This is just a very quick snapshot of Tuesday morning spending a few glorious hours with the wonder that is Marie Wallin teaching us all the beauty of fairisle, at the Campaign for Wool Exhibition. 

I Know I’ve forgotten to take photographs of everyone’s fairisle, I was rushing for a class the other side of London, but I am so glad that I managed to spend a few hours of my life chatting to Marie and other wonderful knitters, some of whom have become my new best friend – you know who you are!

I love these vibrant sheep, they were scattered everywhere, and no two were the same colour.

And to see the blanket in real life is always a treat.  Now all I need is a really good friend to knit it up for me, ‘laughs’.

I’ll have to pick this post back up later in the week, I am now fast turning into the Mad March Hare, I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date….’

Year 2 begins, excited, nervous, anxious, elated, giddy will all be followed by exhaustion.  Onwards…

I had a rather fine cauliflower sat in my fridge for a while and I’ve been tempted by various recipe ideas, should I make a nice potato and cauliflower curry, how about a simple cauliflower cheese, maybe make some lightly pickled cauliflower reminiscent of a brightly coloured piccalilli, or stir fry with garlic and sesame seeds to enjoy with some Thai rice.   And then I noticed the cheese and I knew what was called for. 

A tiny piece of cheddar, the end of some Parmesan which was too hard to grate and a small piece of Stilton.  This was going to be interesting. 

So I fried some onions for flavour, added some potatoes, the amount will vary depending on how thick you like your soup, I like mine to stick to my ribs, so quite a lot.  If anybody has noticed I don’t put too many details of weights and measures in my savoury recipes, I think savoury cooking is about what you have in the cupboard, what your taste buds like and not what you think you should put in.   And then added that cauliflower without any green bits, two stocks cubes,  (mine were chicken, but we are putting this on the meatless monday because they could so easily have been vegetable) plenty of water and about half a pint of milk.  And not forgetting to add the hard crusts of the Parmesan, they will impart flavour and you will be able to rescue some of the cheese from the rind.  And then simmer until everything is softly cooked.

See how the cheese goes soggy, you can cut those bits off.  Then added all of the cheese and whizzed with my trusty hand blender.

And finished with a sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper and a scattering of just harvested from the plastic tub on the kitchen windowsill, cress.   It was a thing of hot cheesy beauty, the cauliflower and potatoes being the perfect foils to allow the cheesy flavours to come through.

I always feel like this is a difficult part of the year, emotionally. On the one hand I start to look forward to the autumn colours that abound and which is my very favourite time of the year.  I long for cold days to make the change in the leaves ever brighter and allow the glorious reds and golds to come forward in a blaze of glory.  And yet on the other hand some of the summer plants are only just beginning to realise that their job is done and one can see how they dance so brightly in the first whisps of an autumn breeze and I feel just a little bit sad that another summer is just about to be gone.

These photo’s were all taken on the same day, within steps of each other.

We can see the brambles and the berries,

ripening up and some are drying up.

Yet still flowering, all to give sustenance to those that look for it.

We can see brightly coloured flowers bobbing in the wind with the bumble bees still hard at work

gathering pollen and nectar to store for the hard winter ahead.

And yet when we look closely we can see that this is a time of transition and soon both feet will be firmly locked into Autumn, rescuing hand knit socks and woollen jumpers to keep the the shivers at bay.  It will be like seeing old friends again, with them being just a little bit more bobbly and careworn.

When I went to see the Tall Ships I came across these sculptures.  I think I audibly gasped when I saw them, they are in a very Victorian Industrial setting and I got the quivers thinking the Martians were invading.  This is not the first time my Martian feeling has happened in London, I blame my older brothers watching War of the Worlds and playing the album constantly, I grew up believing Martians were a distinct possibility.  But even so, I find them really eerie and really interesting, but they send a shiver down my spine.

There are sixteen figures made in cast iron by the sculptor Peter Burke.  Having researched for this blog post I can tell you that they are made to reflect the community, military and industrial history of the site, where munitions factories once employed thousands of workers.

