I started growing some cayene chilis from seed in spring, they’ve now turned into almost meter high plants with really huge fruits. I’ll  allowing them to ripen a little before harvesting and freezing them for future use.

Have you ever frozen chilis? It’s a neat trick, and you can chop them up when frozen too. I’m expecting around 20-30 good sized chilis from my two cayene plants which, considering the lack of summer we’ve had, will be quite an achievement!

I also attempted to grow habeneros from seed. This was a super challenge, those fuckers NEVER seemed to shoot. I tried about 5 times with different propagators and in the end the method that worked for me was clingfilm on the kitchen windowsill..! Sadly, I don’t think there’s enough time left for fruit on those ones so I’ve kinda given up. Next year I’ll start them earlier, and probably invest in a heater propagator to speed up the process.

I bought two small plants from a garden centre, too, one of which is a scotch bonnet & the other is a sweet pepper. The sweet pepper unfortunately haven’t fruited even though it’s grown to a good size. Next year I’ll be growing those from seed and starting out earlier in an effort to get good fruit.

The scotch bonnet has had some results, there were lots of flowers leading to small potential fruits, but again, the lack of summer has resulted in slow growth. I’m hoping to harvest maybe 10 small unripened but mature scotch bonnets from this plant, they should still be usable. However, I might bring them inside and elongate their season?

Next year I think I’ll be buying a myriad of seeds from http://www.southdevonchillifarm.co.uk/, and my greenhouse really will be a chili factory!

Something kinda weird began happening to our tomato plants, I think some form of rot due to wet weather had set in (they’re outside plants), this was causing a few of the fruits to tarnish and rot alongside the branches of the plants. I thought it best to rescue as many of the unripened fruits that I could incase they all ended up being thrown into the compost bin.

Last weekend I went out armed with my bowl & a pair of scissors and removed every single fruit from our plants and then ripped up the plants. I won’t be adding these to the compost bin because if this rot thing is a disease, then I wouldn’t want to introduce that to the rest of my garden.. no siree!

I got a massive amount of green tomatoes off the plants, I’m going to be ripening some with the help of bananas, but the rest will be going into a giant pot of green tomato chutney.

I don’t actually think I’ve ever tried a fresh fig before, only the dried ones, so I was interested to see what I could make with them. I decided to do a simple dessert that used the entire fig rather than a cake or tart or something.

Firstly, I found the only covered baking vessel that I have (and reminded myself that I could probably do with a larger one..). I sliced the fig in a cross down the centre, but not all the way to the bottom, and opened them up (like a flower). I then crushed up some hazelnuts and sprinkled them on top of the figs. A good squirt of honey on each fig, alongside a few drops of natural vanilla essence and the prep was almost done. I then just threw in a cinnamon stick, put the lid on the dish and bunged it in the oven at 170ºC for about 30 minutes.

The figs turned super squishy and took on a slight taste of the cinnamon, the juices from the figs had mixed with the vanilla & honey and started to make a syrup in the bottom of the dish. I poured this syrup into a pan and reduced it futher until it was nice and sticky.

The figs were then served on their own with this syrup poured on top, if I’d had any I’d have put a dollop of greek yogurt on the top too!

Check out these badboys that came out of our garden this weekend. I think we might have pulled them out a bit too early, so we’ve left the rest until their green leaves go brown and start to wither.

I think we have about 10 of these in total, not a great deal, but it’s the first time we’ve tried growing onions so it’s kinda cool to see them finally.

For a while now I’ve been wanting to try and perfect a macaron recipe. I’ve never actually made any proper macarons before, the only ones I’ve tried in the past have been the Nigella pistachio ones that aren’t a true recipe. This time, due to a guest post idea with a fellow blogger, it was time to enter the Thunderdome that is the creation of a perfect Macaron. I’ll explain all this in more detail when I write the guest blog post, but suffice to say there are multiple factors that result in perfecting the macaron recipe – and fucking up any of them ends up in a fail.

Today I tried my first batch, initially things were going well, very well infact. The first isssue I came across was my shitty piping bag being insufficient. Seriously, it’s a 49p piping bag from Wilkos, so I shouldn’t expect great things. I’ve added it to my list to buy a new one!

I followed several recipes, methods & tips, and eventually I ended up with a not-so-bad macaron shell. It has the feet, it has the dome top, it even has the shine & the delightful crispness. However, the ground almond I used wasn’t quite ground enough – FU Sainsburys, FU – so this ended up with a grainy texture, you can see the evidence above. I’ve since been out and bought a finer grade (I hope) almond powder for my next batch.

I’m going to attempt another batch tomorrow, and next weekend I’ll be making a full set of ganache filled goodies :)

Adam’s enjoying eating the rejects.

And yes, it’s Macaron, not Macaroon.

Ignore my nail varnish.

The photo above has had a little bit of photoshoppage, let me show you the original…

I think the edited results are much nicer than the out-of-camera image, the image is brighter, especially the focal point of Pumpkin’s face.

Cropped
Increased exposure
Increased saturation
Increased contrast
Layer masked and lightened the section around Pumpkin’s face.
Sharpened the result slightly

I popped into H&M today on my mini shopping spree in Manchester. The moment I saw this sweater I knew it had to be mine! I’ve never bought anything from their disney range before, most of it is kinda gash, but I really love this thin sweater. This was £24.99, not bad!

Then on the way to the checkout I saw this amazing little dinosaur who is actually a shopping bag. I couldn’t leave without getting one, nope. He was £5.99.

I also bought a few things in Primark & Zara along the way, and I got my winter coat from Topshop which I’ll take some photos of over the weekend.

HDR stands for ‘High Dynamic Range’ and is an out of camera processing method to produce richly saturated, highly contrasted images that better represent the real life lighting of the scene. The usual method of achieving this is by layering several differently exposed versions of the same image and tone mapping the image until you get the desired result. Some of these can look quite garish (and sort of like they came from 1990s deviantart portfolios), but there are some really, really pretty results in quite a few of the more subtle examples.

I’m going to be having a go at this when I can afford the tone mapping software that’s required, unfortunately it’s not something that can be done purely in photoshop.. boo! Here’re a few of my favourite examples of HDR photography, oh and, you should check out this blog, HDR Spotting, where there are daily (amazing) examples of HDR photos.

Check out this amazing tentacled giant squid couch that lives in games company ‘Three Rings‘ office. Their entire San Francisco based work space is styled to look like The Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

& they appear to have a well stocked bar. Amazing. Hands up if you’d like to work there?!

You can see more shots of the office on Wired, definitely worth a look!

A couple of weekends ago I introduced mine and Adam’s Mums to mojitos at the Huddersfield food festival. They enjoyed them greatly.

We’re having a party this Sunday, I’ve stocked up on Rum, 8 bottles of Soda water, & mint. Adam’s Dad’s bringing 30 limes. I’m sure fun times will be had by all.

How to make a mojito

Grab a tall glass, add a shot (or two, if you’re feeling frisky) of white rum (seriously, don’t bother with a branded version, you won’t tell the difference!). Cut up a lime, bung it in the glass, add a good handful of mint & some sugar syrup/granulated sugar… get a drink masher thingy, or the end of a rolling pin, and pummel the mixture together. Top up with ice & soda water, yummers! Enjoy! Raspberry it up by adding uh.. raspberries.