A rare post about cooking

The last time I posted about cooking was on March the 4th. Probably due for one of those then...

Mike came in with a handful of young onions and a sheepish expression on his face this afternoon.
"The weeds were growing underneath the onions," he explained. "So the onions came up, too."

I'd already planned a potato salad for supper, using new potatoes sourced from the farmers' market, the last of the peas I'd gathered from the greenhouse and some chicken thighs. Now I had to factor in these five smallish onions, too, Sometimes my life feels like an episode of Ready, Steady, Cook!

Something crispy seemed appropriate and I began hunting for something like the fried onion side dishes you get in restaurants. After extensive internet research (I read at least two recipes), I settled on following Ree Drummond's Onion Strings on her Pioneer Woman blog. Mostly because her style of writing made me laugh.
In the process of doing the recipe I learnt two things: 1) that you can make buttermilk by mixing white vinegar into regular milk and 2) that deep frying isn't as scary as I thought it was.

Deep frying just isn't something I do very often and I think there are several reasons for this. For one thing, there's the safety issue - it seems to me that I was bombarded with messages about how dangerous it is to have big pans of boiling fat around as I was growing up. Mostly from TV public safety broadcasts, but also from direct experience.

One scary moment happened during a visit from Father Christmas: every year a float came down our road with The Man Himself on it, fairy lights, sweets handed out to onlooking children and so on. It was a big treat. We went outside to see it one year and Mum had forgotten that she'd left the chip pan on. It caught fire and a brave (and, it has to be said, rather stupid) passer-by went into the house and carried the blazing pan outside into the front garden, leaving the kitchen slightly blackened but nothing worse than that.

I have a feeling that moving a burning pan full of fat was one of the things that the public information films advised against...

Then there was the neighbour in the same road who had once spilt hot fat onto her legs and was badly burned and scarred. Mum was first on the scene and it was fairly traumatic for her, too.

And alongside all those negative influences I also worry about how wasteful deep frying is, in terms of the amount of fat used. I suppose I should add health concerns to my list, but I don't think that's a big factor when it comes to my reluctance-to-fry.

Anyway, I digress. I used my mandolin to get the onion slices as thin as possible (with such small onions it's hard to cut them finely with a knife). I used sunflower oil rather than canola for the deep frying, as that's what I happened to have handy. They ended up looking like this:

They tasted great: crispy, savoury, altogether delicious and a good accompaniment to the potato/pea/chicken salad, which was dressed with the juices from cooking the chicken pieces, some Dijon mustard, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

Maybe it's not the healthiest meal I've ever made. But it was certainly local!

Pumpkin patch

The plants in the experimental pumpkin patch we've carved out of the hayfield seem to be doing well. We've been lucky with the weather - there has been just enough rain to keep things going up there, although there were two frustrating nights when we watched storms pass closely to the north of us without dropping any rain. More storms are possible tonight. Fingers crossed.

The point of this bed was to avoid the squash bugs which destroyed all the cucurbits in the barnyard and greenhouse last year. I've sown cucumbers, melons, zucchini/courgettes and a variety of pumpkins and squash up there. As a control, I sowed two zucchini plants in the barnyard. They haven't been bothered by squash bugs yet, but there are loads of cucumber beetles on them which have turned the leaves into lacework in places. In contrast, the two zucchini plants in the hayfield are completely undamaged and much bigger than their barnyard cousins.

The only problem with the hayfield plants is their distance from the house (I know I shouldn't complain about this). If we get a good crop of zucchini and cucumbers it's going to be hard work carrying them back indoors!

On the way back from the pumpkin patch last night I had to do a double-take when I saw these flowers. For a moment I thought they were asters but then realised it was much too early in the summer. They're actually thistles; the flowers are much smaller than Canada thistles and so far I haven't been able to positively identify them. I don't think I've ever noticed them before.

The extent of our civilization

It's been quiet around here recently, mostly because I've been madly busy with work, on or off the farm, or with campaigning to try and stay in work, given recent drastic cuts to funding for archives in Canada. The children and I spent a day in May demonstrating in Ottawa against the cuts.

It was great to see democracy in action like that and it's been wonderful to see the way that our small profession and those sympathetic to our principles have responded to the threats posed by the short-sighted decisions of the individuals currently in charge of Canada's national library and archives. There's an online petition with more details about the issue, if you are interested in what all the fuss is about.

