Category: isle of skye

I am up early on these summer mornings. Usually it’s around 5.30am, ready to start proving the dough for my cinnamon buns.

I may be up but I’m far from at my most alert and awake at this time of the morning.

My first job is usually a sad one – cleaning up the dead voles, shrews and little birds whose corpses litter the hallway. The cats hunt at night and will insist on bringing their catches home to eviscerate. It’s horrible, but it’s nature, I guess.

If it’s too much for me, or if I’m running late, I yell for husband to come down and remove them. He’s very obliging that way.

I clean and disinfect the kitchen worktops, don the apron and hair covering, gather my baking things, weigh the yeast, melt the butter, warm the milk. Mixy, mixy, mixy.

Usually it’s a meditative time, the house silent and the sound of the birds greeting the dawn filtering in through the open patio door.

But this morning was different. Freya arrived with a live shrew in her mouth and dropped it triumphantly in the hall.

A shrew is not like a vole or a mouse. A vole is a plump little butterball of an animal, nervous and wary. A shew is a tiny thing with sharp teeth and a serious attitude. They fight back and they are indignant at being caught. And they’re fast.

It shot down the hall complaining loudly and squeezed under the pantry door. Oh no! The last place we needed it to go. I let Freya in. Silence descended whilst they both listened for each other.

I continued to prepare the bun dough. Freya got bored waiting for the shrew to emerge from under the shelves. She yawned and retreated to the food bowl. The shrew warily emerged and made a dash for the utility room where it took refuge behind the washing machine.

I was beginning to become resigned to having a resident shrew in the house when I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye whilst at the breakfast table. The shrew had emerged and husband managed to catch it and put it out.

And who says that rural living is boring? 😂

We harvested our first few pots of potatoes this afternoon.

A bit disappointing in terms of yield, but to be honest we didn’t expect much as it’s been constant rain and winter temperatures since May.

These were the Arran Pilot variety, recommended for our climate.

We cooked and served them simply with butter and sea salt, alongside salad from the croft and grilled pork tenderloin.

A nice firm, waxy potato with a good flavour. We were slightly underwhelmed, but it’s still early in the season and we have several other varieties to sample.

And let’s face it, a just-picked potato of any variety is fresh and delicious in a way that supermarket potatoes could never be.

Salad leaves from the croft, along with spring onions (Japanese bunching onion variety) and Vietnamese coriander.

It feels good to be eating what we’ve grown again.

So our shed is still full of boxes.

Mainly, it has to be said, these are full of books, although somewhere in there is a box of kitchen stuff that I know contains all the things I’m missing. Looking for you, ridged griddle pan. And French salad bowls.

Hugh lugged in several more boxes over the last few days and we’ve now filled up the big bookcase in the lounge, the study bookcase, half of my studio shelves and another bookcase upstairs.

There are still about thirty book boxes left to unpack but we may have to wait until we have more bookcases built.

We’re now at the stage that we need to order and fit a library ladder onto here so that we can reach the upper shelves. Another one for the to-do list.

The weather has been awful. Rain, cold temperatures and leaden grey skies. We’ve hardly had any summer at all, and my vegetables are feeling it. No cucumbers or tomatoes yet, and the salad leaves are most definitely sulking.

A strange phenomenon is that when the weather is like this, the coffee shops and cafes on the island do a roaring trade. I guess it’s that people feel the need to be indoors.

As such cake baking is at peak production levels with a baking happening almost every day. In addition to that, we have friends who have birthdays this week, so there’s a need for at least two birthday cakes..

This is an almond frangipane cake baked with a hidden layer of raspberries within and topped with flaked almonds and fresh raspberries. It was a birthday cake for one of our friends so I got to try a slice. If I say so myself it was delicious and is definitely going on the keepers list.

Nearly four years ago, before we left London on this grand adventure of ours, I found a wonderfully talented young weaver called Christabel Balfour

You can see more of her work here https://www.christabelbalfour.com

She weaves contemporary tapestries. Her work is beautifully tactile, with subtle colours and beautiful cotton, linen and wool combinations, and as soon as I saw her work it reminded me so much of Skye that I knew that I had to have something made up by her for our new home-to-be.

At this stage, remember, the house was just a drawing on an architects page.

It took a long time until Christabel was free to start the design phase. She posted me drawings and we selected colours and materials remotely. Then the pandemic and life got in the way and there were more delays, both to the work and the house build, so speed or otherwise didn’t really matter.

Then the day arrived when the package turned up on the croft. The house was still a building site and we were living in the caravan with very limited space. We opened it, but it was very quickly packaged back up for safety and stored in the spare room until the house was in a state of greater completion.

