How to grow the best organic perpetual/everbearing strawberries
Ta da! (Massive rumble of drums) Finally this year we are growing and will relish great strawberries! With a bit of trial and a lot of error. Home grown strawberries, picked and guzzled within minutes taste far, far better than any strawberry that you can buy from a shop. Freshness is important but if you grow your own you can choose varieties that taste superb but just don’t travel well and last for the number of days that the supermarkets need to display the fruit. Waitrose tried to sell the best tasting varieties of UK strawberries a...
read moreRecipe for sausages baked on a nest of cannellini beans, hot smoked garlic and bacon
There are two ways of smoking food – hot smoking and cold smoking. The difference between them is that hot smoking cooks and smokes the food whilst cold smoking just smokes the food. In the case of garlic, cold smoking preserves the garlic and adds a subtle smoked flavour. Hot smoked garlic is soft and quite delicious – it needs to be vacuum packed to last more than just a few days. Hot smoked garlic has a much milder flavour than ordinary garlic and a wonderful, deep and smoky taste. It’s excellent spread on a piece of toast as...
read moreAnd the winners of our Direct Line sponsored Grand Draw are….
Danny pulled out the two winners of the Direct Line/Cottage Smallholder Grand Draw this morning. Direct Line sponsored the prize of two B&Q £50 vouchers. He announced the winners at the end of the comments section of the post. Just in case you missed it, I thought that I’d put up a short post. The Grand Draw entries drew my attention to a lot of fabulous ‘new to me’ blogs and ideas as to how everyone would use a £50 voucher. As always, I want everyone to win – which of course is impossible. However, our Grand Draws are always...
read moreGoogle author feature puts your photo on Google search results
We changed our old WordPress theme recently. We wanted a new look and a responsive theme that could adapt to every size of screen from a desktop huge monitor to a tiny mobile. I love the new theme SimplePress – it has a lot of fantastic features that mean I can sometimes help Danny with the task of maintaining the techie side of the blog. Changing the theme of an old WordPress blog can be fraught with difficulties. There are a few idiosyncratic features that we wanted to maintain from the old blog – and these need coding skills to...
read moreLucky break
Many years ago I popped one of those overpriced beer and a glass sets in Danny’s Christmas stocking. It was Stella Artois which we were very keen on at the time and actually I do still enjoy a ultra chilled pint in the summer. This glass remained Danny’s own – I never used it until last week. We both have our own special mugs too – is this a Virgo thing? Back to last Saturday night. It was rather a chilly evening so I was wearing a thick outdoor jacket as I worked at my laptop at the kitchen table towards the end of the day. Danny...
read moreI made two litres of dog food by mistake
On Monday I decided to test out the theory that cottage pie is best made with pieces of beef rather than minced beef. Danny made encouraging noises and disappeared upstairs. “This should be a doddle.” I thought as I quickly piled the ingredients in the slow cooker/crock pot. And that’s where I fell down. I was busy with other things and in a rush. For me distraction has spelt disaster on the slow cooking front several times in the past. Our slow cooker has an auto setting – this means that it will bring the contents to the correct heat...
read moreRecipe for meatballs and spaghetti with red wine, tomatoes and bell peppers. Foolproof slow cooker/crock pot recipes
“Please don’t buy mince again. I just don’t like it.” Danny grumbled out of the kitchen. “But you like spaghetti sauce made with mince! That’s what I bought it for.” The last comment wasn’t exactly true. I wanted to make another cottage pie and Danny had somehow sensed this in the ether. “I know that you liked the cottage pie but I didn’t care for it.” “Oh.” My mum always says that I thrive on a challenge. I was determined to make something utterly delicious with the offending pack of mince. Meatballs sprang to mind...
read moreWin £50 worth of B&Q vouchers with The Cottage Smallholder and Direct Line Grand Draw
For those of you who missed out on the metal bedstead competition: we’ve got another great prize to offer you! This time we’re teaming up with Direct Line home insurance to give you the chance to win one of two B&Q vouchers worth £50! Like most people these days, I review all of our insurance policies annually. Looking at all the options can be time consuming but definitely worth doing as it can save a lot of money. I use the comparison sites first to get the general lay of the land and then I look at the companies that are not...
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