As a consequence of losing a chunk of my income with these cuts, I took on a stall in the local farmers' market on Saturdays this summer. This has meant I've had to spend more time keeping the garden weeded/seeded and my weekends are correspondingly shorter. All in all, there's a lot less time for blogging, but at least I'm spending more time outside, one way or the other!

I went to the national archivists' conference was in Whitehorse this past week (more time away from those fast-growing weeds, ack!). The conference was the perfect place to be at a time of professional crisis like this: a sort of group therapy. The sense of solidarity among archivists from all over Canada (and beyond) was fantastic. A colleague of mine from Britain commented that she didn't think that UK archivists would react in the same way if there was a similar threat to archival funding over there. I think she might be right - and it's only when the Canadian archival system is under threat that you understand that its members do see it as a system, rather than just a loose affiliation of professionals. It's a shame the people at Library and Archives Canada don't recognise it as such...

The last stop on our trip to Ottawa on May 28th was the statue of Dominion Archivist Sir Arthur Doughty (the only statue in Ottawa to honour a civil servant). The words on the base of the statue are these:

Of all national assets, archives are the most precious. They are the gift of one generation to another and the extent of our care of them marks the extent of our civilization.

Chick update

The month-old Buff Orpington chicks are growing fast and now look a lot more like chickens:

There's one of them which is growing much more slowly than the others and which spends a lot of its time eating, so there's something not quite right about the way it's digesting food. But it seems happy enough and is slowly catching the others up.

Out in the barnyard the robins have hatched out.

After being used to the development of chickens, it was a bit of a shock to see how relatively undeveloped robin chicks are at first. These little things hatched two days ago. If they were chickens, by now they'd be running around and getting their own food. But these guys are fit only for being fed and sleeping.

It's a way of life I feel I could get used to...

Rain, rain, come again

It's back to that time of year when we're anxiously watching the weather satellite pictures, hoping for some rain to come our way.

Yesterday I completed a weekend of gardening by sowing squash and cucumber seeds in the patch of land Mike had tilled in the hayfield. This is quite a long walk from the barnyard and doesn't have water nearby, so will have to depend on nature's hand when it comes to liquid refreshment. After last year's experience with squash bugs, I didn't want to put plants from the squash family anywhere near the barnyard and greenhouse. I sowed seed in about a third of this area. It was already pretty dry, so we definitely needed rain to give the seeds a good start.

It was supposed to rain overnight, but didn't. This afternoon, though, the clouds started to bubble up in a promising manner.

Within half an hour of taking the photo above, the sky was dark and the rain was hammering down. Then it happened all over again, two hours later. Perfect.

In the evening, the rain stopped and I went out to do my customary hour of weeding. Well, strictly speaking that is my aspirational hour of weeding: I don't always do it, but always feel better when I do. A bit like any other sort of exercise, really. The brassica bed which was looking so awful two weeks ago has bounced back well.

...even though I've lost one or two of them to this little varmint and his or her extended (and extensive) family.

It's hard to feel resentful towards something quite this cute-looking, I must admit.

The strawberry plants I put in at the weekend are perking up nicely, despite having lain forgotten in Child#2's school bag for 24 hours. Luckily he remembered them on Saturday and didn't wait until today to find them again...

On my way back to the house I spotted this frog in the grass. I think it's a wood frog (Rana sylvatica) - not one I've noticed here before. Like the rabbit, it was very willing to sit still and be photographed.

I think the wildlife is enjoying the rain as much as I am.

Labels

Labelling things isn't a strength of mine, as I've admitted before. Sometimes it matters, as with tomato plants - you need to know which variety is which if you're going to be selling them. Although even then, some people were willing to buy my 'pot luck plants' at the farmers' market yesterday - these ones were half the usual price of the labelled ones because I didn't know which variety they were. Not a labelling problem this time, but a self-seeding one. All those tomato plants had grown from seeds dropped by last year's plants in the greenhouse beds and consequently I didn't have a clue which was which.

Usually, not labelling things isn't a problem as the seeds germinate quickly enough that I remember where I've sown them and recognise the seedlings as they emerge. With basil, though, the seeds take so long to germinate that there's a danger of forgetting where I've put them. I was fairly sure that I had sown some in the greenhouse already this year, but today I thought I'd better sow some more, as I couldn't remember where I'd put them and was worried that I'd accidentally disturbed the slow-to-emerge seedlings by putting something else in the same spot. Labelling the area where I'd sown them would have helped, I'm sure.

