The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: gardening and birdwatching

What with the weather being so nice, we’ve been devoting some of our time to our garden. Coronavirus or no, we were planning to plant a few things in our vegetable patch anyway – we always do! We were lucky with our timing, though, paying a visit to the garden centre to buy some vegetables for planting the weekend before the government advised against non-essential travel.

It’s been interesting to see how there has been a push (well, a few feature articles in the papers) about encouraging people their own food in these uncertain times – I suspect that if people have really gone for this in a big way (and it looks as though people have, echoing perhaps the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign during the War), it’s probably as much about doing something (a something that, it must be said, does appear to have some positive mental health benefits) as it is to make sure we’ve got something to eat if we have problems with the food supply chain later on.

We’ve planted carrots, cabbage and kale in the main bed, in addition to which there are some onion plants which have somehow survived the winter, some asparagus plants doing their thing at the back (who knows, with those?) and the ever-present rhubarb plant. 

Then we have some more kale in a couple of the bigger pots and lettuce in three other pots. 

The troughs have peas and mange-touts growing in them, although at present these have yet to see the light of day!

On a visit to Homebase just before Britain went into lockdown (the primary purpose of which was to get a new gas-bottle for the barbecue), I also picked up a little bag of seed potatoes which I held off planting in the compost-bags until last weekend. Not that it takes particularly long, but I thought I’d spread the work out. Last year, we did get some potatoes but they were mostly on the small side, probably because we planted too many in the bags so this year I deliberately planted less.

A problem we’ve had in the past is one that many gardeners face – slugs. We still had some slug pellets in the shed from last year and they were put down as soon as I’d planted our vegetables, but that was the extent of our supply. Therefore, I’ve fallen back on a more old-fashioned method which may or may not work – eggshells. Opinion as to whether or not these actually work in terms of deterring slugs is mixed on the Internet, but in the absence of anything else right now it’s got to be worth a shot, right?

Inside, we have some micro-greens on the windowsill which are growing at differing speeds; some of these clearly do better than others.

And what of the birds? I was enthused by the RSPB’s new Breakfast Birdwatch initiative (encouraging people to take some time to watch the birds when they’d usually be commuting and/or doing the school run) but a consequence of not having to go to work at the moment is that I have been sleeping in for much longer than I usually do – such is life on furlough-leave! But I’ve still been keeping an eye out for feathered visitors to the garden – as I type I can see out to the feeder on our front lawn – and over the last few days I have seen a wide range of birds either visiting us or flying overhead: pigeons of the wood and feral varieties, ring-necked parakeets, starlings, blackbirds, blue tits, great tits, goldfinches and the occasional wren. The nuts are popular with birds of all sizes, but I am particularly impressed by the agility of the parakeets!

The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: Dundee cake

With Britain in lockdown (although quite frankly Allison and I were already working from home before the Prime Minister ordered the country into lockdown on Monday evening), our thoughts have turned to what we can do while we’re having to stay at home.

Quite a lot, as it happens. The kitchen in particular has been subject to a cleaning regime the likes of which it hasn’t seen since we moved in, and we’re growing plenty of things in the garden and even on a window-sill (more on these in later posts).

But first, some baking.

I’ve not made any bread for a while, although given the amount of flour we already had it’s only a matter of time.

Cakes, though? That’s another matter. In times of national crisis, there’s nothing like a nice cake to lift the mood, right?

We went through the cupboards to see what we had before deciding what sort of cake to make. Checking the cupboards can reveal some interesting things, especially if you’ve not done it for a while. We, it turns out, had a fairly random assortment of dried fruits (currants, raisins, etc) – items that had been bought on a one-off basis and sometimes left over from Allison’s cooking club.

Based on this, a fruitcake of sorts looked do-able so I consulted the oracle (a very well-used paperback version of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course) and came up with Dundee cake. This is an old family favourite (my grandma used to make it) and it’s called Dundee cake because it reputedly originated courtesy of Keiller’s, the Dundee-based marmalade producer which mass-produced the cake in the nineteenth century. As with most Delia Smith recipes, it’s online. 

