Rose Oil

I tried last summer for the first time to make a rose oil. I knew it would be very small, as I didn't have many fragrant roses to use.. I had two stupendously large and fragrant and velvety blooms from my Etoile de Holland, which had only been a cutting six months earlier and I had the flowers from my wild rose - it would put one out for me every couple of days, but it was still getting its feet in, having been transplanted to the new garden fairly recently too.

Well, this year I have an abundance of roses, hurrah! You know, though, I couldn't pick the Etoile de Holland blooms, about 10 this year. It flowered early while we were enjoying warm weather (seems like a while ago now, huh?) and I enjoyed seeing it from the house so much and smelling its fragrance filling the warm still air out in the garden that I couldn't do it. Mum-in-law tells me that I may be able to get it to do a second flowering later in the year .. I shall feed it and talk to it and see.

However, my old friend the wild rose is now a veritable bush .. this summer it is just flowering and flowering and there are always more buds coming, it seems. And the flowers are sweetly fragrant. The only problem with picking them is that they always have a bee or hoverfly inside... and I should point out here that I always leave plenty of flowers for the bees when I gather them to use.

So how do you make rose oil.. well you just stick the (dry) petals in a little jar, cover them with oil and sit the jar in the sun. I use sunflower oil, as it doesn't have much smell and the rose fragrance can be easily overpowered by stronger smelling oils. Put your jar on some kitchen roll because it will ooze however careful you are. The idea is that you leave the petals in the oil to infuse in the sun. When all the colour has gone from the petals you can carefully strain the oil, ringing all the oil from the spent petals using a muslin or coffee filter paper, then return to the jar with new petals. I just keep adding petals to the jar each day till its full then wait. The main problem is getting enough sunshine! I have a very sunny southfacing windowsill (which happily grows tomatoes and sunflowers) so I am hoping for the best, but the weather will have to start playing ball at some point if it is to work! It will take months and months, but I think it will be worth it.

Last year I only achieved a very slightly scented oil, due to a lack of sufficient roses over the whole season. I made it into little pots of rose lipbalm, and the rose fragrance was so ephemeral as to barely be there .. sometimes I thought I was just remembering it or smelling it with the 'nose of faith'! But it so much better than using essential oil, which is desperately expensive in any case. Will let you know how this year's turns out.

I have read about making rose oil in a number of different places, all outlining the same basic method, but it is included in 'Herbal Remedies: A practical beginner's guide fo making effective remedies in the kitchen' by Christopher Hedley and Non Shaw, which I can't recommend highly enough if you want a good guide to making infused oils and salves at home. Its what I used when I started on my herbal adventures and has good clear instructions with plenty of photos.

Or, if you love all things historical, like me, you might like to read the Anglo-Saxon version, (translated) from the Lacnunga manuscript dating to around 1000AD:

'For rose oil, make it thus: one pound of oil, one ounce of mature rose flower; mix together in a glass jar under gypsum and hang in the sun for 40 days so its power may be styptic and cooling; use it for many illnesses, mostly for pain in the head ... that is emigraneum'

This is taken from 'Leechcraft: Early English Charms, Plantlore and Healing' by Stephen Pollington, which I was thumbing through researching for something else entirely when this rose oil entry jumped out and took me by surprise. Imagine my delight (especially as a migraine sufferer!)

Chives

I've got a feeling the titles for all the posts this month are going to start with the same word! We are dealing with an abundance of chives at the moment, following the stormy weather end of last week which horizontal-ised my lovely tall vertical flowering chive clumps. So what do you do with a forest of chives? Well you may ask! I've been scratching my head all day and here's what I've come up with so far..

Chive Vinegars
I had already made a fair-sized bottle of chive vinegar using an earlier harvest end of April this year, as part of a learning assignment on the Susun Weed course I'm taking. But since I'd bottled it, I'd seen somewhere to make a vinegar with the blossoms. So I have a large bottle of blossom vinegar brewing now too. Herbal vinegar takes 6 weeks to mature, most places say, so my end of April batch was about ready and I strained and tasted it this morning. Its good! And I think we can probably use plenty because its good as a general purpose vinegar for liberal use on your fish and chips for example, rather than just for salad dressings.

Chive and Lemon Butter
Ok, so flowers taken care of. Now a good sort of the stems - young, fresh, newer ones can be preserved as herbal butter. My favourite one which I use lots of is just grated lemon zest and finely chopped chives. This is fantastic on the new potatoes we're eating at the moment, but is also really nice for a jacket potato in the autumn or for roast chicken (push the butter up underneath the skin, so it oozes out and bastes the bird while its in the oven).

