Igenlode Wordsmith

I cycled 24 miles today, and by the time I got back I could barely stand after dismounting from the bike, let alone manage the stairs... I am a sturdy and sanguine city cyclist, unconcerned by heavy traffic (which is often moving more slowly than a bicycle anyhow), but I am *not* a seasoned long-distance rider.

I have put on a syrup and ginger suet pudding to boil, which I feel is what is required to Feed The Inner Man under such circumstances :-p (I have to cycle another twelve miles tomorrow morning...)

However the good news is that I managed to finalise the third verse of my ballad translation during the journey; cycling is hopeless for working on manuscripts but quite good for verse ;-)

Since I now have another batch of real quinces (after making japonica jelly last week) I made a recipe from my Russian cookery book -- technically speaking now a Soviet cookery book, I suppose, since it takes it for granted that you will be interested in recipes from all the now independent parts of the Soviet Union!

Azerbaijani bozbash bears a probably not coincidental resemblance to Persian cookery and to lamb plov, ( Read more... )
(Similar recipe online: https://bestrecipes24.com/recipe/azerbaijani-style-lamb-bozbash-soup-with-chickpeas )

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"Little Gentlemen" is coming along quite nicely, although the style is in danger of becoming stilted and verbose -- not very Dumas!
I have now successfully introduced my young OC Venya (playing the 'Nat Blake' role, with Raoul taking on the role -- and vocabulary -- of the cheerful Tommy Bangs who introduces him to everyone and everything) into Athos's house, which is at least fifty per cent of the material envisaged, and am attempting to finish the scene in which Athos reads the accompanying letter (also establishing AU material). ( Read more... )

I made blueberry sourdough bagels, which were extremely purple inside!

I acquired some more ground-plums (the windfall plums that one picks up from the ground; it beggars belief for me that the general public will happily strip the blackberries from alongside the path before they are properly ready, so that nobody gets to enjoy them properly, and yet is prepared to let ripe plums that fall onto that same path rot, get trodden into the ground, and otherwise go to waste, either because they don't know what they are or because they are terrified of 'dirt') and some windfall apples, and had to spend the evening cooking in order to combat the swarm of fruit-flies that were staggering around the kitchen. (The flies were already there but made a bee-line for any slightly damaged fruit!)

I ended up making a German plum cake (not terribly successful with these small wild plums, as the stones cling to the flesh and they cannot be halved -- in the end I just squeezed most of the stones out of the skins), a plum and apple crumble, and a sponge cake (unrelated), while peeling and chopping the remaining apples to put in the freezer as an emergency measure. It's just as well that I failed to pick any elderberries this year, although rather a shame...


These are the yellow plums from one of the other trees, which may be mirabelles -- but the red plums are the same size. It's because they are so small that they are able to fall from the tree without significant damage; commercial plums would split open after dropping from that height.

I made elderflower cordial; I was planning to make elderflower and rose cordial, but the scented roses from the cemetery were no longer anywhere to be found, and even the specific bush by a specific grave that I had once used on a later occasion was still there, but bizarrely was no longer scented (lack of rain?) So I picked extra heads to make the quantity up to thirty for the non-rose recipe.

Then I subsequently used the citrus slices to make a few jars of sweet orange marmalade, having remembered previous doomed attempts at not wasting them! And I used the final partial jar of marmalade to make some marmalade buns, which are basically rock buns with marmalade stirred into them in place of most of the sugar. I also put some of my last batch of home-made marmalade on them afterwards as a topping, as the open jar has been sitting around taking up space in the fridge for a very long time. I still haven't quite managed to finish it up, as it was cut extremely chunky and I could only balance a few lumps on the top of each bun :-p

I bought some desiccated coconut in order to make the beef rendang meatballs recipe, with which I've had success in the past (I had a very little of the coconut milk powder left that I got as a bargain in the market). But when I came to defrost the bag of venison mince that I had separated out into several portions when I originally bought it, I discovered that it really was exceptionally tiny even by my standards; probably only a couple of ounces, as opposed to the "500g beef" expected by the recipe -- although I had definitely never used that much in the past! But I had already gone through all the labour of grinding up my own curry paste in the pestle and mortar from whole cloves and star anise and pounding chopped nuts, onion and garlic to a pulp, so switching recipes at this point wasn't really an option. I improvised by padding out the small quantity of meat with a couple of slices of rather crusty bread and a whole grated turnip, on the grounds that the meat was basically just a vehicle for the spices anyhow.

( Very successful )

I made a successful pear torte by scaling down a recipe from It's Raining Plums according to the ingredients I had available: 2oz ground almonds, 2oz butter, 2oz sugar, 2oz flour, half a teaspoon of baking powder to make it 'self-raising' (didn't seem to have much effect so maybe I should have used more), half a teaspoon of cinnamon and half an egg, a.k.a. one of my chickpea water emergency ice cubes (again, it might perhaps have risen more if I'd had more liquid -- but then I had a disproportionately high proportion of pear already), all cooked in a 6-inch tin instead of an eight-inch one. The recipe describes it as 'a shallow cake', so I assume that the topping/base was only ever meant to spread out rather than rising, but it probably shouldn't have been so crumbly....

I also found my mysteriously-missing cooking scissors, which were reposing in the bottom of one of my cycle panniers where I had put them in preparation for an expedition to pick elderberries back in August which was frustrated by what would ultimately prove to be the terminal malfunction of said bike :-(

I acquired three and a half pounds of windfall plums, picked over 2lb of blackberries (and gathered some windfall apples to go with them) and paid £3 for a box with 8lb or so of overripe cherries -- so I have been drowning in fruit! Preserves: bramble jelly (2 1/2 jars), plum chutney (2 half jars), roasted savoury cherries and cherry-stone cordial. I have also made plum soufflé, German plum streusel cake, boiled cherry vareniki, and other desserts, and still have a fridge full of the least squishy plums and cherries, not to mention a summer pudding waiting to be turned out...

Contrary to my belief, the upper trusses of the Roma tomatoes did in fact set some fruit; the first and largest truss is now pretty much ripe and will need to be picked and cooked with.

( Flat tyre and mileage )

( Clock started again )

( Fic progress )

( fanfiction.net spam ) :-(

I made a Nettle Porridge from an old handwritten recipe that I don't think my mother ever actually used; it's a page of different ways of taking revenge upon the nettles in your garden, starting with Creamed Nettles and ending with the slowest and most complicated of all, Nettle Porridge! This is actually a steamed barley-and-nettle-pudding with a lot of other foraged leaves in the ingredients( Read more... )

( Kulebyaka )

( Chocolate Beetroot cake )

When cutting down the harvested chilli plants in order to empty the pots I found the inevitable few extras that I had missed. I bit into the end of one of the purple (and hence unripe) dark-leaf chillies, at first gingerly, after my previous experience, and then more and more firmly, until I ended up simply chewing the piece I had bitten off. It really was not hot at all, but interestingly it did somehow taste sort of chilli-ish without any fire to it...

However I put the remainder of this chilli, seeds and all, plus an unripe green (and hence Demon Red!) chilli into the Cauliflower à la Polonaise that I made this evening, and there was definitely a detectable heat in that!