I have previously been served some rather mad dishes containing pomegranate by some charmingly potty hippies, and I would certainly not advise you to garnish a cheese toastie, or leek and potato soup with pomegranate seeds (yes, honestly that’s what I’ve been served) but sprinkled over salads or Baba Ghanouch these seeds add a lovely popping freshness.

At the moment I’m really obsessed with a fruity festive salsa of diced cucumber, pomegranate seeds, olive oil, orange juice and toasted coriander seeds. With a little snip of onion in there too (I used chives) its really juicy and lovely with something a bit heavy and has a lovely fragrant depth to it from the orange-y coriander seeds.

I’m also really enjoying sprinkling the seeds on my muesli with a splodge of natural yoghurt and a drizzle of honey it’s lovely fruity heaven.

But my philosophy is that every day can be the weekend if you want, so if you’d like some mid-week decadence but don’t have the time to create quite such an epic spread you can easily treat yourself to something else. Breakfast doesn’t have to be cereal or toast, and it doesn’t have to be an expensive pastry from your local chain coffee shop! I strongly believe that you can have whatever you damn well want in the morning. I love traditional breakfast foods like porridge, pastries, cereals, toast, bagels, eggs, fry-ups, but I also revel in apple pie for breakfast, or lasagne, bicuits, potato salad… But if you’re a bit more of a traditionalist, why not indulge in some crepes tomorrow morning, to kick off your Monday in style? You can make the batter tonight in ten minutes and with a quick stir up tomorrow you’ll be ready to fry and flip in no time.

The king of breakfasts – Apricot Tart.

You will need -

2 eggs,

A mugfull of plain white flour

A mugfull of milk

A sprinkle of salt

Any kind of topping you want, and I mean ANY. Keep it traditional with sugar and lemon juice (brown sugar is always nicest), go a bit Canadian with some bacon and maple syrup, a bit Italian with some pesto, mozzarella, tomatoes and salad…

To make your batter, fill a mug with plain white flour and pour into a mixing bowl along with a sprinkle of salt. Then break in two eggs and use a fork to mix them into the flour. Now, take a mug full of milk, and slowly add a bit at a time to the flour, stirring it in, until you have a nice smooth batter. You can add the milk all at once but you run the risk of the flour clumping and leaving you with lumpy bits in the batter. Now add a splosh more milk, give it a stir and you’re ready to go!

If you’ve made the mixture for the morning, cover it in cling film and pop in the fridge if not get yourself a ladle or a tea cup – something that you can use to scoop up a bit of batter. You’ll also need a frying pan (duh! non stick is best) some kind of spatula and some vegetable oil or a little butter.

Your first pancake will always be a bit rubbish, so persevere! Oil your pan lightly, then put on a high heat and wait until it’s heated up fully before pouring in your first scoop of batter. Crepes should be nice and thin, so don’t pour in loads, just enough to coat the bottom of the pan, whilst you pour in the batter, use your other hand to turn the pan to get the mixture spread about the pan. Once the top of the pancake goes dull and looks as though it’s set, and the edges start to curl up slightly, use your spatula to gently ease it up from the pan and turn it over. If your first one sticks, don’t worry. The next one is very unlikely to!

Just one more thing – please eat them when they’re hot! I know that on American TV shows they make a stack of pancakes and all sit round eating them but they’ll get soggy, cold and a bit horrid – eat them fresh from the pan!

And then, of course, promptly didn’t and instead wandered off and started making shortbread and suchlike. However with some very damp days over this weekend and lots of parsley to make some accompanying tabbouleh I got excited about the prospect of making some bread and actually documenting the process rather than my usual rather haphazard way of operating which owes much to the “slosh it all in and leave it” school of cookery. The thing is, bread is such a wonder that you really can just leave it to its own devices. A few hours here and there mostly doesn’t hurt and bread is such a part of my routine that I always think – “I’ll photograph it doing its thing next time”.  And we all know when “next time” tends to be…! So I decided that I would do two things – firstly I would update my previous blogs about bread and secondly I would make some enriched bread doughs to demonstrate the versatility of this marvelous stuff.

