We spent the best part of our two-week holiday in England based in Eastbourne, at the eastern end of the South Downs Way. The topography of the area is wonderful and the chalk downs of the South Downs Way make for an amazing, windswept landscape.

Because my husband grew up in the area, he knows it intimately, and he had things on his list that he wanted to show us. Dew ponds were on the list, and we spent a lovely time exploring one just outside of Eastbourne near Beachy Head lighthouse.

Dew ponds were first used in England in the fourteenth century I believe, and were intended to provide watering holes for livestock. On the South Downs, in particular, the chalk ground makes it very difficult to collect rain, as the chalk is very porous and absorbs water, and so clay-lined dew ponds were essential for providing a steady source of water for sheep.

Naturally, dew ponds are a great haven for wildlife in general, and create wonderful spots where frogs, dragonflies and other small creatures can exist. Soulsby Farm recently published a post on How to build a rain garden, which ties in extremely nicely with the focus of water conservation and dew ponds. I recommend you go have a read.

My husband grew up in Eastbourne on England’s south coast (just east of Brighton, if you know it), so this was our base for our two weeks in the UK. We also took four days to do London (where we used to live and our first son was born), but I deliberately left my camera at home on those days.

Posts to come from this trip will focus on dew ponds and allotments, but for now, the above gallery is a bit of a taste from our time exploring the South Downs Way and other spots in and around Eastbourne.

Going into this weekend I knew that my youngest son needed new soccer cleats for Monday. Our local thrift shop, which operates for the benefit of local charities, is a great resource for both ice skates and soccer cleats. Used ice skates are usually three dollars a pair, regardless of condition; the same goes for cleats. It’s a great deal for parents, creating a place to send outgrown pairs and to acquire new ones for the season. Saturday happened to be the store’s 38th anniversary and on its birthday every item in the store is always reduced to the same value in cents just for the day; so the previously loved cleats above rang in at 38 cents! I upped that a bit as all proceeds to go to charity.

We had cycled into town that morning to first pick up the cleats and then visit our weekend farmers’ market, after which we had a late breakfast at the coffee shop. (Our friends at the farmers’ market have some hens for us, which is a whole other string of posts.) Next stop was our local bike shop, a wonderful place run by a local fellow in retirement; it’s clearly a labour of love and not necessarily a big money maker (though it could be, as this is one bike-loving town). We chatted a bit, bought a rearview mirror for my bike (much needed), and discussed how we might help with the repainting of a garage space recently acquired for all of the used bikes that the shop owner collects for shipment to Haiti. Having a peak at some of the other used stock on hand, my husband spied the old Norco bike trailer, pictured above. It was exactly what we’ve been needing to haul things around on our land, either pulled by mountain bike or hand-wheeled (as it has great balance and is as easy to push as it is to pull). Anything sold from second-hand stock (which is generally donated to the store anyway), the owner designates for the Haiti Bike fund, so we agreed that forty dollars seemed reasonable for the trailer and gladly added that to the pot.

The trailer has clearly had more than one life, evidenced by the makeshift half-cover, which is exactly as we will plan to use it.

The last find didn’t cost a penny, but was really special. We seem to find wonderful cast-offs when we’re on our bikes; we even found our television this way (who throws out a perfectly useable tube tv?). Our last errand on Saturday morning was to nip over to the supermarket for a few things. Our older son was in the lead by about a block, and as we caught up to him he was holding a model ship in his hands (the photo here shows our younger son holding the boat in the grass at home).

This boy has a passion for model-making and loves boats; he looked so excited by it. He explained that it was just sitting on the front lawn by the fire hydrant, which certainly made it sound like it was being offered, but just to be sure we suggested he knock on the front door of the house. The door was quickly answered by an elderly man who said he was absolutely welcome to it, and that was that, or so we thought. Moments later, the man’s wife came padding down the front walk and over to us on our bikes. She explained that the boat, a model of the old river barges used on the River Thames in London, had been her son’s and that he had died. ‘It’s taken me thirteen years to work up to giving that boat away’ she said – she’d left the boat on the front lawn hoping someone who wanted it would come along.

