When things don't go to plan!

Last weekend with a week of glorious weather fit to continue it was an obvious time to get a lot of seeds sown in pots. My only reservation about this was the state of the garden shed. I knew there were a lot of flower pots and seed trays in there but seeing them or getting to them was not that easy after a winter of shed neglect.

I pottered about in the house during Saturday morning, doing housework whilst Steve ate a leisurely breakfast and drank his coffee. This is a ritual that can go on for hours so I was quite surprised when around lunchtime he went off to change into his work clothes and announced he was going to tackle the mess in the shed. What a stroke of luck - I could find all the flower pots I'd need and not have to tidy the shed myself!

However, after giving the girls their lunch I appeared in the garden to discover a variety of objects from the shed that Steve had put to one side for cleaning. Everything in the shed was covered in mats of spider webs with various pits of dirt clinging to them. A few other things had been nibbled by mice and Steve firstly discovered lots of mice droppings and later the mouse itself! Straight away I could see that my assistance would be required for the great shed sort and that it would take the rest of the day. *Scraps plan to sow seeds today*

Later that day I had cleaned 2 old pushchairs complete with rain covers, several deck chairs, a variety of garden toys, 3 bikes and a rotatory washing line. I'm pleased to say that by Sunday lunchtime the unwanted pushchairs, bikes & washing line had all been rehomed by a successful use of my local Freecycle group.

Late on Saturday afternoon the shed was empty and swept clean and Steve stood looking at the stuff in the garden wondering how to get it all back in. I spotted the walk-in plastic greenhouse that I had bought several years ago on a whim, thinking it was a good idea and a bargain. I had made the mistake of putting it in the shed to deal with later and that had been the last I had seen of it. With enthusiasm I suggested I tried assembling it now and finding a use for it in this current growing season.

The box was a bit battered and the picture on the box had been mostly eaten by snails but the contents still seemed good. On tipping it out it was obvious that the plastic cover was missing - so just the poles for the framework remained. I concluded it must be somewhere so decided to press on with the task. Also missing were the instructions so I took a comfort break, switched on my computer and "googled" to see if I could find instructions for it. It turned out I couldn't but there were adverts for replacement covers to buy should I fail to find mine. My next task was to study the damaged box picture at length to try to work out which pole might go where and how best to tackle the assembly. That done I started by laying out all the poles "B" and poles "C" on the ground to assemble the base before connecting them with the correct connecting pieces.

And so it went on for the next hour until it came to putting the roof poles onto the wall poles. The greenhouse was really rather tall so this job was quite awkward and as I pushed one roof pole into a connecting piece, the incorrect application of force caused the connecting piece to explode into several pieces of useless plastic. Cursing followed. Not to be deterred, I enlisted the help of Steve and a roll of duct tape in order to repair the damage. Then as I came to put on the final roof support pieces I realised they didn't fit. I puzzled over this for a moment before Steve pointed out that I must have mistaken my poles "B" with my poles "C" and by doing so had made the greenhouse narrower yet taller than it should have been! More cursing followed.

I paused briefly to emotionally adjust to the waste of a hour and then I began the complete disassembly if the structure. But unfortunately, as I did so several more of the connecting pieces shattered, clearly having suffered from several years in storage. By the time it was disassembled, the shed had been reduced to a collection of useless poles, missing several vital connecting pieces as well as the plastic cover.

By this point Steve was making progress with getting things back in the shed but wondering whether he should stop and put some shelves up to improve the storage space and accessibility. Brainwave! How about using some of the poles and remaining connecting pieces from the greenhouse to construct a set of freestanding shelves? Brilliant! So that is what I did - something at least savaged from experience.

The next morning, with the sun still shining, it was time to get those seeds sown finally. So I walked into (yes, you heard correctly - walked into) the lovely tidy shed and selected the seed trays I required for the job (instead of just making do with what I could see/reach). By the end of Sunday I had sown a tray of beetroot, all the brassicas, cucurbits, tomatoes & sweetcorn seeds and had them safely stored in the coldframe. It hadn't been how I had imagined I would spend my weekend but it was a useful & productive one nonetheless.

