Dyeing an armchair cover

This dear old chair was adopted after a family friend moved to France.

 

It is a very nice shape, I think anyway, but looked a pretty shabby. Getting it reupholstered would cost hundreds, so we got a cover made out of tough off-white calico.

 

I can't really stand white things, and they can't stand me either, so the plan was always to dye it a different colour. I settled on green.

I played about with different Dylon greens. Tropical Green was a bit too headachey bright but I didn't want something as dark as a full-on Dark Green or as dingey as Olive Green. 

Below are the swatches where I used different ratios of Olive and Tropical Green.

50:50; 75%Tropical:25%Olive; 83%Tropical:17%Olive, 100% Tropical Green.

I plumped for 75:25 and bought the hand dyes. The cover weighed over a kilo so I bought 4 packets.

  

I realised too late one of my rubber gloves had a hole in it...I had a green hand for days, literally. Wear gloves! 

Result:

 

The colour it was in the dyeing bucket was kind of the colour I wanted, and it washed out and dried a fair bit lighter. After a couple of weeks walking past it I decided to go in again and this time, use the machine dyes, as I was annoyed that even after following the instructions and breaking my back turning and squishing and mixing it for a full 15 minutes, I still got a big blodge of blue dye on one arm. I reckoned using the machine dye would give a more even finish.

This time I tracked down a packet of Dylon's Amazon Green, which seems to have been discontinued. I used that and a packet of Tropical Green again. Each pack can do 600g worth of fabric for the full shade of colour, so I thought this would give it a good dose, especially as it the cover was green already.

 Boy was I right!

 

That's more like it!

Next I plan to bleach print it. I just need to design and make the stamp/stencil.

Old house

Lentil and Mushroom Burgers with Halloumi

Ohhh yes. Thank you Sarah from My New Roots, a source of constant inspiration.

 

 

I altered this recipe - I used Portobello mushrooms instead of wild mushrooms, and I didn't have any olives so just omitted them and hoped. Plus I added grilled halloumi and some caramelised onion chutney, as I had a mushroom burger with those at a gastropub recently and it was really good.

Seriously seriously good food.



Colourful vegetables

Does it fade, this mild but genuine shock and amazement, when you've grown vegetables for many years?

 

Do you cease to look wondrously at the beautiful things that appear amongst the plants you put in the ground, that you can just take, like a child who doesn't understand how the world works?



I intend to find out.

Bonkers.

Blackcurrant Frangipane Tart

 
My mum is amazing! I came home to this - blackcurrant frangipane tart. She even did gluten free pastry.

It looks pretty and summery and it tastes like pure comfort food.

 
Recipe:

• Pastry - see Coconut Cream Pie recipe 
• 125g blackcurrants, washed, topped and tailed
•  1 egg
• 1 egg white
•  170g sugar
• 100g ground almonds
• 70g butter, room temperature
• A pinch of salt
• 170ml milk

1. Oven to 190°C. Butter a 24cm (9½in) round ovenproof dish.

2. Make the pastry case.

3. Blind bake it.

4. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy

5. Add the almonds, egg and egg white and mix

6. Stick mixture into the pastry case

7. Scatter blackcurrants on top

8. Bake for 40 minutes until golden and firm.

It is divine with some sort of creamy yoghurt, Rachel's Gooseberry Yoghurt was perfect.

Yes that is another home-grown runner bean salad...

Purple Pepper

I have been looking forward to this moment since February, when I sowed many many seeds into trays of compost and tended to them on all the windowsills all over the house. Amongst other things, I was attempting to grow multi-coloured peppers, some of which promised to be purple! Who knew you could do that?!

 

And today, in that strange way large, seemingly conspicuous vegetables often somehow tend to do, e.g. sudden marrows, my first purple pepper just appeared from nowhere!

 

 

Except...it's black?

Are they meant to be black?!

Now it's gone er...whatever colour it is, I don't know how to tell when it's ripe. Is that it? Should I let it get bigger? I shall find out.

Runner Bean Salad

I picked my first little bunch of beans today!

 

And I knew just the sort of thing I wanted to do with them....and it turned out really tasty, so here's the recipe.

Ingredients (serves two):

Pesto ingredients:
handful of fresh basil
half a handful of pine nuts
half a clove of garlic
teensy bit of fresh chilli
olive oil
sea salt
wholegrain mustard (optional)

Main stuff:
some runner beans
some uber-tasty little tomatoes
leaves if you want them: lettuce, rocket, etc
half a handful of pine nuts

 
First, make the pesto: I used a pestle and mortar because it was far too small a quantity to put in the blender.
1. chop up the basil leaves finely
2. chop up the garlic and the little bit of chilli finely
3. mash up the pine nuts with a bit of olive oil...

