Category: food
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Lammas tide
So here we are at Lammas, or Lughnasadh if you like… 1st August and the first of the three pagan harvest festivals. Only the weather has been a tad chaotic recently and in many ways it doesn’t feel this is the moment. That’s the trouble with the otherwise fabulously convenient six weekly pagan festivals, it…
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Chicken (on the) Run
Ok, so at this time of year there’s not a lot to harvest from the fruit bed, a few mostly green strawberries and the odd raspberry hanging on into autumn… but somehow the girls found opportunity to have a go. Must keep that gate closed, eh.
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Solar Forage, August 14
The forage frenzy continues unabated! As the summer moves inexorably toward equinox and the birth of autumn, the newly purchased (solar powered) freezer is full of cooking apples, raspberries, blackberries and pretty much anything that can be frozen for laters… There are runner beans and broad beans and sliced and diced courgettes in the other…
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Hot enough…
British weather. Got to love it. Summer is here in spades. Unfortunately, even good weather can be too good, and this afternoon I found our lovely Welsummer hen had succumbed to the heat. She was the last of three Welsummers we bought a few years back. Gorgeous plumage as you can see. When we bought…
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So… GM then.
I’ve an instinctive opposition to genetic modification, or GM. It’s always been there, and I’ve acknowledged it over the years by positively (but not obsessively) avoiding purchasing GMO material, even to the feed I give my chickens. And then, recently, there was a news story about a potential solution to ‘ash die-back’ whereby the genome…
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The Obsessive Bread Thread
Ok, your batty blogger can now do wholemeal and white! Whoo-hoo! Halving the salt and halving the yeast and not double proving the dough from Delia’s receipe makes for a pretty good loaf. In fact, one could argue it’s too much loaf for the two pound tin it’s intended for. Last night I put the…
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I knead the dough, man…
The re-discovery of proper bread has roller-coastered it’s way to today’s successful loaf! On the way there have been minor hiccups on the road to tasty comestibles… minor, although not entirely unhorrid [sic] disasters. Hasty emails to Miss at school, telling her of the over-salted bread of her sandwiches (too late), apologies for the ‘more yeast…