It is the time of year when many beautiful and naughty insects fly into the garden. This one is a particularly glamorous yet evil little beastie. The red lily beetle, flies around like a ladybird, but has a very good playing dead pose balanced on its back with its feet and antennae tucked in.
If you disturb the lily beetle at work; munching foliage, mating, or laying eggs , which are its main pastimes, it drops to the soil and is surprisingly hard to spot as it lies on its back.
For a friend of mine, another attempt at photographing the moon with the little Lumix – and Venus too! It’s a wonderful night out there. I hope everyone has been enjoying the spectacle of Venus and Jupiter the last few weeks. It’s enough to make me want to be an astronomer when I grow up.
I don’t know if the expression ‘ Sending Coals to Newcastle’ means anything to non British readers? It’s an expression for sending something to someone which by definition they already have in abundance, so sending bread to a miller would seem to be a slightly crazy thing to do, like sending moon dust to the moon, but that’s what I did a little while ago.
Rye is not as popular in England as it is in the Northern European countries. We get less choice in the sort of flours we can get. It is nigh on impossible to find a shop that supplies cut rye grain, the only suppliers being the mills. The Rye flour generally available is quite coarse and while of course one can bake with it, I like to use a finer flour when I am trying to make European style rye. Continue reading
Zeb Bakes 