Wet and then dry as life springs forth

Sunday Glummery

We've had a good couple of days of days activity on the plot, first in the rain on Sunday, followed by a quick  dash down in the evening sun after work yesterday. The amount of green, relative to unplanted brown, is increasing all the time, which is making things start to look a bit more productive and full of life.

Restaurant Review: The Broad Chare, Newcastle

The dining room at The Broad Chare

You know that feeling you get when something you both fully expected, and wanted, to be great turns out to be actually not that special at all? I experienced exactly that sense of anti-climax with the last Radiohead album. Repeated listens revealed nothing new, and I had to give up and accept it was just...pretty average. Radiohead being who they are, this was probably a deliberately contrarian ploy on their part to question the viability of the album as a musical form. I'm going to assume that The Broad Chare weren't similarly trying to problematise the three-course meal as a format of dining during our recent visit, and that the fact we had a fairly mediocre meal was down to error rather than design.

Sun, Songbirds and... decomposing marrows

Gathering Rhubarb in the Sun

Just another absolute stonker of a day in allotment land today. Light cloud with periods of bright (and hot!) sunshine made for basically perfect conditions. I've managed to pick up just a touch of sunburn; you never hear of it!

Magic Times as the Sun Shines

The plot on Saturday

The last couple of days have been the sort that need to be thoroughly enjoyed and then just as thoroughly committed to memory, in order to sustain good humour and perseverance during periods of less favourable climatic patterns. These are the fine and heady times when the sun shines, things grow and the world seems a generous and benevolent host. I've never seen the plots as busy, which is no doubt partly due to the fact that rents were due, but people were definitely making the most of the loveliness.

Restaurant Review: Tenji, Newcastle

The words "sushi" and "all you can eat" are, one imagines, not regularly found together within complimentary sentences. At probably the most famous sushi joint in the world (3 Michelin Stars and a movie have been dedicated to it) a meal lasts about half an hour, and you have no choice. So it's perhaps against the odds that Tenji on Barrack Road, where they're happy for you to linger until you can't face another grain of rice, and you have a really large selection to choose from, is as good as it is.

Recipe for a rubbish Sunday

Football on the radio and a bag full of Pentland Javelins

First, take the general malaise and existential vertigo that comes with the fag-end of a second day hangover. Allow to fester for a while. Next, fold in some seriously windy gusts of the polytunnel-wrecking variety. Finally, sprinkle liberally with an abject display from Newcastle United, listened to while down at the plot, against an apparently rejuvenated mackem side led by he of the dubious political leanings. If that's not enough to seriously piss on your chips then you're a stronger soul than me.

A fine day to throw up a polytunnel

A barrow full of tunnel

Saturday was an absolutely magic day down on the plot with almost wall to wall blue skies, barely a whisper of breeze and a mild suggestion of heat in the air. Not quite T-shirt time, but getting there. We took the chance to mosey on down and finally get to grips with the polytunnel we bought back in July last year. I pessimistically assumed that either some of the vital bits of it would have since disappeared or that we would be thwarted by an instruction sheet from hell.

A Review of sorts: Grainger Market in general, Lindsey's To Go and mmm... in particular

Today's Menu

Easily one of my favourite bits of Newcastle is the Grainger Market. As a student I used to come here with my housemates and carry away as many cheapo frozen pizzas as our under-nourished hands could grasp. I think they were only about 50p each, and yes, they were as grim as hell. But: 50p! The nasty-ass freezer shop that flogged these is now gone, and among the traditional butchers and grocers are these days a liberal sprinkling of more worthy residents. There is a great mix of places to get some excellent supplies; top notch cheese at Matthews (they have our favourite ever blue; Cashel), to Pumphreys' great range of coffees; The French Oven do a fine range of breads and baked goods (including very decent macarons), and there are relative newcomers like Pet Lamb Patisserie. In amongst all this lot are hardware stores, a stall that sells collectible gaming cards, another hawking Mills and Boon, and of course the fine institution that is the fabulously and glamorously named "Cheap Tab Shop". Come ye, for herewith the stuff of life, in all its wondrous forms.

Lift Off!

Full of chit

The snow stopped, the gales abated, heck- even our old pal the sun even made a prolonged appearance. I'm not calling the arrival of Spring yet, but it was lovely to spend the day down on the plot and we even got our (possibly over-chitted) "Rocket" first earlies into the ground. It felt good, and now you get to read about some actual gardening for once. Treats all round!

If you can't grow, borrow from nature, or; A Recipe for Wild Garlic Pesto

View down the Tyne

So the weather's still crap, have you noticed? I imagine you did, unless you're really good at ignoring these kind of things, or live in an underground compound in which case it seems odd to me that you should be looking at a blog that is nominally about gardening. Going to be growing many leeks in that subterranean bunker of yours? You want to check out one of those survivalist blogs, that'd be far more up your street. Anyway, enough rambling; despite having taken last week off work with the vague hope of finally digging over enough of the plot to plant some seed spuds out, it was too cold and wet. I'm not planting potatoes in snow. The wednesday's forecast was for flurries of white stuff, so I headed out for a cycle before it hit, with the intention of grabbing some wild garlic from the banks of the Tyne. If you can't grow, borrow.

