🗁Added 8 photos to album Stuff I grow.
Flowers and beans in the footpath garden. Planted brassicas, mounded potatoes. Look at the salsify flowers!
Flowers and beans in the footpath garden. Planted brassicas, mounded potatoes. Look at the salsify flowers!
Rhubarb crumble sponge at the Community Kitchen.
Mega mushroom feast after an evening of foraging. Breaded chicken of the woods and dryad's saddle worked great. Plus a teriyaki dryad stirfry, and veg from the garden.
A hasty tart that worked out really well. The base is dates and oats; the middle berry compote and dessicated coconut, and a bit of coconut oil; and the top is carob with creamed coconut. The top separated a bit, but you could pretend it's a feature. Tasted great.
Hanging out with Max by the sea.
Made a Jaffa Cake for Dave's birthday. The base was a thin lemony sponge, overcooked to be drier than cake but not quite biscuit. The orange jelly was made with agar and fresh oj, and was my second attempt - better with some lemon juice to bring out the orange flavour. The top is melted chocolate chips, tempered using a couple of squares of dark orange chocolate I happened to have. It went down well!
A wonderful weekend of snuggling and long walkies with Lowenna. Since her recent near-death experience (from which she is now recovered) she has become accustomed to sleeping in the bed with her humans.. So I let her cuddle up with me too. She expands to fill the space available, and if she gets to bed first I just had to work around her. We walked through Bellsquarry woods a couple of times, and did a long round trip to Livingston Village, where I finally managed to get mac n cheeze from Castaway Coffee.
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A visit to the nearby oak woods. A feast of dryad's saddle, and a little chicken of the woods. Just a mouthful.
Fancy flapjack. The base is coconut (soaked in freshly squeezed orange juice) with orange rind, pistachios, and the usual oaty mixture. I was very short on golden syrup, so there's only a squeeze in there, but the result is that it isn't as horribly sweet as flapjack often is, and it has a good texture that is not too dry and not too dense. The middle layer is dates cooked to mush, topped with crumbled pistachio halva. Then another layer of coconut/orange/oat mix. The last of the halva went on top 5 minutes before the end of baking.
We've had this halva to use up for weeks, which is actually the reason this flapjack was born. Hm, what goes with pistachios? Orange, obviously. Originally I had thought to top it with crumbled halva, but fortunately it occurred to me to test how halva responds to being baked first. I took bets in the kitchen as to whether it would burn or melt. After 10 minutes in the oven - it did both. Not good. Though underneath the burnt part, it was deliciously gooey. So I topped it 5 minutes before the end of baking, and it melted into an absolutely delightful sesame mush.
People who tried it were still talking about it next week, which doesn't often happen! Community kitchen food memory is short.
Mega strawberry harvest, and first artichokes.
Some Dysart sunrises.
A great brunch in Roots & Seeds in Kirkcaldy.
An adventure to Bowhouse market and Pittenweem with K, K&M and Lowenna. Too blowy to swim (except for Lowenna), but we had hot chocolate in Cacao Tree and Lowenna was a super good girl.
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Big harvest of strawberries, so I made tarts. The crust was dates and nuts; the middle dessicated coconut with last year's strawberry compote, topped with a layer of fresh strawberries, coconut cream, and more strawberries. I made a version with grated chocolate instead of fresh strawberries for me, which was better, but strawberry ruins anything for me..
Potatoes are thriving; purple beans and lemon chilli are happy in the polytunnel. Planted out celery in the footpath garden at last, but it's a bit cramped.
Three layer muffins - matcha, lemon, strawberry - went down a treat.
Braw mornings in Dysart.
I made loads of stuff at Community Kitchen today, but was so focussed on making it that I forgot to take photos. Today's challenge was: use up as much as possible of the leftover christmas mincemeat. And we had lots of lemons. So I made a lemon tart, with mincemeat and oats as the crust. And a lemon fruit sponge, where the 'fruit' was, you guessed it, mincemeat. And then blended loads of mincemeat with various combinations of oats, cacoa, ground almonds, coconut, to make energy balls.
My sister and I stayed with our Mum for the latter half of the week, and worked from there. We ate lots of cake, and had many tours of the garden. Mum is managing to grow enormous strawberries, and has a grapevine in the greenhouse. And the wildflower meadow is looking great! And that's just a little bit of it.
We had a successful family game of Who Did This Poo. And went for some walks in the woods.
Then we drove across the country to visit my Grandma, who had just turned 90. My brother drove down to join us too. We ate more cake. Grandma remembered who we all were the whole time and was as sweet as ever.
Afterwards, we managed to squeeze in a half an hour visit to Dad and Ruth, before catch our respective trains back up north.
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Sunny the morning before the solstice, then cloudy and drizzly for sunrise on the solstice, of course. I sat resolutely on the beach in the rain at dawn with my coffee, just like last year.
Pakora (carrot and red pepper) at Mum's. Rhubarb crumblejack at home. Particularly fluffy homemade bread this week.
Another try at solstice-adjacent sunrise was better. Walked to Wemyss, cleaning the beach on the way, then harvested wild rose petals, which grow there in great abundance.
Planted turnips, carrots, mange tout and choy sum seeds, and lettuce seedlings in the garden. Got first courgette/squash harvest, and purple french beans, plus raspberries and lots more strawberries.
In the footpath garden, I have a self-seeded nasturtium bent on world domination. And its minions, which are crowding out the beans and celery. Rhubarb is finally coming back to life.
Coworked in Edinburgh with JL, KA and MW; we had lunch at Holy Cow. Then had another fab dinner with JB, MW and J at Wee Buddha.
After harvesting rose petals at dawn on the solstice, we made rosewater. Then proceeded to add it to everything. Rose lemonade, rose iced tea, rose hot chocolate, rose syrup. Fancy desserts with a layer of rose jelly (lemon juice and agar) and rose custard (almond milk and cornflour) topped with pistachios, almonds, pine nuts and pecans.
Mostly braw mornings this week, besides the actual solstice.
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We were convinced it has lately been too dry to expect much, but we haven't been to "the oyster woods" in a while, so thought we'd wander through to see if anything was starting to fruit. But as we passed through nearby redacted, we filled up our boxes with good quality, perfect condition oysters of at least two varieties (branched and 'normal'), and started to worry.
Sure enough, we got to the oyster woods and had an immediate mushroom emergency. In fact, there were four or five logs that were too old - we had missed by at least a week! But several more that were fruiting prolifically and in absolutely great condition. No worms, and they barely needed cleaned.
We filled up a bag and my backpack directly, and got extremely picky with them. Heroic K came to rescue us with the car, as we began to lose the light.
This saved us over an hour walk home, which we needed as processing them took ages and I was asleep on my feet at this point. We roughly chopped and boiled most of them in salted water, bottling 9 large jars full. There is still a good kilo left fresh, and I made up a box for a neighbour.
Rose, coconut and almond cake (with homemade rose water of course); raspberry ruffles (with homemade compote) and loads of chocolate muffins (with secret raspberry compote inside too) for the Community Kitchen.