Ingredients

Makes 2

Half a packet of ready made pastry
2 or 3 new potatoes
3 big or 4 medium shallots
100g mature cheddar
half a teaspoon smoked paprika
a medium egg

Cheese and Onion Pasty Ingredients

Method

Boil the potatoes for about 7 minutes, or until they’re just tender all the way through, but not falling apart

Whilst they’re cooking, finely slice the shallots and start to gently sweat them off in a bit of olive oil or butter.

Chop up the cheese into thin slices

Split the pastry into two, and roll out into circles about 5mm thick. Not too thin, so that it can support its own weight when holding in your hands but not so thick you can’t fit any filling in.

When the potatoes are cooked, drain and leave them to cool, then slice them thinly.

Cheese and Onion Pasty Assembling

Build up the filling in the middle, piling up the layers to get as much filling and as little air in as you can. Add a pinch of paprika on top to give a little colour.

The final step is where the controversy begins, how one folds and crimps one’s pasty is akin to how one wears one’s baseball cap. Allegedly.

I went for the fold it over horizontally and then crimp from the edges back towards the filling approach. Others heavily favour the fold both edges towards the middle and crimp across the top.

Cheese and Onion Pasty Sealed

Thoroughly beat the egg and use a pastry brush to coat the topside of the pasty, including sealing the crimp. This also helps give a nice golden finish.

Bake in a moderate oven for about 25 minutes

I found a handful of good youtube videos showing how to do the traditional Cornish Rope ranging from expert presenters in their own kitchens to a commercial scale piece. You’ll just have to use your imagination for how I did mine (it’s the same, but on its side)

Mine turned out perfectly edible both fresh from the oven and cold for lunch the following day, but this recipe breaks from my tradition in that the readymade shortcrust pastry isn’t as good as properly home made lard pasty pastry for holding its own weight and texture.

Cheese and Onion Pasty

About 4 minutes into this video is a good close up of the process:

Ingredients

Makes 4

250g plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 beaten egg
2 tablespoons of sour cream or creme fraiche or yoghurt or something
140ish ml milk
1 heaped tablespoon of cumin seeds
50g melted butter

Method

Mix up the ingredients apart from the butter into a thick dough and knead it for a minute or so until it’s nice and smooth. Don’t add all the milk at once, add it slowly until you get a nice workable consistency. It should not be sticky.

Cover and put it in the fridge for half an hour to rest.

Break the dough up into four and roll it out thinly

Rolled out

Now for the sticky part, brush a very thin layer of melted butter over the top of the dough and concertina it up so that it looks like a fan. Curl the edges of the fan round so that it forms a circle.

Folder and curled up

Roll it out again until it’s quite thin. Thinner than we managed.

Ready to cook

It should just about fill a frying pan, but still be thicker than a pancake. Give it about 1 to 1.5 minutes on each side until it’s golden and crispy. Don’t cook it so quickly that the outside burns and the inside’s still raw though.

Parathas

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was a good format that included bits of stand up style banter, audience interaction, a few video snippets of their more embarrasing years and, of course, two live cooking segments. As Dave Myers said, it didn’t have to make sense, they were just living the dream and people seemed to like watching them.

I don’t want to spoil it all, but there were a great many of little details that added to the overall comedy. I wondered how they’d make their entrance, on their bikes of course!

The show started at their beginning, they weaved a tale of baby photos into their careers and how they met, including Si’s tendancies to injure himself at every possible opportunity. Their tour has been going for a while now and they’re clearly very comfortable with the material, including some good comic timing that didn’t help my laughing muscles the next morning ( Si: “What happened was”).

They often made mention of their appearances on Saturday Kitchen, one of the TV shows that my PVR watches on my behalf each week, and how doing that live was the most awake they’d ever been. So much so they pulled two unfortunate ‘volunteers’ out of the audience to sit on stage and be fed at their side table, very cringeworthy.

Judging by the number of recipes in the show’s programme, I suspect they rotated through the various meals as the mood took them. The programme was a mixed bag of glossy photos of the two messing about in front of the camera, a series of well written recipes and a few show notes. A recipe for Caldo Verde stood out as including “First take a small glass of port. Drink it, so that you’re in the right mood. Next take..”.

The first one they cooked was a prawn curry with coconut with Kerala Parathas. I’d not met this style of bread before and I made a note to try them at home when I next had a curry because they looked like a fun change to rice, naan or chapati.

As with many live cooking demonstrations, it’s hard to see the details of what they were doing from the back of the auditorium, so they wheeled out a cameraman. NEC Good Food Show quality it was not, with the camera man getting his cable tied up in the set and generally breaking things, but you could still just about follow it (give or take some Jamie Oliver style speed panning) and it added to the overall entertainment.

Dave Myers is probably the undisputed lord of the inappropriate simile, some better than we got in Red Dwarf. Funny stuff from the winner of celebrity mastermind, but I would question likening shavings of parmesan to a chiropadist’s floor..

If they haven’t got to your neck of the woods yet then I’d thoroughly recommend you tried to get tickets to go, tis a good night out. Especially with a G&T in the interval.

Bodgers Workshop at Bolton Abbey

One new addition between the Pavilion and the Strid were a few carpenters demonstrating traditional woodworking techniques in the appropriately named Bodgers Workshop. They had some good approximations of Stags made out of a few logs and appropriate branches and had a few foot powered tools, including a lathe.

