Fish Out of Water

As we got near the border between County Dublin and County Kildare on our Saturday walk,  C spotted a metal fish plate set into the ground by the canal bank...and then another...and many more as we walked along.

A quick look and it was obvious that they were all beside little fishing stands, with two or three steps down to the water level. I think the fish is meant to be a salmon, though I am basing this more on the fact that the Irish name for Leixlip (the town where we got the train back from)  means Salmon's Leap, than on anything else. The poster was at the Royal Canal Amenity Group slipway and moorings. You can see from all the languages how much fishing is part of the tourism industry. Although these days, with immigration, many places now have signs in more than just English and Irish. Polish being up there near the top, and Rumanian.

And my own fish in water...

Wide open vistas

Part of the (Royal) Canal near us is quite narrow; the stretch is known as the Deep Sinking. It runs through an old quarry, and some of it is up to 30 feet below the tow path. It doesn't look wide enough for two boats to pass - I don't know how they used to manage when it was a functioning waterway. We've passed a memorial to an accident in the late 1800s when some people died.
So for us, it's always nice when we walk a bit further than normal, like yesterday, and can enjoy wide open spaces like these, and more sky and sunshine as the paths are wider and less crowded by trees.

  

 
Aren't the colours in the photo of the railway maintenance car wonderful! It was worth stopping to switch to a wide-angle lens to capture it. They're working on a new spur off the railway line - when we got the train back, we could see all the concrete ties laid down, waiting for the rails to go on.

Swan's Way

We had a lovely walk along the canal this morning, as it was bright and sunny when we woke up. Just as well we had a good porridge breakfast, as in the end it was almost a two hour walk - we got the train home.One of the highlights was seeing an otter - we've seen muskrats in France, but neither of us had ever seen an otter before.
It was, indeed, cold last night and a lot of the canal was lightly glazed with ice.

 

 

Greens are good for you...

It was a very dull and grey day today. At least the snow was almost all gone. Yesterday when I was waiting for the bus, all the boys waiting for their school bus were busy trying to make snowmen before the bus came.

This morning I did spot these bulbs coming up at the end of the road , and couldn't resist adding some text to the stone slab.

RIP Winter is a vain hope, though - tonight and Sunday are both forecast to have temperatures below freezing.

Tonight we had one of C's favourite dinners - a curried beef and potato stir-fry. We always have it soon after one of his other favourite dinners -Chicken Kebabs with Satay Sauce. I used to be able to buy a lovely commercial Satay Sauce, but since it went off the market I've tried I don't know how many brands, and gave up on all of them. It's fiddly roasting and skinning the nuts to make your own, though.
Anyway, with the chicken kebabs we almost always have this recipe for Stir-Fried Chinese Leaves, from Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book. There are enough Chinese living in the neighbourhood that our local grocer almost always has Chinese Leaves. One large head will make enough for about 3 people.
Stir-Fried Chinese Leaves:
1 large head Chinese Leaves (Chinese cabbage, wong bok)
4 tblsp oil
1 heaped tablespoon finely chopped onion - I usually use one French shallot
1-2 cloves finely chopped garlic
2 slices fresh ginger
salt
1 1/2 tblsp each  sherry and light soy sauce
1 tsp ginger
1/4 chicken stock cube
1 tblsp melted lard, chicken fat or sesame oil (I like the flavour this gives, if it's one with some toasted sesame oil in it, and not just all untoasted)

Shred the leaves.

Heat the oil in a large frying pan or wok. Put in the garlic, onion and ginger and fry for one minute, to flavour the oil.

Put in the Chinese leaves and a good teaspoon of salt, and stir constantly for about 3 minutes, so it's all finely coated with the oil. Add the sherry, soy sauce, sugar and stock cube. (I don't like cubes and don't buy them, but if and when I find jars of a good concentrate, I use a quarter teaspoon of that). Reduce heat and continue stirring and frying for another couple of minutes. If it looks too watery, turn the heat back up. If it's drying out too much, add the least amount of water possible. Just before serving add the fat or oil and season to taste.

Another green leafy stir-fry we are partial to is this Gujerati-style Cabbage with Carrots, from Madhur Jaffrey.We normally have it with curries, but when catering for holiday camps I've served it with boiled ham or bacon.

Gujerati-style Cabbage with Carrots: (4-6 as a side dish)

3/4 lb green cabbage, finely shredded

3/4 lb carrots, peeled and coarsely grated 

1/2 - 1 fresh green chilli, cut into long thin strips

4 tblsp oil

pinch of asafetida (optional - it's not always easy to find)

1 tblsp whole black mustard seeds

1 whole dried red chilli

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp sugar

4 tblsp chopped coriander / cilantro

1 tblsp lemon juice

Heat the oil in a large frying pan or wok. When hot add the asafetida, and then straight away the mustard seeds. When they start popping, add the dried red chilli. Now add the carrots, cabbage and green chilli. Reduce the heat, and stir the vegetables for a minute. Add the salt, sugar and coriander. Continue to stir-fry for another 5 minutes till the vegetables are just tender but not overdone. Add the lemon juice and serve.

Last pick from the Botanics

 Bench and Flare

Backlit grass (there was a bad case of unwanted flare in this one which I cropped out. There's a fine line between too much sunshine, making for too high contrast and flare, and that light that gives any picture a lift from the dump-it into the keep-it category. Some from Saturday have too high contrast and aren't worth keeping.

