Coeliac Awareness Week - Yummy Gluten Free Garlic Bread.

It is Coeliac Awareness Week this week, so I thought I would share my super easy gluten free garlic bread recipe. Warm, soft and buttery on the inside with a slight crunch on the outside. I must admit I used to be very lazy and just buy garlic bread and put it in the oven to heat it up. When I found out I was gluten intolerant I couldn't do that anymore. So I had to take matters into my own hands and make my own! I don't make my own bread, I have tried a couple times and once the 'bread' is cooled I could defend my home against an intruder with it, it is that hard and dense. I have found that gluten free ciabatta or regular gluten free rolls work brilliantly though. So this is how I make my garlic butter. 

I don't ever really measure this recipe because it is so easy to make yummy. This is what you need:

1 knob of butter
6-7 cloves of garlic (I like my garlic butter strong, reduce this amount if you want)
3-4 tablespoons of olive oil
1/4 teaspoon of dried parsley
1/4 teaspoon of dried tarragon

Put the butter in a cup in a bowl of hot water (so the butter starts to melt). Peel the garlic cloves and grind them into a smooth paste in a pestle and mortar, you could just chop the cloves up small if you don't have a pestle and mortar. Put the garlic paste in with the butter and add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Stir this until the butter has nearly melted and add the dried parsley and tarragon. Then add the rest of the olive oil. You want the garlic butter thick but pourable. All you need to do now is to slice into some rolls, you want to leave one edge uncut so the slices don't fall apart and spoon the garlic butter down every cut you have made. Put them on a baking tray in an oven heated to 200 degrees C for about 5 minutes, until the crust of the bread has just started to toast. 

Hope you enjoy <3

Much Love

xkx

Planting Our Future Food.

Ed and I have been working hard at the allotment this weekend, I thought I would show you what we have been planting and what is growing. It is so exciting to see the first few plants poking their heads out of the soil. 

The garlic and the salad leaves have survived through the harsh weather. The salad seeds even had a heavy snow on them a couple of days after I planted them, so I was really surprised to see they were growing. I planted my sweetcorn in toilet roll tubes, sweetcorn gets very grumpy if you disturb the roots of young plants so by planting them in toilet roll tubes it means you can plant them straight into the ground when they have been hardened off. The pea shoots and mustard white are a chic edition to salads and they are so cheap to grow, you can even grow these on windowsills. (All the seeds shown were covered with compost after these photos were taken otherwise the seeds would not germinate.) I also planted a row of peas outside, some rocket, spinach, turnips and lettuce. Can't wait for us to have our first salad from our allotment!

Hope you have had a wicked weekend, we are off to a BBQ in a bit *yey*.

xkx

Nettles and Dandelions... for Lunch!

Ed and I have been really busy at the allotment today, planting seeds, digging over beds and fertilising them to get it all ready to grow lots of tasty vegetables. We didn't really have a lot in for lunch today so I decided to have a quick look at what the allotment already had on offer!

I snipped off a little punnet full of dandelion flowers and then donned my gardening gloves to gather some nettle tips. You want the lovely young leaves at the top of the nettles, the older leaves can be a bit fibrous. I also picked some random onion-things we have growing on one of the raised beds, at first I thought they were spring onions but they had a garlicky hit so I wonder if it was green garlic. If you are brave enough to try this and don't have green garlic then you can replace it with a clove of garlic or a few spring onions. 

So to make my weedy lunch I washed the nettles and picked the dandelion petals from the stems. I washed them really well then sautéed the nettles and chopped green garlic in a knob of butter (this will take all the sting away), on a medium heat. I added a little salt then waited until the nettles had wilted, you will know they are ready because they will reduce in size by about half, then I put the dandelion petals in. I cooked this for another 5 minutes then added a portion of rice noodles to the pan and mixed it all together. 

This was so delicious! Ed couldn't believe that I made this from weeds, that are free and easy to find. If you want to try this yourself a couple of things to remember are, nettles are best picked in the spring and autumn, when they are far away from flowering. Only pick these two plants if you are sure what they are, don't pick them if they have had pesticides or weed killer on them and don't pick them if they are at dog peeing height (for obvious reasons). 

Enjoy <3

xkx  

Make Raised Beds and get the Digging Done, While the Sun Shines.

There is an old saying that goes 'Make hay while the sun shines', it was a beautiful sunny weekend so I took advantage of it and 'Made a raised bed and did some digging whilst the autumny sun shone'. I was so pleased that we managed to get these jobs done, the combination of fresh air, autumn sun and a flask of green tea really helped me feel better after my day in bed on Friday.

We went and got some wood on Saturday morning and just managed to squeeze it into the car. And Ed went to work on building the raised bed. I must admit I left him to it because he gets a bit scary when he is holding tools, its like DIY Jekyll and Hyde! So I decided to get some weeding done on the four front raised beds. I then dug in some organic manure so the soil will be in tip top condition in the spring (Ed had disappeared back home by the time the smelly poo came out). 

