Dogs, Chickens and Vintage China

And that's how easy it is! Not First create your sourdough starter, what you do is, one day at work you decide that you want to bake sourdough bread so you look it up on the interweb and ring your daughter up and ask her to put 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of warm water in a loose lidded container. This takes roughly half an hour to get across to said daughter! You then forget about it for a day, and notice something odd in a airtight tupperware container. Doh. Move the resulting mess into a kilner jar without a seal. Add another 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water. Add the same the next day, and the next. Get bored and use some of it to make bread,  very flat bread. Search around on the web and decide to buy some organic rye flour and add that. Come down the next morning to a sourdough explosion in the kitchen, The starter had gone mad and climbed out of the kilner jar and tried to get into the fridge, no literally, it had made it through the door seal...

Bloody Foxes. First Roger the cockerel disappeared under suspicious circumstances, all that was left was some feathers floating around in the stream. The next day I get a call from Helen, all the chickens have gone and the garden is full of feathers. Seven chickens in one day. A neighbour said that at midday he was walking through the village and saw a fox disappearing around the side of a house with something white in his mouth! Ah well, we shall get some more after Glassonbury where chickens aren't really needed

I really  needed to get back to some healthy cooking. Over the last week we've had fish and chips, roast beef and a whole variety of really nice food that is no good for the diet at all. I had the kale in the fridge because last weekend we had Cath and Lyndon round for a meal on the Sunday and I had gone in to Alvis's farm shop on the A38 to get a couple of aubergines and came out with 2 aubergines, a truly massive head of curly kale, 2 scotch eggs, some chillis stuffed with feta, a piece of ginger, a loaf of bread and a large jar of pickled onions. Honestly all I needed was aubergines. Well as it turned out I'd made far too much food, I didn't even use the aubergines which I had gone in for in the first place. I think we've managed 3 meals with kale this week. Chana dal with kale and mushrooms Slow roast beef with mustard seed and nigella seed crust, with Leek and Kale Colcannon and onion gravy. OMG you have to try leek and kale colcannon it is amazing....

A couple of weeks ago I found myself at Bristol Biofuels with Helen, I've been running the Transit on biodiesel for about a year now since they moved up from Avonmouth to just around the corner from work. I will do almost anything to not fill the van up with normal diesel, I'm not an eco-warrior, I'm just too tight to pay the extra. We were going to the White Stuff on Queens Rd in Clifton. I just managed to go via Albert Rd in St Philips. Whilst the bloke was filling up the van with delicious cheap biofuel I noticed a large five litre bottle of olive oil on the side. "What's with the olive oil, is it just an example of veg oil?" "Nah, the boss has a share of an olive farm in Spain, we sell it" Result! I returned to the van with 5 litres of the best cold pressed extra virgin olive oil nestled in my sweaty palms. This means I have a surfeit of the golden nectar, alright green nectar but it doesn't scan as well. This recipe calls for ...

I ended up at Kin Yip Hon in Bristol the other day on my lunch break. I love it, its like stepping into a neighbourhood shop in Shanghai, Theres loads of really interesting things that I want to try, most of which I haven't got a clue how to use. I always end up coming out having spent far too much money. I wanted some kalonji (nigella seeds) and some coriander. Inevitably I got suckered into buying dried mushrooms, chillis, chilli sauce, mustard seeds, ginger, a gallon of vinegar, big bag of sesame seeds, pickled chillis and something marked up as green radish. God knows, they looked like those massive chillis you get at the kebab shop. I had seen a recipe online using nigella seeds and wanted to try them out. Of course when I came to try the recipe I couldn't find it anywhere so I made this one up and it turned out quite well, so I thought I'd post it. 1 Cup of red lentils 2 medium onions 2 carrots 2 cloves of garlic 3 chesnut mushrooms 1 leek 2 tomatoes ...

I'm afraid I haven't got any pictures but I'll try to add some when I do it again. Ingredients 3/4 cup chana dal 2.5 - 3 cups of water 1/4 teaspoon of turmeric 2 medium tomatoes roughly chopped 2 medium onions roughly chopped Coconut oil (or whatever) 4 or five mushrooms chopped into chunks 1 bag of baby spinach ( any spinach will do, or nettles if you fancy it) 2 black cardamom A sprinkle of crushed fennel seeds 3/4 teaspoon of ground ginger (use fresh if you've got it) 1 fresh chilli ( I used a birds eye chilli that was preserved in oil) 3/4 teaspoon of cumin seeds 3/4 teaspoon of ground coriander 1/2 Knorr veggie stock cube 3 - 4 cloves of finely chopped garlic ( I used half a whole garlic from the marvellous Lidl) Fresh coriander for garnish 1/4 teaspoon of turmeric Sprinkle of chinese five spice 1 cup of Basmati rice Preparing the Chana Dal The chana dal needs to be soaked for 1-2 hours before using, what I do is soak a large bowlful and...

I'm feeling a little fuzzy this morning, last night young Mr Newman turned up and we spent an evening in the yurt swapping stories and drinking homemade wine. Suffice it to say that if you meet up with Mark ask him to tell you the story about the German nightclub / rave in the early nineties. I had heard it before but I nearly wet myself, again, Helen however hadn't and I'm not sure she's recovered yet. I told Mark about the famous Butcombe prowler. During the week one of our neighbours had interrupted one of the unwashed in the process of trying to nick their ride-on lawnmower and an email had gone round the village telling people to lock up their garages and sheds and not leave stuff out. This evening when we had gone out to the yurt I had opened the door to be confronted by the lawnmower, now I don't normally keep the lawnmower in the yurt but I had been cutting the grass in the field with the hand mower last week as the ride-on has died and I'd left it i...