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This one’s for Megan, who wanted a picture of the lettuce collection for some reason.  We went for 3 types of “cut and come again” greens. In the salad bowl are green lettuce, red lettuce and rocket.

We did plant far too many seeds, but we’re getting better at thinning them out.  The rocket has been a lot slower to get any sort of height, so we’ve had to protect that from being crowded out a bit. I’m not sure really how many that size pot will support. I suspect it’s not too many, but we’ll see.  Our attempt at relocating a couple to the pot that’s now spare due to the unexplained chilli demise doesn’t look like it was too successful…

Happy, Megan?!

Every now and then for some reason I stand in the kitchen and go though recipe books and on some rare occasions something catches my eye/brain just enough that I decide I’m prepared to put in the effort to cook it.  This Sunday’s effort was “Hungarian Potato Bread”.

Cramming potato through a seive was a bit of work I wasn’t really mentally prepared for in making bread, but with a little help (insert form Bec – a lot of help pushing it through the seive, but if I confess probably my only help though) we got through that process.

Once it was finally ready it was actually a lot, lot lighter and fluffier than in looks in the pihoto (apart from the very edge bits that were a bit crusty), and there really wasn’t anything left and we still wanted just a little bit more…

Would I make it again, even with all the hassle?  You know what, I think I would.  And I think Bec would like me to, too!

I think it is best to start this post with ‘ouch my %#$^£ arse!!!’….. not said once during the trip, but said many many times throughout. Especially after getting off and forcing ourselves to get back on the bikes! OH and that just didn’t come from Mike, my butt too was hurting from yesterday.  It’s amazing how tender it gets when you haven’t ridden a bike for a prolonged period of time. For at least a large number of months. Even years!

I am sure it can only get better the more you ride (here’s hoping)!

Even starting off on today’s travels was a bit daunting. We made a few bike adjustments (seats, brakes etc) from yesterday throughout our venture in the hope that it would assist our aching bits.  We didn’t go as far as we had planned due to the obvious issues. But we did manage to bike up some hills and then coast down the other side, and of course we stopped at a pub to rest our dear butts for a bit…. Then back on and off to get some groceries.

On the return trip (please note laden down with some very, very heavy groceries on our backs) we stopped at a little park to recover somewhat before heading back up the bloody hill and came across a number of little ducks lined up in a row (very cute) waiting to dive into the water….  But because we disturbed them a bit they kinda huddled together to get in there even quicker and we were too slow on the camera shots to get the row pics, but we got some pics of their quick getaway.  It was still a good excuse to stop for a minute! And any excuse would do for Mike!

All in all I would have to say Mike faired much better today.  But I am just not so sure he will be able to walk tomorrow. And I am not so sure that I will be able to race him to the tube tomorrow morning either. Give me a run any day!

After relying on public transport for over 10 years now, we’ve finally had enough of the DLR and Tubes being out for maintenance every weekend that we’ve had to invest in some non-public transport. So yesterday we took a big red bus and went and bought ourselves some push bikes!  (I’ll spare you the story about how long it actually took us to get to the store.  That involved another DLR and  bus trip, coupled with a return trip back home to get the right address, then the right journey…)

Picking bikes was reasonably easy once we managed to grab the one shop assistant that actually wanted to help us buy anything!  Bec  didn’t want anything pink, and I just wanted a bike, and we wanted something that was actually in stock so we could go for a ride the next day when the weather was meant to be fantastic.

Strangely enough it wasn’t quite as easy as you’d think to match all of those criteria, but we just about managed it in the end. The only bikes they could sell us that met possibly the most important criteria of us being able to use them the next day were still broken down in boxes, and we’d have to make them up ourselves. Apparently not a big job, but it just meant we’d have to get two huge boxes home somehow first.

Or did we?…

A small brainwave later, and we were ensconced in a small alley just around the corner with bike bits laid out everywhere, and spanner and Allen keys in hand. A bit of sweat, swearing, grazed knuckles, some odd looks from passers by, and just one trip back into the shop right at the finishing stage to grab the sales guy so he could tell us why Bec’s handlebars kept turning around while  her bike didn’t, and we had some functional bikes on which to get home.

Then we just had to get home! Now if you know me well you’ll find it not too hard to believe that  currently I’m not the world’s best example of fitness. There were a few more stops then there really should have needed to be on the way home, but in my defence it was about an hour’s long ride, along some pretty busy mainish roads in London (weekend) traffic.  And did I mention that there were some hilly bits?  And that my seat was really too low so I felt like I was back on a BMX? And that tight jeans didn’t make it easy for my thighs to move? It gave Bec something to laugh about anyway. “Are you really that unfit?!”. Thanks, I needed that understanding and encouragement! And for that I made her ride behind me at my pace for a while while my legs recovered somewhat.

