Bavette steaks with peppercorn sauce

Posted on May 26, 2023 by Kate Watson

I’ve been planning to write up my old-faithful peppercorn sauce recipe for ages but it never quite felt like it deserved its own blog post (harsh, for an old standard of mine, thank goodness recipes don’t have feelings!). And then the lovely people at Swaledale Butchers offered to send me some of their meat to try and it seemed like a combination made in heaven, because I get to talk about one of my favourite butchery cuts, the bavette steak, a French standard but sadly hard to come by in UK, and share my favourite peppercorn sauce recipe with you into the bargain.

We had visitors last weekend so my dinner plan worked perfectly, almost everything can be prepared ahead of time leaving just the steaks to fry off in a good pan to medium rare, with a good long rest afterwards during which all the last little fiddly bits can come together. I served the steaks with a rich creamy peppercorn sauce, a very traditional French-style tomato salad, a herby green rocket salad, and oven chips.

You can do most of the work on the sauce before the steaks go anywhere near the pan, which really takes the pressure off multitasking at the last minute and over-doing the meat by accident. So do this first, until the mix is reduced by half, and then take the pan off the heat.

Bavette steaks are a favourite of mine and I can be depended to order them if I find them on a decent bistro menu. Anatomically they come from the area where the lower part of the sirloin joins the flank. They don’t have surface fat but will often have a little marbling within the meat itself. The muscle fibres are relatively loosely joined here and are arranged length-wise in the butchered steak, which means it’s important to slice the steak across the fibres when serving – but if you do that the result is a lovely juicy, buttery mouthful which can easily be tackled without any need for a steak knife.

To cook your steaks to perfection, get them out of the refrigerator a little in advance, pat them dry of any juices, and allow them to come to room temperature. (Make sure they’re covered to keep flies off if that’s a problem where you are!)

These are quite thick steaks and will take longer in the pan than you expect, and benefit from a good period of resting afterwards (ten minutes is a good target). I would ideally cook these medium-rare, medium would probably be OK – if you’re a ‘well-done’ steak person (by choice or by necessity) then bavette probably isn’t the right cut for you.

You want a pan that you can get really, decently hot – this isn’t a job for a non-stick pan, you’re going to burn the non-stick surface if it’s hot enough and if it isn’t, you’re not going to do the steak justice. I have a great carbon steel pan that I bought about three years ago which is slowly developing a good nearly non-stick seasoned surface and this is absolutely perfect for this task.

Season the steaks lightly with just a pinch of salt and pepper immediately before they go in the pan.

I like to fry my steaks in a mix of half butter, half cold-pressed rapeseed oil. Heat the fats until the butter is foaming, and then place the steaks in the pan. Don’t crowd them. They should sizzle immediately. Leave them still for several minutes (I would give the first side five minutes, probably). When you turn them over you should find a lovely golden brown caramelised crust has formed. Give them the same amount of time on the other side and then check for doneness. The best way I have ever been shown of doing this is to check the texture of the steak. It sounds odd but if you press a finger tip into your cheek, and then to your chin, and then to your forehead, that difference in firmness is a good approximation to the difference between a rare (cheek), medium (chin) and well-done (forehead) steak. Depending on the thickness of the steak and your preferences they may well need a few minutes longer. If in doubt, you can always cut into the steak to check (you’ll be slicing them to serve anyway) but bear in mind that they will continue to cook a little while they rest.

If you’re happy, set them aside, covered, somewhere warm, to rest for 10 minutes.

Put the pan with the peppercorn sauce back on the heat and warm it back through. Just before serving, stir in the clotted cream and any juices that have leaked during resting and slicing the steaks, and bring it to the table in a jugs so that people can help themselves.

To serve, slice the steaks across the grain into slices about half an inch thick. Add chips and salads. Pour over the peppercorn sauce. That’s it. Could it be simpler?

For the Peppercorn Sauce (to serve four):

Ingredients:

2 small or one large shallots
Big knob of butter
200ml good beef stock
1 tbsp roughly ground peppercorns
100ml brandy
2 good tablespoons of clotted cream
Salt (to taste, if needed)

Melt the butter in a saucepan.

Finely chop the shallots and cook gently in the butter until soft and translucent (about five minutes)

Add the stock and bring to a simmer. Add the ground pepper.

Add the brandy and start to reduce the stock gently. It will take about fifteen minutes for the brandy to cook off and the volume of the sauce to reduce by half.

(Once it’s reduced by half you can take it off the heat and attend to other things, and continue when the steaks are resting. Warm it back up again before continuing as below.)

Just before serving, add the clotted cream and stir in, reduce the heat and stir gently until you’re ready to serve. Add any juices from the resting plate and from slicing the steaks and stir these in. Taste and season with a little salt if needed, and bring to the table piping hot in a suitable jug or sauce boat.

For the side dishes –

Salade de tomates / Tomato salad

This is the simplest thing in the world. Take good ripe tomatoes, slice them thinly (some people think you should peel them first but I am with my grandmother on this one – life is too darn short to peel tomatoes!) and lay them on a plate, seasoned lightly with just a pinch of salt between layers. Sprinkle over with finely chopped fresh herbs – I used a mixture of parsley, chives and oregano. Serve with a good mustardy vinaigrette to taste.

Herby rocket salad

Because the rocket is growing here and the rest of the salad veg isn’t ready yet – but the peppery punch of good wild rocket goes a treat with the peppercorn sauce. This was just wild rocket, with a few slivers of sorrel, mixed with roughly chopped fresh herbs – the same as above, parsley, chives and oregano, be generous. Add a few rocket flowers if you have them, they taste of vanilla! It likes the same mustardy vinaigrette that suits the tomatoes – handy, that!

A few words about the steaks:

I’ve always openly disclosed any freebies or sponsorship on this blog and that won’t ever change. The steaks were sent to me FOC to review, but otherwise Swaledale had no input into the content of this post. There are no affiliate links and I don’t stand to make a penny whether you all decide to go and buy their steaks or not! (You should, though, because they were very good indeed.)

I’m very impressed with Swaledale’s approach to butchery – a focus on locally farmed, traditional breed animals and then using the whole carcass, which is why they offer more unusual – and cost-effective, these steaks cost a fraction of what you’d pay for a sirloin or rib-eye – cuts like the bavette, along with other great options you don’t often see in the UK like onglet, featherblade and spider steaks. The delivery was nicely packed in recyclable materials with lots of ice packs and the meat arrived in perfect condition. Despite (inevitably) being vacuum packed, the bavette steaks caramelised beautifully in the pan.

You can order from Swaledale Butchers here.

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Simple Quick and Tasty Home-Made Dog Biscuits – treats for your special friend, from the Fallback Pantry

Posted on May 24, 2020 by Kate Watson

We’re all having to make-do at the moment when supplies run low – it’s not reasonable to pop to the shops just to pick up one or two grocery items. Then again, there’s no explaining any of this to our pets, and Rosheen (our Rough Collie) would be inconsolable if she didn’t receive her biscuit treats at least ‘once or twice’ a day!

