Louisa Parry » cooking

Goal #1 “make a meal using only ingredients I’ve grown myself” – DONE!

louisa — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 17:00:09 +0000

This was my dinner this evening – courgette frittata with side salad – and it was made entirely using things from our garden (with the exception of the wild garlic pods – some were from our garden, others from further into the woods).

Ingredients:
- courgette (although I only used one in the end – could have used a bit more for flavour though)
- new potatoes
- pickled wild garlic pods (not in picture)
- eggs (from yesterday, needed beating better hence the egg white bits)
- basil (grown from seed this year) & oregano (had for a few years)
- salad leaves (lollo rosso)
- chives
- and, ok ok, a little oil for frying the courgettes – a small cheat ;)

It could have used a bit of salt & pepper for flavour but other than that, was pretty damn good!

And that’s another goal ticked off my list.

10 goals for 2010 – April & May progress update

louisa — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:00:06 +0000

1. To make a meal using only ingredients I’ve grown, raised, caught or killed myself.
April was an interesting meat-y month – we learned how to kill & dress chickens, and we also learned how to make sausages. It was also the proper start of seedling season – and that’s continued in May. So far, we’ve only had lettuce from the garden (winter gems) but the seedlings have been going well. This year is an experimentation year – I’m growing lots of different things to see how things grow in our new garden and also getting used to the different beds (two have proven to be shallower than expected, two deeper).

We’ve also been on a Wild Food Foray, which was a lot of fun and very interesting. I would like to go on another specialising in woodland wild food since that’s our main habitat.

My second attempt at a sourdough starter (after a first failure during the cold cold winter) failed miserably at the start of May – when everything came to a bit of a halt because I was sleeping 14 hours a day and tired for the other 10. However, we learned about slow rise bread while out on the Wild Food Foray and I thought that sounded bloody brilliant – so I’ve been grinding that lately. (Grinding in the levelling-up-at-video-games sense rather than the wheat-ears-to-flour sense.) Although each loaf takes nearly 24 hours from start to finish, it’s a relatively cheap thing to grind at and John is loving all the good, fresh bread.

2. To travel to a place on my “top ten places to go before I die” list.
Nope, still nothing on this one.

3. Finish writing my second novel.
I started to read through what I’ve written so far and while I haven’t done it so far, I know what my next step is (re-drafting while typing it up), then I’ll continue with the story.

4. Learn how to make sausages – wet English style ones and cured ones too.
As I said in #1, yes! Done this one! One goal off the list – hurrah!

Well, we made English wet ones and we learned the theory of making ones for curing (since it’s essentially the same). We also figured out we could use our half garage for hanging – it’s out of the way so it won’t stink up the house, quite cool and could easily be made a little more ventilated. Now it’s just a question of getting a mincer and giving it a go.

5. Spend at least a day fishing out on the North Sea.
I’ve done some research into dog-friendly places to stay on the coast, but that’s it so far.

6. Finally finish learning how to drive.
Done nothing on this.

7. Make a full outfit’s worth of clothing for myself – including spinning any wool used.
I learned how to spin today! Ok, technically that’s a June thing but sshhh! I’ve had the day off today and decided to learn a new craft – I intended it to be dyeing but when I went to the wonderful Textere Yarns (somewhere I’ve been intending to visit since before we moved to Bradford), they had lots of pretty coloured roving so I decided to give it a go instead. It’s lots of fun but my shonky homemade top whorl drop spindle is showing its shonkiness already so I’m going to get a better made one I think (and/or try to make a better one myself).

Today I’ve also started making a light dressing gown for myself for summer – from some lovely fabric I got from a random great fabric shop on Leeds Rd. I couldn’t find a decent pattern/how-to online so I’ve kinda made it up as I was going along, based on the theory of making a kimono wrap for a baby. I’m going to finish it tomorrow – if it works out, I’ll write it up and arguably, by itself, it’ll also be a full outfit, or rather an infit ;)

Tomorrow, I’m also going to try dyeing stuff – got some boring shop-bought dyes to start with but I’m hoping to go natural and find some suitable leaves at lunchtime when we’re out with the Lil’ dog.

8. Learn how to program and make a mini-game/application using Ruby.
I’ve returned to my programs and stuff a couple of times but as I said in my last update back in March, I’d reached a bit of a hurdle in my book, and that’s pretty demotivating. However, my list of ideas for simple programs is growing so I’ll get back to it soon.

