A glut of cucumbers... means cocktails!

Of course it does. It's obvious really!  As you know the cucumbers in my greenhouse have been growing well, with three appearing the moment we turned our backs and went away for the weekend at the end of July.

And they just keep on coming...

My current cucumber stash

It's no bad thing but with the weather turning cooler (ok colder and wetter) I'm not sure how many more salads we have in us, so I needed to find another way to use them.

Our cucumbers are pricklier than the ones you buy, but also taste way better, are crispier and aren't quite as uniform in shape!  We've been eating them in salads and dipping them into houmous for a while now but we still aren't really making much of a dent in our stash. 

After some Googling I decided cocktails were the way forward. MOH and I are quite partial to a cocktail (or two, or more!) and as we had vodka, triple sec and could rustle up some ice and lime juice this Martha Stewart recipe seemed ideal.

Plus my mint in the garden needed cutting down, so it was just meant to be...

Two of the cucumbers quickly became this:

And into the blender they went before being sieved. 

The resulting cucumber juice was a lovely pale green.  With my part complete it was over to MOH to mix the cocktails. 

To a cup of mint, some ice, three tablespoons of lime juice and two teaspoons of sugar he added half a cup of vodka, two tablespoons of triple sec (we substituted this for Cointreau) and three-quarters of a cup of the pale green juice.  

A quick taste and for us it needed a touch more sugar, with that adjusted (and a splash more vodka for good measure) it was into two chilled glasses and garnished with a sliver of cucumber. 

So there we were on a rain soaked Bank Holiday Monday with some beautiful cocktails!  Not quite the weather these cocktails deserved but a refreshing, if not slightly "alchofrolic" way to deal with our cucumber glut. It's definitely a good thing to try!

Shaken, not stirred...

That leaves one more cucumber in the fridge which is destined for juicing (of the non-alcoholic sort this time), and at least a couple more still growing.  I think I'll pickle them (rather than pickling ourselves!) as I can pick them while they're still relatively small. 

Back to Google it is then for a different sort of pickling recipe. 

If you have any tried and tested cucumber pickling recipes It'd be great if you could share them please. 

52 Cookbooks #33: Coq au Riesling and creative leftovers!

I was late to the Nigel Slater cookbook party but am now a fan of his recipes, this Coq au Riesling from his Real Food cookbook is a simple but elegant dish.  As it says on the cover of the edition I have "big-flavoured, unpretentious cooking.  Good ingredients made into something worth eating. Just nice, uncomplicated food"

52 Cookbooks: the challenge is to cook a 

new recipe from one of my (many) 

cookbooks each week for a year...

I really can't disagree with any of that.

So as I was searching for something to cook for dinner on Friday I stumbled across this recipe, and unusually it appealed.  Unusually I'd chosen a recipe that calls for opening a bottle of white wine, it uses 500ml of Riesling and even I knew it would be a dish best served with more white wine.

For any real Riesling or Gewürztraminer aficionados please look away for the rest of this post...

I didn't have Riesling, but I did have a bottle of Gewürztraminer which is similar enough (for me) - I mean, it comes in the same shape bottle so it must be ok!

The next substitution was chicken breasts for the "4 joints of free range chicken on the bone" - I knew it wasn't exactly the same but they were all I had, so I'd take care not to overcook them.  In fact instead of the 500ml of wine, I used 300ml of wine and 200ml of water.  That left us enough wine to drink with the meal... we only had one bottle of the white stuff in the house!

So anyway I was all set with my ingredients, even if they weren't quite the same as Nigel's.  I had streaky bacon, onions, garlic, mushrooms, double cream and parsley.  What could go wrong!

Actually, not much.  I was careful to keep the chicken breasts moist and they were lovely and tender.  I had a bit of trouble with my sauce not thickening - Nigel said to remove the chicken from the pan and cook the sauce "at an enthusiastic bubble" until the cream starts to thicken slightly.

Well maybe my bubble wasn't enthusiastic enough or it was because I had a higher water content or my meat didn't have any bones, but it wasn't up for thickening naturally.  It thickened a little after I added some cornflour mixed with water, but even then it was probably on the thin-side. 

It still tasted good though, but I did have quite a lot of sauce left, so I saved that in a plastic container and we got on with eating dinner with a glass or two of Gewürztraminer - to say MOH was shocked that I had suggested this meal was an understatement to say the least!

