Monday 24th January - Flowers, anniversary of my mother's death, chocolate

I'm on a roll, at least for posting on this blog. I can't say the same about going for a daily walk (too cold) or practising the piano (not in the mood) or doing some drawing or painting (also not in the mood).

While it is so cold and grey I like to sit close to the radiator and read, or knit, or do Freecell and Suduko and the new craze, Wordle.

I'm also pretty occupied by thinking about the garden.

I have potatoes chitting on a windowsill upstairs

Micro greens making slow progress on the kitchen windowsill

and peas just beginning to sprout on a downstairs windowsill. These last are not for planting out, but for adding as shoots to salads once they are big enough.

 I've moved the tete-a-tete daffodils to the sitting room now that they are flowering. They are a such a pleasure, so cheerful, and also so poignant, because they remind me so much of my mother.

Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of her death, back in 2016. We had kept her room in the nursing home full of flowers, mostly pots of daffodils, all through the few weeks she was there after leaving hospital; balancing them as high as we could on the windowsill so that she could see them easily. As each pot of daffodils began to fade we would replace them, and I planted them in a row along the hedge at the bottom of the garden. 

She always had flowers in the house, and taught me how to arrange them, how to 'make a spider web from the stems, so that they criss cross and hold each other up'. The big glass bowl of tulips, the silver coffee jug of roses, the small vases of  grape hyacinths, vast displays of dahlias... 'put the leaves in first, and then add the flowers'. Bunches of cut daffodils always had to have some leaves with them, cut from the garden if necessary. 

It's a strange thing - we were all so focussed on supporting my father through this time, that I think we might have lost sight the rest of us to some degree, of her being my and my brother's mother, and such an important friend for my husband, and being a grandmother, and all the other members of the family and friends affected by her death. Ah well; that's how it was then, and here's how it is now. We did the best we could at the time. It's hard to think and clearly in the midst of everything.  Hindsight and all that.

Anyway, now I have daffodils too, because it's what you need in January and February, to fend off the grey days and now, to celebrate my mother's life.

I took the picture of the flowers just before we sat down to our little smackeral of something; cake and 'second coffee'. We try and restrain ourselves to just three coffees per day - morning, elevenses, and after lunch. Otherwise we would struggle to keep pace with ordering supplies!

I have a fairly inefficient and relaxed approach to watching my weight, which is probably why I still avoir  more poids that I would ideally like. My current aim is to begin each week  little lighter than I began the previous week. Here is a conundrum -  to be at my lightest I should weigh myself first thing in the morning, before breakfast but after going to the loo. Yes, fine, but that sets a harder target to meet the following week. But if I weigh myself after breakfast I'm likely to be disappointed that I don't weight very much less than before, or worse still, I'm heavier. 

My 'diet method', as I have said before, is to try and eat half as much as my husband.

 His plate is on the left, mine on the right. So far, so good. But then I'm more inclined to snack on this and that through the day - a handful of nuts, a chocolate button from the last of the Christmas store, a few crisps or crackers... He doesn't seem suffer from the same weakness, or maybe he is just very skilled at surreptitious snacking? I shall keep an eye on this.

I suppose I shouldn't make cakes if I were that concerned about my weight, or at least not the sort of cakes that I like to eat. That would be a start. 

It does make me very pleased, as well as slightly sad, that the milk chocolate in the Christmas stash is nearly all gone, and only a few milk chocolate buttons. Everything else is the rich, dark, intense kind of chocolate that the French apparently eat in small quantities for medicinal purposes, as a source of iron.  He will enjoy them; they don't have the same appeal for me. And as for the marzipan -  that's all his to enjoy with no competition from me.

  

Thursday 27th April 2016 - Naming Flowers

It has been annoying me ever since they suddenly appeared in the verges along the little lanes between the villages - drifts of delicately pale pink flowers

(now "delicately" can't be an adverb, even though it ends in "ly". It is describing the adjective "pale", no hang on, "pale" is surely an adjective for "pink" which is an adjective for "flowers"? How on earth do they expect 11-year-olds, especially those with English as a second language to work this out? It's beyond me, but then I am too old to have learned more than the very basics of grammar at school. I think I'll ask a teacher on Tuesday. It's going to bother me - but only a bit)

pale pink flowers, as I was saying. Various names were floating through my ind, but none of them sounded quite right. "Loostrife", I think, is always preceded by "Purple", and I suspect it is that tall weed flower that appears in the garden in Summer. "Lady's Bedstraw"? Maybe. (Should that be "Lady's" or "Ladies'?).