Bread holds a great fascination for most people and when someone discovers that I make my own they tend to be overwhelmingly impressed – which is warming to my ego but completely disproportionate to the actual skillset involved.  I think that because good bread takes a long time to make, the general assumption is that it is complicated, however the time involved is not spent caring for the dough or supervising it in any way – it’s bread, not a toddler – and in fact it’s pretty low-maintenance!

Unlike the long, delicious, flavour-filled process of home baking, manufactured bread is made with a high yeast content so that it has an incredibly short rising time to fit in with the busy schedule of commercialism. This diminishes the quality and flavour of the bread to the extent that there is now such disgusting pap on the shelves that I strongly believe it doesn’t warrant the title “bread” at all. I was unfortunate enough to have a slice of Waitrose white farmhouse loaf recently, “fresh from our bakery”, and I can honestly say it was one of the most disheartening and offputting experiences my tastebuds have had for quite some time.

However enough complaining, onwards to the bread recipes -

One of the joys of bread is that you are not restricted to using water, you can allow your yeast to ferment all manner of things. This recipe is made from “enriched dough”, ie. dough with more to it that your standard water/flour/salt/yeast combination and in this case is made by fermenting a tin of chopped tomatoes instead!

If you have never made bread before, it’s certainly worth getting some practice in by trying a basic bread dough here, first to get yourself used to the general process.

So, munching on a slice of delicious multigrain with a spot of Crab Apple Jelly on it, you’re now armed with the knowledge, experience and full stomach required for a foray into foccaccia!

Whilst you’re having another slice of multigrain (because it really is too heavenly to leave alone!), sprinkle some crumbs round the kitchen as you assemble the following -

one tin of chopped tomatoes

dessert spoon quick action dried yeast

1lb/ 454g flour (i tend to use 20/80 proportions of wholemeal/white)

handful of fresh rosemary

good handful of sundried tomatoes (dried are better for this than the sunblush ones in oil)

nice handful of olives, either from the jar or from the deli depending on your budget

coarse sea salt

3 tablespoons of Olive oil (plus a good chug more for baking)

You will also need a large baking tray.

So what to do with all these lovely ingredients? Well, firstly you’ll need to get your yeast going. It’s a live organism and it is its respiration that produces the carbon dioxide necessary to make your dough rise so make sure you keep your yeast happy. Take the tin of tomatoes and empty them into a bowl, sprinkle a little sugar on the tomatoes and a dessert spoon full of dried yeast. Leave them to do their thing.

Maybe have a cuppa or check your emails – when you return your yeast should be growing merrily on the top of your tinned toms. As it eats the sugars in the tomatoes it not only respires it also procreates which is super duper if you want some bread for dinner. So, with your frothy yeast growing away on your tinned tomatoes, get the flour, a mixture of wholemeal and white is always preferable I think, and stir your tomatoes and 3 tablespoons of the best olive oil you can afford into the flour until you have a rather wonderful mess. Flour your worktop, tip out your mess, using a spatula to scrape out all the inevitable sticky bits clinging to the side of the bowl, and sprinkle a little flour on the top of the messy splodge, then knead. At first it will seem like an impossible task but persevere. Use the heel of your hand and squash and stretch the dough, everyone kneads slightly differently, but you’ll find your own rythm and it becomes rather soothing! You’ll be able to feel the texture of the dough change, and it will become stretchy and pliable. The kneading process stretches the gluten fibres and strengthens the dough, allowing it to support itself when the yeast pushes bubbles into it. Later, in the oven as the carbon dioxide expands in the heat the gluten supports the air bubbles in the bread and creates the lovely texture we want.

Once you’ve kneaded your dough, sprinkling a little more flour on your hands if needs be, and you’ve got a nice pliable springy handful pop it back in the bowl, and cover it in cling film or a damp teatowel. This protects your dough from the outside world of dog hair and flies, and also helps to keep the moisture in.

Leave it in a warm place, a windowsill, airing cupboard… Don’t put it anywhere hot though, you don’t want it baked! I sometimes fill a small bowl with warm water and balance my dough-bowl on top, or use a hot water bottle with a little warm water in it. There’s all sorts of ways and means.

Your dough will now rise. Hopefully to twice the size. If it begins to overflow your bowl give it a slap which will knock some air out of it and it will sink back down. This takes around 3 hours, but you can leave it longer – I often forget I’m making bread and leave dough overnight so don’t worry too much about it.