I love how they vary with which piece is missing and how I felt desperately in need of being able to crawl into one of them, but of course that was not possible from the way they are designed.  And I also think, if there was ever a place that needed a bit of yarn bombing, this would be it.  Wouldn’t they look wonderful with some gaily coloured scarfs and warm bobble hats..  – or is that just me.

Left to my own devices its become pretty clear to me that cooking big family meals is not high on my agenda.  I am quite happy to make a vegetable stir fry with rice or cheesy mash or any number of things that require very little in the way of ingredients and very little in the way of effort.  And the other thing that strikes me very clearly, especially when I start to feel very tired, is that I haven’t eaten any type of red meat for at least six weeks.  Which if your a fully confirmed vegetarian and your making sure your getting your green leafy veg on a nearly every day basis its probably not a problem, but if your not making any sort of effort to eat any iron, then maybe it should be worth noting.   When feeding a family, mince has been high on the agenda as a nutritious means of getting a good source of protein, high in iron,  into a hungry growing family as cheaply as possible.  And it seems to have worked because our boys are strapping lads.  We would probably have mince in its many different forms at least twice a week and a piece of beef brisket that would last for at least two meals, probably twice a month, so they never went short.

Mince – It was the first thing I gave up when coming to live on my own.  I just needed a complete break from it.  And as I couldn’t afford steak on my limited student budget and I don’t like beefburgers (which are basically another type of mince) I just sort of gave up beef.

So, about a month ago I fancied buying some beef mince and as my student loan, how shall we put this, I’ve sent the same paperwork in three times and I’ve still not been paid and won’t be for at least another week, and that’s if it goes well this time, the mince has come to the top of the freezer.  And whilst I still have potatoes, I thought a family cottage pie was called for. 

I fried some onions with garlic, added the mince and browned that off and added two tins of tomatoes, a beef stock cube and the rest of the frozen peas.  Simmered it all down for a while.

Made a big pan of mash

and dolloped (such a great word) it on.  One tip worth passing on, if you fancy dolloping your mash in a similar style, use a wooden spoon.  Seriously the mash doesn’t stick to it like it does a metal spoon.

Made pretty patterns to aid the making of the crunchy tasty titbits.

And cooked in the oven for an hour and a quarter.

And served with freshly boiled carrots.  The rest was portioned up and placed back in the freezer for nights when only some comfort food will do.

As you can see my Hinksey Mittens are still not finished.  This is what comes of producing a quilt top at the weekend and starting to gather steam for the year ahead.  Although I have very much enjoyed posting every day, I can see that that probably won’t be possible in the near future.  I’ll try, mainly because I enjoy writing and exploring my world in photography and descriptive prose, not that I am a brilliant writer, I just enjoy the tinkering along of it. I  also think that because I didn’t post as much as I would have liked last year, I will some how miss out when I reread all about my time at University and what I got up to in London.   So to that end I am going to try and post as much as possible, even if you all do get a tad bored by another recipe or blurry shot of something that is being produced in the studio, I’ll know what it means and it will take me back instantly to that time, and that is one of my main reasons why I write this blog.   For when I’m grey – oh sorry, thats not going to happen! – and old and wrinkly and am sat knitting with my pussy cat, whoever that might be, on my lap, with my ipad to hand, just drifting back over the wondrous times I am having at the moment!

Getting back to the mittens,

I don’t knit cable very often, I love the pattern made with cable,  I just don’t do it, I find it takes more of a strain and sometimes I just want to knit plain socks.  So it takes a lot longer, although when I do knit cable, I do find that I can read the chart more easily and am able to knit faster after ten hours or so.  So there is hope, if I just stuck with cable knitting for six months it would all come good.

But so far I haven’t made any terrible errors, and haven’t had to frog a mitten, which is all good.

And they are very pretty.  (can you see who never leaves my side in the top right hand corner of this photograph?)

So just because she is always by my side, Toile, looking very cute at 5 and a half months.

Sometimes she has that look of kitten hood and sometimes she has that ‘hey missus, I’m a fully grown cat’ look.  So cute.