Google Purple Loostrife:

https://www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/10645/i-Lythrum-salicaria-i/Details

Lady's Bedstraw:

https://www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/7596/i-Galium-verum-i/Details

So, neither of these. But round at some friends on Thursday evening, I mentioned the flowers, and they came up with "Cuckoo-flower" and "Lady-smock"

https://www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/94085/Cardamine-pratensis/Details

Their picture has white flowers rather than pink, but other pictures are much closer. 

I haven't heard any cuckoos this year - we used to hear them all the time in the woods behind our house, but not any more. I'm told that there is one in the woods in Cuckfield - just as well. Cuckfield without cuckoos wouldn't be Cuckfield.

The other flower that was bothering me is a little white bell-shaped, star-shaped one, with a small yellowy-orange centre. My mother said they used to call them "piss-pots" when she was a child, because that's what they look like (the flowers, not the children).

I told this story to my friends. "Stitchwort", they said in unison.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/may/24/stitchworts-alys-fowler

Having read this article, I'm sending off for some seeds to put in the shady woodland area (as we like to call it) at the bottom of the garden, to add to the weed collection that already grows there.

Saturday 13th February - Tante Martje's biscuits

I haven't got the recipe sorted yet:

something along the lines of

300 g flour (give or take)
1 packet of butter (half an English pound is roughly 250 g so that's about right)
100g caster sugar

I've always kept a couple of vanilla pods in my caster sugar jar, because my mother did. Smells wonderful. Mummy said that this new-fangled fad of paying inflated prices for small packets of "vanilla sugar" was ridiculous...

Rub all together until it forms a ball, adding more flour as necessary.

You can then carry on by

rolling out the dough and cutting out biscuits, not too thin.

or shape round discs by hand, and then, with the back of a floured fork, make one set of lines going north-south and another going east west, making a sort of criss-cross pattern where they overlap

or form the dough into a fat sausage, wrap in cling film and chill. Once firm, cut slices slightly thicker than a pound coin

or, divide the dough in half. Add enough cocoa powder to one half to make it a satisfactory chocolate brown. Roll out both pieces the same size, place one on top of the other and roll up like a swiss roll. Cover with cling film, chill, and then carry on as above.

Whatever you end up doing, cook them on a baking sheet lined with paper for around 14 minutes at 190C (375 F). Leave for a minute, and lift onto a rack to cool.

They should look like this, tinged with gold round the edges and paler in the centre. Maybe these are a bit on the pale side.

 



The advantage of making the dough into a cling-film sausage is that it can live in the fridge for a while, and any time you want some biscuits you can have fresh, warm ones, straight from the oven for very little effort.

Mummy was taught to make them by her Tante Martje, years and years and years ago. Seventy-five years ago? Who knows. I remember the recipe written in Dutch on the inside cover of her Dutch cookery book (the one with a black and white stripy cover, long gone now.). A soon as I was old enough, she taught me to make these biscuits - I can remember the astonishing mess the kitchen would get itself into whenever I was baking. Now I am teaching my food processor to make them. It is beginning to get the hang of it. It is slightly less messy than the hands-in-the-bowl, dough-stuck-to-the-fingers, flour-all-over-everywhere method.

Boxing Day 2013 - Please Yourself Day

My mother started this tradition, when I was a teenager.

She announced that on Boxing Day everyone could do whatever they liked, and she, for one, was going to do the same.

We were all old enough to fend for ourselves, there was plenty of food in the fridge and we were old enough to manage!

On that occasion my grandmother was staying with us. She elected to stay in bed, and people brought her sandwiches, and soup on a tray, and gin-and-peppermint-cordial, and coffee at regular intervals. I suspect my brother and I stayed in our pyjamas most of the day, watching TV, snacking on crisps and chocolate.

I think we all regrouped and put some kind of evening meal together; baked potatoes, left-overs, celery and carrots sticks, that kind of thing.

It turned out that we were none of us so selfish, or self-absorbed, that we couldn't, or wouldn't, offer food, or drink to each other at random moments through the day. If someone wanted to go for a walk, they went out by themselves if they wanted to, or maybe gathered a party of like-minded people if they wanted company, but no-one felt that they HAD to join in with anything.

The tradition has continued. Obviously, while the children were very young we couldn't go for it in a  big way, but as they got older, they, too, learnt to fend for themselves, with a little help from us parents.