All you need to do is mush the herb and lemon zest into the butter and just squidge it all about until evenly distributed. It helps if you remembered to get the butter out of the fridge a while beforehand (note to self!) and you might want to dice it to speed things along. Now you can do one of two things with your buttery mixture. Where I've followed recipes for herb butters in the past, they always tell you to place a dollop of mixture onto clingfilm or tinfoil and roll it into a sausage shape. You can then just twist up the two ends and you have a convenient parcel for storing your butter in the fridge, just slicing off segments as you need them, or in the freezer for longer term use.

Maybe its just my lack of finesse in these matters, but this method often leaves me struggling to extricate bits of tinfoil or worse clingfilm from my nice little butter rounds. Its alright for storing in the fridge, but if I'm going to freeze the butter I now always use the second method which is...

.. ice-cube trays. This is something I learned when making batches of babyfoods for the little'un when he was weaning. If you freeze things in ice-cube trays, then once they are frozen you just pop them out and into a freezer bag or container and they stay in handy little portions. You can then just take as many or as few as you need out of the freezer. I have to confess to having one little tray of heart-shaped cubes - this always goes down well if you have guests and want to put a little butter portion on the side of each plate or in a little dish on the table. But this pleasing little touch is entirely lost on my boys in everyday situations.

The more robust stalks I chopped finely and decided to just freeze in a bag - I will try adding to soups, to get that delicious onion flavour, where they will be cooked a nice long time so that they become tender. So now I'm left with bunches of stems that are somewhere between these two extremes - time to get baking! I've got a really nice recipe for savoury muffins which I'll share with you next time.

Chive and Marigold Scones

Well its June today, and officially summer! I've never really tried the edible flowers and petals thing before, but this seems as good a time as any to give it a go. And time to do something with the vast quantity of chives I have overflowing the veg patch (standby for more chive recipes to follow!).

A big thank you to Debs at Herbal Haven for this fabby Chive Flower and Marigold Petal Savoury Cheese Scone recipe which me and the little'un donned our aprons to try out this morning.

I'm a great cheese scone fan in general (hence the extra bit of grated cheese to top several of the scones!) and love the onion taste of chives, which I use to make Cheese and Chive muffins, but I've never used the actual flowers before. In previous years I've used the stems then let the plants flower and collected the seed to use in future. But since I took to digging up and dividing chive clumps I have achieved a chive forest and the flowers are everywhere, such a shame not to try and use them.

Because they are practically golf-ball sized, I pulled the petals out - this was fiddly until I got the knack of how to hold/pinch/squeeze to remove the green parts of each little floret. Still the marigold petals couldn't be easier - picked a flower straight from the plant by the back door, gave it a good shake and my assistant helped pull the petals out (nice and easy).

Here he is mixing the dough - look at him go, that spoon is just a blur!

And, voila! Savoury Scones.














Its a really good recipe: quick and virtually idiot-proof, but delicious. Although the colour of the chive petals vanished in the oven, you could really get the onion flavour coming through in every bite. We'll definitely make these again and next time use much more herb - the bright colour of the marigold petals looks really attractive, sunshine on a plate.

Share your herby recipes here ... especially chive ones, lol!

Soup Magic

January has not been great... everyone is sick and/or grumpy. But there was a moment of magic today! In my constant effort to not waste food, eat more veg and cook from scratch, etc I knocked up a soup for lunch. I had a slightly wrinkled and unappetising-looking celeriac languishing in the basket of roots, so I looked up a recipe for celeriac soup. I wasn't expecting much - the list of ingredients looked so innocuous, nothing exciting. You know, an onion, a stock cube, a bit of milk.

But it totally rocked!

And so I am reminded of the power of soup to be more than the sum of its ingredients. We had it in giant mugs with crunchy slices of bread toasted under the grill with a drizzle of oil and pinch of thyme. It was full of flavour and it cheered me up and made me feel better about the world and everything in it.

And the little'un dunked his crunchy toast in the soup and scooped it up and yummed it down with great enthusiasm (before falling off his chair while attempting to imitate the washing machine which just went into spin cycle - its OK, I caught him by the ankle - no harm done!)

So there we are .. whatever the problem is, I think the answer is probably soup.