The Strid

P and H produced some excellent banana cake at our half way point by Barden Bridge, a recipe I intend to approximate soon, and the remaining miles just raced past, though I remain uncertain whether we were propelled by conversation or the banana cake. Still, about 7km in about 2 hours was a good morning’s stroll by one of my favourite rivers.

The Wharfe

What better way to continue proceedings than afternoon tea at Bettys Cafe in Ilkley, which to my shame I didn’t know even existed. The queue for tables was surprisingly short, shorter still because we kept just popping back to the shop counter at the front to get just another two Fat Rascals or an accidental Stem Ginger Cake. Yorkshire’s little corner of Switzerland delivered as great an experience as ever, the breakfast Rosti was a popular choice, although the Macaroni looked very comforting and the triple decker club sandwich was impressively presented. A pot of their own tearoom blend tea was a lighter and most agreeable accompaniment to the meal and went well with the sweet onion chutney I had (expertly dolloped by our waitress) with lunch.

The afternoon was spent with a bit more 6 nations on the tv and discussing cameras and a few details of P’s epic cross-Switzerland walk he’s planning later on this summer, so it’s looking like my holidays are pretty well sewn up for this year.

Getting to Robin Hood’s Bay was quite fun, for no apparent reason I decided to go over the tops of the Moors instead of going round the boring way on the main roads. Dodging piles of snow notwithstanding, it was very very attractive to look at. This is the Hole of Horcum:

Hole of Horcum, without snow

Hole of Horcum, with snow

In the years since I first started walking this stretch of the Cleveland Way with the Outdoor Society when it was one of the first Big Two walks of the academic year, the route has changed little on average, but plenty up close and detailed. The cliffs have slowly but surely given way to the weather and elements battering in from the North Sea. I would surely be getting my feet wet if I tried to walk the original cliff top path.

The height graph, though it really should have stayed flatter than that

It still a fantastic route as an opener to the year, with no navigation required and little climbing, it lets you take refreshment from the onshore winds whilst stretching out all the post holiday excesses.

The weather today was that typically British drizzle that was a test of how waterproof your equipment is, but the clouds went away as we emerged from the cafe in Whitby opposite the Co-op and wandered back towards the cars in Robin Hood’s Bay. The lights from the village projected through the dusk well, guiding us down the old railway line.

Interestingly, the waterproof jacket I got 13 years ago (eek) still does a grand job of keeping the world out, although the reasonably good “mountain” gloves I picked up in Aviemore rather more recently were about as waterproof as a sponge. Excuse to go shopping perhaps?

Here’s the full walk, along with photos:

Robin Hood’s Bay and Whitby

Ah, snow. Like it or loathe it, it’s impossible to ignore it.
England isn’t used to snow in any real quantity, which is why these past couple of weeks have been so newsworthy.
Apart from my Scandinavian car not coping with ice as well as I’d prefer, I’ve been lucky enough to not be significantly inconvenienced by it all. Things are just different, Being Prepared helps more than ever, driving to work just takes 3 times as long and you can’t always rely on shopping at the last minute.

Parliament Street

But that’s not a bad thing, with roads, rails and runways all suffering from the snow, travel suddenly becomes hugely more valuable. When driving, you have to take your time to be aware of the road and your car’s reactions to it. We’re all used to being able to quickly go wherever we want, whenever we want, so this is an incentive to be aware of, and enjoy our surroundings more.

If I lived nearer the Wolds, I’d be considering getting some skis for a bit of fun, the snow round my home is perfect, just need a slope

The thick blanket of snow on the fields is refreshingly like a canvas, showing what and who has passed by, the low winter sun picking out in orange contrast all the foot, tyre and hoof prints left on the lane as the day’s business goes past. Only to be filled in after darkness and snow falls anew, ready for the next days activity.

Chilly Busking

Most people round the city centre seemed to be enjoying themselves, from the kids throwing snowballs at each other and the world in general by the fountain in the middle to the slightly bonkers but very good busker by the Minster, effortlessly playing the piano with gloves on in the subzero wind.

I happened by chance upon the news that they were visiting York at the start of a week long booking signing tour for Mums Know Best, so being a fan of their work, off I went. I thought that three quarters of an hour would have been plenty early enough to secure a book and a place in the queue. Ha. Still, a quick trot up the road to WH Smiths saved the day (and ten pounds off the cover price too, bargain) and into the queue I went.

It was just pandemonium in Waterstones for a few hours, there were a handful of people who came in to try to actually buy a book but with a huge queue snaking all over the shop, there wasn’t much to be done. The employees did a very good job of handling the event, I’m sure they’d done it all before, with a few marking the queue, another couple making sure that chairs were available for those who couldn’t really stand to queue for that long, as well as the two on hand to wield camera etc and the ones apologising for selling out of all of the Hairy Bikers’ books ages ago. You’d think that a shop of all things would have realised that they’d be selling books with the authors coming to sign them.

Hairy Bikers Arriving

It was about 10 past twelve and I had joined the queue in the childrens section near the back of the shop and suddenly Si and Dave materialised, clutching takeaways coffees with a small crowd of surprised shoppers trailing along in their wake. I swear they didn’t even blink at the crowd awaiting them in the shop, going straight into posing for photographs, bantering with the crowd and wishing they hadn’t ridden 11 thousand miles on their bikes for their UK tour series. I wish I’d had my camera closer to hand, the expressions were priceless on many people’s faces as they went from Dozing in the Queue, through WTF to OMG. Still, they were rescued within half a minute or so by a couple of managers and whisked away upstairs to prepare.

