This year I grew borlotti beans.
I had four plants and you might remember I posted about them when they were very small.
Well they grew. And they had lovely pale pink flowers. And beans.
And eventually the beans had lovely stripey pods.
Then I harvested them.
There were 11 bean pods in total.
Which yielded 40 beans.
They do look beautiful don’t they.
So the tomatoes should have been ripe ages ago but mine still look like this:
Which means I’ll be making batches of green pickles again this year. But that’s okay because I rather like the green pickles. I made them first with under ripe plums that I collected in deepest Suffolk with Vivia of Grethic’s Grethica. She also tracked down some recipes which she posted links to here. Its worth watching the you tube clips because they are a bit bonkers but to make it a bit easier I’ve given the recipe the way I did it here.
You need:
Lots of unripe tomatoes or plums
Sour pickle:
1 quantity (see note) each of fenugreek seeds, mustard seeds, red chilli flakes, cumin seeds, coriander seeds
½ quantity of salt
¼ quantity of tumeric
rapeseed oil
Sweet and sour pickle:
8% salt
4% tumeric
50% sugar
rapeseed oil
In both cases the quantities take a bit of guess work. In the second one I assumed it meant use 8% of the weight of fruit you have etc. In the first one it was harder so I just did what looked like a sensible quantity for the fruit I had the get a good level of spiciness.
This is what you do:
Cut the tomatoes (or plums) into quarters. Discard the stones if you have plums. I usually make one batch of each type so I split the total fruit in half then carry on.
Sour pickle:
Mix the spice and salt together in a bowl. Add the fruit and coat with the mix. Cover with cling film and leave somewhere light and warm for 3-4 days. Pack tightly in sterilised jars and cover with rapeseed oil. Leave it to mature for at least a month. This one is quite like lime pickle so is great with curries. I use any leftover spicy oil for cooking curry as well.
Sweet and sour pickle:
Mix the salt and tumeric together and add the fruit. Coat. Cover with clingfilm and leave in a bright warm place for 2-3 days. Add the sugar and leave for a further 3-5 days. Pack into sterilised jars and cover with oil. As this one is sweeter it also works well with cheeses or cold meats.
Here is what you end up with:
So the closing date is passed. The entries are in. I’m about to draw the results for my first ever blog competition.
But first let me indulge in a little wander through some of the thoughts I’ve had about running a competition on my blog…..
1. It was fun, people do bother to write good replies if you set them a topic and now I know there are quite a few other stationery geeks out there.
2. You get way more comments on your posts if people think they are in with the chance of winning and from all sorts of people who either don’t normally visit the blog or don’t normally comment. So it does seem to drive traffic (the google stats confirm this too).
3. You get more comments so you kind of feel more popular but of course it’s important to remember it’s a ‘buying friends with the promise of sweets’ approach.
4. There are people out there who like real old fashioned fountain pens, maybe we need to form a club (there probably already is one!)
5. Random number generators are great fun for playing with for some unfathomable reason (ooo look another random number).
6. Random number generators made me think about what we mean by random. The winning number (which I’ll reveal in a minute) kind of felt like a swizz when it popped up (not, I’m sure for the person who has won), it didn’t feel random. Which takes me back to point 5 as I then spent a good 10 minutes clicking the ‘Generate’ button to see what happened.
7. I like competitions so if you’re reading this and you have fab prizes you’d like me to offer to readers then hey get in touch 
Right onto the draw. There were 50 comments overall. The first one is a trackback so doesn’t count. Two people commented twice but don’t worry they don’t get to be in the draw twice their first comment only counts. So although I put in 1 -50 to the random number generator we really only had 47 entries, I would just draw again if a non winning number came up.
Anyway it didn’t because here it is (drum roll):
The winner is comment 2 which in the way I have done the draw means Kelly has won.
WELL DONE (rounds of applause).
Thanks to everyone for taking part I really did love reading all your favourite stationery items.
So here I am again with my morning cup of coffee and some squares of chocolate.
I really like to try out different chocolate (always dark never milk).
But there are some favourites.
And my ‘regular’ choice for quite some time has been Divine’s 70% bar. Dark, smooth, nicely chocolatey, not bitter. And sensibly priced. A great everyday bar.
So imagine my delight when the people at Divine told me there was an 85% bar being launched and would I like to try it?
Would I? I leapt at the chance.
Here I am looking suitably excited before doing a comparative tasting of 70% vs 85%.
Now I’m someone who likes 100% cocoa solids chocolate, its weird and bitter but really nice. So I wasn’t too worried whether I would like the 85% more just interested to find out how it would compare.
I took a quick shot of squares of each lined up.
I was surprised that the 85% didn’t really look much different (the squares on the right).
I moved on to tasting…..
The 85% was unusually smooth and not bitter, often at this level there can be quite a strong bitter after taste which, depending on what you like, puts some people off. This wasn’t like that at all. It retained the smoothness of the 70% but was more intense, more chocolatey, perhaps more fruity.
I really liked it.
At the moment its only stocked in Tesco but the lovely people at Divine tell me that it will be coming to other shops soon. I hope so because I want some more. Soon.
You can find more about Divine’s products here: http://www.divinechocolate.com/products/bars.aspx
And thanks for the sample bar….it didn’t last long!
Some of the things in the garden are starting to be ripe and harvestable.
Some are only just forming.
I fear many of them will be too late to grow enough before the season is over.
Like this teeny tiny aubergine.
Less than a week on its now actually twice that size.
What do you reckon its chances are?
I’ve not run a competition on the blog before. I’ve thought about it a few times and played with different ideas but never actually taken the plunge.
Until now.
Why?
Well two things really, someone offered a lovely prize, one I’d be happy to have myself and when I asked Twitter the verdict was resoundingly that competitions are GOOD….. I assume everyone is hoping to win. So good it would seem that one cheeky chappy (he knows who he is) suggested I design the rules such that he was guaranteed to win, very naughty. And I won’t be doing that.
So what’s the competition and what’s the prize?
Well the prize is this hamper of goodies:
which has been supplied courtesy of HamperGifts.co.uk, who provide a wide range of hampers, chocolate gifts and mothers day baskets.
I particularly like the fact that as well as the food goodies it comes in rather nice looking boxes, but that’s probably because I’m a bit of a stationery and storage fan, as evidenced by some of my posterous posts.
So what do you have to do to be in with a chance of winning? Well you have to post a comment on this post by 20th September telling me what your favourite stationery item is. I’ll then pick a winner using a complex spreadsheet formula or much more possibly a random number generator. If you don’t list a favourite stationery item your comment won’t be included in the draw and if you comment more than once the earliest comment that meets the competition rules will be the one that counts…..so Dan there is little chance of rigging it in your favour….
Over to you to try and win the hamper.
Please note the hamper will be dispatched direct form the supplier so if you are feeling very generous you could choose to send it to someone as a gift. Note that delivery can be anywhere in the UK except the Channel Islands, PO Box or BFPO Box addresses.
This weekend I ‘harvested’ the lavender from the garden.
As ever there was quite a lot.
So I’m looking for ideas of what to do with it.
So far on the list I have:
Lavender vodka
Lavender water
Lavender crust rack of lamb
maybe lavender scented jelly (I just need someone with a surfeit of crab apples to help out)
and of course lavender bags and pillows
All other ideas welcome there really is rather a lot of it
(to give you an idea of how much the picture is of it laid out on a table that’s 5ft x 3ft)