When the biscuit jar ran dry, something had to be done. I developed this recipe for home-made dog treats, it’s so simple, only 10 minutes to make and 20-25 minutes to bake, full of wholesome things, and good enough you can eat them yourself (but maybe don’t let your dog see you do it!).

Ingredients:

250g plain flour (any other flour will almost certainly also work here as a substitute)
100g rolled oats (substitute linseeds, plain roast pumpkin seeds (chopped up), or just skip these if you haven’t got them)
2 eggs
25g hard cheese, grated – the stronger flavoured the better
1 low salt beef stock cube (or chicken)
~100ml water

You will need a mixing bowl, a rolling pin (a wine bottle can serve in an emergency) and a baking tray with a non-stick sheet or a piece of baking parchment or greaseproof paper.

Pre-heat your oven to 180C / 350F.

In a jug or bowl, dissolve the stock cube in the smallest amount of boiling water you can – ideally less than 100ml.

Combine the flour, eggs, two handfuls of the oats, and the grated cheese in the bowl, mixing well. Now add the concentrated stock a little at a time until the dough comes together and leaves the bowl clean. Give the mix a gentle knead to make sure everything is evenly incorporated (not too much, especially if you’re using strong / bread flour as we don’t really want to develop the gluten for biscuits).

Scatter some of the remaining oats on the non-stick sheet or baking parchment, and on the top of the biscuit dough, and roll the dough out to about the size of your baking sheet, between 3mm and 5mm thick. Add a few extra oats if the mix starts to stick (you can use flour for this if you haven’t got any oats).

Now, using a long-bladed knife, mark the dough right through at 1” intervals, and then repeat this at around 45 degrees to the first, to mark a diamond pattern in the dough.

Bake in the pre-heated oven for 20-25 minutes, until the biscuits are crispy and starting to brown a little. You want these crisp not chewy so put them back in for another five minutes if they’re at all squishy when you get them out.

Transfer to a wire rack and allow to cool, then break up the biscuits and store in an airtight container once they’re completely cold.

Sample (if you like!) or just accept your dog’s opinion. They smell great and Rosheen goes mad for them! They will store well in an airtight container for about two weeks – if you ever manage to keep them that long!

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AFNOR flat-fold fabric face mask – a modified sewing technique, tutorial with instructions and photographs

Posted on May 23, 2020 by Kate Watson

I don’t think anyone predicted that ‘home-made fabric face coverings’ would be the hot apparel item of 2020, but here we are…

Fabric face masks are easy to make, if you have a fabric stash, a basic sewing machine, and a vague idea of how to use it then you’re well on your way. The AFNOR pattern is the best one I’ve found. AFNOR is the French national standards organisation (think ‘kitemark’ if you’re British), and they have undertaken an extensive research program into suitable and effective designs and fabrics, resulting in a PDF report you can find here (in English) which recommends this ‘flat-fold’ pattern, similar to a standard surgical mask, and a ‘duckbill’ mask pattern. The PDF is a really interesting, if rather dense read, but the way the patterns are presented is rather different from what ‘hobby sewists’ are used to working from!

I have modified the assembly technique to make it easier to sew, and also to allow me to use 1/2” bias binding for the ties – if you have 1” bias tape or ribbon, I recommend you use that instead, and you’ll avoid the slightly fiddly bit! (There are extra instructions for using 1″ tapes at the end of the tutorial.)

Fabric selection and preparation:

AFNOR recommend a densely woven cotton or polycotton fabric for this mask, and at least two layers (you can use three if you’re not confident your fabric is heavy enough). Quilting cottons are ideal as they’re usually good solid fabrics and suitable for high temperature washing. For my masks I used a quilting cotton for the outside layer and a good solid cotton curtain lining fabric for the inside. You should be able to breathe through the layers of your chosen fabric if you place them directly against your mouth and nose – but with some resistance. AFNOR suggest trying to blow out a match or candle through the fabric (and through the finished mask) – you should not be able to do this, no matter how much you huff and puff!

Pre-wash your fabrics at 60C, dry and iron before use.

Materials and equipment:

For each mask, you will need:

Two (or three) 20cm (8”) squares of appropriate fabrics
180cm (2 x 90cm) lengths of bias tape or ribbon – I use 1/2” bias tape for this tutorial but if you have 1” bias tape or ribbon it would be better!
Matching or contrasting coloured sewing thread

Equipment:

Sewing machine – a straight-stitch machine is fine but zig-zag stitch is a handy bonus.
Scissors or rotary cutter and mat.
Paper to make a 20cm square template if using scissors.
An iron and ironing board.

How to make the AFNOR flat-fold fabric face mask (modified technique):

Notes on assembly:

This mask is assembled without the use of pins or tacking stitches. This is to avoid poking unnecessary holes in fabric we want to be a barrier. (It’s a bit fiddly in places but the pieces are small enough and the seams all straight so it’s entirely possible.)
Secure the start and end of each line of stitching (I won’t keep repeating this, just assume you need to do it every time).
All stitching is straight-stitch unless specified otherwise.

Cut your fabrics to size (2 (or three) 20cm / 8” squares) per mask. (I’ve cut four as I was making two masks at once to make it easier to illustrate this tutorial.)

With right-sides together, stitch 1/2” / 12mm seams top and bottom, leaving the sides open.

Turn the fabrics right-way out and press the seams flat. Do this carefully as tight to the seams as you can.

Now with the fabric the right way out, sew along these seams again, 10mm / 3/8” from the edge. This topstitching catches the extra fabric folded inside and strengthens the edge of the mask. A contrast thread makes a nice detail here!

Your square is now slightly rectangular with seams top and bottom and open sides. Fold the mask in half, seam-sides together and press to mark the centre.

With the inside surface of the mask upmost, fold each half into the centre so that the outside fold just reaches the line of the topstitching. In effect you’re creating a ‘box-pleat’. Press these folds carefully from both sides to secure them.

Secure the folds by sewing a seam through all the layers, 5mm / 1/4” from both raw edges.

Now, trim these edges neatly, removing no more than 1-2mm of fabric. Tidy any loose ends of thread.

The next section of these instructions specifically relates to using 1/2” bias tape for your ties. If you’re using 1” bias tape or 1” ribbon, brief (simpler) instructions are at the end of the tutorial.

Find the centre of the 90cm length of tape and mark it by folding in a crease line.

Place your mask inside-surface uppermost.

Open up one fold of the tape, and line up the edge of the tape with the seam you have sewn along the short side. Make sure the ‘inside’ of the bias tape is placed downwards, in contact with the inside of the mask. The existing fold of the bias tape should sit over the raw edge of the fabric.

Make a single line of stitching along the middle of the fold of tape, close up to the short edge of the mask. This is fiddly, as you’re sewing within 2-3mm of the edge, so work slowly and carefully.

