I suck. Weeks have passed since I updated here. It’s not for lack of things going on – there’s always something! I must force myself more. However, I shall be more likely to post over at my redesigned Oishi Bakery website – so come and follow me there if you wish. I can’t promise I’ll be more regular with my posts than here, but I’ll at least try…
So we went to Latitude again this year. It was a good weekend, but not as good as last year, probably because of the weather and the line up. Although we stayed in a B&B (I gave up on camping a few years back when I left my tent pitched in a field somewhere in the middle of Germany), we were not immune to the weather by any means. Last year it was dry, sunny and hot all weekend, and this year it pissed down. Loads. Saturday and Sunday. Thankfully I’d brought my DMs. I refuse to be one of those festival twats with Hunter wellies and a stupid band of flowers in their hair (yeah, thanks for that Florence Welch) banging on about how cool it is being at a festival. I don’t go to festivals to ‘be cool’, I go because they’re generally a good value way of seeing lots of acts – although this could be debated at £160 a ticket.
So, good points:
-time with my husband. Love love.
-car singalongs.
-mmmmm B&B. Hot shower, bed, lovely full English with local produce.
-having the foresight to leave after Suede on the Sunday night, just as we did last year. Apparently people were stuck in a queue for four hours getting out on the Monday. Screw that!
-visiting Norwich Thursday day – quite a nice city.
-woodchips to deal with mud in the arena area (although could’ve done with more in the carpark)
-Victor losing a shoe, becoming stuck in the mud on one foot and me debating whether to help him or push him over (I chose the former. I’m a good wife).
-Hurts, Braids, Esben & The Witch, Fiction, Jenny & Johnny, Bright Eyes (V watched them)
-comedy, lots of. Dylan Moran, Alan Carr, Jason Byrne, Mark Watson, Doc Brown, Carl Donnelly, Seann Walsh, Shappi Khorsandi, David O’Doherty, Robin Ince, Jon Richardson, Marcus Brigstocke’s Early Edition, Never Mind the Buzzcocks (had some negatives too – we’ll get to that).
-Linton Kwesi Johnson
-Simon Armitage
-dramatically improved toilets
-chips, cheese and beans (you can take the girl outta the Westcountry…)
-silly girls thinking Tim Minchin was actually performing when it was a nine-minute animated short. HA!
Bad points:
-rain, mud, rain, mud, rain, mud…
-Paloma Faith ruining Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Twat.
-the stampede for Buzzcocks in the morning and silly teenage girls fawning over Noel Fielding. Really? I mean, really? What’s the attraction? I’ve met him a couple of times and fail to see it. Plus, he’s not that funny, honest.
-people with no interest in comedy taking refuge in the comedy tent because of the crap weather, therefore making it even more cramped and uncomfortable than it already was.
-teenage YAHS. We had to pass through the campsite, and some people seemed to have taken up residence there – not actually going to watch the acts. In the arena, it seemed as if they were trying to be as obnoxious as possible. I was never like this as a teenager at gigs! It’s always been about the content for me. Someone posted elsewhere that they actually overheard the following quote: ‘Mummy, you’ve brought the wrong cake knife!’. Genius.
-SMOKERS IN TENTS. The rules apply to everyone, fuckwits.
-Lack of decent headliners.
-Suede’s terrible terrible sound. They got upstaged by a couple of lads who’ve been doing this a much shorter time than you. Sort it out!
-You are just as individual as everyone else in your Hunters and denim shorts with flowers in your hair and face paint. Dicks.
-the comedy tent pitched on a hill (again). UNCOMFORTABLE.
-not getting into the film arena for the Ralph Fiennes Q&A or the Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon one. I forgot that Ralph was in a stupid plagiarised-to-the-hilt wizard film, thus making him more than a cult figure. BOOOO.
-Vodafone and Sky as corporate sponsors. Come on, you can do better Latitude.
-water taps breaking.
-Magners. It’s not a real cider, cockbadgers, get some better stuff next time!
Overall, it’s a good festival with a real mix of stuff happening from music to literature, comedy, theatre and more, which is great. I think it’s going to take a stonker of a lineup to get us there next year mind, as it wore V’s patience very thin this year with the negatives. We’ve got the Apple Cart Festival in a few weeks, in our wonderful home city and it’s a one day thing. Tim Minchin will be performing at this one!
