Cornflower

The small ways of living

    Nan's 'quote du jour' today is a lovely one on the subject of taking pleasure in simple things and finding art "in all the small ways of living"; as Gladys Taber says there, "no matter what heaven may be like, there is no use just waiting for it".

(Flowers on the desk, after Vita's fashion.)

Books and cakes - 61

    " 'Thwaite,' said Mr. Thwaite. 'The same name as mine and the village. Thwaite House. All it means is a clearing in the forest. Exceptionally dull. There may be cinnamon. Come along.'

    We left the trap and went through a door into a stone-slabbed passage with a hanging lantern in it and a smell of roses. 'Scones,' he said. 'Cinnamon scones,' and held another door and we walked over more stone slabs, passing statues and huge black furniture and crossed-swords and huge dark paintings and Chinese jars as big as men. Our feet made a very hollow noise and suddenly from far away there came an odd long note of somebody singing.

    'For tea, if lucky,' said Mr. Thwaite and opened a door into a room where three windows looked out over lawns and cornland to some hills."

    When the cinnamon scones eventually arrived, their warmth and fragrance must have helped young Polly Flint feel at home at Thwaite, where the food is described as "delicious but not robust".

    I'm talking, of course, about Jane Gardam's novel Crusoe's Daughter which our informal book group has been reading, and so I've made a batch of cinnamon scones to go with the book:

8 oz. self-raising flour

a pinch of salt

2 oz. butter

1 oz. caster sugar

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

2 eggs, beaten

For the topping:

Approx. a third of an ounce of light soft brown sugar

1/4 tsp of cinnamon

Mix the dry ingredients, then add 3/4 of the beaten egg and form a dough. Press it out lightly on a floured board (I didn't roll it), and using a 2.5" cutter, cut 6 or 7 scones. Brush them with the remaining egg, then dip the tops in a mixture of light soft brown sugar (about a third of an ounce) and cinnamon (1/4 tsp.). Bake in a very hot oven for around 10 minutes.

Hot off the press

 

    "A little book of straightforward, contemporary recipes, quick or particularly easy to get to the table. A collection of recipes that are fast, simple and, I hope, fun."

    That's from Nigel Slater's introduction to his new book (out today!) Eat - The Little Book of Fast Food. I've been poring over it, earmarking dishes to try, and they are all so uncomplicated and delicious-sounding that I'm spoilt for choice.

    The recipes are written in the form of extended tweets, NS says, and that gives some indication of their simplicity, but many also come with extra ideas, notes and suggestions which allow for variations, so the repertoire of those sought-after 'on the table in under an hour' dishes is even further extended. I also like the tags Nigel has added to many of the recipes, summing them up in three or four words, for example, on Chocolate Oat Crumble (apricots and raspberries flavoured with elderflower cordial and baked with a chocolate-y, oaty topping) he comments, "heady, crisp, luscious", and for Poor Man's Potatoes (potatoes, peppers and onion simmered in vegetable stock), he adds, "frugal, rich, nourishing" - what more could you want?

The royal 'dog'

Click to enlarge

    Here is the Queen in her sitting room at Balmoral, and note the toy corgi in the foreground on the right.

    Here is my corgi, Philip, who - unlike our real dogs - gets to sit on the settee. He is a souvenir of my visit to Britannia.

    Although they are hard to make out in the top picture, on the royal desk are a number of stones which the Queen has picked up on her walks about the estate. As a keen (and choosy) stone-gatherer myself, I'm glad to know I'm in good company.

Miss Potter at the V&A

    Following on from this post of a few months ago, I managed to catch the display Beatrix Potter and the Beautiful Satin Waistcoat at the V&A the other day.

    As you'll see from the top picture, Miss Potter's illustrations for the clothes in The Tailor of Gloucester were inspired by garments in the museum's collection,

and while her sketches were on display - and it was lovely to see them and the manuscript - curiously the garments themselves were not.

    Just by the way, here is Miss Potter herself.

Pause for thought

   

     I'll just point you to Freda's eloquent post today, and in the same vein, to this short clip of the late John O'Donohue to which I've linked before but which is worth repeating.

Little bits of Liberty

    I read Scrapiana's Patch-ology post the other day and thought she'd hit upon a very creative idea for disguising moth holes, etc., with micro-patches of Tana lawn, so while I've put aside a favourite sweater and plan to fix a fraying cuff with this method, Alice has gone right ahead and patched a cardigan of hers with some lovely Liberty snippets.
   
    Thank you, Scrapiana!

Friday flowers

    A few sweet peas, rose 'Blush Noisette',



scabious, thalictrum delavayi,

and cornflowers various.

Focaccia

    Recipe here.

    It's a very wet dough indeed, so I let the KitchenAid do all the work of mixing and 'kneading', and I baked it in a shallow tin rather than on two sheets as specified.

    We ate it with roasted vegetables (aubergine, courgettes, red onion, red and yellow peppers, garlic) and feta. V. good.

