Fishtastic fishcakes

We have a favourite fish bloke in one of the local towns and as I was passing his place on delivery day I couldn't resist grabbing a few bits and pieces. We've decided to use the stuff and remake a fishcake recipe I came up with a couple of weeks ago and put everything else into one of our favourite fish pies...

Mmm Fish Cakes - this is how I like them...

Ingredients
Fish of your choice (a couple of fillets will do) I used two of sea bass
Potato (as always maris or Edwards are great)
Capers, about two teaspoons of roughly chopped
Lemon Zest, about one and a half teaspoons
Optional herbs such as chive, fennel, dill etc
milk and water (I use 150ml of each or thereabouts)
Horseradish, one and a half full teaspoons
Wholegrain mustard, one and a half full teaspoons
One beaten egg
Flour
Breadcrumbs (three - four slices or similar)

My Method
Place the fish (I used two sea bass fillets) skin side down in a frying pan, add the milk/water mix, stick on the lid then bring up to the boil. Once boiling reduce the heat to a gentle simmer for four minutes, after the four minutes turn off the heat and keep the lid on for a further ten - the residual heat will cook the fish nicely.

During this time boil up some potatoes (about six at moderate size) that have been cut small for around ten minutes until they are cooked but still holding their shape then drain and mash.

In a bowl mix the mash, the capers, lemon zest, horseradish, mustard and then flake in the fish. Because I had them I added about 100g of already cooked crayfish that had been roughly chopped. I also added a good full teaspoon of finely chopped chives and fennel. Be gentle when you mix everything together because you'll want the fish to stay fairly chunky.

Now for the messy bit. With well floured hands grab a golf ball sized lump of mixture then flatten it out to make a cake about 2cm thick. Roll the cake carefully in the egg then roll in the breadcrumbs, I stick flour, egg and crumbs on a separate plate and organise this conveyer style. Repeat until done, I managed to get six out of the batch.

Now either fry the fish cakes up immediately for instant satisfaction or plate them, cover them with clingfilm and bang them into the fridge for  day.

 

Meat and Ale Pie

I'm trying to get used to making more effort in the kitchen at the moment given that soon fruit and veg will be once again abundant and we'll have hours of blanching, jam making and other similar stuff to do.

So we'll be adding loads of recipes as we go but as I made some stuff this weekend I thought I'd stick a couple up on the blog to get on with.

My recipes tend not to be massively scientific, weights and measures are generally approximate and based on how I feel at the time and how fresh/smelly/tasty the ingredients seem on the day. So all I can tell you is if it makes it onto the blog it turned out tasty and no-one died.

Meat and Ale Pie

For reasons unknown to myself I felt the urge to make one of these, not tried before...

Ingredients
Diced Game 500g (or other preferred meat, I just found this in our freezer)
Flour (just a bit)
Onion
Mushroom
Carrots
Bottle of ale
Stock Cube (I used a veg one)
Optional splashes of red wine vinegar (balsamic would do) and Port
Pastry (I cheated by using some ready to use Jusroll puff pastry)
Splash of Oil for lubing the pan
Mushrooms
Tomato Puree
Single cream or crème freche
A sprinkle of salt and pepper

My Method
Rub the meat in seasoned flour then heat a bit of oil in a pan (large frying pan is fine but ideally with a lid) and then slam in the diced meat and brown off - takes around ten minutes?
Then remove the meat to stand for a mo, scrape the bottom of the pan so the tasty bits travel with the meat.
In the same pan (might need another splash of oil?) soften the chopped onion until transparent without burning then throw in the chopped carrots for a few minutes. I added a splash of the ale here to help simmer/steam the carrots for about five minutes.
I then crumbled in the stock cube because I never see the point in going to the hassle of melting it in boiled water first - the ale is mostly water anyway. Stick the meat back in and also add some tomato puree (about a desert spoon) a splash of port (this is optional but I'm classy enough to have some laying around the house) and a dribble of the vinegar. Of course I also added the ale at this point - as someone that never drinks this ale stuff I chose to buy a bottle of London Pride purely because I'm about five foot four and it happened to be at eye level in the local garage.

Give it a gentle stir then bang on the lid, bring it up to the boil then turn down to a gentle simmer and I left it for between 40-60 minutes. I didn't time it precisely but basically I leave it long enough until the meat and carrot is done - if it helps it turned out to be the right amount of time to drink a relaxed glass of wine whilst watching my wife weed around nine fruit trees. About ten minutes before the end I tend to add some roughly chopped mushroom then leave the lid off and watch it really thicken up. Take off the heat, stir in a spoonful or two of cream then shove it in a casserole dish.