Now turn the mask outside-surface up. Fold the tape over the raw edge, leaving the final fold tucked under. It should hide both existing seams on this side.

Using a zig-zag stitch, if you have one:

Shorten the stitch length as far as your machine will let you and start with a dense, reinforcing cluster of stitches, close to the ege, where the tape is over the single-fold of fabric. Then extend your stitch length and sew along the tape, repeating the reinforcing stitches when you reach the other end. This technique provides strong reinforcement where the join between the ties and the mask will be under tension when the mask is worn, and the zig-zag stitch overcasts the raw edge of the bias tape on the inside, preventing this from fraying when the mask is worn and washed.

Without a zigzag stitch:

Ideally use 1” binding (see end of tutorial).

If that’s not an option, sew two straight seams, one as close to the folded edge of the tape as you can, and one in the middle. Then at right-angles to these, at the start and end, sew some reinforcing stitches (go forward, reverse, forward again several times) to strengthen the join. Consider also reinforcing these areas by hand stitching and take special care that the ends of any seams are carefully secured.

Do the same on the other side.

Finally, fold and press the bias tapes in half so that the open side faces towards the mask. You will have to shape it a bit near the mask joins to make this work. You can ‘disappear’ any ends of thread from the inside of the mask into the fold of the bias tape.

Straight-stitch the full length of the tapes (it’s only 1/4” wide so just sew in the centre), continuing over the mask seam, along the centre of the zig-zag stitching, and all the way to the other end. This secures the raw edges of the tape and will reduce the tendency for it to stretch in use. Secure your ends.

This all looks much tidier if you use thread that matches your bias tape (as you can see in ‘the one I made earlier’), but I wanted you to be able to see what I was doing as clearly as possible.

That’s it! Your mask is ready to wear!

This is a really nicely fitting mask.

Experiment a bit to find the right position for the ties for you – ladies, if you have a ponytail this is a real advantage as you can tie above / below this to adjust exactly where on your head the tapes lie! While tying behind your head can seem a bit of a nuisance, you can wear this mask comfortably for hours whereas elasticated ear straps start to be uncomfortable surprisingly fast, especially if they’re tight enough.

You should find the fold allows it to sit quite close to your face both sides of the bridge of your nose, without leaving a big gap, and that the lower fold sits snugly under your chin.

You can wear the mask for up to four hours – after that, give yourself a break, have something to eat and drink, and put on a fresh one! After wearing, with clean hands untie the bows behind your head and remove the mask by holding the ties. Don’t touch the front of the mask after wearing. Pack the used mask into a ziplock bag until you can launder it. Wash with your normal laundry detergent, ideally at 60C, dry (ideally in bright sunlight), and press with a hot iron before wearing again.

Extra – using 1” bindings:

1” ribbon

Fold the ribbon in half along its length and press to give you two layers 1/2” wide.

Find the centre of the ribbon.

With the mask inside surface uppermost, line up the middle of the ribbon with the middle of the mask and align the lengthways fold with the raw edge of the mask. Sew a straight stitch seam in the middle of the fold (about 1/4” from the edge).

Turn the mask outside surface up, fold the other half of the ribbon over, and secure with a zig-zag stitch as in the main tutorial.

OR – secure with two lines of straight stitch, one at the very edge of the ribbon and one about half-way between the edge of the ribbon and the edge of the mask. Reinforce the joins as described in the main tutorial. Straight-stitch works fine here because your ribbon should not have any raw edges.

Finally, sew along the doubled ribbon from end to end to secure.

1” bias tape

As with 1” ribbon but start by aligning the raw edge of one of the folds with the raw edge of the inside surface of the mask and secure this first, then fold fully over and secure the front, so that both ‘wings’ of the tape are folded safely on the inside, with no raw edges exposed. You will get the neatest finish with a single row of straight stitch as close to the edge of the front of the binding as possible, but you will still need to reinforce the areas under tension as before.

To finish, sew along the folded over tape from end to end to secure and strengthen the tape.

Happy sewing – I hope you enjoy making your mask and wear it with pride! There’s nothing better than protecting others. Stay safe everyone!

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Coping with lockdown differently – out with the new, in with the old?

Posted on May 6, 2020 by Kate Watson

There seems to be a cacophony of voices out there with advice about what we should all be doing during lockdown. We are being bombarded with recommendations: we should learn something new, a language or a skill; we should embark on new creative projects; we should learn new culinary skills and cook three meals from scratch each day; we should bake sourdough (I mean, we should, if we want to, because it’s wonderful – but it’s not obligatory!); we should make banana bread; we should clang pans on our doorsteps at 8pm on Thursday evenings; we should focus on our fitness; we should (re-)read the Lord of the Rings, War and Peace, or some other worthy volume(s); we should start a new business or side-hustle; we should meditate; we should start writing that novel… And we should showcase these achievements, accompanied by artfully-filtered photographs, obviously, on social media so that all our friends can approve of how productive we’re being and how we’re not wasting this time we have been given.

Honestly, it can all feel rather overwhelming – particularly when these directives bump up against the reality of lives where childcare, remote working, financial and practical restrictions, and worries for our own safety and for that of our loved ones are all competing for our time and attention. I know a lot of us feel like we have less energy and capacity than ever, despite apparently having more time. Instead of feeling inspired, we feel hectored and hassled by the advice, evidence that we’re ‘doing it wrong’ somehow.

For all that, most of us know instinctively and from experience that some of these things (which specific things will vary from person to person) can help us feel better – more calm and centred, settled, more able to cope with the fears, anxieties, and individual challenges of these unprecedented times. Certainly, for me, holding something tangible that I have made – whether it’s a craft item, or a loaf of bread, a meal, some fresh produce I’ve grown in the garden, or even publishing a blog post – gives me a real feeling of achievement. The process of ‘making’ grounds me in the moment, it can be a very mindful process, and promotes a state of flow, where we can escape from our other concerns. Then again there are times when I want to do nothing more than sit on the garden step in the sunshine, listen to the birds and watch the butterflies, curl up on the sofa with a mug of tea and listen to a record, or enjoy a bubble bath – and if we have the blessing of the time to do these things, wonderful! A moment enjoyed – especially in times like these – is never wasted.

And so, (recognising the irony that I’m becoming yet another of those voices – sorry!) I have an alternative suggestion. You can take from it what you like, or ignore it completely. It’s a simple idea, actually: instead of something new, do something old. Don’t start something, finish something. Revisit what you’ve loved in the past, and build skills you use every day.

All makers and crafters, in my experience, have three things in common. The first is a stash – of fabrics, yarns, papers, pencils, paints, ingredients, books, tools and equipment – relevant to the art(s), craft(s) or making we enjoy. The second is a file (physical, digital, or mental) of projects we’ve thought of starting. And the third – unless you’re one of life’s completer/finisher personalities (and if you are, God bless you, where would the world be without you?) – is probably a modest (or less modest) collection of projects that you started but never quite finished.

