vampy – Page 4 – stuff and things

New bathroom, woo!

I’ve posted a pic of my bathroom here before. It’s generally relatively clean, but has a nasty ‘champagne’ coloured suite with gold coloured taps and beige tiles, and had a really nasty pink carpet. SERIOUSLY WHO THE FUCK PUTS CARPET IN A BATHROOM. And the paint was getting a bit peely and it just looked a bit crappy. Oh, and the shower leaked due to a really bad design of a bath with a raised lip at the shower end, so any water that went down the tiles at the back couldn’t go into the bath and ended up on the floor, and soaked through the FUCKING STUPID CARPET and started to weaken the board below. And the shower curtain was manky and mildewy and it was textured so it was really hard to get clean.

Here’s what it used to look like:

Sadly a new suite and tiles were way outside my budget (and my DIY capabilities), but I knew I really needed to do something about the damaged floor board and peeling paint.

I was wandering around primark a couple of weeks ago waiting for bf to get off work, and I spotted shower curtains for Â£5. Not the most awesome pretty shower curtains I’d been dreaming of, but Â£5. So I got one. And then that motivated me to do everything else. I got some paint in a blue that would go with the shower curtain and not look terrible with the beige tiles and 5 different shades of wood, and found a cheap but good quality vinyl flooring remnant on ebay. I painted everything, then began the scary task of taking up the carpet. Luckily the water damage was only to one area of one board, and not to any joists, so I took up the board and replaced it (yay for having spare loft boards lying around so I just had to cut to shape and not buy any timber), then cleaned the floor a gazillion times and laid the vinyl. I discovered that b&q’s double sided vinyl floor tape is shit, and doesn’t really stick to chipboard OR vinyl, so it may need relifting and glueing down properly at some point, but fingers crossed it’ll be ok as it is.

Here is my new pretty bathroom! I am getting a new shower in the next week or so because the motor in the old one blew up and we’ve been making do with a non-powered power shower for 6 months, which is fine for cleaning yourself, but terrible for washing my masses of thick hair. And I’m crocheting a cotton bathmat in colours to match the shower curtain.

Mushroom growing attempt.

So, I decided to grow mushrooms. I’ve done it before from a kit, but kits are expensive, and limited in choice. I decided to start with oyster mushrooms cos they sounded the easiest, so I bought some spawn from ebay.

The auction said you could use various substrates, but I decided on straw because it’s cheap and I happen to have a lot of it lying around for the chickens. I read all the info here and here, then got to work.

I didn’t want to venture into the cold dark garden, so I just grabbed the bag of straw that was in the garage. Only 530 grammes, when the auction said the spawn was enough to inoculate 850g of dry straw. But fuck, even 530g is a LOT of straw.

I got some scissors and cut the straw into the recommended 2-4″ lengths, and shoved it in a pillowcase.

I put the pillowcase of straw into a big pan then covered it with hot water. I was aiming for the normal pasteurisation of at least 70 degrees for at least 20 mins (to ensure the heat has penetrated right through the material), but my thermometer is broken so I just guessed.

While it was in the pan I disinfected the sink, then lifted the pillowcase out of the water and put it in the sink to drain and cool.

A couple of hours later, it was cooled enough, so I gloved up and layered the straw with small amounts of the spawn in food bags, and squished it tightly in. Then I realised it was going to take a lot of bags with that amount of straw, so I put the remainder into a tesco bag instead. I poked some holes in the bags and put them in the airing cupboard. I need to leave them there for a couple of weeks, then hopefully I can take them out and mushrooms will magically appear. fingers crossed!

Also in unrelated news I bought some make-up for the first time in years, partly cos i wanted sparkly eyeliner dammit, and partly cos it was Â£8 reduced from Â£30 and included mascara and eyeliner, both of which i had but really needed throwing out. And it’s pretty good, this pic was after about 4 hours of wear, and it’s still looking ok.

mmmmm timmmmmmber

I went to the woodyard today and picked up some wood for making more raised beds. I got enough for 4 large and 2 small beds, and my brain was all ‘this’ll be super quick to do with my awesome mitre saw, I should be able to get them all done this afternoon’. My body was less co-operative and decided 2 was more than enough work and that I must then immediately rest. Oh well.

So pretty!

This is the bit at the side of the house that spent the last year being ignored, then weedkillered, then covered in a tarp all winter to stop more weeds. There’s enough space there for 2 large beds and a smaller one (which I didn’t make yet) between them. I just need to borrow a strong man to get the digging done. Stupid getting-tired-all-the-time body.

I now need to keep an eye on it and see just how much sun it gets. I know it gets less than the main veggie patch, but the front of the house is often sunny in the morning, so I am hoping it might get more than I think. This area and the greenhouse will more than double my growing space compared to last year.