Of course, as soon as I'd sown the second set of seeds, I found the original lot - tiny, but intact:

Apart from the stint at the farmers' market, Mike and I have spent most of this weekend in the garden, tilling, planting, mulching and sowing. And labelling what I've sown. Not.

As this is likely to be the neatest the vegetable garden looks for the rest of the year, here's a photo. At the very bottom is the garlic I planted last October, growing well. Above that is the bed into which I sowed beans, greens, carrots and parsnips today. Behind that, under a layer of grass-clipping mulch, is one of the potato beds (there's another opposite it).

Now all I need is some good rain to water everything in. I gave this bed a preliminary drink with water from the greenhouse tank last night. In my mind's eye I was going to be serenely standing there, creating rainbows in the last of the evening sunshine with the water from the hose, satisfied with my day's work. In reality, I struggled with the tangled hose for five sweaty minutes and then was swarmed by mosquitoes when I finally got the thing in the right place. There wasn't a lot of serenity involved.

Set in stone

It's cycling season again and I've been out twice so far this month, starting fairly gently with 16km and 20km rides. When I started cycling last summer I struggled to do 6km, so I've somehow maintained a degree of fitness over a fairly inactive winter.

Today I visited the Loyalist cemetery on Burr Road. I drive past this all the time but haven't ever gone through the gates before.

The stones are small and skew-whiff and in most cases there isn't much left to read on them.

I like the home-made feel they have about them and the way they've weathered over the years. The last burial here was in 1927, according to the sign on the gate, but for some reason the local people decided to put up another monument to commemorate the early pioneers in 1928. This huge, stone-studded edifice dominates the tiny cemetery and, in my view anyway, spoils its homely nature.

Next to this monstrosity is a poignant marble slab recording the deaths of the children of Samuel and Harriet Wakeford. There's something not right about the date of five-year-old Harriet's death, though...

Robin's nest

I'd been vaguely aware of a pair of robins flying around the barn yard near the entrance to the greenhouse in the last week when I'd gone through the door. Today one of them was bolder and scolded me as I watched it.

Wondering why, I looked more closely at the fence he was sitting on and realised that the pair had built their nest on top of the orchard fence, between three posts.

Robin's aren't famous for choosing sensible locations for their nests but this one is particularly badly located. The weasel that was killing our chickens in the winter is still around and I've seen it running along the fence this week.

I don't think the contents of these beautifully-coloured eggs stand a chance. :-(

Brassica massacre

The broccoli, cabbage and swede plants were beginning to outgrow the corner of the greenhouse bed which I have been using as their nursery. They were looking very good and I knew it would take a while to transplant them all. I decided that today was the day.

First I had to clear the bed they were going into of weeds, then I spread some of last September's chicken manure over the area. Just doing that took about an hour. Then I carefully dug up the young plants, separated them and transferred them into the new bed. That took over an hour.

I didn't think I'd sown that many seeds, but the plants now fill a 30 foot by 4 foot bed. It was a very sunny day, not ideal for this job, and by the time I'd finished my vigorously healthy young plants were looking anything but:

I feel like I've murdered them all.

This evening I've given them a thorough watering-in and there's some good rain in the forecast for tomorrow night. I hope that will be enough to perk them up a bit. Once they're back in a more upright stance I'll spread some grass-cuttings around them as a mulch to keep down some of the weeds.

I'm hoping this will be a better year for brassicas than last year was - even if it doesn't look terribly promising right now.

Cold dawn

They were right about the temperature: it did go down to -4°C/25°F last night, as this frosted dandelion demonstrates.

The greenhouse and yesterday's additional precautions seem to have done the trick in protecting the young tomato plants. Although they still look a bit pathetic. It's hard to imagine that these will be six feet tall by the end of the summer. Some sunshine over the next few days and the warmer weather promised by the end of the week might make them look more respectable.

Hot bed

I've got my young tomato plants in the greenhouse and potted most of them on into small pots two weeks ago. Since then, they hardly seem to have grown at all, as the weather has turned colder.

I was dismayed this morning to see that the forecasted temperature for tonight was -4°C/25°F. Even with the protection of the greenhouse and a covering of horticultural fleece, I wasn't sure that they'd survive that. 

Luckily, I had cleared out the chicken coop and made some chicken manure at the weekend by mixing the litter with water. I checked the temperature of the manure this morning and it has reached a respectable 40°C/100°F. I thought I'd give the tomatoes a bit of help by shovelling some spadefuls of hot manure onto the greenhouse floor underneath the cart they're sitting in:

Having made all these elaborate preparations, the forecast has now changed to -2°C/28°F, which probably wouldn't have been a problem. Oh well, better safe than sorry!