It felt pretty good being able to tell her that our son was born in London and that we’d just returned from a visit to England and had enjoyed looking at the boats on the Thames when we took a clipper upriver one day. It felt even better to be able to reassure her that fixing up the boat (which needs some repairs and TLC) would be a high priority for our son. It also seemed oddly fitting that our son recently turned 14 and that seems to correspond with the timeframe in which this lady lost her son. It was a brief, but bittersweet conversation, and we’ve since agreed that our son will write a note to her with some details about himself, where our family lives, and how he’ll fix up the boat, and put it in her mailbox. Sometimes second-hand finds have so much more to them than we can even imagine.

We’re just back after a rare two-week family holiday and are still getting to grips with the wildness that sprang up outside in our absence. It’s funny how the grass and weeds made it look as though we’d been away for two months, but the vegetable beds looked much less advanced. It was a crazy time of year to be away, having just put plants and new trees in the ground and prepped more seed block trays, but there you go.

Our youngest was the keener who ran almost immediately down to the fields and to check out the greenhouse; he came back with the report that my winter kale (plants that I originally seeded indoors this past winter) was extremely happy and ready for harvesting. As I’m the one who seems to have come back from holiday feeling sick (fortunately this only came up on the way home), I gratefully agreed that he could go back to the greenhouse with scissors and a basket to harvest some of the kale.

I still haven’t done a proper shop since coming home – just eggs, milk, butter and bread (that’s right, my husband hasn’t baked a loaf in the 36 hours since we got home!) – but it didn’t take me long to know that a frittata would be the way to go for supper thanks to having fresh kale from the garden. Frittatas are, in my view, one of the most wonderfully versatile formats for cooking and a great framework for meals that are both healthful and delicious. They are a frequent work-week lunch as we are fortunate enough to work from home, and often appear at suppertime, especially during the harvest months when it’s easy to pair a slice with some greens from the garden and a fresh tomato or two right off the vine.

Most of my frittatas begin with chopped onion (I wish I’d had red onion last night, as the colour would have been beautiful with the kale, but I made up for that with dried cranberries) and some garlic in a pan. I’m a serial burner of garlic, but it never comes to too much harm in my slightly too-hot pan.

Unlike other leafy greens such as spinach and chard, kale leaves are quite tough, and so they go into the pan immediately on the heels of the onion.

If you search the internet for kale frittata recipes, you’ll find an awful lot making use of purple potatoes. This is a great pairing, but I was looking to do something less stodgy and was also without any purple potatoes. I wanted a bit of colour and something nice to contrast the kale, and decided that a combination of dried currants and cranberries would do. I’ve used this combination before with good success and happen to love the sweet flavourful bursts from dried fruit. I also sprinkled a few red pepper flakes in at this stage (a favourite of mine for a tiny bit of unexpected heat).

I almost always add cheese of some kind to a frittata and feta cheese would have been my first pick at this point, but I had to go with parmesan, which I had half a block of in the fridge. After breaking the eggs into a bowl I blended in my salt and pepper. As I was going with parmesan, I also made the uncharacteristic decision of adding in a small handful of fresh basil leaves from the pot on my windowsill.

A slow cook over low heat once the eggs are added, and 90 seconds under the grill to finish and gently brown the top are all that’s needed.

Kale frittata with dried cranberries and currants
2 tbs olive oil
1 onion, diced (yellow or purple)
2 cloves of garlic, minced
5-6 large leaves of curly or other kale, chopped
2 tbs dried currants
2 tbs dried cranberries
2/3 cup parmesan cheese, grated
8 eggs
Salt and pepper to taste
Pinch of red pepper flakes

Method:

Step 1 – heat olive oil in a heavy saute pan and chop onion and mince garlic; add to pan once warmed

Step 2 – hand shred or chop kale and add to pan shortly after onions and garlic; I usually end up adding a bit of water to the pan to allow the kale to cook a little longer before the next steps