Now, I am definitively *not* a completer/finisher sort of person. Perhaps, like me, you’re a gannet for new ideas and techniques and find yourself picking up a new hobby every few years. Just thinking back over the last decade, I have to own up to taking up home brewing, curing and smoking, sourdough baking, candle making, crochet, embroidery, dressmaking, upholstery, a range of smallholding tasks… each time to solve a problem or try something different. So, tucked away in corners of the house and shed, I have tools and equipment for each of these, a little stash of materials, and, often, an unfinished project or two.

There are, I think, three main reasons we abandon projects. Distraction (certainly if you’re me!). A change in our circumstances leading to lack of time or attention – going back to work or school, starting a new job, or welcoming a new family member. And sometimes, we walk away from something we’re making because it stops pleasing us – we decide that we don’t, after all, like the pattern or colour, or we feel a mistake we’ve made has marred the item and we struggle to enjoy the process or the item as a result, because we’ve ‘ruined it’.

I would like to recommend this – find something unfinished, and finish it. You may well not even remember why you gave it up, but you probably do. If it’s down to that tricky final reason, it’s really worth trying to overlook whatever it is about the item you’re unhappy with, and continue. Why would I invest time and effort into something I may not like any more, you might ask? It’s a fair question, so I’ll give it the best and most thorough answer I can: Firstly, because the sense of achievement you will get from finishing it off properly is truly its own reward. Secondly, taste is a very individual thing, and I’m sure with a little thought you can choose a friend or family member who would be delighted to receive your handmade object as a gift, even if it no longer appeals to you the way you hoped it would (and I promise they will be completely blind to whatever you regard as its imperfections). Finally, and probably most importantly for me – because nothing in this world is perfect, and nothing we make as imperfect human beings can ever *be* perfect, persisting with and completing an imperfect project is a powerful act of acceptance, both of our imperfect selves, and of the imperfect state of the world. In this particular moment, I can’t think of many things more valuable than that!

(It is said that both Amish quilt-makers and Persian rug-weavers introduce an intentional ‘mistake’ into their work, because imperfection is Human, but perfection is the preserve of the Divine. I have no idea if it’s true but it’s a lovely idea.)

On a practical note – it may also be that you stopped because you were missing the next thing you needed to continue – whether that was an item or a skill. I would encourage you to be willing to improvise! Think about how else the item might progress with the equipment and skills you already have. Can you re-purpose what you need – for example using a zipper or some fabric from some old clothing or bedlinen too worn-out for the charity shop? It may not be ‘perfect’ – so what? It adds character! It might even evolve into a rather different, more interesting item than you expected!

Now, if you have no unfinished projects (I mean, I believe you, many wouldn’t…) you could instead re-explore an activity you’ve enjoyed in the past. There’s every chance that if you loved something once, you will love it again. You can probably think back to things you’ve enjoyed doing in years gone by. Did you love drawing or painting as a child? Is there a musical instrument you have neglected in recent years? Did you used to enjoy writing songs or poetry? Have you got a sewing machine gathering dust at the bottom of the wardrobe? Is there an old favourite recipe that you haven’t made in years? Whatever you decide to pick up, just think that it’s only for you, you have nothing to prove – don’t worry about being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at it (which is, sadly, often one of the reasons we give up things we enjoy) just see where it takes you, and who knows, you may be surprised by the results!

My final suggestion is this – if you don’t feel like making something, why not take some time to strengthen a skill you use frequently? We all, I think, have everyday skills that we’ve taught ourselves as we’ve gone through life. Nearly all of us cook, but few of us have been to culinary school. Most of us type, but few of us went to secretarial college. What tends to happen is that we bootstrap ways of doing things – typing with two fingers on each hand while looking at the keyboard, for example, or the way we handle our kitchen knives – and these serve us well but leave us neither as fast nor as accurate as we would be if we could touch-type, or had ‘proper’ culinary knife skills. But why is this?

There comes a point when our self-taught techniques are pretty quick and effective. Effective enough that ‘going back’ and starting to do things an even better way is slow and frustrating and infuriating in comparison.

When I first taught myself to crochet, I fell into the habit of holding both the yarn and the hook in my right hand and the work in my left hand, using my fingers to loop the yarn over the hook the way you would when knitting. I got pretty good at doing it that way and made a few big projects. But because of the ‘double-action’ looping of the yarn, I couldn’t get any faster. Not only that, several friends asked me to teach them how to crochet and I really struggled to demonstrate technique to them because mine was so wildly unsuitable. To get over that hurdle, I had to ‘force myself’ to do things properly. I started a new scarf project, nothing too complicated but with enough technique and variation to keep me interested (I know myself well enough to say confidently that if I’d started crocheting a ‘test’ rectangle instead, I wouldn’t have got four rows into it before putting it down and never picking it up again), and made myself to hold the hook in one hand and the yarn in the other. It was slow, clumsy, and cumbersome, and I kept having to correct myself when I picked up the project and reflexively went back to my old way of working. At the beginning, I wasn’t just slower than I was used to, I was worse – the tension was uneven, I struggled to manage the yarn in my left hand, and I made mistakes with the pattern because I had to concentrate so hard on what my fingers were doing, all of which led to a lot of really frustrating pulling-down and repeating. But with time I got faster. By the time I’d finished the project, I was just as fast as I had been doing it the old way. I’m even faster now. And Mum loved the scarf when I gave it to her for Christmas!

The point, more succinctly (sorry, if you read this blog regularly you’ll know that I’m a sucker for tenuously-related anecdotes) is this – sometimes to go forwards we need to first go backwards. In our busy, everyday lives there often isn’t time to do things more slowly for a while in order to be faster and better later. Right now, there might be.

I’m not going to promise you’ll enjoy it, at least not to start with! But ‘future-you’ will thank you for your efforts. So maybe it’s time to break out Mavis Beacon (is she even still a thing?) and teach yourself to touch type properly. Or find some good YouTube tutorials and start to (re-)learn some kitchen knife skills. Learn to fillet a fish, break down a chicken, or dice an onion like a boss. Maybe there are some drills and scales you ought be doing on your instrument, which you know would improve your playing but you never quite seem get around to? Every one of us (with obvious allowances for disability) has the capacity to do these things well. If you start doing them correctly right now, you’ll be doing them correctly and slowly (OK, sometimes very slowly, and not so well as you might like, initially!). Doing them correctly and fast comes with practice – there’s no alternative to repetition! Keep stubbornly doing it the new ‘right’ way and the rewards will come, and they’ll come faster than you expect. And the benefits will last a lifetime.

Thinking of you all, wherever you are around the world and whatever life is throwing at you at the moment. Do what works for you. Ignore what doesn’t work for you. There’s no right or wrong way of coping with unprecedented times. Be gentle with yourselves. Cherish the small wins and the every day joys. Stay safe. You’ve got this!