9. Climb a mountain or at least a jolly big hill.
Still doing a lot of walking with Lil – or rather a lot more walking than we ever used to. Tom keeps mentioning Snowdon and/or the Three Peaks so maybe, maybe.

10. Participate more in the real world – plan/run a real life green event or scheme.
Again, lots of ideas and I’m *almost* ready to take the first step on two of them.

3BT – soft & even, play time, the new recipe

louisa — Mon, 31 May 2010 21:00:27 +0000

1. Her freshly clipped coat feels like velvet.

2. We worry – as we always do – that the play is bordering on fighting but the woman assures us that it is definitely play. The dogs bounce around together amongst the oak trees as we talk about them behind their backs.

3. The slow-rise bread – 22 hours in the making – comes out of the oven too late to eat with dinner so we have it as dessert instead. Its golden dome is perfectly cracked, its centre spongy & bubbled.

Sausages!

louisa — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:52:36 +0000

One of my ten goals for 2010 was to learn how to make sausages. I’ll admit it was a bit of an easy one — the “make to-do” list item on your to-do list just so you can cross something off straight away — as I was already planning on attending a sausage making course in March. When March came along though, I was incredibly disappointed when we had to cancel our places a couple of days before the course – and delighted when Rachel, the course organiser, said they were running the course again a month later, and would we like to attend that instead?

The course took place on Saturday at Old Sleningford Farm – a lovely informal community/small holding near Ripon in North Yorkshire. The drive up showed off Yorkshire at its best – the sun shining on all the hills, dales and cute cottage-filled villages – and when we got there, the group were having a cup of tea in the sunshine next to the herb garden. There were five of us on the course, plus Rachel & Martin, who ran the session together.

Once the tea was supped, we headed into the purpose-built kitchen and Rachel & Martin told us about their experiences developing the recipes, how they’d come up with their fatty/lean meat ratio and why they used homemade bread instead of rusk. Then we read through the recipes of the sausages we’d be making – all standard wet pork sausages but we were given two recipes for dried/smoked sausages and throughout the day, they discussed how each stage would be different if we were making them (we also got to try the dried sausages at lunchtime – super yum!). They had also thoughtfully copied out large versions of the recipes and hung them on the walls so we didn’t keep having to refer to our take-home A4 papers.

For the rest of the morning, we made the sausage meat. In total, between the seven of us, we made 25kg of sausage meat in five flavours: plain, herby, sage & onion, cumberland and garlic & rosemary. We used both manual and electric mincers to see the different textures produced by different settings, and it was interesting to see how things blended more with repeated mincings.

Once all the meat was minced, we left Martin cooking up some tasting patties for lunch while Rachel showed us around the farm. We met their three pigs – the mum and the sisters of the pigs currently sizzling away in the kitchen – and we tickled the younger ones’ bellies as they sunbathed. I got muddy pig snot all up my jeans. Rachel told us about their experiences so far – they’ve been there for just under six years – and their plans for the future, which was really fascinating and inspiring :)

Lunch was splendid – back in the herb garden, we had homemade bread and homegrown/foraged salad as well as a sample of each of the sausage meat patties and slices of their salami and smoked garlic sausage. For those who are not as anti-fruit/alcohol as me, there was homegrown/pressed apple juice and cider. Our lunch food miles were measured in metres and it was all delicious. For dessert, Martin whipped up a plum upside-down cake which was also fantastic. We didn’t want to go back to work after that feast but the sausages wouldn’t skin themselves.

The hog casings on spools looked and felt very strange but once we got into the rhythm of it, it was easier than we thought it would be – rather satisfying too, making sure the casings weren’t too full or too empty, and keeping the metres of emerging sausage tidy! John & I stuffed the cumberland and plain ones, then we linked those up too – the linking really drove home the importance of stuffing them at the correct density.

We both very much enjoyed the course – and have very much enjoyed eating the sausages we brought home at the end of it! We’re plan to get a mincer/stuffer at home to make our own batches in the future and I’d definitely like to try dried/smoked ones too, especially now I’ve identified that our little garage will be a near perfect place to leave them hanging.

I’d thoroughly recommended the course for anyone wanting to give sausage-making a go – and will more than likely be returning for more course at Old Sleningford in the future.

(Photo by peteralbre)

Death & dressing: killing, plucking & butchering our first chickens

louisa — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 21:00:01 +0000

On Friday night, we killed, plucked & butchered two chickens. As you do.

