Mix flour and baking powder, rub in butter, add dates. Stir in milk until it makes a nice dough and then pat it out on a floured bench. Make sure it’s about 3-4cm thick and cut in to squares.
Place on an oven tray, brush the tops with a little bit of milk and bake for 10-15 minutes at 200c until nice and golden.
Easiest scones ever!
The same potatoes from one of the last posts 6 days after I took the last photo! Something must be going right.
Complete with weeds, but it’s ok, because the weeds are actually tomato plants that have gone all through my garden after I threw some compost in. I’m half tempted to leave them and just let them take over the world.
Apparently it’s so easy! I have to be one of the most impatient people in the world, but even i’m impressed with how fast they’re growing!
First picture is one and a bit weeks after planting, the second picture was taken a few minutes ago, two weeks after planting.
I will be growing potatoes for the rest of my gardening days!
I went on a little trip to Hamilton Gardens a couple of days ago because I figured I needed some inspiration and I wanted to see their Sustainable Backyard and Kitchen Garden.
They had the best and biggest mounds of potatoes and lots of giant veges!
Now I probably went at the wrong time of year because all the summer veges are starting to die down, and we’ve had a terrible summer so it wasn’t as impressive as it could have been, but I think a trip back is a good idea to get some winter inspiration! We met a nice lady who said that all the food goes to Womans Refuge, so that’s super cool.
I’m on a potato growing mission now, and everything else actually. I felt inspired enough that I accidently on purpose purchased a mini greenhouse.
So far i’ve filled it with a few trays of seeds. Trying to work out what I should grow is a mission, because I want to grow everything regardless of the time of year.
I feel like i’m slowly getting there.
My potatoes are taking off, but I keep looking at this picture wondering if it’s possible to have them look like that in my garden. I doubt it!
It’s pouring with rain today but I swear they’ve grown a couple of inches overnight!
Now I feel like I am capable of growing things I’m on the hunt for more vege seeds and maybe even flowers, something a bit out of the ordinary.
I am loving the look of these peanuts, and I am completely in love with the mini black popcorn from Koanga. I kills me that it’s the wrong time of year for heirloom tomatoes and fancy plants. Maybe i’ll have to stop complaining and stick to fast growing fancy coloured lettuces instead.
I think it must be time for beans, planting out my beet seedlings, and growing heaps of broccoli, which has to be one of my favourite vegetables.
How many more months until spring? Hurry up!
I am falling behind updating this. Busy busy busy. Today I made mini pizzas, creamy mushroom sauce, berry crumble, mini carrot cakes, hollandaise sauce, and a whole bunch of little treats. The downside to my little story is all these things were for work and quickly devoured by a silly amount of customers so i’m shattered, and I have nothing to show for it!
Bought some more of my favourite cutting celery, because i’m too lazy to start it from seed right now. I also planted beetroot, pak choi, more carrot seeds, put my beans in the garden finally, watched my spuds start to sprout, and i’ve been waiting oh so patiently for about 10 punnets of seeds to sprout.
And tomorrow I am going to be here looking at pretty things. Yay!
About all I can offer today is a picture of my cat after consuming more catnip than any cat should.
She is the most terrifying cat i’ve ever met.
My zuchinni flowered this morning. Nothing exciting, but I love seeing nice big flowers in my vege garden.
And I was pretty excited to find this jalapeno:
And some more chillis:
I also have some cayenne peppers going a bit crazy and a bunch of tiny capsicums. I’ve never been able to grow any kind of chillis before, and now they seem to be the only thing going crazy, aside from the beans which i’ve had to pick and freeze because they won’t stop flowering!
I need new winter garden projects I think! Time to google like a crazy person and come up with some good chilli recipes!
I am super happy with my purchases today from Cambridge Farmers Market.
I’ve been wanting some Dill for quite some time, for cooking and garnishes, I think it looks pretty, so I picked that up along with some Thai Basil, to hopefully inspire some asian cooking, but most importantly I found Par-cel, or Cutting Celery!! And they’re all organic.
Looks like parsley, tastes like celery! I love celery, I love cooking it, I love eating it with tasty dips, I love the look of big healthy celery plants. If you come to my house and compare my celery plants to my parsely, and consider my celery obsession, you’ll realise this plant was made for me! I’m pretty sure it’s going to grow a whole lot faster.
I’m super happy!
Simple pleasures.
You can buy seeds here.
So today I decided to attempt my first ever loaf of bread. Plain white sandwich loaf seems like a good start right?
You will need:
Mix the yeast and sugar, add half the water. The water must be warm, not hot, or else it’ll all go bad! You need to leave this in a warm place for about 15 minutes until it starts to bubble up nicely.
Put the flour, salt and extra sugar in a bowl, make a little well in the middle and add the oil, or rub in the oil. Then add the yeast mixture and the rest of the water. Mix it all in together until it starts making a nice dough.
When it’s mixed, take it out and put it on a well floured bench. Knead until it’s nice and doughy, and not sticky!
Put it back in the bowl and leave it somewhere warm for about an hour and a half, and it should pretty much double in size.
Flip it out of the bowl on to a floured bench (very important I learnt, it sticks!) and it should look something like this:
Now what you want to do is knead it again, when it’s not sticky it goes in your pre-oiled and floured loaf tins. Don’t be afraid if it looks like this:
Leave it in there for about 45minutes to an hour, it will double in size again, and pretty itself up:
The oven should be preheated to about 220C, so pop them in and bake for about 45minutes. Leave to cool for about 5 minutes then flip it out on to a rack to cool. Then slice.
And then get excited because you should be left with something that looks like this:
Sometimes when i’m growing veges I grow things really well, and when this happens, I go a bit nuts and need to plant everything. I was at a garden place yesterday and I picked up 2 golden zucchini, one plain one, a jalapeno, red and orange capsicums, some other kind of capsicum, broccoli, cos and some other things. But most importantly I picked up these:
I know it’s probably the wrong time for planting them but I am convinced it will all turn out fine!
So I spent morning digging around in the garden, weeding like a crazy person until I had this:
Excuse the weeds on the ground an dirt everywhere, I did pretty it up a bit later.
So I somewhat followed instructions. I dug a 20ish cm trench, put the seed potatoes in, covered it with 10cm of soil, watered, and will top the soil up when the spouts are high enough.
After a big morning of gardening it’s time to chill until later when it cools down.
My poor little dog feels like it’s time for a big nap, the look on his face screams no more gardening! It’s a really hard life being a dog.
Spent a good deal of my day in the garden. I could happily sleep for a week. Dug out some potatoes, dug in some compost, piled up some dirt and planted two rows of carrots. Confession – i’ve never grown carrots in my life. I once grew some seeds and forgot to plant them in the garden. It was sunny, I forgot to water them, that’s the end of that story. So here we go again, and i’m going to look after them this time. Starting with what seems like the basics, Manchester Table and Topweight. I think I cleared out all the stones and things, I guess we shall find out in a couple of months. I planted one row of each and a row of plain red radishes. Then I nailed weed mat to the fence and over the garden to keep the cat off – she gets so much joy out of digging up and weeing on my plants, I don’t even think she needs to go, she does it just to upset me. We have a love hate relationship.
Anyway, here’s todays mini harvest, what I think are ‘Desiree’ spuds, some other type, maybe ‘Agria’, Scarlet Runner’ beans, a cherry tomato and one strawberry that I didn’t let the blackbirds eat. Better than nothing!