I also joined a seed of the month club. It’s soooo cheap compared to seed prices over here, it’s cheap even with international postage, and the seeds are all heirloom varieties. And I love the idea of getting random surprise seeds in the mail every month!

Winter? Are you done yet?

We’ve had a really mild winter this year, I’m not sure if it’s saving all the snow and ice and ickiness until February, or whether it’s just going to carry on being a bit rainy and windy and dreary until spring. I have my fingers crossed for the latter.

As it’s not been too horrible, we’ve been able to start on sorting out the garden a little bit…boring chores like turning compost heaps and cutting back the huge climbing rose, and general other tidying tasks. AND! moving the greenhouse!!! I love it in its new location, it’s actually on soil now so I can plant in it, and it gets the sun pretty much all day long.

I did some sawing and drilling and put a couple of beds in, but will need the assistance of awesome boyfriend to help dig in some sand and compost before it’s plantable in, though given the short work he made of digging over the plot and the trench for the base, I’m sure it’ll only take him 10 minutes or so.

I really want to plant EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW, but I’m resisting as it’s just too early for the majority of things. I contented myself with making a spreadsheet listing all the seeds we have and when they need planting and planning which heirloom varieties I want to try this year. So far I think my list is hugely tall climbing peas, some sort of climbing french beans, various tomatoes, and watermelon. Everything else will be leftovers from previous years, or from super cheap packs we got at the garden centre. I do like the idea of collecting seeds year on year and never having to buy them ever again, but I want to start off with easy stuff that isn’t hard to collect and doesn’t need hand pollinating or separating from everything else to prevent crazy inedible cross-breeds.

After entering the insane amount of seeds into my spreadsheet, I noted that there were a couple of things that were okay to plant in january, so I did! My dining room windowsill is now sporting trays of aubergines, early tomatoes for the greenhouse, onions, and various herbs. We planted autumn onion sets here and at J’s plot, so hopefully with the seeds I planted today, and more seeds planted directly into the ground in a couple of months, we’ll have a good crop of onions that lasts us all autumn and winter.

I also planted some sunflowers a week or so ago, we are going to have a giant sunflower growing competition, which we will both win, as we’ll end up with lots of yummy sunflower seeds to eat.

Leftovers nutella cheesecake

It is a happy day in my house whenever I decide to cook with mascarpone cheese. Either I sit and eat the leftovers with a spoon out of the pot, or I get to make cheesecake. I had quite a lot of mascarpone left over from a yummy tomato and mascarpone pasta sauce I made last night, and I also had some sour cream left over from the chilli I made at the weekend, so I thought cheesecake would be a good idea to use them both up.

This is more a reminder to myself about what I did in case it’s awesome and I want to do it again than an actual recipe, but I figured I’d put it here cos someone might find it useful

Preheated oven to 200 degrees C

Got all these things out:

First I made a simple biscuit base (crushed up digestives and melted butter) and squished that down into the bottom of the tin. I ended up using a 9″ tin because the 7″ tin I intended to use looked like it would be too small for the huge amount of brown creamy goo this made, and I really didn’t fancy cleaning it off the bottom of the oven.

Then I got the mixer out and mixed up the cheese (about 3/4 pot of mascarpone and a whole tub of cream cheese) until it was smooth and creamy. Then with the mixer still running I added 3 tablespoons of flour, and the leftovers of the sour cream (150-200ml), some sugar (150g-ish) and 3 eggs. Finally I added the nutella, I used 2 huuuuge spoonfuls. After scraping down the bowl a bit and making sure it was fully mixed I poured it on top of the base and put it in the oven for as long as it took me to do the washing up and make a cheese sandwich…about 12 minutes, then turned the heat down to 90 degrees and baked until it was mostly set but still wobbled a little in the middle when the tin was shaken (about 25 mins). Now I’m leaving it in the warm oven overnight to cool, so I won’t get to eat it until the morning. boooo.

Here’s a very unglamorous picture of it in the oven, as I totally forgot to take one before I put it in. I am very glad I decided to use the bigger tin

No rest for the wicked

Yeah yeah, so I was all ‘woo, it’s autumn, no more garden work, yay!’. And I was sooo wrong. I ordered some trees from the interwebs, and we planted them in the garden. And when I say ‘we’, I mean J did all the hard digging work and I busied myself with stuff that wasn’t too tiring. I kinda failed at the not getting tired thing, but it wasn’t toooo bad. And now I have braeburn apple, conference pear, and morello cherry trees in my garden. And a victoria plum tree in a pot that I’ll give to my dad because they are his favourite fruit ever.