…seems to last for ages (as Placebo sing). It does mean less watering for my plants, but simultaenously, everything is growing like wildfire – including the stuff I don’t want to! Fast learning the trials and tribulations of a gardener. Had to dispose of all my greenhouse tomatoes due to grey mould, got brown rot on some of my plums, although we still have an abundance of good plums, and powdery mildew has affected some of the squash plants 
The birds attacked my sweetcorn whilst I was away, and am also having a major ongoing battle with slugs and snails. I’m taking it all on the chin for now, as it’s the first year, and it’s all a learning curve. Next year will be so much better. I’m also petrified of putting compost in the compost bin now, as a Fred (hugebrownsuperfastspider) has taken up residence inside and scuttles every time I lift the lid. Wahhhhhhh! Seriously considering hypnotherapy lately, as the spider fear is hindering me as a gardener. On the plus side, I’ve got cucumbers coming out of my ears so have been experimenting with recipes for them. Still have a few outdoor tomato plants that are doing well; have been harvesting runner beans, courgettes, potatoes, shallots, garlic and brassicas. The aubergines and peppers are coming along nicely, and I bought an amazingly goth chilli plant at the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show.
The flower show was lovely, some really nice exhibits, including artistic and informative ones, and I bought a few things including some unusual/heritage seeds, the aforementioned goth chilli plant, a jostaberry (a cross between a blackcurrant and a gooseberry or something) plant and some Tim Burton-esque carnivorous plants.
We went picking just before the flower show, buying tayberries, raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and cherries. I froze a lot of it, and we noshed the strawberries and cherries almost instantly. I made a quite frankly gorgeous summer fruit pudding for the family Sunday lunch we had with my parents and V’s mum and aunt using all except the gooseberries and cherries. I may have to make another one very soon. Nom. I also bought quite a lot of great tasting products from the farm shop, including greengages – in July! Lush.
I also forgot to mention the food festival we went to back in May, the Real Food Festival. It was pretty good (although I was comparing it to the BBC Good Food Show that I’d been to previously with a raging dental abscess, so no comparisons really), and we got some great foodstuffs including some good value British Rosé Veal, cheeses and sauces.
Busy weekend coming up, finishing with Hyper Japan on Sunday, where I hope to get some tasty Japanese food. We went to Sen-Nin the other day on a Groupon offer. It was okay, but there’s no way I would’ve paid the £100+ original price for the food, not on your nelly. We got it for £40 for the both of us, and that’s just about what I would’ve been prepared to pay. We also went to Abeno recently, craving some okonomiyaki, and that was top-notch. Hmm, all this Japanese talk has given me dinner ideas… think I may just have to make some gyudon!
It seems that food is creeping up in price every day, and I’ve certainly noticed it recently, hence the Sainsbury’s challenge that I mentioned in a previous post. I’ll come back to that and do it. Probably. Maybe. Hmm. Anyhow, I was bemoaning the price of food and combining this with a yearning for gooseberries as mine won’t fruit for a year or so – I’ve only seen one supermarket (Waitrose, out of interest) stock these deliciously tart BRITISH fruits that are abundantly in season at the moment. AND THEY WERE TEN QUID A KILO. Excuse the shouting, but this is a travesty! It seems that gooseberries and other home-grown soft fruit has given way to the trendier blueberry (I might add that I’m only growing blueberries to see if I can – I don’t particularly think much of their taste, except in soft and fruity muffins) or other exotic fruit with a massive carbon footprint. So I used my trusty friend Google (which has a great Takashi Murakami doodle today), having had a lightbulb moment. I remembered that when I was younger and growing up in Dorset, there were a shedload of pick your own strawberry farms. I wondered if there were any that had other fruits. Google came up with the jackpot: I found an absolutely fantastic farm called Garsons, merely nine miles from our home. I had originally planned to force my husband to drive me there next weekend, but after a disappointing visit to Oxford (pretty but overrated) & Bicester Outlet Village (I really don’t wear any designer clothes), we found ourselves en route back home early, so we stopped off at Garsons. In season at the moment were the most delicious berries, and Victor turned into a big kid munching them as we picked, which I don’t think was strictly allowed, oops. We ended up with over three kilos of fruit – one each of sumptuous strawberries, raspberries and gooseberries. All for £12. Hurrah!