Posing for photographs

I missed the local newspaper stopping by, but they did a quick write up and video.

They’d been signing for nearly an hour by the time I got to the centre of the action but they were still going strong and seemed most happy to answer my question about when could we see more of their work on DVD. Apparently getting DVDs prepared is a royal pain in the posterior for them, whereas books are easy, so we’ll have to make do without for now. Oh well. Apparently their recipe fairs for Mums Know Best were at Bolton Abbey and they hinted that there might be more to come, so keep your eyes on the local press.

Centre of the circus

Annoyingly I’m out of the country when their stage show is coming back to these parts, so I’ll just have to go somewhere else to see it..

The books, oh yes. I’ve been after The Food Tour of Britain since I saw a few shows from the series, there were quite a few recipes that I wanted to try when the correct season came upon us. The amount of effort that’s gone into the graphic design and layout for this book reflects the success Si and Dave have seen since The Hairy Bikers Cookbook.

The chatter has been reduced to just a paragraph’s introduction or backstory behind each recipe, so it’s much more a professional reference recipe book than a more casual reader you can dip in and out of.

I can’t tell you what the new book’s like because the whole city sold out of it before I could find one to open, so you’ll have to make do with the online preview.

Unless you’re in the market for a large television, I recommend a reasonably large LCD monitor instead, their LCD panels tend to be much higher quality than an LCD TV and are also generally cheaper because they don’t have unnecessary rubbish inside like TV tuners and remote control receivers. Why these are unnecessary will be introduced in just a moment.

The choice of monitor should be limited to those with a native resolution of 1920×1080, or just “1080p” in current parlance, it allows you to use the same device to watch TV, play XBox and run your computer though and generally saves space, money and the planet. This year has seen the release of a lot of 21.5″ LCD panels that run at this resolution, but I’d pick one with a larger pixel size because you’ll be watching it from a few feet away.

These are a few options in various sizes:

Watching digital TV without the help of a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) is missing out on some major opportunities, such as recording two channels at once whilst watching a third, pausing live TV whilst you answer the [phone/oven/small child], and series link recording. Series Link is one of the most misunderstood techologies out at the moment and people usually expect miracles, even though they didn’t when they used VHS or DVD recorders. The implementation also varies between different Manufacturers, so you must read and understand how it does it.

Anyway, the current PVR I recommend is the Topfield TF5810. As long as the PVR of your choice has an HDMI output and contains a function called an ‘upsizer’ which just takes normal TV and scales it up to fill a HighDef screen, you’re good. Be careful, upsizing is a generally a software function and a lot of them are of an unwatchably low quality.

Unlike the Humax 9200T that I’ve been happy with for years, the Topfield’s menu system is fast to use, its USB download to computer function doesn’t crash it and, most importantly, the software is customisable. Which means that the community supplies user interface improvements way faster than the manufacturer can. http://www.toppy.org.uk/ is the place to start looking, but if you just get the addon (or TAP as they’re called) called MyStuff you won’t go far wrong. Download MyStuff.

Finally, don’t forget a good quality spare HDMI cable to connect things to the monitor with:

This setup isn’t for everybody because monitors generally don’t have as many video inputs as TVs, neither are they as large, but this article is just to point my friends and family towards and they can cope with moving a plug when they want to change inputs over

Edit:

I’ve been reminded that I forgot sound. In which case, pick one of these monitors with built in A/V switches and tinny little speakers:

First Google yourself the double chocolate muffin recipe of your choice. Mine isn’t quite my own yet, so I can’t republish it here just now.

Prepare a thick cherry syrup mix with cherries, sugar and a teaspoon of kirsch or rum if you’ve got some. You don’t need much, 1 or 2 cherries per muffin and a teaspoon of syrup is plenty. Or just open a tin of ready made cherry pie filling (it was half price and just leapt into my shopping basket…).

Black Forest Muffins In Progress

Once you’ve made up the muffin batter, put two large tablespoons into a muffin casing and make a well in the centre (a pair of chopsticks works well for this). Into the well, place one or two cherries and a teaspoon of the syrup, then cap it by placing another tablespoon of muffin batter on top. Repeat.

Black Forest Muffins

Bake in a medium oven for 15-18 minutes, leave to rest for 3-5 minutes depending upon willpower and then serve slightly broken open with the cream of your choice. Whipped cream would be traditional, I would go for either clotted cream or creme fraiche.

Finished muffins

For now, however, I’m going to contain myself into a bit of a rave about my latest toy. It’s one of those tools that’s going to have to last my lifetime, but I’ve recently succumbed to temptation and treated myself to a Santoku, made from Damascus folded steel by Tojiro.

After deciding which knife to get, there was a lot of shopping around to be done. It turns out that the cheapest place was York’s very own Barnitts! Whilst they had to order it in especially for me (“these don’t exactly fly off the shelves you know”), it was still £45 cheaper than the RRP. This isn’t exactly an impulse buy, I don’t part with that much money at all easily, so being an Engineer, I made sure the specification was right before I chose my product

Unlike its cheaper counterparts from, say, QVC shopping channel, the pattern isn’t so much painted onto the blade as reflected out from inside it. Beautiful stuff.