By the way, we never did find the plastic cover for the greenhouse!

Hugh would be pleased!

Steve bought a Mothers Day meal for 4 last week. Of the available options he selected the roast beef, some vegetables for roasting, a strawberry trifle and a bottle of red wine. Considering that the meat was worth £10, the whole meal for £15 is a definite good buy.

Of all the roasting meats I do find beef the trickiest. Get it wrong and it is like chewing on flavoured shoe leather. The piece was top rump but I was still a bit nervous that it might end up tough. So I decided to slow roast it in stock for a few hours. As it happens, the selection of vegetables for roasting were perfect for this as they were chunks of red onion, carrot, parsnips and swede - very tasty.

At half past 3 on Sunday I set the oven to 140°C and browned the beef all over in a hot frying pan. Then I set it in the centre of the roasting tin and chucked the prepared vegetables around it. To add flavour I also chopped up a stick of celery, 3 cloves of garlic and a few springs of rosemary and threw these in too. Finally I poured in a pint of beef stock and covered the whole thing with foil.

I let the meat cook at this temperature until about 5 o'clock when I turned the temperature up to 190°C so that I could cook some roast potatoes too. I moved the meat to the very bottom of the oven at this point and cooked the roasts in their own tin above it.

At quarter to 7 I took the meat out to rest. Carefully I poured the stock off the vegetables and returned these to the oven to keep warm. Then I thickened the stock in a pan with a mixture of flour in cold water.

It was a lovely tasty dinner and the meat was suitably tender. It was, however, more than we could eat. Clearly M&S's idea of a meal for 4 would be for a family that included 2 teenage boys rather than two small girls!

Having watched a repeat of River Cottage Everyday, which had focused on lunch only the day before, I decided that the remains of this meal would make prefect Cornish pasties. So as I cleared the plates I chopped the leftover vegetables up into small chucks and put them into a box in the fridge. I saved a container of gravy too. Then on Tuesday when I went shopping I picked up a pack of puff pastry.

Tuesday afternoon I made the pasties. Firstly, I rolled out the pastry then used a saucer to cut out a total of 6 circles. I made the filling by combining small pieces of the cold beef, the chopped vegetables, some chopped up cooked potatoes and a few spoonfuls of gravy to moisten in all. This I spooned onto half of a circle of pastry then used milk to help seal it as I folded the pastry over and crimped it shut. Finally I glazed each pastie with milk and put a couple of steam vents into each before placing on a tray for the freezer.

There is something satisfying about looking down on 6 neatly made home made pasties, made even more so by virtue of making good use of leftovers. Let's hope that I am equally as satisfied when it comes to eating them!

I opened my daughter's bedroom curtains this morning to be greeted with the view of spring below. In the right corner our plum tree in full blossom, to the left our cherry tree with buds close to bursting then just over the fence on the allotment a greengage tree in glorious white and an ornamental cherry in full pink. What a beautiful sight and with so much promise of things to come. It made me itch to get out onto the allotment.

It was after lunch when we finally headed off. Having weeded the strawberry bed last weekend my first job of the day was to plant the 6 strawberry plants I had bought from Lidl's last week into the few spaces that had appeared over the winter. Do you remember the cardboard packaging that came with my jam jar deliveries that we thought we might use as strawberry matting? Well, my next job of the day was to lay that out around the strawberry plants. It went down very easily and seemed quite secure despite the strong winds today so so far so good. I'm hoping it will help to retain moisture, suppress weeds and keep the fruit clean but we will see.

By the time I had finished that task, Steve had finished rotavating the bed I'd dug over last weekend. During the week I had bought a tray of growing salad from Lidl's for 89p. 89p! What a ridiculously cheap price! It's supposed to be used as a windowsill supply of fresh salad but last year I tried dividing it up and planting it out and it was superb - a cheap & easy way to grow instant salad. I'm not sure if it's a little early to plant it out but for 89p it's worth a try so I found a space for it.