But we made it! And without even getting too lost on the way.The bikes then were put to bed for the night in the bike shed downstairs. I have to say that whoever decided to include a bikeshed in to plans for this apartment block was pretty much a genius.  Looking at other buildings you see bikes on balconies, in living rooms etc.  I’m just really glad we don’t have to deal with trying to get a bike in a lift, then through the front door.

How am I feeling today?  My back twinges a little, and my bum hurts! The first from putting them together, I suspect, while I’m not in much doubt about the why for the second ailment! But I’m still keen to go out today. After a bit of seat adjustment etc, and with a camera so I’ve got an excuse to stop a few more times now and then… I guess at at least I managed to avoid any chafing so far!

Now we’ll just have to hope we have a little more luck than our friend Pete and manage to not have them stolen, or at least until after summer’s over!…

I think we need to get Mulder and Scully to come around and have a poke around to see if they can come up with some sort of explanation as to why one, and one one, chilli plant decided to suddenly just go all floppy sometime on Wednesday this week.

I suspect it’s terminal. But I can come up with no reason why it would do that. It was a bit windy that day, but the stalk doesn’t look broken or anything. It’s seemingly just lost the will to live.  I’ll give it one more day to see if it revives, but if not at least it frees up the pot for something else to go in…

In other “garden” news, it’s flowers all round.  We’ve got coriander, sweet pea, chilli and capsicum flowers at the moment. I would like to say it’s pretty colourful, but  really I can’t.  Apart from the sweet peas, everything else is white.  And not particularly nice smelling either. I guess if we want colour we wouldn’t be able to have the veges…

A few radishes are almost at a munchable size, the lettuces are taking over the pot (we really should thin then more, but it seems to mean!),  the baby capsicums are growing daily, the dill and spring onions are still there and I think growing…

All go really!

Tonight as part of our dinner we had a small salad made entirely from our own home grown produce!  Green lettuce, red lettuce, and spring onions! Yum!

Actually, when I say small salad, I really do mean small.  I can’t even call it a mini-salad. It was  more a micro salad made from “micro greens” (i.e. thinnings from the overcrowded pots), but it was still nice to eat what we’ve grown!

By the way, just to give you some idea of scale, the “bowl” it’s in is 7.5cm wide at its widest point!…

Thankfully we did actually have more than that for dinner!

It must be about time to bore you with an update on all the veges etc crammed on the balcony. You are interested, aren’t you? Good!

First up the exciting news on the red peppers: We are now the proud owners of two tiny peppers (one on each of the two plants we’ve got) and a heap more flowers. The only problem is that the plants are only about 6 inches high at their highest point, and the baby peppers are only 4 inches off the ground to start with! I kinda hope that the plants are going to put on a growth spurt so they’ve got more room to dangle, or they might end up sitting on the ground!  Or they’ll just be miniature peppers.

The miniature theme seems to be a general one.  All the chilli plants are also not seeming to get a great deal of height. Yet. I hope! Though they too are starting to look like they’re getting ready to flower too.  It’s about right timing wise, but I’m really sure that the plants have had a lot more height first.  Oh well. I suspect that I chucked them outside a bit soon, and they just hung in there when it was still a bit cold, rather than putting on the growth.

Even the mint plant seems to have decided to live life in the miniature.  All the new leaves that are coming out seem to be staying really, really small too. I don’t think that it’s because we keep grabbing the big ones for cooking, but it might be… We’ll have to see if they get a bit bigger, or I might try putting it in a slightly shadier corner and see if it then feels like expanding it’s leaves a bit more.

Oh, and the sweet peas look like they might be about to put out a flower or two soon as well,  and they’re only about two feet high too! It’s all a little odd!

The only thing that’s got tall is the coriander plant I mentioned the other week.  The flower stalks on that leapt up to about two, almost  three feet tall, and the flowers have just opened today. Hopefully we’ll end up with some seeds sometime.

We had a major catch with the other small coriander plants though. We were sitting out on the balcony enjoying the sun yesterday and for some reason had a good look at one of them and found another little infestation of aphidy things! ARRGGGHHH!  So we gave them all a good once over and squished all the bugs we could find for a bit. There weren’t enough to give up on the plants. It hopefully looks like we can hopefully manage them with daily squishings.  At least the plants are still a manageable size to check every leaf.

The rocket plants are still on the small side too, but the lettuce, onions, dill and radish are all coming along nicely. Far too many for the pots they’re in, I suspect, but we keep giving them a bit of a thin now and then…

So there you have it.  The update. Tune in next time to see if anything has actually grown!

To be precise it was Kadhai Paneer  – stir fry of Paneer cheese with peppers.

