Coming to the end of a long (for me) period of time spent entirely at home. Let’s enjoy the kitchen while I’m still around. This stuff takes an hour to make and costs about three pounds for a year’s supply — and is the best goddamn piccalilli I’ve ever had.
Always a pleasing event of the year. Not many blackberries around yet, but they will come. Plums… for us will, I hope, be just as much in glut as they were two years ago. Believe me, if you live in Hebden Bridge and want cheap plums, give us a couple of weeks, we will be overflowing.
A day working at home. In need of inspiration (for many aspects of my life), let me document the next stage in the cultivation of our habañero plants, first seen on here back in August. A portion of the small but still potent fruit of these has now been strung up to dry; the other half has been turned into a lovely, fresh, spicy paste. Yum. Hopefully more will grow from the same plants, in time.
First day of a welcome five-day break from work. As a gift bought last year (months ago, in fact), Clare booked me on a baking course today run by the very impressive set up at Slattery’s in north Manchester (actually Bury). Got up very early, put in as hard a day’s work as I have in a long time, and came out of it with a lot of very nice cakes and ideas about how to repeat this production process. I tried to document it on camera as well without getting too much in the way or distracted from my own labours. Here Liz, one of my four fellow students, gets her roulade base out of the oven, to soon be filled with strawberries and cream. Yum.
This little beauty fruited while we were in London, and has several siblings on the way. How far they have come, on my bedroom window sill, since they appeared on this blog as babies at the end of August.
Proud parent as I am, I’m still going to eat it, you know. But not whole. Habaneros are very hot.
Hardly the best photo in the world I know, but it encapsulates the day — the annual pre-Christmas family gathering and Mum’s annual chocolate log. It’s my Dad’s hand helping itself to the end piece. Happy Winter Solstice, at least the days stop getting shorter and shorter from today.
It says a lot when you get a photo of my dinner, or rather dinner-to-be, as photo of the day. But on a grey, dull and uneventful December day, this was a splash of colour and form, at least.
She’s certainly going for it as if it might be. Like us, this lady was in the departure lounge of Fiumicino airport, but, I suspect, leaving her home country rather than returning to it.
Such is the name of this fast food joint, our one of choice partly because it is next to the Railway pub, but also because it does do good food, well made. I don’t cook every night you know.
As grated into this reflective metal bowl this afternoon, while I was making blackberry wine. The reflections are cool, sort of like the old BBC globe that used to get smeared across a mirror while you waited for the next programme to start, at some point in the 1970s. Clearly I need a weekend.
Day 750. Gosh, three quarters of the way to 1,000 – which I believe I reach at some point in April, and might as well now go for. As it’s a multiple-of-50 milestone I’ve updated the Best of the Rest page with a couple more shots that nearly made the main blog.
Being 42 