What's been going on between May and August...

Well, it's been a very long time since my last post. Very long. Little and often is the sort of unofficial motto of bloggers everywhere, but I haven't even managed that! Ah well. The simple answer to what's been going on is... restoring a Victorian House (as if you didn't know..). And we now have two rooms that look absolutely tip top. So between May and August there has been a serious push to get our bedrooms looking perfect, and a sort of haven for us - kind of "this is what the whole house might one day look like".

Here is what our front room looked like when we got medieval on it. Since we're talking medieval, the latin tabula rasa kind of works as a description:



And here is what it looked like half way.

Highlights of this phase (personally speaking) were:

- Finally getting exactly the right wood for the job and sorting out floorboards like a pro

- Cutting beautiful 45 degree cuts and remaking new skirting boards. Much more fun to do it with a saw manually than with an electric thingy

- Watching our fabulous plasterer, Claire, get the most perfectly flat walls you could possibly imagine. She is an artist

- Restoring the 1930s fireplace with my mate Man About Dairsie and some spray radiator paint

And finally, here's what it all looks like once we finished it all! So chuffed with it - it's been hard work but really good.





Highlights of this last phase?

- IKEA wardrobes! So easy to make, so easy to get them looking fabulous. We love you, IKEA. And your meatballs. And your amazingly cheap cooked breakfasts.

- Painting. And more painting. And yet more painting

- The amazing carpentry of Alcove Queens - brilliant people who have reinvented a little original fitted wardrobe we had (see photo just above) and turned it into M's shoe palace. Nice.

Top tips if I were to do it again?
- Don't paint on really hot days. Rubbish finish.
- Measure lengths of wood really carefully before trying to bring them into a room - saves scraping your newly painted surfaces...

Oh and a final note - music for this phase generously provided by Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, God Speed You! Black Emperor, whatever radio stations our plasterer Claire listened to, lots of Radio 4 and lots of Radio 2.

Phew. It's good to be back on blogspot!!

Sausages after a long weekend of house stuff...

Kicking back with a pint of Old Speckled Hen, Pink Floyd on the stereo, waiting for something wonderful to come out of the oven...

Been a fairly busy weekend. We recently had the Gas Networks guys out to sort out a legacy of this house once being flats, or maybe bedsits. We had a live gas supply going up into the 1st floor with no means of isolating it, plus two really unpretty gas pipes going up the walls.

When you take a step back and think about it, not too safe really, as well as being a bit unsightly. So the gas guys dug up the road and renewed the live supply, cutting off the old upstairs one. Problem solved. Apart from getting rid of thick gas piping from our top floor...

Much sweat and hacksaw blades later, it is Done. No more pipes. Felt like a bomb disposal expert a little bit though - cutting through pipes that once contained gas, you do get a bit of a gas smell, and that all makes you think .. did they miss another live connection somewhere....

But all well, and now have lots of scrap metal that I'm hoping I might get a fiver for at one of South London's finest scrap merchants. We'll see...

So getting back to cooking, tonight is a little something the most excellent Nigel Slater proposes in Tender Part One. (I know I go on about this book a bit, but it's so good...)

For this, chop up 4 onions quite roughly and soften them in the same pan you're going to put in the oven later. Oh, and preheat the oven to 190 degrees. Meanwhile, chop up some parsnips (about 500g) into 'wine cork sized' pieces (Nigel's words, not mine - loving that!). Toss those in with the onions and let all that colour for a bit. Then chop up 6 sausages (good ones from the butcher, low in fat) into thirds, take the parsnip and onion out of the pan and brown the sausages. Once that's done, put the onion and parsnips back in, along with a few sprigs of thyme and 500ml of chicken stock. Let it boil then put in the oven for about 35-40 minutes.



I'm just waiting for all that to happen now - the photo was before it went in the oven, but looks promising I think.

Wonder if it's time for another pint of Speckled Hen....

Coping with Celeriac

Well then, the most excellent Abel & Cole veggie box yielded this week probably the two staples of organic veg boxes, but coincidentally the two most intimidating vegetables to the amateur cook.

I've written about Kohlrabi already, but that and a celeriac...

I turned to the mighty Google for advice, for my cookbooks are found wanting when it comes to these two. I stumbled upon a rather good site: Simply Recipes, which then gave a link to a fantastic site by Rosa Jackson, who is a Canadian food writer based in Nice and Paris. Her site is here, but her previous blog (where I found the recipe) is here.

