Life, Love & Freedom in a Little City
Cold weather calls for good solid warming food. A gorgeous tuna bake does the job: pasta, sieved tomatoes, creme fraiche, herbs, tuna and cheese. Delish!
Recently, I have taken some time out to rekindle my green fingers, after a nasty confidence-bashing experience with my windowsill herb garden and a lot of aphids. I found a little rose plant on its last legs in Ikea in March of this year. It was in a sorry state with no flowers, curled up dying leaves and the branches looked to be dying off. I just couldn’t resist taking him home with me in the hopes that with a little bit of TLC, it would come back to life.
I cut him right back to the stems and left him to grow back. For months, though I watered and fed him regularly, nothing much seemed to be happening. I was beginning to get quite demoralised, and thought perhaps I had bitten off more than I could chew, but I kept watering it because it didn’t look dead yet. Last week it surprised me with a whole load of new shoots and looks like there’s hope for it yet. Now all I have to wait for is some flowers. Hopefully that won’t be too much to ask for!
Saturday is market day in Wells, and as I walked down from the market towards work, I found the local florist selling capscium plants, so I decided to pick one up. This one had a lot of lovely bright red fruit on it and looked absolutely perfect. So, hopefully it will mark the beginning of a new green-fingered windowsill garden.
Toodle pip.
Inspired by Caroline’s post on Early Birds and Night Owls, I had a look at my own habits and patterns and confirmed to myself that I really am an early bird. By 3pm my energy levels have vanished to a point beyond rescue and by 6pm, I can’t construct a sentence that doesn’t involve food. The last thing I want in the early evening is to be faced with a mountainous pile of laundry to be folded or an hour or so preparing ingredients for a recipe that should take less than 20 minutes to cook.
The only answer is to sneakily beat my own laziness by working smarter, rather than harder and wearing myself out even more. My sneaky answer to that is Prep Day. I arrange my grocery shop to coincide with my day off and spend the entire day preparing food so that when I want to cook during the month, a lot of the painful preparation is already done for me.
First comes the garlic. I grab a couple of heads of garlic, peel and mince it before popping it in a clean jar and add in some olive oil. Whenever I need garlic in a recipe (and I do use a lot of it), I just grab a spoonful from my jar and hey presto, ready to rock and roll.
The second thing I use a lot of in my cooking is onions. They’re a great base, and a staple ingredient but I can tell you for a fact that wielding a sharp vegetable knife at an onion in the evening after a long day is not a good idea, especially when you’re rather clumsy and prone to chopping off the ends of your fingers. A painful affair, I can tell you! So, I start finely chopping as many onions as I have in my posession and sweat them all off in a teaspoon of oil so that they are nice and soft and brown. Once they are cool, I put a couple of heaped teaspoons of chopped onion in little cellophane wrappers and freeze them, ready to chuck straight in the pan whenever I need them. No mess, no fuss, no watery eyes.
A hellish thing to deal with when you’re a woman (or indeed a fella) living on your own is that things come packaged for two eople or for three but rarely for one (unless you pay extra for the privilege) and frankly I hate to waste food. So food is split into single person sized portions. So the next time I want to oven bake some chicken pieces, I don’t have to oven bake the entire bag of chicken but I can take out a single one and leave all the others until it’s time for them to be cooked and eaten.
Something else I use a lot of is a bolognaise sauce. It’s good for spaghetti, lasagne and can easily be adapted to work with meals such as cottage pie. So I’ll knock up some of that and put it in sealable bags or containers, ready to use at a moment’s convenience. Yes, I’ll grant you that Dolmio and Ragu and heaven knows how many other manufacturers already sell ready made bolognaise sauce but when I prepare my own, I know what goes into it, and once I’ve costed up the ingredients, it’s a damned side cheaper than a jar of sauce (especially if you grow your own tomatoes)
It may not seem like much, but at the end of the day, every minute I save by spending a nice relaxed prep day in the kitchen, is a minute I can spend in front of the fire with a good book. I think that’s where I’ll be heading off to now…
Despite being in the middle of yet more building work due to the house flooding last month, I decided to have a domestic Sunday, or at least as far as is possible with half my kitchen currently residing in the living room.
I had a lovely time decanting various bottles of my homemade liqueurs into nice bottles, ready to give out to friends at Christmas:
… and trying out a new recipe for banana and walnut loaf. It came out very dense and moist so I think I might change the recipe slightly for next time but still very nice:
Hope you all had a nice weekend too 
An acquaintance popped round earlier on this week, bearing as a gift, a bottle of plonk, which has rather inspired the musings for this post.
Contrary to its title, this post is less about drinking and more about abstinence, for I personally am not a big drinker. To those who knew me at University, this may trigger a moment or two of hilarity but it is nonetheless the truth. I don’t have a personal problem with alcohol, the drinking of it doesn’t upset me and I’m happy enough to have a glass if one is plonked in front of me, but truthfully, I’d probably rather have a cup of tea.