In the meantime, the girls were busying themselves in their imaginative worlds. My youngest skipped around the plots picking dandelions and fashioned them into dandelion chains and wove them into her hair to transform herself into a bridesmaid. None of the other plot holders are in the least bit bothered about her picking dandelion flowers from their plots and all in all she offers a useful service.

My eldest, the more serious one, busied herself with a fossil hunt in the pile of gravel that someone had had delivered. It may sound unlikely but in fact she has managed to find quite a hoard of Jurassic sea-creature fossils. She spent half and hour with her father in the week examining the specimens from last weekend's hunt under a hand lens. Who enjoyed it more? The enthusiastic 8 year old or the ex-Geology lecturer? A close run thing.

With the salad in, my next job was to sow the peas. I had 8 varieties of peas to sow including mangetout, sugar snap peas, petit pois and purple flowered. This year I'm experimenting with different supports for peas. As well as the traditional twiggy pea-sticks, I'm growing the tallest plants over a metal rose arch and I'm using posts with horizontal wires between for some of the others. This is the method my grandad used and in fact they are the same posts, which he gave me shortly before he died but which are still going strong.

The final job of the afternoon was to pick the asparagus - the first of the season and just enough for a couple of meals. Back home I steamed the asparagus and served it with lamb chops, boiled potatoes, leeks from the plot and leek-gravy. The 2nd day of April and we already have two homegrown vegetables on our plates - love it!

Rescuing Burnt Preserves

Having made the effort to prepare the fruit for jam or vegetables for chutney, it is more than a little disappointing when you accidentally burn the stuff whilst making the preserve but sadly this does sometime happen. I find that apples & plums are the worst fruit offenders, whilst sultanas are the most likely to catch when making chutney.

So how do you prevent all your hard work from being wasted?

Firstly, it is important to never stray far from your preserving pan; althouth it is tempting when it takes 40 minutes to cook blackcurrants or 2-3 hours to reduce a chutney. Your attempts to not waste time and get on with something else could result in the whole process being a waste of time if it burns. For this reason, be sure to have everything to hand before you start - e.g. don't go rummaging elsewhere for your jam jars after you have started the cooking process. Be on hand to give your jam/chutney a stir every now and then. I have a fantastic preserving spoon - a long handled wooden spoon with a squared off spoon-end (from Lakeland) that is just perfect for scrapping the bottom of the pan to make sure everything is still moving around.

The key point for stirring a jam is after the sugar has gone in. Stir and stir and stir until all the grittiness has gone and then a bit longer to be sure because any undissolved sugar will catch and burn. I remember reading in several preserves books that once you get jam onto a rolling boil to reach the setting point you must not stir it as this will lose the boil. Good grief, they make it sound as if doing so will somehow destroy the jam setting spell and all will be lost. I have discovered from experience that stirring during a rolling boil is essential when making plum jam. It is true that the boil drops for a moment but it soon returns when you stop stirring and it is better than having plums sticking to the bottom of the pan and burning. I would add a note of caution: sticking a spoon into a vigorously boiling pot of jam turns it into an angry volcano that spits and spats at you. Speaking as an ex-science teacher, I would not let a pupil of mine do such a dangerous thing and would certainly recommend the wearing of goggles if they did! So, hold your long spoon at its maximum length and stand well back, wearing glasses if you have them. Alternatively, temporarily remove the pan from the heat, give it a thorough stir then return it to the boil.

Chutney becomes more prone to sticking the thicker it becomes so be prepared to dedicate more of your attention towards the end of the chutney making process.

