Off colour
“Why don’t you spend the day in bed if you’re feeling off colour? The Min Pins would love it. I’ll bring you a hottie and breakfast in bed in half an hour.” These past few days I’ve been feeling really odd. Light headed and detached. Not wanting to go to work and longing to stay under the capacious duvet. “I was planning to get out into the garden.” “But it’s pouring with rain!” So I finished the fascinating book I’ve been reading this week. What The Animals Tell Me by Sonya Fitzpatrick. She’s a real life Doctor...
read moreWhite sprouting broccoli 2
The taste of really fresh purple sprouting broccoli from the garden is only beaten by the flavour of sweet white sprouting broccoli. John Coe gives us broccoli plants each year in July. They need to be covered with nets or the birds will strip the young leaves clean within a few days. They also need to be protected from the cabbage white caterpillar. Apart from those two key rules they are easy to grow as long as you know that they will not produce their delicate spears until April of the following year. A lot of my clients have planted...
read moreJackdaws love nesting in our chimney
I was walking back to the car at dusk this evening and passed a very smart building with two smallish standard trees either side of the large front door. I spotted a neat nest of twigs in the branches, and a glimpse of a tail feather. A pigeon was sitting on the nest, she looked incongruous like a miniature partridge in a pear tree on a noisy, dirty road in Newmarket. We have two similar nests of twigs in our garden built by the wood pigeons. More Laura Ingalls Wilder than chic Frank Lloyd Wright, they are still beautifully made and seem to...
read moreDazzling crispy new potatoes recipe
My father was in the army and my parents were stationed in Germany after WW2. The country was devastated and poor. “Every single piece of each garden was filled with vegetables. No flowers. No lawns. Just vegetables. I think that a lot of people were starving.” My mother always described them quietly. My parents swapped a pack of fresh coffee for their first Min Pin, Nippy. The couple didn’t want money. They longed for coffee – not available in their shops. The pup was named after the Nippies – the waitresses at Lyons...
read moreLost in a pile somewhere
Tonight I was going to share my latest triumph. A Seville orange and quince marmalade. A very special recipe that needs a bit of forethought. The local quinces are frozen in late autumn to join the fresh oranges in january/February. The result is a marmalade with an unbelievably fruity depth. Heaven. Over the past couple of months I’ve tweaked and played with it and wrote the final recipe on the back of an envelope. And there’s the rub. Decorating the cottage and occasional entertaining means that piles of these recipe envelopes are...
read moreGood service
In the early eighties I worked part time in a French restaurant on Lavender Hill, London. It was a really long day for the restaurant proprietor. He had to be there at 8:00 am to take in the fresh food delivery and we were often still waiting for diners to leave at two in the morning. This was not the sort of place that sweeps up around the final lingering tables. As a waitress I started work at 6:00 p.m. All the staff ate together and we were allowed one alcoholic drink before the service began. Having studied the alcohol content of all the...
read moreGuest Spot: Sam Raithatha’s special lemon cheesecake recipe
Debonair and charming, Sam serves organic food to the tradesmen of East Anglia. His van is parked in the car park of Ridgeons, Newmarket. A lot of people that I know visit Ridgeons just for Sam’s food. I also have driven in, ordered my food and shimmied out without even buying a one inch brush. Sam also runs the successful Queens Events company. I discovered that he has a penchant for puds when he mentioned that there’s a dearth of them on this blog. So here is his generous contribution to that slim section of our site. This is a...
read moreSun and sunset
Wednesday was like a summer’s day here in East Anglia. Our winter flowering honeysuckle is covered in tiny white fragrant flowers. When I opened the cottage door that morning sun, the lemony scent and the sound of the bees hit me with a surge of spring. The forsythia was just coming into flower. A few daffodils had opened – the first of hundreds that will bloom in the grassy stretch in front of the cottage. I’m working outside this week and jacket, hat, gloves and scarf were ripped off and I basked on my ladder in the sunshine...
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