Recipe Time

It's been a long time since I last made these little bread rolls. And to be honest, I don't remember any of the butter leaking onto the oven floor and creating a stink last time - the second batch were on a baking tray with a rim, but by then the damage was done. I know I've done these when cooking for camps - maybe the kitchen was just too warm this evening. They were still lovely, and we managed to eat half the amount I made, along with a carrot, potato and celery soup.

Aberdeen Rowies - recipe from Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery
She describes them as "nice high flaky knobs of uneven size and shape", with a "homely" appearance.

Make a regular plain dough using 3/4 lb (about 2 3/4cups) strong white flour,2 tsp salt, 1/2 oz fresh yeast and about 1/2 UK pint (10 fluid ounces) tepid water. The dough should be a little soft, not too firm.
Cover and leave to rise in a warm place for about three-quarters of an hour.
Take 6 ounces (3 sticks) butter and cut into small pieces, divide in two and put half in the fridge.
On a surface dusted with cornflour or rice flour, roll the dough out into a rectangle approximately 10" x 8".Dot the butter over two thirds and fold as if you were making puff pastry. Roll out and turn a couple of times, again as for puff pastry. Cover and leave in a cool place or the fridge for about fifteen minutes.
Repeat the process with the other half of the butter, and again cover and leave in a cool place for at least fifteen minutes.
Roll out once more, making the rectangle as neat and regular as possible. With a sharp knife cut into approximately 24 pieces.
Arrange on baking sheets (with rims!!) which have been dusted with cornflour or rice flour.
Cover and leave in a cool place (not warm, or the butter will melt too much) for half an hour.
Bake in a hot oven - 220C, 425F, Gas 7 for about fifteen minutes, till golden.
Yes, it's a lot of butter - but then you don't butter them when you're eating them and I do try to balance our diet out.

I am so glad to have discovered that the Polish shops stock fresh yeast - even if it never seems to keep quite as well as the yeast I used to get from the Irish Yeast Company. Now I just need someone to tell me what all the various types of flour they also stock are and what they equate to.

A Cold and Frosty Morning

is what it was today. Our car has been reluctant to start on cold mornings, and I wanted to prove to C that we really do need a new battery - now! But the locks were so frozen that I still hadn't even got into the car let alone tried to start it before it was time to go to work. I still had time to snap a couple of shots of the frosty leaves on the green, and a not so good one of the frosty roses in a neighbour's garden.

Little Boy Blue

This goes to baby J tomorrow. He's only 7 weeks, I am sure he will get at least a couple of months out of it. It was a nice pattern to knit for a baby - the raglan sleeves mean that there is no bulk in the seams, and there are three buttons down the side of the neck and part of one sleeve seam to make it easy to fit on. I had to raid my craft buttons, nothing suitable in my sewing button box.
Thanks, Lorraine, for the Picture This stamps!
Couldn't manage to find anything specific last night about my photo-uploading problems except that other people seem to be experiencing them too. Time to post on Blogger help, I think...

Beach Bums

After a very wet and windy week which has brought almost all the leaves down, it was good to look back at some holiday photos this evening. Mind you, the day all these were taken we were far from being beach bums. It was the longest walk we did, several kilometres each way along the beach, and when it did get a little cloudy it was a welcome break from the intense sunshine. Even though we started quite early in the morning, soon after it got bright, it was still getting close to the midday heat when we were returning. Part of this was not intentional. We'd had to cross two rivers, one of which had a bridge, one didn't. C doesn't like walking barefoot on the beach, so to cross the one with no bridge he has to take off his sandals, get across, then dry his feet and put his sandals back on. Well, that's the way he does it...We stopped and turned back when we got to a third river. So, on the way back he decided, rather optimistically, that he could take a running jump over the one with no bridge, and save having to take his sandals off. He still maintains that he could easily have jumped that distance if he'd been taking off from firm ground, but my point is that he knew he was taking off from soft sand. And of course he landed in the middle of the river, and wanted to give his sandals time to dry off a bit by towelling them. At first I just stood in the shade, but even there the flies were biting me, so I decided to go for a swim, and then C decided that he'd get in too and then his sandals could have even longer to get dry. It was a lovely swim, and totally isolated except for one fisherman, but it certainly prolonged the walk.
On the outward bound leg we'd seen so many things washed up along the shoreline... a lot of these tiny little fishes. By the return journey the wasps were feasting on them.



A dead dragonfly...

Some little sea snails - at least these were still alive...



We're pretty sure this was alive too - it moved, and it seemed to have antennae, but more than anything else it reminded me of those little Lithops plants that look like stones.I think the green things were wing cases.



Traces of birds...(we saw the birds too)



And these last photos should really have been first, chronologically speaking.





At last I am starting to feel a bit better, but not quite up to investigating why Blogger is being so uncooperative about uploading photos this week. It seems to have partially cropped the photos, but if you click on them you can get the full picture. I think I'll take the laptop to bed with me now and do some research.

