Cold weather comforts

ovember is often full of pumpkins, roots and stews, tea as recommended by Radish below, nourishing baking and that dark steel blue rain reserved for the boundary between autumn and winter. And so it has been, with some added dairy-free kitchen experiments, one of the best being a cobbled together pumpkin and leek quiche.

No soggy bottom here...

To make this you'll want roughly the following:
A blind baked pastry case using pastry of your choice
1 small butternut squash or pumpkin
2 small leeks
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
1-2 tsps English or wholegrain mustard
Freshly ground nutmeg
1 packet silken tofu (pressed to remove liquid)
~ 1/2 cup soy milk
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180C or Gas mark 4.
- Cook the finely chopped onion and garlic gently in a little olive oil in a large frying pan.
- Add the butternut squash, cut into small cubes (1-2cm ish) and chopped leek. Saute everything gently for 10-15 mins until all the vegetables are soft.
- Blend the tofu, soy milk, mustard and nutmeg until smooth. Season to taste.
- Add the tofu mixture to the vegetables and mix before adding to your pastry case.
- Cook for 30-40 mins until golden brown and set in the middle, and allow to cool for 5-10 minutes before slicing.

Silken tofu experiments also led me to the quickest and richest chocolate pudding... All you need is a block of silken tofu to blend until really smooth with a couple of spoons of cocoa powder and maple syrup, and then add in whatever you like best with chocolate, try peanut butter or finely chopped stem ginger. If you blend this and then add it onto a biscuity base and leave it to set for a couple of hours it makes a beautiful chocolate torte.

I got the chance to visit the lovely Collard Hill, scene of my June Large Blue Butterfly adventures this month, for the end of year wash-up meeting to discuss the season. Somerset was damp and green, and my feet remembered many of the hill's lumps and bumps as we walked the transect route in the rain, discussing the successful increase in Large Blues during 2011. Happily, we were also able to find a Brown Hairstreak (Thecla betulae) egg on the Blackthorn hedge, and peered at its intricate golf ball like indentations through a hand lens. Unfortunately, my camera couldn't get that close.

Lepidopterist finger for scale.

There was some further Lepidoptera related excitement when I went out to the woods one evening with the Yorkshire mothmen... It being chilly there wasn't exactly a lot of activity, but by peering at the trunks of Beech, Birch and Ash trees we found the somewhat elusive flightless females of the Winter moth (Operophtera brumata) and Scare Umber (Agriopis aurantiaria). We also found a pair of copulating Winter moths, sometimes you can watch a female drag the male way up a tree trunk, in order to get to her favoured ovipositing spot. Sadly my photos are not amazingly clear as it was rather dark out, but the local moth blog has some good close ups of the females.

Lady winter's vestigial wings

Birch for a bed...

Scarce Umber girls are stripy

Nippy Novembrr eco-endeavours require some dense sustaining baked sweetness to keep one going, which has mainly been taking the form of flapjack. I like them to be slightly crisp rather than soft and stodgy and my favourite recipe works well with either butter or dairy-free margarine. You'll need:

150g butter or margarine
70g light brown muscovado sugar
3 tbsp golden syrup
pinch salt
125g jumbo oats
125g porridge oats
200-250g combination of dried fruits, nuts, seeds, chocolate.

Grease or line a 30 x 20 x 4cm baking tin and preheat the oven to 180C or Gas Mark 4.
- Heat butter, sugar and syrup gently in a pan until butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and allow to cool a little.
- Stir in the oats, salt and dried fruit etc. If you want the whole flapjack to be chocolatey then stir in your chocolate here and it will melt through, if not, allow it to cool some more and then plonk choc chunks in so they remain whole.
- Put the mixture into the tin and spread evenly. Bake between 20-25 mins, until golden brown. If you prefer softer flapjack, bake for less time, and if you like crisper, it'll need slightly longer.
- Remove from oven and allow to cool completely in its tin. If you fancy decorating it a little, melt some chocolate and drizzle over the flapjack then allow to cool before cutting.