During my formative years, as we have all done, I experimented with alcohol, found my limits and occasionally exceeded them with less than desirable results. Somehow, over the years, it just stopped being a part of my life. I’m not a solitary drinker so I have always tended to keep the drink for presents or when I have guests and as someone who lives alone (well to all intents and purposes until I get my new lodger) I simply got into a habit of drinking fruit juice, tea or whatever else when I fancied something to drink, rather than reaching for the plonk.
That has its upsides. Drinking, for me, doesn’t have the associations it has for many of my age group – of relaxation and recreation, or of solace after a hard day and so I tend to enjoy what I do drink, however occasionally, on its own merits.
I find the current culture of drinking for the end result (getting drunk) rather than for the taste and experience of what you’re drinking completely alien. If you’ve ever been the sober one amongst a seething mass of drunks, it really can alter your perceptions of the human race, or indeed a few episodes of Booze Britain tends to have the same effect. I have no problems with the occasionally tipsy, particularly the slightly shambling but always amenable type, but what I can’t fathom is how from it being acceptable to be occasionally tipsy but always civil, it has become the norm to be loud, lairy, falling all over the place, vomiting copiously and generally creating an unpleasant effect on those around you.
As I was pondering, I thought I’d have a meander through some articles on binge drinking and a thread of comments particularly caught my eye. After some discussion about the weekly limits for men and women, somebody commented that as a woman, that meant that you could only safely drink one standard (175ml) glass of wine a night and that was ridiculous. It particularly caught my attention because my initial reaction was to question why exactly it was ridiculous.
I have quite often found, if going out to dinner with friends (and most of my friends are not antisocial or big drinkers) or colleagues, I am by far and away the slowest drinker amongst them. I rarely accept a top up (because I’m that much slower a drinker) and upon occasion I get a gentle ribbing for ‘nursing’ a drink all night, and I always have a couple of glasses of water with it. It’s all in good humour and luckily for me, my friends know me and would never be the sort of people to pressure me into drinking more. They know my limits as well as I do and accept them as much as they accept me. It’s not a requirement for a good time.
That said even I, at times, feel a pressure to be more like other people and perhaps stretch to that extra glass. I felt ever so slightly guilty for being a bit of a stick in the mud but when you think about it, there’s nothing to feel guilty about. I drink in moderation, know and stick to my limits and enjoy what I drink. That doesn’t seem in the least ridiculous to me.
It’s been quite a harrowing and highly stressful week for a number of reasons that I can’t really talk about in a public forum such as a blog, but given that it was I decided that today was going to be a bit of a break from the madness of building, painting, decorating and sewing. So after a leisurely breakfast, reading my new book, the Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley I decided that since the weather was nice that I would take the dogs out for a nice long walk over Tor Woods, which stretch out towards Glastonbury and the Mendip hills.
Along the way, I caught up with a lady who lives down the road and has a beagle and wandered off into the woods for fun times and conversation. While we were down there, we discovered acres of wild garlic, carpeting the woodland floor. It was astonishingly beautiful mixed in with clumps of wood anenomes and primroses and the scent … well you couldn’t have missed it for miles! I’m quite excited, as it’s the first real patch of wild garlic that I’ve found and though I have eaten it before and found it delicious, I’ve never cooked with it and have been excitingly looking for recipes that I can use it in. I found a great one for minute steak with wild garlic and lemon mayonnaise, which I am definitely going to have to try. It sounds heavenly.
While we were out, we also found some great hedgerows with blackberry bushes, which bodes well for my jam and liqueur season next autumn. Now all I need to do is find some blackthorn bushes for sloe season and I’m pretty much set, although I have a hankering to find out more about mushrooms, because this strikes me as a fairly ideal sort of location if only I knew a bit more about which mushroom was which. I am still slightly nervous of picking the wrong ones!
Since I seem to be in the mood for plants and flowers and things of that nature (no pun intended), I went herb shopping at yesterday’s market for herbs that grow well in shade as I don’t get much direct sunlight. So I have some lovage, sorrel, apple mint, oregano and lemon balm, and I’m really looking forward to experimenting with them and really livening up my palate!
Clearly, I must be fated to have a greenfingered weekend as a lady a couple of villages along is giving away an old traditional rosebush for replanting and I cannot think of anything more beautiful to plant in the garden. Fingers crossed for it, that it lives through the ordeal.
So, please keep your fingers crossed for me as it’s the first day of my new job tomorrow and I’m slightly nervous. Possibly less so about the job than leaving the hounds but it has to be done! I will endeavour to get some photos up of the painting and building as it progresses this week (hopefully the new boiler will be in by Wednesday!) but in the meantime, bear with me!
Love to all.
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