Cornflower

Recipes and cookbooks

    No pictures of the finished dish, but I can give you a link to the recipe I used for supper last night, and I can thoroughly recommend it because it was wonderful!
    I've made this dish before but not in quite the way given by Lindsey Bareham, and her method (though I was sparing with the olive oil) made it sublime, so I'll be doing it all again soon.

                                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On to recipe books, and Abebooks are conducting a survey on "Hand-me-down cookbooks". This is what they say:
"Do you own a cookbook that has been handed down to you by your parents, grandmother, or even great grandparents? AbeBooks wants to know about your family heirloom cookbooks. Whether it's a Fanny Cradock book, Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course or other, your contribution could be used in a cookery feature on AbeBooks."
To take part in the survey click here.

     I'd love to know what old treasures are on people's kitchen bookshelves, so if you have something special or meaningful and don't mind telling us about it here please do so in a comment.

Portrait of a lady

   Cover design is a subject which often comes up over at Cornflower Books, and there and elsewhere there's been much debate about the modern style Virago Modern Classics versus their original 'green' counterparts. This picture is on the front of a 1980 Virago, a book I picked up in a charity shop on Saturday knowing nothing about author, title, artist or subject, but very taken by the image.
    It is a self-portrait by Hilda Carline, first wife of Stanley Spencer. You can read about her hapless marriage and about her work here and here (and there's a book, The Art of Hilda Carline: Mrs Stanley Spencer by Alison Thomas), but what struck me was the painting's simplicity, the directness of the woman's expression and the beauty of her face - not conventional beauty or prettiness, but the way it conveys strength of character, a deep-thinking nature, resignation maybe, a serious disposition and perhaps a sensuous one.
     I could be very wide of the mark, of course, knowing nothing about the artist until I began to write this post - which came about simply because the face intrigued me.
    And the book whose cover it graces? You'll find it here.

Later: re. Louise's comment, you should be able to see the picture "Elsie" here, though the watermark/logo rather obscures the subject's face!

Green shoots

     I've enjoyed reading Clarissa Dickson Wright's and Johnny Scott's A Greener Life very much, not just for all the practical information  - and there's lots of it - on growing your own food, raising livestock, keeping a greener home and so on, but for the fact that the authors' personalities shine through. It's not a bland how-to book, but one with a distinctive style. You may throw up your hands at some of the views expressed, or you may agree wholeheartedly with them, but either way you will laugh and you'll learn something.
     Another thing I liked was the little off-shoots of information which punctuate the text, the snippets that have you saying "I never knew that", so here are a few for your edification:
 - Do you grow melons (and who does not)? - support the hanging fruit with ferret hammocks.
 - Henry VIII's romantic wedding gift to the homesick Catherine of Aragon was an orangerie and salad garden in every royal palace.
 - In eighteenth century England, Londoners used to walk among the bean fields of Chelsea to smell the lovely scent.
 - Angelica was once the main export of eleventh century Iceland for use as an anti-scorbutic.
 - In medieval times, ladies would embroider a bee hovering over a thyme plant on a kerchief to give to their knights as encouragement in battle.
 - Shetland sheep don't require shearing; instead, the old wool loosens and can be pulled off in a process called rooing.
 - And finally, this is what you can get if you try your hand at candle-making!

Congratulations!

    For my mother and father, who are celebrating their golden wedding anniversary today. Congratulations, Mum and Dad! 

Yet more muffins

     At the risk of boring everyone, here are some more muffins. I wanted to try out the basic recipe given in The Thrifty Cookbook - Kate Colquhoun suggests lots of variations for savoury as well as sweet versions, and one of them involves raspberries - but I was also very taken by Mary's recipe for white chocolate, raspberry and macadamia blondies which she kindly gave us in the comments on this post. I had no macadamias, but I melted some of the white chocolate along with the butter to go into the mixture, and cut the rest into chunks to mix in with the rasps. They are seriously good, and the texture is better than that of Nigella's ones which I made last week.
(Although we still have a few of these left, another batch has already been requested - and no, despite all the baking that goes on here, my family are not fat!).

The bee's knees

    Here's a fascinating article about the intelligence of bees - that one above which was in my garden last summer is certainly showing impeccable taste in flowers.
    Bees who enjoy the finer things in life can be found in these palatial quarters: the hives on the roof of Fortnum & Mason in the heart of London. Their honey will be available, but at a price.
    Which reminds me of the story about the famous Scottish musician Jimmy Shand. He was staying in a guest house on the west coast and the landlady gave him the tiniest pot of honey for his breakfast toast. "Ah, I see you keep a bee," was his response.
    I'm reading about bee-keeping in A Greener Life by Clarissa Dickson Wright and Johnny Scott (and more from that book soon); apparently bees are sensitive to mood, so you must be gentle, calm and confident in handling them, and to attract them to your garden plant more blue flowers, borage and lavender in particular. Something else I've learned is that you can bottle fruit - specifically perfect specimens of nectarines, apricots and peaches - by immersing it in liquid honey, a practice beloved by the ancient Egyptians and Romans.
    Now I just need a sun-warmed wall for the fruit trees, plenty of space for the hives, acres of blue flowers, and time to tend all these things.

Take ....

....onion, garlic, celery, carrot, savoy cabbage (seen in all its glory here), a tin of tomatoes and one of chick peas, a chunk of chorizo.
Combine as instructed by Kate Colquhoun in .....

The Thrifty Cookbook
to make .....

Ribollita, an extremely hearty, tasty and satisfying soup.

You can find Kate's website here, and I'm just off to try another of her recipes.

Edinburgh's next top model

     The Bohus tam is finished! I am more pleased with this than with anything I've made, I think, as I learned stranded colourwork in the doing and it all went without a hitch.
Here it is modelled by its owner, Harriet,

who braved a cold wind for me to get the pictures.