Book of the day - Virginia Woolf's Garden

    Out next month is Virginia Woolf's Garden: The Story of the Garden at Monk's House by Caroline Zoob -

    "Monk’s House in Sussex is the former home of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. It was bought by them in 1919 as a country retreat, somewhere they came to read, write and work in the garden. From the overgrown land behind the house they created a brilliant patchwork of garden rooms, linked by brick paths, secluded behind flint walls and yew hedges. The story of this magical garden is the subject of this book and the author has selected quotations from the writings of the Woolfs which reveal how important a role the garden played in their lives, as a source of both pleasure and inspiration. Virginia wrote most of her major novels at Monk’s House, at first in a converted tool shed, and later in her purpose-built wooden writing lodge tucked into a corner of the orchard.

    Caroline Zoob lived with her husband, Jonathan, at Monk’s House for over a decade as tenants of the National Trust, and has an intimate knowledge of the garden they tended and planted. The photographer, Caroline Arber, was a frequent visitor to the house during their tenancy and her spectacular photographs, published here for the first time, often reveal the garden as it is never seen by the public: at dawn, in the depths of winter, at dusk. The photographs and text, enriched with rare archive images and embroidered* garden plans, take the reader on a journey through the various garden ‘rooms’, (including the Italian Garden, the Fishpond Garden, the Millstone Terrace and the Walled Garden). Each garden room is presented in the context of the lives of the Woolfs, with fascinating glimpses into their daily routines at Rodmell."

*Caroline is an embroiderer.

                                                       ~~~~~

    Just by the way, I see from Caroline's blog that the rose Madame Alfred Carrière (of which we have an exuberant specimen) was favoured by both Vita Sackville-West and Gertrude Jekyll.

Dinner in the greenhouse

    A Victorian glasshouse which used to be a florist's, nursery shop and greengrocer's, Gee's is now a lovely modern restaurant which retains some of the style of its origins.

    Click here for more pictures (much better than mine), and here for the menu - I can recommend the coco beans with girolles and lemon zest, the pizza (as mentioned yesterday), and the goats' curd cheesecake with figs and honey.

 Not forgetting the flower pot chips!

A word about pizza

    I make pizza often, and it's often been featured here - see, for example, Polpo's courgette one, their red onion and thyme, Leon's bianca, Hugh F-W's asparagus and even his kale and onion version. I'm constantly trying to perfect what is essentially a very simple dish, and thus every iteration, variation of flour, cooking time, and so on, is scrutinised and compared.

    Last week in Oxford I had pizzette from the wood-fired oven at Gee's (and I'll come back to Gee's in a later post), and they were very thin of crust, and with their goats' cheese and garlic or prosciutto and black olive toppings, very good indeed.

    I couldn't hope to replicate the cooking conditions in a domestic kitchen, even though the Aga's roasting oven is very hot, but I thought I'd try for a thinner pizza than usual, so I turned to Hugh F-W's magic dough recipe (from River Cottage Veg Every Day, but I used only strong plain flour instead of the mixture he specifies) and did the following:

    - let the dough rise for a good hour and a half

    - divided it into four pieces rather than my usual two (for 4-5 people)

    - rolled them a bit and shaped them by hand until they were roughly the same diameter as my usual two, i.e. half as thick as normal

    - pre-heated the (oiled) baking sheets

    - baked the pizzas without any topping for 3-5 minutes

    - gave each one a 'suggestion' of tomato sauce (Hugh's roasted tomato sauce from the Veg book again)

    - added the toppings (the same ones as Gee's) and then baked them for around 8 minutes, by which time they were nicely brown, crisp, and still pleasingly thin.

    There was much swapping of trays in and out and from oven floor to rack, and then to the simmering oven while the later pizzas cooked, so there was a bit of a production line going (and no chance to take pictures), but it was worth the extra faff because although I say it myself, they were the best I've ever made.

Inviting

    The University of Oxford Botanic Garden.

Shopfront

   

    I wish I had some interior shots of Liberty for you but all I can offer from my visit this week are exterior ones.

There is so much to admire inside - except the music they were playing which was dire enough to drive us out (we've talked about music in shops before),

and although it's later in period, the building's history makes me think of the magnificent London emporium at the heart of Diane Setterfield's new novel Bellman & Black which I'm currently reading and - thus far at least - can thoroughly recommend.

    Channel 4 are making a documentary about Liberty, to be screened this autumn, and I shall watch it with great interest.

A special crumble

    I have no picture of the finished dish, but the crumble Mr. C. made the other night was possibly the best I've ever eaten. He used these small, sweet and very fragrant eating apples (I don't know the variety), our garden blackberries and some farm ones, and Nigel Slater's recipe for topping from his cherry almond crumble (see The Kitchen Diaries II p. 249, or online here) with finely chopped hazelnuts added and the flaked almonds omitted. Cream was served. It was sublime.