Feed the Birds

I was meeting my sister in town on Friday afternoon, and it wasn't really worth coming home first. As we finished work exceptionally early maybe it would have been worth it after all, but I had a few things to get - coffee beans, hulled pistachios and so on, and I filled in some of the time in Stephen's Green.

It's been quite a while since I made this. I remember making it once when I was catering for an outdoor activity weekend. There were several vegetarians that particular weekend, and some people who would eat fish but no meat, or chicken and beef but not pork, so the organiser suggested it would be easiest just to go vegetarian. I did offer a fry at breakfast, and I think I may have done a meat option for Sunday dinner, but I made this for the night we arrived, as I had the filling already made. It was very popular.
C had suggested an omelet, but there were tomatoes that needed using up, so I made this instead. For the two of us I halved the filling, but didn't want to go to the bother of halving a beaten egg; we managed to eat almost the entire topping between us.

Mexican Chilli Corn Pie
1 tblsp oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 each green and red (bell) peppers, seeded and diced
1 stick celery, diced
1 tsp hot chilli powder
14 oz can chopped tomatoes
11 oz can (approx) sweetcorn, drained
7 1/2 oz canned kidney beans, drained and rinsed
salt, pepper, t tblsp chopped coriander (cilantro)
Topping:
4 1/2 oz cornmeal
1 tblsp plain flour
1/2 tsp salt, 2 tsp baking powder
1 beaten egg
6 tblsp milk
1 tblsp corn oil
4 oz grated mature Cheddar or similar cheese.

Heat oil, fry garlic, peppers and celery for about 5 minutes till they start to soften. Stir in the chilli powder, tomatoes, sweetcorn, beans, salt and pepper. Bring to the boil and cook for about ten minutes. Add the fresh coriander and spoon into an ovenproof dish.
For the topping, sift all the dry ingredients together into a bowl. Make a hole in the centre, and add in all the wet ingredients (whisk them together first), whisking till just mixed. Spoon over the filling and sprinkle with the cheese. Cook in a preheated hot oven (220C, 425F, Gas 7) for 25-30 minutes, till golden and firm. I think it's better to add the cheese halfway through. Also I use a mix of fine and coarse cornmeal.

A Mixed Bag

I found a couple of flags - one outside the National Museum (Collins Barracks) and one on a hotel further upriver - the Aisling, maybe...

Little and large gulls with the usual junk in the foreground

I only noticed this recently, and yet I must have walked up towards it at least a dozen times this year, even though it's not on my normal route. I think it's the Law Society... it's the piebald effect on the dome that really caught my eye. I must walk a bit further than my regular bus stop and check that out for sure, but I can't think what else would be in that line of view.

Botanic Gardens - Form

This was in the Palm House - it was starting to feel too much like rain in there to take time to look for a plant label, but it reminded me a bit of maranta.

Detail of the Crown Imperial

I could take hundreds of photos of magnolias!!

Botanic Gardens - Colour

When I see forget-me-nots they always remind me of when I worked in a company that imported and distributed fine-art supplies. Myosotis Blue was one of the colours in the gouache range.

There weren't a lot of rhododendrons out in the greenhouse - this was one of them. Just behind it was the jasmine-scented rhododendron - heavenly!!

The current photo challenge on SCS is Show Your Colours, as in flags. Well, I did find a flag during the week, but it was such a still day that it wasn't worth taking a photo of. The stripes in this selection of tulips made me think of a flag, though.

Crown Imperials always remind me of the Little Grey Rabbit books I loved so much - in Little Grey Rabbit's May Day Hare steals some Crown Imperials from a garden in the village for the animals May Day procession.

Sunny Saturday...

In fact it wasn't quite as sunny as the previous couple of days, but still beautiful. I woke early and decided to get up and make some chocolate eclairs for morning coffee and our desserts for the weekend, and then after breakfast we went to the Botanic Gardens. Just as well we left a bit later than normal thanks to the baking - they now don't open till 10 a.m. at the weekend. I tried using a chocolate glaze instead of just melted chocolate - I liked how they came out, but C has requested melted chocolate next time.

Plenty of birds - we saw countless blackbirds, several chaffinches, a moorhen foraging in the grass and even some long-tailed tits, although all I managed to grab was a silhouette photo - they flit around.

I thought I had a saved image of an embroidery of long-tailed tits I did about ten years back  (make that more like twelve or fifteen, on mature reflection!), but I can't find it. I'll have to take a fresh photo tomorrow.


C took the lining out of his coat, and then felt he'd been deceived and deluded  by the sunshine, so we went into the greenhouses for him to warm up a bit. The sprinkler system came on while we were in the Palm House - it almost felt like rain dripping from the leaves. But in fact it can't have been too hot in there, as my lens didn't steam up the way it often does. Two of these photo's are actually C's - the bamboo one, and the one with me in the foreground.