**To make the same dish so much quicker cook the chopped carrots in a steamer/Microwave first then you only need to simmer the mixture until the meat is tender - about twenty minutes.

If like me you are a lazy pastry chef I find the Jusroll stuff is pretty good and easily found in shop fridges around the globe. Either way shove it over the dish, trim with a little extra then press down around the edges. Don't forget to jab two steam holes through it somewhere then bang it into a pre-heated oven at 200oc or gas mark 6.

Thirty minutes later and it is hot to trot !

 

More-a-planting

So I have had some set-backs this year - none of the carrots or parsnips I planted germinated. None of the beetroot, swede or perpetual spinach did either. So I had to start it all off in the greenhouse and now, what a nightmare, I have to transplant the lot...

 

Beetroot, perpetual spinach and swedes transplanted into their freshly weeded bed...

 

The two beetroot seedlings that did germinate...

 

Jacob chose to grow some carrots so here he is transplanting them...

 

Russ filled the final remaining raised bed so I planted out the butternut squash, pumpkins and patty pan squashes too...

 

The most soul-destroying thing? Actually running out of space so we are now talking about creating some beds outside of the veg cage for the more resistant crops..... who would have thought eh!?

Progress report

Well the warm weather and abundant rain has brought up more than weeds (although the weeds seem to have the upper hand...) so here is a sneak peak at what going up in the veg patch at the mo!

 

Tomatoes and red peppers haven't looked back since we put them in their growbags!

Strawberries starting to blush - can't wait!

 

Will the garlic every stop growing!!!!

 

I planted asparagus on a whim and am dead pleased that both plants have sent up a long flowering tendril. Obviously no harvest this year but looking forward to years to come...

 

Early peas a-flowering

 

First earlies potatoes almost a-ready

 

After a lag-period the rhubard has also started producing leaf after leaf

 

 

Looking pretty tasty!!!!

Revisiting the Somme

When we started on the big garden area we came to two immediate conclusions. Firstly in its prime (and it's so overgrown that this is testing to imagine) it must have been one carefully planned and impressively put together display of botanical delight. Secondly the obviously talented and dedicated couple who put their heart and soul into the grounds had chosen to place a mostly buried rockery on a flat piece of lawned area.

Now, I hold my hands up that these people knew more about gardening than I ever will and appreciate the effort they put into making the paradise inside our boundary that I expect this was, but... being a boring un-classy type I expect my rockeries to be on a slope. Up and down the land boys and girls grow up, get their first house - be it mansionesque or council chav and then they look at ways to improve their garden. Three words, Pond, Patio, Rockery.

I'm betting that anywhere you have seen a rockery there has been some fathomable gradient that allows the heather to drift over ledges, water to cascade downhill into a subtle water feature and gnomes that perch high up, as if surveying their kingdom between the compost heap and the solar lighting around the barbecue. It is what rockeries are just supposed to be.

I'm aware that the couple that developed our garden over nineteen years know this because they built one. On a slope. With outcrops and ledges (but fortunately no gnomes). So why on earth did they select a strip of pleasant enough lawn then (undoubtedly) import some serious tonnage of rock before digging them in so only the tip of the proverbial iceberg remains for you to stub your toes on. What were they thinking?????

As you can tell this particular ground breaking (excuse the pun) landscaping project didn't sit well with us so we dug the rocks up. Some we lifted but others were enormous. In fact several were so massive that we had to hire a mini-digger for the day and that ONLY had the power to push them four feet to the edge of the pond where they will at some point create another massive headache for us. The plus side was we now had an opportunity to return a nice broad strip of lawn to the garden and my stepdad got very excited driving a mini-digger (think happy child wearing hi-vis and hard hat whilst "brrmmming" Tonka trucks around the lawn then add fifty years and a moustache).

The down side... our new strip of lawn was left like a vast pot-marked, crater-filled moonscape with the addition of slimy mud. So appalling does it look that we have since got used to ignoring it by skirting around the long side of the pond. When we can bear to talk about it at all we call it 'The Somme.' Unfortunately for our neighbours when Karen, our chief mower, whips around the lawn every week the string of swear words that commence as she pulls, pushes and barges the device through the troughs and summits become more audible with every metre. At times she disappears from view altogether and if it weren't for the sound of expletives drowning out the petrol engine you would think that she had been sucked through the earths crust like a Hans Christian Anderson novel.