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Fridge Dough, your Flexible Bread-Baking Friend – from the Fallback Pantry

Posted on April 14, 2020 by Kate Watson

Home-baked bread is the best, isn’t it? But there’s no way around the fact that it can be time consuming – by the time the dough has been mixed, kneaded, proved, shaped, proved again, and finally baked you’re at least two, if not three or four hours into the process. Flatbreads like Pitta, wraps, and pizza, can be made a bit faster, but the dough still needs to be mixed, kneaded, rested, and shaped before it’s baked or cooked in a skillet – so you’re still waiting an hour at least before lovely fresh bread can be yours.

At the moment, while many of us are at home under restrictions, time may not be such a challenge as it normally would be, but access to ingredients can be an issue. In various places, yeast seems to be a commodity in short supply. Fridge dough can help us here, too.

Dough in the mixer

What if I told you you could have a batch of dough, in your refrigerator, ready to be baked into flatbreads within about half an hour, or risen dough loaves, rolls etc after simply shaping and an hour or so proving? And what if I told you that this was a batch that you could keep using again and again just by adding fresh flour, water, and a little pinch of salt and sugar. Sounds like magic, right?

In a way, it is – it’s the magic that has kept traditional bakeries going for centuries, long before standardised, fresh and dry commercial yeast became the usual technology for baking loaves. It’s not *quite* a magic bullet for yeast shortages – you will need a dose of yeast to start it, and you may need to top up with fresh yeast from time to time (because of a process called attenuation that I’ll come back to), but by using this technique you should be able to have almost ready-to-bake dough ready to be used at the drop of a hat, and stretch a single spoon-full of dried yeast to bake batch after batch of lovely fresh bread, which is great if you’re trying to eke-out limited supplies.

I’m sold, how does this work?

You start by making a batch of normal yeasted bread dough. Mine is made from a mix of 75% strong white and 25% wholemeal flour, because it gives a lovely flavour and texture while retaining the nice soft character of white bread, but use whatever you prefer.

Start your batch with:

500g strong bread flour (75% strong white, 25% strong wholemeal)
1tsp dried instant yeast
1tsp salt
1tsp sugar
Progressively add cool water to make a well hydrated, elastic dough.

Kneed by hand or in a mixer with a dough hook, with a little oil (I use cold-pressed rapeseed oil, but a nice light-flavoured olive oil would be fine), for 5-10 minutes until the dough is soft, pliable and elastic.

Oil the inside of a bowl, or Tupperware-type container (a size about 3-4 times the volume of kneaded dough is ideal), pop the oiled dough into this, cover with a lid or cling film (don’t seal it completely as you need to allow gas to escape as the yeast works) and pop it in the refrigerator at least overnight.

Fridge dough in tupperware container

When you come to use the dough:

Take the dough from the fridge, turn it out onto a clean, oiled worktop, divide the batch in two.
Set half aside to bake with, and put half into a bowl or mixer, and add:
- 250g strong bread flour (mix as above)
- Pinch of salt
- Pinch of sugar
- Mix, adding enough cool water to make a well hydrated, elastic dough
Kneed, oil, and return to the refrigerator. You need to be baking with and refreshing the dough at least every 2-3 days to keep it healthy and in good condition.

Now, you can bake the other half of the batch. The technique for pittas is here – you should be eating them within 30 minutes – but really anything you can think of will probably work, just experiment! The recipe and process for soughdough pizza should be equally applicable to your fridge dough. I will add to the tested techniques in a future blog post.

But my yeast is out of date and a bit rubbish, will this still work?

The key here is to really get the yeast going before you make the first batch, so I would modify the process like this:

Activate your yeast in some warm water with a bit of sugar, waiting until it really froths up nicely before making the dough. Then, rather than putting the dough straight in the fridge, I would allow it a full proving cycle at room temperature, so that the dough at least doubles in size, I would then take half the dough out and bake with it straight away, add fresh flour, water, salt and sugar as above, and only then pop it in the fridge. Hopefully your yeast will be strong and healthy and present in sufficient quantity by this stage.

It worked, to start with, but it’s been in the fridge a couple of weeks now, and despite baking and refreshing regularly it’s just not rising properly any more. My loaves / rolls are turning out heavy and stodgy. What’s going wrong?

You’ve almost certainly run into a problem with yeast attenuation. Without getting unnecessarily nerdy about this, your fridge dough is a live yeast culture. Yeast is a highly adaptable little blighter which gets through generations fast, and the culture you are maintaining in your dough can quickly change its growth characteristics to adapt to the circumstances it finds itself in. For nice soft puffy risen loaves and rolls, you want a yeast that expands its population rapidly at room temperature when its nutritional needs are met (that’s to say, once you shape the dough and leave it to prove before baking). Keeping the dough in the fridge, convenient as it is, in in effect selecting for yeast strains that are happier working and dividing more steadily at colder temperatures. This is less important if you want to use the dough for flatbreads, pizza bases and so on, as you’re not asking the yeast to put on that final ‘push’ of multiplication before baking, but if you want to use the dough to bake loaves and rolls too, it can be an issue.

One option is to add an extra spoon of new yeast next time you add fresh flour to the mix. You’ll probably find topping up every four or five times keeps things ticking over reasonably crisply, and you’ll still be reducing your fresh yeast use by a significant margin.

Another option worth experimenting with is giving the dough a room temperature proving step every few uses (as described above with older yeast) as this might tune the behaviour of the yeast culture more towards the one we want.

If all else fails, bake up a big batch of pizza or pittas with the dough you have, and start over!

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Pitta and Naan Breads – from the Fallback Pantry

Posted on April 8, 2020 by Kate Watson

Pittas and other flatbreads are so versatile – whether you like to stuff them, wrap them or dip them – and the difference between the pre-packed long-life supermarket versions and freshly cooked bread is night and day. There are essentially two sorts of flatbreads – yeast leavened flatbreads, of which pittas and naan breads are good examples, which tend to be cooked in an oven, and unleavened breads, such as chapatis and tortillas, which are usually cooked on a hotplate or skillet. Different breads vary in their ingredients, but the process for each type is essentially the same.

These are some of the easiest and fastest breads to make – it’s a mystery to me really why anyone ever buys them when they’re so quick, easy and satisfying to make at home. You can even make the dough a day or more ahead of baking – once baked it’s best to eat these breads immediately, as they go stale quickly. If you bake more than you can eat in one go, they’re best frozen as soon as they’re cold. This recipe for pitta breads can easily be adapted to make naan, with the modifications to the ingredients noted below.