Tojiro 180mm Santoku

It wasn’t just the appearance that I chose this material for the blade, however,I wanted steel that was malleable enough to be able to be sharpened but hard enough to keep its edge once it got it, anything over 60 on the Rockwell scale would do. I also wanted a sensible grip on the handle. I’ve tried a few other knives, IO Shen were good, but I felt were edged out by Tojiro. Despite their innovative sharpening gadgetry and the genius marketing man that is Mr Global, Min, I don’t rate Global’s style at all (although they sell a huge volume of good quality knives to Western Europe, so I’m in the minority with this opinion).

The weight is perfect for me, it’s heavy enough to have a heft of its own and unlike my French knives, the balance is slightly forward of the handle which makes my life easier. The shape of the blade is a great compromise between piercing, chopping and rocking whilst still being thick enough for me to rest my knuckles against whilst using (big hands aren’t always a bonus). Whilst I will still use my 6 and 8 inch Sabatier cooks knives, it’s immediately clear why this shape of blade outsells all others in Japan.

I thought I’d used sharp knives before, but Oh My God. I chopped a stir fry this evening and I eventually had to be told me to stop giggling before I cut myself. Not a chance with that knife, it was completely controlled. I wasn’t bored enough to make a video of it, but this will cut through a ripe tomato, perfectly, under its own action alone. No need to put the point through the skin and cut back through it, or to draw the cutting edge across the skin like a serrated edge.

It literally cut through vegetables as if they weren’t there. Now I begin to underst how TV chefs do their rapid fire showing off action, they use properly sharp knives.

Promenade on the South Harbour

We arrived shortly after dark, about half past 4 and drove around until we found a likely looking car park just next to the RNLI boathouse. Amazingly for this time of a Sunday evening, one of the shellfish kiosks was still open, selling pints of prawns, dressed crabs and so forth. Great stuff.

Walking along the beach was quite bracing, but was still quite jolly with the lights from the barrage of amusement arcades reaching as far as the surf.

2p for a plastic cardboard cutout mobile phone

The tupenny shove machines have certainly gone up in the world since I were a lad, with everything from cuddly toys to cardboard mobile telephones balanced on the edge of some very sturdily stacked two pences.

The gardens were well lit and provided a scenic distraction from the steep walk up the side of the cliffs towards the town, the paths had steps and ramps for all constitutions.

Gardens

Tea was provided by a handy Weatherspoons, with some well kept and entirely refreshing Ruddles Best thrown in as part of the meal cost, although at £1.35 a pint, well worth drinking anyway. I’m quite a fan of Ruddles County, but it’s not really a session ale, but their bitter was just as good, without the unpleasant aftertaste you sometimes get from cheaper brews.

Anyway, the point of visiting the seaside was to attend the recording of the last two episodes of the current series of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, some of the finest comedy our country has to offer. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, get thee hence to the iPlayer and do some revision.

This was the third time I’ve been able to see it live on stage and featured Jo Brand as a guest for the first time and Jack Dee in the Chair. He’s not a patch on Humph, but then it would be a waste to try to emulate him, Jack Dee’s certainly funny enough in his own right.

I wouldn’t want to break theatre etiquette by taking a photograph of the stage inside the auditorium and besides which, my pocket camera wouldn’t get a good enough image anyway. If I did, it would probably turn out looking like this:

See? Rubbish

The recording took about three hours, including a 20 minute interval so the performers could get a brew, which was incredible value for the five pounds the tickets cost. I wouldn’t fancy the job of editing that down into two 25 minute episodes.

Some of the funniest moments were those that would end up on the cutting room floor, Jo Brand tripping over on her first attempt at One Song To The Tune Of Another and taking a good 5 minutes before the rest of the panelists would let her recover her composure. Jeremy Hardy getting Jack Dee to crack up and one very brave woman in the audience getting carried away and singing out the answer to the ‘guess what the audience is trying to hum’ round. You’d never see the deadpan expressions from Barry and Jeremy as they calmly produced ribbons of jinglebells to join in with.

Jon Naismith did as good a job Producing it as always, he does the audience warmup himself (with the same jokes he’s been using for years – so much that Barry Cryer helped out with a metajoke: “you used the joke about the condom? You’re only supposed to use it once!”.

Even recording the pickups was hilarious, had to wait for the audience to quieten down after Jon Naismith asked Jack to say again “and here’s the mystery voice for the listeners at home and this time leave a gap so I can actually DO the mystery voice”. Which of course led to Jack miming “one, two, three, four, five” when he had to say it in the second show

I wouldn’t want to spoil anything from the shows, but one entry from the Uxbridge English Dictionary that bears repeating was “Canapes: a scot unable to spend”.

I’ve already got the PVR primed to record these two episodes the next two Mondays, it will be interesting to see what I can remember about the bits that are cut out.

Spiced Pineapple

I didn’t really follow a recipe as such, just roughly cubed the pineapple and poached it in a light syrup along with a couple of sticks of cinnamon, a teaspoon of ground ginger, half a dozen cloves and a star anise. Then stored it hot in kilner jars so they would vacuum seal.

