Category: barbeque

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Onions, winter seeds & mackerel pate

As long as I do things slowly with a rest and feet up between each activity, it’s surprising how much I can get through in a day whilst recuperating.

Husband went fishing yesterday afternoon at high tide, and came back with several beautiful fat mackerel.

We grilled them for supper last night on the fire pit. There’s nothing more delicious than fresh mackerel, succulent, crispy and smoky from the coals. It’s so good to feel that this is free bounty from the sea! We ate them with fresh lettuce, cucumbers and potatoes from the polycrub.

We cooked them all whilst spankingly fresh, knowing that there were more than we could eat so that the leftover ones could be turned into mackerel pate this morning. That will be my first job after we’ve cleared away the breakfast things.

Whilst bimbling around in the vegetable patch yesterday, bemoaning the state of the weeds and the rushes – knowing that I mustn’t try and sort it out else my poor, tortured stomach muscles would give up the ghost completely – I noticed that the onions were about ready to harvest, and that some of them were sending up flower shoots.

An onion with a flower shoot

The perceived wisdom from Google is that when onions do this they should be harvested immediately. It also advises that onions that have done this should be used first as they don’t store well.

I think a few minutes of harvesting onions later today is on the cards. They come out of the soil easily being grown so so close to the surface, so it’s really no effort. Honestly.

The final job that I want to achieve this weekend is to sow some winter seeds. Once the onions have been lifted, followed very soon by the potatoes, there will be some raised bed space made free, and I’m keen to keep vegetable production going.

I’m going to try some Asian greens and winter radish alongside the winter lettuce and kale. Let’s see what we can achieve. I love that growing is a constant cycle of experimenting and learning.

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A profusion of mackerel

Friends from the village gave us a bag of freshly caught mackerel from Armadale Bay yesterday.

They arrived, shining, still smelling of the sea. I always think they’re such lovely looking fish.

Husband heroically gutted them all in the tiny caravan kitchen sink and we decided to cook them over the barbecue whilst they were at their best.

Mackerel

There is nothing quite like freshly chargrilled mackerel. They were moist, sweet and slightly smoky from the fire, their skins blackened and crispy. We ate them whilst the sun went down with good bread, dill-pickled cucumber and some fresh salad.

There was enough left over to make mackerel pate this morning. The meat was flaked off into a bowl with cream cheese, lemon juice and zest, a lime, sea salt and cracked black pepper.

Mackerel pate

A pot has gone into the fridge to eat later with sourdough toast, and a bowl has been wrapped as a thankyou gift for the neighbours who brought us the fish.

Later on toasted sourdough

I was just musing that the last time we ate mackerel pate was an expensive pot bought from a London deli. And here we are a year on, eating the same, but probably fresher and more flavoursome than anything bought from a shop.

Eaten with thanks as part of our new life here in Scotland.

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Hot, hot, hot

The weather here on the island has been very hot over the past week. The caravan has suddenly transformed from fridge to oven..

The temperature gauge inside recorded 26 degrees centigrade yesterday, and that’s uncomfortably warm for us. Especially when opening windows to try and catch a breeze results in swarms of midges coming in off the croft…reminder to self, we must get some midge netting fitted to the windows.

The seedlings however are loving it. Uncle Bert’s Kale is growing madly, the potato plants are all greening up nicely and I have my first bean on my borlotti bean plant!

It was too hot to cook indoors yesterday and we were too tired to summon up a BBQ, so we headed down to Camuscross early to try and get a table for a cold drink and some supper. It’s so good to be able to do that again now that lockdown has eased.

There are worse places to be on a hot June evening… This time last year we were in London… I know where I’d rather be.

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We have warmth!

Ha ha! Happy faces! The sun has returned! The air and the soil have warmed up and as I speak we have blue skies and a soft, warm breeze.

It will be the midges soon, but I’m hoping that being at the top of a hill with more wind than most that we’ll escape the worst of them. We’re prepared, just in case – I’ve bought midge hats and nets so that if we do get bombarded we have a fighting chance of avoiding being eaten alive whilst we run back to the caravan.

Impromptu BBQ

We had an impromptu barbecue last night to celebrate the lovely evening. These shots were taken at about 7pm. As the sun dipped behind the hill at the back of the croft at around 10pm it started to get colder, and we wrapped up in blankets and added a bit more wood to the fire.

The birds are singing, the sun is shining, and husband has thrown open all the doors and windows in the house whilst he is working so that it cools down.

I don’t want to count my chickens, but it seems like summer has come at last…

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First meal outdoors

It was a long, hard day after a heavy week of work on the build and the croft. We decided to add a fifth vegetable bed to the growing area (remind me I said we’d start small this year? 😳) so that I could plant up my globe artichoke seedlings.

These perennials grow huge, so they ideally needed a bed of their own, which I wanted to site perpendicular to the rest to add a kind of windbreak effect.

New veg bed

For speed, and cost (the price of wood is crazy right now) we decided to use what we had on the croft and make another hugelkutur bed. The existing ones are working well for us, and we still have lots of rushes and soil that we can reuse.

Countless wheelbarrow loads of cardboard, rushes, soil, compost and woodchip later we had another bed ready for planting. It takes us about  four hours to build one of these, and it’s heavy, manual work.

We decided that we deserved a bit of relaxation and supper outside after all that exertion. We carried out some chairs and a fold-up table and positioned them amongst the building rubbish.

We’d recently bought a firepit BBQ which needed testing, so we fired her up and cooked supper on it. There’s nothing quite like the taste of real charcoal grilled Scottish steaks eaten outdoors… Everything tastes better in the open air, I think.

It was lovely to relax together eating, drinking and watching the incredible vista of sea and sky in front of us.

We added some building wood scraps to the fire to make a bit of a blaze after the charcoal had died down, and sat toasting our toes with a small glass of whisky, watching the rain and rainbows sweep across the Knoydart peninsula.

Such incredible natural beauty. Feeling very lucky to be here.