Monday 23 November 2015

Harvest Monday - spiced apple cake and sweet chestnuts

Well, this week has certainly been diverse. Mild, then cold, windy (very), calm, sunny, heavy rain and Saturday night....snow! I didn't get any photos but we had about an inch or so - I looked out the window Saturday night and was so surprised to see it - the west of the county was due some but I really didn't think we'd get any in the city. I had mixed feelings about it though - we were planning on going chestnut foraging the next day and a covering of snow would scupper that!
Sunday morning there was still a thin layer of snow but some rain cleared it all away ( phew? Also not great to be foraging in the rain.)
 
Anyway, earlier in the week it was my birthday and in keeping with office tradition, I made a cake for everyone. I wanted to include an element of 'homegrown' so made one with apples that I still have left from Jan's mum's garden. I found an easy recipe on the web (with the measurements in cups, so I used an old bread machine cup for this). The recipe is here - but I swapped the vegetable oil for room temperature goats butter and used a bit less sugar - it was still very sweet (but very tasty) so I reckon you could use a lot less (and I've just spotted in the recipe comments that lots of people have reduced the sugar quantity too). A really easy recipe though. I ended up baking it a bit longer than the stated 55 mins as our oven always seems to take longer than recipe times.
Yum! I cut it into 20 squares. The cake has cinnamon in too so it has an amazing aroma
It took four apples so I thought I may as well use the peels and cores to make another batch of cider vinegar. The recipe I've used is here - the comments thread is very thorough and worth a read too.
I managed to nip to the allotment from work one dry lunchtime to get some goodies - there is absolutely loads of lambs lettuce to keep picking - I'm harvesting plants whole by snipping them off just above soil level (it keeps the plants cleaner than if you try to pull the whole thing out of the soil, when generally a clump of soil comes with it too ). There was also a bit of kale and some chard, though these are growing very slowly now so I might not get much more from them until spring.
I made a red lentil soup with the kale
And salads like this with the lambs lettuce - still using some of my fermented gherkins from last year too.
We did get out chestnut foraging on Sunday, hooray. It was raining whilst we waited for the bus and during the journey there (a 20 min bus ride from the city) but when we hopped off the bus the rain stopped, yay. The rain had melted any remaining snow, so that wasn't a problem either.
We were a lot later than last year and most of the leaves had fallen off all the trees, so it was harder to look for the chestnuts on the ground, hidden amongst all the leaves. Plus I reckon the squirrels had already helped themselves quite a bit too. But we got a reasonable harvest and had a nice day out.
 
Next to a quiet country lane near the wood we spotted some windfall apples on the grass verge, so picked up a few of the best ones of those too - an unexpected bonus! We could easily have taken more (it didn't seem that anyone else had been collecting them) but they would've been too heavy to carry back.
We walked back to Norwich on the Marriott's Way - a dis-used railway which is now a walking, cycling and bridle route and found a couple of geocaches on the way, including this cute little hedgehog, hidden in a rotten stump, cool.
And finally, one of my exciting birthday presents from Jan - a Ghillie kettle! I'd been hinting about this recently, hehe.
The water is held round the outside and you heat it up from below by making a small fire in the bottom compartment.
I'd used one before but not for a long time (when I'd volunteered for a practical conservation organisation for a couple of years after leaving university).
Looking down the middle (Before lighting it of course!)

To put it to a proper test, I filled it right up (about 4 litres apparently) which did take a long time and a lot of sticks to keep the fire going before it got really really hot. But luckily I keep lots of sticks in the back garden, and we found that dried sweet pea stems worked well too. If you're just heating up a bit of water to make a couple of cups of tea etc it would be pretty quick I reckon. Plus it was fun! (And good back-up for power cuts etc, and when we build our own off-grid house (in our dream future!)).

 

Thanks for reading this week. Linking in with Harvest Monday hosted by Dave's Our Happy Acres

 

17 comments:

  1. Very neat kettle! Ummm ... is that a real "live" hedgehog? I can't really tell, never seen one in person. I love your bday tradition of taking a cake to work, lucky for them.

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    1. Hi Susie. Aw! It's a little porcelain ornament - geocaches are hidden all over the place - they are sometimes just a Tupperware box or similar but other times the people who 'lay' (hide) the cache go to a lot of effort. There's a free mobile app you can download from geocache.com that lets you track where all the caches are (some are only available to paid premium members, but not this cute hedgehog, hurrah), usually there's a clue to where they're hidden too. Then you log that you've found it and there's also a tiny rolled-up piece of paper inside that you write your name on and can see who else has found it before. We've only recently started looking for them, and jan just keeps an eye on her app when we're going somewhere interesting to see if there's any around. (I don't even have a smartphone!)
      It seems to just be us over here then that take a cake to work for their bday :) some people just buy one but I like to make it.

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    2. Ooh, that sounds like a ton of fun ... I've heard about the geocache thing, never looked into it enough. Yes, the "take a cake to work bday thing" is definitely not traditional here. But I'll work on that!

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  2. I like the idea of baking a cake for your own birthday. That way you can make what you like if nothing else! I can almost taste it with those apples and cinnamon. I've never foraged for chestnuts but I used to go hunting for wild pecans with my parents. I also remember them going out looking for persimmons in fall.

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    1. Haha, thanks Dave. Yeah I don't know when it started but over here people take a cake to work around their birthday. I suppose it saves everyone else having to remember!
      Wow, wild pecans sound amazing, we don't get them here and they're expensive to buy in the shops. Often the chestnuts sold come from overseas (and are also quite expensive) so it's nice to gather some from the countryside.

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  3. Happy birthday! It sounds like you had a lovely day out in the woods picking nuts and apples. And that hedgehog is adorable, a great find.

    You're still getting a nice variety of greens, and your corn salad looks like it's doing really well. I must remember to purchase new corn salad seed, mine didn't germinate this year.

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    1. Thank you phoung, it was a nice day :)
      Ah, shame about your corn salad seed this year. I've started letting some plants go to seed over the veg bed, so I don't have to remember to sow it each time, it just pops up everywhere.

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  4. Your cake looks so moist & yummy! And how lucky to be able to forage for chestnuts & get quite a good haul at that - they are a favourite of mine.

    That is such an ingenious kettle - had never seen nor heard of it before. Would definitely have come in handy during our Christmas week power cut a couple of years ago!

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    1. Thanks Margaret, I'm trying to think if there's any more chestnut woods nearby that I could get to easily :)

      The kettle design is apparently popular with anglers, campers etc. it's very light. I actually saw a canoeist on TV using one this week too (on dry land, not in the canoe!). There's different brands as well and you can get cooking accessories like pots and pans. I remember just calling it a Kelly kettle or a volcano kettle. Yes, definitely useful for power cuts!

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    1. Thanks sue, it went very quickly at work!

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    2. Oh Sue, I also meant to say that we saw a nuthatch in the woods when collecting chestnuts, yippee :)

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  6. That ghillie kettle looks really cool! I presume it is intended primarily for use at your allotment? I bet they are quite rare, and I imagine there is not a great demand for such things in this hi-tech age!

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    1. Thanks Mark, the kettle is cool! It probably won't get used much to begin with, but is more of a back-up and a bit of fun for now (until I get my bit of land and off grid house - In the distant future!)

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  7. Those chestnuts look gorgeous. I've seen some tasty-looking recipes for chestnut cheesecake that I'd like to try.

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    1. Thanks Matt, mmm I do like cheesecake, sounds interesting. We're hopefully heading out today to some nearby woods for a walk and to see if there's any chestnuts (I can't actually remember if there's any chestnut trees in these woods though, so we might just have to enjoy the walk!)

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