Blackberrying

Bannau Sir Gar - Black Mountain - the last of the Carmarthen Fans . . . call it what you will. This is where we walked to last week - the lake of Llyn-y-Fan-Fach being at the roots of the sharpest dark ridge you can see. It's worth walking to the top of our steep hill to see this view. . .



Yesterday evening I felt like a little wander along the hedgerows to pick some blackberries. With the rain we've had on and off, the best ones (as ever) were going over quickly, and I had to be careful not to put my hand on a wasp, as plenty were making the most of the berries.

I walked along the old card track towards Lime Kiln Field, reaching under leaves - some browning already at the edges as autumn is truly with us early this year - and disturbing flies and worse, with the tinkling note of the nearby stream in the background, and a few quarrelling sparrows in the hedgerow to my left. I ducked under a strand of barbed wire and crossed the Park field, where walking was difficult due to the heavy clay soil being poached by the dairy herd who had been grazing there recently. The hedgerow yielded little fruit - it had gone over or was fly-sucked. A jet flew overhead, so high I couldn't see him, only hear the whine of his engine. A cabbage white butterfly fluttered from bramble stem to hedgerow leaf.

I climbed our hill, and in the distance a buzzard mewed, its shrill voice sounding peevish and whistle-like. A damsel fly rose from the brambles and the little khaki sh*t flies (followers of Next Door's dairy herd) were on every fruit I wished to pick. A good reason not to eat blackberries straight from the bush! The fields across the valley have been cut and baled for haylage - a few canny souls took advantage of a few dry days last week and cut for hay - but it will be a difficult year for horse-owners looking for small bale hay again. Most of it will be brought in from England, at a premium. Straw too of course, as this is hill-farming country - too steep and too wet for growing any sort of corn.

This morning's first job will be to raid the freezers for the last of the 2008 brambles. I have several bags of sloes too, but I will let those stay a while in case I can't get a decent picking this year. Bramble Jelly it is then . . .

Gingerbread recipe

This has been requested by both the guests who have eaten it in the past week, so yer tis (sorry I don't have a piccy though).

GINGERBREAD:

(serves 14 to 18 - less if Greedy!)

1lb (450g) plain flour
6 rounded teaspoons ground ginger
2 rounded ditto mixed spice
2 1/2 level tsp. bicarb. of soda
8 oz (225g) mixture of butter or margarine or cooking fat
8 oz (225g) golden syrup
8 oz 9225g) treacle or molasses
4 oz (125g) dark brown soft sugar (I usually omit this)
4 grade 3 eggs
1/2 pt (275ml) cold milk
2 tblspn cold water

Well grease and line a tin of about 11" x 9" x 1 1/2" (27.5 x 22.5 x 4cm) - though I usually use a loaf tin or a 10" circular tin. Set oven to 300 deg. F 9150 deg. C), Gas 2.

Sift first four dry ingredients into a bowl. Put fats, syrup, treacle and sugar into a pan and melt gently over a low heat. Do not boil. Beat together eggs, milk and water.

Make a dip in the centre of the dry ingredients. Pour in egg mixture, followed by the melted mixture. Stir briskly without beating, making sure you work in all the flour. I will add at this point that I often have terrible trouble doing it this way and have been known to have to push it all through a sieve because I have lumps of flour! Its the warmth of the melted stuff I think, makes the flour glutinous. I am going to try adding the flour to the wet mix next time . . .

Transfer to prepared tin and bake in oven for 1 - 1 1/4 hrs or until wwell risen and deep brown and a skewer inserted in middle comes out clean. You may need lnger if you have it in a deeper pan.

Leave in tin for 15 mins to cool and then lift out carefully onto wire cooling raack. Store in an airtight tin when cold and keep cool (warmth will make it go mouldy). I put mine in a plastic freezer bag in the fridge.

There are variations on this: Double gingerbread is made by tossing 4 oz (125g) finely chopped and drained preserved ginger into the mix.

Brandied gingerbread has a liqueur glass of brandy over the top and left to sink in - having made holes with a thin metal skewer.

Fruity gingerbread: Toss in 4 oz (125g) raisins or sultanas to dry ingredients.

Date gingerbread: Toss in 4 oz (225g) finely chopped cooking dates.

Chocolate gingerbread: ass recipe but use 14 oz (400g) plain flour and 2 oz (50g) cocoa powder and increase water to 4 tblspns.

Chocolate fruited gingerbread: as above but add 2 oz (50g) mixed dried peel into mix.

Iced Orange gingerbread: Make any of the above and allow to mature for at least 1 day. Tie a band of greaseproof paper around the sides of the gingerbread to prevent icing trickling down. Mix 6 oz (157g) sifted icing sugar to a thickish icing with strained fresh orange juice. Spread over top of gingerbread and leae until set. Decorate by sprinkling with finely grated range peel then add a few halved glace cherries in decorative design. Remove paper before cutting.

