montjoye

While staying with my folks recently, Mum and I made a batch of beef croquettes. This starts with simply boiling stewing beef in water. That smelled so good that I had a sudden thought that maybe the problem with my beef stews is the vegetable bulk? So I'm trying a more beef centric stew version to test that. Of course I couldn't resist making it more complex than just beef in water, but there is very little volume in there other than beef and enough liquid. Anyway while I remember what I put in the pot:

750g stewing steak, cubed and with the chunkiest fat evicted
brown this in olive oil in 3 batches
deglaze with a glass of red wine
add: 3 smallish flat mushrooms chopped
~1T tomato juice/passata
1 cube frozen parsley
~1/2t dried thyme
shake of hing powder
~8 turns black pepper
grated nutmeg (maybe 1/8t?)
enough water to barely cover

bring to the boil, drop to a simmer for 2-3hrs, lid on. Must check for seasoning later, the only salt in the above is in the parsley (and tomato goop I suppose). I mean to thicken it a little at the end and treat as pie filling.

I wanted a dress to wear for my parents Golden Wedding celebration. I decided to use a length of panel printed silk crepe I've had for a couple of years, but was struggling to find design inspiration to turn it into a frock. Then I remembered this lovely and simple dress I found in Kelvingrove art gallery, Glasgow back in 2008. A child's dress in silk batik. Made by Jessie M. King in 1923. I think it's delightful and I spent quite a while looking at it. I came up with a plan to position the printed panels that I thought would be pleasing.



So I made it up.




I'm rather curvier than a small child, so the effect on me is not that flattering. Another trademark elegant sack? or just ugly? It is very comfy and nicely floaty though. I'm still interested in garments from simple rectangles, triangles, but they are challenging to make look good on a curvy figure. One needs a big enough circumference for the outward curves, shall we say, but then there is too much bagginess around the inward curves :-)



Like most loosely fitted things on a curvy girl, it looks better when I'm moving. Some will find these pics amusing.

    

Now I need to decide if this acceptable? or simply too dowdy and I need to think again?

Posting this in case some find it useful. Also because I'm delighted to have come up with another useful variation.

I will only buy free range chicken, and buying it in pieces is expensive. So every so often, I buy a whole free range chook, from which I get at least a dozen meals, sometimes more.

The legs and wings make two meals. I usually make a ginger/soy/honey marinaded slow cooked thing with noodles and veg. Tonight I did a baked thing with cream/zucchini/mushrooms/rice instead.

The thighs make two meals. My standard is a cacciatore variant

The breasts make about 4 serves. I usually do satay or curry but random pasta sauces are also good.

Then the new thought was- instead of just making stock from the resulting carcass, steam the meaty carcass for half a hour. I put thyme and bay in the steaming water. Let this cool, strip the carcass and one gets about a cup of cooked chicken, useful for sandwiches, pasta, pizza etc. Say another two meals. If you have inexpensive white wine, use that for all or half of the steaming water. Either way, the resulting water is a rich stock.

The steaming water counts as stock, then one can boil the bones(including the any of the other bones you haven't already boiled) for more stock. Say 1-2L stock that will make 4-8 serves of soup.
Edit- more like 1L or less stock from only one chicken carcass. I usually collect the bones in the freezer and make a larger amount, hence my confusion.


Not bad for just one chicken.

I suppose I started sewing at about 4 or 5 years old? Pattern darning on hessian to start with, guided by my Mother and Grandmother. Several of those pieces still exist in my Mother's collection. My Mother sewed most of our clothes when my brother and I were small. Initially, much of the fabric came from her old full skirted 50's and 60's frocks. My Grandmother, dear Nana, wanted to be a tailor, but her family could not afford the apprenticeship fees so she had to go to work in a pickle onion factory instead (one of the saddest stories I know). She did manage to study at nightschool however, and had considerable skill. Nan made lots of Mum's clothes of course. Nan (and Gramps) lived with us from when I was about 10, so I grew up with two fairly accomplished dressmakers. Now I have Nan's last sewing machine, sniff.

