Cornflower

Friday flowers - while the sun shines

    Scotland has been hotter than Hawaii this week. We still have the sunshine, and the blossom it has brought out (lei, anyone?), but temperatures are due to return to normal very soon.

    Dancing Beastie has a lovely post on the Scots attitude to good weather!

Cookbook of the week - Noma

    If you've read the blog for a while you may remember this post about the book Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. I said there that it wasn't really a book for the home cook to use in the kitchen, and that stands, but just for fun we have now tried a recipe: René Redzepi's famous malt soil!!

    Click back to the earlier post and in the last picture, bottom right, you'll see what we were aiming at, though we went for the other version of it, the 'vegetable garden'. The recipe is here, and there's a helpful suggestion on substitutions here, but to cut a long story short it's a blend of different flours (we used chestnut as we couldn't get hazelnut), with a few other additions, made over two days and sieved so that the end result looks like rich loam or good compost.

    We had it at a fine tilth until Mr. C. decided to add some liquid to it to help the vegetables stay in place (talk about muddying things up), but that didn't affect the taste which I thought was nicely nutty - I really like this strange stuff - though Harriet described it as "burnt toast made into fine breadcrumbs".

    Anyway, I said we were having fun with this mad dish, and so as it was supposed to be a vegetable garden (and the 'crop' was better than the picture above suggests), we thought it should have some gardeners to tend it,

so out came the Sylvanians ...

    There was much hilarity in the kitchen.

Mrs. Mop

    I can't find an online version of the story, but there's a piece in the paper today about a survey which suggests that one woman in three "secretly loves cleaning": they find it "relaxing", "satisfying" or "therapeutic". I think I'd put myself in that category as I don't mind the work itself - just as well since I'm the one who does most of it - I'd much rather live in a clean, tidy environment than a messy one, and putting it all in order gives a sense of satisfaction and small achievement. What I don't like is having to do it when other tasks are similarly pressing - it can sometimes be hard to leave my desk in order to get the hoover out, and I grumble then, but needs must.

    I've been dipping into Rachel Simhon's The Home Handbook with all its helpful advice on cleaning and on keeping everything within a home well-maintained, and I was surprised to read that the author was not a 'natural' housekeeper; when she had to write a newspaper article on the work of the National Trust, she spent a week at its housekeeping conference and then came home intent on applying the "tried and tested, low-impact, environmentally sound techniques" she had learned with reference to great houses to the business of keeping her London flat up to scratch - she calls it a transformative experience!

    One more word on the book for now - each chapter is charmingly prefaced by a relevant quotation, so for example 'The Kitchen' is headed up with this passage from the wonderful Cold Comfort Farm:

    "Flora watched him with interest while he turned the cold water on to the crusted plates, and began picking at the incrustations of porridge with his twig. She bore it for as long as she could, for she could hardly believe her own eyes, and then she said:

    'What on earth are you doing?'

    'Cletterin' the dishes, Robert Poste's child.'"

    As we know, old Adam's life is eventually transformed by Flora's gift of "a liddle mop", and that's my new mop head above, pressed into use this morning. It's easy to forget what a difference replacing the head makes to the job of washing the floors, but Rachel Simhon recommends it be done frequently, and sponge mops be avoided as "they are virtually impossible to clean" - glad I've got the approved type.

    Anyway, to get back to where we started, are you in the "secretly loves cleaning" category, or do you find it a real chore?

Books and cakes - 49

    "Wimsey gratefully took in the cosy sitting-room, with its little tables crowded with ornaments, its fire roaring behind a chaste canopy of velvet overmantel, and the silver tea vessel winking upon the polished tray. 'I feel like Ulysses, come to port after much storm and peril.'

    He bit gratefully into a large and buttery muffin."

    So muffins it had to be - the yeasted variety, of course - made following Elizabeth David's advice to use olive oil instead of the traditional lard or butter, and baked on the hob rather than in the oven.

    In English Bread and Yeast Cookery (where there is an extensive, comprehensive chapter on muffins and crumpets) she quotes Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, writing in 1974 when he was in his nineties, recalling how in his youth,

"muffins would come in their heated covered silver dish along with salt cellar, china tea, cream and folded napkin, and be set down at my elbow by a club waiter still in the livery of the Regency, knee-breeches, silk stockings and buckled shoes ... and all for no more than a shilling."

    The Fenchurch St. Paul Rectory may not run to a servant in livery, but Mrs. Venables' muffins were very well received by Lord Peter Wimsey after his car goes off the road in the snowy, desolate Fen country of East Anglia at the beginning of Dorothy L. Sayers' The Nine Tailors. It's a terrific book, and you can read all about it here.

Cookbook of the week - week 12, part 2

    Watercress and potato soup, from the March chapter of Elisabeth Luard's A Cook's Year in a Welsh Farmhouse. The recipe given is actually for sorrel and potato with the suggestion to substitute watercress if you have no sorrel to hand. It turned out velvety and peppery, and with that chlorophyll-rich vivid green (the picture above was taken before the addition of some double cream or crème fraîche, the one below after) it looked and tasted wonderful.

    The book is illustrated with great photographs by Clare Richardson but also with Elisabeth's own watercolours, some of which you can see here, so leafing through it is as much a pleasure as cooking from it.

A day at the office

    Above is a detail from the tiled dado which runs throughout the Victorian building in which the Mindroom office is housed. A former school, it has been beautifully and sensitively converted to provide premises for a number of voluntary sector organisations, and our light and airy accommodation, with its view of Arthur's Seat, is a pleasant place to work; I was there today for a Trustees' meeting, and the picture provided the prompt for this post.

