Help me identify this house plant!

Auntie Vera

This is nothing to do with baking.

Do any of you lovely knowledgeable people know what this plant is called? I was given a piece of the stem and told to cut it into three and plant it in some soil, six months later it looks like this.

Some sort of succulent, very enthusiastic about life in general, grows huge long stems that then break off under their own weight.

It came from someone’s great aunt, hence the “Auntie Vera’ moniker. It hasn’t flowered yet so no clues there.

The truth is out there…. one of you must know it! (edit : see the comments for the identity of this plant)

Edit: Almost a year on (Nov 2011) having replanted sections in the summer, we moved one pot into the bathroom where it is warm and steamy and quite light in the window and it has produced amazing flowers. See below:

Guess who has decided to flower after all this time?

Chocolate chestnut brownies

Dan Lepard’s Chocolate Chestnut Brownies

I like the chocolate part very much, moussey and light in texture, just lovely in fact! However the freshly roasted chestnuts might have been the wrong thing to use, Dan Lepard specifies tinned ones in the recipe – I think I would leave them out altogether and just use the brownie part as a delectable chocolate dessert with lots of icecream. I think my taste buds don’t register chestnuts in desserts; they become strangely tasteless once they are combined with sugar. I am not too keen on them in bread either.

In my heart of hearts I really only like chestnuts straight from the shell, with some salt and black pepper and maybe a dab of butter. They’re good with sprouts and bacon at Christmas and I would like to try Azelia’s soup which has shitake mushrooms and lentils in it as well as chestnuts and sounds savoury and delicious.

Outside the back door

I'm still standing, yeah yeah yeah

It may be the 1st of November but this Chinese broccoli is looking very enthusiastic and the cardoons are sprouting like nobody’s business. I am tempted by Robin’s tweet to pick a few stems and see if I can turn them into food. I always thought you had to tie the plant up in brown paper and blanch the stems for many weeks and I have just left them to be gloriously ornamental and make flowers for the bees.

How do you cook these Robin?

This week’s task is to plant the new garlic and replant some of the giant singles that we raised earlier in the year by mistake. I’ve been eyeing up DocFugawe’s winter garden which is a long way away in Oregon and thinking that we should have tried some of those good looking greens he has, but it’s probably too late to sow new stuff now. We’ll have to make do with the chard and the broccoli.

My last handful of beans and friends

There is also a row of teeny tiny leek babies which need transplanting. If I write this down here, I might actually do it this week. Promises, promises.

Not garlic but cucumbers! A gifted plant produced enough baby cucumbers for a whole jar of pickles!

I have learnt that garlic needs to have a month at a cold temperature in order to divide into cloves – if you plant it and it doesn’t get that cold month, then you just get one big bulb. We have a whole bunch of those which we have been eating, and they are fine. The bonus of getting that wrong is that you can apparently re plant them at the right time of the year and then they will turn into properly divided big garlics in due course.