Today I set to digging over the large veg patch at the front of our plot. This was very hard work but it needed to get done before the heavy frosts starts to fall. I just thought about my dad when I was digging because I used to always help him out in the garden when he was digging over the veg plot, usually I would have to pick up all the weeds. Once I had dug it all over I sowed half of the patch with my green manure (because I vastly underestimated how much seed I needed) and hope the birds didn't swoop down and fill their tummies with my rye when I went home. I also got two bulbs of garlic planted as well, which is very exciting. Can't wait to see them peeking out of the soil.

This is a sneaky pic that I took over one of our neighbours fences in the allotment, that pumpkin is huge! I wonder what they are going to do with, it would look amazing as a jack-O-lantern, then made into a lovely soup or something... *yum*.

Hope you have all had a great weekend in the autumny sun.

The Great British Garlic Challenge & My Green Manure.

I've not been very well today so I have spent all day in bed, so when Ed got home from work carrying this little box it really cheered me up. Ed and I love garlic, we managed to buy some from our local market this time last year-ish from the Isle of Wight and it was so delicious. So when I was researching where to get some garlic from to grow I stumbled upon The Garlic Farm. I found their website really useful it really is the one stop shop for garlicky wisdom. I then saw that they are running a competition called The Great British Garlic Challenge  where they are looking to find the best amateur garlic grower in the UK and that was the point where my competitive streak began to surface, especially when I saw how good the prize is. So I ordered my Solent Wight bulbs and was very pleased when they came in a few days.   

I love how they package up their garlic, it feels like you are getting such a wonderful little present through the post that has had a great lot of care and attention put into it. 

The bulbs look strong and robust, ready to be in the running to win The Great British Garlic Challenge.

And the bulbs even come with a little information card that has tips for growing and even recipes on the other side. I love this company, I think the detail and passion is so evident in every level of the service that I have received. And if I don't win the challenge I will definitely be pestering Ed to take me there next year. So I am excited that planting garlic will be one of the allotment jobs for me at the weekend, the others will be fixing the one raised bed then digging some organic manure into them and the other job is so sow some green manure in the big veg patch at the front of our plot.

This is Hungarian Grazing Rye one of the plants that is classed as a green manure. Basically it locks lots of loveliness into the soil ready to give plants I grow in the spring a good start. It is also really good at suppressing weeds *YEY*. 

There are many types of green manure available for lots of different soil types and what time of year you want to sow. The website I got my seed from is really informative www.sowseeds.co.uk. The seed came in a couple of days as well which was fab. The only down side is I totally underestimated how much I needed, I ordered enough for 6m squared when I probably needed double that. Oh well it just gives me an excuse to order some more off seeds off them, as they have a rather tempting veg section with seeds that I can sow now, in the colder months. Just have to hope that I feel well enough to at least get some of the jobs done over the weekend.

Hope you have lots of autumny adventures planned this weekend.

My 2 New Chilli Plants and Lovely Market Food.

I am really lucky to live in a place where twice a month (on a Saturday) we have an abundant farmer's market. Today I was excited to see some new stalls, one was even selling unusual chilli plants. And here they are (well two of them), unfortunately I was too excited to actually write down the names of these two chilli plants so I can't introduce them to you properly.

I was drawn to the first one because I thought the colour of the flowers and the leaves are breathtakingly purple. 

I also admired it because this plant is not afraid to make it obvious that it is part of the Solanaceae family. So this beautiful thing is closely relation to the deadly nightshade plant and I think the flowers are nearly identical.

The second plant I bought because of my greedy side, I saw this plant groaning under the weight of all its baby chilli-peppers and I thought *yum*. I really love hot food and I can't wait for these little beauties to turn a blazing red so I can add them to my cooking and maybe even make some chilli oil and Harissa paste.

The stall holder said that this purple will fade to yellow and then ripen to a fiery red. 

I also picked up a few other bits and bobs from the market. I picked up some raw milk that is produced from local 'happy' cows. I like to try and support the local farms, one way for dairy farmers to make a decent living is to sell milk like this straight to the customer. Its been all in the news lately about how the money that farmers spend producing milk is actually higher than the price that is being paid for it, which in turn is slowly killing the industry. I was raised on raw milk so I know that it works for me fine (Ed can also drink this milk whereas he can't drink pasteurised). But you may want to do your research before trying it.

We bought garlic from the market too, this one is called Bella Italiano and apparently the flavour is really strong, it smells lovely and I have promised Ed that I will make some garlic bread with it, so we will probably be stinky after eating that.

You have got to love Wobbly Bottom Farm cheese. The name is just fabulous and always makes me smile and the cheese from here tastes so good that you could easily eat enough to make the name ring true. This is pesto cheese, I have never seen this before but the taste is amazing, it is really basilly and tastes like green (my friends always laugh at me for saying things taste like colours). I can't wait to try and cook with this lovely cheese, I bet it will taste amazing in summery salads too. Food always tastes a million times better from the market.

Hope you are all having a good weekend.