Apples and Pears (cont)

In case you were wondering what I did with all those apples and pears .. well, firstly I made mulled spiced pears and figs for Christmas presents. This was one of those torn from a magazine recipes now creased and splattered over time. We had the bit over that wouldn't fit into the kilner jars while it was still warm with a little vanilla icecream. Remains to be seen if the other jars make it until Christmas and actually leave the building!

Mulled Spiced Pears and Figs

200ml white wine vinegar
400ml ruby port
250g soft light brown sugar
heaped tspn mixed spice
a cinnamon stick
7 pears, peeled and cored and cut into 8 wedges
250g ready to eat dried figs, cut into halves

Put the vinegar, port and 200ml water in a pan with the sugar and spices. Stir, bring to the boil, then simmer for 35mins. Add the pears, bring back to the boil and cook for 2-3mins. Transfer the pears to a bowl and stir in the figs. Boil the liquid in the pan for about 10-15mins until halved in volume. Pack the fruit tightly into sterilised jars, top up with the syrup and seal.

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And I made these apple soul cakes from a marvellous apple recipe post at Tales of a Kitchen Herbwife (thankyou, Sarah!). We had them still warm from the oven with mugs of tea while watching fireworks outside on Bonfire Night. I had been reading about soul cakes and the tradition of leaving little cakes outside the front door to appease any wandering souls on Halloween, so was really excited to stumble across this recipe.

Pumpkin and Spice

Made a pumpkin soup for Halloween, and it was SO nice to grind the toasted spices, the fragrance filled the kitchen. Carved the pumpkin into a little lantern, too.

Apples and Pears

We have been blessed this week with a rather wonderful crate brimming with apples and pears from mum-in-law's garden. Its been a bumper crop for both this year and I've been busy devising more and more schemes to make the most of them, having distributed the bounty as far and wide as possible amongst friends and neighbours. One of the things I love about this time of year and its abundance is the passing on of tips and recipes for storing, freezing, preserving and baking of produce.. I am learning so much. We eat a lot of porridge in the winter, so I have stewed and frozen plenty of fruit to put on top. We only have a small freezer, though .. already made a huge batch of chutney, so looking up new recipes. Please share yours if you know some good ones?

Have found this book from the Soil Association invaluable this year as it has good illustrations of the different varieties of fruit and vegetables and tells which are best for which sorts of thing. Also, as well as full-blown recipes, it has lots of quick and easy ideas for enjoying produce simply (which is ideal when you have a glut and aren't able to spend too many hours in the kitchen!), such as yesterday's upside down cake (recipe to follow)

Pear and Ginger Upside Down Cake

Thickly butter an 8'' sandwich tin and sprinkle liberally with light soft brown sugar.
Lay peeled, cored pear halves attractively on top (I did slices).
Beat 4oz each softened butter, light soft brown sugar, wholemeal SR flour with 2 tspns ground ginger, 1tsp baking powder and 2 eggs.
Spread over the pears.
Bake at 190degreesC(375degreesF/Gas 5) for 20 minutes until just firm.
Turn out.

Supermarket SOS

Got the chance to try out some remedies this week, in my battle with a horrible flu thing. Not having my usual stocks of herbs and remedies, for one reason and another, I was unprepared and at something of a loss - but its amazing what you can still do with just a quick trip to the local supermarket these days. Fresh sage, fresh lemon thyme, a squeezy pot of organic runny honey, a couple of lemons and a big lump of ginger. And a ferret around in my box of essential oils. Here are some things that really worked ..

Strong cup of sage tea with a dollop of honey stirred in for a sore throat - gargle with each mouthful before you swallow.

Lemon Thyme tea with dollop of honey stirred in for nose, throat and chestiness - this one was better made in a pot and allowed to brew for a good 10minutes.

Steam inhalation for congestion - washing up bowl, hot water and a few drops of Rosemary, Eucalyptus, Peppermint essential oils - towel over your head and inhale!

A few drops of the same oils in a table spoon of carrier oil (I used sweet almond but sunflower oil would do) as a chest rub and in the bath for when you start coughing and/or it goes to your chest.

For mornings when your cold is so bad you think you will never be able to get going: lemon juice and several slices of root ginger in hot water, strong as you can take it with a nice dollop of honey mixed in. I peeled and crushed some of the ginger to get the juice. You can feel this warm you up all the way down to your toes - and its great when you can't taste anything anymore, because you will definitely taste this.

