Eat Your Gin & Sip Your Greens

We've been really enjoying Autumnal greens recently. We got some Romanesque from the grocers a few days ago and how bloody amazing is it?! For something from nature to grow like that, with never ending spirals and patterns. Wow! We call it space broccoli in our house!

Tofu, Romanesque, Courgette, Mushroom and Seed stir-fry (by the fella)

And we're loving purple sprouting and long stemmed broccoli at the moment too...

Steam away...

Roast sweet spuds, creamy mushroom rice, asparagus, broccoli & kale

By the fella too!

He has been cooking up some delicious treats recently as I've been getting in at six-ish after working in the shop or cafe a couple of days a week and it's always a bit of a relief that food is done and dusted!

It is sometimes a struggle to get the different varieties of food into the kids though. I was quite surprised that Talulah (our 8 year old) willingly ate her asparagus and Autumn always neeeeeds to know how many more she has to eat until she can scoot away and play with her animals (which she is quite obsessed with). Funny girl.

Oh...and we grew some potatoes earlier in the year in our huge garden and had a delicious meal with these little beauties. That was a good meal indeed.

Talking of the huge garden, which has been amazing throughout the summer, now is the time to properly get on with cutting so much of it back. It's really going quite wild now, but being so rushed off our feet with all the different projects/jobs/kids/family life, it's been hard to get on top of it. It would be helpful if I purchased some garden tools. Thankfully the fella's been good at keeping the lawn down. We must put some days aside to strip it back before Spring is upon us!

I did wonder if I very nicely asked a group of friends over to do a whole lot of weeding and pruning with us one day, then feed their bellies with yummy grub and perhaps be supplying them with a steady flow of mulled cider here and there to keep those fingers warm and toasty... hmmm... it might just convince them...

Ah...and I must not forget to mention, we have succeeded this year (as we didn't last year) in making some blackberry and raspberry gin in time for Christmas. As you can see from my very first post back at the end of December 2010, we were merrily enjoying it with our Christmas celebrations and my birthday. This year the blackberries were from our garden and if I'd have thought about it even just six weeks ago, we could have used the raspberries from our garden too, but when I was bottling the gin up, they'd all just about been consumed by us all, so I did cheat and get some from Waitrose.

It's really super easy to make fruity gin for Christmas. We always try and do it in September, so it will be ready for Christmas. It is literally a whole load of fruit of your choice (we used elderberries before), sugar and the gin. I don't have any quantities for you as I just looked around online and came across different gin recipes online.

Well...that's all folks...

TtFn