The quantities of the various dried fruits in the recipe did not of course match what we had in the cupboard (we didn’t have any glace cherries, for example), but I reckoned that if we added up the total weight of all the dried fruits and then put in what we had up to that weight, it should be OK. On the recipe, currants, sultanas, glace cherries and mixed dried peel weigh in at 450g (more or less a pound in imperial), and we were able to get enough currants, sultanas, dried mixed fruit and raisins to get to that level (using up everything but the raisins, as it happens). 

We also didn’t have a small orange and a small lemon to zest, but we did have some large lemons in the fridge so I just zested that. Also, we didn’t quite have enough blanched almonds left to meet Delia’s requirement, but that’s just for decorating the top of the cake anyway (the trick is to put them on lightly and not press them down). So I went with a simple cross rather than arranging them in concentric circles. Although with the outer circle, it’s really a Celtic cross!

When making cakes I do get apprehensive about cooking times as the last thing I want is for it not to be done properly on the inside (the opposite of those foolish contestants on Masterchef who seem to think that they’re going to be the ones who can do the perfect chocolate fondant, which clearly started out as underdone chocolate cake). 

Only once the Dundee cake had cooled could I cut it open to check...

Thank goodness it was done in the middle! The result goes very well with a cup of tea in the afternoon.

Making our own Scotch (quail) eggs

We bought quail eggs for the first time the other day. While browsing in Morrison’s the other day, we noticed that they were on sale for £1:85 per dozen which seemed like a bargain to us. But what to do with them? We thought we had the answer. Why not use them to make some Scotch eggs?

I’ve made Scotch eggs before, although previously I’ve used regular chicken eggs; for the uninitiated, Scotch eggs are hard-boiled eggs which are wrapped in sausage meat, coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried. I’m not sure how particularly Scottish they are – they were apparently invented by the posh London department store Fortnum & Mason at some point in the mid-18^th century), and these days they are widely available across the UK in supermarkets, motorway service stations, etc. For years they were regarded as little more than a somewhat greasy (and in some cases alarmingly bright orange) picnic item but in recent years the foodie revolution has seen them being made with all sorts of different types of eggs (even pickled ones as well as eggs laid by birds other than chickens), with the meat coating including black pudding, smoked haddock, etc. You can even get ones where the yolk is still runny once the frying process has been completed! For home-made ones, deep-frying is a bit of a no-no so I tend to bake them in the oven instead (25-30 minutes at 190°C usually does the trick).

Quail eggs are much smaller than the ones that are laid by chickens (unsurprising really, given that quails are the smallest European game birds) and have nice-looking brown speckled shells. 

After consulting the Internet to find out about boiling times, I boiled them for three minutes and then, after a shelling process that was more fiddly than I thought it would be, I set to work on the sausage-meat. 

Starting with pork from our pre-Christmas trip to the Smithfield meat auction which had been ground up using my new hand-cranked sausage-maker before being frozen, I added salt, pepper, parsley, dried herbs from the cupboard (oregano, sage) and herbs from the garden (rosemary, thyme). 

 

The meat was then divided up into twelve parts, each of which coated one quail egg. 

The resulting meaty balls were rolled in breadcrumbs and baked in the oven for 20 minutes (as they were smaller than the ones I’d made with chicken eggs before).

The result? Delicious, even if I do say so myself!

Fish for Christmas - the follow-up

As a quick follow-up to a couple of posts made earlier this month, here’s how those fishy Christmas projects turned out:

I had made pickled herring before, using the same recipe – a family one written down by Allison’s grandmother – so I had few fears about that; both variants turned out well and were hits with our guests. As is the case with so many things, the home-made version (the garlic one for preference, personally) was better than its shop-bought equivalent.

The one I was worried about was the gravadlax. The fact that the cure was separated from the fish itself by a thick layer of dill concerned me; would two days be enough to cure the fish? And then there was the rye bread to go with it; that didn’t rise and so was very dense (should’ve realised that that would be the case where the proportion of rye flour to white was 50-50). It turns out I shouldn’t have worried – a thin slice of dense (and buttered) rye bread worked better as a base than a cracker would have done. And the gravadlax itself was fantastic! Much better than smoked salmon; I’ll be making that one again. Shouldn’t have doubted the recipe, of course. The success of this means that there will in all probability be more appearances by recipes from Tim Hayward’s Food DIY book on this blog in 2017.