When your tummy starts rumbling and you’re feeling that dinner really should be rather soon and that this was all a stupid overambitious idea go and grab your bread dough, and scrape it out onto a floured work surface.  Give it a little knead and then use your knuckles to work it out into a large rectangle, about the size of your baking tray.

Chop up your rosemary, olives and sundried tomatoes and then sprinkle them over two thirds (taken from short end to short end) of the dough and press it all into the dough a little. Fold over the empty piece of dough, to cover half of the filling, then fold over the remaining visible half of filling-covered dough. If it sounds complicated imagine folding a three sided leaflet.

Place this onto your olive-oiled baking tray and use your knuckles and fingers to work it out to the very edges of the tray. Don’t pull the dough, squash it from the middle and work it outwards, pour some olive oil on top of it too to make it nice and slippery. Eventually you should have a big flat dough, with bits of filling poking out and with lots of dents and dimples in it, if there aren’t that many use your finger tips to to prod more into it – it should look like the worst kind of cellulite imaginable!

Now take your sea salt, sprinkle it all over the top, make sure the dough is lovely and oily and then leave it on the side to rise again a little (about 10-15 mins) before you whack it into the oven at 200C Fan/220C/425F for half an hour.

I always enjoy serving this bread warm and whole, on a large wooden bread board so that everyone can tear off their own piece. But it’s also lovely ripped into large chunks and served in a basket or on a platter. However you do it though, you can guarantee a feeling of warmth when everyone present says en mass – “you MADE this? WOW!”

Well, actually the key problem here is that I tend to get carried away when digging, or rummaging with my hand, for potatoes – it’s such a soothing and satisfying activity that I keep poking around and finding another all lovely and gleaming bone white tucked into the cool pungent soil and then suddenly, whoops, I’ve got too many again. To be honest, when it comes to carbs I always overestimate and frequently end up looking at a huge mountain of pasta and wondering how on earth I managed to miscalculate so outrageously.

Once I’ve eaten my fill of spuds my wild miscalculations as regards portion control invariably leave me with a mighty cairn of them which I duly put in a bowl in the fridge for “another time”.  Often “another time” is when I feel lazy and cut the potatoes into rings, fry them and eat them with some baked beans and an egg – perfect. This year though the sheer size and quantity of spuds has led to me really truly going overboard and there is a serious potato situation in my kitchen, every time I open the fridge door, bowls of cold spuds look sadly and accusingly up at me. This has stressed me out slightly – don’t get me wrong, I love fried potatoes, and I also love eating cold boiled potatoes just dipped in salt, straight from the fridge (don’t judge me, it’s delicious) but there really is a limit to how much my metabolism can take and I abhor wasted food. Luckily this tale has a happy ending as my Mother has a copy of Elizabeth David’s Italian Cooking which I have always loved, and having recently been given my own copy I decided it really was high time I gave her potato Gnocchi a go. In my head the idea of Gnocchi seems terrifying and complex, and despite having read the recipe more times than I care to admit I’ve always had an irrational fear of it. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was absurdly easy – I made it for lunch and it took as long as one might spend lovingly constructing a sandwich – it was also yummy, especially cooked with a bashed garlic clove, and tossed in a little butter and home made pesto.

Alongside the wisdom of Elizabeth David I did a little freestyle cooking/constructing and made a potato salad. Not the claggy mayonnaise-y type but one with pretty much anything that I could find. Lettuce, rocket, peas, asparagus, radishes, chives, spring onions, gherkins… all tossed together with cold boiled spuds and a grainy mustard vinaigrette – perfect!

Not only is this great for lunchboxes through the week, it’s also perfect to go with an omlette as a light dinner, or with an array of other salads (such as Prickley Green salad – perfect for using your beetroot up!) for a big salad-y dinner with a bit of flat bread or pitta.

The joy of both of these recipes is that you need remarkably little to transform your potatoes from a fridge-burden to a summery delight!

For a 2 person serving of Gnocchi you will need -

1 egg

2 0z/ 55 g  of plain white flour

8 oz/225 g  of mashed potato (you can mash up cold boiled potatoes as I did)

1/4 oz/7 g butter (I just used a dollop and hoped for the best, life’s too short to measure out 7 grams!)

