The Cottage Smallholder

Driving to the supermarket to do the Big Shop on Sunday I worked out that we spend over £500 a year on flowers for the house. A chilling thought as I love flowers. A house without flowers just doesn’t sing. As I squeezed the car into a tight parking space I hoped that an excuse to continue with this magnificent expense would come to me. It didn’t.

As I strolled with my trolley, I’d decided that it might be fun to try and find flowers for the house from the garden. This is the first post in a series of twelve, one each month until December.

If I put the money saved into a Min Pin proofed tin for a year we could prise open the lid and treat ourselves to

• a weekend by the sea.
• an elongated dinner at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons
• a hefty bet on the Grand National

Admittedly this is not the best time of year to be venturing out with a pair of secateurs and a hot Min Pin (Inca always travels with me on my forays into the garden). After ten minutes I found the elements for this tiny posy. Rose buds, snowdrops and an aconite that opened like a star.

This end of January resolution is already paying off. At this time of year I don’t usually look at the detail in the garden. My mind is set on the job in hand – feeding the chickens, checking the ponds and the two bee hives (are any bees flying?). The bees seem to be thriving in this mild winter. They were on the honeysuckle by the front door yesterday morning.

Yesterday I noticed tiny details in our garden as I searched for flowers. Bulbs and buds appearing and a long list of jobs to be done. These can easily be tackled in an hour at the weekend and if they’d been left for another month would have developed and grabbed an entire weekend. I was feeling pretty good – in a thrifty sort of way.

Despite this, I missed my large vase of flowers and was considering putting this posy under a vast magnifying glass for a bit more impact. Suddenly everything changed. Danny invited an old friend to stay. He arrived with a pretty bunch of flowers. In an instant he was my friend too.

I couldn’t do without our fat and lean gravy boat. It’s cleverly designed so that the lean gravy is drawn from the base of the boat. The fat can easily be poured off from the fat spout. A few weeks ago I was struggling to skim the fat from a stew. There was no time to chill the dish in the fridge overnight and remove the fat easily. In desperation I thought I’d try using this gravy boat. The experiment worked. The gravy boat was immediately promoted from ceremonial mascot – merely gracing the Sunday lunch table, to Chef’s ADC with total responsibility of removing fat from sauces, casseroles and stews.

I am now looking for a larger one, not just to keep the half pint one company but a beefier one would be very handy. It only takes a few minutes for the fat to float to the surface. Excellent.

Amazon sells a fat and lean sauceboat. A great investment even if you only use it for gravy and a good present for anyone that’s keen on cooking. Lakeland have a more basic but practical one here.

My friend Emma gave me this special roast chicken recipe. Everyone loves it, including her young children and it’s quick and easy to prepare. The chicken sits in the stock as it roasts so it is succulent and full of flavour. The garlic sauce is delicious and doesn’t blow your head off. If you are looking for an easy way to cook pheasant this recipe works very well with game.

Ingredients:

• 1 chicken (approx 1.5 kilos)
• 1 head of garlic
• 300-600 ml of hot chicken stock (depending on the size of your casserole. There needs to be enough to cover half the bird)
• Splosh of white wine (optional)
• 3 sprigs of thyme
• 1 unwaxed lemon/apple/onion to stuff the cavity
• 6 rashers of streaky bacon
• Ground black pepper

Method:

Set the oven to 210c (190c fan-assisted)

1. Put the lemon in the cavity of the chicken and place the chicken in a small casserole dish.
2. Break up the head of garlic into cloves and scatter them around the bird (do not peel these).
3. Tuck the sprigs of thyme around the bird.
4. Arrange the streaky rashers over the breast of the bird.
5. Pour on the hot stock and the wine. Season with ground black pepper.
6. Put a piece of foil under the lid of the casserole to insure a tight fit. An place the casserole in the centre of your preheated oven.Cook the chicken covered for an hour.
7. Remove the chicken temporarily from the oven, put the bacon and put it on a small baking dish to crisp at the bottom of the oven. Return the chicken to the oven for another 30 minutes (lid off to brown). Top up the juices with more hot stock if necessary.
8. When the chicken is cooked, remove it to a warm place. Don’t forget to take the bacon out of the oven at this point. Cover the chicken with foil and some towels to relax whilst you prepare the garlic sauce and cook your vegetables.
9. Remove the garlic with a slotted spoon. Squeeze out the garlic from the skins (discard skins) and using a hand blender whiz the garlic into the rest of the juices. Pour into a warm jug to serve with the chicken.

There’s something very sexy about hyacinths. Their fresh, heady exotic scent draws one way beyond the waxy flower heads and squeak of constraining leaves.

Danny buried his nose in a pot of them and glanced up at me,
“Mmmmm. Lovely. They smell of spring.”

And they do but the scent has a deeper resonance for me. Each year the hyacinth draws me back to T.S. Eliot. When the flowers have finally come into their own and the house is heavy with their sultry perfume, I’m searching for my copy of The Waste Land. Somehow the flowers and the poem are interwoven for me, both returning every year, familiar yet always surprising.

You can read The Waste Land through this free link http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html
I first encountered the poem at seventeen. I can still almost smell the emotion in these lines:

‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Extract from The Waste Land, T S Eliot (1922)

When we go away on holiday we search for two types of shops, hardware shops and food emporiums. The latter can be supermarkets, outdoor markets, greengrocers or delicatessen. If the country is sunnier than England, we are looking for locally produced herbs and spices. Perhaps it is something to do with the sunshine or the processing but these herbs are so much more pungent and last a lot longer than most of the dried herbs available in the UK.

Fifteen years ago I went to Crete for a month and found some wonderful blends of local herbs in a large indoor market. Unfortunately most of them were tossed out by the Penultimate Paramour as “out of date”. He didn’t spot the airtight jar in the photo – we still use these, the aroma is heady when you prise off the top. Danny was amazed that herbs could last so long. We found the sack of Provencal herbs at Charles de Gaulle airport a couple of years ago. We’ve used a sack already and when this one is opened it’ll be decanted into a le parfait jar with a tight rubber seal. We bought the little jar in Como. The combination of mixed Italian herbs and dried mushrooms are heavenly and won’t last long.

Herbs and spices are great presents to bring back for friends and family. We found some tiny Le Parfait style jars in Newmarket and decanted herbs for my mother, she used them sparingly until she saw me sprinkling Provencal herbs into the mince and liver casserole of dog food (Min Pins are gourmets too). Within a week she was banging on the door for a refill.