They were initially full to the brim, but we just couldn’t help ourselves on the way home!
I then proceeded to make gooseberry & raspberry jam:
And a delicious gooseberry tart/flan:
We pretty much noshed all the strawberries as they were due to their ripeness, as we didn’t want them to spoil. Still got about a third each of raspberries and gooseberries, and made raspberry trifle cupcakes earlier. We’ve been having some gorgeous salads lately on account of all the leafy brassicas growing and ripening in the garden, alongside cucumbers from the greenhouse, and I made ciabatta yesterday, which was quite an effort but turned out to be a resounding success. I’m going to make bruschetta with it shortly for dinner tonight. Nom nom nom.
(Oh, have I mentioned how much I love putting things in parentheses?)
…I am a rubbish blogger. Sat here in neglect, this site has been, for about six weeks. Terrible. I can only apologise. I’ve been absolutely crazily busy (too many adverbs, I know) recently. The most exciting news is that I’ve finally started the push to actually get into doing what I really want to do for a living. It might take a while, and there is a not undaunting amount of competition already out there, but I can only try, and be passionate. It’s called Oishi Bakery and you can visit the as yet unfinished website here. Of course, it can also be found on the ever-ubiquitous Facebook and Twitter. I’m basically going to try and cater for people’s events, with cakes, cupcakes, cake pops and other forms of baking. Ideally I’d love to do English puddings etc, but there’s not really much of a market for it unfortunately. So, if you know somebody who is after something tasty and edible for an event or any other reason – weddings, parties, office gatherings and much more – steer them in my direction! I plan to keep a blog on the new site specific to the business, but I shall still keep this one for other food, garden or whatever related musings.
On that note, I’ve recently been harvesting some goodies from my garden – blueberries, lettuce, rocket, potatoes and red mustard. Everything is growing like wildfire right now, and I suspect next month is going to be a bumper harvest month, which is great. I’m also going to the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show next month with my mother-in-law and her sister, where the centrepiece is a huge edible garden. Christ, I’m 27 and excited about a garden show. There’s something wrong with this picture. Anyhow, best get back to grappling with my CSS stylesheets and get this site up and running. I’m making a Ponyo cake for a birthday next week, so it will be interesting to see how that turns out! I shan’t leave it so long in future, as I’ll be back soon with some pictures as soon as the weather realises that it is actually mid-June.
I read an interesting article in The Guardian the other week on whether a family of four could be fed for £50 a week. My interest was piqued as we probably spend in the region of £80+ a week on just the two of us, either at Sainsbury’s or Ocado, whichever one I have a voucher for that week (although there is a Sainsbury’s less than five minutes drive from us, going around the supermarket with my husband can be a torturous experience at times – doing it online is easier, faster and involves less arguments!). Apparently, Sainsbury’s have promised it can be done, and today they released their meal plan. I was vaguely hopeful that it would be a good plan to follow (and thus the spare shopping money could be spent on cookbooks or other delights) and that we’d adhere to it. In practice, it’s totally unfeasible. As mentioned, it’s just the two mouths that we need to feed, our own, and yet I can see already that those with children would struggle. A solitary sandwich for lunch is not enough for adults, let alone growing kids – where are the yoghurts, fruits etc that bolster and support the sandwich to make a fully-fledged meal, also known as lunch for every single day? And the drinks? Not to mention the plan is high in salt, lacks variety and is unethical in places. Whilst the plan and shopping list can be praised for its inclusion of free-range eggs and pole-and-line caught tuna, the chicken is not free-range, nor are the other meats ethically sourced. Furthermore, eating the same plan on a weekly basis is uninspiring and demotivational.
All of this soapbox talk has a point. As a result of this disappointing plan, I’ve been inspired to devise my own meal plan for a week, and then build it into four week’s worth of healthy and nutritious meals and snacks. For £50 a week. Obviously, I’m attempting to grow my own fruit and veg which affects things here and we also tend to buy our meat from the butcher’s if we can, plus I make my own bread. All these factors I’ll attempt to take into consideration when planning. Watch this space.