Long story short, Celeriac and Kohlrabi rosti were fantastic, and pretty easy to sort out.

First of all, peel an entire Kolrabi and a smallish celeriac. Chop it into manageable chunks, then shred in a food processor. Once this is done, then add an egg, 50g of gram (chick pea) flour, 2 tbsp of water, some chopped parsley, and whiz it all in the processor until it's all nicely blended.



Actually, I found that more like 3 eggs were needed, probably a bit more flour (another 20g?) and a wee bit more water. I also thought it would be good with a chopped red chilli and some coriander.

Anyway, once all that's done, heat up some oil (about 3 tbsp) in a large frying pan on a medium heat, form the mixture into little 3cm wide thin cakes (use a dessert spoon), and fry 'em all up, keeping them warm in the oven in between batches.

Really nice! Especially with chilli sauce and a little salad.

Thank you to Rosa for this one - great stuff

London Skies...

Well it's been a long time. Kinda busy finishing off our first room in the house - the first one to look exactly the way we'd like it to look! Major achievement, and much bloggage to follow.

But this weekend has been absolutely gorgeous in the sun. And a little strange too. For the first time since probably 2001, the skies over London have been completely clear, with not a vapour trail or a low rumble of aircraft to be seen or heard. This just struck me as I was out in the garden the other morning and the sky was perfectly clear. And again when we were out with friends in the grounds of Cliveden House.


(The photo is from our garden, not Cliveden...)
I know it's extraordinarily difficult for various people importing or exporting, or for folks struggling to get back from holidays or organise anything that depends on air travel, but still, for a few days in 2010, we will all remember the clear and quiet skies over London and how it makes us think about what life was once like...

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Why Albums Should Live On

Some great news today about Pink Floyd, who have just won a legal battle against single track downloads. Check out Mashable for more details...

While iTunes is great etc, and it's just so much easier to access music than it ever used to be, there is a lot to be said about attention spans... I remember being so chuffed when I was able to download Horse With No Name by America, partly because I'd only heard it twice before in my entire life on the radio, and never actually knew who wrote it.

Yay for iTunes. But it goes back to endless debates I always used to have with friends about the integrity of the Album. Sometimes artists deliberately compose a work for extended listening. My mate ManAboutDairsie (he doesn't know that's his name yet...) and I always reckoned that too much got shoehorned into the 'new' CD format when it really took over from vinyl and cassette and it made albums a bit dull, just collections of tracks. And iTunes have proven us right, up to a point.

So that's why the Floyd should be saluted. Sometimes, the Album is the way to listen to music. Some Albums command you to make time for them - it may only be a few times a year or whatever. But it will be richly rewarded.

And purely from a cooking point of view, there is nothing better sometimes than making a roast dinner with Dark Side of The Moon on...

Another weekend, another new skill...

Well, it's been a busy weekend. Decided that some of our floorboards really needed some attention - that much sagging couldn't be healthy...

So the day started with a trip to Howarth Timber and Building Merchants, a cornerstone of probably one of the worst traffic complexes in all of London - Brockley Cross. You wouldn't have thought that much chaos could be engineered in such a small space. And yet..

Anyway, Howarth's was one of the slightly more intimidating hardware stores I've been to. Not often you have to ask if somewhere does actually do Retail! But for all that, they were really friendly and helpful and now if ever I need wood or anything at all to do with fitting or shaping or otherwise messing with wood I will know where to go. I think we must have seemed such rookies - the newbie DIY kids with no clue what do do...

Getting back to the house, sure enough it was an unholy mess underneath the sagging floorboards, with some of them resting on live electricity cables. Nice.

Bit of shaping, hammering, sawing later, it started to look pretty good.

I have two books to thank for this little feat. One a book my Dad gave me from back when he was doing something similar to a house from a similar era - an early 1980s Readers Digest 'Looking after your (you may as well add 'Victorian' here) Home' which is ace - all the basics including stuff that you don't even have to do anymore, like make your own rawlplugs out of wooden dowel... And another - The Victorian House manual. Which is by Haynes, they of the VW combi maintenance guide fame. Brill. But they make everthing sound like armageddon and what do you think you've done buying a Victorian property...

All things considered though, enjoying my foray into flooring techniques...