How to make your orchids flower for months
I can now understand why some people get obsessed with orchids. These are definitely flowers with attitude. We have two types of orchid living in the cottage. Phalaenopsis and one Dendrobium. Their flowers remind me of the heads of mythical beasts. Open-mouthed in a chatty rather than a snappy way. If you care for them properly, their extended flowering period almost guarantees that eventually they will start to work their magic and make their presence felt. Our orchids live in the bathroom, on a deep windowsill. They seem to like the steam...
read morePotato salad recipe
I love a good potato salad. Jersey Royals were half price on Saturday. They were ideal. Unpackaged, mud still clinging to the skins. I got home and decided to have a sniff on the internet for a good recipe. I was looking for something simple yet chic. My mum was coming to lunch and, to be quite honest, I wanted to impress her. I found a great potato salad recipe on Delia Online involving lemon and olive oil vinaigrette and loads of spring onions. I had bought three quarters of the amount of potatoes but made the full amount of sauce. While the...
read moreMy cherished second hand asparagus steamer
Ever since Gilbert told me that the easiest way to cook perfect asparagus is to use a steamer, I’ve wanted one. Until then I suspected that they were a bit faddish. Just another bit of kitchen equipment that we could do without. Gilbert thought the same until his sister sent him one for his birthday. To be polite, he thought he’d give it a whirl and was instantly hooked. It’s a well designed bit of kit. All you need to do is rinse the asparagus and snap off the woody ends. The asparagus stands upright in the steamer, with the...
read moreJudy’s recipe for elderflower and lime jellies
My sister has just come back from France. She was visiting friends who have retired and moved there. She came back bursting with sun and stories and this recipe. I halved the amount. It filled three 100ml glasses. I used two small limes as I reckoned that the limes in France would be bigger than those that I found in Waitrose this evening. Our flowering elderflower heads are small – clearly young, first of the season. So I used what I thought would be the equivalent of 2.5 large French heads. This was the final course of a snacky lunch...
read moreHow can I make my chicken go broody?
Every now and then I get an email from someone who desperately wants a chicken to go broody. Going broody means that the hen suddenly fancies raising a brood of chicks and will sit on the eggs constantly to incubate them until hatched. You can’t make a hen go broody. It’s like trying to make X more amusing, or sexy. Either X has the tendency to be amusing or sexy or does not. If you want to breed chicks you need an incubator or a broody hen. There are strains that have a tendency to go broody. Bantams (a small breed of chicken) are...
read moreHow to cook perfect poached eggs
We’re very keen on a cooked breakfast at the cottage. This is now largely restricted to the weekend. Our chickens give us a good supply of fresh eggs. We used to buy our bacon in 1 kilo packs. A dangerous move as the great slab like pack looked so inviting that we had bacon sandwiches most mornings. A delicious way of jumping a couple of dress sizes in a year. Now I buy just enough bacon for the weekend. Poached eggs have been a favourite with me since I could say “egg”. I always thought that you had to have a special poached...
read moreFlowers from the garden: May
It seems longer than four months since I last bought flowers for the house. I’m still finding it hard to keep my vow not to buy any for a whole year. For the last couple of weeks we’ve had no flowers indoors, from the garden or anywhere else. I’ve been returning from work too late to drift into the garden with my secateur. And, I suppose in a way I had lost heart. Last weekend I visited one of my favourite private flower stands (on Duchess Drive, Newmarket). I had surreptitiously spotted that they were selling Sweet Peas a...
read moreAsparagus, haddock and prawn risotto recipe
It was my turn to cook tonight. On the way down to Essex this morning, I decided to cook kedgeree. I had found some traditionally smoked Haddock in the freezer. The bag looked small so I poked about for something else. We had the remains of a pack of uncooked tiger prawns. Danny is 54.5% keen on kedgeree as a supper dish, this might tip him over to 64.5%. Especially if he had a starter of asparagus. On the journey home I changed my mind and decided to make an asparagus and smoked haddock risotto. Everything would be in the one dish. The...
read more
FD