Leaving the Farm and arriving in the City

A card from my sister who knows I'm a little nervous about the next chapter! :)

As I type, I can no longer claim to be ‘pretending to farm’ as I’m just off out to shop for a nice coat to see me through the winter in Switzerland where I shall be shunning my wellies (photo below) in favour of my Louboutins (the ones I just received from my sister for my birthday - photo also below!) and instead of discovering the wines of Bergerac and Pecharmant I shall be discovering the wines of Switzerland.   I should note that we’ve already discovered some fabulous Pinot Noirs…..I think we’ll do well here!

Before packing up the farm, we invited 4 friends from the hamlet round for aperitifs.  We had a lovely evening and upon arrival, one couple presented us with a bottle of champagne to wish us well and another couple who make and can their own pates, presented us with 4 cans of home made pate – one each of wild boar, pork, duck and deer – we are very much looking forward to sharing them with new found friends in Switzerland!

We drove to our new home and I am so pleased we decided to do that because it meant we got to bring some of the bounty from the garden with us and on our first night we enjoyed a beautiful recipe for ‘Vegetable Tian’ that a friend shared with me recently and it so perfectly uses so much of what we have in the garden right now, tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes, onions & garlic – I’ve posted it below if interested in a really tasty vegetarian meal or if simply trying to deal with a glut of vegetables from your garden!

Vegetable Tian 

Ingredients

Olive oil

1 x Onion, chopped

2 x Garlic cloves, crushed/chopped

8 x Large Tomatoes

Chick Peas (I used a can, drained & rinsed)

1 x Aubergine, sliced

1 x Courgette, sliced

Parmesan, grated

Salt & pepper

Saute the onion and garlic in the olive oil.

Add 6 of the tomatoes, chopped (preferably peeled but not essential – for easy peeling – pour boiling water over them for 60 seconds – remove and peel)

Preheat oven to 180/350 degrees

Reduce the tomato sauce and then stir in the chick peas and add salt and pepper

If not using an ovenproof dish, pour the mixture into an oven proof casserole dish and alternate slices of tomato, aubergine and courgette in a layer over the top, sprinkle a little more salt and pepper over the slices and cook covered in the oven for 30 minues – remove the cover and add the parmesan – turn up the heat a little and continue cooking for another 20 minutes until the cheese is golden and the vegetables are fully cooked

Serve with fresh bread – bon apetit!

I also added extra aubergine and courgette to the tomato sauce – this isn’t necessary but I have a lot of aubergines and courgettes to get through – it was still delicious!

For the ‘aperitifs’ with the neighbours, I prepared a rose wine cocktail which actually went down surprisingly well – I’m always nervous about introducing new things to our neighbours so although very surprised (and we did have pastis on standby just in case) I was pleased that 2 healthy sized jugs of this rose wine cocktail were consumed during the aperitif hour (which actually lasted for 3!) – the reason I wanted to make a rose wine cocktail is because I read my ‘vin de noix’ recipe wrongly and bought 5 litres of rose wine when I should have bought 5 litres of red wine so I rectified my mistake to make the ‘vin de noix’ which left me with 5 litres of rose wine to do something with – if any of you have a glut of cheap rose I can highly recommend this as a tasty pre dinner drink…

Rose Sangria

3 litres Rose wine

Strawberries, quartered

Raspberries

2 peaches, peeled and chopped

1 bottle sparkling wine

Prepare the base a day ahead or at least the morning of by pouring the rose wine into a large jug (or a couple of large jugs) and add the fruit and leave so that the fruit will flavor the wine.

Just before serving add the bottle of sparkling wine – mix lightly and serve

A votre Sante!

With that I shall say ‘a bientot’ and hope that in the not too distant future I can share some fabulous food and wine tips from ‘La Belle Geneve’!

Jamming, Canning, Freezing & Packing up for the next chapter

Tony and I can’t quite believe that having arrived here in May, the time has now come to start the next chapter and so this week finds us finally purchasing a chest freezer so that when Tony returns from settling me into ‘school’, there’ll be plenty to keep him fed for the foreseeable future but equally importantly and given we now have over 100 ears of corn ripening and about 50 pumpkins coming in (the largest of them is already over a metre long and apparently not yet ripe – we’ve had the neighbours round to inspect and advise!), it’s going to be important to freeze what we can so that we can enjoy the bounty in the coming months.  The cauliflowers are also just starting to appear but still no sign of the broccoli or brussel sprouts yet so those should still be a few months away which is just as well as our freezer is still only a small chest freezer with a 210 litre capacity and I’ve already managed to half fill it with individual portions of lamb stew, lamb curry (recipe below from my sister – it’s an excellent one to use up leftover lamb, turkey or chicken), beef bourgignon, moussaka, lasagna, courgette soup, courgette cake and carrot soup, much of this made with our very own vegetables now that we have celery, carrots, onions, courgettes and aubergines ripening as I type!

