Drying your own herbs
The cottage is filled with the sweet aroma of coriander/cilantro. Later there will be wafts of mint, oregano, marjoram, lemon balm and sage. Tomorrow it will be garlic. It has suddenly got much colder here but there are still herbs to harvest to add to hearty winter dishes and give us a hint of summer again. Needless to say I’m using the dehydrator to do this. It makes quick work of the drying process which is good as J.P. gave me a sack full of coriander. We will return half of the dried coriander to them. A good swap in my book. We...
read moreDeluxe cauliflower goat’s cheese with smoked duck breast and tomatoes recipe
At the end of the day in the market, vegetable prices are slashed. I totter back to the car with bulging bags of spuds and veg to supplement the stuff from our kitchen garden. Yesterday I bought a giant cauliflower for 50p and made a deluxe cauliflower cheese using some delicious crumbly blue goat’s cheese – bought for a few pence from the Tesco CFC. We always line the base of the pie with tomatoes (ours are still going strong) and a handful of either bacon or ham. Last night it was some smoked duck breast that I’d unearthed in...
read moreBeef stir fry with water chestnuts and black bean sauce recipe
It’s rare for us to eat out these days as it’s so expensive. But I try and cook something a bit special for Saturday night. When I visited The Carter Street Butcher I picked up a 600g piece of organic skirt of beef for four quid – far cheaper than the non organic butchers in Newmarket. I had a longing for water chestnuts and black bean sauce so I added them to my weekly shopping list and glided down to Newmarket in Danny’s car. A lot of people had clearly spent the day decorating the outside of their houses with fairy lights and...
read moreHome cured Christmas ham
I love ham, bacon, salami – well most processed meats actually. They get the thumbs down from the nutritionists due to their high salt and fat content. Having found out how easy it is to cure bacon at home using far less salt than traditional cures I decided to have a go at curing a ham last Christmas. We bought some local free range pork and used our wet cure for bacon recipe as the soak. The recipe is here the only difference in curing a loin of bacon and a leg is time. The leg was soaked for three weeks in the fridge submerged with...
read moreQuick piquant turkey stir fry with Romano peppers and button mushrooms recipe
My food dehydrator is turning out to be a winner. For years I’ve often had the frustration of running out of an essential ingredient and having to adapt my cooking plans. I now have access to a large range and choice of ingredients. I can do off the cuff cooking which is fun. As long as I remember to bung them into the slow cooker for an hour to rehydrate I can throw a meal together in minutes as all the chopping and preparation has been done prior to dehydrating. My dehydrated fruit and veg are stored in ziplock bags in a vast carrier...
read morePine needle vinegar update on the making stage
I dragged in the thoughtful gift from Anne Mary’s Caledonian pine tree and started to pull off the needles. They came off reasonably easily but they had a little brown husk on the ends that attached to the branch. As far as I could remember Robin Harford’s pine needles were green from tip to tail. So I shot upstairs to the laptop and examined his photos carefully. Not a dot of brown husk anywhere. The Sherlock Holmes in me detected that he’d probably cut the pine needles off the branch with scissors. I eventually unearthed our...
read moreCauliflower soup with blue cheese and orange zest recipe
This is another in our skinflint soup series. This delicious soup was run up with leftovers that could easily have just been thrown away. They made an elegant soup. The two key ingredients are mushroom ketchup and the zest of the orange which transformed this soup from good to sublime. Danny chickened out on the orange zest front. Refused even to taste it. He missed out on a real treat. I got the idea of combining orange and vegetables from a video from dehydrate2store where Tammy mixes dried ground orange peel with dried beetroot and...
read moreHomemade pine needle vinegar
It was Danny’s turn to buy the Balsamic vinegar last weekend. Someone had put an expensive bottle of Balsamic beside the cheap ones in Tesco and he ended up paying five times more than he could have. The resulting shriek got me thinking about Balsamic vinegar in general. The price and quality of Balsamic vinegar can vary enormously. We have a very expensive bottle that we use occasionally for dipping or salads and generally have a ‘cheap’ bottle that we use for cooking. But cheap Balsamic vinegar is still much more expensive than...
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