So large scale embroidery was my start. Then making dolls clothes, both by hand and later machine. Practicing on sewing machines by making "stamps" and spirals etc with old needles on paper. Also making dolls. Pipecleaner dolls and dressing them, often in different country's traditional dress. I was impatient with school sewing lessons because they didn't do things the way my family had already taught me. by late high school I was starting to make clothes for myself, partly because I had access to fabric, but very little money. I kept making clothes all through Uni days, and in the latter part of that, discovered the SCA. Costume became part of the sewing mix, but without much historical accuracy at the beginning.

So many weekends and holidays were all about the gift of time in which to sew. I remember one set of Easter holidays when I was so excited because I had time to make a coat. That coat got made and worn lots. I was so happy both making it, and having made it. For years, I'd spend weekends sewing in the family dining room while listening to one of two sets of albums- Eurythmics or Steeleye Span. I'm astonished in retrospect that my poor family were so tolerant of this.  Yeh I should get out more, or have got out more, but I'd not be as good a seamstress if I had.

I have kept making clothes for myself ever since. Some of the impetus is that I don't have a figure that matches the shapes that retail clothes are made to fit. I look way better in well fitted custom made clothes. I can't buy trousers that fit for any money, or shirts, or anything much except knits and shoes, and even the knits I fairly often end up altering (actually, I've altered a bunch of shoes too). I also love fabric, really love fabric. Well, I really love high quality fabric, especially when I find it for cheap.

I continued my dressmaking education by reading lots of "Threads" magazines, books, and learning things from my sewing friends. Later I found my costume experience informing my general dressmaking. I haven't used a commercial pattern in years. Commercial patterns don't fit any better than retail clothing. I did however learn a lot about garment construction from the instructions in the commercial patterns I worked with for years.

You know that advice for writers? "just write, lots, keep doing it, write, really". Well for me it was sewing. I could simply not count how many garments I have made, or altered, or remodelled. So many. Mumblety years worth. I'm pleased with what I can do, but I suppose I feel I ought to be able to do more. This was not though my paid career. So it's just a well developed hobby, but if I'm away from needle and thread for too long, I crave it.

Allium free tomato ketchup take 2. Identical to the first try but with double the spices and no celery (because I didn't have any). The first one was good enough for me to eat it all in about 6mths.
Website of inspiration: allrecipes.com/recipe/homemade-ketchup/

1 jar tomato passata (~700ml)
2/3 cup vinegar (I used cider vinegar from Weaver)
slosh water
generous half cup of brown sugar
3/4t salt
1/2t mustard powder
1/2t freshly ground black pepper
2 clove
2 allspice berry


Passata to saucepan. Rinse with vinegar. Rinse again with small amount water. All into saucepan.
Add all other ingredients
bring gently to boil. Stir lots or it will spit.
Simmer further until the consistency looks like tomato sauce.
Remove whole spices
Bottle in sterilised vessel.

Based on my favourite Apricot Rhubarb chutney but twisted towards orange, inspired by recipes on the net (by Delia and Antony Worrall Thompson)



Apricot Orange Chutney:

2 kg apricots, stones removed, halved
zest  and chopped flesh of one orange
1/2c sultanas
500ml (2 cups) cider vinegar
1 c (210g) light muscavado sugar
1 tablespoon ginger, finely grated (well out of a jar)
1 teaspoon salt
1 red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped
½ t cloves (lifted out towards the end of cooking)
1/4 t nutmeg, freshly grated
1t tumeric
1 teaspoon coriander seed}
2 t mustard seeds}
½ t cardamom seeds}- dry fried, then partially ground in the mortar
plus the cassia sticks from the sauce below

Heat slowly until sugar dissolved, then boil gently until thickened. Remove cloves and cassia towards end of cooking. Bottle.



