Home Grown

This may not look very exciting but it really, really is. This is a lovely big bunch of spinach, which happens to be the first thing that we're eating out of our garden! It turns out that in addition to being quite strict with the plants, Rocco is also a bit sneaky and secretly planted spinach in one of our flower beds. I noticed the similarity to the spinach in his garden, so I didn't weed it out and the whole story came out today when I asked his opinion on whether our leafy things were edible.

And they are ever so edible when put into Turkish style baked eggs, which is what I had for dinner. The original recipe used rocket instead of spinach, but I like spinach better. Also, we now have a bunch of it growing for free in our back yard, so we're going to be eating a lot more of it. That said, I think you could probably make this with any cookable leafy green.

Baked Eggs with Yogurt and Chilli

300g spinach (or one bag of pre-washed)
4 eggs
150g plain yogurt
1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed
50g unsalted butter
1/2 tsp kirmizi biber (or chilli flakes mixed with paprika)
6 sage leaves, shredded (or a good shake of dried sage)

Pre-heat oven to 300F/150F. Wash the spinach and cook in pan over medium heat for 5-10 minutes - the water from rinsing should be enough to cook it in.

Transfer the spinach to a small, ovenproof dish and make four indentations in it. Carefully break an egg into each crater, taking care not to break the yolk. Place in the oven for 10-15 minutes, or until the egg whites set.

While the eggs are in the oven, mix together the yogurt and garlic along with a pinch of salt. Set aside - but do not chill.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan, add the kirmizi biber and fry for a minute or two or until the butter foams and turns a nice golden-red. Add the sage and cook for a few more seconds, then remove from the heat.

Once the eggs are done, take the dish out of the oven. Spoon the yogurt mix over the centre and pour the hot chilli butter over the yogurt and eggs. Serve piping hot.

This makes a nice brunch item but I feel it isn't quite enough to go it alone. It needs accompaniment, by big mugs of tea or hot chocolate(!), fat slabs of toasted granary bread, a big bowl of oatmeal or muesli, and maybe some nice sausages. Or whatever you have for breakfast. That sounds really good to me and now I want to have breakfast for dinner - except that I've already had dinner. Oh well. A big mug of hot chocolate will be a pretty good dessert.

The Back Garden

I know it's almost June, but only in the past couple of weeks has it been consistently warm enough (though not necessarily sunny) that I'm convinced that it's actually Springtime. We've had fits and starts of nice weather for a while, but now it really seems to be sticking. Yay for sunshine! To celebrate, I took a tour of the back garden a few days ago.

This may not look like much at this point, but with any luck, this planter will supply us with tomatoes and lettuce. The lettuces are coming in really well, actually, and are already noticably bigger than in the photo. I've planted another container with lettuce and several more with tomatoes. We eat a lot of them in the summer and I'm hoping to improve over last year, when I got not a single tomato. Everyone I've talked to says it was generally a bad year for gardening, so hopefully it wasn't my black thumb that did it.

Our next door neighbour/gardener Rocco did a lot of work in our garden last year. We're trying to keep it up to a degree - he did clear out a lot of weeds and overgrowth, which definitely needed doing, but he is much more of a garden disciplinarian than I am and left the flowerbeds a bit bare - and even wanted to get rid of more. He divides plants into two general categories: pretty flowers and rubbish. Needless to say, we had a lot of rubbish. He wanted to get rid of this little rose bush, but I vetoed the removal. Its flowers aren't very impressive, but I find them very sweet and tiny.

I bought these little carnations last year and am happy to say they're doing well. They are just under the rose bush so I can see both from the back door.

This camelia is so impressive - the bloom is larger than my outspread hand. Another bloom is just opening up and there are two more buds, so I'm looking forward to a lengthy show.

I don't know what these purple flowers are, but we've got several clumps of them. I've seen them in other gardens and in parks, so they must be good. Plus, they made it past Rocco's cull last year, so I guess they qualify as "pretty flowers".

We have a single hollyhock (I think). It gets ridiculously tall, like three or four feet, and lasts a long time. I imagine a bunch of them would be very impressive, but for now we're making do with just one. Don't want to overdo it.

Rocco gave us several beautiful purple lillies (or irises - I don't know the difference). They're all blooming very impressively against the wall of the shed. I can see them from the kitchen window.