Unexpected guests

I collected our new chicks today, bought to replenish our flock after the fox and weasel depredations we've experienced over the last twelve months. Unfortunately the weather is being unco-operative, with rain, snow and well-below normal temperatures today it was too cold, even with a heat lamp, to put put the chicks in the corner of the barn we had planned to use. Having chicks in the house is the way we reared our first batch in 2009 but since then we've also gained a rather efficient domestic bird-killing predator in the form of Minnie the cat. This meant that we couldn't keep the chicks in an area which is accessible to Minnie and, since our downstairs is pretty much open plan, that left us with little choice.

The chicks have therefore taken over our spare bedroom (one of the few rooms the cat can't get into) with an improvised heat-lamp bracket made out of a step-ladder:

We'll keep them indoors until they've got some feathers or until the weather warms up a bit. It's lucky we haven't got Mike's mum staying here at the moment, as she often does at this time of year - I don't think she'd have a very peaceful night with this lot cheeping away at the end of the bed!

Change of scenery

I've often travelled to Toronto on the train, but haven't ever headed east of our area by rail. Yesterday I took the train to Ottawa for the first time and was looking forward to a new view through the train window.

Once you get past Brockville, the landscape is very different from the more heavily-populated Toronto-Montreal corridor. The stretch between here and Toronto is a mixture of farmland and industrial development, with a few sections of park and beach. The lands either side of the line to Ottawa from Brockville are very different: evidence of human activity is much less obvious and there are lots of pines, boggy open areas and stands of dead, waterlogged trees.

The weather changed suddenly yesterday evening, as I came home. First the wind got up, producing a fairly scary dust-storm as the dry soil next to the road near the station in Fallowfield was lifted into the air. Then the rain poured down, settling the dust and drenching the commuters returning to their cars from the bus stops. The storm clouds transformed the landscape again. This is the view from Fallowfield station:

The reflections of the huge clouds in the pools of the wetlands we went through were beautiful, but hard to record with a camera because of the speed of the train. This next one is the best I could muster. This view is typical of the boggy nature of the scenery. I can't help but feel sorry for the men who laid the tracks in the first place: they must have been eaten alive by biting insects...

Five-years on

It's been pointed out to me that I haven't blogged for a while. Looking at the date of my last post, I have to admit that this is true. It's not that nothing has been happening, just that most of it is business-as-usual and probably not very enthralling.

Five years ago today we were on our first visit to Prince Edward County, hoping to find somewhere to live. It was a cold, blustery day; sometimes raining and sometimes snowing. One of the first things we saw as we stepped into the house was the woodburning stove; warm and welcoming. The kitchen has changed completely since then. All except for the woodstove which continues to be the heart of the house (but without the faux-brick surround it had then).

Out in the barnyard, an almost blank canvas awaited us. We didn't venture into it on the first visit (much too cold and wet), but on our second viewing, three days later, the weather had cheered up and we explored the barns and woodland behind the house.

The concrete pad next to the small barn looked like this:

Now that same space is covered by the greenhouse we put up in 2008. I spent some time on Saturday tidying it up and hoeing weeds out of the cracks in the concrete. This is how that space is looking today. Maybe it doesn't look terribly tidy to you. But you haven't seen the 'before' picture (which I conveniently neglected to take).

The raised beds are looking good and already producing some food. On the left of this photo is the purple sprouting broccoli which I left growing over the winter. I've tried this most years and this is the first time that it hasn't been killed by frost. We had some with our lunch last weekend and there are new sprouts coming. The rest of this bed is filled with young peas, growing up tomato cages. They don't seem to mind that the supports were designed for another plant.

In the bed which held tomato plants last year I've got radishes, beets and salad greens of various types growing. I'm trying to get better at timing my succession sowing of salad leaves: too often I end up with a glut followed by a few weeks of no-greens-at-all. Not this year. Oh no. This year I'm going to get it right.

Today I sowed another few rows of greens in one of the barnyard beds, along with some parsnips, carrots and some more beets. It's a lot drier outside than it usually is at this time of year: five years on, we could really do with some of 2007's rain.

But maybe not the snow, if everyone's OK with that.

