The slow cooker chef: low fat summer vegetable and bean casserole recipe
So many vegetarian recipes are high in fat with an emphasis on cheese and eggs. These ingredients can pull a flagging recipe round in seconds. We sometimes eat these dishes – the cheese and eggs make tham tasty, I’m cooking for an alpha carnivore foodie after all. Last night I woke at three a.m. and mulled. Surely, with a bit of thought, I could make veggie food that’s low fat and delicious. This morning I opened an eye to the promise of thunderstorms. I was suddenly kitchen bound as I’m working on an outside job at the...
read moreInterblog day out at Audley End
“Lets have an interblog garden visit.” Magic Cochin from the superb Purple Podded Peas blog suggested a couple of weeks ago. Danny was alarmed. “Does that mean that we’ve got to weed the herbaceous borders?” “No it’s an outing to a great garden. It’s going to be the kitchen garden at Audley End. And we’re going to look at the service wing.” “That sounds wonderful.” And it was. I left D happily tucked away in the Rat Room and spent a few hours soaking up the atmosphere of...
read moreThe Pickled Walnuts project. Stage one.
“What on earth are you doing, Fiona?” I was sitting on the floor on a large plastic sheet, wearing rubber gloves and stabbing green walnuts on an old bread board with a carving fork. No wonder Tessa was intrigued. I’ve been desperate to get my hands on some green walnuts for years. About 10 days ago I spotted some on a friend’s tree. It was just at the end of the picking green walnuts season. “Take all you like but hurry or they’ll be too hard to pickle.” She picked one and sliced it firmly with a...
read moreThe Indian Runner ducks have gone
Freddie, Tipex and Eric Boss had a final breakfast of French beans, emptied the fresh water fountain and moved to their new and permanent home on Sunday morning. S and Rollo arrived with a sturdy wooden crate in the boot of the Golf. “We’ll catch one each,” S explained as he set up the crate for our return. Secretly, I was a bit concerned. I’d never picked up the ducks or even touched them. They’d pecked gently at my green gardening gloved fingers hoping that they were edible. S is an expert domestic fowl catcher...
read moreWork and holidays
Yesterday I didn’t write a post. I took a holiday from everything and spent a day with Seraphina. Lunch and shopping in Saffron Walden. Tea and cakes at Audley End. Perfect, as we both needed some time out. So this evening I’m sharing something very special. I’m showing you a few shots of the house where I am working at the moment. It’s the quintessential English country house set in an acre of garden and has a good, calm feel. Here, time has stopped still. The job involves repairing and decorating the outside at...
read moreCourgette glut
“Is this from the same plant as that one.” Danny held up the small courgette and its older brother that I had overlooked and was travelling rapidly towards becoming a marrow. He weighed the two in his hands and glanced at me. “I think that we are on the brink of a glut.” The trug had never been weighed down with courgettes before. So initially tiny hands clapped with glee. The chicken poo enriched compost had worked like a dream. Yesterday I was wondering what we could do with them all. They lay in a long tranche in the...
read moreUpdate on Einstein: the pigeon trapped in our chimney
Danny woke me early. “I’ve an idea. If we block off the sitting room end of the chimney, I could run a tube from the exhaust of the car down from the chimney pot. Carbon monoxide. The end would be quick and he wouldn’t suffer any more.” Perhaps it was the effect of the heat wave. The hot, fretful, sleepless nights had finally taken their toll. The idea was crazy. Our chimney is high – a good twenty five feet above the ground. It would be impossible to get a tube in the chimney without a cherry picker. And who has...
read moreLow fat Saag Aloo recipe
“A typical meal at home doesn’t consist of a main course and vegetables. Rather a pot of rice and a lot of side dishes,” Danny’s friend Dipak confided, a year or so ago. I remembered the remark this week. Had I started making side dishes for curries and frozen some portions, I would now have a selection in the freezer for mid week meals. On days when I long to reach for the telephone and order a takeaway. I make a good raita but this has to be run up and eaten immediately. Why not add some other dishes to the freezer...
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