Expectant parents

No no, don't go getting excited, nothing quite so momentous. Or perhaps it is.

We've been proud half-tenants of an allotment for over a year now. Well, I think it was Christmas 2007 when we first started discussing the allotment with Tom and Jane and decided we'd go for it in a haze of Merlot induced enthusiasm. It took a further year (and further wine, although this time I think it was Cava) to move the allotment discussion on.

It became a reality in March of this year. Four raised beds. Planning on a scrap of paper. Regular "how many peas do you get from a seed" type conversations and well, we're making progress.

The house has been taken over, we have root trainers in the porch - on all windowsills, herbs, tomatoes and peppers throughout the rest of the house. Potato grow bags, onions and garlic in the back yard and a distinct dislike for B&Q peat free compost, which has the consistency of horse hair and a similar itching capacity.

The planting selection has been based on

1. what we'll eat fresh
2. what we can make into chutney
3. what we can freeze

Although what we're going to do with all that cauliflower and sprouts, I really don't know - but at least this Christmas, it will (hopefully) be a totter down to the allotment to pick the carrots, parsnsips and sprouts for lunch, rather than Asda.

It's rather exciting, at the moment - obviously because we're obsessed, in that new parent sort of a way, we can see changes from day to day, although I suspect I will become bored in looking at the state of change of a leek pretty quickly.

We've had our first casualty. Three actually. Three of the peppers were lost at sea. Nigel has an interesting watering technique - if its not swimming then it needs more. We are now exercising caution and restraint in watering. I don't think squeezing out the peat pods and hoping there is still life is a viable solution to over watering. But what would I know. I still don't know how many peas you get from a plant. And where is there to ask dumb questions like that? None of the gardening books or websites seem to cater for such basic questions - I know, I know, that the answer is a piece of string one, but please, have pity on us newbies!

Grating Potatoes

As ever we bought too much food for Christmas and now there is the frenzied searching of the fridge to work out what we have to eat and by when.

The ham has been sliced and tin foiled into Nigel sandwich sized parcels, so that's 8 days food in the freezer.

Our bargain Tesco's "buy one get one free" 2.5kg of potatoes was planned to be potato and leek soup, after all the ham generated a huge amount of stock, now residing in the freezer in small plastic containers, but the market had no leeks and I really didn't want to get into the car (I'm thinking of the cost of fuel involved in this as well now!) and go to the supermarket. So we decided on rosti's.

Rosti's actually helps us out on a number of front. Firstly, obviously the potatoes, then there's the left over onions (red and yellow), then the garlic, and the extra cooking bacon that I didn't use in the super cheese straws that I made earlier (more on that later). The final benefit - my forearms. We decided that our ancient food processor, which seems to have several modes (chunks, small chunks or decimation) wouldn't actually help. So I'm around 1.25kilos into a series of scraped and grated potatoes.

Taste test: Great, wow. I made these? Around 20 mins in a frying pan (ok, so I had to go to Odells and pick up some cooking rings, but I figure this will be one of our freezer staples that we'll make at the weekend and warm up during the week. Put it this way, it will make a change from the veggie chilli and curry that has made up our staple winter diet for the last two years.

Back to the kitchen, another batch is on route, although I'm not sure my forearms are fit enough for the rest of the grating!