Chicken Curry

Serves 4

Ingredients:

4 x Chicken Breasts, diced

2 medium onions, diced

2 tins of chopped tomatoes

1 tablespoon Vegetable oil (or sunflower)

Half a sweet pepper

2 cloves of garlic

1 inch ginger

2 medium chillies

4 cloves

1 tsp turmeric

3 tsps garam masala

2 tsps ground coriander

1 tsp coriander seeds

1 tsp mustard seeds

2 tsps cumin seeds

1 tsp chilli powder

2 dessert spoons of natural plain yogurt

Fresh coriander

Salt & pepper

Method:

1. Make a paste with the sweet pepper, garlic, ginger & chillies.  Set aside for later.

2. In an oven proof pot, heat the vegetable oil until hot.  Add mustard seeds, cloves, cumin seeds, coriander seeds & onion and fry until onion is soft.

3. Add the paste made earlier, fry for a minute and then add the rest of the spices and fry for a few minutes.

4. Add the chicken and cook until browned.

5. Add the tinned tomatoes and the yogurt.

6. Put on a lid and cook in the oven for an hour at 180 degrees.  Check half way through and stir – if needed add a little water.

7. Add salt & pepper to taste, and sprinkle on the fresh coriander leaf.

8. Serve with pilau rice & naan bread.

Variations:

1. Use lamb steak instead of chicken.

2. Use lamb mince instead of chicken, and add some frozen peas.

Our neighbours just popped round last week with an enormous bucket of raspberries which would have been impossible to eat in time and so I made a few pots of raspberry jam and having been to one of our local markets on Saturday where I found some lovely Charlotte strawberries at an excellent price, I purchased a few kilos and also made a bumper batch of strawberry jam.  The same neighbour who gave us the raspberries also mentioned that he had more tomatoes than he could use and so asked if I’d help myself if we could use them and so I’ve also spent the better part of an afternoon this week peeling and boiling tomatoes and the cupboard is now stocked with jars of fresh tomato sauce, all properly sterilized and should be good to use over the winter once the fresh tomatoes have all disappeared.  Whilst chatting with him as I was ‘legally scrumping’ his tomatoes, he asked if we wanted to plant some raspberry plants in our veggie patch and if so, he’d be happy to give us some of his plants for planting during the month of November (apparently the right time to get the raspberry plants in the ground) and so I’ve asked Tony to follow up with him – fresh raspberries will be a phenomenal addition to our garden next year.

We had our last visitor for the ‘season’, my father arrived last Thursday and returned home on Sunday, literally a flying visit but a lot of fun and of course the time flew by – the day before we enjoyed a lovely lunch ‘chez nous’ with some friends who are currently living in the UK but who we’d last seen in Cayman and prior to that we had a few days with some friends we’d last seen 15 years ago (Cayman friends again but last seen at a wedding in Scotland!) who now live in Austria – it’s been a fun couple of weeks and a little busier than we’d originally planned however it turns out that’s been a good thing as it’s taken my mind off the apprehension that the next chapter brings – although I’m sure it will all work out, it will be the first winter we’ve spent outside of Cayman in 20 years and so I am packing my thermals and figure if I am prepared for the worst I should at least remain warm even if I experience the worst!

(some photos below of the last week spent with friends and family).

And so I shall leave you with an ‘a bientot’ and hope I can report periodically on any progress made on the farm especially given that in between all the renovations planned on the property, Tony is also planning to prepare a small part of one of our fields for planting vines next year…..more to come on the future wine produced from ‘Chateau ‘Opwood’!