You can put pretty much anything in this, recently i've tried dried pear and crystallised ginger with dark chocolate, and coconut chips, cranberry and dark chocolate with sunflower and pumpkin seeds. Mmm, time to embark on more winter walks armed with oats...

Coconut and cranberry

Adventures in Meddling

runchy gold, rust and red tree shrapnel is carpeting the pavements, darkness is falling at four-thirty, wood smoke is permeating the valley, and autumn is well and truly here. Being alternately mud-spattered or wrapped up in voluminous knitwear at this time of year is strangely comforting, but before settling into such a rhythm, I spent rather a lot of October gadding about...

It started off in glorious Grasmere, before quick jaunts to Scarborough's shores and ghost hunting with Pudding Pie in York, a delightful trip to Brussels and Ghent, before the main event; East Anglia, the scene of so many MSc moments. Given that I am, alas, once again without work, what better way to spend time than bother those of you who do have eco-geeky jobs? So I started off with Mrs Teacup, who now works in community development for local food in Suffolk. She took me to an allotment, which is getting turned into a community orchard, and we happily weeded away in cold sunshine, while other volunteers dug a very big hole.

If you like orchards brandish your garden forks! Well, that's one.

While at Mrs T's, I gazed with interest upon two huge platters of Medlars, gathered from a tree in Dunwich. They were being left to blet (rot to a delicious ooziness) before being eaten. She very kindly gave me a few, and they've slowly been ripening to collapse in my fruit bowl. Tonight I ate my first 'naked' Medlar, and it was lovely. It has the grainy texture, but not the juiciness of an overripe pear, and tasted delicate, almost like partly cooked crumble filling. There is a particularly evocative and almost joyously lascivious description of the bletted Medlar from an enthusiast who urges one to 'nip the medlar in its side as if you are a vampire and its tender, turgid, russet-skinned being is a plump neck. Now suck its guts out.' Ooh er.

Blet you darn Medlars!

Next up was Mr Watervole, who is very busy and important working for the National Trust at Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast, looking after its glorious wetland haven for waders, vegetated shingle, and decrepit abandoned MoD buildings. And a really big nuclear bomb. Mrs Teacup and I got to experience the Orford Ness ferry, saw much damp red Salicornia, watched diggers build new lagoons and walked through the strange shingle at sunset.

If you ask nicely you can ride in the Landrover...

A short, flat train ride took me to Norwich, where I headed to Goat Manor, home of Luscious Lemon, the lovely Grazing Officer at the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. On a truly beautiful blue Saturday we cycled through narrow lanes to Buxton Heath, one of the sites she looks after. In search of the ten or so Dartmoor ponies that graze the heath we wandered around in thick afternoon sunshine, avoiding the mire, but finding no equines. Finally, on our way home we screeched to a halt on our bikes, spying the cheeky faces of the ponies peeking over a gate at a side entrance. They were rather enthusiastically curious, and quite boldly surrounded us. Unfortunately this suggested that they had been fed by visitors to the heath, which is not ideal for semi-feral beasts... Hopefully with a little more interpretation (my favourite!) on site, they will start to keep their distance from people again.

A golden evening on the heath.

They all have names, I just can't remember them...

A rather momentous moment for the blog now, as the first actual Battenberg makes its appearance. . Not homemade, but made especially delicious by eating it off Ms Lemon's wildflower and moth covered crockery! Well deserved after finding two lonesome and chilly Green Brindled Crescents (Allophyes oxyacanthae) in the first moth trapping session at the Manor. One day, it'll be a carefully hand constructed chequered creation gracing the tea table.

Mrs Teacup I hope you approve!

Now that the season of conkers, treacle toffee and dragon breath is upon us, it's time to reacquaint ourselves with those sustaining foods that will, ahem, cushion us against the winter. Behold, the veggie toad-in-the-hole! Oh, there will be more...

Mmm, fluffy and pillowy.

