Stained Glass Jelly ...

Ive been inspired to new heights since reading the Food Librarian Blog - honestly what that blogger cant do with Jelly isn't worth knowing. Jelly is a big favourite of my minifreerangers and to be honest I don't make it enough for them, so inspired by Stained Glass Jello we gave it a shot.

We mixed up a few flavours of jelly and let them set really hard the night before and then cut them up and tipped into one tray. Then we mixed condensed milk with gelatin, let it cool and then poured it in...hey presto!!!

Who knew that jelly had so many possibilities! The minis are putting there orders in already...does anyone know where I can find blue jelly? They wont be happy until we've made a rainbow, or at least the Spurs colours for dad!

Rainyday Fudge Cake...

Sometimes on a Sunday, when its too windy for walking and too wet for digging, theres nothing for it but to throw caution to the diet plan and fire up the ovens. My tribe's cake of choice is always of the chocolate variety, so today we decided to go for it and bake a chocolate fudge cake of staggering proportions...

My assistant chef was in full agreement of course!

  We followed Nigellas recipe for Fudge Cake from the Nigella Bites book. The recipe called for:

400g plain flour
250g golden caster sugar
100g light muscovado sugar
50g best quality cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
half teaspoon salt
3 eggs
142 small tub sour cream
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
175g unsalted butter, melted and cooled
125ml corn oil
300ml chilled water

For the icing
175 dark chocolate
250g unsalted butter
275g icing sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

The dry ingredients are combined in one bowl, the eggs, sour cream and vanilla are blended in another. Then the butter, oil and water are beat together in yet another bowl. This cake is definitely one to make only if you have space to spread out!
Next the dry ingredients are mixed into the butter and oil mixture and last of all, in goes the eggs and cream. It mixes together satisfyingly well and pours easily into two sandwich tins. These bake for 55 mins until they come out skewer clean!

 I was a little surprised at how big they got!!!

The filling is a simple chocolate butter cream with which we filled the cakes up and then slathered all over! We topped it off with icing sugar and glitter  - which you can't see on the pictures but now coats everything, everywhere in our kitchen. I think we'll be finding edible glitter for months to come...

The results were delicious; a dense, fudgey, chocolaty reason not mind rainy days so much after all!

Beach Boy...

This is what my Freerangeboy gets up when I'm hard at work...

Dog Rustling...

Hard to believe he started life a cityboy through and through...

I am wondering when all this fresh air is going to tire him out though! - still waiting on that one...

Snowdrops and rainbow rice...

At last the garden is waking up, not exactly springing into action but definitely rousing from the long winter...

Its been too miserable to explore the garden much so it was a nice surprise to find these waiting to greet us today!

Meanwhile we've been busying ourselves indoors finding 101 ways to entertain children on rainy days, of which there are many here in Gods Own Country! I found the 'recipe' for Rainbow Rice'  at Homemade Serenity - a way with rice that involves no cooking, or eating but did keep the little freerangers occupied for ages! All it took were some squidges of watercolour paint into freezer bags of uncooked rice and a splash of water. We gave it a good mix and shake and left it to dry. The results were almost too pretty to play with...

 Well okay, not quite too pretty to play with...

 Unbelievable, but some leftover paint and a bag of value rice kept them busy for a couple of hours...

Beat that Nintendo!

We'll definitely do it again, maybe making some Diwali patterns later in the year and by then we'll hopefully have hoovered all the bits that these pictures don't show falling off the table!

To Beef or not to Beef...

We did resolve to buy local and fresh when we moved here, and then life kept getting in the way and there we were in the supermarket. We also resolved to buy in bulk so we could cut out the weekly shop and spend more time doing fun stuff, but we had to rebuild a house and that left little space for storage. But at last, we're getting there... in the space of a week we've bought half a pig and a big box of beef to see us through the spring, oh and a chest freezer to put them in for the pricely sum of £20! (the freezer not the meat!) The tip for buying such a value freezer is to wait until your absolutely desperate for one and them pray that your neighbour moves house and needs to offload one fast!

Our beef came very local, so local that BH picked it up as he dropped our little one off at Toddler group. Manor Farm Beef are Chris and Charlotte Shipley who run a mixed farm quite close to us and have been nominated for a Yorkshire Taste Award. Charlotte ran a tasting session recently at which their steak was devoured. My littlefreerangers wasted no time in tucking in...

I cant tell you the struggles we've had to get this one to touch her dinner, never mind finish it and ask for more! The joint I cooked was a Crop of Beef  and I slow roasted it for most of the day - it was as they say on 'Diners, Drive Ins and Dives'.....Capital T Tender! I would have taken a picture only it was set about too quickly by the hungry herd!

Needless to say I am going to be cooking more beef recipes and going back to Manor Farm. They are having their first go at Driffield Farmers Market on Saturday, so who knows - might see you there. I'll be the blogger taking pictures and loaded down with joints of meat!

Eggs at last...

It's been a long wait as our girls stopped egg production quite a while before Christmas. But at last, after much encouragement and perhaps a few waves of the stuffing mix, they're back on line. At least one of them is....



Our first egg of the season - hurrah!


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Adventures in pastry ...

Okay it might not sound so adventurous, but Ive never really made much pastry before and I set my self a new year goal, forget cutting out carbs and drinking only herbal teas, I am resolved to master, or if not master at least figure out pastry...Ive made cakes, I'm getting better at bread, I'm having fewer disasters with scones but Ive avoided pastry thus far, or I'm ashamed to admit I've bought it frozen, so I figured it was about time to get to grips with it...

 Its not perfect, and probably never will be but I made a chicken pie with the kids (they were on leaf cutting duties)...

It was from Nigellas 'How to Eat' in the children's food section. The filling she recommends is really nice and very child friendly, just stock, milk, butter, cooked chicken and sweetcorn and then topped with pastry. I did double the pastry ingredients as I think her pie dish mush have been tiny, the amounts certainly wouldn't have covered ours.
 I must admit I couldn't quite believe how easy it was - and how well it went down with all the Freerangers, I wouldn't call myself a pastry connoisseur but its definitely homemade from now on for sure!

Plant Potty...

Who says there's nothing fun happening out in the garden? Admittedly most of my gardening day was spent trying to find the garden under layers of leaf sludge...but my girly had other ideas...

 Completely oblivious to onlookers she decided that the trees really needed some decoration and set to work with what she had to hand. That's my girl....born to accessorise!

Her little brother got to work too, rearranging everything that Id arranged half an hour earlier and then scattering tools on a mums only treasure hunt around the garden - result: 4 hours of fun in the garden but very little done - at least when it was snowing our garden looked the same as everyone else!!!

I'm walking on sunshine...

I'm thrilled, I'm over the moon, I'm dangerously delirious and at the same time ever so 'umbled. I've just received an award. My first ever, from Jo at jo-throughthekeyhole.blogspot.com who writes not one but two thoroughly good blogs and has taught me a thing or two about gardening I can tell you!

To be honest I had wondered how people received the awards that you see on their blogs, and now I know! I started writing this blog to keep a handful of friends back in London up to date with what we were up to and probably like many of you I've found its taken on a whole different life of its own. In the past six months since I've been writing I've taken more photographs than in my entire life, I've written more often than I ever did when I attempted to keep a diary, I've been visited by readers from 45 different countries and I've discovered a camaraderie through shared words that I never knew existed, so to get an award is way more than I was expecting - Thank you x

Okay so the deal that comes with the award is that I have to share 7 things about myself that you might not already know, here goes...

1. My favourite film in the entire world is Mrs Miniver. Makes me long for a world of hats and gloves and stiff upper lips - brilliant!

2. When I was at school I won a Young Northern Poet award and was presented with my award by Brian Patten and Roger Mcgough. Roger was lovely, but I idolised Brian Patten at the time and he was a right miserable git - early lesson in the inevitable disappointment of hero worship!

3. On a teacher exchange to China I had tea with the Minister for Education and was offered a job by a school director whilst I was on the toilet!

4. As a student I had many jobs, including working at the Body Shop for several years, back when it was still a bit hippyish. I was in charge of bridal makeovers and had an absolute scream doing up brides to be and mother in laws on their big day.

5. My favourite drink is a classic margarita, closely followed by a mojito and of course a good old cuppa tea - Yorkshire Tea of course!

6. When I had my first child I bit so hard on the gas and air that I broke my front tooth in half - you can imagine how lovely those photos were

7. My husband is one of the most amazing model makers in the country and has worked on Harry Potter, Bond and Sexy Beast amongst other films, but he gave it all up to come and raise children and chickens (I  will consider hiring him out for a fee though!)

There you go, now you know...

Now its my turn to nominate 15 sites worthy of this award. Apologies if you're not on this list, it may be because you've already been nominated and I can only pick 15. Blimey this feels like way too much responsibility, here goes...

In no particular order...

A City Chicken Farm
Mels Backyard
Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments
Elephants Eye
Our Wee Farm
Well, this isnt getting t''ens fed...
Bellau kitchen
mrsnesbitt's space
A Mingled Yarn
Chocolate Log Blog
BrownievilleGirl
Vanilla Sugar
21st Century urban housewife
Living on the Edge
Corner Cottage Bakery

I could go on...However please do not feel under any pressure to receive the award, just like Jo before me, I wanted to let you know how much I enjoy reading your blogs. And once again Jo, thank you - you made my day!!! I do love getting all of your comments and even if I don't get chance to reply to them all -I really love reading them.

From Rocky to Rockette...

Its been a surprising few days on the homestead. We've learnt some very important things...

1. No matter how many books on poultry you read your hens will always surprise you.
2. No matter how many books on poultry you read your children will always surprise you.

I haven't seen much of the chickens over winter. I go to work in the dark and come home in the dark and BH sees to them in between. But I do remember that before the winter set in we had four fluffy young hens, a mixture of Buff Orpington Bantam, Wyandotte and Rhode Island Red - pretty little girls all of them - not any more.

As I was clearing up leaves, mini freerangegirl said 'mum, one of our hens is a cockerel' and it certainly did look like one. We called BH up to ask the same, but he insisted that it definitely wasn't as it had never crowed...

...and on that note the little fella stretched out his neck, shook his beautiful plumage and you guessed it...Cockadoodledooed. Not once, not twice but for the rest of the day and pretty constantly too. Needless to say we have a very embarrassed BH in our midst. Looking at him now its pretty obvious but then hindsight is 20:20 as they say...

My poultry princess got to name him and immediately called him 'David Beckham' which I thought was rather apt as he's got Spurs! But he has gone to live on a friends farm where he can cockadoodledo to his hearts content without driving my neighbours nuts. I think its back to chicken school for us - where my daughter is probably giving the lessons!

January is the cruelest month...

I'm finally emerging from the post Christmas malaise that descended upon our rather exhausted household. The decorations are packed away for another year, the cards that never got posted have been guiltily put out of sight and the fridge has been emptied and restocked with things that at least look like they've seen a vitamin!

And at last the snow has gone!

Finally the view is green again!

Like everyone else we were taken by surprise by the amount and the longevity of the snow. We hadn't finished winding up our outdoor jobs and projects for the year so under the snow they've sat - for seven weeks altogether. The last couple of weeks have been all about assessing the snow damage and getting up and running again. So far we've not done badly, the raspberry cage has collapsed, several favourite plants have definitely bitten the dust, but compared to friends with burst pipes we've been lucky so far.

Fortunately for me I have my head gardener to plan the season ahead, even if she does take more tea breaks than she spends digging, she assures me shes thinking very seriously about what to plant this year...

We braved the plot together and after much sighing and oh dearing we've decided upon our gardening resolutions for this year...

mine were - no more big brassicas - we've fed the caterpillar population enough thank you very much! and this year we are going to get better at taking cuttings and collecting seed.

mini freerangers were - she's going to plant her broad bean seed in pots and keep them in the house as last year she lost them all to a hungry vole population and she wants to see more roses - every where!

So after that exhausting brainstorming session we had another cuppa and decided to leave the clearing up for another day!

Happy 2011 everyone, thank you to those of you who kicked me out of my rut and got me back in the garden, I'm definitely back and feeling like freeranging - hang on, is that the thud of a Marshall's seed catalogue I hear on the doormat, Wahay, here we go again!