Borcht for a cold day

It is truly the end of autumn here. The fallen leaves have stopped being crisp and crunchy underfoot and turned to slippery pre-mulch slime. To be fair, that’s probably got as much to do with the apocolyptic rain we’ve been having as anything, but it all adds to the feeling of brrrr…

It wasn’t a good time for our central heating to go on the fritz then. The boiler was whirring away and there was gallons of hot water, but the radiators were stone cold. Thankfully this was remedied pretty quickly by the nice man from Scottish Gas, but it all put Mr Rhubarb in the mood for borcht.

This is a lovely soup – consomme, really. It’s full-flavoured yet light, cheerfully pink, and ultra-easy to throw together while you’re doing something else.  Beetroot is reputedly very good for you, especially your liver.  And it makes a nice change from another cup of tea of coffee when you just want something wet to cheer yourself up.

Borcht
4 or 5 large beetroots
2 sticks celery
3 cloves garlic
six dried mushrooms

Wash your beetroots but don’t bother peeling them and chop into quarters. Put them in a large pot with the celery, broken into two or three bits, the mushrooms and the garlic cloves, cut in half. Pour over cold water, bring to the boil then turn down to a gentle simmer. Leave it cooking for three or four hours or until you think the beets have leached all their flavour out into the water. Strain through a sieve and serve.

If you want to dress it up, you can serve with a plate of boiled potatoes, chopped hard boiled egg and pickle. Dill or parsley would be nice to have on hand too, perhaps with a little sour cream? But don’t go overboard! The brilliance of this soup is easily dulled with too many accompaniments.

Eat up and stay warm.

Either/or

I should be: doing dishes, laundry, and ironing and cutting pieces of fabric for little doll quilts

I am: watching Masterchef with a tear in my eye, a glass of Villa Maria and a bag of crisps and looking forward to Buzzcocks.

Oh well.

Kids easy dressing gown tutorial

It’s always risky taking my big girl to a fabric shop.  She has clearly inherited the fabric-loving gene and will wander around happily touching stuff or hiding behind the displays.  On this last visit she impressed the ladies by working out how much bias binding she could buy with her pocket money (not that she knows what she’d do with it – she’s not *that* whizzy!)

Anyway, she adores soft fluffy fabrics and fell in love with a light green fluffy fleece with pastel swirls on.  Now, for the past week she’s been wearing a dressing gown for ages 2 – 3, so it wasn’t a big jump to think that maybe I could buy the fluffy fleece and run her up a dressing gown. 

Initially I offered a poncho design – benefits being it’s kind of like a snuggly blanket plus you don’t have the open dressing gown flapping about, which is my main gripe about children in dressing gowns (ie I run around after them trying to bundle them up). But in my heart of hearts, I knew it was a kind of cop-out.  Then I wondered about a jelaba (spelling?) style – like a long T-shirt, I suppose.  No, it had to be a proper dressing gown.  So, without the aid of a safety net, I went ahead and, you know what? It worked!

First you need to make some measurements:

•  total length of dressing gown
• across the back of the shoulders
• around the waist
• length of arm from shoulder to wrist
• around the armpit
• back waist (ie, from the back of the neck where that little bumpy bone is, to where the waist is)

The basic design is a really simplified kimono, so no tricky sleeve fitting.  Use the across the shoulders measurement to work out how wide you want your back panel.  My girl was 15″ or so, so I added a few inches and came up with the back panel being 18″.  It helps if this number can be easily divided into two and three.  The length came out at 30″, so I cut one rectangle of 18″x30″ for the back. 

For the front panels you need two rectangles, each 2/3 as wide as the back, so there’s room to overlap.  So I cut two of 12″x30″.  Then to make the neck space and cross-over at the front you need to cut a triangle off each.  Measure half-way in at the top and make a mark (so in mine it was 6″).  Then measure the back-waist length at one side and make another mark.  Join the marks with a diagonal line and cut along it.  If you lay the pieces out now, they should look quite like a dressing gown already!

You’ll need sleeves, of course.  A big rectangle for each measuring the length of the arm and as wide as the armhole measurement plus a little.  I folded them in half lengthways and trimmed a long but narrow triangle off them so they’d taper at the wrist – just eyeball it, an inch or two should do it.

At this point, it’s helpful to sew the fronts and back together at the shoulder seams only.

Now you’ll also need a belt – just a piece of fabric folded in half to your preferred width and probably 1.5 to 2 times the waist measurement depending on how likely your child is to trip up on long ends.  I hate turning long tubes inside out, so I just ran the overlocker over the raw edges – it’s not perfect but it was so much quicker and easier!

And finally you need a collar.  I made mine a little too narrow so I think a piece at least 10″ wide sits best, maybe even wider.  To work out how long a piece you need, I think you’re actually best to measure it once you’ve sewn the fronts and back together.  You measure from the start of one diagonal front, round the back and down the other front, ie the length of where you’re going to place the collar. 

Take your large rectangle and fold it in half lengthways and then again widthways.  Now mark a curved line so the collar will taper into the dressing gown.  All the folding means you just do one cut so it will all be the same.  A picture will probably show this best!

