Bread and radishes

Another day where the kitchen smells of freshly baked bread!

This is Wayne’s second go at baking bread using Jim Lahey’s “no work, no knead” bread in a pot method and it came out even better than the first.

We had meant to visit Jim’s Sullivan Street Bakery when we went to New York last year but somehow didn’t make it. If the bread is as good as this we must put it on the list for next time. The crust is super crusty and the inside is chewy and  delicious, a bit like ciabatta.

As the oven was warmed up Wayne also baked some potatoes, and I had harvested radishes from the veggie garden, and Vanessa Barrington’s D.I.Y. Delicious just happened to be sitting on the kitchen bench with a yummy looking potato, radish and green bean salad on the cover. Lunch sorted!

The baking smells appear to have attracted a couple of curious visitors too…

Good companions

After a hot day yesterday it is lovely and cool this morning so I took a wander around the vegetable patch. The lettuce are going gangbusters! They seem to prefer the cooler weather too. I think I’ll be picking some leaves for sandwich lunches during the week.

And for sandwich inspiration may I suggest a visit to Tifamade? She has some fab looking ones that she delivers on her pink bicycle in Paris (cakes too!)

Also for sandwiches, look! The radishes look ready to harvest.

I had planted a row of radishes in between two rows of carrots, because the radishes sprout quite quickly and so mark the place of the slower sprouting carrots (making it less likely that I will dig them up while looking for a spot to plant something else.) In this bed there are also dwarf bush beans and soy beans and, happy accident, it turns out that beans are good companions for both carrots and radishes! They do seem to be getting along very well in any case.

Keeping with the green theme, I’m wearing my new t-shirt featuring a very happy bookworm giraffe with his books. Books are good companions too, and it’s quite appropriate attire for a librarian, I think.

 

tiny carrots

There is nothing nicer than an early morning wander around the veggie patch before getting ready for work, just to see how things are going.

Look! Tiny carrot seedlings have popped up…

I’ve never had much luck growing carrots, perhaps because you have to plant them straight into the soil and it can take quite a long time before their feathery shoots pop up, so they tend to get trampled or accidentally pulled out because I’ve forgotten where I planted them. This year I planted two rows of carrots with a row of fast growing radishes in between to mark the spot.