A new record

In 2010, these daffodils opened on April 3rd. And that was two weeks earlier than in 2009. This year, they were open when I arrived home on March 20th: two weeks earlier again. The anemones are flowering, too:

Quite a contrast from the same week in 2008, when the hayfield looked like this:

Of course the disadvantage of all this warmth is that the weeds are actively growing, too...

Big views, little views

 It's been one of those mad fortnights where I've been dashing from venue to venue and city to city. I've seen two different Londons, one of which suffered a riot while I was there (and it wasn't the one you might expect). My travel plans were complex, sometimes bordering on the convoluted, but went surprisingly smoothly. Well, all except for the last day, when Toronto's waterfront was cushioned with a fluffy layer of fog and the plane I was on couldn't land there. We ended up going to Ottawa to get more fuel and finally landed back in Toronto four hours later than scheduled.

An unexpected bonus of the diverted flight was that we flew over Prince Edward County on the way back to Toronto. I was sitting on the right hand side of the plane and got a good view of the Bay of Quinte and Lake Consecon. At times like that, you wish there was an option to don a parachute and get straight back home without having to go to the airport and then take the train for the two-hour trip back along the shoreline. Although it might have been tricky to get my suitcase down to earth in one piece, I suppose.

It was good to get home and catch up with what had been happening here. The weather has been unseasonably warm, meaning that the greenhouse sowings I made before I left have been making impressive progress. The experimentally pre-sprouted peas have come up in soldierly-looking lines of sturdy little plants. This is definitely the best way I've found so far of ensuring germination and growth of early peas. Says she, counting her peas before they've podded.

The carrots I sowed last autumn are looking good, too:

Outside, it's been warm enough for the tyre/tire-garden rhubarb to start unfurling its leaves.

On my rushing-to-catch-up to-do list for Sunday is: sow eggplant/aubergines, peppers and tomatoes; clean out chicken coop; cut down last year's asparagus ferns.

Day of rest? I think not.

Cracking crumpets

I read Emily's post on making English Muffins the other day with interest. It reminded me of the crumpet rings I bought a long time ago (probably from Lakeland, but the ones they sell now don't look like mine). I think I tried to make crumpets with them once, when we lived in England, and it wasn't a successful experiment. But crumpets, once regular weekend tea-time fare for us, are hard to find in the shops here (and disappointing when they are found) so I thought it was worth repeating the experiment.

I can't remember what went wrong last time I tried, but I suspect the problem was that the crumpet batter stuck to the rings. The trick to avoiding this is to make sure that the rings are greased and that they are allowed to get hot in the pan before you add the batter.

Anyway, here's the recipe I used. It's from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book (1998). I note that the other recipe on the same page is for Peshwari Naan Bread. This one cookery book page sums up a century of British food tastes, I'd say. But I digress...

Crumpets
Makes 12 crumpets. (The book says this quantity makes 24. The book lies.)

350g/12 oz/2 generous cups strong white flour (I used all-purpose*)
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon sodium bicarbonate
1½ teaspoons instant dried yeast
300ml/10 fl. oz/1¼ cups warm water
250ml/8 fl. oz/1 cup warm milk
Oil for frying

Mix all the ingredients except the oil in a food mixer for a few minutes to make a thick batter. Cover and leave somewhere warm for an hour. Beat for a further minute then pour into a jug.

Heat a little oil in a frying pan over a high heat. Grease four 3-inch crumpet rings and stand in the pan for two minutes until very hot.

Pour the batter into each ring, so that they are about three-quarters full (the batter will expand as it cooks). Cook for 5-7 minutes on a medium heat until the surface is set and holey.

Remove the metal ring - the batter should have shrunk away from the edge, so this is fairly easy (not how I remember it from my earlier attempt!). My rings have little handles, which help. Flip the crumpets over to cook for one minute on the other side.

If you eat them straight from the pan, you don't need to toast them. But if you let them get cold, then toasting them will bring them back to full crumpetty perfection.

Watching the holes appear in the surface of the crumpets is fun. Here they are after a minute or two, with holes appearing at the edges:

Two or three minutes later, nearly ready to flip over:

And the finished product, crying out for some butter to melt into all those holes.

Personally, I don't think crumpets are complete without Marmite on them, too. But I accept that might be a little too English for some people...

*I tried this recipe with strong flour a week or two after writing this post. It wasn't a success: much harder to pour the batter, which turned into a gloopy mess. My advice is to stick with regular flour. If you like, you can substitute wholemeal flour for half of the total, to make a slightly more rib-sticking version.