Having long abandoned the hope of close cropped, perfectly flat Kensington Palace style grass we've decided that our rustic garden is fine with a bit of 'natural' terrain but we need to improve its smoothness a bit, sort out the really big holes and try levelling it just well enough to mow without next doors kids learning more vocabulary than is healthy. So rather than roller it repeatedly with an industrial tractor that I haven't got I took the opposing view, if I can't flatten the lumps then I can fill the gaps.

 

Armed with a dumpy bag of soil and a trusty wheelbarrow I spent an hour today smoothing the slopes and filling the literally man sized holes. This photo depicts a working progress, still a bit more to do tomorrow and I know what you are thinking, yes, it does look crap. However with a liberal dab of grass seed and a bit of firming down and we might have a mowable space after all. Failing that we'll carry on as usual and hand out ear muffs to the neighbours.

Spuds!

Veg patch is coming along nicely despite a minor set back with the carrots and parsnips but more on that tomorrow....

Been earthing up the spuds recently - they are coming along nicely. Maris Piper and King Edwards this year!

A picture of  five minute project I did for the kitchen.

Having made the big kitchen island with a sycamore top I had some of the waney edged sycamore left over. I had planned to make a chopping board with it in the usual way of slicing it up, alternating the strips to prevent warping then gluing it all back together.

Due to a lack of moral fibre during the day that I made it though I got a bit lazy and simply cut out a lump of the wood, gave it a sanding and job done. I did fully expect to see some cracking, warping and cupping but surprisingly six months on and it looks the same as it did on day one (with a few more grazes of course)

So with a bit more of the 'scrap' sycamore I made two more yesterday..

 

Oh and a TOP TIP that I read somewhere a while back. Make little feet for your board out of equal slices of wine bottle cork, then when you've butchered the top side you can sand them off and turn it over - don't forget to add a few more feet though to help prevent spills from becoming trapped underneath.

A rocky patch

Rockery !!!

Having decided that we only want edible stuff added to the main garden we set to work trying to find out what can be safely eaten should we choose to chomp whilst mowing the lawn. The obvious (even to us) stuff like rosemary, tarragon etc is definitely going to be involved (and we have some elsewhere) but we also wanted to find stuff that is a bit more unusual, perhaps even colourful and flowery?

So after searching a couple of books and web stuff we organised a list of suitable stuff then shot off to the excellent local garden centre (Derwen in Welshpool) to grab stuff to start of when we re-do the rockery.

It was at about this point that we and the fabulous staff at Derwen had a nervous breakdown. To make life difficult for us most of our list related to scientific names which we didn't understand and didn't match up to much of the plant packaging on site. Our stress involved us wanting to make sure we are getting safe plants because some flowers have edible and non-edible types. The Derwen staff stress was caused by us chasing them about with long lists and asking stupid questions, such as...

"I'm looking for geraniums, but not the usual geraniums I need the ones beginning with P that are often mistaken for normal geraniums but apparently are actually a bit different.
"Err.. I know a bit about geraniums, what do you want?"
"Here's a list we've found online - got any of these?"
"Do you need these particular types for your planting location or is it a colour preference?"
"No we might want to eat them but need to make sure we are getting ones that are edible and won't poison us"
"Are you going to eat them?"
"Probably not but you never know!"
"Steve, your customer..."

Any way we got there in the end. Here is a before shot of the rockery at the start you can just make it our under that huge pile of undergrowth.

 

To give you some idea just how unloved our garden has been. This is a picture of the rockery AFTER we have already weeded it thoroughly and taken it back to bare earth once already!

 

Here is Karen getting stuck in...

 

 

Here is a list of the plants that we transferred from our old herb bed into our new edible rockery:



Sage

Tarragon

Bay

Rosemary

Oregano

Mint

Thyme

 

Plus some new ones:

Borage

More Thyme

Curry Plants

Pansy

Artichoke

Aubergine

Chili Peppers

Viola

Dianthus

Daylily

Calendula

Fennel

Thymus

Camomile

Coriander

Pineapple Mint

Chives

 

(We also bought loads of Lavender and some grapes plus, the lovely ladies at Derwen also gave me some free Cobnuts which were past their best and we've stuck them in and they seem ok - but more on all this later)

 

So fast forward a few hours and we have a reasonably well weeded patch of rockery and tons of new (edible) plants which will hopefully establish themselves and fill the gaps soon.

 

 

PANIC !