This is my apple tree. Not hugely exciting, but it’s planted and looks happy and hopefully will have made me lots of fruit by this time next year.

Littlecat also had autumn garden fun by climbing my birch tree.

We’ve done lots of work on J’s plot in the last few weeks too…and it was very much needed. This is what it looked like after a summer of neglect.

After a couple of hours of strimming (him), and weed pulling (me), we’d got it looking much more like a vegetable plot and less like a patch of weeds, and also picked loads of potatoes, onions, and beetroot. 3 weeks later it was still looking much better, though some naughty weeds were trying to return.

We wanted to get a head start on planting and put in as much as possible to extend the cropping season next year, so we put in onions, garlic, asparagus, peas, and broad beans. That’s pretty much all we can get in the ground now until spring, but it’s a good start. It gets dark sooo early these days, so it was hard to get a decent pic, but trust me, this area is all dug and planted and looking awesome.

I just realised I’ve been very bad at blogging about fibrey things. I have still been knitting (a lot), and spinning (a little), I’ve just not got round to talking about it, but I should probably share this as I think it’s the biggest project I’ve ever done.

Sometime in the dim and distant past (march I think), I was all full of planning and enthusiasm, and decided that for my mum’s 60th I’d spin, design, and knit her a jumper. Because November is sooooo far away. So I grabbed a pile of fibre, mostly in natural colours, with a little blue for fun.

I carded it all up on the drum carder, which took approximately a million years. I think I did 3 passes to get it mostly-blended-but-not-too-even. Littlecat thought it was the most fun thing in the history of the world.

I then took each batt, split it into 4 lengthways, and rolled it up into a little bump, planning to just keep them in a box and grab them at random to further mix up the colours. When i ended up with 52 of the things, I was starting to fully realise just how long this would take. Oh well, it was March, November was soooo far away.

And I spun. I was good to start with and got through a lot, and wound my singles off onto a cardboard core on my ball winder so I could ply the first singles with the last and minimise any differences in spinning over the time it would take. Then at some point I forgot about spinning, as is often the case in summer.

THEN IT WAS OCTOBER ARGH.

So I brought the spinning wheel up to my room so I could spin while watching tv, and plied some of the singles, so I could spin when I had the energy, then knit in bed once I got tired. And I spun, and I knitted, and I doodled, and I found some nice contrasting handspun in my stash, and when I finally applied myself to it, I FINISHED IT.

(yes it’s a terrible pic, it was dark and the lighting was poor, but she likes it, so yay!!!)

It’s the end of the (gardening) year.

There were warnings of frost last week, so I brought in allll the tomatoes, and currently have 3 trays of ripening tomatoes taking up all available worktop space in my kitchen. At the start of the season I was all excited about making lots of stuff with them, and I made salsa and spicy tomato pepper ketchup. As time went on, my enthusiasm waned, and I just started sticking the ripe ones in the freezer. I now have a huge carrier bag full of frozen tomatoes to cook with. Nom.

After taking the tomatoes in, there wasn’t much left in the veggie patch, so I planted out the asparagus that’s been sitting in pots all summer, covered all the empty beds with a load of compost and stuck some fertiliser in the one I was planning to use for onions, then today I put in some onion sets and built an anti-cat frame to go over them (and got to use my new saw, yay!).

It’s not very exciting, but there are onions in here, and they won’t get dug up by cats or pulled up by birds! There’s also a huuuuge elephant garlic.

The rest of the area is rather boring, though amazingly the raspberries are still going strong, I keep going out there thinking it’s nearly time to cut them back and weed around them, but every time there are more fruit.

The greenhouse has meant I can prolong the growing season somewhat though, I have romaine lettuce which are very happy in there, a couple of chilli plants I really need to get round to picking the fruit off, and a tomato that i found growing randomly in the wrong bed, which i assume came from last year’s compost…it’s flowering, though I think it’s probably too late to get it to fruit, even in the greenhouse. I also moved the pot of watercress from outside into the greenhouse, and planted some rocket, arctic king lettuce, spinach, and mixed salad leaves in the two big troughs, so I should have salady things well into winter.

Next year I’m planning to grow more fruit, and after ages looking around, I decided to order this..an apple, pear, cherry, and plum. I will probably get another apple tree too so they can have treesex with each other and give me more fruit, but I’m very happy with finding 4 trees for Â£30, and it’s just getting to the time where I can plant bare rootstock trees, and I’ve already got a big strong man to agree to help me dig the holes for them.

I have a new toy!!!!

And I love it!