And as soon as you feel the slightest suspicion of a cold coming, take a garlic capsule every day I'm sure this lessens the impact and gets rid of it faster. I also tried a Nigel Slater thing - roasted a whole head of garlic, then popped the flesh out of each clove and spread the puree onto toast. It was absolutely delicious and I sure being in the warm kitchen smelling the roasting garlic in the oven didn't do me any harm either.
Hope this helps someone else out there feeling poorly and miserable!!

Please contribute any tried and tested cold and flu remedies that you set store by?

Pumpkin

I was given an ENORMOUS pumpkin for halloween this year ... so I've been looking up recipes as I'm determined not to waste any!



This recipe is from my Abel and Cole organic box newsletter. They have lots more pumpkin recipes on their fab website, too.

Pumpkin Muffins
225g pumpkin flesh
2 eggs
tspn ginger
1/2 tspn cloves
125ml milk
50ml honey
50g brown sugar
2 tbspn butter
175g plain white flour
1 tspn baking powder
tspn cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C. Steam the pumpkin flesh until tender then puree and allow to cool.

Mix together the eggs, milk, honey, sugar and butter and mix with the pumpkin.

Combine flour, baking powder and spices and add to the pumpkin mixture. Stir to mix but don't overmix.

Pour into muffin pans and bake for 18 to 20 minutes (makes 12).

Carrot and Geranium Salve

Yesterday I made a new batch of Carrot and Geranium Salve, which is cooling, soothing and nutritive for any dry and chapped skin. The ingredients are totally natural, healing and wholesome (as opposed to the synthetic components in commercial preparations which include byproducts of the petrochemical industry), you can make it easily at home and it keeps indefinitely. So I love it! I use mine as a lip balm, which I apply morning and night. I can also recommend it for when you have a cold, and the skin on your nose becomes red and sore and chapped through constantly using tissues: put some salve on at night before you go to sleep and be amazed how it heals!

The basic carrot salve recipe comes from a wonderful book 'Herbal Remedies: A practical beginner's guide to making effective remedies in the kitchen' by Christopher Hedley and Non Shaw which is full of very simple but effective remedies which you can make from vegetables, herbs and spices readily to hand with no fancy equipment or utensils needed. It really got me into having a go at home-made remedies.

The original recipe gives the proportion of 1 part beeswax to 5 parts oil, although I use much more beeswax than this to give a more solid ointment more appropriate to a lip balm. Beeswax is so nutritive and healing on its own, that the higher the content the better, I find. I am lucky enough to have been given an ample free supply by a bee-keeping friend, but you can buy beeswax granules fairly readily. You don't need to use any particular fine or expensive oil for this recipe. Regular sunflower oil is perfect, though I start a new bottle of organic oil for making the salve.

The quantity specified depends on the size of your carrots, but makes rather a lot so you might want to halve it. Yesterday's batch made about a pint which fills enough jars to give several away to friends and relatives while still supplying enough for general use for the next few years. You need to collect and clean/ sterilise lots of little glass jars. I like to save little jam and marmalade pots, but I also reuse containers, some plastic, which had other creams or beauty products in.

As well as thickening the recipe with extra beeswax, I have also changed it by adding a drop or two of essential oil at the end of the process. You really don't need any more than this to impart a pleasant fragrance to the salve (which on its own doesn't really smell of anything). Geranium seems to suit very nicely, and actually has its own skin soothing properties which makes it an ideal choice.

General hints and tips are:

1. If you're anything like me, you WILL get drops of oil everywhere so have a kitchen roll to hand, and run a sink full of hot soapy water before you start!

2. Its not dangerous or difficult to do, but you will be heating oil.. so don't allow yourself to be distracted (this is not a recipe to do with children running under your feet or a phone that needs answering nearby)

3. You always need more jars than you think you will!


Carrot and Geranium Salve

Take two plumptious fresh organic carrots



Wash and grate them, then put them in a large frying pan and just cover them with sunflower oil. Fry gently until the oil turns orange and the carrot is soft.



Remove from the heat and, when cooled slightly, strain into a pyrex jug.



This is your infused oil. To thicken this into an ointment, place the jug into a pan of gently boiling water. The water level should be lower than the level of the oil in the jug. Keep it simmering very gently on a low heat, while adding chunks of beeswax to the oil. Stir occasionally with a wooden spatula to encourage the beeswax to melt and disperse.



To test the consistency, pour a little of the mixture into one (the smallest) of your clean jars and allow to cool.