Not as desperate a situation as this blog title sounds but a bit of a wake up call occurred today.

I walked past one of our two massive elderflower tree and noticed that the flowers are just starting to open. After last year when we spent a busy week or two making and bottling litres of elderflower presse (we tried elderflower cordial too but it was foul) you'd think we'd be looking forward to creating more of the delicious stuff.

Here's the hiccup. I opened one of our freezers today to fetch some chilli and noticed about TWELVE LITRES of elderflower presse sitting there unloved and waiting to be cracked open. Apparently we made more than we thought and then forgot about it.

Option One
- Don't make any more this year and use up our frozen batch

Option Two
- Make shed loads of the stuff with fresh flowers and have some kind of massive elderflower party to free up space in the freezer.

So. Elderflower Presse anyone?

Two years, seven months and a bit

Ever since we moved in we've been excited and puzzled about how to plan our garden, the huge undertaking that in its prime was part of the National Open Garden Scheme and took pride of place in the community. Then after it had been abandoned for several years we moved in to an unsightly jungle and didn't really know where to start.

Improving the sheds and sorting the back paddock area to effort but was pretty simple. We've replaced the sheds, added some Ebay greenhouses and a decent growing area. Smack in some fruit trees and soft fruit and we are pretty much done.

Unfortunately our reasonable successes on one side of the house has forced us to consider the other, bigger and far more tricky side.

Imagine if you will about three quarters of an acre, partially covered in a very bumpy lawn and dried up pond. Consider a boundary created by a range of mature trees including seventy foot sycamores, sixty foot leylandi and various other large unkempt shrubs that we do not recognise. Around about ten percent of the internal space belonging to an almost visible rockery area and the remaining ninety percent one incredible mass of brambles. Add in a dusting of misshapen topiary and you will just begin to understand what we are dealing with...

On the plus side we have limited time and budget and absolutely no clue about gardening.

What we have done so far is:
- Stick in some bee hives in a little fenced off area which needs some finishing touches.
- Have a HUGE spruce tree removed and carved the remaining five foot of trunk into a head.
- Built a fire pit area for chillaxing and BBQ!
-Add a few fruit trees

Although most of our effort has obviously been spent elsewhere in the grounds we have at times sat down with pen and paper and thrown down some ideas only to change them during the next chit chat.

We finally think we have an answer though so here are the basics and I'll stick a map up some time soon:
*Build a living willow seating area next to the eventually refurbished pond
*Clear the beds from the terrace and try growing grape around our windows
*Clear the rockery and find something to stick in it
*Get topsoil and fill in the lawn dips to make a smoother surface
*Remove a couple of existing beds in favour for more lawn and open space
*Add a couple of shrubs
*Remove a few dodgy plants
*Build some sort of small wall along the edge of the terrace

Oh, and to add a bit of a challenge we decided that any plant we add to this side of the house has to be technically edible.......

Pigs are little buggers...

Introducing our two little piggies and two that belong to Tim!

Woohoo!!!

Dashed back from work to get back in time for pig day!!!

Karen and Tim picked up our four little weaners from the local breeder and despite smelling out our van like you cannot believe they arrived safe and sound to look around their new home.

Very cute little piggies (and hopefully they'll be tasty too!)

The learning curve is VERY steep. Immediately we realised that the ark we built for housing is ginormous even taking into account the size we expect them to be. Also the pen that we have made is ridiculously large for them but we assume this will just keep them happier and make the meat leaner which is all good.

To our utter disbelief they INSTANTLY proved the recommendations about secure fencing. Despite our research into how to lay out the fencing - which we followed meticulously everyone failed to mention that young weaner pigs aren't much bigger than cats and can actually fit THROUGH the bloody stock fence !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After chasing them around the paddock like a Benny Hill clip until they all got locked indoors an initial head scratch offered two solutions, either chicken wiring over the strong stock fence around the seventy metre perimeter (much dosh needed) or simply taking all the left over barbed wire (and a bit more) and just going nuts....

Hence yesterday alone and undaunted my day off turned into an absolute fencing fest. I laid under tension four more barbed strands around the inside plus another with Tims help on the outside at ground level, about 400m in total.

Whilst my broken hands and back may never recover the result is an awe-inspiring Checkpoint Charlie-esq prison camp of a pen. Think guard towers, machinge gun nests and anti-personnel corridors.

The effort seems to have paid off because today the pigs found no way to escape and instead turned their attention away from the new intimidating 'on steriods' fence to rooting around in the grass and eating acorns and grubs. Apparently 'Stalag Swine' is now fit for purpose.