To be accurate, the wonderful John B and my John did the killing, then my John’s brother Chris and I joined them in plucking, then John B showed me how to dress the chicken, and then I showed Chris.

The chickens first came into our collective lives late last year as unwanted day old chicks and Chris handreared them in a make-shift nursery in his conservatory until New Year, when he had to clean out the chicken poop, ahead of the arrival of his son, Zachary on Valentine’s Day/Chinese New Year. Despite being planning/building a chicken pen/coop since we got this house last September (well, planning it since I went on a chicken course in April last year), we still weren’t ready to take them when Chris needed to get rid – and John B, who already had his own girls, offered to take in the still-unsexed chicks. He gave us regular updates about how they were doing – and a few weeks ago, his suspicions were confirmed: two of them were definitely boys. Over the last week, the boys had become somewhat randy boys and were hurting his girls with their “affection” so one way or another, they had to go. John B has been banned by his daughters from eating anything they’d named so he couldn’t do it and a friend on his allotments offered to do the deed instead – but he thought he’d give us first refusal.

When I first developed an interest in raising chickens, I considered the possibility of having to kill one and decided that it was an important thing to accept if I wanted to have hens. I doubted I’d do it just because one got a bit old or stopped laying but I expected that I might have to do it if, say, one of them was badly hurt and it would be inhumane to let it live. Then I read this great article about bringing up boys alongside girls until they reach eatin’ age (15-20 weeks). Getting only point of lay pullets means someone else somewhere along the line has had to kill the boys. If we bought hatching eggs/day old chicks, that someone would be us. When my John asked me on Thursday if I’d be ok with doing the necessary on Friday, it was a bigger version of my cat poo epiphany the day Carla & Carbs came to life with me: Carbo did a poo in the tray on the first evening and in a split second, I realised that no one else was going to help me get rid of it, that having to scoop poop was part of cat ownership – and since then, I’ve not flinched when it comes to doing my poo duties (pooties).

So at around 6:30pm on Friday, John B arrived with the boys and first one, then the other, grew a few inches taller. There was no pleasure in the killing and it was solemn & serious – which, as most people who know us in person will realise, is quite a change from normal for us. We wanted to do right by the birds and made sure they were very dead before we started plucking. In the temperate evening air, the birds cooled gradually while we pulled at the feathers. Some of the bigger ones needed to be pulled out one at a time. Others left behind a sticky residue. The light pinfeathers could be pulled out by the handful. It was still a time consuming process for us newbies, even with John B’s help and supervision. Eventually though, the chickens were bald and we took them up to the kitchen to butcher/dress them.

As it had all been a bit last minute, we hadn’t made preparations to hang them (although afterwards, we realised that our little garage would work for that in the future) and we didn’t have all the right tools for the butchering job – we had a reasonably sharp chef’s knife, a serrated-but-pretty-blunt paring knife and a block of wood but it would have been easier with super sharp, small knives, a pair of just-for-the-kitchen secateurs, and a tenderising mallet (for hitting the top of the knife). Still though, we made the best of it and I only stabbed John B twice ;) Once the head, feet and wings tips come off, it felt a lot more like handling a shop-bought chicken – less like an animal, more like food, even with the pulling-the-innards out bit. That bit actually went surprisingly easily for me and I found it fascinating how everything looked like it should look – everything was very well defined and crisply coloured, like a plastic anatomy teaching aid. The whole process wasn’t anywhere near as bloody as I expected and when I finished (including skinning it, because the skin was a bit tatty and tbh, off-putting), it looked like an actual edible chicken.

It took us just shy of three hours from start to finish – from the chickens arriving to having two ready for the oven – which wouldn’t get us hired at a chicken farm but I didn’t think it was too bad since most of the work was being done by first timers. The whole process was far from fun, it wasn’t how I’d choose to spend a Friday night, and I don’t think we’ll be doing it regularly but it wasn’t as horrific as I thought it might be and we’ve accepted that we’ll have to do it again – and we’re ok with that. We won’t start raising chickens for meat – certainly not here anyway, we haven’t the room to make it worthwhile – but as a side effect of laying, we’ve accepted that it’s inevitable.

