Half term sucked

I was looking forward to half term. A rest from making packed lunches at 6.30am, a rest from "where on earth are all the school socks?" and a rest from the school run, fraught with "have you got your lunch/clarinet/sports kit/my marbles?" angst. Instead we would do fun things and go on nice autumnal trips wouldn't we?

No.

On day one H9 was sick. On day three R7 was scratching her scalp. On investigation I found some rather grown up head lice and many, many babies. Bugger. Oops.We haven't had head lice for ages (years) but I constantly check because there's the threat you will be asked to remove your child from school should they be found to be infested. The week I ran the Cardiff half marathon I forgot to check. Bugger. Oops.

They're all dead now (not the children, the head lice) but I'm paranoid they'll come back. I chase, brandishing comb, while my offspring run away shrieking "no mummy I have NOT got head lice," with me in hot pursuit (and gaining because I can still outrun my children...ha ha) wailing "but that's what you said last time and you DID!"

Meanwhile it rained. Biblically. Everywhere is ankle deep in slippery mud. The small dog goes out, absorbs it all in his wiry fur and shakes it all over the kitchen floor. Then he wipes his face on the dining room carpet drawing big muddy stripes. The carpet is Scotchguarded but I'm not sure this sort of treatment is entirely good for it. Perhaps I should put down canvasses and sell the results as canine art?

This Monday it was a school inset day (and payday - yippee!) so we went to Tesco. When we arrived the CR-V was doing an excellent impression of being on fire. I sniffed at the smoke - it was steam. A broken radiator. I left it simmering while we shopped and it calmed down enough to be topped up with coolant and driven home. Another bloody big bill. Sigh.

What can a woman do in the face of such (relatively minor really) adversity? Bake, that's what.

What we have here is brioche (bread bakeathon #15), Halloween cupcakes, bagels (bread bakeathon #16), naan bread (so easy to make and heaps cheaper than bought) and green tomato chutney.

Bread bakeathon #14 and sheep

The next instalment in the River Cottage Bread book bakeathon is bread sticks. This is a dough similar to focaccia but is a simple enough thing. Mix it together, leave to rise, go for a five mile run, return (wearing the contents of a puddle courtesy of a Land Rover), roll out the dough, cut into strips, spread with oil, sprinkle with seeds, rise for a bit and then bake. They are shepherd's crook shapes because as you lift the strips of dough they stretch and become too long for the tin. I quite like the shape.

We ate them with what I call 'Trail soup'. It's a vegetable soup based on a recipe that I originally read in 'Trail' magazine, hence the name. Chop two carrots, a slice of swede, a leek, onion, garlic and a potato into smallish cubes and leave to sweat in a tablespoon of olive oil with a teaspoon of butter added. Then wash the horrid sauce off a can of baked beans and add those along with some stock or water and maybe some green leafy bits like Savoy cabbage or cavelo nero and a chopped tomato. Add a handful or two of tiny soup pasta shapes and cook until everything is soft. Adjust for seasoning and serve with grated Cheddar cheese and bread sticks. A bit of pesto is lovely stirred into the soup too. Next bread: Brioche.

This afternoon's task was to sort the sheep. They've been quietly eating grass in the fields over the summer and now we need to sort the ewes from the lambs, check the ewe's teeth (if they've got no teeth they can't eat enough to rear lambs so they have to go). The ones we are keeping also get a dose of worming medicine at this time of year. We're organic but this has the blessing of the Soil Association.

In the race they go, two or three at a time. We check they've got ear tags and replace any as necessary. The rules on ear tags change annually. A year or so ago they had to be tagged in each ear as lambs. Now it's one tag but they're plastic and are a real bugger very difficult to insert in the ears. Ewes and ewe lamb replacements are drafted through the gate to the left; lambs for meat and cull ewes go to the right.

Toby the cat is there purely in a supervisory capacity. He chose the wrong place to sit as shortly after I took this picture he was bounced on by a siily lamb. After that he supervised from inside the building.

A purple dot of marker spray shows that this ewe lamb is being kept and will go on to have lambs of her own. The dot also means we can tell the two groups apart which is lucky because when we thought we had finished and were herding the ewes out to the field again the lambs made a break for freedom and the whole flock got mixed up again.

I'm afraid I may have lost my temper a little (a lot!) at this point. We managed to herd them back into the yard, with a bit of shouting and chasing (there's always a stubborn one. I chased it, furiously. It being temperamental, stupid and intractable, flattened mum into a pile of sheep poo before we rounded it up. I hate sheep.) I redrafted the dots from the non dots, then we tied the gates really tightly this time and now (phew!) the ewes are on the hayfields, the cull ewes and lambs for fattening are on the field by the house and the ram and the pet sheep Chops are (noisily) in one of the little paddocks.

Bread bakeathon #13 and winter planting

The next bread from my recipe-by-recipe bake through of the River Cottage Bread Book was ciabatta. It's a bit of a palaver to make but the results are well worth it.