The verdict:

• It tasted good, although the sauce was a little on the thin side (see above)

• This would be a relatively easy dish to cook when you had people over, although I think I'd use "on the bone" meat if it was for more than MOH and I to be on the safe side!

• It made a nice change to have a wine-based sauce and I'd definitely cook this again

• I did wonder if I'd gone a tinker too far with the sauce, but the creative leftovers (see below) were a real bonus and just show you don't have to ditch your kitchen disasters mishaps all of the time!

Creative leftovers

With a tub of thin creamy- white wine sauce left over, I decided that I could do something with this and make it into a pasta sauce if I could thicken it a little.  There were still some mushrooms, bacon and onions in the sauce so after a day or two in the fridge the flavours were just as good, if not better.

I grated some cheese and juiced a lemon and added both of these along with a couple of spoonfuls of plain flour to the sauce and stirred constantly while it was on the heat.  It had the desired effect and we had a much thickened sauce to stir through some freshly cooked pasta.

Bonus - two meals for the price of one!

Linking this post with ClaireJustine

A new sign for our garden...

When we were in Guernsey last summer celebrating our wedding anniversary I fell for this vintage pool sign.  You know the sort of falling that meant every walk we did around St Peters Port involved just happening to wander past the shop with the sign in the window...

Just by chance, of course...

After a couple of times going into the shop eventually we came out with our very own sign!  It wasn't expensive but we'd travelled for the weekend with hand baggage only and I'd needed to convince MOH it would fit into our rucksacks.  It did but for the record I would have been willing to ditch some clothes for it, clearly his not mine...

But anyway, last week I hung it in the garden on our Laburnum tree.  Although MOH had bought some chain to hang it with in the end I used some red ribbon - mainly because I couldn't work out how to attach the chain and because I wanted it around one of the branches, so it hung correctly. It'll need to come down for the winter so there'll be another opportunity to work out how to attach the chain next spring!

Here it is zoomed out a bit.

And no, we don't have a pool!  But if we ever got one, I've already got the sign...  Just as I finished hanging the sign the weather had a go at providing a natural pool with a mahoosive storm, so my lovely new sign has already survived it's first downpour.

Hanging my latest garden ornament got me to thinking about what else we have in our garden, so I thought I'd share some of those too.  Here's a wooden whirly thing (technical term) which I bought in Cairns, Australia back in the late 90s - it's mesmerising to sit and watch it whirl!

Then there's the cast iron owl who's been hung from one of our large sycamore trees near the patio.  He holds a tea light and while he looks quite grumpy about it he casts a nice glow when he's lit.

This is our rainbow glass hanging which we bought in Padstow, Cornwall in a shop that wasn't owned by Rick Stein!   He's everywhere in Padstow and we stayed in his B&B - very nice it was too, but it did become a bit of a challenge for us to bring something non-Rick back with us!

Ah the obelisk.  This is at the end of our garden and provides a focal point from the house.  I had the winning bid in a charity auction at work, much to MOH's dismay.  It's about 5 foot tall and made of wood and not something MOH was prepared to carry home on the train, so we drove up to the City to collect it one weekend.  It was that colour when I bought it and it stays out in all weather and has lasted remarkably well!

These are our concrete hares - Hartley and Devon, of course we named them.  We saw these at an exhibition at Greenacres in Devon, which was Agatha Christie's house and is now a National Trust property.

Being us, we didn't buy them at the time and then regretted it.  So onto the internet I went to find out who made them and to order a couple.  I managed that ok and then arranged for them to be delivered to MOH's aunt's house in Devon, where my in-laws collected them when they visited and we collected them from them!

Actually even if we'd bought them when we were there, we'd travelled to Devon by train so lugging two concrete hares back into and across London probably wouldn't have happened.  And if you're wondering about the names - of course you'd call your hare Hartley wouldn't you?!  Well you would if you grew up in the 1970s and watched Pipkins.

Our wind chimes came all the way from Maui, Hawaii which we visited for a wedding and we had no trouble getting this one in our case, although it did have a stop over in Las Vegas on the way back.

The last of my ornaments that I'm sharing needs a bit of work.  It's a dove house, but unfortunately the bottom fell out and it needs a bit of a paint-job and some work done to the roof.

But I think it should be fixable - with some woodwork skills from MOH - and I have some plans for it, which I'll share when they come off!

So that's my garden ornaments - what do you have in your garden?