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So – we’re back from skiing, thinner, tanned and full of American protein (the food was marvellous, but we must have seen a grand total of about three vegetables in the two weeks we were there). Holiday photos and some restaurant reviews to be drip-fed to you over the next couple of weeks in addition to normal service.

Our Christmas present to ourselves arrived on the day before we left – a new Smeg fridge (the model number is FAB28R for those interested) in a poppy red. It may not be a traditional fridge colour, but I absolutely love it, and with a 258-litre capacity it’s more than twice the size of our old, dribbly, half-height fridge. It’s gorgeous; shiny, chunky, and terribly, terribly red. The chrome handle and lettering are beautifully machined and feel very durable.

The inside of the fridge is just as well designed, with a bottle rack which can be set to hold your bottles horizontal or at a tilt, a cheese box, adjustable shelving, egg and butter sections, plastic flexible fingers to stop bottles standing in the door from tipping and falling over when you open it, the mandatory salad drawer, and lots and lots of glorious, well-lit space.

I’ve filled it with good things – there are two jars of foie gras in there, some goose fat, a duck and its giblets, some dried fish (Ikan Bilis), wasabi, two kinds of mayonnaise, two kinds of miso, salted and unsalted butter, and the usual milk, cream and eggs. There’s some Speck, walnut oil, garlic, several different kinds of chili and soya sauce and a huge volume of vegetables. There’s Gü chocolate souffle for the sweetie-craving Mr Weasel, litres of cranberry juice, some Stilton and Parmesan, and a great big jar of anchovies from the Italian delicatessen. This is fantastic – with the old fridge, tiny and poorly-designed, filling it after the weekly shop was always a taxing exercise in topology.

The shelves are glass, not mesh, so there’s no danger of dripping and contamination (a real problem in the old fridge, which we inherited from the people who used to live here). They’re also very easy to adjust, so I’ve got a comfortably variable space between shelves at the moment. The small freezer compartment – small because we have a large freezer in the utility room – is just large enough for a bottle of vodka and an ice cube tray, and there’s plenty of space in the door for my depressingly large collection of sauce bottles. (Does one household really need eight different kinds of chilli sauce? I think it does.)

I’m still rather jet-lagged, so tonight we are having an uncharacteristic pre-prepared meal of fresh pasta and a supermarket pasta sauce.

Which I’ve been keeping in the fridge.

You might have noticed an uncharacteristic lack of updates over the last week or so; huge apologies. I’m on holiday in America, and had expected to be blogging as usual from here until I discovered that the hotel wireless access thingbob doesn’t accept UK credit cards as payment.

This leaves me scratching a bare minimum of time online at an Internet cafe down the road, where I’m not allowed to upload pictures. Normal service will resume at the end of February; meanwhile I can reassure you that I am eating furiously, taking copious photographs and notes, and have come up with a Creole Hollandaise sauce recipe. Please come back soon.

Weekend cat blogging (thanks Clare!) is something I normally have to go to a degree of effort for, taking about thirty bad photos for every good one. The kittens move around a lot, and my camera really can’t cope with the sheer s-p-e-e-d of a pouncing ball of fangs. They only look cute for the three percent of the time when they are not either sleeping, tongues lolling and chops drooling; or trying to kick each other in the head. Here are some photographs which I rejected for earlier weekend posts – now I look hard at them, maybe the photographic upsets are actually quite cute. Enjoy.

Thanks again to Kalyn at Kalyn’s Kitchen for organising Weekend Herb Blogging.

I spent Saturday morning walking around the winter gardens at Anglesey Abbey, near Cambridge. The gardens are remarkable all year round, but the winter shrubs, the famous snowdrops (inedible, I fear, but extraordinary; there are more varieties of snowdrops at Anglesey Abbey than anywhere else in the UK) and the icy, misty walks you can take around the grounds make a sunny, late January/early February day the best time of year to visit. Weekend Herb Blogging was foremost in my mind, so I scurried around looking for plants I knew to be edible.

One of the first shrubs I saw was this witchhazel (Hamamelis). Witchhazel displays these remarkable flowers from January to March. The flowers are delicately scented and last a long time on the bare twigs. In extreme cold, the petals will close, so the flowers are frost-hardy and a real mood-lifter in the long cold months.

I’d love a witchhazel for our garden, but they don’t like the very alkaline soil we have here. (The village we live in used to have a chalk quarry, and my garden comprises about a foot of decent soil before you get down to solid chalk.) They thrive in an acid soil; one of the best home garden specimens I’ve seen is in Mr Weasel’s parents’ garden; they live on the edge of a very peaty, tannic moor. Different varieties flower in oranges, reds and yellows. The yellow plant pictured is Arnold Promise – I’m afraid I wasn’t able to find an identifying label for the red plant below. (If anybody knows what variety it is, please leave a comment!)

