Enough with the rain already!

Here are some edible flowers … eye food as much as tummy food, and an antidote to this chilly rain…

Lilac is one of my favourite velvety petal foods. Fling it in salads or on top of a cake.

…but there is also sweet cicely

…and forgetmenots (of which I have an embarrassment) … and if this is just too cutesy for you, then have a look at my myosotis strawberry pot over here

Cakes are a good way of dealing with a rainy day. These ones are from a recipe in this book. If you can cope with the fact that the lady who wrote it looks a bit scary, then it’s really rather good. These cakes are proper delicious…better than victoria sponge ones, in my humble opinion, and really easy to make. I use tiny paper cases instead of big ones, and they produce the loveliest mouthfuls ever. Reduce cooking time a bit if you’re going miniature.

Sweet violets for a heady concoction

The lovely thing about mothers is that they love you … whatever.

This year, mine will get this:

I used to grow all my sweet violets in pots when I only had a balcony to play with, and one of the first things I ever did when I got to my new garden was to plant them all in the ground near my apple tree.  They have thanked me for freeing them and are flowering now as if the world were about to end (I hope it’s not, because my new book is launching tomorrow)…

If you want to buy violets then go to a specialist nursery and pick your favourites. I’d suggest sticking with Viola odorata, (I love V. ‘The Czar’) because although Parma violets look oh so tempting, they don’t like frost, so need special treatment.

Violets do this funny thing to your nose: After that sensational initial hit, the scent sort of overwhelms the olfactory senses, and you can’t smell anything any more. It’s quite a feat for such a tiny little thing…and knowing you’ve only got a limited time to experience the sublime smell is all part of the charm methinks.

Anyway, I have enough now to make violet syrup, which was one of the first floral concoctions I ever tried. I used to drink it with champagne (those were the days) – as a sort of violet kir royal. Now I just lick it off a spoon with my daughter….smiling.

You need:

15-20 sweet violet blooms, stalks removed

150ml water

Granulated sugar

Method

Boil the water and add the flowers. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 24 hours or so. The next day, weigh your liquid and add twice that weight of sugar, heating slowly to dissolve it. Put a lid on the pan and leave it to infuse again for three days. Put it back on the heat and reduce it to a syrupy consistency. Strain and devour.

You can get a taster of my new book in You Magazine on Sunday. Very much hoping you like it…

x

Something to soothe

Never parTICularly been one for an ‘erbal infusion’ (unless it’s lemon verbena or peppermint)

I’m far more likely to munch leaves or a flower in a salad…

or cover it with sugar and put it on a cake…

… but stuff’s wee bit stressy at the moment, and I went out to pick a tiny posy because I thought it was something rare, and non-computer-based…and then I found myself marvelling at these pretty things, and I picked up Jekka’s Herb Book, and it said  that a tisane acts as a ‘mild sedative’…’good for anxiety and insomnia’, so I chucked some leaves and a flower in a cup.

Primula vulgaris are mighty easy to grow, particularly if you have a deciduous tree kicking around, under which they can live in a nice, moist, partly shady world.

Wild primroses are less common than they should be, so don’t pick them unless there are absolutely loads, and certainly don’t pull them up by the roots.

Colours vary from the palest of creams to much deeper, eggy yellows, and look how pretty the buds are:

You can grow them in a pot – just use JI No2 and water regularly, and you can divide them in the autumn if you’ve got big clumps.

The scent is sweet.

I think the small bottle of blooms did more for my jitters than the tea

My new book is coming out soon – and people – (people I admire and respect) are being SO nice about it. This is totally wonderful and deeply gratifying and NOT what I expect…So thank you English Mum and Fennel and Fern.

This site came under attack a while ago and I basically lost the whole caboodle. It was the brilliant Neil who resurrected it, and who is now helping me to improve it. My beloved Lust List has completely disappeared and I am re-writing it (slowly but surely…a little bit every day….). I am hoping to have it back up soon as poss.