Ok, so now you need to sew your collar.  I do this before the sleeves as it means you have less fabric to wrestle with.  What I did was sew the pieces right sides together and ended up with an inside-out, completely closed-in shape (on purpose!) then made a little slit at the centre of the non-curved part so I could pull it through to the right way out.  The reason for this is that my fleece was extremely fluffy and little bits kept coming off so I wanted to keep as many raw edges tucked away as possible. 

To attach the collar, pin it in place WRONG sides together, so it looks like the collar’s going on the inside of the gown.  You’re going to sew it on and then flip it back out, so the seam is on the right side of the dressing gown, but hidden by the collar, and on the inside is a nice smooth seam that won’t annoy little necks.  To make the pinning go smoothly, pin the ends and the centre point then adjust as you go to make the rest space out smoothly.  Once that’s sewn on you can breathe a sigh of relief – the end is in sight!

Pin the sleeves on to the body section and sew that seam. 

The finishing seam runs up the side of the dressing gown body and out along the underside of the sleeve.  Before you sew this last seam, make two loops out of ribbon if you like, or the same fabric as the dressing gown, measure down the backwaist length on the back section and sew them in place right sides together and raw edges together.  Now when you pin the back and front together to join them just make sure your loops are tucked into the middle of the sandwich.

Then all you have to do is hem the bottom and the cuffs!

I will try to come back and edit this with pictures and diagrams, but as this is my first dressmaking (ha!) tute, I’d love to hear feedback and wow, if you actually sew this, I’d be over the moon if you told me.

Potage Parmentier

It’s properly autumn here, now.  The central heating has been bumped up and I’ll be putting the winter quilts on the beds soon.  And I wore my favourite teal winter coat for the first time just yesterday.  So it’s obviously weather for soup.

Having read Julie/Julia on holiday recently, it was no wonder potage parmentier was on my mind – the soup that started it all for her.  I actually have a copy of the Julia Child book – a rare thing here in Britain, we were much more aware of Fanny Craddock and Marguerite Patton seguing into Delia Smith.  But my parents lived in the States for a few years, so we have a number of American and Canadian cookbooks from the 60s lurking around, and the Julia Child was one I’d snaffled one time I was at Mum’s.

It all looked so simple – isn’t that the whole point?  But jings, I hadn’t quite comprehended the sheer volume of three leeks once they’re sliced up! Add to that four pints of water and four big tatties and my pot was looking brim-full.  And then it took bloody ages for the water to boil. 

About three-quarters of an hour later, the soup was supposedly ready.  I whizzed it up with my stick blender as per instructed and then finely chopped parsley which, in a devil-may-care way I flung into the soup, only briefly pausing to think “will Miss Small baulk at this?  oh, of course not, that’s the OTHER daughter…” (you can see where this is going, can’t you?)

Obviously ten minutes later I was to be found sifting through four pints of potage parmentier with a teaspoon to try and get a bowlful without any parsley.  Which I have to say is bloody hard.  The resulting bowl had mere homeopathic quantities of parsley but I still had to hide it from her to get her to eat it.  Oh, and the other weird thing about it was it was slightly strandy, if you see what I mean?  Spooky little leeky strands permeate the entire pot.  I don’t mind them unless i think about them too much (I have texture issues, clearly) and no amount of blending will get rid of them.  They swim with the tide.

So, potage parmentier, or fancy leek and potato soup – I think I’ll stick to my usual method.  If you want spooky strandy soup, though, you can do this:

put 1lb of chopped leeks and 1lb of peeled chopped tatties in a really big pot, add 4 pints of liquid (for a really thin soup – personally I think it’s a pint too far) and simmer for 45 minutes.  Whisk in 3 tablespoons of butter. Recklessly throw in parsley and instantly regret it.   Eat for about a week afterwards.

If you are like me a child of the 70s you may have recollections of packaged vicysoisse soup - thin, slightly grainy and murkily green soup with small rubbery nuggets of, well, I dunno – maybe leek or parsley but whatever it was, even its own mother wouldn’t recognise it.  Given the ingredients and simplicity of preparation, looking back, I have to wonder why we bothered.  I mean, how hard is it really, to boil up some veg and add butter?  Still, at least it didn’t have the strands.

Greek Meatballs

This is a yummy dish and great to prepare in advance if you’re super-organised like that.  I’ve adapted it from Jill Dupleix’s recipe, and the sauce is more or less hers completely, but I like to squeeze in extra veg wherever possible, and the bonus is that it extends the meat, so you get practically two meals out of one teeny packet of lamb mince.

Here’s how I do it:  First, open a bottle of red wine.  Don’t you love recipes that start like that?  Ok, rip up some bread – two slices if its crusty loaf-style and three if it came in a plastic wrapper – and put in a bowl.  Pour over about a glass of wine and leave to soak.  In the food processor, put one onion, a carrot, a stick of celery, a few stalks of parsley and fresh mint  (if I have them, but it’s not a disaster if you miss them out, three garlic cloves), 1 tsp or so of cumin, half a tsp of cinnamon, unless you foolishly try to tip out the quantity from a large jar over the food processer bowl in which case you might end up with a bit more.  Because I’ve got some spinach in the fridge, I’m going to bung in a handful or two of that but aubergine or courgette are especially good here, and mushroom’s not bad either.  Whizz it all up until it’s shredded into tiny confetti pieces. 