Step 3 – add red pepper flakes, dried fruit to pan; lower the heat to just above ‘low’

Step 4 – break eggs into a bowl and quickly beat with a fork, adding freshly grated parmesan and additional seasonings (in this case, basil, salt and pepper); mix everything together

Step 5 – pour egg and cheese mixture into the pan and stir gently so that vegetable mixture blends well with egg mixture; preheat grill

Step 6 – cook over low heat on the stove top until the frittata is setting well and just the top remains liquid

Step 7 – slip the pan under your grill for about 90 seconds, or until the top of the frittata is lightly browned

Step 8 – allow the pan to cool for a few minutes before slicing and serving

When my chard is ready it will be a frequent main player in my frittatas, as will sweet peppers and leeks. I love to use chorizo sausage as an accent, and have fun playing with different cheeses and companion flavours in general. If you have a favourite frittata combination or suggestion, I’d love to hear it.

Reblogged from my sister's pantry:

Little Sis and I are having such fun writing this blog!  It truly adds to the fun when we think someone is enjoying our blog or is learning something from little ol’ us.  We certainly have learned a lot from our fellow bloggers.  So as our friend Anna at oceannah has nominated us for a Liebster award, we would like to thank her…

Read more… 417 more words

I'm really chuffed to have been noted by the ladies over at My Sister's Pantry in their selection of blogs to highlight. Do check out My Sister's Pantry - great recipes, strong opinions and fantastic food for thought on what we eat.

I’ve written a lot here about how we prefer handmade and hand-operated tools and things to their modern counterparts. Preparing our beds for spring planting is no exception. This lovely old hand plough was found here on our land after we purchased it.

With the last frost apparently behind us and warmer temperatures something we can rely on, we quickly prepped and planted an enlarged version of the bed directly behind our home today. It was a full eight-hour day, but boy it felt good. I’m too tired to write it up here, but maybe tomorrow I will.

In case you are wondering, our son did volunteer for the job.

I’m not in the habit of true confessions, but I can and will confess to a major culinary crush on England’s Nigel Slater. Everything that man dreams up, I want to cook or bake. And his words? I can just read them again and again. I don’t know, I just feel in sync with the man. Over the years, he went (like me) from being someone very taken with comfort foods and simple but delectable flavour combinations, to someone who increasingly embraced healthy and local food choices, with an increasing emphasis on in-season produce, etc. Nigel’s journey to becoming a locavore has mirrored my own, or so I like to think.

Probably my favourite cookbook of Nigel Slater’s is The Kitchen Diaries (it’s his favourite too!), although I’m still thrilling to new discoveries in the gorgeous two-volume Tender that my dearest friend Jocy gave me two Christmases ago…it’s hard to choose.

Anyway, probably one of my most favourite recipes of all time by Nigel is pork chops in mustard sauce, which is a funny choice for me, as pork chops were kind of a later-in-life discovery and not a natural go-to food for me. Bacon? Sure! But pork chops, not so much. This recipe changed all that. It starts with a bit of butter and some olive oil gently melting in a pan (that’s our electric stove, I must confess, as the weather now is too warm for the Ironheart – the good news is that we’re now past the threat of frost and can move our seedlings outside).

Having already salted and peppered the chops…

…they are added to the pan for browning:

Once the chops have been nicely browned, I remove them to a warm plate while I do the next steps. Nigel recommends cooking the chops in the pan at this point, until no longer pink when cut into, but here I do deviate from my mentor’s guidance (I feel terrible, I know). I prefer to add the chops back in once I’ve got the sauce ready, and to continue cooking them in the pan as I reduce the sauce. Hate me if you will, but it just feels better to me.

So, it’s time to pour in a glass of white wine to deglaze the pan and stir up all those gorgeous crunchy bits from the browning phase for the chops, and then add the cream and the mustard.

Once the sauce is well blended, I put my chops back in the pan and keep the moderate heat going.