 
4. Mash the whole lot together with some sea salt...

 
5. Chop the beans up a bit and blanch them in boiling water for 4 minutes - you want them to still have a crunch.

6. Strain and let cool for 5 - 10 minutes. Meanwhile dry fry the pine nuts to very very lightly toast them.

7. Mix some or all of the pesto into the beans, and mix the halved tomatoes in too.

8. Leaves, beans and tomatoes, pine nuts. Easy.

It is exciting, growing vegetables.

  Yellow courgettes

 

 

  Tomatoes - they taste INSANELY good, had my first one yesterday

 

  Spaghetti squash, just starting to make off in every creeper direction

My Favourite Salad

My lettuces were ready for eating (i.e. about to get out of control, we're not talking baby leaf) today, so it was definitely salad for dinner. This is my favourite salad, which I'll be honest, takes a long time if you make a decent amount of it because of all the sweating and roasting of vegetables, but you could whip it up in 40 minutes if you made a small, unsweated batch.

 

 



 

Ingredients:

 

1 aubergine

2 red peppers

1 courgette

some sort of earnest lentil

feta cheese

fresh mint

red onion

fresh salad leaves

tomatoes (if you like)

 

1. Sweat the aubergine and courgette by chopping them into chunks, sticking them in a colander and pouring tons of salt on them, and leaving them in the sink for 30 minutes.

 

 

2. Meanwhile, roast the red pepper chunks in a bit of olive oil at 200C if you're limited with oven space. Should take about 30 minutes.

 

3. Rinse the salt off the other veggies, and pat and squeeze them dry with embarrassing amounts of paper towel. Roast them for 30 minutes as above.

 

4. Meanwhile, cook your lentils. I use green speckly ones and they usually take about 35 minutes. Apparently you shouldn't boil them like hell, just simmer.

 

5. Leave the lentils to cool or even run some cold water through them if you're eating soon.

 

6. Chop up some feta, some red onion and some mint and bung everything together.

 

7. Eat with lots of fresh leaves. I chopped up some tomatoes and spread a bit of my homemade (with hazelnuts this time!) pesto on them as they were a bit boring.

I usually put the lentilly salad on the bed of leaves but my bowl overflowed...

Elderflower Champagne

It's that lovely time of year again, the elder trees are all suddenly going for it, blooming away. I am taking advantage of this. Off I went to collect the elderflowers in my new basket. The recipe says 25 heads of elderflower, which sounds like loads, but it only takes about 5 minutes to collect.

Recipe for 10 litres:

·       6.7 litres hot water

·       1.170kg sugar

·       Juice and zest of 7 lemons (I just peeled the rind off them, we'll see if it works)

·       3 tbsp white wine vinegar

·       25 heads of elderflower

1. Put the hot water and sugar into a large container (a spotlessly clean bucket is good) and stir until the sugar dissolves, then top up with cold water so you have 6 litres of liquid in total.

2. Add the lemon juice and zest, the vinegar and the flower heads and stir gently.

 

3. Cover with clean muslin and leave to ferment in a cool, airy place for a couple of days. Take a look at the brew at this point, and if it’s not becoming a little foamy and obviously beginning to ferment, add a pinch of yeast.

4. Leave the mixture to ferment, again covered with muslin, for a further four days. Strain the liquid through a sieve lined with muslin and decant into sterilised strong glass bottles with champagne stoppers (available from home-brewing suppliers) or Grolsch-style stoppers, or sterilized screw-top plastic bottles (a good deal of pressure can build up inside as the fermenting brew produces carbon dioxide, so strong bottles and seals are essential).

5. Seal and leave to ferment in the bottles for at least a week before serving, chilled. The champagne should keep in the bottles for several months. Store in a cool, dry place

Nettle and Dandelion Beer - Bottled

We bottled the nettle and dandelion beer!

We recycled old beer bottles and used a capping machine (sounds more sophisticated than it is, it's a bit like one of those big modern corkscrews with the two big arms).

 

Much to my amazement, it smelled very much like beer. We put a teaspoon of sugar in each bottle before filling and capping it, so that it will ferment a second time in the bottle, and get fizzy!

Broccoli Pasta Recipe à la Emmerr

 

Spaghetti
Broccoli
Philedelphia / equivalent
Slivered almonds (or just chop them yourself)
Cheddar cheese
Salt and pepper
 
1. Put pasta onto boil in salted water.
 
2. Halfway through pasta boilage, chuck broccoli florets into water with it.
 
3. Put almond slivers in a dry frying pan and heat to toast them. 
 
4. When spaghetti and broccoli are done, drain (hoik broccoli out if done before pasta).
 
5. Mix a dollop of Philedelphia in.

6. Add toasted almonds.

7. Finely grate some cheddar cheese over the top and grind some pepper over it too.

Vegetable of the Week: The King Oyster Mushroom

The King Oyster Mushroom is like the oyster mushroom's brother who has taken lots of steroids and now works as a bouncer.