 It should be smelling pretty good already!  Add in half a beaten egg and squeeze out your winey bread and plonk that in too.  Save the soaking wine as you’ll need it for the sauce.  Whizz again, just to make it all mixed through.  Tip the whole lot out into a bowl, add a pack of lamb mince (500g or so if you are good and went to the butcher) and squeeze it together with your hands.  I promise that the phone will ring during this exercise, or a small child will require assistance in the bathroom.  Roll the mixture into the size of balls you like and put on a baking tray.  Make sure they’re not touching.

Here’s where Jill becomes a Greek goddess – you don’t fry these little orbs, you bake them!  No more hard outsides, greasy insides…they’re light, juicy and perfectly toothsome. So bake away, for 20 minutes at 180/gas 4.

Meanwhile, in a saucepan put the wine from the bread, a tin of tomatoes whizzed up to smoothness, two squirts of tomato puree, two of ketchup, a tbspn of olive oil, tsp of sugar, two bay leaves and a sprinkle of dried oregano.  Stir it up, bring to the boil then reduce the heat and simmer for ten minutes.  Depending on how your day’s gone, you might like a glass of that red wine just now.   Especially if you got a fright when you discovered your pack of lamb was a mere 250g…  (update: they worked fine! extremely green, light and delicate – ideal for after dental surgery or when an aged relative is coming to visit – but they held together ok and tasted fab)

After ten minutes, put your meatballs in the sauce and simmer for a further ten minutes.  I like to serve it with plain boiled rice. 

Check out Jill’s own website too – I recommend her drunken potatoes recipe!  Think I’ll be postponing that planned career in food styling though…

Eight things…

The lovely Vonnie tagged me for this blooming ages ago – my first meme! – but somehow I’ve not got round to doing it til now.  So, here we go…

Eight things I’m looking forward to:

1. Getting my car back from the garage after 2 weeks in there, and 4 weeks without it in total. What this experience has proven to me is that we would find it very difficult to be eco-friendly public transport users and still do all the stuff we (by which I mean my children, of course) do, and that includes going to school.
2. Going to a beginners beading course tomorrow morning! I went to the Bead Company shop in Partick last week and it was an Aladdin’s cave of colour and sparkly things.  It was so frustrating not knowing what to do with any of it! 
3. The toasted cambazola and chilli jam sandwich I have under the grill right now
4. Having 2.5 hours to myself every weekday morning once Miss Small starts nursery. In this time, I will write a novel, sew multiple crafty items as well as complete wardrobes for myself and the children, declutter and clean the house to Martha Stewart-esque perfection, and prep the evening meal.  I don’t think those are unrealistic expectations, are they?
5. Seeing Coraline when it comes out on dvd, or in fact anything Lovefilm sends and the postie doesn’t intercept as it is bound to be far better than its last offering, Batman Begins.
6. Getting on with some sewing – which will involve major tidying, so…
7. …seeing my craft space all neat. 
8. Meeting Vonnie! In person! At some unspecified yet hopefully soon time.

Eight things I did yesterday

1. Bought a pomelo which, I’m assured, is like a bigger yummier grapefruit.  Nice.
2. Cooked a 3 course meal at short notice for my sister and her friend whose weekend in Paris became a trip to the west coast of Scotland after she lost her passport.
3. Went to the gym!!! A friend gave me a week’s free trial at the fancy-schmancy gym nearby and it was lovely.  I think I might be delusional but I felt better even for being shown round.
4. Dropped a bag of jamjars off on the doorstep of that selfsame friend who had picked a surfeit of brambles at the weekend.
5. Wished my home was in such a state that I didn’t go into a panic at the thought of people coming round spontaneously.
6. Phoned the garage. Again. Didn’t believe when he said it would be ready that afternoon.  Was proved correct.
7. Laughed out loud listening to That Mitchell and Webb Sound on iplayer.  How I love iplayer…
8. Spent ages on the computer trying to find a news story suitable for my 7 year old to read and report on for her homework

Eight things I wish I could do

1. Invite people into my house spontaneously without having to apologise for the state of it
2. Wear high heels all day without my feet getting sore
3. Not go in a huff when criticised/corrected
4. Use my overlocker without being scared the thread will break for some unfathomable esoteric reason
5. Play piano as well as I used to
6. Take a wee nap in the middle of the day, ideally in front of Murder She Wrote
7. Lose loads of weight
8. Think of an eighth thing!

Eight TV shows I watch

1. Masterchef the professionals
2. QI
3. Never Mind the Buzzcocks
4. Tweed
5. Murder She Wrote
6. Diagnosis Murder
7. Kingdom
8. Martha Speaks

Phew! That was actually far harder than I thought it would be.  I’m not tagging anyone, largely because I don’t ‘know’ that many bloggy people, but if you would like to do this, consider yourself tagged.