175 days ago
It’s another hard night cooking at the Welsh hovel as you can see below. First up is a creamed pumpkin and bacon soup with the insides of the carved Halloween pumpkin. Throw in a sprinkling of cumin seeds and it was delicious. Now that the kids are in bed it is time for marrow and ginger jam as I try to cope with the marrow glut. What you see below is the flesh of one very large and one small marrow together weighing 3.8 kg. That has been cubed and, as I write to you now, is being cooked on a low heat with some of the juice of eight lemons.
175 days ago
One of the advantages of being at the end of a long and poorly lit lane is that we are unlikely to be pestered by brats saying Trick or Treat tonight. I have zero tolerance for this awful import from America.
455 days ago
After last night there is just one butternut squash from the summer left in my larder. But it is large enough to make two soups. The last twenty or so leeks are still left to be picked in my garden.
564 days ago
The sprawling massd you see before you are the two butternut squash plants I put down earlier this year which seem to have merged into one. Behind them lie half my tmatoes and under the white netting winter cauliflower and cabbages. I hope that the last of the cabbage whites will soon bugger off and I can remove the netting allowing my plants to shoot higher. Underneath the squash foliage I have, so far, found five squashes but there may be more. The first two picked are shown below.
1267 days ago
Last year, unable to find a pumpkin to buy at the last minute, we used turnips and celeberated Hop-tu-naa This year I snapped up a pumpkin and watched by Sian the cat hollowed it out. I am not a great pumpkin carver so by my standards this was an adequate result. Then came the pumpkin soup.
2730 days ago
The younger generation suggested half term pumpkin carving. But I could not find a pumpkin in the local stores as all the chavs seemed to have got there ahead of me. But I spotted a turnip and, remembering my time in the Isle of Man, Halloween became Hop-tu-Naa.
3632 days ago
I left England in April with a well behaved herb garden. I returned to Bristol in May to find that all my plants had prospered but that the parsley was completely out of control. What had been a pleasant little plant was now more than 1 yard long and 1 yard wide. The true horror of its expansionism could only be appreciated from above. The poor lavender bush had almost been swamped.
Part one of my solution was to transfer the lavender bush to a patch vacated by a failed attempt to grow a raspberry bush. It had started to sprout but in my absence someone had snapped off its small branches and I feared the game was up. The lavender bush appreciated its move and is now thriving.
But still the parsley grew. By my calculations at current rates of growth it would have covered the entire garden by late August and by 2017 it would have headed off down the A4 and be approaching the outskirts of Bath. And so yesterday afternoon the Mrs was demanding a romantic supper and so I took the scissors to the parsley and put a quarter of it in the pot.
Parsley Soup