A father’s day cake

The Hunk is one of those people who appreciatively wolfs down anything you put infront of him – it’s one of the (many) things I love about him. So when I placed the pelargonium flowers on top of this cake and it looked unspeakably girly, I knew it wouldn’t matter a bit. Sure enough, when I gave it to him and harrumphed about it being a bit ‘princessy’ for a boy, he said ‘babe….it’s CAKE!’ – enough said.

Scented leaved-pelargoniums are one of my favourite plants…mostly because they appeal to my nose. You can get them in little plugs in the springtime and in rather larger pots right now, and their scents range from violet to rose to coca-cola (yes, indeed). i like to use rose-scented Pelargonium graveolens, for punch (see The Virgin Gardener) and cakes, but any scented-leaved pelargonium will add something to your baking and this time round I used a deliciously apple-rose scented pele (whose label I have, predictably, lost).

I grow all my pelargoniums in pots of John Innes No. 2 compost. I keep them outside in summer and bring them inside my kitchen window for the winter. Those I don’t have space for but don’t want to lose, I take cuttings from (incredibly easy….I will show you how very soon).

I got the recipe from the gorgeous book River Cottage Cakes by Pam Corbin. I love this book because it is pink, but ALSO, because it has a recipe for dog-biscuits in it, in which Pam begins by saying ‘I do think it’s important to keep everyone in the family happy’….Mr Pug would agree wholeheartedly.

This cake is called Scent from heaven cake and calls for lemon verbena (which I’ve already blogged about here). She uses rice flour in hers…I had none, so just used self-raising flour. It’s delicious…mostly because it’s one of those cakes that you ‘feed’ with flavoured syrup (in this case, pelargonium-flavoured), so that it gets saturated with yumminess.

Enjoy your weekend…it’s gonna be a scorcher apparently
I’m on the tellybox tonight, on ITV at 8pm for THREE WHOLE MINUTES…go me!

Chutney stuff and nonsense

I’ve been having a chutney-making fest – it’s my first time (don’t know what took me so long) – and I realise that all this time I’ve had this weird prejudice, putting home-made chutney together in my head with people like this this -very odd really, because I’ve always devoured it…

There’s a generosity about making chutney that I love.  The whole point of preserving is anything is to avoid wasting anything…it usually comes from having a glut of something – You don’t make something like this in small quantities, so there’s always a bounty of it.  It begs to be shared and given away.

I had a big pile of un-ripe tomatoes and more jalapeno chillis than even I could handle.  The chillis were bothering me badly and I briefly flirted with this idea of salsa and stuffed peppers, but In the end I got predictably lazy and decided to combine the tomatoes and the chillis so I went browsing to find out chutney secrets.  I found this wonderful recipe on the sumptuous and stylish website that is Fennel and Fern and adapted it to include my piles of jalapenos.

It couldn’t be easier:

Jalapeno and green tomato chutney

Green tomatoes (6 or 7 big ones or lots of small ones), roughly chopped

Jalapenos or mild-ish chillis (I used about 12 big ones), roughly chopped

4 red onions, sliced

4 apples, cubed

450g muscovado sugar, (I didn’t have enough so I used half muscovado and half demerara)

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

2 teaspoons ground ginger

sultanas – a couple of handfuls

400ml cheap malt vinegar

2 tablespoons good balsamic vinegar

A knob of butter

Method

Heat the butter over a medium heat and add the sugar and sliced onions.  Cook them until they’re golden and soft.  Now add everything else except the vinegar and cook it for a few minutes, just to soften, stirring occasionally.  Add the malt vinegar and simmer for half an hour.  Then add the balsamic and cook some more until the mixture is soft and thick and gloopy.  Taste and adjust, leave to cool and then put your chutney into sterilised jars.

And on the subject of jars

I bought these glass lever-arm preserving jars (rather expensively) because I fell in love with them.  Problem is I want to give away the chutney but keep the jars – such a quandry darling, but as always, there is someone out there who has blogged about it, so here, if you are agonising about such things (which I’m certain you ARE) is canning queen Marisa’s take on preserving jar ettiquete…i do so love the world wide web don’t you?

Oh, and I nearly forgot to tell you….it’s DELICIOUS!