To make 12 pittas (takes about 2 hours, including proving and baking time):

500g strong bread flour (I use a 75% white, 25% wholemeal mix because I prefer the flavour and texture, but 100% white is fine too. Flatbreads are more forgiving of lower gluten flours, so if you only have plain flour at home you can still attempt this bread, it will just be a little less elastic / chewy) plus extra for dusting / shaping.
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp instant dried yeast
Oil – I use cold pressed rapeseed oil for this (and almost everything), but olive oil would be more traditional
Water (about 300-400ml)

In a bowl (or bowl mixer fitted with a dough hook) combine all the dry ingredients, about a tablespoon of oil, and mix in enough water to form a nice elastic dough. One of the most common mistakes people make when making bread is not adding enough water to the mix. The best bread comes from a really well-hydrated dough that’s just on the edge of being too wet to work with, under-hydrated dough makes stodgy, heavy bread with poor texture and rise. The more practice you have with this, the easier it will become to judge – I use a little shortcut, which is to add water until I’ve gone a little bit too far, so the dough is starting to become sticky, and then add a spoon or two of extra flour back in just to make it handleable again.

Knead the dough for 5-10 minutes, by hand or in the mixer, until it becomes lovely, smooth and elastic. I oil my countertop for kneading rather than flouring it, as that avoids accidentally incorporating more flour into the dough.

What you do next depends on whether you want the bread today, or not:

If you want to bake the pittas straight away, oil your ball of dough, return it to the bowl, cover with a clean tea-towel and leave it at room temperature to double in size, which should take an hour and a half or so.
If you don’t want the pittas until tomorrow (or a little later) oil the dough and cover the bowl with cling film, or put it in a good-sized Tupperware-type container, and put it in the fridge at least overnight. (What you’ve done here is create a batch of ‘fridge dough’, which is really versatile – more on this later. If you’re short of baking yeast at the moment, this is a game changer!).

When you’re ready to bake:

Set your oven to its highest temperature (ideally at least 220C), with a heavy baking sheet or baking stone inside.

Decide how many pittas you want to bake – I tend to take half the dough and divide it into six pieces. Flour your work surface generously for this bit. Form each piece into a tight ball by drawing the edge repeatedly into the centre, and then leave the balls to rest for about 10 minutes, covered with a tea towel.

To shape the breads, you could use a rolling pin (in which case try to roll them out about 5mm thick and in an oval sort of shape). Personally though I can’t see the point, it’s just as easy to stretch them out by hand and I think the texture is better. First, squash the balls down into a thick disk, then slowly stretch them out.

Only stretch the edge, the middle will take care of itself. You’ll find they want to spring back but keep working on them in turn, each time you ‘go around’ you’ll find them willing to stretch a little bit further. Get them to the size and shape you want, around 5mm thick (but this will be a bit variable – it’s fine, but try to avoid going particularly thin as these areas won’t be able to ‘puff’ into the traditional pocket). Cover them again with the tea towel for about 5 minutes.

When the oven is up to temperature, working very quickly, pull out the hot baking sheet or stone. Place each pitta on it, the opposite side up to the way they were on the work surface (having the ‘dry’ upper side down seems to help them bake nicely), and get them back in the top of the very hot oven as quickly as you can. You want to avoid losing any heat if you can.

If everything has gone right, they should puff up in the oven into little ‘pillows’. Once they’ve puffed, you can turn the baking sheet around (particularly important if your oven has hot spots). You want to cook them until the outside of the bread is dry but still soft. Don’t wait for the top to brown, they’ll be crispy by then – they’ll normally have some colour on the bottom where they have been in contact with the baking sheet. Take them out of the oven and cover with a tea towel until serving, just as soon as they’re still warm but not too hot.

They’re perfect for stuffing, dipping in home-made hummus, or enjoying with soups, salads – anything you can think of!

Variation: To make naan –

Use strong white flour or a 50:50 mix of strong and plain flour (Or 100% plain, see note above).
Use a mix of half-milk, half water, and add about four tablespoons of plain yoghurt (you’ll need less water/milk as a result).
You can use a plain-flavoured oil or melted ghee in the dough.
Once out of the oven, brush with melted ghee or butter while still wet. Mix crushed garlic with this butter for a garlic naan, or fold chopped dried sultanas, figs, or dates and almonds into the dough, before shaping, for a Peshwari-style naan.
I expect my naan to be a bit bigger than pittas, so I would make six or eight from a full quantity of dough.

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Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread – a collection of recipes from the Fallback Pantry

Posted on April 6, 2020 by Kate Watson

Limited shopping opportunities mean many of us are baking bread at home for the first time – or at least, for the first time in a long while! So here’s a quick round-up of recipes and techniques to give you some extra ideas and inspiration.

“But I can’t get…” Some advice on ingredients and making do:

Flour and yeast seem to be ingredients in short supply at the moment, so some creative baking may be required.

If you can’t get bread flour, you still have options if you have other flour types available.

Chapati (Atta) flour works well as a bread flour, it makes a slightly dense but very tasty wholemeal loaf. I recommend using a bread tin for this.
Soda bread and flatbreads are more forgiving than traditional loaves – you can make pittas, tortillas, chapatis and all sorts of lovely things.
You can bake with any mix of bread flours – combining rye, spelt, or wholemeal flour with strong white gives a tasty satisfying loaf which rises better than these flours will on their own.

If yeast is the problem:

Get cracking with that sourdough starter!
In the meantime, experiment with soda bread.
Old expired yeast (those packets in the back of that cupboard!) will be sluggish and produce poor results, but can often be brought back to life. It will take a little care and attention – activate the yeast in some warm water with a bit of sugar before baking, even if the instructions say this isn’t necessary, and use more than the recipe says. Be prepared to give it extra time to prove – time is flavour so this is not a bad thing!
If you have a little bit of yeast, you can make it last (almost!) indefinitely by making a ‘fridge dough’, which maintains a live yeast culture in the fridge for batch after batch of baking. This is what traditional bakeries have done for centuries, and works really well – store the live dough in the fridge and plan to bake two or three times a week to keep it refreshed and active.

Good luck and happy baking!

Yeasted breads:

No Weigh! – the bake-anywhere, traveller’s loaf
A basic, white bread recipe and technique which requires no special kitchen equipment – if you have flour, water, salt, yeast and oil, access to an oven and some sort of a baking tray, you can make this loaf.

Don’t be Sour – a dalliance with yeasted ‘quick’ bread
A good basic ‘pain d’épi’ loaf recipe that can be adapted for all sorts of different flour types.

Roast Garlic & Rosemary Bread
A lovely fougasse-type bread ideal for serving with pasta.

Pain de Savoie, from Paul Hollywood’s ‘Bread’ – Cooking the Books, week 2
This is a filing, savoury loaf with which is a meal in itself – made with bacon (or ham) and cheese, it really hits the spot.

Milk Loaf, from ‘How To Bake’ by Paul Hollywood – Cooking the Books, week 14
Something a little sweeter and more sophisticated – if you’re missing posh breakfast breads this simple but delicious milk loaf might be for you.

Sourdough (and semi-sourdough) baking:

Sourdough Saga: Episode 1 – failure to launch
How (not) to create a sourdough starter.

