Author: Juliet Kemp

food

Vegan lentil loaf

Juliet Kemp

I have been making this at Xmas for well over 10 years, and every so often someone asks me for the recipe and I spend ages digging through my email for it. So here it is, for future reference. It is based on a Rose Elliot recipe, but hers had egg and cheese in, and fewer tasty things like garlic and Marmite.

Lentil loaf: serves 4-6 as part of big roast dinner

Ingredients
6oz split red lentils
8 fl oz water (may need to add more)
1 bay leaf
1 medium-sized onion, peeled & finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled & finely chopped
2oz mushrooms, washed & finely chopped
1.5 oz fresh wholemeal breadcrumbs
1 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tbsp lemon juice
salt & pepper
splash soy sauce (to taste)
herbs to taste – thyme, rosemary, sage, oregano are all nice, depends what you have on hand.
Marmite (to taste)
Nutritional yeast to taste (optional)
1 tbsp soy lecithin or egg replacer (optional)
Marg & dried crumbs (optional) for coating tin

Method
Put the lentils, water, & bay leaf in a saucepan & simmer gently until lentils tender & liquid absorbed. Add more water if necessary, but only a little & as needed or the loaf will be sloppy. Remove bay leaf.

Meanwhile, fry onions, mushrooms & garlic gently until onions are transparent.

Preheat oven to 190C/375F/gas mark 5. Prepare 1lb loaf tin by putting long narrow strip of greaseproof paper on base & up narrow sides. Grease tin with marg, & sprinkle generously with dried crumbs if using.

Mix lentils, onions, mushrooms, garlic, & rest of ingredients. Spoon into tin & level top. Bake uncovered for 45-60min, until firm & golden-brown on top.

Notes

  1. Nutritional yeast has a nice cheesy taste, but is non-essential. Soya lecithin/egg replacer helps the stuff to bind together, but we don’t use it for anything else so don’t have it in the house, & I don’t bother. It just means it comes out a bit less sliceable.
  2. It’s a very forgiving recipe, generally.
  3. It keeps well in the fridge. You can also make it a day in advance & heat it in the microwave, or make it as far as ready-to-bake, leave it in the fridge overnight, & put it in the oven the next day (which is what we do at Xmas).
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By land/sea to Northern Ireland: the return

Juliet Kemp

I’ve written before about options for travelling from London to Belfast without flying. Those options are all still available, but on my most recent journey last week, I discovered yet another one: overnight via Liverpool.

London/Liverpool/Belfast

Route: Train to Liverpool, ferry to Belfast
Cost (single): £140* for a cabin (overnight)
Time: 13h30
Epicness: Very civilised. Bit of a faff getting from Liverpool Lime St to the ferry terminal (8 min Metro ride, 15-20 min walk; or you could get a taxi) but nothing major. Bit of a wait in Liverpool but plenty of food options.
Notes: You could also do this in the daytime but I’m not sure how well the trains work out, though the ferry part would be cheaper. The cabin was very comfy. This is now my favourite option.

* This was the cost for this trip per person: £65 London-Liverpool, £75 Liverpool-Belfast, with 2 people sharing a cabin. If you booked the train leg sooner, or were prepared to share a cabin or just have a seat, it would be cheaper. Daytime might also work out much cheaper.

For us, travelling with a baby, this was hands-down the best option. Leon slept happily all night tucked into the berth with me (and unlike the sleeper train, there was plenty of room for both of us). We only had one train journey with an awake needing-to-be-entertained baby; he fell asleep just after dinner in Liverpool and didn’t wake up again properly (just roused briefly for feeds overnight) til Belfast.

This option is especially good now that the Belfast/Stranraer ferry is no more and you have to go via Cairnryan with a coach transfer; which sounds rather more faff to me than it used to be. Next time I think we’ll do Liverpool/Belfast both ways.