The Christmas Eve meat auction at Smithfield

To Smithfield on the morning of Christmas Eve, to pick up a bargain or three at the annual meat auction. This event, which takes place annually at London’s famous meat market, is one of the London Christmas traditions that I wrote about for Londonist recently, but not something Allison and I had ever gone and seen for ourselves. Clearly, this was something that needed to be rectified. After getting off the train at Farringdon, we saw a few people with shopping carts making their way towards the north-western corner of the market building, close to the junction of Charterhouse Street and Farringdon Street; they, and we, congregated by Harts of Smithfield, the butcher’s that does the auction and which has a sign (there all year, apparently) proclaiming their shop-front to be the location of “the one and only” Christmas Eve auction, starting at 10:30am. The crowd was spilling out onto the road, which was closed off by the City of London Police shortly before the fun started. Punters, be they people who come here every year or first-timers, were excited at what lay ahead.

As the appointed hour approached, the crowd had swelled to several hundred and three catwalks extending out into the crowd were constructed of wooden pallets; it was from these that the meat would be sold. Not long after 10:30, the main butcher – the man who conducts this sale every year – made his way onto the central catwalk and announced how the auction would work. This was all about making sure that “everyone gets something” and unlike at a regular auction there wouldn’t be any bidding – here, there was a fixed price for each cut of meat and anyone wishing to have one of these would have to hold up the appropriate amount of cash (change, we were told, would not be given).

First up were some legs of pork – English legs of pork, complete with trotters on the end – going for £20 each. A forest of £20 notes appeared above the crowd as punters vied to get the attention of the butchers who were holding up the legs along all three catwalks. A brisk trade was done, with a few dozen legs being sold. “What are we going to do with this?”, I heard a woman ask a man, presumably her husband, who’d just bought one. “You’ll need to buy a bigger oven,” quipped another man standing next to them. More hands holding banknotes went up for the next bargain, topsides of beef; “fifty quid anywhere else, twenty here,” proclaimed the master of ceremonies. English loins of pork were next, each one at least three feet long (how many chops could you get from that?) and costing £10 each. “We could probably make room in the freezer for that,” said someone who did not sound at all convinced that they could. Be that as it may, for bargain pieces of meat, Smithfield on Christmas Eve is clearly the place to go. Many seemed very happy with what they got!

A few professional-looking photographers were in attendance, looking for money-shots such as a little girl sitting on her father’s shoulders, holding up a £10 note (the nearest butcher spotted her too, and made sure she got something). It was even claimed that a TV crew (from Brazil, of all places) was in attendance. Large pieces of belly pork (£10 each) were followed by the turkeys, which went for £20 – or at least they did once one of the assistant butchers, an evidently put-upon chap called Charlie, was able to get them out of the boxes (although not before his colleagues had got the audience to chant the man’s name several times). Shoulders of pork, sold in bags of two for £20 followed, then big sides of green gammon for £20 (‘green’ in a butchering context meaning a piece of bacon or gammon that’s been neither cooked nor smoked) and boxes of ducks, four for £20. The punters were still very keen to buy, and much money changed hands in a sort-of feeding frenzy. “This is fabulous,” said the chief butcher. “Great to see so many people spending money. It’s ’cos of Brexit, of course.”

Ribs of beef were brought out to cheers from the crowd, for this was probably what many had been waiting for (all that was needed was for someone to strike up a chorus of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’); they were quickly snapped up by eager buyers, along with more shoulders of pork and whole suckling-pigs which buyers carried away on their shoulders which must have made for some curious glances on the Tube ride home. As reinforcements arrived – dozens of boxes containing more beef ribs, brought along on a fork-lift and then hurriedly unpacked by the assistant butchers – the coin-toss ritual began. This is a simple game which is very much a part of the ritual at the meat auction – call the coin-toss wrong, and the punter has to pay the asking-price. Call it right, and the meat is his (or hers) for free. Given that the asking-price is in any case a bargain, it’s a win-win situation.

By this point, the auction was coming to an end. People – some of whom had come with backpacks or shopping-carts (or had parked nearby, for it was a Saturday and parking is free in the vicinity at weekends) were started to leave, fully-laden with enough meat to feed their families for some time.