Witchhazel is not precisely edible, but it’s used medicinally, and the Cherokee tribes used its inner bark, cooked down to a syrup, for healing wounds, soothing sore throats, and as an astringent. We still use it for its astringent properties these days, and you can make your own tincture by taking a few twigs in winter, before the plant flowers, scraping the bark off and soaking it for a few weeks in a half-water, half-vodka mixture. (Dilute the tincture again with two parts of water before using.) It’s good dabbed on oily, teenage skin.

Viburnum is another plant which flowers on bare twigs in the winter, and here I’m luckier with my grotty soil; viburnum will do well anywhere as long as it has decent drainage. Surprisingly, the berries from Viburnum bodnantense ‘Dawn‘, with its intensely scented, pink flowers, are edible both raw and cooked, and don’t taste at all bad. (You’ll need two bushes if you want the fruit; viburnum is not self-fertilising.) It’s the flowers I want this for, though; the scent from a viburnum bush in the winter will carry for metres in the cold air, perfuming everything around it. Dawn starts to flower in the late autumn and just keeps going until winter is over. I bought a very young specimen in the garden shop when we’d finished our walk; it’s going in front of a laurel tree in the garden later on today. The plant (and its flowers) is hardy down to below -10°C.

The gardens at Anglesey Abbey are planned beautifully. After a winding walk through flowering winter shrubs and red-twigged cornus, you’ll come around a corner into a stand of silver birch trees like something straight out of Chekov. The silver birch is an amazingly versatile plant; in Prague last year we saw tiny boxes made from the pressed outer bark, sap-scented and warm to the touch. (Removing this papery outer bark does not kill the tree.) The inner bark can be pulverised and used as a thickening meal. Birch tea is made from the leaves, and a medicinal tea from that resinous inner bark.

Sap from the tree is sweet and delicious, and the birch can be tapped like the maple, although too much tapping can kill the tree. In England, this sap was traditionally used to make beer. I found a recipe from John Evelyn’s 1664 Sylva or a Discourse on Forest Trees and the Propogation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions (a good read if you are interested in 17th-century fencing techniques) for the beer, which, if you can get your hands on a gallon of birch sap, will be just as good today as it was 350 years ago.

To every Gallon of Birch-water put a quart of Honey, well stirr’d together; then boil it almost an hour with a few Cloves, and a little Limon-peel, keeping it well scumm’d. When it is sufficiently boil’d, and become cold, add to it three or four Spoonfuls of good Ale to make it work . . . and when the Test begins to settle, bottle it up . . . it is gentle, and very harmless in operation within the body, and exceedingly sharpens the Appetite, being drunk ante pastum.

More on Anglesey Abbey tomorrow. They’ve got a working watermill at the back of the gardens, where I had a very interesting chat with a miller and bought a sack of some flour ground on the premises. Watch this space for some excellent bread and discussion of the sharpening of millstones.

Gastronomy Domine is a finalist in the Best of Blogs award (Best Cooking/Recipe blog). Voting has finished now – thanks to everybody who took the time to vote. There’s now a jury vote as well, and my understanding is that the results will be announced at the end of the month. Please keep your fingers crossed!

Kalyn from Kalyn’s Kitchen (also up for the Best of Blogs award – please vote if you haven’t done yet) has tagged me with another meme – this time I’m to list five things I want to work on in the kitchen this year.

Knife skills
My knife skills are horrible. I’m fast, but I’m not very neat, and some tasks, like boning whole birds or filleting fish are only accomplished in this house with a maximum of mess. One problem here is my total inability to sharpen knives on a butcher’s steel. I may give in to technology this year and buy a knife sharpener that you don’t need an Olympic skater’s degree of precision to operate.

Cakes
Regular readers will have twigged to the fact that I don’t really have much of a sweet tooth. Mr Weasel does most of our baking, and I don’t really enjoy cake-making that much; compared to a lot of what I cook I find the method very rigid, and I get a bit fed up with following recipes to the letter. I am not an obedient cook. Unfortunately, I’m not good enough at baking to be able to construct cake recipes in my head. This year I’m hoping to work on this, so by the end of the year I might just be able to make up some new ones.

