Raw milk

Yesterday, I collected my first order of raw milk.

Like a kid with a bag of sweets/lollies who has been told to "wait until you get home", I couldn't wait to get home to sample it.
As soon as we got in, I rushed straight for the kitchen cupboards for a glass. Ahh! Creamy, sweet goodness. A little more pungent than the last time I had sampled raw milk, but beautiful all the same.
Happily, I noticed over the course of the day that the cream was beginning to settle on the top, so I may have home-made butter too soon.
For those of you who are wondering why I am buying raw milk instead of standard milk, well, I am certain that it is much better for you.
Raw milk is full of good bacteria that are needed to colonise the gut for intestinal health, as well as essential enzymes that our bodies need in order to digest it. To be brief, it contains essential fats, amino acids, proteins, vitamins and minerals that are reduced, destroyed or altered by the pasteurisation and standardisation methods used in commercial milk.
Oh, and yes, it is safe to drink! Milk from factory farms must be pasteurised to make it safe, due to the cow's diet, risk of drug traces, and medical problems due to modern, heigh-yield breeds and intense farming. However, milk that is intended to be drunk raw is from small-stock farms of grass-fed old-fashioned breeds, such as Jersey cows. Delicious!
If you would like to read more about raw milk, click here http://www.westonaprice.org/ or here http://www.rawmilk.org/default.php or even here http://www.raw-milk-facts.com/About_Raw_Milk.html

And for a very interesting study on the safety of raw milk, take a look at this article http://www.realmilk.com/safety-raw-milk.html

Happy drinking!

what's cooking today?

With my freezer and pantry devoid of baked goods, I wondered what to bake for the coming week's lunch boxes. It was a tall order. It had to be low in sugar and milk free (although yoghurt was ok). I also only had half a block of butter left, and just one lonely egg in the egg-box. I refused the temptation to visit the supermarket for more ingredients, as past experience showed that I always walked out with an extra half-dozen items that I suddenly urgently needed!
A flick through Mrs B's, Mrs Smith's, and Mrs Lawson's dog-eared tomes gave no solution, and the cupboard contents were thoroughly un-inspiring.

So, after discovering the left-over cooked apples from yesterdays dinner (pork with cream and apples), I decided mini apple pies were in order.
All was going well until I started to cut out the pastry circles for the patty tins and realised that I had made my usual error of underestimating how much pastry I needed for 24 little pies. I barely had enough for 8! So, after a quick change of plan, I made a quick sponge in the processor using half spelt flour, half cornmeal, baking powder, quarter cup of sugar (I figured the apples were sweet enough), the sole egg, rice bran oil, a glug of lemon juice and some yoghurt.

It was a fairly runny mixture, which I expected, but as I was 'inventing', I wasn't too sure how it would turn out.
Thankfully, 20 minutes or so later, the oven turned out 14 well-risen sponge-topped apple pies. They were good! Better than I thought. The hard part now is to make sure they do actually make it to the lunch boxes!

In the beginning...tea at Grandma's.

Every Saturday, my family would visit my maternal Grandparents for tea. I don't mean a 'cup of tea and a biscuit' type of tea, or a 'main meal' type of tea, but a good old, traditional, afternoon tea, or high tea as it is often called.

My Grandparents house had two downstairs room, along with a very small kitchen. The back room, next to the kitchen, was their main living area, reserving the front room for entertaining visitors.

Grandma was a wonderful host, offering a cup of tea or coffee, before you barely had your coat off. As guests, we would never be allowed to help ourselves from the kitchen.
Tea would usually start with a fresh white 'Bloomer' (A loaf of bread baked on a tray, rather than in a tin, giving it a relaxed oval shape.) which mum would have bought the day before. Mum was also in charge of cutting the loaf, & spreading it thick with butter and jam.
Occasionally, there would be eggs, or jacket potatoes too.
Once the bread and jam was dispensed with, there came the cake. And my, how much cake there was!
Both Grandma and mum would bake a cake each, sometimes two, and it would have been unthinkable to produce one that was not filled and decorated with jam and butter cream.
My favourite of grandma's creations was always her coffee and walnut cake. Beautiful coffee sponge, filled with coffee buttercream, and topped with glacé icing and walnuts. I can still taste it now! Mum sometimes made caramel shortbread, or peppermint slices, which were always popular, and very moreish!
Occasionally, when the mood took her, mum would make 'fancies'. These would be individual cakes, shaped as a diamond or square, and elaborately decorated with buttercream, toasted coconut, chocolate hail, piped icing or anything else she felt like using that day. They looked stunning.
By the time I was in my teens, a bought cheesecake, Boston bun or other bought cake would often be added to the calorific table. So much to choose from!

Once I started dating, it became another tradition that my boyfriend had to meet not only my parents, but also my Grandparents. So it was, that when I finished work on Saturday afternoons, my boyfriend would meet me in town and apprehensively join me for afternoon tea. I can't imagine Grandma's shock when some of the 'young men' arrived at her doorstep wearing eye-liner and nail polish! Thankfully, they always had very good manners and if Grandma didn't approve, she never said.
It must have come as a relief to her when the man I eventually married had no make-up, even if he did have long hair in those days!

gingerbread train

For the last couple of years, I've had a recipe for a gingerbread train, complete with it's cargo of lollies and chocolates, sitting in a file in my kitchen. "One day, I'll make that" I kept saying to myself, and finally, last Christmas, I did! (It's just taken me nearly six months to design the blog to post it onto!)

Almost 50 individual pieces were cut and baked from gingerbread, ready to assemble the engine and three cargo trucks. Stacks of plain biscuits were used internally to strengthen each structure, and each piece was ‘glued’ together with royal icing.

After allowing the icing to set overnight, red, white and green royal icing was used to decorate the train, along with silver cachous, and liquorice.

 Four evening's work, and voila! The completed train!

Life is sweet

well, right now it feels like it, anyway.
Confined to solitude with Laryngitis, I have been enjoying the sun & getting out into the garden, musing about what veggies I'll be growing in the spring, & looking forward to my first taste of raw milk.

I have to admit, I'm feeling pretty contented right now, because over the next year, I'm hoping to:

use mostly raw milk
eat beef from traditional Devon cows
enjoy the company of our own free-range chooks...
...and put their eggs to good culinary use
grow heirloom vegetable varieties

Ahh! Pure, unadulterated, chemical-free, nutrient-rich food. Just as nature intended.