Super Green – or do I mean orange!

According to the BBC, scientists in the USA have engineered a carrot that provides extra calcium. They hope that if this can be introduced into the normal diet it may help in the reduction in the instances of diseases like osteoporosis.

Now is it just me, or is not the point of a healthy varied diet to provide the majority of the nutrients we need! So if people aren’t eating the correct foods why pick a carrot to help increase calcium levels? Is it not the lack of vegetables in the western diet that’s causing the prevalence of the vast majority of modern diseases – so picking a vegetable, good idea! This was tried once before with the humble broccoli, I think that failed then too.

Although the history of the carrot on the BBC piece is quite interesting, I didn’t realise that the carrot we know and love so well was actually originally purple and was only turned orange in the 17th century.

As the for the veggies on my table this year, they’ll all be as normal as possible and if we have a good year in the garden hopefully the vast majority will be home grown.

 

Tags: carrots, calcium, healthy diet, home grown, osteoporosis, genetic engineering

The Christmas Cake is finally iced

Back at the end of August, we decided to make a Christmas Cake, not in itself an unusual thing, but since then we’ve been adding capfulls of Metaxa, my favourite Greek brandy every couple of weeks! Boy does it smell gorgeous every time we take the lid off for the next instalment of brandy.

Well yesterday saw the final addition of the marzipan and the icing, after of course the last couple of capfulls of Metaxa

Yum yum, I think I’ll have to lock away the car keys for the next couple of days!

 

Tags: metaxa, christams, cake

Sunshine – at last!

Well finally it’s here, I realise it’s only one day and it may all go to pot tomorrow, but I’ve finally managed to sit outside, have a glass of wine and cook some of my home grown food on the bbq. I also managed to get 1kg of lamb mince and get round to making some lamb burgers using a recipe I dreamt up a few weeks ago: Lamb (obviously!), mint, chopped olives, garlic, a little tomato puree. All stuffed with Feta and Thyme. Yum Yum!

All of the herbs came from the garden as well as being able to cook some courgettes that I picked this morning.

 Good this going green lark in’it!

 

Memories of those Late Summer Evenings

Over the past couple of weeks there’s been a series on BBC 2 following Rick Stein around the Mediterranean looking at all the different foods in all the different countries.

Last week Rick was in Corfu and the memories came flooding back!

Corfu is like my spiritual home, I’ve spent many an evening over the years just sitting (with a glass of wine and a plate of sea food) watching the sun slowly go down across the bay, just chilling. I even proposed to my wife in the centre of Corfu town, where we then went and had a unique ring made by the famous Meandros family.

I just love it, the place, the views, the history and of course the people, my good friends for many years. In fact over twenty years, we’ve almost grown up together.

Go visit, try the food! I know you’ll love it.

 

Mud Glorious, Slugs

As you’ve probably heard the weather here in the UK has been pretty awful over the past few weeks. Actually on the south coast we’ve had it pretty easy with only a small amount of localised flooding, so we really have been lucky!

Anyway, one of the side effects of this rather dramatic increase in moisture has been an over enthusiastic growth in the slug and snail population. Now normally I’m a kind of live and let live type of guy, but the bastards ate my lettuces.

In a post that I thought I had made but looking at it I haven’t (so look out for my veg patch post – coming soon) I am trying to educate my (almost) three year old daughter on where things come from; veggies, fruit and meat.

The excessive number of slimy creatures in my garden seemed determined to stop this education process, so I’m trying to despatch these little menaces as humanely as possible.

Any ideas other than beer or slug pellets would be helpful!

 

Lets get pickled!

OK it probably will not look or taste anythink like this but at least it’s ours!

When we moved into our house a little over two years ago we noticed to one side in the garden was a fairly big apple tree. For the first couple of years it really didn’t really produce much in the way of fruit, but this year! I don’t know if it’s because of the unusually sunny April we’ve had or the extra rain we’ve had over the past few weeks but the trees actually bending under the weight of the apples. So, in an attempt to relieve the poor tree we removed about 5kg of apples and then wondered what on earth we were going to do with them. Not being one who likes to waste food we decided to try our hand at making something.

A short while of looking through our recipe books and surfing the net we came accross an old book which had mainly preserves and pickles in it, which is where we found a recipe for ‘Apple, Onion and Mint pickle’.

An afternoon of chopping slicing and dicing has left us with five 750ml jars of pickle that now needs to sit for about a month. By the end of August the pickle should be ready to eat (apparently it’s very good with cheese!) and I will make a post telling you all about the flavour, the smell and whether it was a worthwhile process.

If in the meantime anyone else has any recipes for using up an abundance of cooking apples then please feel free to send them to me.