We did do the Belfast/Cairnryan route on the way back as I was bound for Aberdeen, but unfortunately I still don’t know how much faff it is. Due to flooding (coach delayed for unknown time), landslides (no train from Stranraer), and more flooding (couldn’t get around flooding to Ayr), we wound up taking a 2 hr taxi ride to Dumfries instead, and a train down to Carlisle, before I headed north again. I do not recommend this as Happy Fun Times, although at least we’re not still sitting in Cairnryan ferry terminal.

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Sewing beyond my means…

Juliet Kemp

Or at least beyond my likely abilities. But what the hell! It’s more fun that way.

There’s a sew-along on a forum I’m on of this quilt-as-you-go version of the Amy Butler Weekender Bag. Which I gather is famously Very Hard. (Famous if you hang out on sewing blogs, anyway, which largely I don’t. Yet.) I love the look of this version of it (patchwork is ace!), but since I have done next-to-no quilting, the sensible thing would clearly be to back away slowly and, I dunno, practise a bit first on something smaller.

So, of course, the pattern is now sitting on the table looking at me, a couple of metres of organic wadding are on their way, and I’ve dug out a bunch of scraps to piece the front parts. My excuse is that it was clearly a Sign that my order of “some random remnants” from the nice organic cotton people included some nice thick plain fabric suitable for interlining.

Selection of brown/blue/green fabrics laid out with slightly bad lighting
Some scraps, yesterday (flash has done nothing for the accuracy of the colours; it’s broadly a blue/green/brown look I’m going for)

It’s going to be FUN. Yes. I mean, what can possibly go wrong? Other than everything, obviously.

To balance this out with something I’m actually competent at, I’m also ploughing through the Xmas crafting: making beanbags (little hacky-sack type ones) and Phazelia’s Mitred Baby Jacket for Leon, and [ CENSORED ] for assorted family members who are old enough to potentially read this blog. Also I still have a pair of socks for ME to finish to replace the ones I accidentally felted shortly after Leon was born.

But it’s the bag I’m most looking forward to, despite knowing that it will involve sweat and tears and bad words and so on. AM WRONG IN THE HEAD.

growing things

Tidying up the garden for the winter

Juliet Kemp

At the weekend I hoicked out the tomatoes (getting a fair crop of green tomatoes in the process), courgettes, gone-to-seed lettuce, and a bundle of unexpected carrots, to clear some space before winter.

I also dug over the compost and found huge bundles of happy worms and woodlice doing their thing in there. (I should really have taken a photo, shouldn’t I?) I felt a bit bad upsetting them all in order to extract some of the lovely dark compost-y compost from the bottom of the pile. There was enough to spread over a single bed; hopefully by the spring there’ll be another bed’s worth as well. There’s something very satisfying about compost; all that waste turned into lovely rich stuff to help your plants grow. It just looks productive.

Winter lettuce is doing nicely and needs thinning soon; chard also doing well; pak choi suffering from slug/snail depradations.

I also planted one whole bed and an extra row of broad beans, and two rows of snow peas. By getting the beans in now, they have a chance to get going in the spring before the ants and the aphids move in. Which also means that after the first crop in the spring, I may as well hoick them out again as by then the ants and aphids have overrun the plants. That, in turn, means I can plant nearly as many as I like since by the time I want to put other things in, they’ll be out. Succession sowing is also very satisfying!

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Canal paths and cargo trikes

Juliet Kemp

Last week I took the Christiania (without baby) over to Three Mills to pick up a stack of recycled scaffolding board. Contrary to the doubt of the chap who loaded them up (“they’re really heavy, you know, will you be able to get them home on that?”) the Christiania dealt admirably with the load. But I noticed something about roads and paths.

On the way there, I took the path along the Limehouse Canal. I thought this would be pleasant, especially on a slow-moving trike, and it looked more direct than the road.

