Mum's potato pancake - a quick and filling dinner for two!

Here's an absolutely delightful recipe my Mum shared with me recently. It's cheap, it's easy and it's very filling - a perfect dinner for two after a long day at work! Both S and I were surprised how good it tasted, and we will definitely be making it again. This potato pancake is crispy on the outside and soft and fluffy in the middle, and the pizza-like topping is an explosion of flavours.

Ingredients for the potato pancake:
3 large or 4 medium potatoes
2 eggs
2 tablespoons of flour
1/2 tsp turmeric
Salt & pepper
Oil for frying

Ingredients for the topping:
You can use any combination of these - a great way to use fridge leftovers!
Bell pepper
Mushrooms
Smoked sausage or ham
Onion
Garlic
Peas/beans/corn
Tomatoes
Grated cheese
A little oil or butter for frying

Grate the raw potatoes and transfer them, juice and all, into a bowl. Add all the other ingredients and mix well with a spoon.
Heat the oil in a large pan. Pour the pancake mixture onto the hot oil and fry on medium heat until the underside starts getting brown.
In a separate pan, heat some oil or butter and fry your selection of topping ingredients (all chopped small), except the cheese.
Flip the pancake using another frying pan or a large plate. Cover with the topping mix and sprinkle on some grated cheese. Cover and continue to cook until the cheese has melted. Cut in half and serve (I served it with the pickle I wrote about in the previous post). Delicious!

Quick fridge pickle - Danish style

The Danish Agurkesalat is one of my favourite ways to serve cucumbers. I make it quite often and serve right away, but last night for the first time I made it for the fridge - it should keep for about a week and the flavour is actually supposed to improve over time.

Here's how I made it:

Ingredients:
1 English cucumber
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1/2 tsp salt

Optional flavourings:
Whole black peppercorns
Mustard seeds
Dill
Garlic
Chilli

The recipe is very simple. All you need to do is put the vinegar, sugar and water in a saucepan over low heat and wait for the sugar to dissolve (stirring helps). Don't boil the liquid. Meanwhile, slice the cucumber thinly, sprinkle with salt and transfer to a jar (I doubled this recipe and made two jars). When the liquid cools down, pour it into the jar along with any flavourings of your choice. Put the lid on and place the jar in the fridge. Serve after a minimum of 3 hours. Keeps in the fridge for up to 1 week.

Spring is creeping up on us!

This time of the year is soo exciting to me, a brand new gardener. I can see sings of spring popping up all over the garden and it just blows my mind, seeing all these little things waking up from their winter sleep.

The little patch in front of my house is full of things planted by the previous owners and I keep getting one surprise after another. The other day I discovered the oddest-looking furry little plant, which my Mum identified as lungwort. I've read up on it and it seems to have a lot of wonderful properties, so I'm all excited about trying lungwort tea some time this year! 

There are different flowers popping up here & there and I can only guess what they are. My edibles are doing ok - there are loads of tiny buds on my Japanese quinces; my garlic and onions are still looking strong and my rhubarb is definitely growing. These days I'm in the garden at least once a day, marvelling at all the changes!

I don't know what this plant is, but looks like it's going to have yellow flowers very soon.

Heather is looking absolutely beautiful.

Daffodils have grown so much over the past couple of weeks!

I will definitely have some rhubarb this year :-)

The sage is thriving - I've harvested quite a bit over the winter months but it's still producing new leaves.

Garlic seems to be doing alright.

Lungwort - isn't it the most peculiar looking plant?

I think these are crocuses but I wouldn't bet my life on it...

Seeds

Spring is still far away, but it doesn't stop me getting excited about my little seed collection. We recently visited my parents and I received a few seed packets from my mum; I have also bought some myself. It's not a huge selection as I don't want to get overwhelmed; besides I only have so much space to work with.

I have (more than pictured above):

Carrots (2 varieties)

Chard

Lemon balm

Wild strawberries

Caraway

Nigella

Parsley (collected from my mum's own plants last year)

Peppers (mix of sweet and hot)

Aubergine

Lovage

Corn

Bush beans

Chives

Dill

Butternut squash

Courgette

Kale

Foxgloves

Daisies

Tomatoes

Some of them can be sown indoors right now in February, which I did this morning. I also ordered broadbean seeds, but they haven't arrived yet - I think I will plant half of them indoors and half directly in the raised bed and see what happens. 

This is my first year of gardening and I still have loads to learn; being impatient doesn't help, so I try to control myself. I wish I could sow everything already! Here in Scotland though the last frost can appear as late as mid-May, so I need to be careful.

I already have a fair amount of things growing in the garden that I have planted since autumn; my rhubarb is doing exceptionally well and is a pleasure to watch. The garlic, onions and strawberries look good; all the fruit bushes and trees on the other hand still look dead so I have no idea how they are doing. Time will tell!

A childhood memory

Source: https://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/123890316.jpg

I was thinking about my garden the other day, and out of a sudden a memory of the garden in my childhood home popped to my mind. 