It's a really wet dough involving a mix of flour and semolina and you ferment it for three hours. Every half an hour or so you add a slug of olive oil and fold the dough up, lovingly, like a big soft blanket. This gives you a silky soft dough which is pretty impossible to handle. The only way to deal with it is with prodigious quantities of semolina to stop it sticking to your hands, the work surface and the dog. Daniel Stevens talks of bake stones, linen cloths and the like but when I tried that last time I lost all of the air from the dough transferring it between them. This time I proved it on the tins and it was more successful.

The result is six lovely little loaves, delightfully crispy on the outside and pillowy soft within. We ate the first ones hot from the oven, torn open, drizzled with a little olive oil and stuffed with grated mature cheddar and sliced home grown cucumber. The next meal we had them sliced into fat fingers, dipped into extra virgin olive oil and then into home made dukka. Divine. If I wasn't baking my way through this book recipe by recipe I'd make more ciabatta but I have an agenda and next on it is breadsticks.

The Delfland Nurseries Organic winter plants arrived on Tuesday all neatly snuggled into two brown cardboard boxes. They consisted of the winter vegetable selection (nine star broccoli, spring cabbages Duncan and spring hero, calabrese pacifica, perpetual spinach, bright lights chard, giant red mustard) and the winter salad selection (winter purslane, corn salad, land cress, lettuces winter density and Arctic King and wild rocket). Today with children out and husband working late I dodged biblical rain and headed into the polytunnel for a planting session.

After a bit of determined dibbing we now have neat rows of winter food - brassicas at the back, little salads at the front - all lined up like soldiers in the new big polytunnel and ready for the worst winter can throw at it. A polytunnel is quite coddling for some of these varieties but past experience has taught me that they hate the wet we get here no matter how good they are at surviving the cold.

My mini cucumbers are still going strong - astonishingly considering it's almost November - I think they like the new polytunnel too.

Guilty cake, bread bakeathon #12 and a lovely thing

This is carrot cake but it's also a guilty cake too. I made it yesterday after a particularly shouty morning before the school run. Brian's been on early shifts this week (why can't criminals stick to 9-5? Then he could work normal hours...) which left me outnumbered. On Friday after a shower interrupted by BANG, BANG, BANG on the door and MUMMMEEEE and then getting dressed which involved the door being slammed back on its hinges so the other one could go MUMMMEEEEE at me, starkers, and complain about the previous one I got, shall we say, a little stressed.

It ended with the eldest saying "calm down Mummy" in an irritating Michael Winneresque way (is anything guaranteed to have the opposite effect to calming?) But we made friends, I took them to school, then I made cake.

It's a honey-soaked carrot cake from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Everyday and I've just had a great big slice of it for Saturday breakfast. Breakfast is the best time of day to eat cake. Your appetite is unblunted by previous meals and you've got the rest of the day to use up the calories and there's not much difference between cake and toast and marmalade, except this particular cake's got nearly a pound of carrots in it which makes it one of your five a day.

While the cake was baking and as it was a chilly day which makes it a good idea to have the oven on (since turning on the oil-fired heating is Banned) I made the next instalment in my Big Bread Bakeathon. This is focaccia from the River Cottage bread book and is something I make regularly because it's so lovely with a bowl of veggie soup. I'm not sure mine would come up to Paul Hollywood's exacting standards on The Great British Bakeoff but it's delicious and is a big family favourite. We ate it with roast butternut squash soup which is, basically, autumn in a bowl.

While I was baking the postman arrived with an unexpected parcel. Inside it was a 'Peter's Seedling Pot Maker'. You use the top punch part to wrap newspaper around and then press it into the die part with a little water which fixes the base of the pot. This is perfect for seedlings as you can plant them out in the pot (which then degrades) without disturbing the roots and checking the growth.

The lovely thing about it is that it was made by my Dad who has taken to woodturning at his new home on Mull and the even lovelier thing is that the top part is made from wood from a tree that grew here on our little farm on the Preselis. Paper potmaking can now be a nice indoor winter activity for me ready for the spring sowings. In the meantime it is sitting in pride of place on the mantelpiece.

Gardening, swearing and sewing

Yesterday we grabbed the bit of sunshine and used it to help us finally finish tensioning the polytunnel. This was achieved with much swearing. I now know (having watched that wonderful bit on Fry's Plant Word where Stephen Fry and Brian Blessed swore like TV chefs while inflicting pain on themselves) that, when one has hit ones thumb with a hammer (again and again) saying f@ck and b@ll@cks helps with the pain.

Anyway we achieved our objective, the far right hand corner of the tunnel no longer flaps so I'll stop nagging Brian about it anxiously when the wind blows. I cleared out the tomatoes too, made the happy discovery of a tennis ball-sized butternut squash and started getting ready for a delivery of winter plants from Delfland Nurseries. I had intended to grow my own winter plants but we were delayed so long by the weather that everything backed up (and suddenly it's October!)