In practice, what I found was a rough-surfaced (sand/gravel) path, heavily cambered towards the river. On the trike, with its slight tendency to drift down the camber, this makes for difficult riding. (The bike path along Cable St, while tarmacced, also has an awkward and variable camber which is harder going on a trike, but at least there I’d go into the kerb not the canal if I lost concentration.)

Even worse were the mini-‘steps’ (lines of stones on their ends sticking out of the path, possibly to give better grip for pedestrians but extending across the whole path leaving either no, or very little, smooth part for bikes) at intervals. There was no warning of these. I just suddenly found myself bouncing alarmingly over them with no option to avoid. I was genuinely worried I might damage the trike (happily it’s tougher than that), and if I’d had L in the box he’d have been proper upset.

But wait! There’s more. A very steep bridge over the canal, which advises cyclists to ‘get off and push’. Fine, it’s a steep bridge, I wouldn’t want to build a new one; but again, there are mini-steps all the way up and down to bump the bike, or in this case the 35kg trike, over, and no smooth part to help you along.

This path should be great both for leisure cyclists and for actually going somewhere. But the stone bumps would put me off taking a regular bike on it, or going for a ride there with a young child on a bike; and given all of the above issues it’s very unlikely that I’ll ever take the trike (especially with L in) there again. It’s a desperate shame. This is exactly the sort of path that should be a lovely ride, happily shareable by cyclists and pedestrians and enjoyable for both.

I took the road back — a longer route, and with 30+ kg of scaff board in the box — and knocked 10 minutes off the journey. Bah.

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Baby & trike: the next stage!

Juliet Kemp

I’ve just realised that I have nearly no photos of L in the trike over the last 6 months; perhaps because we just use it as a transport option without thinking to take a photo.

However! As of this week, L-transporting in the trike has gone from this:

Red cargo trike box with rain cover, baby in car seat inside

to this:

Baby sitting up on box seat of a cargo bike, smiling at the camera and playing with a book

He seemed very happy to be making a more upright journey, and much less bothered by the bumps. (Which makes sense; sitting in a bumpy thing is more comfortable than lying down in a bumpy thing.) It is kind of terrifyingly old, though — a whole 7.5 months, no less. Scary.

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River of Flowers

Juliet Kemp

I came across River of Flowers recently: a project aiming to plant and encourage urban wildflower meadows to help the flow of pollinators across London. (It’s now spread to elsewhere in the world.)

As someone who’s trying to create her own little wildflower meadow in the back garden (all 12 or so sq m of it), I found this a lovely idea. Unfortunately it looks like signup on their London map is just for parks, allotments, gardens etc, but browsing those is fun too. There’s also a list of urban meadow partners, and mention of an Urban Meadows Kit to encourage people to grow mini-meadows in their front gardens, though it looks like that isn’t available right now.

There’s also some information on helping pollinators, which reminded me of a talk I was at this week, on solitary bees. I already knew that they are deeply fascinating creatures, but now I am even more convinced of it! There’s much more info via the Bees, Wasps, and Ants Recording Society, including basic info and more detailed information sheets. We already have a nice pile of dead wood at the bottom of the garden to provide insect-housing; I’m now intending to make some more solitary bee homes this winter. And to visit Roots and Shoots over in SW London to see their awesome Trellick Bee Tower. All hail the bees!

(More on helping bees in another post….)

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From skirt to (baby) trousers

Juliet Kemp

Another round of decluttering recently unearthed a skirt that I made for myself many years ago, but have never actually worn. After seeing two posts about upcycled baby trousers, one from a T-shirt and one from trousers, I thought I’d see if my skirt could become a pair of trousers for Leon.

I used an existing pair of cotton trousers to cut a pattern. As with the above posts, I cut them with the side seams on the existing side seam of the skirt, and the bottom hem on the skirt’s hem. No need to repeat work already done.

Baby trousers look very long from crotch to waistband, especially if (as here) you need to fit them over a cloth nappy.

denim material on desk, one leg of trousers cut and being used as pattern for second leg
First leg being used to cut out second leg.

