Summer talks in Essex

How are you? I don’t know about you but it seems to me that 2012 is flying by. I can’t believe it’s May already – you certainly couldn’t tell from the weather! As I write this there is a huge lake which has appeared in the field behind our house and is now filled with ducks and Canadian geese. My other half spotted a swan floating regally in it this morning.

Apologies for the radio silence. I have had to take a break from blogging here much of this year so far as I’ve been busy juggling work commitments with writing a new book on how to run a greener business for Gibson Square Press. It will feature lots of interviews and case studies with real companies and what they’ve been doing to be more environmentally friendly. I’ll let you all know more about it when the book comes out soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve been very privileged to ask to speak recently at a number of society meetings in and around Essex, including the Wanstead Women’s Group, the Shenfield U3A and St Mark’s School in Harlow, about how to be green without sprouting a ‘beard and sandals’ or spending a lot of money. I have also kindly been asked to give two further talks this summer in Essex, both on very different topics. Perhaps if you’re in the area you’d like to come along. On Mon 21st May I’ll be visiting the South East Essex Organic Gardeners in Prittlewell at 8pm to give a talk on my husband Douglas’s new salad growing venture Sweet Pea Salads which is launching soon in Hertford. Non-members are welcome to attend for an entry fee of £2. The address is Growing Together, 47 Fairfax Drive, Southend-on-Sea SS0 9AG (corner of Fairfax Drive and Prittlewell Chase).

For those of you who have more of a taste for crime than vegetables, I will also be speaking at the Essex Police Museum in Chelmsford on Thursday 14th June at 7.30pm about writing my crime novel Victim Support which is set in Essex and, if you don’t have one already, you can also get your personally signed copy of the book there from me at the discounted price of £6. If you fancy coming along, the museum is based at the Essex Police Headquarters, Chelmsford, Essex, CM2 6DA. If you’d like a copy of the book but can’t make it to the talk then please email me at piperterrett@googlemail.com.

Also, if you’re a member of a society in Essex, Hertfordshire or the London area and would like me to come and give a talk to your group or to your pupils at a school assembly – whether on how to be green, how to write a book or another topic - then please feel free to get in touch by emailing me at piperterrett@googlemail.com – I am generally happy to travel within an hour’s drive of Hertford where I now live.

Take care,

Piper

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Meals on a budget – sticky toffee pudding

Morrisons' M Savers goodies

I was approached a few weeks ago to take part in the Morrisons M Savers Recipe Challenge. The supermarket launched its new range of affordable products in January, which replaces the old Morrisons Value range, and includes 400 products, from grocery items, such as tinned foods and flour to make budget meals, to kitchen utensils. To mark the event, the company decided it would be fun to challenge a number of  frugal living bloggers – including Penny Ritson and Karen Bryan of Help Me To Save to cook up low cost recipes using M Saver ingredients.

I agreed to take part, although as I have a few dietary requirements nowadays (I found out last year that I can’t tolerate aliums – (onions, garlic & leeks – it’s a family thing as my grandmother was the same) I thought they might find me a bit of a tricky customer. These days I have to be quite careful what I eat. Cleverly they decided to get me to make a sticky toffee pudding – quite safe, well apart from the likely impact on my waistline…

I’ve never made a sticky toffee pud before, so I prayed I wouldn’t make a hash of it. It was exciting when the package arrived from Morrisons on Saturday including some of the ingredients – self raising flour (just 52p for 1.5kg which isn’t bad), sultanas (in place of dates), skimmed milk (1 litre for 49p) and custard – and a number of their new M Saver kitchen utensils, such as a spatula and stirrers. There was also a £5 Morrisons voucher to cover any ingredients which I needed which weren’t in their range.

Making the pudding was surprisingly simple.  I measured out 200g of the sultanas and mixed them with 250ml of lightly brewed black tea, placed the mixture into a saucepan and brought to the boil, cooking for around 4 minutes and lastly mixing in half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda before taking off the heat. Next I creamed together 175g of golden caster sugar and 85g of butter until soft. Then I added a beaten egg, 175g of the M Saver’s self-raising flour and a teaspoon of cinnamon, gradually beating this into the creamed butter and sugar. After that, I added the sultanas and tea mixture, mixed it all up and added it to a baking tin. The M Saver’s spatulas came in handy for this. They’re only £1 but they’re surprisingly good quality and made from wood from sustainable forests.