Barring the Way

The photo challenge for this week on SCS is Barring the Way. I wanted to take a photo of the level crossing, but the weather has been so wet, and I've been trying to throw this cold and cough for good before winter sets in. I tried a still life with some Duplo, but that didn't turn out either.
These two photos were taken along a short-cut to the local shopping centre where I usually go on Saturdays for the paper, milk and fresh meat and vegetables.
Talk about needing to catch up - time to make a new folder for November photos and I'm still trying to organise my September folder.
Plus I'm trying to get a little baby Aran knitted by Sunday, before the baby gets too big to wear it...

Catch-up

I thought I'd better pick a couple more pictures of Farmleigh before this weekend is over. And yikes -I was thinking I could go next week to try to capture some beautiful yew berries that I had out of focus, but it will be closed. Here's hoping for sunshine tomorrow, in that case. Reflections by the lake, and a reminder that what is the end of the season for some things is just the start for those little cones starting to grow, and looking so fresh and green.

And what might be one of my most favourite cards I have made this month...

I'd better finish playing catch-up and get a few more Greek photos sorted out - it's time to think about getting some printed and into an album. Maybe next week...

Last Rose...(of Summer)

It's well and truly autumn, but as we did get to Farmleigh this morning (again the car wouldn't start, so we were a bit later than planned) and got to see the exhibition of the Derek Hill Collection, that song title is in my mind. It was also the title of one of the paintings in the exhibition. More tomorrow...

Food, glorious food, don't care what it looks like...

       

I don't think I've ever seen Oliver, but this song was on a record I had when I was little. Last week we had a training session in work after our regular assessment. We did an experiment which was to show how much our sense of taste actually is influenced by what our food looks like. In a group of 3 people we had a taster, a  helper and a note-taker. The taster was blindfolded and had a divers nose-clip on their nose, meaning that the only way of perceiving food was the taste buds on the tongue, giving you salt, sour, bitter, sweet and umami, plus texture. I was the taster for the first series in our group - and at first I thought the first sample could have been a thick creamy yoghurt, but my second thought was jam. After tasting all three samples (being blindfold this was where the helper was required - spoon-feeding the taster like a baby, and giving water in between each sample), the nose-clip was removed, thus restoring the sense of smell, and all three samples were tasted again. It was indeed jam - apricot (which took me a minute to home in on, at first I thought it could have been plum), blackcurrant and strawberry. It was funny because the one I could have sworn from the texture was strawberry was actually the blackcurrant. While I picked them all up on taste, some people in other groups didn't get the blackcurrant till the blindfold was also removed. The second series, after switching roles around, was savoury - puréed parsnip, swede and broccoli. In this case the taster picked up the fact that it was something savoury, but the broccoli caused a lot of trouble in all the groups. Mind you, even on sight I wasn't sure what it was, I thought it could have spinach mixed in with potato or something, or peas, and like all brassicas it oxidises quickly to lose its fresh taste and aroma. It wasn't till I remembered the taste of a creamed broccoli soup that I actually worked out what it was, so obviously for me the crisp crunchy texture of broccoli must be a large part of the way I identify it.  I could hear the conversation in another group - their taster thought it was earthy, rather like mushrooms but the wrong texture. An interesting experiment! And believe me, it's not easy to talk with one of those clips on your nose.
Afterwards we were shown a video clip of Heston Blumenthal conducting  the same experiment, where someone was totally sure that sweetcorn was apple.

Canal Walk

Since Farmleigh will close at the end of the month, when today dawned bright and sunny (and frosty) with blue skies we thought we'd try to fit in a trip there this morning. But the car wouldn't start, and rather than spend a long time trying, we went for a walk along the canal instead. It hasn't done my cold any good, but it was better than staying indoors on such a glorious morning. The strange thing is that when C got the battery charger out and tried the car once more before connecting it up, it started perfectly first time and doesn't appear to need charging at all. Maybe we'll get to Farmleigh tomorrow if the good forecast holds. Maybe we just weren't meant to go to Farmleigh today.

Reflections 1

Reflections 2

Bolts and Braces - a new railway bridge

Man was this horse hungry - I was waiting a long time for it to raise its head

Just for fun - ghost bird

We're still trying to identify that bird - I do have a better picture for ID purposes, but this was just as it flew off. We had a delightful time watching a whole bunch of long-tailed tits flitting around  (the first time C has seen any in years), but this bird was too big for that, too long and blocky a tail to be a sparrow, too big for a wagtail, not yellow enough for a grey wagtail. A mystery bird, all in all.

Autumn Splendour

Last week's photo challenge on SCS was Fall Splendour. As things turned out, we had the most dismal dull grey skies after the challenge was posted - and not rain, but almost like a mist that never lifted for a couple of days. Then last Saturday when it started to get a bit nicer, we were going to be out all day up North. So the only photos I got were a few I took on the walk down to get the paper and some bread and milk on Saturday morning before we went out.
Actually it seems to me that for the end of October there are still an awful lot of green trees around - even driving through the Glen o' the Downs last weekend and again  on Thursday this week, I'd have expected it to be a riot of colour, but it's still pretty much green.

I also finally found enough sunshine for a picture of these berries, which I wanted for the Berried Treasure challenge. I do know what the tree is called - I took a photo of the label on a tree in Farmleigh last year, but I'd have to scan through a pile of photos to find it - or get out my RHS book of plants, which probably wouldn't be any quicker.