A Yorkshire Autumn

ast autumn sowed the seed of the Battenberg's voyage, as I introduced Pedro and Radish to my little corner of Yorkshire. Our wanderings took us to tea shops, through woodlands to hilltops and to kitchen tables. The spell of unemployment took me to recipe books and experimental afternoons with the Aga. One particularly glorious day, well supplied with snacks, we three headed to Hardcastle Crags, a wooded valley extending to moorland, owned by The National Trust. Many stepping stones, funny looks from dog walkers and ginger beer in the Pack Horse pub later, we'd found huge ant solaria, flowering Cowberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea) and Crowberry (Empetrum nigrum) and many fungi, including a bank of moss cushioning numerous puffballs of some sort. We also came across a teepee made of branches and bracken.

The Northern Hairy Wood Ant (Formica lugubris)

Unidentified purple velvety fungi - any ideas?

Tidying up the garden I salvaged the old lavender flowers from the compost's clutches and decided to try making lavender shortbread to welcome my sister home for a short visit. It was lovely, and floral baking will be making a reappearance in my kitchen when the flowers reappear in the garden.

Purple sparkly sugar is perfectly respectable

After stripping the most appetising flowers from their stalks I roughly ground them in a pestle and used this recipe:

250g very soft slightly salted butter
250g plain flour
75g mixed cornflower and semolina (just what I had left)
70g golden granulated sugar
~ 2tsp ground lavender flowers (more or less to taste)

Preheat oven to 160C/Gas 3 and line a 6x10 inch glass dish with baking paper. If you use a smaller dish it'll take longer to cook....
- Mix butter, sugar and lavender.
- Sift flour and cornflower/semolina onto butter and lightly mix until a smooth dough is formed.
- Press the dough into the prepared dish until vaguely even. Bake for about 30 minutes until top and bottom are both light brown.
- Cool in the dish, cut when just warm but remove when completely cold.
- Decorate with what you will, we used Divine dark chocolate, small purple elephants and purple sugar.

In October my father spent a week at a conference discussing sustainable food and gender in Italy. While he was there he learnt to make gnocchi from an Italian grandmother, and when he returned we spent a morning learning from him and feasting on the tiny dumplings for lunch.

Gnocchi with cherry tomato sauce

All you need to make them are some starchy potatoes and plain flour.

- Boil your potatoes until soft, drain and allow to cool completely.
- Next you have to get them into a useable form for kneading, which technically means using a potato ricer. We didn't have one, so used a rotary cheese grater, but I think a normal grater would work too. So, rice or grate your potatoes into a big pile on a floured work surface.
- Now you shake some flour onto your pile of potato and start kneading. Flour must be added and the dough kneaded until it no longer feels sticky, but is instead bouncy and you can feel it stretch slightly. This will probably take a while, maybe 15-20mins.
- When you're happy and no longer sticky, split your dough into three or four and using the flat of your hand roll each portion into a long thin sausage shape. When it's a couple of centimetres in diameter, use a sharp knife to cut small dumpling portions.
- The gnocchi need to be thoroughly floured when then have been cut, so they do not stick together, and laid on a tray for a couple of hours to dry out.
- When you are ready to eat, drop the gnocchi into a pan of boiling water, and remove as they float to the surface, which will take a couple of minutes.
- We ate ours with a sauce of cherry tomatoes cooked in a little olive oil and torn basil. 
- Any uncooked gnocchi you don't need, freeze and save for a midnight dumpling picnic in midwinter.

October offered a great deal of baking opportunity this year, and feeling especially childlike on All Hallow's Eve my sister and I made a lot of very garish creepy crawly biscuits. We did supplement this with a slightly more mature, dairy free pumpkin pie, made with butternut squash. It still had a spider on it though.

Bats in my biscuit tin

A pumpkin stares into the future

Autumn slowly crumpled towards winter, and ice appeared on the inside windowpanes in November. Watching the icicles melt one morning I was surprised to see a disorientated and dozy wasp basking in the early sun on my windowsill. I have his photograph, but we haven't stayed in touch.

Hairy, but is that enough to keep warm?

And then, it was winter.