Hedgehog soda bread

At Christmas I made soda bread for the first time, from a recipe by Dan Lepard in The Guardian. It was delicious, and easy, and doesn’t require any of the things that normally put people off making bread: no yeast, no kneading, no time waiting for it to rise. You simply mix it up, slop it on a floured baking tray, and put it in the oven.

So I thought I'd make it again – you do need to get in some rye flour, which of course needs using up. The other ingredients include wholemeal flour, some porridge oats whizzed in the food processor, and my favourite versatile kitchen friend: baking soda.

My son came home from his school last week with a ‘hedgehog bread’ that he’d cooked with his class. They’d kneaded a brown roll each and then moulded it into a hedgehog shape. You make the prickles by cutting with scissors, then lifting up the triangles. You can shape the eyes with the (well-washed) scissors too. These are our hedgehog soda breads, eaten with a borlotti bean and winter vegetable minestrone. I substituted light muscovado sugar for dark brown, and used semi-skimmed milk instead of a mix of yogurt and milk. My boyfriend Clive thought it was even better than the first attempt.

The only problem: my son says he doesn't like the taste of this bread. Next time we'll try the hedgehogs with a more straightforward wholemeal and leave the soda bread for the grown-ups.

Halloween pumpkin costume

This is the costume I made for Ethan last year. We dyed an old cotton sheet and T-shirt in the washing machine with cold-water dye (make sure you choose the right type of dye for the fabric you’re using), then I Googled for ideas on making a cape. The Family Education site has a downloadable pdf showing rounded and scalloped capes (as well as other Halloweeny costumes and activities at this time of year) and then I measured Ethan to get the length and drew the right size pattern for him on newspaper.

At the neck I cut and stitched a facing piece, which means you can seam round the neckline rather than turning over a hem. I also found some brown fabric ties that had been the handles of a posh shop carrier bag, and sewed those in at the same time.

I didn’t fancy doing a fiddly hem around the scallops, so just ran along some zigzag stitch about a centimetre in from the edge. It stops the frays and looks quite decorative too.

The mask was another Google find. We printed it out and then painted over.

This year Ethan wants to be a ghost.

Self-sufficientish in bread

I’m almost beside myself with pride over this pain de campagne. You wouldn’t think that a lump of dough could inspire so many good feelings, but it does. (It tastes good too – nice crunchy, chewy crust, satisfyingly nutty and homely flavour.)

This week I decided to see if I could make enough bread myself for our needs, and how many loaves that would take. On Monday I produced a green olive and parsley focaccia, from Nigel Slater’s recipe – I’ve made it before and it really is foolproof and delicious. It did us for an accompaniment to Moroccan cumin and tomato spiced eggs on Monday evening, and open tuna and caper sandwiches Tuesday.

Yesterday evening I began the ‘chef’ or starter dough for the pain de campagne. It’s a recipe from Leiths Baking Bible, which has a whole huge bread-making section I’m now beginning to explore.

You mix flour and yeast and mineral or filtered water (you don’t want the chlorine in tap water to kill off the yeast), leave it, refresh with more water and flour, and then you make the dough, knead and leave to rise overnight. After a couple more processes, involving lots of flour (hence the lovely, rustic look of the loaf), voilà!

For the weekend I’m planning a white loaf and rolls – something my son will eat, instead of all this fancy stuff.

Elderflower walk 14 June

This Sunday I’ll be gathering elderflowers with fellow members of Transition Larkhall, and others, and then swapping recipes for cordials, champagnes, fritters and, apparently, elderflower soup.

If you’re around Bath and want to come along, we’re setting off from outside the Larkhall Inn on St Saviour’s Road at 2pm and heading up Charlcombe Valley to the church, then back down through the allotments. Bring a snack and a drink – we’ll stop along the way. Should be back around 4pm.

To help elderflower cordial last longer you can add citric acid – food-quality citric acid is available from pharmacies in small packets, but this should be enough unless you’re making a huge batch. I’m planning to try the recipe in Pam Corbin’s River Cottage Preserves book.

We’ll be putting the other recipes that people bring – and future seasonal events and workshops – up on the Transition Larkhall website.

Restoring a garden bench

This is our bright, shiny (well, eggshell), elegant cast iron and wood garden bench. Except that it’s not at all new. It came from Gardenalia – not so much an Aladdin’s Cave as an Aladdin’s Oasis on the London Road in Bath, with old tools, bistro tables, galvanised watering cans and assorted plants and horticultural bric-à-brac. The bench’s bolts were rusted through and a couple of slats needed replacing. Luckily, two salvaged slats in the Gardenalia yard fitted the bill. We came home happy; it would be our Project.

Now, you may be a dab hand, or drill or plane, at DIY, but this was fairly new territory for us. We consulted our trusty Reader’s Digest Complete DIY Manual. We Googled. We asked advice from my father, who knows practically everything there is to know about DIY tips and hints. We borrowed a more powerful drill and some wood filler from a friend (thanks, Jake).

As Clive took the bench apart, a small piece of cast iron sheared off (apparently it can be quite fragile, I discovered while tetchily searching online for what to do). The helpful people at Iron Art, round the corner, told Clive they could either weld it for us, or we could stick it with a resin glue. We chose the Araldite option, as the piece isn’t load-bearing. To my relief (and Clive’s) it seems to have fixed perfectly well.

Conventional paint strippers contain hazardous solvents. Homestrip is an eco-friendly water-based version from the Green Building Store, but we decided to simply remove flaking and rusted-through paint till we got a good surface. Light sanding did fine for the slats, and I bought a slimline wire brush from our local hardware store, which was very satisfying on the metal end-pieces (they also had the new bolts we needed).

For the top coat we chose a low-VOC eggshell. Natural oil-based glosses and eggshells, while avoiding the petrochemicals found in most brands, can give off volatile organic compounds (VOCs are the things that give you a headache). We went for Farrow & Ball’s new Exterior Eggshell in pale Tunsgate Green. After a bit of final retouching, and hardening off in the sun, our bench was ready for us to eat lunch on it. Aaah.

Sheherazade Goldsmith's eco reading

A friend tore out Sheherazade Goldsmith’s last column in the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine for me. She’s put Ms Harris’s Book of Green Household Management among her recommended eco reading – see it just down at the bottom on the right? Thanks Sheherazade!

Cinching in a second-hand dress

I bought this lovely silk dress from one of the second-hand clothing fairs held regularly at New Oriel Hall in Bath. It’s really too big for me, and in the high street I probably wouldn’t have tried it on even at sale time, but I thought, why not.

Luckily it has long ties that pull the dress in and make it look a perfect fit from the front. I checked the back too (there were plenty of long mirrors this time: at one fair I had to stand on an upturned bin in the Ladies’). It pleats quite a bit, but really the back view is absolutely fine too – almost as though it’s a feature. There were some great finds elsewhere, like Celia Birtwell for TopShop; though sadly in the wrong size for me.