A Day of Domesticity

It rained all day yesterday, starting with a soft mizzle before breakfast, working up through light drizzle to steady drizzle and then proper rain by teatime. It was nice to stay indoors and play catchup and I found myself back in my old winter-time routine of doing the ironing mountain whilst listening to the Archers Omnibus.

My middle daughter, G, was in a cooking mood. She wanted to make Quiche for to take for lunch during the next week. Many of my cookery books - they all usually prefixed "Country" or "Farmhouse" didn't have a quiche recipe, so we had to fall back on my original Margeurite Patten cookbook, and the quiche turned out really well. Then G made Chocolate Chip Muffins, messed up by mixing up two recipes side by side and so had to make a double batch to use up the double amount of sugar she'd added. What a hardship it will be to eat these! Just the thing for hungry returning-from-the-Festival appetites I think.

Now you know what she had for tea too!


Yummy muffins . . .


We were low on bread so I made an oaty loaf (everyone likes oaty bread - just wish I could get the flour in larger bags.) The only trouble is, half of it disappears before it has even cooled! When she came back from Uni this time, G couldn't believe how filling home-made bread is compared with the steamed bread from supermarkets, which you need half a loaf of to make the same impression as ONE slice of home made. I think she may even make her own bread when she returns to her Uni flat - she already makes her own pizza base, so this is a natural step . . . I am glad that both my girls think home-made from scratch is best. My son is good at bread-making too, and he will often do the kneading for me if I'm busy.



Today I have to collect T and J from the Green Man Festival at Usk, so I will be on the road all day. I intend to stop in Brecon on the way, and have a stroll round my favourite shops (again - we were there on Thursday, after dropping them off, but couldn't linger then). I have promised steak and chips for tea (they've been living on pot noodles all weekend as they are the lightest food to carry!), followed by Apple Dappy and custard. Apple Dappy is our favourite dessert - a real West Country rib-sticker - and is so tasty with the spices (ground cloves, cinnamon, etc.) I am pretty sure that the recipe is on my original Codlins and Cream blogspot, but I will put it up on here later.

Kim, who stayed with us last week, asked for some of my tried and tested recipes last week, so I shall put up a post when I have time. I have some standby recipes which we have so often they take little thought in the preparation, including various cobblers, savoury chicken, and other bung-it recipes which have stood the test of time.

>APPLE DAPPY

225gram/8 oz/2 cups Self-Raising flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

Pinch of salt

50g/2 oz margarine

150 ml / 1/4 pint / 5 fl ozs milk

450g/ 1 pound/ 2 v. large cooking apples

1 tablespoon Demerara sugar

½ level teaspoon each of cinnamon, ground cloves, ground nutmeg (or 1 teaspoon mixed spice)

Syrup:

1 lemon or a little lemon essence

1 tablespoon golden syrup

15g/ ½ oz margarine

100g/ 4 oz sugar

200 ml/ 7 fl oz water

Make the syrup first. Peel a fine strip of lemon rind and squeeze the juice from the lemon. Put rind, juice and all other syrup ingredients into a pan and stir over a gentle heat until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and leave in pan until needed.

Sift flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Rub in margarine. Mix to a dough with the milk. Roll out on a floured board to a rectangle about 20 x 13cm (8 x 5 inches) and 7mm/ ¼ inch thick.

Peel, core and chop apples. Spread them on pastry. Mix sugar and spices together and sprinkle over apple. Roll up pastry and apple like a Swiss roll. Then cut into slices about 2.5 cm/ 1 inh thick.

10. Grease an ovenproof dish and lay slices flat in it. Remove lemon rind from syrup and pour over the apple slices. Bake in a moderately hot oven: :Gas 6, 375 degrees F, 190 degrees C, for about 30 minutes. Serve with cream or custard.

More New Forest Days

A Forest mare and foal. The collar she is wearing is a reflective one so she will show up if she is crossing the road after dark.


I've not finished writing about my holiday yet, though it seems just a memory now. My forum friend "Yarrow", who has just been to stay with me here, also drove down to meet up when we were in the Forest. She brought her two children with her, and as they had never been to the Forest before, I knew they were in for a special day. First off, we had a lovely wander around Burley and all its "witchy" shops. There were donkeys in the car park, and ponies which were happy to be petted as well.


Then we drove across the Forest to Lyndhurst, the "capital" of the Forest. We used to catch an early bus to go riding here (from the pub below) and get off at Ashurst and walk across the Forest, which was magical so early in the day. There was a beautiful windy stream which we called Snake River . . .