Return the jug to the pan and add more beeswax if you would like a thicker (more solid) ointment. Once the mixture is ready, remove from the heat and allow to stand and cool slightly. When it is only warm rather than hot, add one or two drops of geranium essential oil and mix in well before pouring into the remaining clean jars.



You will notice that as the ointment sets it forms a little dimple in the centre. This is supposed to happen and isn't a problem. If you want a more perfect finish, most books say you can keep a little mixture back to reheat and use to top up the jars (I have never felt the need!)

Elderflower Cordial

Just wanted to share this link to an Elderflower Cordial recipe which I was very kindly sent by Naturewitch... I know some of you out there will like to see it too.

I now have my very own elder in my herb garden, a young tree which obligingly self-seeded itself into a tub.. you can imagine how thrilled I am! It is small enough that I think it has a good few years before it becomes too large for the roof garden, and it is covered with little flowerbuds. Many of the local elder trees are already in bloom, so I'm looking forward to seeing the first blossom on the Hedgewitch tree sometime soon.

Weeds and Wildflowers

I always intended Earth and Tree to be a repository of information and resources, a kind of 'bringing together of interesting stuff' relating to a more natural and earth-centred way of life. To this end, I spent some time (more than I anticipated!) yesterday organising all the blog links on the side column into categories so that we can find things more easily.. if your site has fallen off, please let me know as it won't be intentional! Some of the wonderful blogs could have been listed under several categories but I just went with what felt right at the time .. hope you will find it useful?

Speaking of bringing together interesting stuff...

Its a good time of year for Backyard Herbalism with all the weeds and wildflowers in abundance, including the dandelion .. if you're wondering what you can do with them, check out Greenwoman's post on making a Dandelion Salve and Yolanda's post on making a Soup with the buds.



And if you liked yesterday's post on the Cowslip, you should also see the Wiggly Wigglers post on Cowpats and Cowslips which has more interesting information for you.

Chicken Out!

For anybody wondering about the noisy chicken wandering about at the bottom of my blog (!) ..

its a badge I added after signing up for the Chicken Out campaign. Those of you in the UK will have seen Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver (TV chefs) and their series of programmes highlighting the miserable existence of ultra-cheap supermarket chickens. They are campaigning for free-range farming methods. Their website is great, as it has ways to get involved and information and recipes and all sorts.




I don't usually have the speakers on when I blog, so I was completely unaware of the sound effects till the other day when I'd put the sound on to watch a u-tube clip someone sent me. Got the fright of my life when my blog page opened!!

Herbal Haven

A little bit of herbal wisdom .. the Herbal Haven spring newsletter

I'm hoping to visit their stall at the garden show at Capel Manor horticultural college tomorrow (am excited!)

Abel and Cole

I love opening my organic fruit and veg box each week and seeing what treasures are inside ....



.... and the website has lots of helpful recipes for what to do with various vegetables (click title to visit).

I would like to go to a local farm shop ... but there aren't any in London! Have just found out about a new farmers' market not too far from me, though, that I might try out this weekend... UK farmers' markets

Hey Pesto!

I had a great afternoon in the kitchen today, listening to the radio and knocking up a batch of pesto.

I have a basic recipe which gives the right proportions of the ingredients (see below), but I basically just keep adding olive oil until the consistency is OK. Oh, and I always put more garlic than it says, because I like it and its so good for me. Today I had two good handfuls of basil and one of parsley and I substituted the pine nuts with walnuts, which is a nice variation. Incidentally, I've seen a recipe somewhere lately for a three herb pesto with Lemon Balm which I might try in the summer.

The motivation behind today's pesto-making was Daughter of the Soil's wonderful post last week about growing peppers - especially the long pointy Ramiro peppers, my favourite.

http://daughterofthesoil.blogspot.com/2008/02/peppers-and-ice.html

I've never tried to grow peppers, but felt inspired to have a go so I decided to get some to roast and use the seed. No time to lose, as peppers need to get going fairly early in the UK so that they have chance to ripen - I think the advice was by early March.

I like to make roast peppers by halving and de-seeding them, then stuffing them with a mixture of cubed organic feta cheese, halved organic cherry tomatoes and home-made pesto. Cook for about half an hour in the oven.



Pesto Sauce

2 garlic cloves, crushed
8 tbspn chopped fresh basil
2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
50g pine nuts
100g grated Parmesan cheese
150ml olive oil
seasoning

Instructions: Put it all in the blender and press 'go'.. hey pesto!