A bit of home-grown and home-made.

Oh! Look at me! Back on blogger, two days in a row. This might have something to do with Hubby having commandeered the telly to watch "The Legend of '81"- a documentary about Ian Botham (yawn).

Just look at my veggie patch, there. It has a life of it's own. At the bottom of our garden is an awesome looking field of sweetcorn and in spite of never seeing a farmer, it is all growing in nice neat rows with not a weed in sight. Now, I'm not the most conscientious of gardeners but I do try my best to potter among the veg and flowers, trying to keep things tidy in between school runs, cooking, shopping, teaching, washing... etc etc. I only have to turn my back for 5 mins and all sorts of things crop up/ die/ get eaten before I can stop it. However, some mysterious 'weeds' have grown up among the lettuces bearing pretty purple flowers. I have no idea what they are but I have left them alone for aesthetic value.
But this post is about what I have been up to in the kitchen this week, really. I have been combining our homegrown veg with leftovers to make up this weeks meals as follows:

Sunday: Roast chicken dinner (including my mothers cabbage from her veg patch) (I saved the left over chicken carcass)

Monday: Boiled bacon and parsley sauce with tatties and supermarket veg. (I saved the remains of the bacon joint and some of the cooking water which included onions and celery).

Tuesday: Chicken and bacon pie with broad beans from my veg patch (made with leftover chicken and bacon and parsley sauce adding extra cream in a dish with leek and topped with puff pastry and more of Mum's cabbage).

Wednesday: Summer potage! A soup made from chicken stock that I made from the old carcass plus some of the bacon cooking water I had also saved. Then I added pearl barley, chopped chicken and bacon, more broad beans and lettuce from the veg patch and then I sent Hubby out to get a tin of chopped tomatoes to put in also.

Now, I was in the supermarket a few days ago and found a massive punnet of blueberries being sold as seconds for just 39p! They were fresh. I think, maybe, a few packets had split so they had been done up again like this. So, apart from putting some au naturel in the kids' lunchboxes, I made these blueberry muffins with them. The kids had the little ones for snack after school today. The big ones are for breakfast tomorrow. They are fantastic. The pics are a bit blurry (sorry) but can you see how the blueberries are juicily oozing out of these muffins? Num, num!

So here is today's dinner, the summer soup served with baguette and a selection of cheeses. I wasn't really looking forward to it at first, but it was delicious. I was almost tempted to open my Mum's bottle of homemade plum wine, but then thought "no. It's only Wednesday!" But then Hubby walked in with the tin of tomatoes... and a bottle of rose wine. 'Nuff said. Hubby and I were chatting about how much we both used to dislike pearl barley when we were children. But all our kids love it and we seem to like it now, too. Funny, that!
Look at those happy faces!

Tomorrow: sausage, mash 'n beans.

About vegetables.

We have just returned from a little camping holiday in Norfolk. I shall post about that later. This post is just to comment on a couple of other blogs I have been looking at. Having just been down to the veg patch to pick some curly kale to go with the corned beef pie that Mum left us for dinner, I wanted to look up what I could be sowing now for later on. My tiny plot (see sidebar for link) gives advice on planting potatoes to be ready for Christmas. I like the idea of growing now what we'll have with our Christmas dinner so I think I'll give that a try. I've also just been looking at Salt and Chocolate. Mary Beth and her children have set up a lovely little veg stall outside their home to sell off the glut of produce from their garden. We barely seem to grow enough to feed ourselves so we won't be doing that but I'd love it if others from our neighbourhood did this. My nextdoor neighbour had a plant stall for a while and I enjoyed going to get little bargains there. I have also seen eggs and honey for sale at a couple of houses too. I was talking to one lady who lives nearby and she says that even though she freezes a lot of it, she gets a lot of extra produce and in the past some people have had little stalls like this but, unfortunately, money got stolen and the weights and measures police have also interfered. That is such a shame. I'd love to go pottering around the village to buy things from the neighbours. Much more pleasurable (and tasty, I'll bet) than fighting my way around Tesco's. My next-door-neighbour did have the smart idea, though, of leaving envelopes to put our money straight through the door.

Sew easy!

I've been promising myself that I will start sewing for some time. Well, I haven't yet blown the dust off the sewing machine, but yesterday I did get round to making little skirt and matching headscarf for Honor. The skirt is a simple circle skirt I made by following a short tutorial on youtube (complete with annoyingly loud music!). I bought this green cotton in Dunelm Mill. It was a roll end so I got 2 metres for about £1.98, or something like. I drew around one of the kids hula hoops to get the circle and then cut a smaller hole in the middle for the waist.

Then I, very crudely, hand sewed the hem and waistband, with elastic, and cut out some heart shapes with this scrap of strawberry fabric and sewed them on, too.

The headscarf was made using the basic pattern from the book I bought recently, 'Carefree Clothes for Girls'. It is simply a triangle cut from the same green fabric and I've used the strawberry fabric to make the border and ties. Then the sides are frayed to give that homespun effect!

She was delighted with her new outfit. It's just a practise, really. I had to re-sew some bits this morning that started to come apart. Honor wants more skirts like this so as this one is a bit on the short side, I had better make the circle a bit bigger next time.

And just look at these gorgeous peonies, roses and fatsia japonica from my garden! I've had trouble with my peonies over the last couple of years. The plants come up with lots of lovely lush green growth and plenty of buds, but then the buds have failed to open. I looked up the problem on the internet and some of the advice suggested that it may because they are not getting enough full sunshine. Apparently they need at least 6 hours of full sun per day. Well they've opened up this year and there certainly been plenty of sun. We are set for much, much more this weekend. A real scorcher. Hubby put the pool up last night so tomorrow will be spent playing in that. I hope we won't literally be drowning our sorrows, though, after England play Germany.