I like to keep it all on the heat, gently stirring as needed, until the chops are done and the sauce has become thicker and granular, like this:

Last night was truly comfort night. I served the finished chops and sauce with boiled new potatoes (a classic Nigel pairing for this dish and others). Nothing else. In the summer months I’d normally include a lovely generous bunch of lettuce leaves from the garden (with a very simple oily vinaigrette), also something I know Nigel would like, but without fresh lettuces to harvest and no willpower to conjure up an appropriate side-dish, I called it done. Nigel would have thoroughly approved, I feel sure, as I know he has his own comfort-driven suppers when vegetables just don’t get a look-in.

To cap it all off, my older son, the baker, was in baking mood and made a batch of his favourite chocolate oat brownies which – boy after my heart – he has modified to make his own. He and I rounded out our meal with a brownie each (and a glass of milk which the dear boy deemed essential and delivered to me where I sat on the sofa!), while my husband finished off the new potatoes.

Pork chops in mustard sauce (from The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater)
Pork spare rib or chump chops – 2 large, about 1/2 inch thick
2 tbsp butter
1.25 tbsp olive oil
2 large cloves garlic
Glass of white wine
2/3 cup cream
1 generous tbsp grain mustard
1 generous tbsp smooth Dijon mustard
8 cornichons or half as many larger gherkins (I did not include these last night)

Rub the chops all over with salt and pepper. Put the butter and oil in a shallow pan set over a moderate to high heat and, when they start to froth a little, add the flattened garlic and the seasoned chops. Leave to brown, then turn and brown the other side. Lower the heat and continue cooking, turning once, until the chops are no longer pink when cut into.

Lift out the chops, transfer to a warm serving dish and keep warm. Pour off most of the oil from the pan, leaving the sediment behind, then turn up the heat and pour in the wine. Let it boil for a minute or so, scraping at the sticky sediment in the pan and letting it dissolve. Pour in the cream, swirl the pan about a bit, then leave it to bubble up a little before adding the mustard and the chopped cornichons (or gherkins).

Taste for seasoning; you may need a little salt and possibly black pepper. The sauce should be piquant and creamy. If you want, you can finish the sauce with a few drops of liqour from the cornichon jar to sharpen it up. Pour the sauce over the chops and serve.

Enough for 2 with mashed or unbuttered new potatoes.

My husband has made it clear that breakfast muffins and treats at our house feature chocolate or chocolate chips way too often; my boys are 14 and 9, and I can’t deny the truth of this perspective. When I remember to look after the grown-ups a bit more, we both love a healthy muffin full of fruit and nuts. Which is where this recipe comes in.

It’s the kind of recipe that started out life in a cookbook, evolved into a recipe passed along to me by a friend who’d made a couple of changes of their own along the way, and then changed again once it got it my hands (a fair amount). The resulting recipe is berry burst oat and spelt muffins.

The recipe begins with soaking the large flake oats in milk for about 10 minutes or so.

My favourite stage is when it comes time to add in the good stuff – I think this recipe lends itself to a lot of different combinations at this stage, but we tend to use (frozen for much of the year) raspberries, blueberries, cranberries and chopped pecans. You could easily substitute dried fruit (as the original version of the recipe uses) such as apricots, raisins, dried apple, etc. or add other fresh or frozen fruit, such as strawberries or rhubarb.

Berry burst oat and spelt muffins

1 cup large flake oats
1 cup milk or buttermilk (I use 2% organic milk)
1 cup spelt flour
4 tbs natural bran
1 tsp cinnamon
1 heaping tsp baking powder
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/4 cup blueberries
1/3 cup raspberries
1/3 cup cranberries
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup sunflower oil
1 egg

Method:

Preheat oven to 375 F. Makes 12 muffins.