This jasmine also grows against the shed and it is gorgeous. I brought a sprig in the other day and you could smell it as soon as you walked in the door. Lots of fat, lazy bees hanging around, but they aren't too aggressive so we're co-existing peacefully.

And this vine I just don't get. The bottom of it is brown and shriveled; we thought it was dead and almost pulled it out. Then it started growing leaves and produced these very large, sort of alien-looking buds, which opened into large, strange flowers. I don't know what they are, but I like them.

Spring Cleaning

We did most of our heavy-duty spring cleaning in March, in advance of my parents coming to visit. We are having some more houseguests (the DJs for Matthew's brother's wedding) next weekend, so that's a good excuse to do a few more things. Today Matthew painted our new conservatory door* and while, he had a brush in hand, also threw a lick of paint on the kitchen window sill. It is blindingly white and so pretty now!

I spent the day reading in preparation for starting a draft of my dissertation. I would much rather be painting, but had to confine my creative urges to making us an afternoon snack (toasted cheese and tomato sandwiches toasted on the George Foreman grill - yummy and easy to clean!) and changing my desktop wallpaper. I can't afford real Cath Kidston wallpaper, but these make a pretty good substitute...

*The conservatory door had to be replaced after we had an attempted break-in last November. The would-be burglars splintered the door frame but didn't get in. Then they climbed on top of the glass conservatory and kicked in the window to the flat upstairs, which has been empty for over a year, so they went away empty handed. That only made us feel mildly better, though, as it took three months for our insurance to sort out our door being replaced, during which time we got very, very cold!

A day by the sea

Monday was a bank holiday in the UK, but we celebrated in our own way - by staying at home on the day and then taking a day trip to Hastings on Tuesday. We'd had several days of nice weather in London and a day at the seaside sounded like fun. It was fun, but not in a warm, beach-y sort of way. In more of a blustery, slightly freezing, "if I'd forgotten for a moment how cruel the British summer can be, it's coming back to me now" sort of way...

We decided on fish and chips for lunch, which seems like a no-brainer, but a historical pub was very tempting. We pencilled it in for dinner, but didn't count on the fish being so unbelievably huge and greasy. It was good, but despite the labelling, it actually seemed quite UNhealthy.

Neither of us was able to finish and we'd ordered the regular portion - I can't imagine the large! I also had a pickled egg. I've never had one before but the concept has always intrigued me. The flavour was less complex than I'd imagined, essentially just "hard boiled egg" plus "pickle juice". I mean, I know that's what it is, but I thought it might taste like more. I have resolved to try a pickled quail's egg at the next opportunity (no, I don't run across them very often, so I have no idea when that will be). Maybe that will be the flavour haunting my imagination.

Of course, the natural thing to do after a very heavy, greasy meal is to climb a hill so steep that it has a funicular railroad running up it. We cut through a graveyard on the way up, which is now a lovely little park.

Apparently the graves are still there, but to make it more park-like the headstones are now just leaning neatly against the wall. This seemed weird to me, but it is a nice little park.

This is practically my only photo of Hastings Castle, which was built by William the Conqueror (he actually built the first fortifications even before the Battle of Hastings), that isn't full of French high school students. There was a group of them roaming the town and we ran into them just about every time we turned a corner. They weren't horrible, just adolescent. Very rambunctious, wearing silly clothes as badges of their youth culture, chasing each other around and shrieking as signs of affection, etc - in other words, teenagers.

Later we wandered around on the beach for a while. As you can see, it isn't the kind that makes you want to spread out your towel and soak up the sun, even if there had been sun for soaking.

Hastings is home to England's biggest beach-launched fishing fleet. That means that all these sort of sad looking little boats aren't abandoned, but at high tide are pushed into the water by tractors. We learned in a film at the castle's interpretive centre that Hastings's harbor silted up in the 13th century, so how they fished between that time and the invention of tractors, I don't know.

We don't know what these flags are for, other than whipping around violently in the wind and looking very spooky and pirate-y. On those counts, mission accomplished!

Despite all our tramping around, we never worked enough appetite for dinner, so we had a nice cream tea instead (big, hot homemade scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream and mugs of boiling hot tea), then walked along the promenade to St Leonards, the next town along the coast. I counted nine charity shops on one street, but it was late in the day, so we just called it a day and caught the next train home, where we still weren't hungry for dinner but did sleep very, very well indeed.