Japanese food
I love Japanese food, but I don’t cook much of it; I have to go to London to get a lot of the necessary ingredients, and there’s a cultural subtlety to the cuisine that I need to read more on. Cooking in Japan (Nihon no ryori) is a blog that’s relatively new to me, but extremely informative on Japanese food. I’ve lined up a few Emi Kazuko books to buy. Miso and dashi are lurking in the fridge, ready to deploy.

Wild foods
We moved into the countryside last year, and we’re surrounded by woods and hedges brimming with interesting foods. Look out for more of this in the spring, when the elderflowers will be blossoming – honeyed elderflower fritters, elderflower cordial and elderflower champagne beckon. (The picture is of last year’s sloe gin – you can see how the sloes’ juices are seeping out and blending with the gin and sugar. This will be great when it’s ready to decant.)

A new kitchen
A poor workman always blames her tools. Strictly speaking, I blame the people we bought the house from. They built the kitchen themselves, and were enthusiastically incompetent carpenters and designers. The cupboards aren’t deep enough to fit plates in. Half of the doors have roughly carved flowers on them; they got bored halfway round the room and just painted flowers on the rest. The surfaces are about four inches higher than is natural or comfortable, the floor is covered with lino which seems to have been chosen for its startling resemblance to pitted industrial spillage, and the whole thing is tiled from floor to ceiling in a colour I like to think of as terminally-ill-frog green. (The agents’ details said ‘extensive splashback’.) Nothing is at a right-angle to anything else. Little tongues of Polyfilla slurp out of the edges of the units and the plug sockets. Still; it’s a big room, and when we can get it all ripped out and replaced, it’ll be fantastic.

Here’s hoping I win the lottery this year.

This, I’m afraid, is where this meme comes to die. Everybody I might have tagged has already been tagged (I come to this rather late). It could be worse. Your kitchen could be terminally-ill-frog green.

Thanks to Clare at Eatstuff for organising Weekend Cat Blogging again.

Here are Mooncake and Raffles relaxing to some karaoke. Raffles is pleased with his Diana Ross impression.

This week, we bought an Epoisse (an exceptionally stinky French cheese) and ate it for dessert. I wish I’d had my camera to hand – the kittens, normally not much moved by human food, made up their minds that it was a particularly sticky and inert kind of delicious mouse. We ended up giving them a small slice to stop them trying to dive into our plates – a slightly foolish decision, given they syrupy stickiness of a ripe Epoisse, and the horrendous smell of an Epoisse-y kitten who hasn’t washed all the cheese off her shoulders a couple of hours later.

I leave you with a cuter picture. I found them dozing on the lovely Mulberry towel Mr Weasel’s parents bought me for Christmas when I’d left it to dry on the radiator. Suits them, doesn’t it?

Gastronomy Domine has reached the finals in the Best of Blogs awards – voting will, apparently, start soon. Watch this space for more details.

Meanwhile, I’ve dropped some photos from the previous post. I’ll replace them later (the originals are still on my camera), but for now, please imagine what meatballs would look like if blessed by the Extremely Good Meatball Fairy. They looked just like that.

It’s Sunday – time for Weekend Herb Blogging. Thanks to Kalyn for organising it again.

You might remember my day in the garden back in October, when I planted something approaching a metric tonne of garlic in the back garden. It’s now grown leaves, and seems to be doing well – here is some of the garlic which went into beds, and the garlic which went into a pot (the idea here is that I should be able to compare the two in the summer and see which planting method worked better). They’re doing very well – I’ve not had to mulch them, since garlic is frost-hardy down to about -10°C.

The larger plants among the shorter stems of garlic in the top picture are the gigantic elephant garlic. The plants will need fertilising in the early spring, when the bulbs in the ground will start to swell and grow. Can’t wait until they’re ready to eat.

Behind the garlic in the bottom picture is a pot of rosemary. Nothing too unusual about that, you might think, but this is, for me, a very special plant. The rosemary came from my wedding bouquet in 2004. I’d asked the florist for rosemary in among the roses and lily-of-the-valley to reflect the cooking I do – and when we went away on our honeymoon my Mum took the rosemary out of the bouquet (yes, that is me in the picture – if you look closely you can make out the rosemary in among the flowers) and was able to get it to sprout roots in some damp compost. She potted it up and gave it to us when we got back.

The rosemary is growing fiercely a year and a half later (a Spanish friend tells me that a strong rosemary plant outside the house means that there’s a strong woman inside the house). I haven’t cut any of it to cook with yet, and won’t until it’s a bit bushier. The plant is a brilliant reminder of a wonderful day, and it should last, carted around in its pot from house to house as we move, as long as I do.