As the sale died down and the clearing-up operation began, some punters remained – those who’d picked up on an aside earlier, to the point that if anyone wanted their meat cut up on the spot it could be done at the end (having been to Smithfield of an early morning before, we were well aware that a Smithfield butcher will only cut up a piece of meat for you after he’s sold it to you – this is, after all, a wholesale market). We came away with a beef rib, a pork shoulder and a topside of beef – all of which had, of course, to be carried home on the train.

A London Christmas tradition experienced, and great fun it was too!

Fish for Chrstmas, part 2: Gravadlax

With the herring pickling away in the fridge in the shed, it is time for the next part of the Christmas fish preparation – gravadlax. For this, I’m relying on a truly excellent book called Food DIY by Tim Hayward that I received as a birthday present; it has all sorts of recipes and ideas for those who like to get their hands dirty and expand their food-making skills. As someone who bakes bread and has even made a pork pie a few years ago, this is very much my sort of cookery book. I’ve read through and several recipes have jumped out at me, so I can foresee all sorts of culinary adventures for 2017.

But first, the Christmas gravadlax. Gravadlax is, quite simply, cured raw salmon. Hayward explains that it’s a Scandinavian thing – the word derives from the Swedish for ‘buried fish’ and originates from fishermen “saving part of their catch by burying it on the beach. Presumably the salt in the sand had a preservation effect”. Rather than the usual smoked salmon for Christmas, this year we are going for gravadlax. Our fishy festive saga started at Billingsgate a couple of weeks ago, and in addition to gutting and filleting the herrings for pickling I also filleted the whole (gutted) salmon that we bought. I ended up with two thick pieces, both about eight inches by four, along with several smaller fillets which are being frozen for other meals. The off-cuts were roasted, with whatever meat I could get from those being frozen for sandwiches at some point in the future. For now, though, the focus is on the two fillets which were defrosted yesterday, ready for being made into gravadlax.

The cure has four ingredients – salt, caster sugar, black pepper and coriander seeds, all of which were ground up in a mortar and pestle (which is which?). 

The result actually looks a bit like sand which is appropriate given how this method of preserving fish originated. 

Then there was some dill that needed chopping up. The two fillets were then laid out and a thick layer of dill applied to each, followed by the cure (which strikes me as slightly counter-intuitive, as I’d’ve thought that the cure should be in direct contact with the fish, but there you go). 

Then some not-chopped dill sprigs are put atop whichever fillet you’re flipping over.

Now for the tricky part – one of the fillets need to be flipped so that it goes on top of the other. The risk of cure mixture and chopped dill going everywhere at this point is probably why Hayward says that this should be done on cling film! 

The resulting sort-of sandwich then needs to be tightly wrapped in cling film and stored in the fridge for the next 48 hours.

So that’s the gravadlax ready – we eagerly await the result! The next part of the plan will be to bake some rye bread for it to go on. Hayward has a recipe for that, too…

Something a bit special for breakfast

How about something a bit special for breakfast? The first and, let’s be honest here, usually the best meal of the day is one of those meals that I really enjoy cooking (must be something to do with the smell of frying bacon), and when we have guests staying it’s nice to do something a bit different. Bacon and parsley hotcakes it is, then, using a recipe that Allison clipped from the BBC Good Food magazine a few years ago.

We start by cutting up the bacon into lardons and dry-frying it until it’s crispy (contrary to what I appear to have learned in the Scouts, there’s no need for oil when frying bacon). 

While that’s cooling, the dry ingredients – self-raising flour, grated cheddar cheese (the more mature, the better), a small handful of chopped parsley, thyme (fresh or dried, either will do), salt and pepper – are mixed together in a bowl, to which the bacon is added.

Then come the eggs and the milk – the recipe says to use six tablespoons but I’ve found that you don’t need to use more than four to get a nice, thick batter. 

Spoonfuls of the batter are then fried, a couple at a time (oil is needed for this bit of frying) until golden; the recipe says that it serves four (meaning that it makes eight hotcakes) but I sometimes find that I can make six of them with the quantities provided. 

The recipe says that these are best served topped by a couple of poached eggs but I prefer fried ones; probably because I find poaching eggs to be a bit of a hassle (and it would involve more washing-up; by frying the eggs, I’m limiting the number of pans used to one).

So, there we are – bacon and parsley hotcakes, for when you want to make something a bit special for breakfast.