Food glorious food

First sweetcorn, dripping with butter and spinkled with maldon sea salt and freshly ground black pepper.
Borlotti beans with sage, lemon, mustard, olive oil and pancetta. Beetroot with green sauce. Many thanks to Sarah Raven and Valentine Warner for their simple and easy recipes.

Smashing pumpkins

Atlantic giant; Uchiki Kuri; butternut and blue ballet. The atalantic giant is at least 18-20" diameter and growing daily.....not sure we'll be able to bring it home at this rate!!

Relishing beetroot relish

1lb raw beetroot shredded
1lb onions chopped
1 1/2lb cooking apples, peeled cored and chopped
1lb raisins
3 tbsp ground ginger
2 tsp dried chilli flakes
2lb granulated sugar
2 pints malt vinegar
1 1/2 oz salt
Juice of 1 lemon

Just chuck it all in a large pan, heat slowly to disolve sugar and then bring to boil and simmer for about 2 hours until thick. It will thicken as it cools too.
Although it doesn't look anything like Branston it blooming well tastes like it, eat it with everything!!!

Eat your heart out

Here's an example of the kind of stuff we're bringing home everyday. It varies, somedays more somedays less, some days radishes; lettuce; rocket; spinach and chard. We're also still thinning out carrots and may have to thin out parsnips to help the bigger ones on their way. The pumpkin and squash patch is going great guns (post pic tomorrow), and the corn is looking ike it's a bout a week off for the first harvest. Searching for recipes for stuff that don't involve ingredients that are totally unavailable here, so the simpler the better.

Go-Karting, Portuguese style

The Great Eggscape

Sorry about title, had to be done......
The chickens have got a bit naughty and had figured out how to escape from their pen.
The river has run dry and is obviously full of tasty bugs! so the chickens have been jumping the levada wall and wondering off on to other peoples land. I would be merrily gardening away, unaware of their eggscapades, until I would here a plaintive cry off in the distance.
Always wearing the wrong clothes, I have had to trudge off in shorts and crocs to rescue them, getting lacerated in the process. Fed up with it, we have erected another fence away from the levada wall and today they managed to stay behind the fence all day, maybe I will be able to leave them unattended from now on whilst I go for a quick dip at the local river beach.