Drawing with Light

A pastoral scene under a lime tree

Some valuable lessons learned yesterday. Every day is a school day, right?

1. The word photograph means drawing with light.
2. Clean your lens.
3 Forget all the bells and whistles on your camera, learn to compose your shot.



I went to a photography workshop with Suzanna Crampton on her idyllic farm in Bennetsbridge Co. Kilkenny. 

In my dark and distant past I did photography in university as an elective subject. I had used an old Canon camera for years and had a "fairly" good understanding of f stops, shutter speeds and iso. But my new "bells and whistles" digital camera was a whole new ball game.

I was grappling with a pile more settings and getting really bogged down. Not seeing the wood for the trees so to speak. Suzanna took everything back to basics. She showed us photos taken with disposable cameras that looked as if they had been taken by a top notch camera. I happened to mention that my iPhone used to take fabulous photos but the quality had really gone down lately. Straight away she asked if I had cleaned the lens. Talk about a "DOH!" moment. It was manky.

Then she told us put our cameras on "programme". This means it does all the thinking for you and you just shoot.

Here are the results.

Hosta

Pepper posed for me

Acer palmatum dissectum atropurpureum (couldn't resist)

Getting arty

All the triangles

Dove

I got it

You're not herself

She's after us - we're for it now

These are a few of the hundreds of photos I took. Many were rubbish but some were not. I had a really enjoyable day because despite the heavy rain overnight it turned out lovely in the afternoon. Of course it helps to have had the following props: fabulous gardens, plants and garden ornaments, dogs, horses, doves, Zwarbles sheep. Oh and a great teacher!

I also bought some black wool to knit (well attempt to knit) a long cardigan.

I'll be back.

Porter Cake

When I was a child one of my friends was not allowed to read Enid Blyton. I was an avid reader and I used to lend the books to her surreptitiously. She then read them by torchlight in bed underneath her covers. To this day I never knew why she wasn't allowed read them. But then she and her siblings were only really allowed to play with us and not the other children living on the road.

Her mother was a big, very grand Donegal woman who could talk for Ireland, lowering her tone when a child was in earshot (usually a very nosy me). Her husband was (I think) a senior civil servant in the Department of Foreign Affairs. I know now she had very influential contacts and she used to entertain at length at home. She was a great cook and her dinner party preparations usually involved a lot of whispering and lowering of tone whilst talking to my mother.

She gave this recipe to my mother years ago and my mother had it stuck in her copy of Full and Plenty. I was always asking mum if I could have it. She eventually gave it to me the other day.

I made the first cake yesterday (pictured above) and now I have wrapped it up in baking parchment and tin foil and it is stored in a tin for a month to mature. For this reason I can't show a picture of it cut.

I followed the first recipe almost exactly until I got to the dried fruit but I had different fruit and no candied peel. I also used 330ml of Guinness Foreign Extra. Well actually I didn't even pour it all over the cake, thinking it would make a very soggy cake, so I poured some into me instead.

Lady Iveagh's Porter Cake Recipe
225g softened butter
225g muscovado sugar
4 eggs
500g mixed dried fruit (I used sultanas, cranberries, raisins, dates and prunes)
100g walnuts
300g flour
330ml bottle of Guinness
1 teaspoon of mixed spice

Cream the butter and sugar well. Add in one egg at a time and a tablespoon of sieved flour to prevent curdling. Stir in the dried fruit, walnuts, spice and 4 tablespoons of the Guinness. Sieve the flour and add it in bit by bit (I use Spelt so you may need more or less). Transfer into a suitable tin lined or greased. I baked it at 130C for 2 hours. Check a skewer comes out clean to make sure it is baked in centre. Allow to cool. And here is the bit that confused me. It says in recipe to pour the remainder of the Guinness over the base of the cooled cake (after skewering a few holes in it). I was sure that this would make a very soggy cake and most of it was running through cake onto my counter top. I decided to pour it in several stages in small amounts and drank the rest. I left it out overnight and next morning it didn't seem remotely soggy.

I looked up a few recipes for Porter cake and none of them say to do this so it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

I couldn't even wait a month. I can confirm it's sublime with the taste of Guinness not obliterated by heat but instead infusing the fruit with the most unbelievable tang. This is the way to make a porter cake!

I intend making the Lady Killanin recipe next. But I need a couple of months to mature this one and eat it (being on a diet like).

Off the Pig's Back

Warm potato salad with a yoghurt mustard dressing

I hesitated writing this post. Why? Because the following dishes were cooked using ingredients that were dumped. I get black sacks of old fruit and vegetables for my pigs from a small green grocer in my local town. It's a pretty good green grocer in that you can get virtually anything you could want (in season and completely out of season). In this respect it often has a better selection than the local supermarkets. For this reason it does really well.

A lot of the stuff is pretty shook but quite edible for pigs. And other times I fish stuff out and really wonder why? I have microscopically examined stuff and for the life of me couldn't find a thing wrong with it. In fact I would have been happy to pay full price for it.

There is so much about food waste in the media that I wonder how someone running any business can be so casual about what is in effect throwing away money. I have never gone by use by/sell by dates in my life. I use my nose, my eyes and my cop on to decide if something is safe to eat. I came from a family that never wasted food. Not because of financial constraints, but because we were educated to believe it was wrong to waste. Even when I had more money than sense, I never would have dreamed of throwing away a chicken carcass. In fact my (ex) husband used to joke I put stuff in the fridge and let it grow whiskers. Then and only then I dumped it.

The dish pictured above is made from a bag of salad potatoes and bunches of scallions that I found in the black sack. I made a dressing using Greek yoghurt, grainy Dijon mustard and some lime juice (from a lime also dumped.) The salad potatoes had a few eyes which was maybe why they had been dumped and the scallions a few yellowing outer leaves.

cock-a-leekie soup

This cock-a-leekie soup was made using potatoes and leeks that were dumped.

I had boned out a chicken carcass as I was using breasts in one dish and the legs and wings in a stew with haricot beans. I browned off the carcass and then made stock with it. When it had cooled I flaked off the remaining chicken and added it to the soup.

Melanzane alla Parmigiana

The aubergines in this dish were also dumped. It was really, really delicious. In fact so good that the chef who normally doesn't like "tomatoey" stuff told me he really enjoyed it.

The recipe is in the previous post here.

I make this sweet spicy pepper relish at least once every two weeks with peppers that are in the black sacks. Very often I use packets of chillies that are also dumped to add to it. When I get a large quantity of chillies I make Jerk seasoning, recipe here.

Fennel and Mushroom Ragout

This fennel and mushroom pasta dish was made using three massive and completely perfect fennel bulbs. I usually only buy fennel in summer from the farmers' market I go to. But when I discovered them in the black bag I couldn't bear to dump them in my compost heap. And the pigs won't touch them. Recipe here






I have made orange curd in the past and used it in a luscious chocolate cake but since I am off sugar at the moment I just put them in the compost as the pigs don't eat any citrus fruits. Check it out here. In fact it is on the list of my most popular posts on the blog.

The reason I hesitated about his post is that so many people are so squeamish about food. I know many who would be absolutely horrified I used ingredients that were dumped to cook with, a lot of this is due sadly to food safety concerns and indeed food safety bodies, but I think if you look at the pictures you will agree that the food looks delicious. And you will have to take my word for it that it was and we have not been sick or poisoned.

It's food for thought. What do you think you would do?