This year's apricot sauce:
2 kg apricots, stones removed, halved
1kg white sugar
finely grated rind and juice of a lemon
2 cassia sticks

Heat slowly until sugar dissolved.
Ignore with lid on while finishing some other stuff for maybe half to an hour. This allows the cassia to infuse. Remove cassia, blitz apricots, replace cassia, simmer for 10min, remove cassia, bottle.

I got sick of cleaning things, so I've broken that up with setting up my next brew. This is that 20L of apple and pear juice that I scored for $1/L. It's 37.5% pear juice 'cause I cleared the shelves of the 50:50 mix and had to buy some plain apple to make up 20L. It's Berri brand clear juice.

The yeast is Vintner's Harvest SN9 which several people on Lochac brewers recommended as good for cider, leaving a fuller mouthfeel. So I'm doing a very simple ferment to test it.  vintnersharvest.com/products/vintners-harvest-wine-yeast-sn9. My brew stash doesn't have any simple cider left so this is needed anyway. I do still have a few last bottles of strong home pressed "harvest" cider, about half a case of apricot cider and quite a lot of the very dry mulberry cider. The latter I'm thinking of as primarily cooking booze.

OG 1.043
April 12th, no gloop, 1.004, some spritzig
April 21st, still no gloop, spritzig faded, 1.005, 5.0% abv, bottled.


June 8th
Reporting in on how this went. I call it a success. Nice soft mouthfeel, definitely less dry than with champagne yeast. Fairly light flavour, but it is only cheap commercial juice. I under dosed the carbonation sugar so it's low fizz. Must remember that my ciders don't have the same late ferment issue that many of my beers suffer.

These biscotti are a new experiment.  I wanted something both more authentic and gluten free to do with the egg yolks leftover from the macaroons below. I've made an HA recipe for "bisket" a few times before, which is nice, but is too brittle to transport successfully. www.godecookery.com/engrec/engrec47.html

(Ooo, or there is this one that I just found  www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/bisket-cakes.htm)

The biscotti recipe I used is a "traditional" italian one*, and not far distant from the medjeeval one, but less fatty, no cream or butter and with the sugar in the mix rather than used as a dredge.  www.cooks.com/recipe/o23qs8us/italian-biscotti.html

My changes:
used GF flour
leave out the vanilla
used 4 yolks and 3 whole eggs
divide the mix in two (actually I made it up as two separate mixes)

One half add:
1/2t aniseed, crushed and mixed with the dry ingredients
1/2 cup unblanched almonds, coarsely chopped and toasted in the oven

Other half :
half this sugar was light muscavado.
finely grated rind of one orange mixed into the egg
~80g pistachios
(I don't have any historical basis for the orange and pistachio. I wanted some alternate flavour for those who don't like aniseed and R had already planned a sweet with rose water)

I think I left them in the oven a bit too long in the drying stage. They are still tasty though, just a bit more toasty than is perhaps ideal.


Gotta say, GF flour sure is different than wheat flour to work with! First time I've used it.


The macaroons below are the same as I did last year montjoye.dreamwidth.org/422789.html.

Another piece of lovely linen has been made into a thing. I think I bought this piece from tangent woman? It was too small for most things I could think of, but was enough for an apron. I deemed the fabric so nice that it deserved a fancy hem. I've been working on it as my medjeeval project when I didn't have a more urgent one since festival before last. In the last little while I decided that 2 years was quite long enough to work on an apron though, so I decided to get it finished for this festival. Done.

This was an opshop find that I pounced on to replace my old favourite gardening jumper*. Same colour, a little larger, far fewer moth holes, but with a stiff scratchy zip. I cut the zip out, stitched up the resulting two layer edge and put two buttons with loops as the new closure. I'm so pleased with the transformation. From a harsh, cold, modern look to a soft, warm, old fashioned one. Much more appealing to me anyway.

The end result:


reconstructed "before shot with the zip just placed in position.


*a lovely soft Burberry one found in a charity shop in Edinburgh, dahlink.