-plus a sauce of your choice, pesto is always a nice one and traditional for potato gnocchi but you can use anything you fancy!

Take your mashed potato, and mix into it the flour, egg and butter. Then on a floured surface, work it into a dough and knead it. You will probably need a fair bit of flour to stop yourself sticking, especially at this time of year as the potatoes are new and stickier, and with the current weather, they’re quite a bit wetter too.

Once you’ve made yourself a slightly springy dough, cut it into 4 pieces and then using your palms and fingertips roll the dough on the work surface to make a long thin sausage. It should be about as thick as your ring finger. Then use a knife to cut the sausage into pieces about 3/4 inch (2cm) long, use your thumb, index finger and middle finger to make a dent in one side of the dough so that the gnocchi has a curl to it. Once you’ve done this to all your dough, drop the gnocchi into boiling water. It’s particularly nice if you put a bashed garlic clove into the water too.

When the gnocchi rises to the surface it’s done, so scoop them out with a slotted spoon as they come to the top and put them into preheated dishes, then toss in pesto, sprinkle with parmesan and enjoy!

For your potato salad you will need -

Cold boiled potatoes

pickled gherkins

spring onions/chopped red onion/chopped shallots/chopped white onion

mangetout or sugarsnap peas

radishes

french beans

a robust lettuce such as Cos or Romaine. I use Bronze Arrow from the garden.

Rocket

Chives

Grainy mustard

Olive Oil

Salt/Black Pepper

White wine vinegar (although I sometimes use cider vinegar or lemon juice)

This recipe is a great deal more “chuck it all in and hope for the best”, mostly because it’s about using up leftovers and enjoying what’s in season. The key elements to this salad are that you will want the potatoes as the base, a pickled flavour, something a bit hot such as rocket and/or radish, something crunchy and leafy, something a bit oniony such as chives, onion or spring onion and a vinagrette. So you could easily put asparagus in this, although it is now out of season, so please please don’t go and buy some from Kenya, please! You can throw in some cooked french beans or some cooked mangetout, some crunch raw sugar snaps… Also think of colours and textures. You can maybe jazz it up a little by serving this with marigold petals sprinkled on tip, or by using different lettuce to add depth of colour and texture. I chopped the ingredients in different sizes to add interest so why not slice your radish thin but leave your gherkins chunky, or vice verca?

Once you’ve made a bowl full of yumminess, prepare your vinaigrette with 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar. Then use the same amount of grainy mustard as you did vinegar and a good grind of salt and black pepper, whisk it all up and then sprinkle all over your waiting salad.

I went to Paris last weekend for 48 hours of jazz manouche, macarons, wine and patisserie. It was a wonderful whirlwind, and in amongst morning trips down the nearby Rue Montorgueil for cheese, tarts and pastries and evening trips to brasseries, book shops and jazz bars I managed to dart up the Champs-Élysées and visit the famous Ladurée for some of their divine macarons. I spent more money than I should, and I ate them straight out of the bag on the pavement outside but it was all worth it. Violet and blackcurrant, pistachio, orange blossom… mmm!

Today, in honour of my little cross-channel adventure and in preparation for the next three days of Jubilee fun in which I will be vigorously flag waving and picnic-eating, I made some lavender macarons, using my home made lavender sugar, and filled them with walnut cream made from homegrown walnuts. A deliciously French tribute to the flavours of my English country garden…

Enjoy your weekend wherever you may be, and I hope you manage to get your fill of Pimms, cucumber sandwiches and strawberries!

Recently I’ve even been making lots of hand embroidered bags as gifts and to sell -

If you love lavender as much as I do and if you saved some of your lavender last year like I did then you should have some fragrant almost spiced smelling sugar. I keep looking at mine sitting there in its jar and promising myself that I’ll make some lavender shortbread soon. And then I wander off and read, or bake something to post off to friends, or write a letter or turn my hand to something more seasonal in the cooking department and leave it for another day.