This is a pub in Lyndhurst which in the 1960s had a riding stables running from it. The ponies were kept in the old stabling at the back of the pub, and we mounted up in the old stable yard and then - stopping the traffic - rode out down the High Street in Lyndhurst to reach Bolton's Bench and an hourly ride that side of the town, or else we would take the road straight across from the stables and ride around the edge of the Golf Course and into the Enclosures. The memories are still crystal clear to me. In the churchyard near Bolton's Bench is buried the lady who, as a child, was the model for Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland.

Had we gone straight across, we would have passed this shop, which has a wonderful window display and now sells beautiful scented gifts.

Memories of bygone days.

Then we stopped on the way back to Burley and had a walk. It made a change to explore a totally different part of the Forest.

This shallow lake turns out to be a boating lake, but only dog-walkers were about when we passed it.


A very bad picture of me (on the left) and Yarrow, who has a wonderful blog here. We get on so well - it is as if we have known each other from a previous life. I am so grateful to the Internet, forums and blogging, as I have made lifelong friends. Even the lovely Ann of the Forest, who we house-sat for, is a forum buddy of mine!




I will try and write about the Downton Lace tomorrow, but in the meantime, a piece of yesterday's home-made ratatouille-topped pizza beckons . . .

Going Stir Crazy . . .

Yeesh. I wish I had done a how-to-sort-your-blogger-account course. I have finally been able to get back into my old blogs, but I have just left links to this new one for fear of not being able to get in again in the future. If I was "clever" I would know how to bring across everything from the original blog, but this will have to do for now. I hope all my old friends will seek me out.

There will be a proper post shortly, meanwhile have a think about lace-making, as I plan to write about Downton Lace shortly.

Waving goodbye to my guests

I have just waved goodbye to my guests, Kim and her two lovely children. We have had a lovely time together and packed a lot in. I wish them a safe journey home and hope that they will have happy memories of exploring new bits of Wales.

Yesterday we drove down to Manorbier Castle in Pembrokeshire and divided our time between the castle and the beach, and I managed to walk up to the 12th century church the opposite side of the valley to the castle.

Below shows some of the lovely gardens which line the walls.






Manorbier was where Gerald de Barri was born (we know him as Gerald of Wales and he famously penned - as Geraldus Cambrensis - his history of Wales). This website can give you far larger pictures than mine (!) and some good historic background too.

This was the huge inglenook fireplace in the kitchen, you can just see the little skirt of front wall which would have been full height and incorporated into a room with the fireplace.

These triangular holes were intgriguing. For bee skeps or for pigeons I wonder? Though there was a proper dove cote in the main wall of the great hall.

Ivy-leaved toadflax growing on one of the walls.

Anemones and lots of shellfish in one of the many rock-pools down at the beach below the castle.


The rocky rock-pool side of the beach.

Just off to take our eldest daughter and her boyfriend to the Green Man Festival, so had better dash.

Llyn-y-Fan-Fach again

Common water-crowfoot floating on streams and ponds near Llyn-y-fan-fach.


I am hopeful that I will gradually be able to gather all my old friends around me on this replacement blog. At the moment though, I don't have the heart to start up a second version of BB's Nature Notes, so I will just incorporate them in this.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. I am watching the dawn break as my back was creaking in the wee small hours and sleep denied me. This is the price I have paid for delaying a long-overdue visit to the Chiropractor and then climbing the mile and a half up to Llyn-y-Fan-Fach yesterday.


Younger legs than mine had no trouble with the climb up to the lake and the Carmarthen Fans.

The weather was kind and it stayed dry, with a little sunshine on occasion . . .









As you can see, the scenery is stunning. This bird posed long enough to take his photo but exact ID on him is a little vague - Stonechat or Whinchat I suppose.


Looking back across the path we had just climbed to the stunning view beyond.



It was pretty windy when we finally got to the lake and inside the bothy, used as an emergncy shelter for anyone caught out up there after dark/in bad weather, the wind sounded even stronger. We debated the possibility of the bothy being a safe place to be in case of Zomby invasion, though you would need to keep the fire burning good and hot to stop them getting down the chimney. I blame my 18 year old son for this conversation!

You can just see the bothy to the right of this picture. I believe it may have been the original hut build by/for the consciencious objectors who were abandoned here during WW1 to manage as best they could, whilst working hard on building the retaining walls around the reservoir that you see today. I've been trying to find further details on this, but drawn a blank so far. My memory suggests that they had to grow their own food (in a rather inhospitable area) and were just "dumped" there.

The curving stream in the pictures (above and below) is a leat which feeds into the lake.

"And I will raise up mine eyes to the hills . . ." The stern face of Black Mountain, last of the Carmarthan Fans.

Beside the pathway to the lake runs this beautiful river, chuntering over boulders, dropping down little waterfalls, splashing cheerfully downhill all the way.