I've also got my leeks tucked up for the winter under a nice thick mulch. Note the handsome chaps in the background? Those are the cockerels. We keep squeezing them in the hope that there might be some meat on them and then using the fact that there isn't to put off the inevitable. When the four of them are in full voice at the crack of doom, it's quite a racket, but a cute racket that I quite like. (I CAN'T keep four cockerels, I really can't!)

I've also been turning an old pair of Ikea curtains into cushions; a housewarming one for Dad and Pat, a cupcake one for R7 and a horsey hearts one for H9. I was inspecting the remaining pieces of material recently (the tab top and hemmed bottom) and wondered, if I sewed them together again, they would fit the dining room window. They did.

I used a piece of scarlet ribbon to hide the join, bordered by gingham ribbon from eBay and finally edged one side of the panel with some lovely pom-pom trim I bought from Nellie Dean at the recent craft fair in Maenclochog. The result? One re-purposed curtain for less than £10 (and plenty of spare bits of ribbon and pom-pom trim for other things.)

Bread Bakeathon #9, #10 and #11

This blog should be sub-titled 'end of the second chapter of the River Cottage Bread Book'. I've baked the Basic Loaf and now I have baked everything in the Variations on the basic bread recipe chapter.

The final three included monstery bread (heavy with oats) and hazel maizel bread, a lovely concoction involving maize meal, apple juice and nuts which made for lovely crusty brown rolls - both of which I forgot to photograph (but they just looked like brown rolls).

The last bread in the chapter was Empty-the-shelf bread, the opportunity to use up tail-ends of whatever bags of flour are to hand and anything else that might be leftover, like nuts or muesli (but Daniel Stevens advises against empty-the-Hoover-bag bread...)

My Empty-the-shelf bread included maize meal and apple juice from the previous bread, a handful of wholemeal flour, white flour, a handful of porridge oats, walnuts and sesame, pumpkin and sunflower seeds with a bit of walnut oil for luck.

I was bored with rolls by this point (and had been watching Lorraine Pascale's Home Cooking Made Easy on BBC2) so when it came to shaping we got a pain d'epi (at the front) and a fougasse. The latter is a lovely shape for tearing and sharing with a bowl of soup and is a shape I think I'll be making a lot in the future. It bakes well too and gives lots of lovely crust.

So having baked all the basics (and I think my bread has improved in the process) we now head off into the realms of 'Beyond the basic loaf'. This promises such delights as focaccia, ciabatta, brioche, bagels, muffins and pizza, all of which I have cooked before, but also includes Vetkoek (which are deep fried. I NEVER deep fry!) and barbecue breads at not really a barbecuing time of year. This should be interesting!

Cardiff Half Marathon

Running hurts. Have I mentioned that before? Sometimes I can't think why I do it but, like any true addict, I can't stop. Some days you feel you could run everywhere at high speed. Why walk? It's so slow! Other days running feels impossible. Too much effort! Too painful! When you get out of bed and pull on your trainers you never know what sort of a day it is. Yesterday was one of those 'running is hard' days which was a shame as it was also Cardiff Half Marathon.

The Doctor wasn't in.

My running legs didn't turn up for this year's race. At some points I felt I was running on the spot as people streamed past me. At mile seven, plodding along a four mile section of scorching dual carriageway, I was going so slowly I was able to dig out my phone and send Brian a text saying "too hot!". What I actually wanted to text was "HELP!!!!!!" or "call me a taxi!"

But I'm no quitter so I abandoned my plans for a PB of around two hours and 15 minutes and aimed just to complete. I had a low moment when the 2:15 pacer just ran away leaving me running on the spot (at least that's what it felt like!) but then Brian, H9 and R7 were there on the side cheering and yelling "only 500 metres to go!" and I managed to resist asking for a piggy back to the finish line.

My time was two hours, 25 minutes and ten seconds. It's easy to lose ten minutes on a half marathon looking at the view, eating jelly babies, drinking water and stepping over those who had collapsed, fainted, vomited or pulled something (so many this year). It wasn't my fastest ever time, but not my slowest either and I'll be back next year to have another go at the 2:15 mark.

Mrs Relievedtohavefinished wearing medal and hideously unflattering huge t-shirt.

Afterwards I was virtually immobile, tearful and in quite a bit of pain. Running half marathons HURTS! Next year (yes, of course I'm doing it again next year) I plan to start my training earlier (you see I really wasn't going to do it this year so I'd got a bit lazy in my running). Having discovered what to do to avoid back pain I find I now need to find what to do to avoid ankle pain.

I ran this year to also raise money for Birmingham Hospice who cared for Ann (who was like an aunt, but was my cousin-in-law) until her death in August. Ann was one of life's truly lovely people, always there at family weddings and christenings with a big hat and even bigger smile. It was a privilege and and honour to run in the hospice's running vest in memory of Ann. As a member of her wider family there was little we could do when she was so ill but raising money for the hospice was something I could do.

There's still time to sponsor me so anyone who would still like to do so can click the button on the right hand side of this page. Enormous thanks to everyone who has sponsored me so far and helped towards my total of £175 - but I have had other monies pledged so I expect to reach £200. THANK YOU!