But at last, as you may well have suspected by this point, I got round to making some lavender shortbread the other day. I needed the  push  of outside influence to get myself moving, in this case I needed to take some promotional photos (not going to say too much here, but the words National Trust come up…) and I wanted some delicious shortbread in the photo so it seemed like the perfect moment.

I normally go for fairly healthy food, mostly because it’s tastier, but with shortbread you either commit yourself to the fact that its 50% fat and sugar, or you don’t bother because half-hearted shortbread is just a waste of time – my motto is generally that if you’re going to get fat, you may as well enjoy it!

The recipe below is for normal shortbread, but instead of using plain caster sugar use your lavender sugar, including the flowers. You can also use vanilla sugar for this which you make by storing a vanilla pod in with your sugar for a while.

So to make this indulgent Provence-tasting delight you will need -

150g/6 oz plain flour

100g/4 oz slightly salted butter (leave it out at of the fridge so it’s room temperature and soft, and then cut into pieces)

50g/2 oz Lavender sugar (plus extra for sprinkling)

Preheat your oven to 150C/Gas Mark 2/Fan 130C and get out a baking sheet, prefereably one without a raised outer edge so that you can slide your dough onto it easily.

In a mixing bowl place your flour and butter and then using your fingertips rub the two together gently. Don’t use the palms of your hands as they’re far hotter than your fingers and you’ll run the risk of making your mixture gooey by melting the butter. Just gently rub the butter and flour across your fingertips from little to index using your thumb and slowly you will be left with a mixture that looks similar to breadcrumbs.

Now you can stir in your lavender sugar, and then using your hand gently work the mixture together so that it forms a ball. Once you have a loose ball you can turn it out onto your work surface and gently using the heel of your hand knead and turn the dough until it’s smooth. Don’t overwork it as it will become claggy, gooey and tough.

Using a floured rolling pin (or if you’ve not got one, a wine bottle) roll out the dough to form a 7inch (18cm) circle. Smooth it out with your hands and tidy up the edges with your fingertips and then slide your round onto your ungreased baking sheet. Use your thumb and two fingers to form the fluted edges, and then use a knife to mark out the shortbread into eighths. Don’t cut through the dough, just score it. Then use a fork to prick the dough all over. This allows air to escape as the dough cooks so that it remains flat as it bakes.

Bake for around half an hour, although mine took closer to 45 minutes so timing depends on your oven. Take it out of the oven and whilst it’s still warm cut along the score marks you made and sprinkle with your gorgeous lavender sugar.

If you need it to firm up a little still, cut up the shortbread as above and place it onto a cooling rack and then with the oven off, return it to the oven with the door ajar so that the heat will dry the shortbread but not cook it. Don’t forget it’s in there though!

As exciting as your lovely shortbread looks, wait ’til it’s cool to eat it as it needs to be nice and crispy.

To start your repotting, dig up your mint, or slide it out of its pot, and select several strong looking lengths of root to replant in fresh soil.

I grow mine in containers to keep it under control (when you see the root system you’ll understand why!) and I repot it each year in a mixture of soil and garden compost – peat-free potting compost will do.

Fill your container to within a couple of inches (5cm) of the top, lay your lengths of root across the surface of the compost (yes, horizontally) and cover with an inch (2.5cm) of compost/soil.

Water well and place in a sunny place near your kitchen door.

If you have no mint at all, beg a piece from a friend or buy a pot from a supermarket and then plant out (without disturbing the roots) in a larger container.

Once you’ve planted out your mint, place your leftover bits of root in a black plastic bag to make sure that they die and then once they’ve superated you can pop them on the compost heap – otherwise you’ll end up with a lot more mint than you wanted. Before you dispose of it though, why not snip off the leafy bits and make yourself some minty pea soup, or perhaps make yourself some mint tea – wash your mint and then place some sprigs in a teapot or in the bottom of your cup and pour boiling water over them. If you like it more Moroccan add lots of white sugar and use a teapot – its delicious, easy and refreshing!