I placed the baking tin in a warmed oven (180 degrees C) and cooked it for about 35 minutes. My friend Andrea was round for dinner that evening – our first dinner guest since we’ve moved home. I was also cooking a roast dinner for us so I just popped it in at the same time, which made the oven heat go a bit further. Funnily enough, when I told her I was cooking sticky toffee pudding, she told me that it was her favourite dessert. No pressure!

Initially I was a bit worried, as although it came out looking beautifully brown and had risen, when I went to take it out, I realised it hadn’t cooked completely in the middle. Oops. I think I’d been a bit greedy and put too much mixture in too small a tin. But I ploughed on regardless and later, after we’d had our dinner and everybody had room for dessert, I made the sauce to go with it.

Again, this wasn’t exactly slimming either, but at least it was between three people – me, Andrea and my husband Doug. Over a low heat I warmed 100g of butter with 100g of soft brown sugar, 150ml of skimmed milk and a dash of double cream to give it a boost. The sauce was really tasty with a good toffee favour to it. And my concerns about the pudding itself disappeared once we all tucked into it because it was really delicious. It worked well with the sultanas and the sponge was soft and tasty – and the . There was also a tin of M Saver’s custard leftover in my box of goodies, but we all felt a bit too fat from our meal to have custard as well, so I am going to try this out later with a different dessert.

All in all, adding in the extra ingredients, accounting for the amounts used (and counting in the amount the M Saver’s ingredients would have cost if I’d paid for them) - the meal cost just over £3 to make, which isn’t bad for such a tasty dessert. We also had plenty leftover as we couldn’t eat it all, so I think it would probably have fed about five people altogether. Not bad for around 60p per person. Our nearest Morrisons is in Welwyn Garden City, but if I was in the area I would definitely give their M Saver’s range a go again for any budget recipe I might make in the future.

Have you tried any of the M Saver’s range? If so, I’d be interested to hear what you think of the products.
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A Busy 2012

Busy signing books!

How’s your 2012 going so far? Mine has been very busy as usual. No rest for the wicked as they say! I am writing another non-fiction book which has to be finished in just a couple of months, so very busy with that – I’ll let you know all about that soon – and juggling my other work commitments.

A very big thank you to everybody who has supported me by buying a copy of my debut crime novel, Victim Support. If you didn’t manage to get your signed  copy, you can buy one directly from me by emailing piperterrett@googlemail.com or via Norsey Press marketplace sellers (also me) at Amazon.co.uk.

Posing for the paparazzi

And special thanks to everybody who came to my book signing in Billericay, where the book is set, in December – especially to the lovely Sylvia Kent (centre of the photo) who gave so much of her time to help organise and promote it and Mara Cotterell (on the right) who provided some of her delicious home-made cakes  (from her new business Cake-Bites.com) and spent a lot of time out flyering on the day too. Very kind.

We were lucky to have a steady stream of people throughout the afternoon – it was lovely to see so many old friends. Lots of people I know from Billericay came but also others from further afield, such as my cousin Terry and his wife from Maldon, old family friends – Geeta and Sue – from Ilford and an old friend, Tim Shand, from Witham too. It was fantastic to see everybody. What’s more, we sold lots of books – far more than we expected which was brilliant. Lots of people took a chance on Victim Support as a Christmas present stocking filler – even famous Essex novelist Elizabeth Lord - which was very kind.

And the feedback so far has been heartening too. People have been saying that they really enjoyed it and asking when the next one will be finished, so I’d better get my skates on and write it. After several years of working on the book in my spare time, this kind of feedback makes it all worthwhile.

We had some great publicity for the book too from Sylvia Kent’s blog, the Billericay Gazette, the Hertford Mercury, BBC Essex and particularly Scott Ross at Phoenix FM in Brentwood, so a big thank you to all of them. You can listen again to my interview on Phoenix FM here  and Sylvia Kent also read part of the book and discussed it towards the end of her interview as part of the Book Club on Phoenix here. Over Christmas I was also a guest on BBC Three Counties to talk about frugal living, which was great fun too.

This month I’ve been blogging for the Energy Saving Trust’s blog about the trials of energy saving and living in rented accommodation – as we now are in Hertford since finally selling our home in Billericay in October last year. Plus I’ve also been trialing two brilliant energy saving devices made by Savasocket – which I’ll be writing about soon, as well as some of Morrison’s Supermarkets’ new M Saver range.

Have a great week! x Piper

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My debut crime novel – Victim Support

Hot off the press!

I’ve got some exciting news to report! After a lot of hard work, the paperback version of my debut murder mystery novel Victim Support, published by my own press Norsey Press, is out now! It features my female police detective character Inspector Sam Cree and is set in the fictional town of ‘Norsey’, based loosely on Billericay in Essex where we lived for 7 years. We’ve just moved to Hertford – but more on that soon. Let’s just say it’s been a crazy month.