The Pumpkin Dilemma

The 5 pumpkin plants that were given to us by our neighbours really are starting to become a concern not least because we were expecting them to be traditional round orange pumpkins and they’re very long large mostly green although some are totally white.  Having lost control of this patch and lost count of the pumpkins growing in it, we’re not sure what variety they are or when they’re considered ripe.  I took one off the vine while still green because I’d heard from another friend that they should be between 40cm – 80cm long and this one was nearly 60cms so I figured it was probably ready and delivered our first fruit to the neighbour who gave us his plants (sadly his pumpkin plants haven’t yet produced a single pumpkin which is excellent news for us so we finally have someone we can share some produce with – it must be the only vegetable our neighbours don’t have a glut of themselves!!).  They were very gracious in thanking us before telling us we’d picked it too soon and if left it should turn yellow/orange in due course and so we’ve left them alone although there is still no sign of any yellow or orange but they’re getting bigger by the day and so I may have to invite the neighbours round just to inspect and give us some advice on what to do and when they should be picked.  Some photos below of the glut that will soon be coming our way!

In trying to decipher what variety we have growing, I googled pumpkins and discovered that we’re a long way off from winning any competitions as the record for the world’s largest pumpkin is held by someone who grew a pumpkin that weighed in at 2,009 pounds!!  I’m quite relieved that we don’t have that variety growing in abundance although by the end of it we may have that weight in total.

The other exciting development having eaten our way through our first crop of heirloom lettuces, we’d planted a second batch, 9 different heirloom varieties, just before we left for Geneva and Burgundy and some of these are now ready to eat – they’re all spectacularly delicious and there’s just something quite special about making a salad for lunch made up entirely of produce from the garden now that we have the tomatoes we’d salvaged, green peppers, carrots, onions, many more cucumbers (photo of yet another cucumber to be picked this afternoon), beetroot, snap peas and green beans, delicious yellow courgettes and fresh parsley, basil, mint, tarragon, thyme, sage & rosemary.

The item from the garden we’re still looking forward to is the fresh corn – Tony planted 80 plants and we’ve now got 2-3 ears popping up on each plant so there is a corn eating regime in our future and possibly the purchase of a chest freezer finally so that we can store some of this, the freezer we currently have is bursting at the seams with courgette lasagna, our neighbours green beans, courgette loaf cake & courgette soup!

Our next door village holds a night market every Thursday for the months of July and August and last week we invited our neighbours to join us for a bite to eat – it’s always a fun time with a meal of duck and fries or a duck sandwich and fries accompanied by a glass of local wine for EUR4!  This is all enjoyed with a live band playing (usually a local band with an accordion player) and various market stalls selling local produce and crafts and so it was here that we met our local beekeeper.  When we returned this year we noticed that our neighbours had lots of hives on his land, the field immediately next to ours and we can hear them on occasion, apparently the beekeeper uses his land to keep his bees on occasion.  We are understandably very happy to have bees in the neighbourhood to help with the pollination of all we’ve been growing.  But, even better is that we bought his Acacia honey and this was made form the Acacia trees that we can see from our house and were all in full bloom when we arrived in May.  I don’t think I’ve ever had honey that’s literally been made next door and it’s absolutely delicious so we’ll be heading back to the night market tomorrow with our EUR8 for dinner and a drink and a few extra euros for the honey so that we can stock up – it does go particularly well with our homemade yogurt for breakfast.

I shall leave you with another recipe, this one for Spanish stuffed marrow - we tried it with half of one of our neighbours marrows the other night and it was absolutely delicious although still enough to feed 6 people!  I've posted the link below it's a BBC Good Food recipe - I recommend reading the comments before making it (note to cut the canned tomatoes down although I used fresh from the garden, I also substituted parmesan for manchego) and if not overly keen on spice, be careful of the cayenne or do as we did and serve it accompanied by a nice fresh tzatsiki (yogurt, dill, garlic and cucumber) which will offset the spice.

Bon apetit!

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2493639/spanish-stuffed-marrow

Coping with a glut of courgettes

The garden is continuing to produce at an alarming rate and we are struggling to keep up with production – we certainly can’t eat it all and so where possible we are trying to freeze or can the overspill.  Our courgettes seem to have eased up and that was helped by packing our recent chums off with 2 oversized round courgettes as they left to drive back to the Isle of Man however this didn’t really appropriately offset the 3 large courgettes and 3 even larger once courgettes now marrows that our neighbours gave us the other day and so I’ve been making courgette soup, courgette loaf cake and courgette bread and am about to make a courgette lasagna (using courgettes instead of pasta) as recommended by my brother and then finally, I shall grate and freeze some courgettes for future use.  I’ve also made extra courgette loaf cakes and will be making deliveries around the neighbourhood later today!  Photo below of Tony with the last batch of marrows the neighbours gave us!  Also recipe below of the courgette loaf cake which hopefully will be well received by our neighbours,

