Hello!

Village to close.

The 1,000 year old village of Stony Bridgeford in Oxfordshire is going to close because it is no longer viable.

I'm not big on New Year resolutions, because I always end up breaking them.

January is a stupid time of year to resolve to run 5 miles a day in the dark and the wet and the slipperyness of frosty mornings, and it is just as daft to resolve to eat salad when what you really want is pie and mash and gravy and plenty of it. (The "plenty of it" bit is my downfall, sadly, so that's the bit I'm going to try to deal with.)

However I was given Plenty for Christmas and it is an excellent read. I'm up to June at the moment (it starts in March), and I am resolving to keep using my veg box and to try to ensure we use as much locally sourced food as possible. My definition of local may not be 100 miles, I'm going to be open minded - I'll still be buying tea for example and I may use supermarkets, even Tesco, but I'll be selective.

The bloke sweater is nearing completion... and it may actually fit the original intended recipient!

Now, I need your advice.
Would you wash, block and then seam (minimal seaming as it's knitted in the round), or would you seam, wash and then block?

n

Secret knitting

It's that time of year, isn't it?
Thirty five days to go until the Winter Solstice - my personal deadline for secret knitting. Adam, after several years of saying he didn't want to wear hand-knit socks, and refusing to try them on at all, may have succumbed to them at last. He came in from walking the dogs last week and was rather wet and soggy. I handed him a pair of socks...

... the finished version of course.
He put his cold feet in them.
He wriggled his toes.
He sat back on the sofa.
He wriggled a bit more.
And said...

"You know if these were in dark green..."

Gotcha!

Of course, that means I now need to knit fairly solid dark green socks. I will need to experiment with colours and things so expect lots of dark green bloke-ish yarn in the shop this week. There should be time to squeeze in a pair of bloke-socks by Solstice, shouldn't there?

I think I have almost caught up with myself (I really, really shouldn't go on holiday). and the Fibre Club mailing will be in the post any minute now.

In other secret knitting, Sally and I have been beavering away on the Mystery Mitt-A-Long which will be starting soon. She is knitting one version and I am knitting another. This is mostly going to happen on ravelry but I expect it will spill over onto here as well. We have done multiple swatching and doodling and charting. As you might expect, I am using a Moleskine Quadrille and Sally has taught herself to chart in excel. Between us though we are doing rather well. There has been much laughter and tea and coloured pencils.
Our mittens are meant to be fun, they are not like these, which are beautiful and very stylish. Oh no, ours are quite different, much more - shall we say, organic?

And what about these socks (also from the Twist Collective)?

I forsee colourwork and texture being big trends this winter, especially as we all try to squeeze every bit of value from our yarn.
In recognition of this there will be some mini-skeins in the shop this week and also more solids in 50g aliquots. I love that word. Aliquot. It sounds elegant and rather mysterious at the same time. I've been trying to figure out how to work it into the blog for ages.
I digress.
Mini skeins and 50g aliquots in the shop this week, in solid colours.
And Hug for Cranfords.
And Fibre.
Wednesday.
Posting on Thursday.
Because I'm going on a wee trip on Friday... to Harrogate.

The veg bag, BTW, was great.
There was mud.
Potatoes.
Mud.
Carrots - and I can't show you the biggest carrot, it was quite ridiculously HUGE.
Mud.
Onions.
Beetroot.
Bean sprouts (except they aren't beansprouts, they are lentil sprouts, mung bean sprouts and chick pea sprouts and you can feel the vitamins being absorbed and doing you good as you crunch them, straight from the box).
Yellow chard.
Savoy cabbage.
Celery.
Tomatoes.
Parsnips.
And mud.
I like a bit of mud. There is a letter with the veg bag telling of farm goings on, and it has been, well, muddy. So I quite like the fact that there was mud on my potatoes.

So far we have had lentil, carrot and potato soup with ham.
Hummus, tomato and beansprout wraps.
Stir fried chard, onion, corn (frozen), chilli (2 from the fridge door, bought a couple of weeks ago and looking rather sad) and chicken with a lemon and creamed coconut sauce.
Today I will make spicy parsnip soup, and we'll have rosti potatoes with something or other... maybe sausages. And tomorrow I am thinking quiche with carrot, cheese and finely chopped cabbage mixed in for colour interest, served with potato wedges and a beetroot salad.

Can you tell that I am liking this?

n

What's in a bag?

Today is a very exciting day.
I have joined the ranks of those who get a veg box delivery. In my case it's a veg BAG delivery from the lovely people at The Whole Shebag, which is based near where I live. There a number of these schemes around, and several of them deliver to this area, but I picked TWS because they actually grow much of the produce themselves, or they swap with other growers locally. I'm less concerned about the organic bit and more interested in the local bit after browsing the the web last week and finding a link to The Fife Diet, which was also reported by the bbc last year. A few weeks ago it was on The Food Programme as well and you can "listen again" to it.
bbc iPlayer only keeps things for a week but this is a pre-iPlayer broadcast, so it's still there.
The Fife Diet was inspired in turn by the 100 Mile Diet, a movement which started in Vancouver in Canada in 2005. You can see your own personal 100 miles by clicking on the link. I live in Kirknewton in Scotland, so you can see that mine covers a huge area as far north as Aberdeen, south to Newcastle and west to the Mull of Kintyre. There is a lot of sea!! I forsee much fish on the menu.
I could have berries from Perthshire, lamb from the borders (although Mrs Hamilton's is about ten minutes away so I would probably go there), and I can have wine from Cairn o' Mohr who make an elderberry wine which is better than anything else in the world. (And Asda sell it, or I can get it at the Edinburgh Farmer's Market so I don't have to drive to Perthshire.)

