Flower arranging for Harvest Festival at St Edmunds

September 23, 2014

This weekend saw us pop up to Norfolk for the first time in a long while. We arrived eventually after one of the worst journeys through gridlocked South East London ever! Which meant we were way too late for even a sniff of any fish and chips... Next time...

On Saturday morning I was roped in/volunteered to help Mum with her flower arrangement for Sunday's Harvest Festival. I'm not sure who was most worried, as I think it's fair to say that we're more at the "plonking in a vase" end of the scale of flower arranging...

But one of the ladies from the Church had provided a flower arrangement receptacle so we thought we'd better have a go at filling it up!

After a scout around the garden we found these, which included geraniums, dahlias, olive branches, some grasses and some berries.

It took us a while, but it didn't turn out too bad - even if it was a bit skew-whiff on the base! It wasn't until we'd finished that Dad offered some of his pinker dahlias, which would have been a dead giveaway to the flower arranger's identity - but we were done, and happy with our reds.

So our next job was to deliver it safely and in one piece to the Church - St Edmunds in Hunstanton - and place it in Mum's designated spot. Once there, we shuffled some baked beans and mandarin segments to make room for it and stepped back to admire our masterpiece!

It actually looked OK - I think we were both relieved!

I think ours was probably the last flower arrangement to be added, and the Church was already starting to look good with its harvest displays. And as you'd expect for harvest there were lots of reds, yellows and oranges.

I was pretty taken with this sunflower arrangement, and the clever use of allium seed heads (we could have done this, if we'd had some alliums and thought of it!)

And this one which had incorporated apples (which is way too advanced for Mum and I!)

On Saturday lunchtime this marrow was looking a little lonely! But it reminded me of Harvest Festivals when we were growing up when we'd each decorate, I think what was a cardboard mushroom box (with a handle too!) from the market behind Mum's work, carefully arranging the produce available before carrying them to church on Sunday morning and joining the procession along with the other children to hand them over.

It's strange how one marrow can trigger memories from my childhood. Usually marrows trigger the stuffed marrow kind of memory so it was a surprise for this one to prompt something different!

St Edmunds is a grand looking church which opened in 1866 and here's a picture of the inside. If you're ever in Hunstanton and are looking for a church service be sure to pop your head round the door of this one, I'm sure there'll be a friendly welcome.

What memories do you have of Harvest Festivals? And did you take part in a Harvest Festival this weekend?

52 Cookbooks #36: Beef in easy tomato sauce

September 20, 2014

Well I missed last week of this challenge - we spent some time in Cornwall and although I had a recipe planned I didn't get a chance to cook it - never mind, I'll either try and catch up or I'll just miss a week and not beat myself up over it. After all, I was on holiday...

This week I've turned to Gok Wan and his Gok Cooks Chinese book. It's a book I've used before with success but not for a while. The recipe I chose - beef in easy tomato sauce - played to my store cupboard ingredients, some home-grown tomatoes and some steak that was in the freezer. The only thing I needed to buy was a humble onion, so nothing too exotic there!

*52 Cookbooks: the challenge is to cook a new recipe from one of my (many) cookbooks each week for a year...*

I started by frying the beef until was browned and then swapped it for the onion in the wok. These took on the colour and flavours of the meat and looked like the onions you get in takeaway Chinese, so I was already pleased!

In went the garlic and ginger, closely followed by three of my tomatoes roughly chopped. When the flesh had broken down a bit, in went the chicken stock and it simmered for a few minutes to reduce a little. With that the main sauce ingredients went in a tablespoon of oyster sauce and soy sauce, half a tablespoon of sugar and three tablespoons of tomato ketchup. Yup, that's the easy tomato sauce bit!

It simmered for a couple of minutes before the beef went back in to warm through. It really was that easy. But as we wanted more for dinner, this was then put into the oven so I could wok-fry some vegetables and noodles.

I'd bought one of those plastic boxes of stir-fry veg from M&S so the larger veg went into the wok ahead of the noodles I'd cooked and stirred some sesame oil through. With those softening, warming and sticking to the bottom of the wok the leafier veg went in along with some of the water from the drained noodles. As it was a fairly large box of veg I'd purposely cooked less noodles than usual so the veg to noodle ratio was high. With a splash of soy sauce, we were done, so with chopsticks at the ready we ate...

The verdict

We both liked this dish and would cook it again
I'd definitely use this cookbook again and plan to try some of its other recipes
This dish would be relatively easy to tailor to add veg, perhaps some peppers or some green beans
The sauce was good, but I'd add some chilli next time - either freshly sliced or substituting some chilli sauce for some ketchup

52 Cookbooks #35: Carrot Cake

September 7, 2014

This week I'm back on cake - carrot cake - which is MOH's favourite (apart from Coffee & Walnut cake which I made a while back - see 52 Cookbooks #17: Coffee & Walnut layer cake) and it's from a slightly unusual cookbook. It's a Harry Eastwood book titled Red Velvet & Chocolate Heartache, which is a great name for a cookbook!

Underneath the title it says "the ultimate feel-good book of natural cakes that taste naughty" - the difference with this book is the recipes use rice flour and all contain vegetables. So we're pretty used to carrot cake, and even courgette and beetroot in cakes. Potato too isn't unheard of and nor is pumpkin so butternut squash is only a step away... but there's also recipes which include turnip, parsnip and swede - yes, I'm working up to those!

My carrot cake has 280g of finely grated carrot in, which is about 4 medium sized carrots. But first I started by whisking the eggs and muscovado sugar for 5 minutes - definitely one for the food processor then!

To that I added the carrots and some orange zest and mixed those in. Then it was in with the rice flour, baking powder, ground almonds and cinnamon. A splash of vanilla extract and it's almost ready to put into the sandwich tins, all that's left is to stir through sultanas soaked in orange juice and some walnuts (as I didn't have any pecans).

As they went into the oven, they were a pale orange as you'd expect. They cooked for just under an hour at 180 degrees, which seems a long time - but I guess that's the difference with this more unusual cake without butter.

When they came out, they were quite golden. But they came out of the tin easily enough.

They needed to cool completely before I could go anywhere near them with icing. The icing has butter, icing sugar, lime juice and cream cheese - it's still relatively low in fat with only 35g each of butter and cream cheese. So with that made it was time to sandwich and decorate the cake.

It didn't turn out too bad!

The verdict:

This was never going to be a light and fluffy cake, I'm not sure carrot cake ever really is...
The walnut/pecan swap worked well
I'd cook this again and would try other recipes from the book - especially those with beetroot (I've some growing in the garden), pumpkin and courgette.
Unfortunately it's not really a cake for licking the mixing bowl out! I guess that's the lack of butter in the sponge, I guess you can't have everything!
The good thing is that's not the case with the icing - the bowl was definitely worth licking out this time. Happy days.