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Posted by Rachel

But before I get carried away, let’s look at the soup -

Feel inspired? Excellent. I’m not a user of frozen foods, I have a freezer full of food but it’s all things that I have cooked and then frozen portions of, or gluts of things like plums that have been stewed down and frozen. However when I was a student and had what one might term a “cash flow crisis” I only had £2 to last me a week and a big bag of frozen peas seemed like a good investment as I had no food in the house and I invisaged them going with a multitude of different things that I hoped I might be able to beg, borrow or bin-raid in the following days. They were just wonderful  and I must admit to being a convert, to the extent that I started to go a little pea-crazy and began throwing them indiscriminately into my cooking. However in amongst all the mad concoctions that I gleefully threw together this soup was a minty-fresh delight.

Sooo… Inspired by my minimal ingredients, gather together -

a bag of frozen peas

Some garlic

An onion (or half an onion)

A handful of fresh mint

Natural Yoghurt if you have some (to serve)

Vegetable stock, or just plain water.

Salt/Black pepper.

Take your onion and cut it up quite small, don’t be too obsessive about it, but we don’t want chunky onion rings. Chuck them into a saucepan with a little olive oil and put them on a low heat. Give them a little stir with a wooden spoon to get them all oily and then let them just soften and start to smell a little oniony – we don’t want them to be browned. Once they’ve gone nice and soft, and a little transluscent chuck in a few cloves of garlic. Cut off the top and bottom and then placing the flat of your knife on it, bash the clove with the heel of your hand. This crushes the garlic to intensify the flavour and also loosens the papery skin so that it shoul djust slip right off. Chuck the bashed and skinned garlic in with your onion and allow it to soften too, then throw in your frozen peas. The amount you use really does depend upon how hungry you are but to serve two, I’d use 250g. Now pour in either stock or boiling water. You want enough to just more that cover the peas. You can always add more, but it’s quite hard to remove it!

You will also want a handful of fresh mint. Using a pair of scissors cut half your mint into your soup, and then with a stick blender or liquidiser zzschooosh up the soup, and bring to a gentle simmer. Often I’m so hungry that I eat the soup almost immediately as the fresh flavour of the mint peas and garlic works well without having a long simmer, but if you’d like the onion and stock flavours to really ripen a little then you’re welcome to simmer it a little. Towards the end of cooking, chop in the remainder of the mint and add a spirnkle of salt and black pepper. Serve with a dollop of natural yoghurt and some crusty bread, or if you’re poverty stricken have an extra large bowlful without all the extras – either way its still fresh and delicious!

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Over the next few days, look out for an update on how to repot your mint and other garden-y things from the resident Organic Master Gardener. Mint is starting to pop up again in the garden and it may need a helping hand…!

I’ve been away this weekend enjoying my Easter bank holiday and whilst I was away Norfolk suddenly flickered into life and on my return the beautiful blackthorn blossom had been joined by elegant fluttering petals on the plum trees and the lovely soft young leaves on the hawthorn which had all unfurled. When the leaves are this young they have almost a glow to them, their green is so vivid and they look good enough to eat… and of course why would I be writing about them if they weren’t edible?

Hawthorn leaves are known rurally as “bread and butter” and you can pick them from the tree and eat them fresh as they are. If you don’t fancy being quite so rustic you can pick them and throw them straight into a lovely spring salad. Other leaves are coming ready now as well. Although I’m not usually one to recommend the supermarket to you, of late they have started selling “living salads” or as I prefer to term them “cut and come again” salads because you can cut some off, and they will grow back again – hurrah!

Another fabulous leaf that you can rely on now is chives which are currently poking their way out through the cracks in my terrace. I put them in a lot of things, their delicate onion-y flavour is so addictive and I eat little handfuls of them on my way past. I’ve started to sprinkle them into my tabbouleh too, which I enjoyed tonight with some home made pitta breads.

Other greenery that will be poking its nose out soon is Jack-by-the-Hedge which is really lovely with a soft garlic-y taste and utterly divine in sandwiches. You can also keep your eyes open for Sheep’s Sorrel which when it arrives is lovely and zesty and has a delicious springtime flavour that refreshes your palate after a wintertime of heavy root veg.

Over the next few weeks I want to start putting some more bread tutorials on here as I know its an area that people are frightened to try, so to whet your appetite here is so easy peasy focaccia, or as I prefer to call it “flat bread”. Because it’s bread, it’s flat, and I’m not at all Italian!

And whilst I’m typing up recipes, what do you need to look for next? St George’s day mushrooms of course!