Glanbrydan’s Weblog

We are at Aberystwyth farmers market this Saturday, May 5^th from 9.30 am to 2.00pm on North parade.

Rocky road cupcake

lemon loveliness

sticky toffee pudding cake

The spring is with us! It’s wonderful how a little bit of the suns wrays can make us all feel so much better. Some of the spring bulbs are in flower making a tiny splash of colour in the undergrowth.

The dog is barking and the cat meowing so it must be dinner time. Must go, the natives are restless……

Just a bit of news before I go.

Welsh Country magazine have published an article including our quiche recipe. Must get a photo along to them

http://welshcountry.co.uk/welsh-food/welsh-food-news/638-news/9277-glanbrydan-share-some-of-their-baking-secrets-

The last of the snowy pictures I promise. It hasn’t snowed here since Christmas and Vicky dog loved to leap through it. Look at the snow balls she has collected whilst on a walk.

This is homemade fast food: tasty & filling, a complete meal in about 20 minutes.

Some days cooking seems like too much of a stretch. We do sometimes have a Chinese takeaway but these days we try to keep it a bit healthier. This recipe is probably cooked in the time it takes us to decide what we want and actually get somewhere near to a place that sells fast food.

The important thing here is that this dish can be cooked with any seafood you fancy.

Ingredients

10g butter or a corner off the end of the pack

1 Onion peeled and diced

1 or 2 cloves of garlic peeled and crushed

2 eggs

A small tub half fat crème fraiche

Two handfuls of strong grated cheddar

100g smoked salmon

A bag of fresh pasta fresh pasta

Baby asparagus spears (about 100g)

Some broccoli florets – just the little flower heads so they cook quickly.

Nutmeg and a grater

Salt and pepper

To make:

Start by melting the butter in a smallish pan until it starts to sizzle.

Add the onion and garlic cooking gently for about 5 minutes. Stir in a little salt and a good pinch of black pepper.

Stir in the crème fraiche and heat for about 30 seconds. Remove from the heat.

When that has cooked start to prepare your pasta as per the pack instructions. When you have about 2 to 3 minutes of boiling time left (which was the entire cooking time for my pasta) add the asparagus spears and broccoli.

Then while they are cooking chop your smoked salmon into bite sized chunks.

Beat the eggs in bowl until they are combined and add the cooled crème fraiche mixture along with the grated cheese.

Drain the pasta, turn off the heat and return to the pan along with the salmon and crème fraiche mixture. The idea is to very gently cook the egg so you don’t get scrambled egg with your pasta

Give it all a good stir and divide between 2 bowls. Grate on some nutmeg and season to taste. Remember the smoked salmon is salty but hasn’t been cooked with the other ingredients so keeps it saltiness to itself.

I am just trying to find a bit of time to dedicate to the Glanbrydan business web pages.

Exciting news is we have a web site – so far though not much content

http://www.glanbrydan.co.uk

Having failed to grow our own courgettes so far this year we have been supplied by our friends Aura & Martin. This regular supply has encouraged us to work our way through our own short list of recipes that contain courgettes and borrow further recipes to give the veg a continued appeal. Although I think T.W.O may have had enough already. He has been heard to mention, ‘oh courgettes. What a surprise!’ more than once. They can also be added to quiches and tonight I am going to try using them instead of pasta in a savoury mince dish – but as a vegetable dish here are my 3 favourites.

Courgettes roasted

 Aura has been cooking this for weeks so here’s my version

Oven to 180 degrees C or gas mark 4 Slice up a courgette or two depending on Size and how many you need to feed. We use one enormous courgette for the 2 of us.

Slice up an onion

Crush and chop a couple of cloves of garlic

 Slice up a sweet red, green or orange pepper into thin strips

Place these in a roasting dish and pour over a few table spoons of olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Mix it about to distribute the oil and then cook for 45 minutes to an hour. Keep an eye on it though as you want the courgettes softened but not charred.

Courgettes griddled

Aura served this cold to us but you can have it warm. Take a few courgettes and slice longwise so you have thin but long slices. Either grill these for a few minutes, use a griddle pan on the cooker top or put them on a BBQ. They 5 to minutes, turning once to get some nice charred lines down them. When they are just softening take them off and drizzle in olive oil.

Courgettes and tomatoes

Slice up 1 big or a few small courgettes thinly Slice one onion Crush and chop a couple of garlic cloves Tin of chopped tomatoes A sweet pepper (green or red) Small tin of tomato puree Dried Oregano seasoning

Using a large frying pan gently fry the onion and garlic for a few minutes. Then gradually add pieces of the courgette allowing them to sit on the base of the pan for a few minutes before moving them to the side of the pan to allow more pieces of courgette to be cooked. Once all the courgette has been cooked put the pepper in and give all a good mix up letting the pepper cook for a couple of minutes. Then add the can of chopped tomatoes puree tomatoes, a good teaspoon of the oregano, a good pinch of salt and pepper. Allow to bubble gently for at least half an hour stirring every few minutes to make sure it doesn’t stick. Serve with any meat, fish or veg dish.

  It has taken so long to get this far but we have been sleeping in our new bed for some weeks now. The house is really taking shape and having run out of money and energy we forget to look around us and take in the transformation of our little cottage.

Snuggled against a Welsh hill side with a copse of trees across the lane to protect us from the worst of the weather the little cottage sits. It was white and now is almost the colour of milk on 3 sides waiting for us to find a match to repaint the front.

The garden sits half covered in buttercups, bits of left over things from the build and a large container. The parking across the little lane also houses another container and these have held our lives worth of things for almost a year.

Slowly we have been bringing our possessions back indoors to the half painted home muttering every evening that we must do more painting. The upstairs is almost painted if you ignore the door frames and skirting while the downstairs is not even a quarter painted – another little job on the long list.

Jescat is sleeping in the study, he likes the smaller room while Vickie dog (or the Vicklar as we have nicknamed her since the comedy TV series Gavin and Stacy as in the Gavlar) is still in her kennel and run where she keeps an eye on us from the garden. The good news is that we have doors, windows, walls and floors. No home kitchen or stairs as yet but Rome wasn’t built in a day as they say. Although we could do with a battalion of men to help us get this place finished I guess we will have to wend along doing it bit by little bit.

Whilst we have not properly returned to living in our cottage we have started to move things back in.
More excitingly our new baking kitchen is being delivered. Everything is stainless steel, the cooker, the fridges, the sink and even the new scales! Slowly are little baking room is filling up and we will begin to install the new gadgets and gismos next week.
Now the baking business is a little more serious because it has to pay for the shiny new toys so we have a target each month to bring in so we don’t end up loosing money. As much as we love our pies and pasties sometimes the reality of following our little dream brings responsibility too.
In a way it has helped us to focus more on how we can improve the time it takes to produce things, after all you cannot just go spending money on everything you fancy (mainly because we don’t have it in the first place).
We have received a bit of help from our local council towards the cost of some of it and we are very grateful.