Happy Saint Patrick's Day !

The very top of the morning to you all! May Saint Patrick smile upon you, and send his blessings to your door.

My mother says that if it's nice on 17th March, it's because the good saint has interceded with the Big Boss to make sure that his feast day is dry and fine; he's turned the sunny side up, and that's a sign that the rest of the spring will be fine. Well, this morning, I'm happy to report that the weather is pretty glorious here in London.

It's a really big day back home. They have a bank holiday with all sorts of music, parties and parades. But over here in England it's just another day, and I always feel out of step as a result. It's like when you know you really ought to be doing something else, and you can't help but feel uncomfortable because you're not getting on with it. Well, deep down in my DNA, I know that I really should be having a huge, all-day party today, but instead I'm doing the school run and going about my business as normal. Pah! That sucks!

As a B-plan I'm going to have a little supper party tonight for my nearest and dearest. We can't get too exuberant as tomorrow's a school day, but I'm sure we'll make the best of it.

I've bought a side of Irish smoked salmon as a starter. Then we'll have boiled ham with colcannon, and finish off with some old fashioned rice pudding, flavoured with vanilla and a bay leaf or two. It's not very flashy, but it's honest Irish food.

In case you'd like to make something Irish in honour of our patron saint, or just for the fun of it, I'll give you the low-down on how to make Colcannon, the dish that, without a doubt, has kept generations of our ancestors alive. It's the ultimate comfort food, about which songs have been sung and poems have been written over the years:

Did you ever eat colannon
When t'was made with yellow cream
And the kale and praties blended
Like a picture in a dream?
Did you ever scoop a hole on top
To hold the melting lake
of the clover-flavoured butter
Which your mother used to make?

Yes, yes, yes and yes again! Well, ok, my mum didn't actually make the butter, but I can certainly tick all the other boxes.

Colcannon

Anyway if you'd like to make this potato nectar here's what you need and here's how to do it:

Ingredients for 4 people

3/4 lb/ 350 g kale or Swiss chard (you could use Savoy cabbage, but I prefer the flavour of kale)
1 1/2 lb/ 775g potatoes
50 ml double cream or crème fraîche
(I prefer the flavour of crème fraîche, but it's not very authentically Irish!)
50 ml milk
1 large spring onion chopped finely
1 oz/ 25g butter
200 g bacon lardons

Method

1. Wash and peel the potatoes. Place in boiling water and cook until soft enough to mash.
2. Wash and chop the kale. Steam it for a couple or three of minutes. I usually do this over the saucepan with the potatoes in. When cooked drain off excess moisture on some kitchen paper and set to one side.
3. Fry the bacon lardons, drain of excess fat on some kitchen paper and set to one side.
4. Very, very finely chop the spring onion.
5. Roughly mash the potato, add the chopped spring onion, cream and milk and mash some more until they reach a puree texture. Season to your taste.
6. Add the steamed kale and mix so that it's evenly distributed throughout the potato.
7. Serve with the bacon lardons sprinkled on top.

Enjoy!

Bonny x

Crochet a Shamrock for St. Patrick ...

Are you in some far-flung part of the world where Shamrocks are pretty scarce on the ground? What to do? How to get one for St. Patrick's Day (17th March - this Monday!)?

Rest easy. I have the solution. You can crochet one!

How does this look? And it's super easy-peasy to make.

Crochet Shamrock

Here's what you need:

A little bit of left-over green wool in 4 ply
3 mm crochet hook
darning needle
very small safety pin

Here's a crochet map of how to do it:

By way of explanation, the terms used are American terms. Ch for Chain is, I believe, universal. SC is Single Crochet in America, but in Britain it's called Double Crochet. Tr is Treble Crochet in America, but it's called  Double Treble Crochet in Britain.

Here's what to do:

1. Start off with a sliding loop: wrap the yarn a couple of times round your left index finger (if you're right handed like me - or the other way round if you're left handed) keeping the dead end of the yarn closest to your wrist.

Row 1

2. Work a slip stitch with the working end of the yarn through the loop.
3. Ch 1. SC 8 into the loop and join with a slip stitch into the first Ch 1. Be really careful to work clean stitches in this round without splitting the yarn as it's easy to get it knotted when you come to tighten the circle in step 4.
4. Gently pull the dead end of the yarn to tighten the loop and close the circle in the centre.

It should look like this: -

Row 2

5. SC, Ch 3 and Tr 1 into first SC of last round. Tr 1 into next SC. Ch 3 and join with a SC to the same stitch that you did the last Tr into. SC into next stitch. *Ch 3. Tr into next stitch. Tr into following stitch. Ch 3 and join to the same stitch as last Tr with a SC. SC into next stitch.* Repeat from * to* once more. SC into next stitch. Ch 7 to make the stem of the Shamrock and cast off.

