Maids of honour

It feels like spring has taken a long time to arrive in Cumbria this year. With May Day last weekend it was time to cut some blossoming branches, fill a large le Parfait jar with water and pop the branches in, bringing a little bit of spring in to the house.

With spring arriving again it feels like its the right time to start-up Springtime again. And what better way than with a traditional May Day recipe.

Maids of honour are often associated with stories of Tudor courts, Henry VIII and of course, maids. I do not doubt that these stories may be based on grains of truth, but similar versions of this recipe were common during medieval and post-medieval times. The reason being that maids of honour are a seasonal, springtime recipe often associated with May Day. But why May Day? The obvious link is the term ‘maids’ being associated with young women and May Queens, etc. But looking at the actual recipe, the tart makes the most of new sweet milk from cows that had recently been let-out to pasture, giving another reason for their popularity on May Day.

May would have been a lean time of the year in terms of fresh fruit for cakes and puddings. Although one ingredient which was plentiful, and at its best, was milk. Many sweet  dishes were made from milk or curd cheese at this time of year in the past, so it is no surprise to find that the filling of a maid of honour is mainly curd cheese and jam (or lemon curd from fresh eggs). The combination of cheese when it’s at its best and jam from the store cupboard is not only wonderful, but also firmly rooted in the agricultural calendar of the past.

Recipe

Ingredients

• 1/4 pack of puff pastry
• 120gr cottage or curd cheese
• 20gr caster sugar
• zest from 1/2 a lemon
• 15gr ground almonds
• 1 medium egg
• a little bit of jam or lemon curd (I’ve used homemade lemon curd, blackcurrant jam and apricot jam –they all taste good!).

Method

1. Take your pastry out of the fridge to come up to room temperature.
2. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.
3. In a bowl mix the cheese, sugar, zest, almonds and egg. Don’t worry about the lumps if you use cottage cheese, this melt when the tray goes in the oven.
4. Roll out the pastry, then using a cutter, cut out circles about 9cm. Don’t twist the cutter, just press down sharply.
5. Put the rounds in to the holes of a muffin tin.
6. Put barely half of teaspoon of jam or curd into the base of the case, followed by the cheese mixture. Do not over fill the cases.
7. Put in the oven for about 20 mins.

Garlic Day – Wild garlic pesto recipe

Following on from Damson Day, today marked Garlic Day. Wild garlic is just starting to come into flower, and like Damson Day, Garlic Day seems to celebrate the beginning of the season. We have many pockets of wild garlic, in slightly damp, wooded areas in the lanes around us. One, which is just off of the route I drive through each day, is ideal for stopping at on my way home to grab some leaves to add to a salad.

Using the wild garlic l gathered yesterday, and some from closer to home, I made a super-quick wild garlic pesto. I made this pesto into a creamy sauce, added some left-over chicken and served it between homemade sheets of pasta with the wild garlic flowers pressed in dough. A very ‘garlicky’ meal to celebrate the day!

Pesto recipe

Ingredients:

15gr wild garlic leaves

5gr fresh basil leaves

15gr parmesan, chopped into small cubes,

15gr pine nuts

70ml olive oil

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Method:

1. Roughly chop, or rip, the garlic and basil leaves.
2. Put the cheese and nuts in a magimix for a few seconds until both are chopped.
3. Add the leaves and blitz until all the ingredients are combined.
4. Add the olive oil and the salt and pepper and blitz for a few seconds.
5. Using a spatula, transfer the pesto into a jar and top up with more oil so that mixture is covered.

Damson Day and Almond Ice Cream

Today was Damson Day in the Lyth valley. We found out about the day earlier in the week and thought it would be fun to go along. Admittedly, I was a little unsure as to why Damson Day was being held in April, surely it should be when the fruit is harvested in late summer? My neighbour then pointed out that it was to celebrate the blossom on the trees.

In years gone by, people used to gather in the Lyth Valley each spring to see the blanket of white blossom in valley from the damson orchards. In recent years, Damson Day has been held by the Westmorland Damson Association to help promote the resurrection of the damson orchards and raise awareness of the small deep purple fruit, which resembles a small dark plum. Damsons are commonly used to make all sorts of jams, cheeses, jellies, gins, syrups and wines. They are also used in meat dishes, especially alongside game, duck and pork. But one of the best things about them is that the trees are extremely hardy and survive the strong cumbrian winds without a problem!

We set out this morning to the farm which hosts Damson Day, expecting a small affair, only to find it was packed with people! A small farm, with it’s buildings and associated fields, was filled with stalls selling all sorts of damson produce, other locally produced goods, various crafts stalls and demonstrations including spinning, rope making, basket making and you could even make your own besom broom (like a witch’s broomstick!).

The only food and drink stalls were: a local brewery, a soup and sandwich stall organised by the local school and beef stew stall. All of which looked wonderful! We opted for sandwich and cake, with the sandwich filling being local cheese and damson chutney, it was delicious. It was also refreshing to only have good quality, wholesome food available.

After finding a quiet spot on which to sit down and munch our sandwiches, I found a solitary seat in the marquee for the cookery demonstration. This was a total surprise. The demonstration was about black pudding and scrambled eggs! Black pudding is something I’ve always avoided because I don’t like the idea of it, but, after being told about the ingredients (onion, herbs, spices, barley, salt, etc), the history of it and the nutritional qualities I plucked-up the courage to try some. It’s not something I’ll be eating all the time, but it was not as bad as I thought it would be!  

 

Desperate to escape the crowds, we set-off down the narrow lanes to explore the surrounding area and the damson orchards. The blossom really is blissfully beautiful, especially against the spindly damson trees.

