Elderflower Cordial Part 1

Here we are in mid June.  What is in flower down in Zeb’s favourite woods?

The wild garlic has vanished and there are swathes of frothy cow parsley, icecream pink dog roses, sparkly blackberry blooms and the elders are full of ripening heads of fragrant baby stars.

This is the year I finally try to make elderflower cordial. My aunt Barbara, who lives on an island on Lake Mälaren,  Sweden, makes this every year by the gallon and supplies all her neighbours and people who visit the one shop on Adelsö get the opportunity to sample it too!

The elderflowers have heads of little tiny star like florets, they look a bit like stelline, and on a warm summer’s day you can follow that glorious fragrance to the source….

It makes sense to only take a few from each shrub or tree as the elderberries that form later are a valuable source of food for birds in the autumn. We asked our local parkkeeper who maintains these woods which belong to the Council if it was all right and he was happy for us to collect some flowers for our personal use.  We picked about half a bag, approx 25 flower heads,  in the end.

Avoid picking them where spraying has taken place or near a roadside if you can and make sure you can identify them confidently.  These woods are nowhere near farmland  and I am pretty confident they haven’t been sprayed. The books say pick on a warm dry day, and choose flowers which have a mixture of not quite open budlets and open flowers.

I have no idea how the commercial stuff is produced, or where the manufacturers source the huge quantities of elderflowers they must need…. Maybe there are armies of elderflower pickers all over the world stripping the woods bare..

More to come….

Click here for Elderflower Cordial Part 2

More Vermont Sourdough..

I blame the starter, it wanted to bake, it was begging me to use it. I hadn’t planned on baking more of the same this week.

I made one of the variations on the Vermont sourdoughs the Mellow Bakers are working on this month;  the one with increased wholegrain. I had some wholemeal flour from Melin Llynnon, a restored Welsh windmill on Angelsey which,  ‘ was known as ‘Môn Mam Cymru’, the ’Mother of Wales’ or ‘The Breadbasket of Wales’  because of its capacity to produce wheat and bread flour in great abundance.’ I also used a little spelt and rye to create a good mix of grain.

One day I would like to tour around all the working mills, large and small that are left in England and Wales.  Anyone like to join me?   Like some people dream about bee keeping, I dream about a mill :)

Quick dough notes:  I used a lot more water than the recipe gives as the flours were very thirsty,  and I  added a small pinch of commercial yeast needing to bake the loaf mid-afternoon.  This gained me about an hour and might have helped aerate the loaf a little more.

A small portion of baker’s yeast, up to 0.2 percent can be added to a levain dough without any noticeable changes in the bread’s sourdough characteristics. This small amount of yeast will have a slight impact on fermentation and dough volume.    Jeffrey Hamelman. Bread P. 152

The bread had a really hot full bake and the crust is a little scorched, but we enjoy a rich dark crust;  Chewy, smoky and nutty with a sweet, well risen middle and an interesting texture from the coarse particles of bran speckling the crumb.   This goes on my bake again list!

Sally’s Griddled Lettuce

We have a few lettuces, just a few, and we weren’t getting through them quickly enough. Then I read Sally BR at Bewitching Kitchen on an intriguing recipe for grilled lettuce. Read her post here.

I  have to report that it is the most popular lettuce dish in the house. It was requested again today. So maybe we will get through them all with luck, plus I’m hiding them under my coat and smuggling them out to the neighbours.

On the subject of growing your own;  you know, on those gardening programmes, they always talk about sowing little tiny quantities of everything every two weeks, so you have a constant stream of fresh vegetables, does anyone actually manage to do that?  We did it last year and found that they all catch each other up anyway, like the No 65 bus from Ealing to Kingston via Richmond.

I just looked it up here to check it still existed, as it’s been a while since I was on it, and am happy to see it behaves the same way as it has done since I was a child. The shape of the bus may have changed over the years,  but it is still notorious for its erratic regard for the timetable and its proclivity to travel in a pack with fellow 65s.

But I digress,  here are some pictures. So if you’re ever stuck with more lettuce than you know what to do with, what’s the answer?  Try this for starters.  I made a dressing with creamy home made yoghurt, crushed garlic, olive oil, lemon and fresh mint;  everything Sally says about this dish is true!  Completely delicious.  From ground to plate in ten minutes! Griddled lettuce tastes better than chinese leaves, and almost as delicious as asparagus cooked in the same way. Mmm. Thank you Sally!