I’ve been keeping an eye on ebay for greenhouses for a month or so, figuring this is probably the best time of year to get one if i want a bargain, but I kept getting outbid, so eventually I put out a ‘wanted’ on cheapcycle, and someone offered to sell me this one. Dad came with me to dismantle and collect it, then I spent a very long 7 hours putting it up the next day.

Eventually I plan to move it to the main part of the garden next to the veggie patch so I can plant tomatoes and stuff directly into the soil, but that’ll require a fair amount of work to level the area, so i decided to just put it up on the patio for the winter so I can sit in it when it’s raining, and grow a bit of lettuce and rocket. So for now it’s all set up with a table, a few pots, and a bench for me to sit on. AND I LOVE IT.

In which I try to improve my baking – chocolate chip cookies

I am a pretty good cook, but I’ve never felt that confident at baking, it’s like some sort of magic, you put a load of goo into the oven and then it comes out and it’s transformed into something yummy. So I’ve been trying to bake more recently, and make up my own recipes, and generally try to understand how it works a bit better.

Last week someone posted a recipe on LSG for the most awesome chocolate chip cookies in the world, and I decided I had to make them. The problem was, the recipe was all in American, so it needed some amending. Firstly I had to work out a suitable substitute for ‘cake flour’, as that doesn’t exist in the UK, then I had to convert the cups to weight measurements, then I had to reduce the amount of butter as I refuse to use more than one pack of butter in any recipe. Then I had to make up for the fact I appear to not have any bicarb, I probably used it all for cleaning, or left it somewhere else in the house. Oh, and I added way less chocolate than asked for, mostly because I didn’t have enough, but also because holy fuck 1 1/3lbs of chocolate is a lot.

So here is my adapted recipe, which turned out reaaaaaaaaally well, and although it was an obscenely large amount of dough which turned into 25 huuuuge cookies, they still all got eaten in record time.

275g 00 grade flour
275g strong white flour
2 tablespoons cornflour
2.5 teaspoons baking powder
1.5 teaspoons sea salt
250g butter (room temperature)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
260g granulated sugar
250g soft light brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
300g chocolatey bits (I used a bag of chocolate chips and a bag of chocolate buttons).

It is probably better that you use the recipe linked above if you want a detailed description of what to do, along with photos. This is just a short summary of what I did when I made these cookies.

1) Sift flours, baking powder and salt into a bowl and set aside
2) Using an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugars until fully blended, then add one egg at a time while mixing. Add the vanilla and the oil. Slowly add in dry ingredients while mixing. Marvel at the vast quantity of dough produced. Realise that the mixer may well break if you abuse it any further. Wish you were rich enough to own a Kitchenaid mixer. Pour chocolate chips into bowl and work them into the dough with your hands to save the poor old mixer.
3) Cover with clingfilm (so the film actually touches the dough, no air space) and put in the fridge for 24 hours or so. If, like me, you feel that 25 monster cookies is just TOO MANY COOKIES, you can make them into circular lumps now and put them in a tray in the freezer, then when they are frozen transfer them to a bag, then you can have instant cookies whenever you want them! I actually defrosted them before baking, but there is one left lurking in the freezer for me to attempt to cook from frozen and see how it turns out.
4) Take bowl of dough out of the fridge about an hour before you want to bake, because it will be solid and need time to soften up again. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Make balls of dough about 2 tablespoons in volume and squish them into circular lumps about 1.5cm thick (they will flatten and widen more during cooking) and put them on foil on a baking tray. Bake for 11 minutes, or until cookies are starting to brown. After a few minutes cooling in the tray, transfer them to a wire cooling rack and try and resist eating them for as long as possible.

New toy!!

I got a new toy yesterday! Looook, it’s prettttttty. And most importantly it was cheap. Yay for cheapcycle!

So now I will be able to cut ALL THE THINGS without whining that woodwork makes me tired and having to ask someone to help me. woooo. The only project I actually have in mind is I need to make some frames to go over the veg beds to protect the asparagus from cat digging when I plant it out, and to protect any seeds I put in the soil next year, but I’m sure I’ll think of plenty of other things I want to make. I am considering a lean-to shed type thing so I have somewhere to put the garden tools other than in the garage, but gren’s motorbike is currently living where I’d most likely put it, so I’ll need to do some thinking. So for the time being, here is the one and only thing I did with my new saw….cut some wood! Exciting eh?

And because I was in there, I decided to take a pic of the garage. I’ve kinda almost cleared it up enough to be useable as a workshop again, another couple of hours work to sort out all the boxes and stuff, and it’ll be done. Then I can saw things and grind things and lathe things and drill things to my heart’s content. I just need to remember to put an extension lead in there so Gren doesn’t move my grinder again next time he wants to sharpen a knife.