This is one of those dishes that needs a fair but of effort in constructing a sauce, and then you chuck the final dish together at the end. So this morning I was feeling a bit bored and got stuck into the sauce early. I’m really glad I did, and the prep seemed to go on for far too long when you compare it to the list of ingredients, and then the cooking of it took even longer! If we’d started cooking at our normal time I think we might have expired with hunger by now!

Anyway, on to the checklist…

1. It was a stir fry of Paneer cheese with peppers, as I think I’ve mentioned.
2. The ingredients we didn’t have were dried fenugreek leaves, so we skipped them.  I also went a bit easier on the chillis than the recipe suggested, as I didn’t want Bec accusing me of trying to knock her block off!….
3. The only thing that confused me about the recipe was… Well, not really confused me, but it was one of those recipes where a whole lot of things are in weights, not volumes.  How many cloves is 30g garlic anyway?!  I’m glad we had scales handy!
4. But on the whole the recipe was pretty clear, as usual. It just would have been more helpful to have some idea how long it would take, especially if you were looking through the book later at night and thought it sounded good for a quick dinner… It ain’t!
5. If I made it again what I’d do differently is get someone else to help with the prep!  I was really sick of “finely chopping” stuff by the end of it!
6. We had it with nothing else, other than a glass of Chardonnay, and it really didn’t need anything else.
7. If we had it again I’d have it with nothing else again!
8. On a scale of 1-10 we’d give it a 9 (only to give for something amazing still to come…)
9. see yesterday.
10. see yesterday
11. I’d definitely make it again! Well, Bec is saying “I’d definitely have Mike make it again!”.  Which is just as well, as I decided right at the start that I would make enough sauce for 2 meals and shove one lot in the fridge.  So we have another really quick and easy meal coming up one night soon.  Yay!

1. It was a this kinda weird yogurt and chickpea flour dumpling dish. Pitod ka saag, apparently!
2. The only ingredient that you might have trouble finding in the cupboard was asafoetida, but luckily we seemed to have some in the spice drawer from some previous dish that we can’t now remember….
3. The only thing that confused me about the recipe was that the whole concept seemed really weird!  You basically cook yoghurt and gram flour (chickpea flour) until it gets to the state where it makes a kind of cake, let that set and make a sauce.
4. But on the whole the recipe itself was pretty clear and easy.
5. If I made it again what I’d do differently is to add a bit more ginger at the end to counter the lingering sweetness of all the yoghurt in it. And maybe have a few more green chillies on the side to add a bit more bite to some mouthfuls.
6. We had it with plain rice, and a chenin blanc.
7. If we had it again I’d have it with plain rice, definitely. It really seemed to need a mouthful of dumpling, sauce and rice to provide a really nice balance.
8. On a scale of 1-10 I’d give it a…. you know, I’m still not sure! We’ll try to decide on that a bit later…
9. Who’s Michael?!
10. WHAT KIDS?!
11. I’d probably would make it again, if only for the fun of stirring the cake thing!

See Megan, it’s easy! Tee hee hee…

But honestly we’re really not sure what to make of it as a meal.  It tasted fine (in fact more than fine, it was really quite nice), but the texture was a bit odd.  The best we can come up with is a cross between polenta, paneer and icecream (without the ice cream sweetness).  Try imagining that!

Worth a try though, if only for the fun of stirring this weird gloop around the pot for while.

We know our friend Megan in Houston likes to cook, and likes a nice curry as much as I do.  Well, maybe not quite as much as I do, but she likes them.  So I was telling her about the curry book I talked about earlier the other week, and we even bought her a copy. Before our copy arrived she borrowed it from the library and was going to give a recipe a go. And promised to write a blog about it.

Apparently she did cook it. But as she thinks it’s fun not to post it just to wind me up we’re still missing the blog bit, so I have no idea how it went and what she thought of it.

So I’ve decided to help her out, even though I’m not sure she deserves it.

So here’s a recipe review template, just for her. Let’s see if it helps… Although she might have to change the “tonight” to “last month” soon…

Tonight, Mike, We Made [Insert recipe title here…]

1. It was a [insert small description here for those without the book]…
2. The ingredients we couldn’t find/had to substitute/don’t like anyway so skipped were…
3. The only thing that confused me about the recipe was…
4. But on the whole the recipe was clear/easy/a bit fussy/totally and utterly confusing [delete as appropriate].
5. If I made it again what I’d do differently is…
6. We had it with…
7. If we had it again I’d have it with…
8. On a scale of 1-10 I’d give it a…
9. On a scale of 1-10 Michael would give it a…
10. On a scale of blech-yum the kids would give it a…
11. I’d definitely/maybe/never [delete as appropriate] make it again.