Her comment is "nice, cosy and it looks really cool!"
Mine is "I can't believe I made this!".

Specifications: it's the Large Lace Collar Tam, the yarn is merino/angora, the kit is available from Solveig at Solsilke (look under Bohus Stickning), and it took me almost six weeks to make, but I am slow.
Some of the details are below, including (top left) the wrong side - I'm glad I wove in all the ends as I went along.

Any morning muffins

    Would you like a muffin?

     These are not quite the Christmas Morning Muffins from How to be a Domestic Goddess, but 'almost'. Nigella, naturally, has a constant supply of dried cranberries in her walk-in pantry and gallons of orange juice in her posh fridge. My pantry is so full of dog food and recycling bins that I can hardly get in it, my store cupboard is conspicuously lacking in dried berries, and the orange juice was finished yesterday - for this is the real world, not the glamorous* one of the lady in the Brora cashmere twinset. But when the muffin mood took me, I just improvised, omitted the fancy stuff and relied on the spice content to give the flavour. In the mixture is a generous quantity of nutmeg, and on the top - combined with demerara sugar - some cinnamon, so you can imagine the gorgeous smells which filled the kitchen when I took them out of the oven. I'd make them just a bit sweeter next time (I did put in more sugar than the recipe said to compensate for the missing ingredients) and they'd be wonderful eaten warm.
     They were so quick to make that I'm keen to expand my muffin repertoire. Does anyone know this book - it gets great reviews - or can you suggest another?

*To go off at a tangent, I discover from reading The Thoughtful Dresser that the word 'glamour' was introduced to the language by none other than Sir Walter Scott who anglicised the Scots 'glamer': "the supposed influence of a charm on the eye, causing it to see objects differently from what they really are". Delusive and alluring!

Chlorophyll & carotene

    The great thing about having a blog which covers several subjects ("multi-faceted", even) is that I can move almost seamlessly from creativity to clothes and on to comestibles as the fancy takes me.
With the sun lighting up the kitchen this afternoon and a bag of vegetables to unpack, what else would I do - apart from get on with making supper - but start photographing the contents?

I've spared you the muddy, whiskery Jerusalem artichokes, but I couldn't resist the glorious green of the cabbage, or the way the light fell warmly on the carrots.
As to what to make, The Thrifty Cookbook by Kate Colquhoun has given me an excellent idea - more on that soon.

 

Closet thinking

"Out of the items in the wardrobe I will select the items that make up the self I plan to be that day".
So writes Linda Grant in The Thoughtful Dresser.
     Compared to Linda Grant's, my wardrobe is pitifully small (and my life no doubt comparably narrower than hers), but I see myself as just the one 'self' with no need for a bewildering array of garments to express any other facets of my being; or, on the other hand, maybe I'm a dull person. 
     I truly dislike shopping for clothes. I admire beautiful things and am interested in them in an aesthetic and cultural sense, but I will only go and look for clothes for me when I absolutely have to. I am thus a low-maintenance woman who buys few - but good quality - things and makes them last. That's not to say that I don't care about what I put on, because I certainly do, and I take (a lot of) notice of what other people wear, and I love to read descriptions of clothes in books, but just as Jean Muir's working wardrobe was only ever navy blue, mine is similarly edited.
     I enjoyed the book's literary references from Austen to Zola, Edith Wharton to E. M. Delafield, and the peeks into the well-filled cupboards of others are illuminating, if occasionally alarming, but I found it all rather haphazard and fragmentary, and a potentially fascinating subject  - why we wear what we wear, and what functions other than the purely practical clothes perform for us - has been squandered rather to the personal and the sensational: a more considered, ordered, objective approach would have made for a much more satisfying book.
    But as with clothes, it's all a matter of taste.

A way to go

 

     Do the words "morning pages" and "artist date" mean anything to you? If they do, you're probably familiar with Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self. If not, and you feel you want to "unlock your latent creativity", you could do worse than read the book and follow its plan. In it are tools for anyone who has ever wanted to write, draw, paint, sculpt, make music, any creative activity whatsoever - blogging even! - and who has thought "I can't do that", "what's the use of trying", "I'll never manage it", "I'm not good enough ....". I'd say, having read it and used it, that its worth is not just in getting you to put pen to paper or paint on canvas; it can help shift blocks in other areas, too. If you feel like having a go, Sarah has set up a group to do it together - details here.

    Another book of Julia Cameron's I have found useful was Walking in This World. Yes, she continues the themes of The Artist's Way but crucially adds a daily or, at least, weekly walk to her other exercises: solvitur ambulando, in effect. She says, "Ideas come to us as we walk. We also invite their quieter friend, insight. Walking often moves us past the 'what' of our life into the more elusive 'why'".
    Sarah's chosen just the right time of year to start a programme like this, I think, and whether you want to work through the book(s) on your own or with her group, I'd encourage you to have a go; artist or not, you will find it is a way forward.

Main feature

    Having a glut of lemons (no, I don't possess acres of citrus groves - although I do live in the Athens of the North - just bought too much fruit at the supermarket) I thought I'd use some to make a cake and try out a new recipe.

Can we call this one a health food as it has no added fat and all that vitamin C?

This is Santiago Almond Torte with Lemon Syrup (click there for the recipe). We had it warm with cream for supper last night; I'm having it chilled with my coffee just now. It is very good indeed and the only modification I'd make would be to increase the eggs to, say, six medium or five large, just to lighten the almond mixture a little bit more.

It's adding a welcome tang to Monday morning!

Trailer

Coming soon, to a computer near you....

Cake.

CBG

The Book Group have spent A Month in the Country! Read our impressions here.