Cranberry and clementine sauce recipe
I finally found cranberries in the Cambridge Sainsbury’s store on Friday. I wanted to whoop with joy and run around the store waving them over my head. Instead I quickly grabbed two packs and quietly popped them into my basket. I’ve been looking for cranberries for weeks and was beginning to worry that we wouldn’t have homemade cranberry sauce with our Christmas goose this year. We have a great cranberry sauce recipe here. Reading the comments on that article prompted me to give our sauce a new twist this year. Why not...
read moreHappy Christmas cleaning
Christmas and Easter are flagged as reorganisation opportunities here in the cottage. No matter how frenetic our lives and projects are, we always take a few days off. Treasured days. On the run up to the holidays I politely explain to my client that they will not be seeing me for a couple of days before the festivities begin. This is when we Christmas clean or Easter clean the cottage. We seem to miss out on the traditional Spring clean. We discover how much wildlife is coexisting with us in the far outreaches of the cottage rooms. Woodlice,...
read moreUpdate on the Farming Friends – Cottage Smallholder Interblog Guinea Fowl Event. Gentle beings.
June 2007 saw the launch of the Farming Friends’ – Cottage Smallholder’s Interblog Guinea Fowl Event. Looking back at the guinea fowl posts this is a well rounded cycle. Amazing highs and lows and even tears. Everything started here when Sara at Farming Friends sent us six guinea fowl eggs in the post I love my guinea fowl. They are gentle docile beings. Hanging about in a group, they communicate constantly with one another. I went down at dusk on Saturday to lay some gravel in the gluey, muddy run. They had settled in the...
read moreMenu for Hope and Food blogging
We all love to eat great food. Most of us have never gone without. We might read a recipe and turn it down because it’s just too expensive to make. Imagine not having the money to buy food. Any food. It’s the last day of Menu for Hope. ?5 buys you a raffle ticket to win a scrumptious prize. Last year $66,000 was raised to fight real hunger. Just now I saw that the total was just $57,000. It would be so good to top last year’s total figure. We have put up a slim hardback winemaking book that has given me superb results –...
read moreMarmite
I used to always buy small jars of Marmite. I didn’t lavish it on bread every day so it seemed the sensible choice. But these dinky jars easily get lost in the larder. When the Marmite Deamon took over I often couldn’t find the jar. I would carefully search each shelf and finally tear the larder apart. Eventually, two days later, I would discover the jar skulking behind the kitchen roll. Danny always got the blame. A bit unfair as he hates Marmite. When I discovered that he really didn’t like Marmite I questioned the...
read moreFather Christmas
My sister’s bedroom door was ajar. She had just started school and was closeted with her new friend, May Ashmore. Two years younger, I was feeling the age gap. Sara was five and out in the world and I was stuck at home. I hated being excluded. When I quietly opened the door my sister spun round, “This is a private conversation.” The tone was sharp. And they looked complicit. I crept away but hovered in the corridor, intrigued by the whispers. May Ashmore had come to tea. At the table Sara’s new friend had announced that...
read moreMoney tree
Many years ago I was staying with a friend with time on her hands. In the past, I had noticed the tall green leaved plants that stood in three pots in her drawing room. They didn’t flower. They just made up a dull wall of leafy greenness. When I arrived for this particular visit, they were covered in tiny white flowers, as insignificant as the plants. “The flowers are not real,” she whispered. “They are teeny pieces of tissue paper secured with a twist of florist’s wire. It took me two days to make them. My...
read moreGuest spot. Best vegetarian recipes : Emma Bennett’s Vegetarian Moussaka recipe
Last week I ate three excellent vegetarian meals. Danny ate two – he was stuck coming back from Wales and made do with a burger. My trusty Alpha Carnivore mentioned his meal in passing. “It was an Aberdeen Angus burger but it was tiny. I didn’t want a burger and envied you.” I was polishing off the final (large portion) of Emma’s Vegetarian Moussaka. Unbelievably good. With Danny away I could have seconds too. I decided to start cooking this meal on Sunday evening and prepared the lentils and aubergine. I made...
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