Pasta

Homemade tagliatelle, spicy tomato sauce from our own tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, roasted red peppers, shredded fresh basil and a little Sardinian pecorino.

Hellebores

These are from the allotment garden.

Pasteis de Natas

We discovered these small pastries at a nearby Portuguese cafe.  They are crisp puff pastry shells filled with egg custard and are delicious, particularly with a cup of coffee or tea.  All the cafe's bread and pastries are made on the premises and the owner/baker was kind enough to tell me how he made them.

After several experiments I still wasn't able to reproduce anything as good as our cafe.  The problem was the filling, it was neither a pastry cream nor an egg custard, but something in between.  As a last resort  I searched for a recipe on the internet and eventually found one that seemed to follow the instructions I'd had from my friendly baker.

The results were very good.  The recipe can be found at Pasteis de Nata.  I used good quality (all butter), shop bought, puff pastry instead of that given in the recipe and I found that cutting the sugar to 120g got approval from my team of tasters.

These cook very quickly (8-12 minutes) and are simple to make, using bought pastry.  The filling can be made well in advance and kept in the fridge for a day or two.

Bread

Bread

 I know that it isn't cool, and I am undermining the temple that is my body, but I love bread.  Crusty baguettes, seeded wholemeal loaves, toast, croutons, bruschetta, etc.  I like baking bread and have for the past 3 years or so used a sourdough method.  This involves using a  flour and water mix in which I have cultivated wild yeast organisms (known as a starter) instead of adding dried or fresh yeast.  I thought I was starting to get some good results and then my 3 year old starter began behaving as if the battery was flat.  The results can be seen.

Doorstop

Looking the problem up on t'internet, it seems that my starter has become too acid and is not allowing the yeast to multiply and do its work.  I'm now trying to revive it by taking a small amount of the original and giving it frequent small meals of flour and water.  A similar regime recommended to invalids, so it should work, shouldn't it?

11 January - Post script:-

The starter has its mojo back

Winter Surprise

These were a welcome surprise from the allotment yesterday.  This time last year there was no sign of life in the artichokes, they were just a soggy mass of blackened leaves smashed to the ground by the severe weather.  This year is a very different picture as so far as the weather has been much milder with only a handful of frosty mornings.

These were delightful, briefly boiled and then dressed with salt, black pepper, walnut oil and lemon juice. They are small but as the choke hasn't developed and apart from a few tough outer leaves everything, as shown in the picture, is edible.

Pictured decorated with a couple of radicchio leaves, also from the allotment.

New Year planning

Nothing much happening at the allotment at the moment.  Cold, wet, windy, muddy; not very inviting, but fortunately not much to be done either.

The pleasure for gardeners at this time of year is planning.  Ordering seeds, stocking up with fertilizers and compost and trying to remember where everything went last spring (not too difficult) and where everything went the year before (a stretch), so that I can plan some degree of plot rotation.  This is where a good journal pays dividends.   I keep notes of what we sowed/planted last year, when we did it and what did well and what didn't.

A good friend sent us the RHS Allotment Journal, it looks pretty useful and I look forward to using it.

Carrots

The allotment garden is a pretty dismal sight at the moment.  A few slug attacked beetroots, dodgy looking raddichio and a clutch of unseasonable globe artichokes.  The rest is a landscape of weeds and signs (not many) of winter digging.

But there is a bright spot and it is our late, third crop of carrots this year.  If you've never tasted home grown carrots then you will not believe how superior they are to shop bought ones. The other two crops were blighted by Carrot Root Fly, which shows itself as unsightly tunnels in the carrots.

Because of our disappointment with the other two sowings we decided to have a final go and sowed these in late July. Protected from the dreaded fly with a fine mesh netting the results can be seen.  I guess we should be thinking about lifting them all and storing the larger ones in a clamp but while the weather continues mild and they are not being attacked by slugs then we'll leave them in the ground, dig and eat them frequently. Roll on perfect night vision.