Backlit cyclamen (in the Alpine House)

Cropped this photo and cleaned up the line across it to make this card for the MMTPT challenge this week. Printing in on linen-effect paper has washed out the vibrancy of hte colours but gave me the abstract effect I was hoping for.

Shooting up: I always like bracken. It grows pretty much everywhere here, but I have particular memories of the fields behind the cottage in Killybegs, Co. Donegal, which is really the first place I remember from family holidays. The fields were edged with fuchsia hedges, and full of bracken, sheep and the sound of corn-crakes. At least it was something to compete with the smell of the outdoor chemical toilet!! I also remember picking ripe fronds and laying them on paper, to get the pattern from the spores as they fell off - and doing the same with mushrooms, too.

 

Shooting out: the old Cactus House and the Waterlily House are the last of the Curvilinear range waiting for restoration. Seems like they've been waiting a long time, when the last time they grew the giant Amazonian Waterlily was in 2003.

Bits and Pieces

It was a lovely bright (cold) sunny day today, but I couldn't leave the house as I was expecting a delivery of wine. When we married, C was a white wine only drinker, and it took a long time to get him to be open to red, let alone come to prefer it. Then last summer at my aunt's he had a lovely Italian white. So lovely - to him - that he would happily have bought a whole crate of 12 bottles. I just ordered 7, and made up the dozen with other wines. As we opened the last bottle and he still likes it just as much, it was time to order some more.
Anyway, aside from waiting for the delivery, it was good to catch up with in-depth housework, as the last few weeks have been so busy that usually one thing has got neglected each week for the last month.
I did have to go to the post, and having spotted the ice still remaining from yesterday, nipped out with the camera when I got back from posting all my stuff. It was amazing out in the back garden hearing all the ice falling from the trees - sounding like heavy rain, but with almost nothing to see.

 

The lace cap is an afterthought for last week's Fabric challenge on SCS, and even the previous one for Delicate.
I'd have to pull out the family tree to work out the connections  of who made it, but the little envelope it was enclosed in reads as follows...
Well help, I appear to have mislaid the envelope, which is similar to the one in the photo. I hope it didn't blow out the window this morning. Going to have go on a hunt for it, I guess... The one in the envelope is just plain fabric with a tiny lace inset in the crown. Anyway, this lacy one was made in Lincolnshire in the early 1800s by some distant family connection.

The catkins are on a tree at the end of the road - I've been noticing them the last few days coming home from work.

Still in the Botanics

Bridge over Frozen Water

Paradise Chatter - C thought I really didn't need any more photos of Strelitzia, but I liked taking this silhouetted against the windows; they really did make me think of some exotic birds or animals gossiping away.

??? He also thought the last thing in the world I needed was another 20 shots of a robin.

 Open a little wider, please!!

I do have a wooden heart:  this is a bench in a little Sensory garden - full of grasses for sound, a water feature and heavenly scents. This time of year it was the Wintersweet that was dominating.

First visit of the year to the Botanic Gardens...

...which will keep me supplied with photos to share for a few days. Yesterday the forecast for today was bright and sunny, after a cold night below freezing. We woke up bright and early, to discover that it was NOT bright or sunny, just cold. So cold that I went off to find an extra blanket for the bed till it was time to get up. But by the time I was coming back from getting the paper and vegetables, the blue sky was peeping through, and by the time the brownies were out of the oven, C was happy enough to come along for a trip to the gardens.

Some dead clematis in the fence around the magnolia patch. I think C must have wondered why I took this, as when he saw it on screen he said it was a hundred times better than he was expecting.

One of the few times I actually remembered to stick some nuts in my pocket for the squirrels - and the only squirrel we saw was already being fed by somebody else.

I always love the structure of the Curvilinear range of glasshouses.

This was a tiny little magnolia in a pot in the Australian/S. African zone glasshouse. The tree can't have been much more than a foot or 16 inches tall, and the copper bloom can't even have been as big as my thumb.

  

And a bud, on the same little magnolia

Signs of Spring

Some of the flowers from my aunt's garden yesterday.
The heliotrope, however, was taken on the walk up, at the top of Church Lane. When I was a baby, the avenue to the Dower House my parents were renting on a farm belonging to relatives had heliotrope growing all along it. I was only three when we moved to Greystones, so I have almost no memories at all of Belcamp, but I feel the heliotrope must have "imprinted" on me, because I always love it, and will always pick a stem to smell any time I see it.

 

 

  

  

 

 

 

And no, the teasel isn't exactly a sign of spring - but it's a lot better photo than the ones I took in her garden back in the autumn!

When I was thinking about Greystones now having a half-hourly train service, I remembered how, when growing up, we used to have a *code* for ringing from Bray if we got that far and had aages to wait for the next bus or train - we could ring from the call-box at the train station, and if we let the phone ring three times and then hung up, my mother would know that there was someone waiting at Bray station. It was just 5 miles, so it wasn't too far to come in the car.

Somewhere over the rainbow...

...away above the chimney tops...
I was out in Greystones today visiting my aunt. It was a cold, sunny day, and her garden was full of signs of spring. Before I got there, though, I took these pictures as I walked up through the village. Not that it's really a village any more, now that it has traffic lights, a half-hourly train service (big advance this year on the previous hourly service) and some very busy parking wardens giving out tickets.