pâté

I do like offal.  Not only is it versatile and tasty, but often very cheap.  When you raise your own animals for slaughter, you receive plenty of offal, and we very much enjoy the treat that is it.
For a start, on slaughter day, we have a first taste with a dinner of fresh liver, as [...]

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haw ketchup

As I mentioned in my last post, we had a go at the haw ketchup recipe in the River cottage preserves book, and we are converts. Haws now join the list of wild foods actually worth foraging for.  Not that it’s actually hard to get enough haws.. they are out in masses. I won’t actually [...]

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autumn forage

I’m a bit nonplussed, underwhelmed even   about foraging. My Dad, an ex boy scout, was always telling us of things we could eat… you know.. like hawthorn leaves. So us kids would dutifully pick a leaf and chew it.. and wonder why anyone would bother.  The truth is, although there are a lot of things [...]

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apple and blackberry cordial

So, I was thinking to myself, now it is the jamming and preserving end of the year, that a cook can never have too many books on the subject. Not that I am very good at all at following other people’s recipes – but I like to flick through and be inspired by ideas etc, [...]

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meat

You may have noticed, that I am a meat eater.  I don’t say this apologetically, as I am a thinking meat eater, and am happy with my decision. I have thought about it for most of my life. I grew up in a household that encouraged us to think about it – we always kept [...]

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christmas home ed

We are now into our last week of home ed before the Christmas holidays, we like to have a wind down week, with lots of Christmassy things.
So far we have made mincepies, and chocolate logs.  We have been reading ‘A Christmas Carol’ again – that’s a great one in an educational as well as seasonal [...]

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dyeing with nettles

what are nettles good for #8.  Dyeing.
Some years ago himself bought me a book on dyeing with natural materials : Wild Colour by Jenny Dean, which unfortunately is no longer in print.  Actually I think it was a bit of a mistake present, as at the time I was dabbling in tie-dyeing with synthetic dyes, [...]

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garden rethink

Our garden is very overlooked, and today the neighbours probably wondered what I was doing, as I spent a fair bit of time just standing in the middle.. looking.
We are rethinking the garden layout. See, when we first came here, we had the idea that the garden would have the flowers, and the fields would [...]

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