The garden has come on leaps and bounds since I first started planting in it. Not just the things I want to grow either, the whole garden is in danger of becoming a bit of a jungle out there. The husband helped to clear some of it, but there’s still mammoth amounts to do, and the cats won’t stop bloody defecating in the garden, no matter what tricks I try. Short of me sitting on the verandah of the summerhouse with a shotgun, I’m just going to have to keep trying. I was indifferent to them before, and in fact I consider myself an animal lover, but now I hate the little feline gits.
Anyway, as I said, hopefully with all this growth we’ll have a bountiful harvest. May is a pretty lean month as far as harvesting goes, but in June I should be able to get something back from this hard work, and create some beautiful food with it.
The blueberries are starting to flower already, April’s weather has been intense! 
Potatoes going absolutely mad. Earlies on the left, maincrop on the right (I think).
Rocket garden! So much goodness here – lettuces, cabbages, peas, beans, carrots, rocket, beetroot, courgettes, cauliflowers, red mustard…whew. Now with added copper tape on the edges. Screw you, slugs.
Greenhouse madness. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and aubergines all thriving.
I love rocket. Nom. 
Parsnips are finally coming through too, and strawberries are beginning to perk up, along with the raspberry canes. I planted out my butternut squash, pumpkin, sweetcorn and purple sprouting broccoli, but I think I damaged the roots a bit, so I’ll wait and see if they recover. Also, I was given a present by my mother-in-law of some vegetables and fruit trees – pear, greengage (so underrated), cherry and peach. It will be a couple of years before they fruit I would imagine – something to look forward to.
I’m not really a fan of cupcakes (they’re generally overpowering in their sweetness, even for me), but I came across a recipe for cola cupcakes so I decided to try it out. They’re made with cola syrup both in the cake mixture and the frosting.
They were incredibly tasty, as documented by the fact there’s not one left!
We’d been craving some good old fashioned comfort food after our holiday. The food in Croatia was mediocre, quite salty and poor imitations of Italian food mostly. I had a traditional Croatian stew in Split and whilst nice, it lacked the punch of something like a Hungarian goulash. The best food we had was Bosnian food, in Dubrovnik (which was also incredibly fatty). They do some delicious cheese and meat dishes, and I particularly liked the cold aubergine slices wrapped around spicy cheese. We also had a nice meal at a Mediterranean style restaurant in Dubrovnik, where I had a beautifully cooked saddle of lamb. So, I made a popular dish in our household (I think my husband would eat pie all day every day if possible), a creamy chicken, pancetta and mushroom pie. Rather than a warm comfort-style pudding to accompany it, a cold dessert was requested, so I made moreish white chocolate pannacotta with strawberries. If only I had more time to cook, or do anything, I’d post more detailed pictures and recipes. As it is, I just took pictures of the finished dessert, which I’ll leave you with.
The kitchen. Always the heart of the home. Finally, we got rid of the blue eyesore that came with the house and have a beautiful and practical kitchen in its place. It’s 99% finished – we’ve just got to get new external and internal doors, but I love it and I’m in there more often than not, it seems. It’s also great that we’re already making progress on the house. The husband is now concentrating on his arcade (and has also decided the summerhouse will be arcade two!)
A pictorial history of our kitchen, because it truly needs to be appreciated just how awful the original one was:
I’ve been slack with regards to the blog, it’s true, it’s true. Food/garden updates coming soon! I’ve been terribly busy of late. My aunt ran the London Marathon two weeks ago, and did it so well. Proud niece! Felt quite inspired by it all, the realisation of how much training, hard work and motivation had gone into it. It was really nice to be able to have my Grandma to stay too, with an actual guest bedroom that isn’t strewn with arcade machines/books/computers or any of the other numerous hobbies and activities myself and V partake in.
Due to the timing of the bank holidays, we decided to get away from it all and go to Croatia for a week, returning yesterday. It was very pretty, but the cities were all very small with not much going on culturally and we’re not the type to lay around sunbathing, so we got a little bored. We saw an awful lot of the country, from Zagreb down to Plitvice Lakes, then on to Split and the surrounding islands (namely Hvar) before the last stop of Dubrovnik. What I did really treasure was being able to spend a week away from it all and some quality time with my husband.
Now I’m going to enjoy the rest of my bank holiday weekend by being old-fashioned and homely, and these idle hands will endeavour to update the blog…
The Wind-up Tori Chronicle