Just as well because had they again lazily minced through the fencing after all that work they'd have been straight to the butchers and we'd have settled for chippolatas instead of big rustic sausages!

Here are some pics...

Here little piggy....

So when our lifestyle began to change into something resembling a farm we had chickens, got quails and bees and of course in conversation everyone asked us about pigs - apparently the obvious next step to a smallholding ?!

We at once decided two things - pigs would physically fit in our garden but the mess, smell, destruction and hacked off neighbours was something we had no interest in putting up with. We also knew (very little) stuff about pigs other than you have to be registered for keeping them, on DEFRA's radar and that there were legal responsibilities and practices to maintain - far too much hassle!!!

We mentioned this with absolutely no agender to our new mate Tim, a keen cook who loved the idea of having proper fresh, homegrown pork. It turns out he rents a place with three acres just down the road and has been toying with the idea of keeping a small flock of sheep for breeding and the occassional munching.

Fast forward several weeks and having perused several (boring?) pig keeping articles and a couple of decent ones we decided to take the plunge. Tim has sorted the paperwork which he largely had to do for his sheep anyway and between us we've spent hours building a stock fence with correctly spaced barbed wire to prevent offending piggies from disappearing too early. Everything we've heard about keeping pigs is that their size and nature will ensure that they flatten any poorly made defences and take to the hills whether intentionally or by absent mindedly knocking down the fence.

We've found a local breeder with four boy piggies ready to go soon (Welsh Lop crossed with Gloucestershire Old Spot) having been weaned and they are due to arrive any day!

Above, an arc made from some ply, timber and several reclaimed bits of corrugated iron. Our initial plan followed something we'd read on the web but in practise we thought this too small so we added fifty percent to the size.

 A few mornings in the field building a stock fence that will hopefully keep the piggies at home.

Bee updates...

Here is a photo of our two new queens (with an entourage).

Quite odd to see them arrive in a small envelope with 'LIVE BEES' printed all over it by a (probably) slightly nervous postman :-)

Queen cages went in well and we followed some good advice, everything seemed to go textbook. Both queens have been accepted by the colonies and todays inspection shows they have started laying.

On the down side we finally took a peek in the green hive, the first nuc we tried splitting off and letting it rear a queen for itself. Two emergency queen cells have obviously been formed and well looked after by their sisters. One was uncapped as is usual and the other had a hole in its side which we assume means the first uncapped queen bored into the second cell to finish off its rival.
So far so good but unfortnately the queen seems to have flown for mating but never returned. Eaten? Stamped on? Who knows!

This nuc has been checked a couple of times and definately no queen so we have combined the remaining bees to the second nuc in the yellow hive to help boost numbers. This seems to have gone well.

We are therefore now a three colony family - not too bad.

Bee issues...

Currently:

- Blue hive back to strength from splitting off a nuc.
- Pink hive was showing signs of chalk brood last inspection, this inspection however shows a massive increase in the problem over seven days.
- Green hive, still doing its thing and cooking its queens!

We've decided two important and challenging (risky?) decisions.

First we are going to re-queen the pink hive to hopefully end the significant chalk brood issue.

Secondly we are going to split a second nuc from the blue hive to create a colony in yellow but because we need to re-queen pink we've decided to buy two mated queens by post and introduce one to pink and the second to the nuc that we'll start in yellow.

There are two reasons for this decision, one being the benefit of speed in getting mated, laying queens in place in each colony and two, we are new to beekeeping and its another thing to try.

We'll see how it goes...

Blue hive developments and more...

So big times for our bees...

Blue colony had the nuc split off for the green hive which seemed to go well and two emergency queen cells were produced pretty quickly - looking good so far...

What to do with the blue hive?

Big decisions to be made at the bee garden!

Our blue hive is massively strong (brood and a half) and while not showing any particular signs of swarming we are considering whether to play about with it. We initially planned to try splitting our two original hives (blue and pink) this season to make two new colonies (yellow and green) but pink is probably not quite ready.

Our plan therefore is instead of artificially swarming blue we'll bang two supers on to give them plenty of space and hopefully prevent swarming and split off a nuc. By removing a few frames instead of roughly half the bees this way we'll hopefully let the blue colony jump back to size a bit quicker and get the benefit of seeing emergency queen cells produced in the nuc.

If the blue hive does bounce back quickly we'd then have the opportunity to split off a second nuc to start our yellow hive off!