If you’re in Billericay on Saturday 10th December, you can meet me in person at my book signing which is taking place at 2.30pm-5.30pm at the Coach House, Billericay Town Council offices, Crown Yard, off the High Street (near Waitrose car park). I’ll be doing a reading from the book from 3.30pm onwards and you can get your signed copy discounted to £6 on the day.

If you can’t make the signing but would still like a signed copy of the book (£6.99) please contact me directly at piperterrett@googlemail.com or you can buy a signed copy from me via Amazon.co.uk from Norsey Press marketplace sellers.

Here’s a little taster of the plot:

When twin boys go missing, DI Cree and her colleagues on the Norsey Force are already overstretched. Then, a student and an elderly woman are mysteriously gunned down and evidence suggests a sniper is at work. In the background of each murder is an unsolved crime. Is revenge the motive or something deeper? Sam and her boss, Chief Inspector Bill Irons, face a race against time to find the missing boys and the killer before he strikes again.

This is my third book – my first was Bedroom DJ: A Beginner’s Guide and my second The Frugal Life: How to spend less and live more, which is still selling in these tough times – but Victim Support is my first attempt at fiction and I’ve been working on it for a number of years on and off. I’m very excited!

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Tasty Hallowe’en Pumpkin Recipe

Hallowe'en pumpkins!

Woo hoo! Hallowe’en is on it’s way! Spooky! Wandering into a shop this morning to pick up some supplies, I noticed that the place was stacked high with Hallowe’en goodies – witches hats, pumpkins and even bats pasted to the windows (not real ones, I hasten to add…). With each year that comes, we seem to be getting more and more into Hallowe’en and trick or treating. When I was a kid I loved Hallowe’en but it wasn’t anything as popular as it is nowadays. I used to get dressed up as a witch and once I even sat in the great big chestnut tree in front of the house in the dark and tried to spook  the passersby! I’m not sure how convinced they were though as I was only about eight and not very scary.

That said, I’m not a big fan of trick or treating. A lot of people do it now around our way but it can be a nuisance and also I think dangerous for young children unless they’re accompanied by an adult. It’s one of those things that I’m not entirely sure I approve of, even though the kids love to do it in Ireland where my folks live. My mum even keeps a plastic cauldron of goodies by the door at this time of year. So maybe I’m just a big spoilsport!

Anyway, I do love Hallowe’en pumpkin lanterns. My neighbour loves to make them and they are so much fun. Unfortunately we didn’t grow any pumpkins this year, which was a great shame. A few years ago I grew a couple of good ‘uns, which are pictured above. By the way, while I remember, here’s a link to my great friend and local journalist Sylvia Kent’s recent blog entry on Wendy and Keith Petty’s Atlantic Giant pumpkins. I’d love to grow some of these!

We do have a couple of squashes which Doug grew but they are very small – far too small to carve out, so we may have to buy a pumpkin this year. If you’re making a lantern and you don’t know what to do with the pumpkin innards, my great friend Nina gave me the following recipe a few years ago, which is really delicious, for pumpkin brownies.

Nina’s pumpkin & chocolate brownie recipe

150g pumpkin peeled & cut into chunks

1tbsp golden caster sugar

75g butter

75g plain chocolate

250g soft light brown sugar

175g self-raising flour

15g cocoa powder

3 eggs

Boil the pumpkin until tender, then drain. Puree and sweeten with the caster sugar. Preheat the oven to 180 deg c/ gas mark 4. Grease and flour a 180cm x 30.5 cm tin. Melt the butter & chocolate together in a saucepan and then add the other ingredients. Stir everything together thoroughly and pour into the prepared tin. Bake for 15-20 minutes. Leave to cool in the tin and cut into bars. Enjoy!

I made these and gave half of them to another friend a few years ago who was pregnant. She was travelling home by train and, by the time she got there, she’d scoffed the lot!

Got any good Hallowe’en recipes? If so, I’d love to hear them. Otherwise, have a spooky time of it! :)
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Autumn is Here

The last of 2011's tomatoes

Autumn is well and truly here, isn’t it folks? I can’t believe it. Someone said to me this morning that Christmas will be here soon and I suppose they were right.  In fact, some mornings I could be forgiven for thinking that it’s winter already. Yesterday the front page of one of the tabloids claimed that it will snow in October. It sounds crazy but who knows? These days our seasons are all of a muddle.