Sloe Gin Ingredients

I had the chance to pick a couple of kilos of Sloe berries last weekend so we could finally get around to making some Sloe Gin. It’s too sweet for my taste, but I know plenty of people who do like it. Buying a year’s supply of Gin all in one go was a bit wallet stretching, but it’s not like it’ll go off.

Sloe Gin. Fresh and after 1 day infusing

The Sloe Gin recipe was a bit loose, but went along the lines of about 1 pound of berries and 100g of sugar per litre of gin. Or as J tells it: “Half fill whatever sized bottle you’ve got with Sloe berries, add a couple of handfuls of sugar and top it off with Gin”. Then turn it once a day for a week, then once a week for a month and then once a month until you’ve run out of patience and want to drink it.

Carols, dixieland style

The sound track was provided by a local dixieland jazz band playing christmas carols, I forgot to note the groups name, but I’m sure I recognised their trumpet player from the old Wednesday night jazz jam session in the Black Swan from a year or 10 ago.

Barley Hall

Barley Hall was doing it’s usual historic market, with stall keepers dressed in costume and happy to cater to all of your needs, provided they can be made from hand stitched leather, hand woven wool or properly blacksmithed.

One brand that’s really taken off this year is delicouslyorkshire who had taken over the top end of Parliament St with their usual made in Yorkshire market. My bag came out a good deal heavier than it went in..

I try to make a rule of not shopping round a supermarket when hungry, but that should also apply to markets. I stopped by Cross of York to see if they had any fish left for dinner tonight and was reminded of how good a skilled fishmonger can be, watching them fillet my choice of fish ready for the pan. So tonight will probably be pan fried butterflied-fillet of Trout on a bed of steamed kale with a sage risotto, followed by a baked apple because it’s cold and dark and I like that sort of thing

Baked goods aside, I didn’t really achive much Christmas shopping, I did pop into Borders to see what the effects of its administration were. The 20% sale coupled with the seasonal pile of customers led to an epic queue, so I’ll leave that shop until next time I’m in town.

Speaking of which, next weekend’s looking busy with a walking club trip to the famous Lion on Blakey Ridge, and the weekend after is my second favourite (after the fortnight’s worth of Food and Drink Festival) time in York, Festival of Angels.

There were a lot of neat touches with the event’s organisation, including doing a deal with some off site parking in Stamford Bridge and making the “torch lit procession” part of the event.

Otherwise it was pretty much a fireworks event. There was a nice big bonfire that you could get close enough to to feel the benefit from, a mulled wine tent was doing steady business, which gave something warming to hold and sip whilst queuing up for the hog roast and traditional barbequeued burgers and hot dogs. We thought the burgers didn’t look too wide so I had the double, turned out they were just thick instead, which coupled with the serve-it-yourself onions and ketchup meant I was mostly wearing my dinner at the end. Very tasty though.

There were a couple of decoratively lit horse trailers with party games and people selling the sort of glowy light sticks you get these days, there was even a barrel for children of all ages to try their mouth at bobbing for apples grown on the premises. The bar was well stocked, though I couldn’t get near it, with optics as well as draught beer. The local Guides were present, running a tombola with prizes that were collected over the recent weeks.

The brass band kept up a very good set, and were well organised and didn’t compete with either the fireworks or the tent from Minster FM who were compereing the night’s proceedings. They even got the timing spot on with getting the crowd to chant “10..9..8..etc..1..FIRE!” which led to a remarkably good display of *whoosh* *kablam* *aahh*.

The fireworks were a good selection and well sequenced, with pretty much all the childhood favourites apart from a catherine wheel. I think the crowd was about 100m away from the fairly modest looking launching apparatus, so the bigger rockets really did explode overhead. It went on for what seemed like about 20 minutes and was remarkably dense. Way better than the Scout displays I used to help, although computer firing sequences are much less fun than running between the milk bottles and the back of the landrover to get the next rocket.

There were a few picnic tables dotted about and plenty straw bales to perch on if standing up for the full display wasn’t your thing. There was plenty of space, so the crowd wasn’t too deep and even the car park was well organised (it would have to be for that many cars).

The Cadets were doing the parking and they made good use of the glowy sticks, having one in each hand to direct the traffic like you see people on TV doing with planes. There were a couple of tractors doing the rounds to tow out the people who got stuck in the mud, which was fine from our point of view because we were smug cyclists but would have been highly fustrating for the drivers who would have had to wait for their turn for quite some time. But then, everybody was parking in muddy fields so there was bound to be a fair number of stuck cars.

All in all, it was a very accomplished event, certainly better then the Castle Howard one last year, possibly because it involved less traffic jams.

I had a gossip with one of the Balloon Tree’s staff earlier on, they apparently sold out of all 1600 tickets (that’s all they were brave enough to sell) with a week or so to go, so I’m glad I got mine when I did. They found it succesful enough to have already started planning next year’s, so fingers crossed that a small, succesful enterprise will triumph where other, larger organisations have chickened out from.

So, yes, good traditional British nights out are still going strong. Yay.

I’d left the sweet peas last few rounds of flowers to set seed, and I needed the large tubs they were in, so it was time to collect the seeds and dry them out ready for the spring. Many people recommend planting sweet peas about now and then giving them a prune in February to give them a good start and encourage many stems. I’ve never had any success doing that, so I’m going to sow them in 5″ pots in about March time and hope they’ll establish themselves ready to plant out again in late spring.