It should look something like this:

6. Now you need to attach your safety pin. Place it on the wrong side of the Shamrock and sew the harbour pin (the one that doesn't have a pointy tip) to the Shamrock, like so:

And now you're all set for the big day!


Bonny x

Random Friday: 5 things that made me smile this week

By way of explanation: spring has finally arrived in London - hurrah! As a result this week's 5 random things are perhaps not very random; they're all a bit sun-related.

Post box and cherry blossom in West London

1. Breakfast in the sunshine

My weekday mornings are usually a hectic speed-fest. I always seem to be racing just to keep my head above the waterline. My son, Emi, has to be fed, turned out in his best bib-and-tucker and magicked off to the school gate before 8:30 a.m., the dog has to be walked and fed, and my husband usually has some early morning crisis that demands my input. So by the time I get back home I feel as though I've done a day's work already. But the thing that picks me up is my home-made granola with a good cup of extra-strong black coffee, which I've been able to enjoy in the sunshine on my kitchen terrace. Sublime me-time!

If you'd like to make my granola; it's super, super easy, and you can find my recipe here: Mulberry Granola Recipe

2. Spring flowers

A4 Daffodils

After the long, grey slog of winter I'm really enjoying the colour or our wonderful spring flowers. Right now we've got drifts of daffodils all over Ealing, which are making me feel very Wordsworthy - drifting lonely as a cloud ... and all that .

The daffodil is the great everywhere/ anywhere flower in England. They pop up all over the shop. Just look at these beauties growing on the verge of the A4, the main artery into London from the West.

Also, throughout the month of March we have the wonderful Camellia Festival in nearby Chiswick House. I trolleyed over there last week and was delighted by the blossoms on the two-hundred year-old camellia trees. The Middlemist's Red (which is pink) was imported in 1804, and I'm entranced as much by the romantic history of the tree as by its wonderful pink flowers. If you'd like to read some more about the camellia collection, I wrote a little bit about it here: Chiswick House Camellia Festival

Middlemist's red: 200 year-old camellia, Chiswick House Conservatory

3. Driving with the roof down. 

It finally feels as though spring has sprung, and we've been enjoying driving around with the roof down - yeah!

4. Long, lazy walks along the Thames

Maxi (the black, fluffy chap with the button nose in the photo above) and I went on an all-morning walk along the Thames tow path the other day. We took some friends, had lunch in one of the lovely little pubs with a riverside deck on the Hammersmith embankment, and it was awesome. I'll write a post about it next week for anyone who'd like to do a really good Boat Race walk. And, yes, the Oxford/ Cambridge Boat Race is coming up very soon (Sunday 6th April). Come on the Light Blues!

'Ello! Would you like to be my friend?

Hammersmith Bridge

5. A Haircut 

On account of the rising mercury it seemed appropriate that Maxi should have a haircut. He was panting a bit with the heat, so this morning he kept his appointment at the local doggy beauty parlour. He went from looking like this:

to looking like this:

I'm not sure that he's totally sold on the nice bow.

Wishing you all a great weekend,

Bonny x

signs of the times ...

So what's going on here?

Health and Safety gone mad?

Newly-discovered species of man-eating tree?

Homicidal gardener with a death-wish against anyone who gets in his way?

We stayed safely on the other side of the fence,

Bonny x        

Stange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance at the National Gallery

I toddled along to have a look at this exhibition yesterday. It's interesting for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is the art.

They say that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, and one of the themes that the exhibition explores is how, here in Britain, there has been a general prejudice against German art. It is suggested that the strained relations between the two countries over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the wake of the First and Second World Wars, is partly to blame for this attitude.

Also in operation is our love affair with the Italian Renaissance - Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, anyone? And our, in my view, unfair perception that the German Renaissance was its poor relation. Anyone of that way of thinking should make straight for room 4 of the exhibition, which displays the works of Hans Holbein (the younger), Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach (the elder).

As a counterpoise to all this negativity there must have been a period when the art of the Northern Renaissance and the German Reformation struck a real chord with the English people. After Henry VIII became head of the English Church and led his people away from Rome I'd have expected there to have been a certain sympathy for the German Masters and perhaps even a shared Protestant aesthetic. Perhaps this underlies the emergence of Hans Holbein as the official court painter to Henry VIII, and his enduring popularity here in England, borne in no small measure of his iconic depiction of his patron king. Included in the exhibition is his exquisite miniature painting of Anne of Cleves, which played its part in paving the way for Henry's disastrous marriage to a woman that he never found comely. 

The final room of the exhibition is interactive, allowing visitors to vote and leave comments on how they feel about what they have seen. I hope that the National Gallery will let us know the general consensus in the fullness of time, and I hope it will show us to be more open-minded than the trustees of the gallery were way back in 1856 when they sold 37 early Westphalian works from the Krüger collection on the basis that they did not fit in with 'the present state of the gallery'.

The exhibition is running in the Sainsbury Wing until 11th May.

Enjoy!

Bonny x