    For anyone who hasn't come across Mindroom before, we are a charity specialising in learning difficulties, giving both direct help and support to individuals and families affected by those conditions, and staging events from major international conferences and masterclasses, to small training sessions tailored to specific requirements, all with a view to passing on knowledge and expertise so that no-one goes undiagnosed or their needs unmet. I've been involved since the start - over ten years ago now - and I'm proud to be associated with such highly committed, professional, dynamic colleagues, but the demand for Mindroom's services shows no sign of diminishing, in fact the gap between the ideal world encapsulated in our '2020 vision' and the status quo is a very large one. Hence the need to spread the word a little further.

A lunch with a view

    The view from our table at lunch today. It may look as though we were on the deck of a yacht or some Mediterranean island, but in fact that expanse of blue is the North Sea, for we were eating in The Seafood Restaurant in sunny St. Andrews (and very good it was, too).

Cookbook of the week - A Cook's Year ...

    Almond cookies with cardamom, "crisp, buttery little biscuits to dip into mid-morning coffee ...". In A Cook's Year in a Welsh Farmhouse by Elisabeth Luard this recipe features during the winter months, and as the cardamom adds such a note of almost gingery warmth to the finished biscuits, they are perfect for the colder time of the year, but I wouldn't pass them by whatever the weather.

    You're meant to grind the whole (unskinned) almonds yourself, and I'm sure that would give an interesting texture and an artisanal feel, but I had only ready ground almonds in the cupboard so that's what I used and no harm done, though I forgot the dusting of icing sugar at the end. Next time ...

Freshly pressed

    I do like ironing!

Mothering Sunday

    "Mother", bronze by William Landles.

(There's more on mothers here.)

Cookbook of the week - week 11, part 2

    I've made pesto many times but never gnocchi to go with it. Sarah Woodward's The Classic Mediterranean Cookbook gives straightforward instructions, and though this is not a quick process, it's a very satisfying way to spend a couple of hours, and the end result is certainly worth the time involved.

    The potatoes are boiled in their skins and then peeled and mashed with salt; flour is gradually worked in, and that's all there is to the dough - there was no egg in this recipe. Left to sit while you make the pesto - much pounding and crushing and that lovely bruised basil scent througout the house - the gnocchi need only a minute or two in boiling water, and they have a surprisingly subtle, delicate flavour which makes them a great foil for punchy taste and coarse texture of the pesto.

Friday flowers - daphne

    Deborah was writing about Daphne odora the other day and she's spot on in her description of the scent. The flowers shown here are on my desk, and the fragrance - from just two sprigs - is indeed sublime.

Cookbook of the week - 'Classic Mediterranean'

    Sarah Woodward's The Classic Mediterranean Cookbook has been on our shelves for years and gets an airing every so often. This week it has done us proud, beginning with Djej Emshmel, a Moroccan tagine of chicken with lemons and olives, which we had with Roz bi Saffran, saffron rice mixed with pine kernels, hazelnuts, dried apricots and raisins.

    The leftover rice was used in a 'deconstructed kedgeree' - i.e. alongside smoked haddock and poached eggs - for breakfast next day, while the broth in which the chicken was cooked became Avgolemono Soupa, a frothy, savoury egg and lemon soup. All of these dishes were good enough to want to repeat soon.

In life as in the kitchen

 

     Later today I'll be making a roasted tomato sauce to have with pasta and to use in risotto, but beyond throwing the tomatoes into the oven with garlic, herbs, olive oil and seasoning, there's nothing laborious about it.

    Contrast that with the work of the residents of Campodimele, the subject of Tracey Lawson's A Year in the Village of Eternity (my perfect lunchtime reading just now) for whom the tomato harvest is just one of the calendar's many culinary red letter days. In the chapter on September, Tracey Lawson describes the industry involved in preserving the local tomato glut: la conservazione dei pomodori. One village lady rises in the very early morning and works sixteen hour days bottling tomatoes in the form of both cooked and raw sauce - she will have 350 bottles of sugo in her larder by the time she is finished. Another lady enlists the help of her grandchildren to mash the raw tomatoes in their glass jars:

    "'Nonna, dove trovi questa forza?' asks nine-year-old Lorenzo, 'Where do you find your strength?'

    "Theodora smiles. It is the smile of a million Italian nonne, for whom no kitchen task is too tiresome or too time-consuming if it benefits her family's palate or health.

    'Dove trovo l'amore, trovo la forza!' she replies. 'Where I find love, I find strength!'"

Provisionally speaking

    I'm making the Cauchy socks from Cookie A's book Sock Innovation. You begin with a provisional cast on as the cuff has a folded picot edge, and not having worked that before I needed guidance. I couldn't fathom the illustration and written instructions as given at the back of the book (standard Interweave Press ones), and various videos were tried and found wanting, but in the end I used this page with reference to this video (for the long-tail cast on), and I managed.

    I can see that folding the hem and picking up the provisional stitches would be straightforward with thicker yarn and bigger needles and above all, knitting flat, but doing it in the round at a relatively fine gauge was quite a fiddle. However, I got past that tricky bit and am working away fine so far.

    For anyone interested in the socks' name, here's Cookie's explanation:

"My first cat was named after the French mathematician Augustin Louis Cauchy, who was famous for the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality among numerous other accomplishments. These socks use a simple knit/purl combination to form lines that resemble inequality signs, hence the name."