January tomatoes

The window boxes did become casualties of all of the activity surrounding the wedding and honeymoon in the latter half of 2011 and as such got rather left to their own devices for the last quarter of the year.

However, one of the upsides of this is that with the mild winter all of the green tomatoes that were left on the tomato plants have been gradually turning red throughout December and January and every week or so we get another 15-20 red tomatoes to put into our dinner. My new favourite cookbook is Plenty by Yottam Ottolenghi and I used this lot in his Lentil and Aubergine recipe.

Very tasty indeed!

30 before 30

So... here it is, my 30 before 30. I thought that by drawing it out, making it pretty and sticking it on the kitchen door it would inspire me to do things and encourage me to keep planning through the cold winter nights after a long day at work. Here they are written out in a more user friendly list:

Food
1. Start a sourdough mother
2. Eat an oyster on Mersea Island
3. Make chutney with vegetables I have picked myself
4. Make a cassoulet
5. Catch a fish and learn to fillet it

Exercise
6. Run a 10k
7. Stand up on a surfboard 5 times in a row
8. Swim a stretch of the Thames
9. Walk the Ridgeway
10. Go skiing

Culture
11. Read To Kill A Mockingbird
12. Write a blog with a readership of over 250 people
13. Do an oil painting
14. Knit a Christmas jumper
15. Use my Tate membership card in all four Tate Galleries

Garden
16. Grow an aubergine on the windowsill
17. Plant a sunflower on International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day

London
18. Walk the Capital Ring
19. Visit Highgate Cemetery
20. Eat a steak at Hawksmoor
21. Walk from our flat to the Olympics
22. Drink champagne at the St Pancras Champagne Bar before departing on Eurostar
23. Go to a live event (concert, theatre, sports match etc...) every month

Outside adventures
24. See a basking shark
25. Go skinny dipping
26. Watch the sun rise on the east coast and set on the west coast
27. Sleep under the stars

Miscellaneous
28. Give blood
29. Drive a car with nobody else in it
30. Spend some time volunteering

I am very excited at the prospect... Best get planning!

2011 highlights

So... whilst the blog didn't get written in 2011 we did try our hardest to keep the windowsill alive and kicking. Here's a few picture highlights from the year - more stories to come over the coming weeks...

It's been a while...

Well... it's been a very long while indeed since I sat down at my computer and updated the blog. I do have an excuse though, we got married at the end of last year and then spent a month on honeymoon where we moved around a lot and we planned the whole thing ourselves. The stresses and strains of planning a wedding followed straight after by a big trip like that sadly left little time for blogging and tending to the windowsill.

But now I'm back and looking forward to all of the excitement that 2012 has in store. They say that after a big event like a wedding and honeymoon where you have spent so much time building up to it that you need to ensure you have things to look forward to afterwards. So that, combined with the fact that I'm turning 30 at the end of this year (eeek!!) has led me to create a "30 things to do before 30" list. Which leads me nicely back to the windowsill and the blog as one of my 30 things is to:

"Write a blog with a readership of over 250 people"

So here it is, I'm back and ready and raring to go!

Packed lunches

Here in the flat we always take a packed lunch into work with us. The problem comes with trying to find new tasty things to take in that transport well, fit easily in a lunchbox and so that you have different things each week. There seems to be a real lack of topics on this in cookbooks so I find myself constantly scanning our cookbooks for ideas of what we can have now. As I presume others might find themselves in the same situation I thought that I might start a relatively regular "What's in the lunchbox this week?" feature to share ideas for interesting packed lunches.



And this week...? An onion and camembert tart slightly adapted from Nigel Slater's Appetite. It's pretty easy to make too which makes it ideal for slinging together on a weekday evening whilst you've got other stuff going on.

6 onions
good chunk of butter
pack of puff pastry
1 camembert
bunch of thyme

Peel the onions and chop them into fat wedges. Melt your butter in a pan on a lowish heat and sling the onions in and leave them for quite a while to sweat down giving them a push around every now and then - I ended up leaving mine for about an hour whilst I was finishing up a bit of work and checking emails. When they're done they should be translucent and golden. Roll out your puff pastry into a large flat rectangle and place on a baking sheet. Run a knife to create score lines a few centimetres from the edge and scatter the onions over the area inside these score lines. Brush the edges of the pastry with some of the onion butter. Then break your camembert up into little pieces, place them inbetween the onions and scatter a generous sprinkling of thyme leaves over the top. Place in a preheated oven to 220 degrees for about 15 minutes until the pastry is golden and the onions slightly browned.

We've managed to get five portions out of that which we'll take into work and have alongside some chutney and mixed salad. Delicious!

Sunflowers and tomatoes!

As the title of the post suggests as of today we have sunflowers and tomatoes! Nine of the sunflower plants have come through and we have seven little tomato plants so far. So exciting to see the first signs of life!

Prarie fire and jalapenos

The Wahaca chillies did so well last year that I've bought some more chilli seeds. Last year we had serrano's and I think another trip to Wahaca is in order so I can pick myself up some more seeds but in the mean time I did a bit of chilli ordering from the guys at the South Devon Chilli Farm. I was in need of some dried chipotles to make chipotles en adobo and I thought that whilst I was paying for postage and packing I may as well pick up some seeds.

So... I bought some prarie fire which are really pretty little plants that you can keep inside in pots and some jalapenos as they're used in loads of recipes and you can never find them in the shops. However, I'm not quite sure how windowsill friendly the jalapenos will be so that may have been a mistake if they start shooting up... We'll see!