I expect we’ll get better at plucking and butchering, and as a result, will be able to use increasingly more of the chicken. As it was, we used all the breast & leg meat (from ours) to make a lovely big curry tonight, the cats & dog had the fried livers & hearts between them on Friday night, Chris took all the feet home with him and the rest of our carcass will end up as soup via stock. I think we’ll be able to save more of the innards once we’re more comfortable poking around that whole mess and more of the neck/wings when we get better at plucking. Not fun-fun, but very interesting.

Wild Food Fun: Whitby Crab and Wild Garlic Risotto

louisa — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 20:00:59 +0000

A change from my last very quick and easy wild garlic (Ramsons) meal – I made crab & wild garlic risotto for dinner today.

I got two dressed crabs from Leeds Farmers Market – the guy gave me a free one because he wasn’t doing another market for a few days and they don’t freeze them, so I decided to do something a little different than my usual, which is gobbling them down with some bread & salad. I found a crab and leek risotto recipe online and thought wild garlic would do instead.

I’m not the risotto maker in this house but John was out (and doesn’t like crab anyway) so I just bodged it. I knew I didn’t want to cook either the crab or wild garlic for too long so I made a very plain standard base with the rice (although as a nod to the to-be-added ingredients, I added lemon juice to the stock) and added the crab and the wild garlic (roughly cut again) just before the parmesan at the end.

The risotto was very fresh and light – the crab quite delicate but definitely there; ditto the wild garlic. The leaves were mostly wilted like spinach and I was glad I’d cut them up a bit.

Wild Food Fun: Wild Garlic (Ramsons) potato cakes

louisa — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 20:00:39 +0000

I had my first wild garlic of the season today! The woods behind our house are *full* of it – the banks of the stream on both sides are five foot deep with it, mostly just small baby leaves at the moment but some bigger leaves too.

I picked some – a large handful – while on my lunchtime walk with Lily. Because they’re *everywhere*, it was easy to pick up some from slightly off the beaten track and I nibbled a leaf as I walked back to the house.

In the kitchen, I squished the roughly chopped wild garlic leaves into some leftover mashed potato and added a beaten egg as a binder, then shallow fried them until golden brown-ish. In the other side of the pan, I fried up some smoked bacon and ate them together with a giant grin on my face.

In the past, we’ve done slightly more elaborate things with wild garlic – eg, the ubiquitous pesto – but this was very simple and delicious!

My favourite British green/simple living/craft blogs

louisa — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:55:06 +0000

I read A LOT of green/simple living blogs – some religiously, others only when the subject particularly appeals. There is such a wealth of knowledge out there and inspirational actions, not from proclaimed experts or media stars but from a range of people living (or trying to live) “simpler” lives. (I share my favourite posts here – http://www.google.com/reader/shared/louisa.parry)

However, the vast majority of the bloggers are from the US and while a lot of the information transfers over here, it’s nice to read stories from British bloggers too – their photos show familiar hilly landscapes not alien prairies or mountains, they talk about tea & Jaffa cakes, and they have small, climate-challenged gardens & no chance of an allotment this side of the year 3000.

So anyway, on with the links:

Frugal favourite: Notes from the Frugal Trenches
Wiry inspiration: Alison Bailey Smith’s abscraft blog
Best for colour: Attic 24
Best lack of colour: Fine Little Day (Ok, not a British blog but still contrasts wonderfully with the last one!)
Wild wood/living: Hunter-Gatherer-Cook/Man Up A Tree
Super greenies: Alice in Blogland, My Zero Waste & Green Eyed
Green fingers and egg collectors: My Tiny Plot, The Compost Bin & The Cottage Smallholder
Most likely to make me drool: Eat like a girl
Beauty in everything: Three Beautiful Things

10 goals for 2010

louisa — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 11:00:26 +0000

To make a meal using only ingredients I’ve grown, raised, caught or killed myself.
To travel to a place on my “top ten places to go before I die” list.
Finish writing my second novel.
Learn how to make sausages – wet English style ones and cured ones too.
Spend at least a day fishing out on the North Sea.
Finally finish learning how to drive.
Make a full outfit’s worth of clothing for myself – including spinning any wool used.
Learn how to program and make a mini-game/application using Ruby.
Climb a mountain or at least a jolly big hill.
Participate more in the real world – plan/run a real life green event or scheme.

Why you should wash out your tea cup every day

louisa — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:25:45 +0000

(or why you shouldn’t leave dregs in your cup if you take milk and two sugars, and are out of the house for a day.)

Woohoo for Wispas