Recipe: Mussels with N'duja and Fennel

Aftermath

It would be great to be writing about how I'd just planted out our seed potatoes or having just put up our polytunnel but the weather continues to be irredeemably gash, so that's not happening. Winter seems either unwilling or unable to leave the stage, despite the booing and jeers from all sides. It really is the tenacious, thick-skinned git of the seasonal family. I stopped being hacked off for just long enough to nip to the shops today, picking up en route one of the foods that is meant to be best at this time of year (Winter, that is); mussels.

Chewing our way round London

For those with an at least passing interest in food, London can, viewed from afar, almost seem a bit... daunting. There's just too bloody much stuff to eat. With only a few days excursion in our nation's capital the temptation is to draw up some sort of "must do" list, cramming in as much as one's available time and gastric capacity will allow.

Feeling a bit seedy...

As minds turn to what can be sown when, I've just done a full stock-take of our seed stash and, well, we've got loads. It's amazing how many packets you can rack up without even really paying attention. As well as the few orders we've put in to various companies and the leftovers from last year, they tend to accumulate via being stuck to the front of gardening magazines, not to mention the odd donation.

All fired up

The sun comes out; is spring about to be sprung?

An absolutely gorgeous day today, so with just a faint whisper of a hangover I headed down to the plot for the first decent stint in a long time. There was some actual heat in the sun and it was beautifully bright. I did briefly stick a fork in the soil, but it's still treacherously damp and cloddy, so no real digging action today, that'll have to wait. There was plenty enough tidying-up to keep me occupied for a good few hours.

Let there be white

The track to the plot today

As it hadn't rained for a good few days, we were all geared up to do a bit of digging on the plot this weekend, hoping that the soil might have become just a bit less waterlogged. However that plan was scuppered as we woke up on Saturday to find a good few inches of snow had fallen during the night; I don't remember hearing that being advertised. We took a walk down today to have a look and take waste food to add to the compost.

Restaurant Review: Alyn Williams at The Westbury

Trips down to London have been sadly infrequent recently. One of the good bits about a visit southward is the chance to seek out a relatively bargainous lunch at one of the zillion or so top-flight restaurants that litter the place. Newcastle is not bad for eating out, with a few genuinely excellent restaurants and eateries, but with food as most other things, Londoners are farcically spoiled. Not for us are the multi-course extravaganzas of matched-wine tasting menus (we need the train fare home...), but, especially at lunchtime, it's very possible to eat some amazing stuff without incurring a bill that runs into hundreds of pounds. On previous sorties south we've been to Texture, Pied a Terre and Arbutus, all of which were great in different ways. This time out, I had seen some good reviews of Alyn Williams' newish restaurant in the Mayfair-situated Westbury Hotel, so off we schlepped to check it out.

Getting back into it...

It has been almost a month since we've done anything even vaguely allotment-related, which, clearly, simply won't do. In fairness, the weather during that period has pretty much all been on a scale from mildly repellent to cataclysmically shit, so there hasn't really been much to do. Better to neglect now than in the middle of summer when things are really happening. Yes, that's it; we've been getting our neglecting in at the most appropriate time.

Bit of a sausage-fest in here...

On the way to sausage heaven, pretending to drive the train and loving it

One doesn't, as a rule, get invited to an afternoon of sausage making very often, so it'd be churlish to turn it down when it does happen, and so I didn't. A bit of background: a friend, Mark, who does a lot of shooting of game, had started making sausages from the resultant carcasses. Having recently upgraded from a manual sausage maker to an electric version, he invited me and another friend, Neil, round to have a bash at putting some flavourings and seasonings together. I might have known it was going to be a good day when, despite getting on at Monument, I managed to snare the only really good seat on the Metro. That never happens.

A meagre but mealworthy midwinter harvest

A couple of years ago, before we got ourselves the allotment, the idea that it would be possible to be feeding ourselves from veg harvested at this time of year would've seemed pretty daft. I have vague memories of eating autumn-harvested kale from the garden when I was a kid, but that would be about it; Dad was, for the most part, a summer gardener only and as far as I knew, winter was for staying inside, and not for pulling up leeks

Happy New Year!

Impressive church. Drunken loutishness not pictured.

Belated good tidings; hope you had a great festive period and that the near year has kicked off in a style not too dissimilar to that which you would have chosen for it. We had excellent Christmasses. Plural? Why yes; you see Kasia's folks are Polish, and so for the them Christmas Eve is the big thing, and so she was at home celebrating that while I headed off home to Scotland to imbibe outlandish quantities of various comestibles and accompanying libations with my clan. Just when I had started to feel healthy-ish again, it was down to Lincoln for a stag do. Lincoln is a lovely city and it was good to have a chance to wander round and see the Cathedral and old town before the staggish unpleasantness kicked off, booze and matching shirts to the fore...