Sourdough Saga: Episode 2 – keep calm and carry on?
We got there in the end!

Sourdough Saga: Episode 3 – good things come to those who wait!
My basic sourdough recipe.

Sourdough Saga: Episode 4 – cheese and sun dried tomato bread
A nice recipe variation.

Sourdough Saga: Episode 5 – how to look after your starter

Sourdough Saga: Episode 6 – awesome home-made sourdough pizza
This is a really good replacement for take-away!

Sourdough Saga: Episode 7 – six months on, life with my sourdough starter

Sourdough Saga: Episode 8 – semi-sourdough baguettes
Not a ‘novice’ bake, but one I’m really really proud of. These baguettes are the business!

Slash the risen loaves along their length

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Stinging Nettle Gnocchi with Garlic and Sage butter – advice on eating weeds, from the Fallback Pantry

Posted on April 3, 2020 by Kate Watson

Welcome to a new blog series here at the Country Skills Blog: in the ‘Fallback Pantry’ I plan to build a collection of recipes to help make the best of what’s in the kitchen and garden. At the time of writing, at least a quarter of the world’s population is under some sort of ‘lockdown’ restriction resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, making the sorts of recipes and techniques the blog has always focused on more valuable and relevant than ever.

Whatever our circumstances, a slow, thoughtful look at the resources at our disposal will hopefully yield options to help us eat well and make the best of what we have available.

With regular trips to the shops on hold for most of us, access to fresh greens can be a particular challenge. Thank goodness it’s stinging nettle season! Nettles are a great wild food, really nutritious and full of good things, widely found in gardens and other green spaces, and can be used very much like spinach. This recipe for home-made gnocchi really makes the best of them, I think – and they’re fun to make, so you can keep the kids entertained for several hours, too!

An important note about wild food –

When picking wild plants to eat, it’s really important that you’re completely confident that you know what it is you’re picking. There are one or two seriously poisonous wild plants out there, and eating the wrong one could kill you. That said, stinging nettles are some of the easiest wild plants to identify – most British children will have mastered this skill by the age of five or six (though an adult friend of mine admitted to me recently that she wasn’t that confident she could!). Invest in a well-illustrated field guide and learn how to use it, take someone with you who knows what they’re doing, and if you’re ever in the slightest doubt, don’t take a risk! Remember that in many countries there are rules about what you can and can’t pick, pull, or harvest on land that doesn’t belong to you, so please stay on the right side of the law, and check with the landowner first to be sure.

SERVES TWO

Ingredients:
100g stinging nettle tops
200g potatoes
One free-range egg
Around 100g Type-OO white flour (you can substitute strong white bread flour (better), or even plain flour will do in a pinch. Not self-raising, please!)
Semolina (not essential – you can use more of your flour for shaping but will sacrifice a bit of texture)

To Serve:
50g unsalted butter
3-4 sprigs of fresh sage
2 cloves of garlic
Parmesan cheese
Salt & pepper
Optional extra: dry-cured streaky bacon lardons

Serving alternative: any other sauce you fancy – all sorts of pesto-type sauces will work well here, so the only limit is your imagination.

Pick nettles carefully – I wear washing up gloves – selecting the top two or three pairs of leaves only. Nettles are best early in the year, they can get rather tough and coarse flavoured later on. Actually, I tend to pull up a whole batch of nettles – I’m usually weeding – and then pick through them for the nettle tops afterwards. Remove the leaves from the stems, wash them thoroughly, and dry in a salad spinner (keeping your gloves on all the while!). 100g is roughly the amount you get in one of those prepared salad bags.

Start by boiling your potatoes, skins on, in a pan of briskly boiling water.

Meanwhile, in a large frying pan with a well-fitting lid, put a splash of water and a little knob of butter, add all the nettle leaves, cover, and steam until the leaves start to soften and go a slightly darker shade of green. You can take your gloves off now, as the sting will have been disarmed.

Squeeze all the water out of your nettle leaves, by hand in a tea towel, or in a sieve. Then chop the steamed nettles up as well as possible.

Keep an eye on your potatoes. When they’re cooked, drain them into a colander and once they’re cool enough to handle, you can peel their skins off really easily.

Your chopped nettles should now be essentially cold. In a food processor (or pestle and mortar) combine the nettles with the egg and reduce to a reasonably fine pulp.

Mash your potatoes, ideally using a potato ricer if you have one.

Combine the mashed potato with the egg & nettle paste, and mix well.

Now, start adding the flour until it makes a soft but manageable dough. This will probably be about 100g but will vary depending on how much moisture was left in your nettles & potato, and how large your egg was.

Once you have a workable dough (it will still be a bit sticky) dust your counter with semolina, take a handful of dough, and roll it into a sausage about ¾” in diameter. Then cut the sausage into individual gnocchi about ½” thick and place – spaced apart – on a semolina-dusted baking sheet or chopping board. Carry on until you have used up all the dough.

Allow your gnocchi to rest for about 30 minutes and then press gently with the tines of a fork to get the traditional ridges, which help sauces cling to the gnocchi.

To Serve:

Bring a large saucepan of salted water to a brisk rolling boil.

Meanwhile, in a large frying pan, melt the butter. Chop the garlic finely, add to the butter, and cook very gently until golden.

While the garlic is cooking, add the gnocchi to the boiling water. They will sink initially, and are done when they float to the surface.

Finely slice the fresh sage leaves. When the gnocchi are cooked, add the sage leaves to the butter and garlic, stir quickly, and then transfer the gnocchi into the garlic and sage butter in the frying pan using a slotted spoon.

Mix well to coat the gnocchi evenly with the herb butter, and serve, topped generously with freshly grated Parmesan and a good pinch of ground black pepper.

Variation – fry off some good smoked streaky bacon lardons until golden and crispy, before you start cooking the gnocchi, and add these to the gnocchi and sauce at the end.

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Seeds of Change – this year’s garden plan begins

Posted on March 10, 2018 by Kate Watson

Welcome to March, and spring is (or at least should be!) just around the corner. Last night, the first ‘Gardeners’ World’ of the year aired on BBC2: you might say that the official ‘starting gun’ of the gardening year has been fired.

We’ve had some exciting weather here in Cornwall to start the month, with heavy snow and freezing temperatures, so much so that we actually got to go skiing on our field! I can’t help but wonder if we’re the first people ever to ski in this little corner of the county? But if the weather outside can’t make up its mind, inside, we’re making plans for the new growing season, and our first seeds – tomatoes and chillies – are sown and have already germinated.

This year, I’ve had a rethink of the approach to my veg growing. Out go the F1 hybrids, as you can’t save seed from them and they leave me dependent on buying seed from a progressively smaller number of commercial seed producers, most of which are divisions of the sort of large multinational agrochemical companies I would rather not be supporting – even in a small way – with my hard-earned cash. In their place, heirloom varieties with a good track record of performance in garden growing situations, which hopefully I can save seed from for future years, improving the sustainability of our growing while reducing my annual seed bill.