When I was little, my parents, both young teachers just a couple of years out of university, got jobs in a primary school and a preschool in a small village (pictured above) not far from where I was born. The jobs came with a house: a very old, neglected, pre-WWII house typical for that part of the country, which had been German up until the end of the war. The house was attached to the primary school; in the picture below the school building can be seen on the left, the house is in the middle, and the building on the right is a barn.

I spend most of my childhood there, from the age of 5 to 18. 

Source: an old German postcard

There was a really big garden there, probably four times the size of the garden I have now. We had a huge strawberry patch, with probably about 100 plants; several black, red and white currant bushes (white was my favourite!), a large Japanese quince bush, five or six peach trees, a very old and huge pear tree, loads of tomatoes, courgettes and cucumbers (all out in the garden, no greenhouse!), wild strawberry bushes dotted all over the place and probably many other things I can no longer remember. The gate was guarded by a giant mulberry tree, very popular with all the school kids. Behind the garden, there was a large and old orchard, a real jungle after many years of neglect. We had apple and plum trees there. I remember sitting high up on a branch and eating apples straight from the tree!

Being a kid, my only job in that garden was weeding (and harvesting - but that was pure pleasure!). I didn't realise it at the time, but my parents must have put an awful lot of work into it - the soil was very poor and sandy (the opposite of the heavy clay I have now); I remember them making buckets of nettle 'tea' and getting bags of manure from the nearby farm to improve it. In addition, the hot and dry summers meant long hours of expensive watering. My parents were both raised in cities, without much gardening knowledge or experience, so they learnt everything on the go. It is only now that I have my own garden that I can fully comprehend the importance of all the hard work they did - and I can sort of understand why, when my parents moved to the house they live in now, my mum decided not to grow any more vegetables and only keeps ornamentals now.

It's a very fond memory, as are all my memories from that time. I don't think I fully appreciated it when I was a kid, but it was a truly great place to live, and I think deep inside that was the reason I always wanted to move back to the countryside. I am so happy that dream has now come true!

Garden update: new additions, changes and insane weather!

This winter has been very mild; we have only had a few frosty nights and zero snow. For several weeks the weather was very spring-like, and the plants in my garden started waking up. 

My apple tree has quite a few big, fat buds on it. 

The rhubarb has shown its face. 

The flower bulbs I found buried in the potato planter, and scattered all over the garden back in autumn, have all sprouted. I'm not sure what they are, possibly daffodils, but it definitely looks like I'll have some flowers this spring! 

The garlic and the onions I planted in October seem to be doing particularly well, although I am not sure if they are supposed to look like this in the middle of the winter! This is my first year of gardening so I really don't know if I should be happy or worried...

Buds on the apple tree

Garlic jungle! No picture of onions as their bed is covered with fleece.

Baby rhubarb

Daffodils (I think??) 

There are a few new additions to my garden as well. I  wanted to grow kale, and while researching the subject I discovered a perennial variety of this lovely vegetable. It's called Daubenton's Kale, apparently a very old variety, and is supposed to be very hardy. When I bought it online, the orders were limited to 1 plant per customer, which was a bit disappointing, but then it is supposed to grow very tall (up to 2 metres!) so if all goes well I should have enough leaves just from this one plant. I can also propagate it from cuttings if needed. At the moment it's sitting in a fleece tent, to protect it from slugs and snails until it's established and starts growing.

Another newbie is a second apple tree - Golden Delicious. We love apples so I thought doubling my chances of getting a decent crop would be a good idea :-) I don't expect much from them this year, but hopefully by 2018 they will be established enough to start producing.

And lastly, not a plant but certainly a very important part of my garden - a compost bin. It's a 300-litre bin, which I hope will be enough for our needs. So far the council has been collecting all of our green waste, but no more, I shall start producing my own compost now! Although first I need to find a good spot for it. The first place I put it in didn't quite work - the bin (weighed down with several bricks, mind you!) got blown away last night by the insane wind (or was it a hurricane!) that's been torturing us for a couple of days now. There's been some damage to the garden but I have rectified all that I could, and I hope the plants are resilient enough to survive.

Daubenton's perennial kale, resting under its fleece tent

New apple tree - Golden Delicious

Brand new compost bin

Christmas presents and cooking with Outlander

Santa was very good to me this Christmas, I got a tonne of books! As a fan of the Outlander TV series,  I was very pleased to discover the entire collection of the books it's based on, as well as a beautiful cook book featuring many of the dishes mentioned throughout the story. It's full of photos, excerpts from Outlander and recipes that I know I am definitely going to try. I have already made two things from the book: oat & honey bread (and rolls) and bridies.

The bread recipe yielded 6 rolls and 1 small loaf of bread. They came out really nice, soft, slightly sweet and full of oaty goodness. Great with cheese and pickle! I will definitely be making them again soon!

The bridies (filled pastries) were surprisingly simple to make. This recipe is supposed to make 8 six-inch bridies: 4 vegetarian and 4 filled with beef. I managed to get 12 and was still left with a huge amount of the veggie filling (enough for at least another 4!) but ran out of pastry. I think I will make them again as they were utterly delicious, hot or cold, but I will adjust the quantities of ingredients.