Step 1 - let oaks soak in milk in a mixing bowl

Step 2 - add dry ingredients: flour, bran, cinnamon, baking powder and incorporate

Step 3 – beat egg and add, along with sugar and sunflower oil; mix batter gently

Step 4 - add fruit / nut ingredients (in my case raspberries, cranberries, blueberries and pecans) and stir just until incorporated

Step 5 – pour into prepared muffin tin and bake for about 20 minutes at 375 degrees fahrenheit (or until tops are golden brown)

These muffins are so good and so satisfying; they are full of such good things, that it’s hard not to feel fairly virtuous about eating them. Yes, there is that brown sugar, but otherwise, they are pretty squeaky clean. I do prefer sunflower oil to canola, which I’ve heard some not very good things about, and am interested to know what heart healthy fats others prefer.

We love these at breakfast, tea time and for snacks. Now, if only my children would eat them…

We’re big readers and we try to read together as a family as much as we can. This isn’t always easy – good weather, busy schedules, projects on our land, can all conspire to make it difficult to do this every day (not to mention the other books that we all have on the go). We simply don’t manage it every day. But we do read a family book together as often as we can, and have weekend or several-nights-in-a-row binges when we make up for not reading our shared book every day.

I summarized our favourite reads together to date nearly 18 months ago, in The very best family books. Not long after that I added another must-have title for our desert island book list in Another family book we can’t live without. I’ve had cause to revisit these posts in recent weeks and months and realize it’s time that I updated our family’s list. (Our children are 14 and nearly 9, both boys.)

Here’s the original list, reprinted and with some additional comments

Uncle and Uncle Cleans Up by J.P. Martin – wonderful, irreverant stories written by an English clergyman in the middle of the 20th century. Martin wrote six books about the pompous but generous elephant named Uncle, but only these two have been reprinted by New York Review Books (thank goodness!). We keep hoping the other four will follow; recent family conversations about these books have focused on whether we can get involved in reprinting them ourselves and what the cost of secondhand versions of those four titles fetch (hundreds of dollars, in case you’re wondering)

The 21 Balloons – a wonderfully strange story by William Pène du Bois that won the Newbery Medal in the US in 1948. In it, a retired schoolteacher sets out to cross the globe in a hot air balloon and crash lands near the volcanic island of Krakatoa, discovering that it’s actually home to 20 families who share the wealth of a secret diamond mine. The island is in the throes of getting ready to blow in the story and the people on the island go about their daily lives with incredible seismic activity that causes the landscape to visibly roll and buckle under their feet. As my nearly nine-year old would say: cuckoo!

Dominic – a near perfect story of the wanderings of a young dog that mixes exciting physical action and bravery with deep philosophical pondering, this novel by William Steig is our favourite of his many wonderful works (Abel’s Island is a close second)

The Black Joke – Farley Mowat’s gritty and engaging story of adventure on the seas would win if we had to choose, but we’d also prefer to be allowed to take Owls in the Family, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be and the Boat Who Wouldn’t Float. Effortlessly funny, exciting and real, these Canadian tales are what good stories should be. More recently we’ve read Lost in the Barrens (1956) and The Curse of the Viking Grave (1966), which focus on the adventures / trials / coming of age of two young men, one white the other Cree, in Canada’s north; these are also terrific reads with some interesting historical details and lots of good talking points

Little House in the Big Woods – the whole series of pioneering life by Laura Ingalls Wilder is strong, but none of the later books pack the perfect punch of the very first one. This wonderful miniature of pioneering life, told through the seasons, is faultless and so easy to get caught up in. Although we haven’t read the books as a family for some time now (too many others to discover!), we regularly talk about “Pa” and “Ma” and “Laura” as though they are family members (well, I suppose it’s really me who does that…). One of my favourite sayings of Pa Ingalls’ is “A miss is as good as a mile”, which I had cause to say just yesterday to my youngest when he had tearfully confessed to nearly vacuuming up one of his precious gerbils.