It begs the question, of course, of why F1 hybrids are so popular? As I see it it’s a combination of things – not least, I’m afraid, a cynical preference for what are effectively ‘copy-protected’ seeds on the part of the seed sellers, as the offspring of F1 hybird varieties will not come ‘true to type’ and will often have very inferior production characteristics. But besides that, F1 plants are often that bit more vigorous (so called ‘hybrid vigour’) and are very consistent in their growth. Want ten (or a hundred, or a thousand) identical tomato plants, which will germinate together, grow at very much the same pace, and produce identical-looking and consistently sized tomatoes? If so, you need hybrid plants, as there will always be a bit of variability from plant to plant in open-pollinated heritage varieties.

Who cares about that? Commercial growers, mostly – while I can see that it might have some benefits to the produce showing fraternity (as the judging at vegetable shows is obsessed with the consistency of the vegetables presented – three or five near-identical peas will always beat bigger or better inconsistent specimens), it’s actually the case that most keen vegetable showers are keen to maintain and improve their own varieties, keeping seed from the best producing plants to improve their performance from year to year, something which is impossible for F1 plants.

Also out are dwarf peas and beans – I’m sure they have their use, but darned if I can think of it? I have a feeling that, again, they were developed to allow commercial, field-scale growing of beans without the need for supports, which can then be harvested by machine. But for the individual gardener, what a waste of growing space they represent, if you can instead grow them upwards on a great big wigwam and get a far bigger harvest from each individual plant. They’ve become so prevalent in the seed catalogues these past few years that I keep finding I’ve bought dwarf bean seed by accident. This year, no more – if it can climb, it will climb!

A few years ago I started experimenting with soil blocks for seed starting. The mix I developed then – 4 parts peat free multipurpose compost mixed with 1 part vermiculite and 1 part topsoil (harvested from our generous numbers of field molehills!) continues to serve me well. We’re as strictly peat-free here as we can be – though it can be hard to source reliably peat-free plants.

The blocks work extremely well for mid-sized seeds that are single-planted, or for little seeds planted in small clumps. The 2 inch blocks that I make are obviously little use for anything bigger – beans, peas, and pumpkins / squashes still get started in 3 inch pots. But they’re a great way of reducing the amount of plastic we use in the garden, as they fully replace module trays – and my experience is that seeds started in these blocks transplant outside really well, with almost no ‘check’ to their growth when relocated – probably due to the minimal handling and root disturbance, combined with the fact they are already accustomed, thanks to the soil component of the mix, to the soil conditions here.

This year my chilli varieties are Santa Fe Grande, Ring of Fire and Maule’s Red Hot – sourced from US-based heirloom seed supplier Baker Creek Seeds. I’ve chosen these three specifically because they’re short-season varieties – one of the problems I’ve had with chillies in the past, growing outdoors in the tunnel, is that I’ve grown fantastic plants but there just hasn’t been enough time for the chillies to ripen before winter. With a bit of luck, these should fruit and crop earlier. Having decided on these, sown and germinated them, I was introduced last night on Twitter to a traditional African variety called the Fish chilli and I’m caught – it’s a beautiful variegated plant that produces variegated chillies! – I ordered some seed last night, so let’s hope it arrives quickly and is able to catch up for the missing growing weeks.

My tomatoes are Cuor Di Bue (Oxheart) and San Marzano, from Italian seed suppliers Franchi. The Cuor Di Bue packet, unusually, advised me to sow under a waxing crescent moon – which, as it happens, I did, however unintentionally! Joining them, from Baker Creek, Rutgers, A Grappoli D’Iverno (Italian winter grape), Brad’s Atomic Grape (a bizzare-looking, streaked, technicolour variety), True Black Brandywine and Black Vernisage. That makes seven varieties, which is three too many. Last year I only grew four (Oxheart and San Marzano, along with Golden Sunrise and my Grandma’s old favourite, Moneymaker) and decided firmly that it was a good plan and I’d be strict with myself in future and not over plant… What can I say, I’m a sucker for a seed catalogue!

I’ve had great, quick, strong germination this year – the tomatoes were almost all up on day 4, and the chillies broke the surface between days 10 and 14, really brisk germination and better than I’ve had in the past. I put this down in large part to my new gardening gadget purchase of the year: I’ve invested in an LED grow lamp for my germination set-up, to add to the two cheap heated propagators that have been my dependable friend for years now.

The cost of LED lamps has crashed recently, and my panel cost me less than £20, with very little electrical running cost, either – LED lights are very efficient. When previous grey springs have produced weak, leggy, lanky seedlings, this year’s plants seem strong, are growing vigorously, and are a lovely dark green colour. I’m particularly impressed with the effect on germination, which I hadn’t anticipated. Better still, my baby plants are no longer jammed into window sills all over the house, but instead can sit on a bench in the back hallway, where the temperature is more stable and they’re not so at risk from low overnight temperatures. It also feels less like I’ve transformed my entire home into a grow-house. At this rate, I’ll need to buy a second panel to cover more of my growing bench!

I’ll be back to keep you posted soon!

P.S. Those of you who are long-time followers of the blog will remember Dave the dog, our wonderful Rough Collie, who made regular cameo appearances here. I’m sorry to have to tell you that we lost Dave last year, he was thirteen, not a bad age, and unfortunately his legs eventually let him down. We miss him very much.

But all clouds have a silver lining – and this is ours: she’s called Rosheen, has rampaged into our lives like a little tricolour whirlwind, and I’m sure you’ll all be very familiar with her antics soon!

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The Eurovision Drinking Game

Posted on May 12, 2017 by Kate Watson

It’s Eurovision time! Tomorrow, Saturday the 13th of May, from Kyiv (the Ukrainian capital city previously known as Kiev), it’s that time again!

I’m afraid I haven’t had time for a full review and new 2017 edition of the Eurovision Drinking Game Rules – but here they are, freshly time-travelled from last year, for those of you asking for them (I have actually had requests. No word of a lie!).

For 2017, have a Special Brexit Booby Prize – any reference to Brexit, everyone downs their glass.

Country Skills for Modern Life

It’s Eurovision time again! Where has the time gone? I had almost decided to skip the traditional Eurovision Drinking Game Rules post this year, but Hubby convinced me otherwise. So, somewhat belatedly – sorry folks, I’ve been incredibly busy the last few months – it’s that time again! The 61st Eurovision Song Contest takes place tonight – yes, TONIGHT – May 14th 2016, in Stockholm. <whispers> And this year, I’m going to miss it! The pathos! The tragedy! So I need all you guys to play extra hard on my behalf, OK?

Before we go on, I must pause to welcome our American friends, who for the first time ever can watch Eurovision live on tv! How exciting for you guys! You are, I suspect, going to find the whole thing rather mystifying – don’t worry, just keep drinking, and you’ll find the disorientating effect of the contest itself is…

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