We were on holiday last week in Norfolk and had a brilliant time in the (miraculous) sunshine there – I’d worried that it would rain all week – but now that we’re back it’s clear that many of the vegetables in the garden are on their way out. Doug has pulled up the sweetcorn which has served its purpose for the year and the tomatoes are starting to get blight. Luckily the ones in the green house are OK at the moment and we’re picking our way through the ones outside which are still edible. We’ve been making lots of roast tomato sauces which I’ve become totally addicted to now. All you do is heat the oven to 180 degrees/gas mark 4, cut up as many tomatoes as will fit in a baking tray, season and throw on some olive oil. Then roast for 45 minutes, remembering to turn halfway through. It’s also nice with some slices of pepper and chilli. We have plenty of these in the green house – especially chillis – which we’re working our way through at the moment. Then serve on some pasta or it’s also really nice as a rich spicy salsa for fajitas. If you have too much then you can freeze it and use it later.

Red hot chillis!

There’s still carrots in our bed and in pots and – naturally – the courgettes are still going. We are struggling to keep up with just the two plants though. I think some major batches of vegetarian chilli could be in the offing. The loose leaf salad is still going strong too and we’ve had some delicious salad selections. We’re not quite sure about the chicory Doug’s growing however. It looks amazing but when we tried it out the other day it had a very strong bitter taste to it. Apparently it’s supposed to get milder the colder the weather gets, though, so we’ll see how it goes. Sadly our fig tree, which is in a pot, fell over while we were on holiday and detached itself from the automatic watering system and isn’t looking too well. Doug gave it a good water and we’re just praying it will make it.

The good news is that Marmalade our Orpington hen has stopped being broody – but only to go through another moult! That girl likes to look her best for Mr Right. So Missy our light Sussex hen is busy keeping the home fires burning on the egg production front. That girl rarely seems to take a day off. We came home to no less than six eggs which my neighbour Nina had kindly saved for us.

Let me know how your own veggies are doing and if you’ve got any good autumn recipes for using up the last of the season’s produce as I’d love to hear them. I feel that with this autumn chill now it may be time to make some soups and casseroles soon. Mmm….now I feel hungry again…
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Mushroom Foraging

Parasol Mushroom - you can see how they get their name...

Doug and I went for a long walk yesterday evening in the woods behind Outwood Common Road in Billericay and stretching up towards Crays Hill. I wanted to see the pigs and hens which the farm near us keeps – the footpath goes through their farm and their Rhode Island Red hybrids are such characters – and it’s a lovely walk anyway. Just in case, Doug, who loves to go foraging for mushrooms, brought a bag with him. In the past we have found some parasol mushrooms in one stretch in the woods about this time of year, although perhaps closer to October. But we didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything this year as we thought, despite all the rain we’ve had lately, that it might be a bit early.

However, we were wrong to be so pessimistic because we did in fact stumble across quite a number of big parasol mushrooms which were largely untouched, although somebody (maybe a rabbit?) had taken a small bite out of one of them. Doug collected four large specimens, carefully arranged them in a tupperware box which was bursting at the seams by the time we left and took them home to eat. Parasol mushrooms, which are edible, are relatively easy to identify because they have a large parasol-like head and tiger stripes on the stems. There are so many species of mushroom and a number which are poisonous so we always find it best to stick to the ones we know and, if in doubt, leave other ones alone. Some mushrooms will just give you a nasty stomach upset while others can kill you and there’s not always an antidote so it’s not worth taking chances with these things.

On our travels we also saw an abundance of sloes, hawthorn berries and some rosehips too. We’ve never tried making sloe gin before but I think we’ll be returning to the scene of the crime soon to collect some and make a stash of sloe gin for Christmas. Many of the sloes looked ripe but when we checked the internet last night it said that it was best to pick them in late October after the first frosts, so I guess we’ll be doing that. Do get in touch if anybody has any good recipes for this or rosehip/hawthorn berry jelly as I’d like to try making that.

Reading through an old copy of the Telegraph from last Tuesday, I was surprised to see none other than Prince Charles out foraging for mushrooms around the Balmoral estate. It must be trendy now!
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Energy Saving on BBC Breakfast

I got an urgent call out of the blue on Tuesday lunchtime from the Energy Saving Trust which I work with as their Green Voice of the UK. “The BBC want to do some filming with you about saving energy as temperatures have dropped so low this August, can you do it?!” I stepped into action – well, mainly rushing about tidying our house which was something resembling a compost heap and making sure it was fit for the team from BBC Breakfast to film in.

Here’s a link to the piece on the BBC Website.