Courgette Loaf Cake

Ingredients

1.    1 Egg

2.    200g castor or granulated sugar

3.    100g melted butter (I use salted)

4.    ½ tsp vanilla essence

5.    300g courgette or marrow coarsely grated

6.    300g self raising flour

7.    50g raisins or sultanas or cranberries (or a mix of any or all)

8.    50g walnuts or pecans (or a mix)

9.    1 tsp cinnamon

1.    1 tsp baking powder (I’ve made with and without and both work well)

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.  

Grease a 2lb loaf tin (or any size you wish – I use 3 smaller loaf tins – I think that size makes a nice gift).

Mix the first 5 ingredients in a bowl – sift the flour, cinnamon and baking powder (if using) into another, larger bowl.  

Add the fruit and nuts (mixing them in the flour first helps them not to sink to the bottom of the cake).  

Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture – pour into the loaf pan(s) and bake for 45mins -1 hour or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

Sadly we’ve had to uproot all our tomato plants as they were riddled with ‘la maladie’ – a blight that seems to only affect the tomato plants or certainly only our tomato plants – we didn’t spray them with the copper sulphate that is used to stop mold and fungus growing after wet weather.  All but one of our neighbours use this copper sulphate a few times a year on their vegetables however one of our neighbours proudly declares his vegetable patch entirely ‘bio’ (= organic) and so we have chosen to emulate his methods – he does say that on occasion he’ll lose an entire crop due to sticking to his organic ways but he also says that it is rare this happens and interestingly he hasn’t lost any tomatoes this year but he has given us some tips as to how we can protect ours next year without spraying so we shall look forward to trying again next year, in the meantime we have literally had to discard a couple of hundred tomatoes with the plants we’ve uprooted – the ones we’ve managed to save, I’ve peeled and they’re bubbling away on the stove as I type so that I can at least have some jars of tomato sauce for future use (perhaps in the chorizo stuffed marrow recipe I’ve just stumbled across!).

We had a wonderful discovery in the garden yesterday – I’d thought our melon plants had stopped production of the green beans and so hadn’t been checking on the beans until yesterday when I went simply to check on the melons (we have a couple of dozen of the large dark green melons – we’re very much looking forward to trying those in a couple of weeks) and discovered 2 very productive plants and managed to harvest a large bowl of beans so I shall be topping and tailing later today in order to blanche them before freezing them – we did of course have them for dinner last night, steamed with a little salt, pepper and butter – they were absolutely delicious.  Photos below of our beans, the tomatoes we've salvaged, aubergines, carrots popping out of the ground, 2nd batch of strawberries and some more yellow courgettes on the go!

The other exciting development in the garden is that we’ve got our first few ears of corn growing (photos below) and so it may only be a few weeks until we are eating fresh corn – this is a first for both of us and we are understandably excited about it!

Not wishing to end on a sad note, I do have to report that we have had our first death in the house….a field mouse that we’ve have living with us for the past month or so finally left us….we had a mouse trap that we’d rigged as plan B and plan A was a humane trap that Tony had researched and meticulously set up in order to trap him alive so we could relocate him as far away from the house as possible – sadly he chose the trap (to make it as fair as possible, both had peanut butter on them to lure him so there was a 50/50 chance he could have chosen relocation over death!) – it was when I spotted him on my kitchen counter that I knew his days were numbered and so as cute as he was, I’ve reclaimed my counters and hopefully don’t have to bleach them twice a day anymore! (photo below of the mouse that was).

We’ve had a couple of visits from chums, one family who came in their camper van which is just as well as we don’t have room to house people very comfortably since we took out the second bathroom and all the other bedrooms in order ot start some proper renovations – we did think we’d be a bit further ahead this summer but the garden has been all comsuing – this is good as we’ve learnt an awful lot and will be so much better equipped for next year.  In the meantime, we’re just doing what we can to keep up with what’s being produced and have had some very interesting meals made up entirely of chard, kale, bok choy, courgettes and aubergines……in order not to waste what we have this will be our dinner fare for some time – hopefully the healthy food will offset the rather lovely and yet inexpensive local wine we’ve also been enjoying fairly liberally!  I shall close with a few photos below of our recent guests – good times in La Belle France!