Bird Time

I found it hard to believe that I didn't see one single bird on the Liffey this morning, except for a little grey wagtail flitting up the river ahead of me - no gulls, no ducks, no cormorants. But I did see these gulls in work, and thought the one landing with the open wing worked well for the recent Shades of Grey photo challenge.

There's no doubt about it - while this year's robins are still relatively fearless compared to most of the other species, and will hop around while C is working on his bike, they are nowhere near as people-friendly as last year's. Also they seem to prefer these little fruity suet pellets to the mealworms which last year's robins loved so much. I sometimes see one flying off with a pellet in his mouth, so I suspect it's part of the feeding his mate courtship ritual, but as it's not carried out in the back yard this year, I can't be positive.

And another newbie to the garden - today we had a goldfinch!  In our last house we had so many - there could be over a dozen perched on the washing line waiting to get at the peanut feeder, which is NOT their normal food. I used to spend hours watching them out of the kitchen window. We haven't seen in in the garden here in all the four years we've been here, but last week I hung up a nyger seed feeder, and today we were rewarded with a very interested goldfinch - you can see his beak stuffed with the little seeds. Unfortunately the feeder was out of the sunlight , so I've also used the first photo from when he landed on the seed feeder, even though it's not as well focussed - then he spotted the nyger seeds and spent over fifteen minutes there, with a few brief breaks any time the pigeon patrolling the ground underneath scared him off.

An oddity

 and a semi-preserve is how The Penguin Book of Jams, Pickles and Chutneys describes lemon curd. I've had a hankering for it for a while, and made some last week. The recipe in this book called for the rind and juice of 4 lemons, 4 eggs, 4 oz (half a stick) of butter and 1 lb (2 cups) of sugar. The recipe in Penguin Cordon Bleu Puddings and Desserts called for 2 lemons, 3 eggs, the same amount of butter and half the amount of sugar. I reckoned that less butter to sugar had to be good thing and went with the first recipe. It made three jars, one of which we brought away with us for the weekend.

We're having unscheduled oranges in caramel tomorrow. I was making a risotto tonight, and as there was some rhubarb that needed cooking I put some sugar and water on to boil up to a syrup, and then forgot about it. Luckily I went over to stir the risotto just when it had reached a beautiful rich caramel and before it burnt the pan!

More glass and wood...

We had some good sunshine today, and I managed to take the photo I had envisaged when my aunt gave me the little Coddington lens.

The wooden monk also came from my grandmother. I'm pretty sure that once upon a time something must have been inlaid in the cross in the Bible on the lectern, but not ever while it was in my posesssion. I also always felt that the wooden base was a much less attractive wood than the rest of it, although it does have a lovely grain.

These little glass animals are tiny - they came from a Russian stall at a Christmas fair in Paris a few years ago. They're not even as big as the top joint of my little finger.

Mother's Day...

Truth to tell, it's not a day my mother ever encouraged us to celebrate, as being way too commercial. But C always gives at least a card to his mother. She got an early delivery of this one as he won't be around to visit her this weekend. So I made the box to look pretty too - I hope she got extra mileage from having the box on display until it was time to take the card out.

A Glass Act

The current SCS photo challenge is glass. I have another photo I want to take - the last time I visited my aunt she gave me a little Coddington lens which had belonged to my grandmother; apparently gardeners used to use them to inspect their plants for little bugs. But the weather this week hasn't been cooperative - we've gone from sunshine to windy, colder days with more grey sky. Great drying weather for clothes, not so great when you want consistent bright light.
These are the photos I did use.

Antique Venetian glass beads - with a little historical interest as they were given to my grandmother by Lady Gregory. My aunt gave me these about twenty-five years ago, and although I don't wear a lot of chunky jewellery, I wear these a lot. The little perfume bottle has been around forever, I have no idea of its origin.

Modern Venetian glass - the little sweets, each one with the artist's name engraved on it, and my sweet little flying pig all the way from NJ to celebrate National Pig Day, and the message that while pigs may not really fly, we can achieve some of our ambitions and dreams.

This glass bowl came from the widow of a teaching colleague of my dad's. She used to have two, a pale blue one and this one, but she'd given the blue one away before she moved into a nursing home, I think. When my mum and were clearing her room out after she died I got a few things, and this is one of them. But in several sessions of trying over a couple of years, I have still to get a good photo that show the detailed engraving in the actual fish and the markings of weeds and bubbles on the bowl, and doesn't have too many background reflections in the silver. This is the not-very-good best of many, many attempts.