We were out earlier, doing this and that. Our reward was to be part of the beautiful morning; while BestB was scraping the ice off the car, I took this picture. Every berry had its own jewel-drop of water.

Sunday 22nd December - Christmas Preparations continue

The tree is up, as you will know by now.

I also made brandy butter and rum butter yesterday.

Brandy Butter

Cream equal weights of softened unsalted butter and caster sugar. My mother taught me to keep the caster sugar in a jar with vanilla pods, long before anyone had heard of vanilla sugar. It is perfect for baking and for strawberries (oh, do you remember strawberries and cream and hot sun and thin cotton summer clothes and going barefoot, a few months ago?). For us, I used three ounces each of butter and sugar - that would be around 75 g I suspect. Once the butter and sugar are combined, beat in brandy. I probably used three tablespoons, hard to tell as I just use the cap from the bottle. It is as much brandy as the mixture will hold; some tends to leak out a bit. I also grated in some lemon zest - about a quarter of a lemon.

Rum Butter

As for brandy butter, but use soft brown sugar and rum (obviously!) and some grated orange zest.

They will keep for a while in the fridge.

We always have these, and cream, with mince pies and with Christmas Pudding. In the unlikely event you have any left over after Christmas, use them as part of the ingredients for the farmhouse fruit cake which you will find here
http://www.recipesfromacornishkitchen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/farmhouse-cake-this-is-my-favourite.html
or make buns (Victoria sponge recipe). Weight up the left overs, and assume half the weight is butter and half is sugar, and add and subtract and adjust your recipe accordingly. Now you know why you had to do sums at school.
 
Next to be done are the dining room and the fireplace.

Neither will happen today, as first we will have Sunday lunch and then I will be playing for a carol service over in Hampshire (their organist is on holiday on the other side of the world!) and before anything else can be done we have to deal with this:

I had a bit of work to do before I could practise the carols for this evening as the overspill from the dining room table was spectacular, even for us, but I just moved the mess to somewhere else. For now.

I think we'll be eating our roast Sunday Lunch on our laps. As usual.

Saturday 21st December 2013 - The Ceremony of The Tree

We got the tree done!

Every year, I wonder if it won't be just fine as it is.

Then I give in and put the lights on - and yes, that was worth doing. But it looks so pretty, need I add any more?

 Tinsel next. "It has to lie along the branches as though it was snow" can you hear my mother's voice? No? Well I can, so there is no other way to put the tinsel on.

Baubles. Red and Silver, and, daringly, pale gold ones. Four of the baubles are from Woolworths, still intact since our first Christmas Tree in 1977. They are a bit faded and tarnished, but go up every year.

 You might think that the tree was finished now, but no. Between 3 and 6 strands of lametta have to be hung over every single little branch and twig.

You might have noticed how the day was advancing; it took the whole day, off and on, to decorate the tree, with intervals for visiting parents, having lunch, wrapping a few presents that someone was going to come and collect, pause for a tea-break...

And in just over two week's time, we will be reversing the process and bracing up for next year. Christmas seems to go on for ever and ever, through December, and then, suddenly, The Day arrives, and Christmas is here, but for such a short time.

The little crochet Nativity figures I bought from Traidcraft a couple of years ago have been on the bookshelf for several weeks.

 Now they are almost hidden by the tree; you might just be able to make them out now you know where to look, precariously balanced just in front of the "Oxford Companion to Music". A reminder to me; although as I am playing the organ at a Carol Service tomorrow evening, and for the Midnight Communion on Christmas Eve, and on Sunday 29th December, the Christmas story won't be far from my thoughts.

Wednesday 6th June - Apples, potatoes, and my mother

My mother was told that if you keep an apple in with your potatoes, it stops them from putting out all those irritating hairy rootlets.

She tried it, and it works!

So, for once, I did as I was told, and put an apple in with my potatoes. It works! My potatoes live in a black fabric bag in the vacuum cleaner cupboard in the kitchen - not a hugely convenient home, but the best I can do. Last week, we bought a plastic bag of potatoes and threw them in, still sealed up in their bag, on top of the half dozen leftover spuds and The Apple. Yesterday, I went to get some potatoes, and found that the fresh ones, still in the plastic bag, are now all ready for planting out, whereas the old ones are still round and sound and, more importantly, bald. That apple had been there for about a month or so, and was wrinkled, but not rotten.

I have cooked the older potatoes, put the newer ones out on the windowsill in empty egg boxes to await planting, and retired the apple to the compost bin.

So, Useful Top Tip; keep an apple in with your potaotes,