In Nice, a trip to the market would have produced all sorts of things.

Beautifully plump baby aubergines, arranged on giant cabbage leaves, and yes they really were that shiny.

Bouquets of fresh chillies.

And small mountains of sun-dried tomatoes.

But I am just as excited about the bag of locally produced potatoes, onions and other goodies which will be arriving soon.
I'll let you know what I get tomorrow.

I'm about to post off a large heap of Club yarns this afternoon, so I'd better go and deal with those.
I do wish the veg man would hurry up though...

n

PS. Maybe I should rename the yarns in the shop as recipes?

462 could be Tapenade

463 looks very like those sun-dried tomatoes... or maybe just Heinz Cream of Tomato. Comfort food for a cold day.

n

126767

At the moment the only camera in the house has flat batteries, and although my phone has a camera, it's the phone which I need to take a photo OF if you see what I mean. Since this is clearly impossible, until the batteries are charged, you'll just have to take my word for the fact that I took 126767 steps on holiday.

17th - 11902
18th - 16358
19th - 12238
20th - 20083    Yesssss! I broke 20,000
21st - 16880
22nd - 19977    Why on earth didn't I take another 23 steps? I think this was the day my wallet went missing so we had to walk to the police station and back as well... maybe I was just too fed up.
23rd - 10181
24th - 7526      What a slacker, anyone would think I was on holiday or something!
25th - 11622

Debbie aka Sussex Yorkie guessed used her skill and judgement to calculate 125001.
And Ruth aka Rooknitting was close behind in the mathematical machinations with 123456. (Nice number to choose.)

So a bag-let and some yummy-but-teeny-tiny nougat will be in the post to them later today.

The Store Cupboard Challenge is gathering pace, Debbie (mentioned above) is doing it, as is Isabella aka Spinning Fishwife, and lots of others as well. Isabella is also planning to blog every day in November, brave woman. The Store Cupboard post on her blog is here.

I am pleased to report that on Saturday we had beef (freezer, bought as a going-out-of-date-tomorrow bargain) and butter bean (from stash storecupboard) casserole with potatoes and Yorkshire Pudding (sadly with shop-bought egg because menopausal chickens are a waste of space).

Sunday saw us having Thai green curry (the last of a jar of paste in the door of the fridge) with lots of veggies (reduced from Tesco) and a can of reduced fat coconut milk (from the tins box in the stash). And we had it with (almost out of date but frozen a few weeks ago) naan bread.

Last night, I'm afraid, we had Fish and Chips... but tonight I am back on the wagon again and we will have a mixed bean and chorizo (but not chorizo really, some Polish sausage instead) casserole.

This afternoon Sally is coming over because

• She is fed up with thesis-busting
• I am fed up because Gavin has just left to go to the USA for a week. I still think that the BBC coverage of the US Presidential election will be better than the US coverage. Jeremy Vine may even have a new Swing-o-meter. Do I stay up? Or do I go to bed? Hmmmmm.
• We are hatching a plan (with remote access and assistance from Jane) to offer a Mystery KAL pattern very soon, and this is a design and plotting meeting. We are thinking mittens.
• There may be a need for biscuits... perhaps the ones in the sidebar.

Mitten news soon, and tomorrow there may be a little free fibre up for grabs, because there are other plots taking shape too.

n

The November Store Cupboard Challenge.

Last year I wrote about my grandmother's cookery book. I can't link to the blog post because it's on the old blog, so I'll just show you the photos I have.

I have forgotten why the champagne cork was there, but never mind!

This is when my Mum was almost two years old.

And the book itself begins with guidance for wives, thus.

I'm not sure if Nana had less than 30/- per week for herself, her husband and her child, nor do I know if my Mum was dosed with the Cod-Liver Oil, but it's fairly likely. In the 1930's, I suspect that you did as you were told. This was twelve years before the advent of the NHS.

It's interesting that if you lived in the country with four children (and chickens) then Cod-Liver Oil was not deemed necessary.

Anyway, last year I decided to try, as far as possible, to cook from my store cupboard. This was partly an attempt to clear out without throwing out, and partly because I wanted to defrost the freezer before the end of November so I could make space for Christmas baking and so on.
This year, having had a freezer disaster a few weeks ago when the lid wasn't shut properly and I had to throw a lot of stuff out rather than risk cooking it, the freezer is less of an issue, but I could still do with a frugal month food-wise.

- Using everything up.
- No food thrown out.
- No left overs (unless frozen as lunch-for-one).
- And maybe this time, making a deliberate attempt to use as little packaging as possible.

I have quite a lot of dried pulses which I bought with good intentions but which have stayed in the drawer because a can of red kidney beans or chick peas is quicker. So they need to be used.
And there are cans of things which seemed like a good idea at the time but which are still in the cupboard months later.

So, would anyone care to join me?
I'll post as many recipes and ideas as I can (bearing in mind that I have yarn and fibre to dye).

Does anyone have a good recipe for Spicy Bean Burgers, please?

n

PS  Don't forget to guess work out my steppage from France (see post below this one).