It was great fun – especially filming the shower clip about the amount of energy it takes to heat water. Our bathroom is tiny so you can imagine how difficult it was to fit myself, the reporter Laura Yates and the cameraman Jamie in there. I got quite wet standing next to the shower, actually, as I kept fluffing my lines and having to do it again! They were so professional and patient and did an amazing job.

We had a lot of fun but I also hope we made everbody think about how they can cut their domestic energy use. It’s certainly made me wonder what else we can do to conserve heat in our home – and save money – and I’ll be doing my best to stick to my guns and not put the heating on until we really have to. These recent price rises are a worry, though, as they are so substantial. My own supplier has hiked gas prices by 19 per cent and electricity by 10 per cent and many people are already worrying about paying the bills, not just for energy but everything else at the moment. I think many people will struggle and it’s been so unseasonally cold recently that I know quite a few friends have considered putting the heating on already this year.

For more energy saving tips, visit the Energy Saving Trust’s website where you can also carry out a web-based home energy check too. And let me know if you have any energy saving ideas of your own to share with me.

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Monster Veg

Not exactly regulation shape!

Over the bank holiday – well, specifically on Monday once it had finally stopped pouring with rain of Biblical proportions here in Essex! - we ventured out into the back garden to pick some of our fruit and veg. Doug brought in a big bowl of raspberries, we picked a huge bowl of blackberries and we are drowning in green and yellow courgettes from two bushes. We also had to palm off two enormous cucumbers from the green house on our unsuspecting neighbours which, because of their ‘non-EU regulation’ shape, shall we call it, produced a few titters. Some delicious Hungarian wax chillis and bell peppers were picked and ended up in a lovely beef goulash which I made last night, courtesy of this James Martin’s recipe.

But I just had to stop and show you the incredible sight that greeted us when Doug decided to delve into the carrot and parsnip bed. Now, Doug has been growing vegetables for something like five years now, and myself for a couple, but I have never in my life seen anything like it. I asked him what he’s been feeding them but he claims it’s nothing special. Maybe he’s been going out in the dead of night and feeding them beer dregs or something…I swear it’s not GM anyway!

Look at the size of it! Dangerous in the wrong hands...

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Marmalade goes broody

My beautiful ginger girlie!

We thought we were doing amazingly well with eggs this summer – with both Marmalade, our big ginger Orpington hen, and Missie our light Sussex hen, working hard to lay us eggs every day, but it seems that the production line has ground suddenly to a halt. Marmalade has turned broody. Being an Orpington, this is an occupational hazard. Big, cuddly, loveable mammas of hens, Orpingtons are prone to go broody at the drop of a hat. They crave nothing better than being mum to a few ginger chicks and, when they do turn broody, spend about six weeks hogging the nesting box and doing everything it takes to hatch the imaginary egg, including pulling out their own chest feathers so that they can get their skin closer to the egg.

It does cause a few problems for Missie, though. Missie is still laying at the moment – she hasn’t turned broody yet – as she did last time Marmalade did in about March, which was a pain –  and is busy, as Doug calls it, ‘crossing the picket line’ to continue her hard work in the office. However, it’s a bit tricky laying your egg when every day you’re confronted by a large feathery ginger mass in the nesting box, determined to stay put. Marmalade will not be moved, after all. Sometimes Missie ends up precariously sharing the box with her, other times she gives up and lays her egg on the bars. Occasionally she’s got stuck in the hen house altogether as Marmalade’s broody mass (she even makes these broody noises, which are a bit like ‘bub bub bub’) blocks out the doorway and the way back into the run (as well as the sun).

As far as we can tell from our experience of keeping chickens for about six years now, there’s not much you can do to stem the flow of broodiness once it sets in. We keep kicking Marmalade out of the nesting box, once Missie has laid her egg of the day, and shutting it so that she has to run about in the run and ‘have a life’, as I tell her most days. But generally we’ve found that we just have to wait for the craving for motherhood to run its course. In the meantime, egg production has halved.

It’s a shame not to be able to give into Marmalade’s dream of motherhood as she would make an amazing mum, I’m sure. It would be lovely to see her taking care of a few chicks and on occasion, we have oohed and ahhed about what it might be like. But it’s just not worth the angst at the minute of keeping the hypothetical chicks safe from the attentions of the local fox/Dougal my cat, not to mention the fun when we find out that half of them are cockerels…and working out what to do with them. Then, suddenly having a few chicks isn’t half as nice as it might be.

Let’s just hope Missie doesn’t succomb and we don’t have to start buying eggs again!  If anybody’s got any great cures for broodiness then do let me know. I’d love to hear them!
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