Sweet Pea Pods

I also took the opportunity to rescue my specimem pelargoniums for the winter, one has done substantially better than the other two, not sure if that’s because it was in a wider pot or whether it was just a better plant. I’m always surprised by the volume of dead material you comb out of a herbacious plant when preparing to overwinter it indoors. I tend to take all the flower stems off and prune back the longer, more spindly stems so encourage the plant to spend its energy on new growth and building up energy in the roots ready for the spring.

Tidying up a geranium

I recently took advantage of a few special offers that Thompson & Morgan advertise to Gardener’s World Magazine readers. Turns out they keep an online catalogue of them all, so you don’t have to place your order in the correct month. I’m sure things like the 100 free Spring Flowering Bulbs and 100 free Alliums are more than effective as a loss leader given the good selection of other plants advertised in that page. In a way, I’m quite happy to just order from that subset of their full range, way too much choice otherwise. Anyway, they will hopefully provide a good mixed background to the specimen tulips bulbs I’ve got to plant in the tubs I’ve just freed up.

http://www.thompson-morgan.com/gwm is where you want to be.

Otherwise things are a bit same old same old. A lot of my friends are off Doing Interesting Things at the moment, be it travelling the world, taking contracts in Australia or New Zealand, being couragous enough to quit their current job without having a replacement signed up first or doing their part to continue the species.

I guess this introspection was brought home by renewing my passport ready for some gratuitious trips away in the new year. Has it really been 10 years since I stopped by Goodricke College’s photo machine about 2 months after I decided to start growing my hair long (yes, I’ve been stuck with that photo for 10 years..)? I’d love to say I’ve come a long way in that time, but in many respects I’m feeling a bit like Peter Pan and refusing to grow up. Given a lack of other demands upon my time, I still tend towards consuming narration (one reason my bookshelves are bursting at the seams with crap scifi and fantasy fiction) and take part in adventures that others have already created.

Problem is, I still very much enjoy the life I’ve built and feel very little compulsion to change things for the worse, just for change’s sake. I get to look out of the window at the afternoon sun highlighting the Wolds in the distance. I’ve worked in the same office since I graduated and I still get the opportunity to make a difference every day to a cause I consider worthwhile. I’ve been able to pick up new skills that take my fancy, like cooking, photography, gardening and even dabbling in Tai Chi (scarily, I’ve signed up for a class in a different style of that at work, should be ‘interesting’). Oh, and I get to share it with a certain somebody I think I’ve persuaded that it’s better to live with me than not

Growing up doesn’t seem all it’s cracked up to be, once I’ve finished and published this ramble, I might head back to the internet in search of more data to answer my current question. What’s the difference between investing in a Stocks’n'Shares ISA over the next 30 years and a Government approved Stakeholder pension? Does the tax relief on contributions but also the administration fees outweigh the lack of flexibility with what you can do with the capital come retirement age?

Gah! It’s almost tedious enough to try an experiment in the kitchen, can you leaven an apple cake using yeast because the nearest shop to home’s sold out of self-raising flour?

Wikipedia’s write up of fudge is a pretty good summary of the chemistry involved, but what follows is my take on how simple you can get away with. Equal parts of thick cream and sugar, boiled up to 116 degrees C and left to cool. Add flavourings to taste. If you use a good flavoursome sugar, you probably won’t need to add anything else, I split mine into two so I could try Rum’n'Raisin and traditional Vanilla.

Ingredients

Makes 450g of fudge

284ml double cream
284g golden granulated sugar
1 tbsp rum
1 tbsp vanilla essence
handful good raisins

Fudge ingredients

Method

Mix the cream and sugar in a pan and very gently heat to a simmer, stir until the sugar is all dissolved. The best tip I found for telling that is when you no longer feel the sugar crystals against the bottom of the pan.

Fudge in the pan, with the sugar thermometer

Take to a rolling boil, careful not to boil it over the pan until sufficient water has evaporated to let the sugar heat to 116C. Mine took about 20 minutes on a medium heat until my sugar thermometer read ‘Soft Ball’

Fudge, just off the boil

Whilst that’s going on, line a shallow tray with greaseproof paper to cool and shape your fudge. I tried clingfilm as well. Greaseproof worked perfectly, a double thickness of clingfilm didn’t.

It’s at this point you should have a reasonably thick, golden caramel coloured gloopy mix which is still fluid enough to pour.

Fudge cooling in the trays

Mix in your flavourings and pour into your tray to set, mine was set in 30 minutes at room temperature.

To help resist the temptation to eat it too soon, I got a couple of tablespoons worth from scraping the pan to, err, check quality. Yes, that’s it.

Next time

Next time around I’m definitely doing a double quantity, to try to get a much thicker result and also because it’s dead tasty (I suspect my dentist would disagree).

I’ll also be more organised and soak the fruit in the rum overnight, that would make a huge difference to the final texture and experience. I used generic rum to get the recognisable taste out of it, I did briefly consider using the Renegade Rum I’ve got, but I suspect Jim McEwan would drive down from Islay just to slap me.

It shouldn’t be too hard to make a roll effect either. It would need to be cooled on a sheet of greaseproof to about 1cm thickness but only left for about 5 minutes, enough to hold its shape but not to properly set. Then melt a couple of bars worth of chocolate, spread the choc on the fudge and then roll on a bamboo mat. Serve sliced.