If you have ever burnt your jam or chutney then you'll remember the smell well and will be super sensitive to it in the future. This is a good thing as it will give you the chance to save the preserve before it is ruins beyond saving. Be aware that a similar smell occurs when small amounts drip or splatter onto a hot hob so it may not be your preserve that is burning after all. If you suspect burning then remove the pan from the heat and give it a tentative stir. If you feel a layer at the bottom that is stuck then stop stirring. If you are to save your preserve then it is not a good idea to stir the burnt layer into the non-burnt stuff above. It may be that your jam is set or your chutney is thick and you can carefully bottle the non-burnt preserve without disturbing the burnt later at the bottom. I would strongly advise tasting it though to check that the burnt flavour has not penetrated it. Should your jam or chutney not be ready for bottling then tip it into another pan or bowl, clean out the preserving pan then return it to the preserving pan and continue as normal, again checking that the burnt layer hasn't affected its flavour.

So how do you remove a burnt on layer on the bottom of your pan? Firstly, a soak in very hot soapy water is a good idea. Try to remove anything that will come away easily so that only the really tough stuff is left. Next, use a blade hob scrapper if you have one or a wire wool pan scrubber. You can also use a sprinkling of bicarbonate of soda and boiling water to shift it.

Inevitably, however you clean your pan it will leave it scratched. This happened to my preserving pan and eventually I found that everything I cooked in it was sticking to the bottom. Somehow the scratches in the bottom of the pan make it more likely for things to stick in the future. I was finding it very labour intense to have to stir everything pretty much all the time, including things like blackcurrants that never normally stick. I feared it might be time to buy a new preserving pan but first I thought I would try polishing the bottom of it smooth again.

I started with a scourer and a thin layer of vegetable oil. This immediately came away black so I knew I was removing the top surface of the steel (a good thing in this case). Having rinsed that away with soapy water, I fitted a mini drill with a buffer pad and smear the bottom of the pan with toothpaste. Then I picked up the phone and had a nice long chat with my mum whilst polishing the pan with the drill in the other hand. Finally I gave the pan a thorough clean to remove the toothpaste and hey-presto it was smooth and shiny again!

For the final test I cooked up a batch of rhubarb (another sticker) and ginger jam and it cooked perfectly with no more than the normal level of stirring required.

I don't think I have ever met a preserve maker who hasn't burnt something at some point so if you do burn something you'll be in good company. It is disappointing and it is tempting to try to save what you can. As I have said, most of the time something can be salvaged but always check the flavour. Don't let it put you off, just chalk it up to experience and learn from your mistakes for next time.

Red Hot Sauces

At the beginning of the year I was asked if I could devise a sauce for Red Hot World Buffet. For anyone who has never been, Red Hot offer an all you can eat buffet with a variety of world cuisines.

With so many different cuisines on offer in the restaurant, it was initially difficult to decide where to start with a suitable sauce... Indian, Chinese, Italian, British...? So I decided not to focus on just one but to come up with several sauces and to see which one they liked best. On that basis I made a lime chutney suitable for Indian food, a plum sauce for Chinese food, a sweet chilli sauce, a tomato ketchup and a brown sauce.

After several weeks of maturing in the bottle, it was time for the sauces to have their first outing so on Tuesday I took them to the Red Hot restaurant in Milton Keynes' theatre district where the chefs & service staff had a chance to have a taste. Oddly it was both exciting and slightly nerve-raking to be present as people tasted my sauces. After many years of making preserves I have learnt to have faith in what I make because lots of people have told me that it's good stuff but usually people just buy a few jars and disappear, to eat and comment in private.

The feedback from the Red Hot staff was both useful and interesting and soon it became obvious that the Lime Chutney, Plum Sauce & Sweet Chilli Sauce were the 3 favourites. Another or maybe several tasting sessions are needed yet but it was a good start. It will be interesting to see how the process unfolds.

Horray for spring

On Friday afternoon 200 children left school with a Red Nose biscuit they had made and I left with aching feet but a feeling of satisfaction. Then several hours later I sighed, felt my shoulders drop back to their normal position and realised it was the weekend!

