a busy domestic blog of knitting, sewing and all kinds of needlecrafts, cooking my garden produce and preserving it

Saturday 25 January 2014

Lunch from the lottie


 A couple of soups with all home grown ingredients.

 Firstly, "A rich root and cheese soup for a winter's day" from Nigel Slater's Tender - parsnip soup to you and me. The parsnips, onions, garlic and chillies were all home grown but I haven't managed to grow my own turmeric yet.

Then I decided it was time to use some of the beans I grew and dried last summer in a minestrone soup of sorts with tomatoes from the freezer, turnips stored in a bucket since November and kale picked freshly this week, with a little dried chill and oregano for flavour

after soaking

Saturday 18 January 2014

Finished at last!

selfie with cardigan
 Well, this isn't the best photo in the world but it does prove that I've finished my fair-isle cardigan project.

close up of pattern on sleeve
It appears that I've spent nearly a whole year knitting this! Hunting through the blog for previous posts about it, I found the first reference last January - OK it was only in the planning stage then but I can't believe it's taken me so long. It was a bit slow to get started , ran into problems along the way and my usual running out of yarn difficulties Still, it's finished now and I'm hoping my next project doesn't take the same length of time.





















Tuesday 14 January 2014

Recipe testing - Nigel Slater's Tender vol 1 - A rich root and cheese soup for a winter's day

A long rambling title but this is really parsnip soup. I've a mammoth 4-5 inch diameter parsnip to use and happened on this recipe while trying to find my 'normal' one, so thought I'd give it a go.
Soups are always easy to make - in this case basically take two parsnips, onion, garlic, chilli flakes and turmeric, and boil in veg stock. I did encounter a couple of problems with the wording of the recipe though.
As I say, I've an enormous parsnip to use so I'm cutting slices off as I want them - which led to the first problem; the recipe calls for 2 large parsnips. How large is a large parsnip? I'm not a stickler for them, but it's one of those times when weights and measures can be handy.
The second problem - again with the parsnips - was there was no indication of how small to chop them. In fact it seemed to say pop them in the pan whole. Anyway, I chopped them into small dice as quicker to cook, and after that everything went well.
I didn't have single cream, as called for in the recipe, to hand, so stirred in some milk at the end - it was still creamy enough. I also skipped the cubes of cheese Slater suggests adding, so technically mine was just "a rich root soup" but still delicious and different to my normal 'curried parsnip soup'.