Or cheat and mix in a deep tray and use a pair of chopsticks to very gently mix the two into a marble pattern.

There was a masterclass in Amrut whisky at this year’s festival, so I was keen to get caught up with what I’d missed out on. It was also an opportunity to show off my Bruichladdich Academy t-shirt, which I’m not too abashed to say was well received and led to some good banter over the evening

The Indian malt whisky was all produced by Amrut (I won’t link to their site, Google reckons it’s harmful) Distilleries, who have three main and distinctive expressions released in the UK at the moment, all available at bottle (40-50%) and cask strength (> 61%).

Eddie did as good a job as usual matching them up to three Scottish whiskys, to make sure we were comparing like with like. I don’t think I’ve actually written up a Whisky Lounge Tasting before, so I’ll go through the format in a bit of detail. I would say I’d make careful reference to my notes from the evening, but apart from names and numbers, I can’t make head nor tail of my scribblings. You’d think my handwriting was already as unintelligible as it’s possible to get, but just wait until 6 stiff doubles have cast their votes too..

This was a fairly select gathering, half-term was working against us, so Eddie had about a dozen pupils for this round of head-to-head tastings. It started off with a lot of background on what was in front of us and what we’re hoping to achieve. Eddie knows Ashok Chokalinga, Amrut’s brand ambassador, pretty well and has absorbed enough about the company and its history to recount it with authority. The banter is interspersed with bits of history, tales of some unique malts that people had been able to get their hands on, discussions of how the festival (rub it in why don’t ye) went etc. Hopefully the festival will have two sessions next year, which should help matters along somewhat.

The key characteristic of Amrut’s whisky is the accelerated maturation associated with India’s hotter climate than, say, Scotland’s west coast. It doesn’t need a formal age statement because a number of people will, rightly or wrongly, severely mark down the whisky because it’s, say, only 6 years old. The angel’s share is going to be pretty impressive too, so I’d guess it’s a commercial decision as well as a quality one. Regardless, if you left a single malt spirit in a barrel in their warehouses for 15 to 18 years, I doubt there’ll be too much left in the bottom apart from the strongest, most tanniny oak liqueur imaginable.

Back to the tasting. The whiskies are presented anonymously in 6 numbered glasses. Eddie always puts them in a sensible order to build up your palette as gradually as possible, it takes over an hour for your nose to recover sensitivity from a full ‘hit’ of whisky, so the most flavoursome tend to arrive at the end.

We’re led through the various stages of Tasting a whisky, spending most of the effort on the nose, trying to tease out all the different layers of the scent by holding the glass increasingly closer to your nose whilst smelling. If you just stuck your nose into the glass of a heavily peated, cask strength whisky, you wouldn’t be smelling anything else all evening (but why would you want to?).

The scoring is done on the Eddie scale from 6 to 10 in steps of 0.5. A whisky gets 6 for just showing up and you’re unlikely to ever meet a 10. It’s entirely personal and unscientific, but it does allow regional averages to be compared because there are some very strong geographic trends for people’s whisky taste preferences around the UK.

Unintelligible scribblings

I’ve already mentioned that my sense of smell is a bit broken, so the scenes and flavours my memory throws up to match a scent aren’t necessarily what the rest of the world would. The colours were all very similar, so it’s not worth noting those this time around. Also, as I started to enjoy the whisky more, my notes became noticably more, err, absent,so without much further ado, these are the 6 whiskies, presented in order but with the answers matched in.

I correctly spotted the three Amrut whiskies as they went past during the evening, and was very close to the Bowmore and the Highland Park (Island style whiskys can be hard to split out from Speysides), but then the three Indian expressions are very distinct and I only had three to choose from. Likewise, I know what the shape of a Scottish Single Malt taste is like so spotting ones that were obviously out of kilter was easy.

To be fair, I also bought a bottle of Amrut Fusion the other weekend, just before it was awarded number 3 in the world by Jim Murray (which caused supplies to dry right up), so I’d hoped I’d at least spot that one.

The surprise finish was a small sample of Amrut Peated Cask Strength as an unprecented whisky number 7. This totally demolished the competition and, unfortunately, nearly demolished me too. By this time, my lift home was parked outside and was pointedly looking at its watch, so I sadly made my excuses and left before I made a greater fool of myself.

I’m normally fairly sensible (boring?) when I go out drinking, no more than 3 pints of an evening as a rule, but I do sometimes get hugely over excited when in a friendly crowd and the alcohol’s been flying and there’s a shared topic of conversation you can really get your teeth into. Sadly, there’ve been times in the past when that’s led to an embarrasingly crippling hangover the morning afterwards (I’m thinking Stevenage here..) so I clearly need to take more advice from Yoda. Control, I must learn Control.

Another thing that has been clear for a long while and was reinforced this evening, in case it isn’t bleedin obvious by my collection, I do like an interesting peated single malt. Apparently a sherry finished Connemara has just been released, which is well worth watching out for.

Not having had alloy wheels on a car before, it didn’t occur to me that they would need some TLC every now and again.

The problem started about a year ago, when my Saab 9-5 was 8, with the two front wheels losing their air pressure more quickly than I’d expect. I found myself topping them back up from 20-odd psi every couple of weeks.