And what a glorious weekend it turned out to be. The frost was just thawing as I pegged my washing out in the garden early on Saturday morning. And by the afternoon it was very nearly... er... warm. Time for another family outing to the allotment. Whilst Steve wrestled with the temperamental Mantis, my first job was to plant the onion sets.

I have tried planting onion sets at various times in the year with varying success. The worst time from the onions' point of view seems to be in the autumn as many of them succumb to the winter weather. Those that do survive tend to only reach a small size and the whole crop is ready about the same time as spring sown sets so no advantage there either. The worst time for planting from a human point of view is February when everything is still cold. I used to dread the onion planting as by the end of it my fingers & feet would be numb. Heat-treated onion sets need to be planted later - usually April, which is nice time to plant onions. Only thing is, heat-treated onions are more expensive to buy and don't seem to be significantly better than ordinary ones. So now I buy ordinary, spring planting onions and wait until March to sow them.

Having planted 100 brown Sturon, 100 red onion sets and 40 shallots, I turned my attention to the girls' plot which needed digging over. In the background, the Mantis was reluctantly being coaxed back into life. By the time I had forked over the girls' plot the Mantis was up and running so Steve gave the bed a going over with it. Then I marked it out with string to separate it into five main sections - two sections for potatoes, one for shared sweetcorn and one section each for their main vegetable growing area.

By this point the girls were getting bored with their quest to dig down to bedrock so I suggested they got their potatoes planted instead. My youngest is growing Mayan Gold again this year. She started growing all yellow vegetables last year and enjoyed it so much she's doing it again this year. Despite Mayan Gold being chosen mainly on the basis of its yellow colour, it turned out to be a very tasty potato that made lovely crispy chips. My eldest this year will be trying out Mayan Twillight - a yellow potato with big pink patches. It looks very pretty and I'll be interested to see how it cooks.

With the girls' potatoes planted they were ready to go home so we left Steve planting 3kg of Charlottes. Back home the girls were hungry & thirsty so I put some apple & cinnamon hot cross buns under the grill and made it extra tasty by spreading plum & cinnamon jam on top. A lovely springtime snack to end a lovely spring day.

Red Nose Day

I'm spending the day at my youngest's daughter's school tomorrow & Friday making "Fruity Face" biscuits for Red Nose Day. I did the same thing two years ago for the last Comic Relief and volunteered to organise it all again this time.

I sometimes wonder why I do these things. Sorting out a simple recipe and testing it is one thing but scaling it up to make 220 of them over two days with children between the ages of 3 and 7 is another. It involves meetings, letter writing, spreadsheets, budgeting, delegation, people skills, teaching skills... shall I go on?

So far this week I have worked out how much stuff I needed to buy, collected and counted a vast quantity of 50p donations, been out to buy the ingredients, organised my team of volunteer helpers, tweeked the timetable with the deputy head and cooked a test batch to remind myself of what equipment we'll need and any possible pitfalls to highlight in advance.

Phew... no wonder I'm feeling tired. 180 biscuits to cooked tomorrow... expecting to feel tired tomorrow night too... and Friday night as well.

Still, this time next week I'll have a rosy view of the whole thing and be pleased to have done it and who know, in two years time I might do it all again despite several times today saying this would be my last time !

Fruit Face Biscuits (makes 6)

4 oz (110g) self-raising flour

2 oz (55g) margarine or butter

2 oz (55g) caster sugar

A few drops vanilla extract

1 fl oz (2 tablespoons) milk

3 glace cherries

12 raisins

2 dried apricots

Preheat oven to 190°C, gas 5 and grease a baking tray. Sift the flour into a bowl then rub in the fat until it feels like breadcrumbs. Stir in the caster sugar then add the vanilla extract to the milk and use it to bind the mix into a soft dough. Divide the dough into six balls. Roll each ball in your hands then flatten onto the baking tray. Press two raisins into the biscuit to form eyes, half a glace cherry for a nose and a thin slice of dried apricot for the mouth. Bake for 20 minutes until risen and golden. Cool on a wire rack.