Next, I pinned and sewed the front and back seams, and the crotch seam.

Pieces of trousers pinned together along front and back seam, ready to sew

Front and back seam sewn, trousers pinned together to sew crotch seam

They looked pretty good already at this stage. The beaded decoration was already on the old skirt (I’ll take it off if Leon gets too interested in it as I’m not sure how secure it is.)

Trousers turned right-way-out, waistband still unfinished. Dark stretchy denim with beaded decoration on front left leg

I pinned and sewed a waistband, with plenty of room to feed some elastic through.

Trousers inside out again, inch-thick waistband pinned ready to sew, with white pin marking for centre front

Note pin marking the place at the front of the trousers where I was going to leave a gap for the elastic to be fed in through.

Waistband of trousers, right way out, gathered with elastic threaded through, unfinished at front

Waistband sewn and elastic threaded through on a safety pin and pinned to what I thought was the right length.

Elasticated trousers aren’t that much of a fashion statement, but they’re the easiest to get on over a baby bottom, having as they do no fastenings to do up while the baby is trying to crawl away from you. I checked the tightness of the elastic on Leon, then cut the elastic, took a few stitches to hold the ends together, and hand-sewed the gap in the waistband shut.

Sleeping baby on bed, wearing new dark denim trousers and white/blue/green stripy top
Sleeping baby, new trousers!

I’m pleased with that bit of upcycling, which took maybe half an hour all in, and may be repeating it with a pair of worn-out trousers currently lurking in the fabric box.

food, growing things

Adventures in Parenting: food from the garden

Juliet Kemp

It’s taken a looong time this year (possibly because of June’s dreadful weather), but finally I am regularly harvesting food from the garden*. Carrots (my first ever really decent carrot crop!), courgettes, little cherry tomatoes, chard, and the last of the garlic.

Simultaneously, L has started on solids, which is great fun. We’re doing baby-led weaning, so I’ve been putting slightly more effort into lunch (ie not just hummous sandwiches) then just giving L some of whatever I fancy eating. If possible, including at least a little of our back garden veg. Stir-fried chard, courgette, carrot, and a little garlic, with rice or rice noodles; a few halved cherry tomatoes or some rocket on the side; pasta with garden veggies in a tomato-y sauce; steamed veg with a baked potato.

L is a big fan of courgettes and carrots (most of it eventually ends up on the floor, and thence in the dog, but he grabs and sucks and gums with enthusiasm). The first time I gave him a cherry tomato, he pulled the most peculiar face and drummed his feet on the high chair, and I assumed he must not like it. But no; when it fell out and I put it back on the table, he grabbed with enthusiasm and shoved it straight back in, for another flapping-and-grimacing session. I guess tomatoes must be pretty intense (and home-grown fresh tomatoes even more so) after six months of breastmilk.

Seeing him starting to experiment with food has been fun; being able to share food that I grew with him has been fantastic.

It’s not that I want to be parenty-high-horse about it. L is also eating plenty of stuff I didn’t grow; and I don’t garden because I think it’s better for L, although I do want to reduce household food miles**, but because I love doing it. It’s one of the non-parent things I’ve tried to keep up while submerged in newborn parenting.

But I love growing food, and I love eating food I’ve grown, and I love being able to include L in that. Some of those plants I planted (or watered, or thinned) while carrying him in a sling over the last six months. I harvest them while he plays on the grass, and then we both eat them. It feels like the way I want my life to fit together, with the various parts of it feeding (ha!) into one another.

And then I blog about it, and the words join into the same pattern.

* There’s been salad all summer; but we haven’t eaten that much of it. I have to conclude that we just don’t eat much in the way of salad leaves, even nice ones, and intend to plant much less of that next year.
** Not that our tiny back garden meets more than a fraction of our food needs, although I’m trying to improve on that over time as I work out what’s best to grow.