The Moomins – Finland’s Tove Jansson spun some pretty surreal and affecting stories with her comic strips and novels about the Moomin family. Where to begin? Our family just “gets” these stories and can’t get enough; we can’t be the only ones as the books were made into a tv series and now there are movies (movies!). One of my fondest recollections is of reading a chapter of Moominsummer Madness each day when we were on holiday in the Maritimes in 2009

The Black Stallion and The Black Stallion Returns – Walter Farley’s first two novels about Alec Ramsay and his horse were huge hits in our house, although our youngest demanded a rewrite of the final pages of the second book (if you’ve read it, you’ll know why). I actually had to tape it into the book after typing up the revised ending late one night; my apologies to Mr. Farley. Our older son is particularly offended by the cinematic adaptation of the second book; he sat through the first 30 minutes saying “that’s so cheap” and “that’s not how it happened!”. The film versions of both books change some pretty big “details”, but it’s the movie of book two that really sticks in my son’s craw!

The Mouse and His Child – I’ve already written on this blog about how entranced our family was by an audiobook of this epic and sprawling novel by Russell Hoban. In some ways, I can’t imagine experiencing this book without the vocal genius of William Dufris, so if push comes to shove, I’d say listen to it rather than read it, if you can. It does tend to go on a bit at the end (as in, “When is this going to end? I thought it already had!”), but that’s actually a very minor irritation with an otherwise brilliant story full of colourful characters and set pieces. And a confession: until I found this audio book in our library earlier this year, I had no idea that Russell Hoban had written anything longer than Bread and Jam for Frances and other such delightful titles. That was an eye opener!

Our additions to this list now include

Watership Down by Richard Adams – this is one of those novels that truly gripped the four of us; we didn’t have a lot of trouble reading this book daily, in part because we read it in the cold months when we’re indoors a lot more, but largely because it was a very compulsive read. This imagining of the life of a rabbit warren and the individual rabbits who break out before it is destroyed by a modern housing development and their subsequent journey is full of rich detail and is beautifully told.

Tolkien’s The Hobbit – this title was simply forgotten when I first prepared our list in late 2010; at this point we’d already read it twice as a family, and we’ll no doubt read it again before too long. This classic tale of hobbits going up against the fearsome Smaug is simply full of charm, adventure and fascinating detours, and is a great introduction to Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Like millions of others, we’re very excited that Peter Jackson’s film version is in the works!

Swallows & Amazons, Winter Holiday, both by Walter Ransome – these very British books are time capsules of a particular era, but they also capture wonderfully well what childhood is at its best and most free, full of ongoing games, constructed adventures and references to adults that clearly mark them out as ‘other’. Our children are very comfortable in a more British world, even one that no longer exists in time, because of their father and the fact that ‘British-isms’ pervade our household. Even I contribute, as having worked and had my first child in England, ‘nappies’ became a firm part of my lexicon instead of diapers, and that’s just one example.

A special mention
There is one series of books that we’ve missed out on the chance to read as a family, largely because I unthinkingly started the first book with my youngest and after that the boat had left the dock. My husband joined us early on, however, so it’s become a ‘mum/dad/youngest son’ book, instead of a true family book, and that’s nice too. I’m referring to the five-book series The Borrowers by Mary Norton about the little people who live under the floors, behind the walls and in other parts of human habitation, ‘borrowing’ food and small household items for their living. The adventures of Pod, Homily and their daughter Arriety are so engagingly written and truly at their best when the characters speak for themselves. The conversations are so real and achingly funny at times, with harrassed and anxious Homily (the mother), calm and unflappable Pod (the father, nearly a Yorkshireman in his preference for fewer words: “Have done, that’s enough” he says to his wife!), and adventure-hungry Arriety. The only quibble with the books is that they tend to feature preambles to the main action which bore our younger son; they concern an elderly woman and a young girl who travel back to the scene of the woman’s childhood and they provide context for why anyone knows of the little people called the borrowers, but these scenes just don’t capture our son’s attention enough. A small detail, however, as the main story with the characters that he cares about take up most of the books.

So besotted with The Borrowers is our son that he has taken to occasionally leaving them bits of food or little items he thinks they may need, along with handwritten notes. Recently he decided that they probably need his dollhouse furniture more than he does, and so he’s been leaving curbside collections for them! I can’t think of better proof that a story has successfully woven its spell than this: