Rain Rain Go Away

Well it's Tuesday morning, it's been raining hard for the last 32 hours, it's still raining and I discovered yesterday that I have a leak in my roof which is coming in through the bathroom ceiling. It's so bad I have had to put a bowl underneath it to catch the drips! I have no idea what I'm going to do apart from keeping everything crossed that the rain will stop, but I'm sure that something will come to me.

On a more positive note, I harvested my first apple yesterday. In fact I picked two and made an apple crumble with them, they were delicious :-)

My tomatoes on the other hand are looking very sorry for themselves. Most of them haven't ripened and I'm not sure what I should do with them. I don't know if they will ripen by themselves if I pick them and put them on a windowsill or whether I should be looking up a recipe for green tomato chutney. Any thoughts??

I'm not ready for Autumn, it's caught me completely on the hop. I haven't done my final lawn mowing of the year, I haven't collected any sticks or fallen logs for the fire, which I start doing at the end of August before the weather turns nasty, I haven't bought any coal for the fire and I haven't started filling up the freezer for the Winter in case of snow. I know the last one sounds a bit odd but I live at the bottom of a valley and have been snowed in a couple of times before so I always like to make sure I have enough food for both myself and all the animals to last if it happens again. I feel as if I need to rush and start getting ready for Winter and I seem to have an overwhelming urge to start baking and cooking and stocking up ........ weird!!

Anyway, today I am going to start to rectify the situation, I'm going to bake lots of bread, some pies and casseroles and a couple of cakes and I'm going to start filling up the freezer. I'm also going to go through the cupboards and see what I'm short of and make a shopping list for payday so I can go and stock up. I might even look into something like Approved Food. I have heard good things about the bargains you can get from there and I might see if it's worth placing an order. It would be interesting to hear if any of you have used Approved Food and have any useful tips?? 

The First Fire of the Year

I don't know what's wrong with me at the moment, but I'm really, really tired. I haven't been working any harder than normal and I haven't been doing anything out of the ordinary but for some reason I'm tired. I woke up at almost 9am this morning which is so not like me, I'm usually up and about by 7am and yesterday afternoon I was so tired that I curled up on the sofa and had a nap. I think it's the weather, I may me going into hibernation mode early this year. It's raining and it's cold and yesterday, when I went to the car boot sale at 7.45am, it was 6 degrees!! That's 10 degrees lower than this time last week and when I got back with my haul of goodies, I was so chilly that I caved and lit a fire! In august ..... whoever heard of such a thing. I would have put the heating on but oil is so absolutely, extortionately expensive now ....... £500 each time I have a tank full of oil ..... so I am going to have to be really careful with it this winter and only have the oil-fired heating on a couple of hours each day to heat the water. Heating for the house is going to have to come from burning coal and logs on the fire and from putting on extra layers of clothes. I am also going to be making a massive draught excluder for in front of the living room door to try and keep the cold out of the living room and putting a thicker curtain over the front door. I know that some of the bloggers I follow have amazing tips for thrifty living and for keeping costs down and these have been very helpful but if anyone has any tips for stretching a small budget a bit further I would be most interested to hear them. It all helps.

Foul Weather Alert!

It's official ...... I think Autumn has really arrived. It's not cold but the weather is absolutely awful. It's windy, it's bucketing down with rain and has been for the last three days, and I'm miserable. I don't mind cold weather, I don't mind windy weather but I really don't like wet weather. There is nothing worse than squelching through the mud to feed the animals with rain dripping down your neck. Perfect weather really for being indoors so, while the weather has been so bad, I have been sewing like a maniac to put things on my table at the market. I have also finally given into demand and I have put a few Christmas things on there too. I have mixed feelings about it really but if people want to buy Christmas stuff and I don't supply it someone else will so I might as well make a few extra pounds. 

 Christmas Bunting

 Christmas Cards

Spice Scented Christmas Decorations

On one of the few nice days we have had recently, I was taking some things out of the boot of the car which was parked on my driveway in front of my shed and out of the corner of my eye I spotted something in the grass. it turned out to be this little chap.

I grabbed my camera, which being the sad person I am I always have in my bag, but by the time I had got it he had tucked his head in and was just a little ball of spikes. I crouched in the grass behind my car and sat quietly waiting for him to pop his head out and as I was doing my very best David Attenborough impression in the undergrowth I spotted another little ball of prickles.

I know that we have had hedgehogs living under my shed for a few years now and I'm guessing that these could be this years babies. They were sooooooo cute. I sat and watched them for about 10 minutes until they both snuffled off under the shed. There seems to be an awful lot of wildlife around at the moment. There are buzzards in the trees across the river which the llamas eye with great suspicion and there are cute little toads hopping around all over the place. I keep a pile of rotting logs on top of an old pallet as a toady hotel and they seem to love it. They return the favour by munching all the slugs on my patio and garden and in my opinion, that's a very agreeable arrangement. The bats that live in the wall at the back of my house are still very active at night, swooping around and eating all the bugs that are attracted to the porch light when I take the dogs out and the owls are hooting up a storm each night as they glide down the valley hunting for their supper. 

One of the good things about the weather getting cold and the nights drawing in is that I now have the perfect excuse to cook comforting casseroles and delicious rib-sticking pies. I'm also baking bread every day and this time of year, all my favourite winter veg is now on sale at the market. Food-wise, I love this time of year ...... weather-wise ...... NOT :-)

Chilli Stuffed Marrow 

Freshly Baked Bread

Autumn Splendour and a Draught Excluder

In an attempt to banish the autumn blues and seeing the sun shining outside my bedroom window this morning, I grabbed my camera, wrapped up warm and headed off to take some lovely photos. The leaves have been falling off the trees for a few weeks here in Cornwall and are crisp and crunchy underfoot and in the valley where I live, the colour are amazing.

In an earlier post, Time to Start Knitting a Scarf, I mentioned that I thought that this Winter was going to be a bad one and yesterday, the UK had it's first taste of what might be to come. It snowed in Northumberland and more snow and sleet has been forecast for the North of England over the next day or so and although it hasn't snowed here in Cornwall so far as the climate is a bit milder, I decided that it was time to start sorting out the house for winter. 

I live in an old house. It was originally workers cottages which were knocked into one many many years ago and as such, it can be quite draughty. The thing is, I don't mind this so much. I find houses that have been stuffed to the rafters with insulation and turned into hermetically sealed boxes quite stifling and I always seem to get sick if I'm in such a stale environment for too long. I sleep with my bedroom window open even in the depths of winter when there is snow on the ground and I feel all the better for it and I hardly ever get sick. 

Now I know there are people out there who will be horrified by this but this and bemoan my flagrant waste of energy but, despite all this, my heating bills are not huge. I am careful about how I heat the rest of my house. I don't have the radiator on in my bedroom so I don't waste money by heating a room with the window open, I don't heat bedrooms or rooms that aren't used and I am very fortunate in that the walls in my house are over a foot thick which keeps things cosy in winter and cool in the summer. 

My hallway though is quite another matter! It's always cold, even in summer and in winter, it's very very cold, mostly because of a very poorly fitting front door which, at the moment, I can't afford to replace. There is a big gap at the bottom of the door and even though I have fitted a bristle draught excluder to the door, it still blows a gale into the hall and when it rains I end up with a puddle there too. The fact that my downstairs loo is just off the hall and in there is my washing machine and tumble dryer, making it unpleasant to do laundry, I decided, this year, to make myself a draught excluder to stop the outside getting in!!

I rifled through my fabric box and pulled out a lovely piece of pink paisley Cath Kidston fabric and was on my way to grab my sewing machine when I realised that lovely though a draught excluder would be in this pretty pink fabric, when it rained, or when it was dragged across the floor by muddy dog feet, it would just end up a soggy mess so it was on to plan B.

Oil cloth! I turned an old oil cloth table cloth into a fantastic waterproof, mud-proof, dog footprint-proof draught excluder, which will hopefully make things a little warmer in my hallway this winter. 

Butternut Squash Soup and Winter Veg

Autumn is one of my favourite times of year. I love the smell of wood smoke as people begin to light their fires in the evening and the crackle of leaves underfoot as I yomp in the field with my dogs and I particularly love the seasonal foods that go along with the changing season. I'm not really a salad person or even a cold food person really, I much prefer warming soups and stews and casseroles. Good, hearty cold weather food. I love cabbage and broccoli and beetroot and cauliflower and sprouts and basically all things green and leafy (except lettuce!). Whenever I can, I prefer to buy locally grown, seasonal fruit and vegetables and try not to buy vegetables from the supermarket (although there are times when I find that a quick trip to my local Morrisons is all I can cope with) and my favourite place to get my veg is at a local farm shop. They have a fantastic range of seasonal fruit and veg and they look so luscious. The seasonal squash in the photograph below looked so perfect that I actually thought they were plastic and I picked one up to check! 

One of my favourite winter soups is butternut squash. It has a lovely sweet, buttery taste and once blitzed, it has a beautifully velvety texture. 

Butternut Squash Soup 

Halve your butternut squash. You will need about 2lbs of flesh but you can halve all then ingredients if you want to make smaller quantities. Scoop out the seeds and place in an overproof dish along with some unpeeled garlic cloves, a drizzle of oil or a knob of butter, a sprinkle of salt and some rosemary sprigs if it takes your fancy or maybe a few chilli flakes.

I usually put some foil over the tray to stop it burning too quickly and then I roast it in a pre-heated oven at 180oC (fan 160oC/355oF/gas 4) for about 45-50 minutes until the squash is nice and tender. Take the foil off for the last 10-15 mins so the squash gets golden. While the squash is cooking, peel and chop an onion and soften it in some butter. Once the squash is cooked and cooled, peel the skin off, which is now much easier to do than doing it before it's cooked and cut into chunks. Put the chunks into a saucepan with the onions and also squeeze the roasted garlic cloves into the pan. Add one and a half pints of chicken stock (or vegetable stock if you prefer) and simmer for about 15 minutes. Blitz your soup, add a blob of creme fraiche or sour cream and top with either some chopped chives or some crispy bacon bits if the mood takes you. Serve with crusty bread, preferably in front of a roaring log fire while watching Gardener's World on TV ........ Yummy :-)