(I also found some wild garlic ready for Garlic Day tomorrow!)

 

Although there were no damsons for sale (wrong time of year - I’ll have to wait until later in the summer for those) I did buy some damson syrup. As soon as we got home I set about making almond ice cream for after supper. We had this drizzled with a little bit of the syrup. A perfect end to a really special day.

Almond Ice cream

Ingredients

1 pint of double cream

250ml semi-skimmed milk

1 tsp of vanilla extract

6 egg yolks

40 gr caster sugar

2 tsp of almond extract

 

Method:

1. Put the cream, milk and vanilla in a heavy based saucepan and warm gently.
2. Meanwhile, mix the egg yolks and the sugar together. When the cream is hot, but just below the boil, add this to the eggs, whisking continuously. Then, using a spatula return all of the mixture to the pan and continue to heat.
3. Stir the mixture until it begins to thicken. However, you only want it to just coat the back of a spoon.
4. Once it has reached this point, tip the mixture into a clean bowl and place this bowl in a sink of cold water which reaches about half-way up the bowl.
5. Leave the bowl in the sink for about 30 mins, then transfer it to the fridge to finish cooling completely (about another hour).
6. Add the almond extract and stir well. Tip the mixture into the ice cream maker.

Keep it in the family, or amongst friends

I was asked what I plan to do with my rhubarb this year. Well, the short answer is: nothing.

The longer version is that when we decided to move over to Cumbria one of my first concerns was the rhubarb, “How can I leave that here?”. The simple answer was that I had to take it with us. So, I duly dug up the rhubarb last January, popped as much as I could into pots and brought it over to Cumbria. The previous autumn I had split it, so I was a bit wary about transporting it and leaving in it pots indefinitely, so soon after. To spread the risk I also gave some to a friend who has promised to give me some back when we finally settle.

Last year it really didn’t do well in pots and was at least a quarter of the size it usually is (that may have had something to do with my forgetting to water it). I hadn’t expected it to still be in pots now, or for us to still be in a rented house for that matter. For the time being at least it seems happier this year, but I don’t want to rock-the-boat and risk weakening it again two years in a row. So it will continue to sit by the backdoor in the courtyard and be much admired this year, so long as the cat leaves it alone. Unless of course it grows strongly and then rhubarb crumble will be on the menu!

I really should explain why I’m quite so worried about my rhubarb. This rhubarb is a little bit like a family heirloom to me. Some families pass down the family silver, but the rhubarb has been passed down on my mum’s side of the family for about a century.

It originated in my great-grandfather's vegetable plot, then moved onto my grandfather’s two successive homes, then onto my mother’s garden, and now some has come to me. My mum forgot to take some with her when she moved, so some of mine went to her new home where it now thrives.

With that legacy behind it, maybe I shouldn’t worry whether it is a survivor; like me, it seems to thrive on change wherever it is placed.

The primary function of growing vegetables is usually to create food; and at the moment with the current economic climate the practice is increasingly being heralded as a way of saving money, which is not a bad thing! But vegetables (and growing them) can also be associated with other things such as memories or family, or they may just bring out a smile on a rainy day. Surely that’s just as important?

Springtime in snow

Cracking-on with writing at the moment, but had to go for a quick walk in the snow before it all melts!

I can't wait....

Impatience. It's something I've always suffered from.

I suppose I should explain a little bit about the site. I have a BIG deadline for a long-term piece of research (my PhD) which is due for submission on the 31st March. In theory, every waking moment should be spent trying to meet this deadline and not planning my life, which starts again from the 1st April. I started it in 2004 and it has been trailing around behind me now for four and a bit long years.

But that is not the reason for Springtime. There is an ideal which we are trying to achieve. We have our house on the market to sell and we are renting a lovely place in the Lake District, the Barn. The house has been on the market for about 8 months now, I know, it's the worst time to try to do something like this. I'm getting a little impatient for the ideal, as it includes us having our own cottage in the lakes with one or two spare bedrooms so we can offer bed and breakfast and a little bit of land for a proper vegetable patch and some chickens. Springtime is my record of ideas, preparation and thoughts about/for our ideal; and hopefully at some point this year, the realisation of our dream.

The Barn is great but it doesn't really have a garden, just a flower bed in the shade of the house and a shared courtyard. The other day while I was dreaming about growing our own vegetables again I decided that actually it's a bit silly to put life on hold until 1st April. So, I started to research what grows well in pots! Now I'm just waiting for my seeds and seed potatoes to arrive. Again, the impatience is kicking in...

I just saw a man with a PDA wandering around outside and my hopes were raised that it was a delivery man with my seeds who was having problems finding the Barn. Anxious to get outside before he left, I quickly pulled my shoes on and grabbed my car keys to make it look like I desperately needed something from my car, but actually I was just going to see if he needed directions (ideally to the Barn to deliver my seeds). And then I saw his van: E-On. Oh well, my patience needs to be stretched a little further.

...back to the PhD.

The clash of the new and the old

“There are times to cultivate and create, when you nurture your world and give birth to new ideas and ventures. There are times of flourishing and abundance, when life feels in full bloom, energized and expanding. And there are times of fruition, when things come to an end. They have reached their climax and must be harvested before they begin to fade. And finally of course, there are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope and fear, but messages of how things are.” Chogyam Trungpa

How very true.

That's exactly how I feel at the moment.

As one stale, old and tired piece of my life draws to a close I can't wait for the new flourish of the next phase. At the moment they seem to overlap somewhat, making my emotions roller-coaster around between dramatic highs and lows.