I have to admit this is a bit of a sad speciment but he still tasted fantastic. I found a recipe for vegetarian bacon that was just king oyster mushroom sawn into planks, saturated with smoked paprika and salt and fried. Didn't have any smoked paprika so I used normal and it was tasty. But nothing like bacon.

I also tried grating them into ommelettes and sauces, which was very good too. In a subtle, grated way.

My First Sewing Project

...well, since the kite I made in year 6.

I made it with Famie, from the Burda 7494 pattern, in a cotton linen blend.

 
I've already been wearing it to WORK, yes that's right, I can work now.

Puddles the Cat

 

My mum is amazing!!

 

Mum: "He looks like he's been the victim of an oil disaster."

Morrison's Magical Fruit and Veg Section

I went to Morrison's the other day and was amazed. No, I am sadly not being sponsored. They'd done a refit and whilst 90% of it looked the same to me, the fruit and veg bit was ridiculous! New 'swamp coolers' breathed swirling marshy mists over central tables of immaculate produce, miniature lawns of herbs such as sage and mint were neatly but abundantly displayed. But the most striking thing was how much completely weird things they were stocking - prickly pears, spherical courgettes the size and shape of baseballs, dragon fruit, every kind of posh mushroom you could possibly hope to find in San Francisco....I was gobsmacked.

I can't be bothered to go and persuade a supermarket manager to let me take pictures of his territory, or have lots of shoppers stare at me while I do so, in fact, leaving the house is looking doubtful today. So instead I have searched the interweb for evidence and it turns out, it's not just Waterlooville where the aliens have landed. Here are some stolen pictures.

 

 

Love that there's a Wrexham.com.

 

I found this novelty interesting for several reasons. Firstly, I'd never heard of half the stuff, or at least seen it. Secondly, it's a recession, surely this is the worst time to breed dogs and/or open delicatessen vegetable sections? Thirdly, it's Morrisons.....not that I'm a snob but isn't Morrison's thing 'cheap and British'?

 

But as I wandered the brightly coloured aisles of exotic potential vitamins I started to get how it could work. I was actually quite excited by the new things. I wanted to buy one of everything and then google them when I got home to find out what virtuous exciting recipes I could make. I was getting inspired.

 

However, that would be excessive. Therefore, I am going to slowly work my way through the Morrison's Incredible Intergalactic Inglenook of Plant Produce, and post reviews.

 

So. Time for this week's

VEGETABLE OF THE WEEK

 

The Karela

 

Review: I chose this because it was up there with the weirdest-looking thing I could find. The helpful label on the veg table said 'Good in stir fries!'

 

I cut the end off and cut it up. The outside is firm and squeaky. The inside is soft and pithy. I fried it in butter along with some mushrooms.

 

It was AWFUL. It was SO BITTER! And chewy. Blergh. I've just googled it and it's called 'Bitter Melon.' It is sometimes used instead of hops in Chinese and Okinawan beers.

 

I quite like the surprise of eat first, google after. I think I will continue this format.

 

Stay tuned for the next VEGETABLE OF THE WEEK.

 

Chicken-Related Newsflash

MFC DIVES INTO POND



Eye witness reports suggest that My Favourite Chicken, or MFC, ran at a high speed into the pond and became completely submerged, a highly unusual behaviour for non-aquatic poultry. 'It just ran and went straight under the water,' said Eco Luke, 84. 'At first, I thought it was a duck.' This would have been logical apart from the sinking. Co-witness Andy Gill later confirmed what were believed to be his wild claims. When questioned on the hen's reaction to the event, Luke said, 'It didn't like it very much.'

MFC, the alleged swimmer, declined to comment on the event.

 

Experts have, however, called into question the quality on the witnesses' reports. It has later come to light that MFC was not wet when identified from a line-up later that afternoon. A tip-off has been provided by someone known only as Lion, outlining the dubiousness of the witnesses' reliability. This includes a quote from Eco Luke saying 'Chickens all look the same to me,' and a theory that both Eco and Gill could be attempting to discredit MFC's reputation, to result in more cheesecake being shared with them and less with the hen.

Chikins

Osama Bin Chicken (OSB) and My Favourite Chicken (MFC.      ...sounds disturbingly like a fast food chain)

 

 

MFC's offspring looking outraged that Sapphire stole her corn cob

 

Small Grey Hen, OBC, a white cockerel, MFC

 

Big Grey Hen and chick