as though there's little to show for a lot of hours put in, it demands its own pace  - and patience on my part!

More muffins

     After the success of the recent batch of muffins, more were requested, but this time I've made something a little different. Baklava Muffins from Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking (one of our most-used books) taste exactly as the name suggests. You combine walnuts, demerara sugar, cinnamon and melted butter to make a baklava 'filling' and put that between top and bottom layers of the buttermilk-enriched muffin mixture (the one above was split open to better show the middle).

When they come out of the oven, drizzle over some warmed runny honey.
These have met with universal approval and I've been asked to repeat them. The thing is, we are a family of five, and my muffin tin has twelve sections, so some people can have three, but not everyone. The selfless Mr.C., passing up his allocation entirely, has made the rest of us very happy!

Bright spot

    Bright spots in the day: well, I've just eaten a very good muffin (recipe later), there's been some knitting (not quite enough to merit a picture yet, but soon) and here's some joyous music, the brightest spot beginning at 4 mins. 56 secs.

Harris Tweed

     As I run off my (mail-related) frustrations on the treadmill, there are mills of a different kind working out their own problems. The Harris Tweed industry is in difficulty, and you can find out about it on this radio programme, The Battle of the Tweed.

    The tweed in the picture is my daughter's old school coat: beautifully made, smart, warm, hard-wearing, but 'old' because it was phased out a few years ago to be replaced by something 'modern' and nondescript.