Earlier on this summer, it turns out ‘every couple of weeks or so’ wasn’t often enough and I’d done sufficient damage to my side walls to need a new set of tyres. Oops. It got as far as losing 5 psi a day before I got around to doing something about it. Even paying 50p a day for a few minutes at the nearest air hose wasn’t too expensive over a year, but the week’s holiday away from such things was enough to tip the balance.

The problem is that alloys rely on their coats of paint and lacquer to keep an airtight seal with the tyres and over time this gets attacked by the atmosphere and the occasional ambush by feral curbstones.

Gouges from rims of old alloy wheels

It was characterised by the paint on the spokes bubbling up as well as the more obvious gouges near the rims.

Bubbly paint on old alloy wheels

There are a number of services advertising on the interwebs that profess to refurbish wheels, but they all boil down to

1. sand blast the old coatings off back down the the aluminium
2. spray on a base coat
3. spray on the colour paint of your choice
4. varnish

As amusing as it would be to have hot pink or lime green wheels, local expertise (as well as not having to take days out of work) beats fancy websites so I turned down a national franchise and visited Ian Jemison Engineering, who just about all my team at work had heard of (except me, of course). He’s more well known for his years of experience driving rally cars, so I was confident I’d be in safe hands. In his words, “they were much more badly corroded inside than outside, and the outside was pretty poor”.

He doesn’t publish his prices, so I won’t either, but it cost much less than the set of tyres and it took a day to do all 4. The effect was very good, if I was bothered about the appearance I’d be very happy as they look brand new. As it is, that’s another 7-8 years of life out of my wheels, without following the advice of the dealers and spending over a thousand pounds on a new set or having to fit a compressor to the car Scrapheap Challenge style.

Newly refurbished wheels

Result.

I harvested this year’s apple crop yesterday, another surprisingly generous harvest considering the small stature of the trees and their pots, I also gave up on the tomato vines putting any more growth into their fruit and picked it all green.

The tomato variety, F1 Totem, did well again this year, keeping to a bushy habit despite having plenty of space for its root to run around in. It wasn’t anything like as early to fruit as in previous years, but that’s almost certainly because of the amount of wind that whistles through our garden. I had two containers planted up with it, one longer trough that’s about twice as deep as a grow bag, and a shorter one that’s four times as deep. Despite the roots only going halfway down the compost in the deep trough, its plants did over twice as well as the shallower trough, so that’s worth remembering for next year.

I composted the rest of my courgette and squash vines after their leaves got covered with mildew and pretty much stopped working, although again I took a reasoanble final crop off them. The yellow ball variety, One Ball, did reasonably well, but was too late and didn’t get the chance to develop its dozen or so fruits per fine. The green ball variety, Eight Ball, did better and because its skin is pretty solid, I’m treating just like a squash so am hopeful they’ll keep for a couple of months.

I lifted a few pots of alpine strawberries that showed just how vigorously they can spread when given half a chance, to make room for a collection of red cabbage seedlings that should hopefully mean that next spring I’ll be mostly eating cabbage, as well as finding people with a home for some strawberries

If my chutney making is anything to go by, Autumn is early this year, the previous two years saw me harvesting green tomatoes the last weekend in October, not the first. The local squirrel has been busy stashing away acorns and nuts to make sure we get a few trees growing in odd places next year.

Squirrel, making a getaway

I’m having a go in a slightly different way this time around, in a bid to reduce the simmer time and therefore keep the colour less caramelised, I took out the seeds and soggy bits from the middles of the tomatoes. It was particularly fiddly, but seems to have done the job. I’m also mixing my own pickling spice which I first infused into the white wine vinegar over a slow heat for about half an hour: 1 teaspoon nepal peppercorns, 1 star anise, 1 teaspoon coriander seed, half a teaspoon cloves, 1 sprig rosemary and 4 small sticks of cinnamon. It’s simmering now and will be for another hour or two, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Spices to infuse in the vinegar for pickling

A quick consultation with the RHS Big Book of Everything suggests that I need to leave my Canna and Fushias well alone until the spring before trying to split or root some cuttings which means it’s time to see what spring flowering bulbs are left in the shops. If you give them time to get their roots spread before the frosts hit, they can flower a week or two earlier than if you put them in directly before the spring and stand a greater chance of growing on the rest of the year to flower again next spring.

Whilst the batter is distinctly mauve to it, the cake ended up not very purple at all. It tastes pretty good and stayed pretty moist for a few days now, so I’m happy with the result. Next time, I would gently simmer the apple chunks in some more plum syrup for added purple.

Ingredients

165g self raising flour
55g softened butter
55g granulated sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
3 peeled eating apples
1 beaten egg
100ml plum infused syrup

Method

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C

Cream the egg, butter and sugar together with the whisk, then sieve in the cinnamon and flour whilst continuing to whisk.

When you’ve got it to a consistency of fine breadcrumbs, add the syrup in small doses and continue to whisk. You’re aiming for an airy light, creamy consistency that can still hold its shape.

Finely dice two of the apples and gently fold into the cake batter.

Slightly purple cake batter in the tin

Core, and thinly slice the remaining apple and lay it out along the bottom of your cake tin. Pour over the rest of the batter and gently press it into shape.

Bake in a warm oven for 20-25 minutes, until the top has turned golden brown.

Leave to cool for 5 minutes, then turn out onto a rack to finish cooling.
Use another tablespoon of the plum syrup to make some icing if you prefer.

Slightly purple apple cake