And here it has stayed, wrapped in it’s protective linen shroud in a dry cupboard in the hall, waiting for it’s moment. Because we haven’t finished the plaster on the walls in places let alone the painting, no art has yet gone up onto the walls.

Today we moved a temporary bookcase from the wall in the sitting room area that I’d always planned for the tapestry to be mounted on, and once the wall was free, Hugh hung the tapestry.

It’s beautiful. All the colours of the sea, sky and mountains here are woven into it, and for the first time we can see how right it looks in this place.

There’s something so very tactile and warm about a woven piece of art. I keep running my fingers over it to appreciate the contrasting textures that Christabel has built into it.

Thank you Christabel Balfour. You are a very talented lady and I am very proud to have a piece of your work.

As it’s been such a cold, wet spring and so far devoid of any summer, despite being just a few days from Midsummer’s Day, the slugs have been multiplying. And having a field day with the salad leaves.

We have lots of old pallets lying around the croft from deliveries of compost and building materials. Hugh started piling them up around the grow area to raise the grow pots up to make for easier harvesting, and to deter the slugs. It seems to have worked.

That extra few feet of vertical crawling to get to their prize seems to have deterred all but the most adventurous of them.

We now have a small city of pallets around the polycrub, all topped with fishboxes, canvas grow bags and old lick tubs, containing salad leaves.

It does look a bit Heath Robinson but it does the job until we can get proper grow beds built.

Pictures taken on the only sunny day we’ve had in June!

It’s rhubarb season and if I have my way it’s going into everything, including cakes. The season is short and we need to embrace its rhubarby loveliness.

These are mini rhubarb and almond cakes. It’s a soft almond cake mixture with an inner hidden layer of rhubarb, topped with roasted rhubarb, flaked almonds, and an icing drizzle.

This is a large rhubarb and almond cake. Same recipe but dressed differently, and baked in a 20cm cake tin.

But rhubarb doesn’t need to be complicated. I like it best just poached lightly with a handful of raspberries over a bowl of Greek yoghurt.

Embrace your rhubarb! It’s a wonderful thing.

And grow some if you can.

I’ve been baking up a storm for our local cafe, The Stables at Armadale Castle. They buy in commercial cakes but have been very keen to sell something different and home-baked locally.

I started with big cakes, but they are apparently a bit messy to slice and serve for the girls serving in the cafe. So the idea of making mini loaf cakes was born – single portion size cakes that can just be served as they are.

And it’s been very successful. So much so that my mini loaf cake tin is hardly ever out of the dishwasher on rotation for the next batch!

Here are a selection of flavours that I’ve made for them, and I’m still experimenting and trying more. I’m thinking rhubarb and white chocolate this week whilst the rhubarb is still in season..

Raspberry, redcurrant and white chocolate ganache

Salad leaves that have been lovingly grown for flavour need to be fresh and crisp as long as possible if they’re not to go to waste.

In order to sell them we obviously need them to be bagged, and in choosing bags we’re trying to balance keeping the salad in great condition with using sustainable materials.

Normal plastic bags can fog-up in the fridge with the moisture from the leaves. They’re also single-use and not very environmentally friendly.

Compostable bags made from plant fibre are environmentally sustainable, but tales abound of the biodegradable ones falling apart in the fridge with the humidity and dampness of the leaves. Combined with which they’re often difficult to compost at home.

Micro-perforated ppl bags seemed to be a good compromise, allowing produce to breathe and being fine to refrigerate. Sadly though, our home trials have shown that the leaves don’t last in them, wilting after just a few days.

There doesn’t appear to be a perfect solution yet.

For now we’re using reusable stay-fresh produce bags with a sticker asking people to reuse the bag. The bag is impregnated with a porous, food safe, natural Japanese stone powder suspended in the polythene film; the powder absorbs the ethane gases that most fruit and veg release, and the bags let the contents breathe, creating an environment that helps produce stay fresher for longer.

The downside, because there is always one, is cost.

Whereas a standard plastic bag for food use is a few pence, a stay-fresh bag is much more. Not a problem if you’re using them at home and only going through a few a month, but if you’re packing produce in any volume it can get pricey.

I’ve found somewhere that I can bulk-buy them that makes them a bit cheaper, so we’ll trial these for a few months and see how they do.

The month of May on the island is when the wildlife and flora seem to spring back into life after a long, cold winter.

You can almost feel the limbs of the earth stretch and unfurl, like a frond of bracken curling open from it’s tightly coiled fiddlehead.

The trees are suddenly green and frothy with new, vibrant growth and blossom. The hawthorn, rowan and blackthorn trees are a mass of creamy white flowers that shower the grass with every breeze.

The cuckoos are everywhere, their distinctive, insistent call the background soundtrack to the long, light-filled days of May.

The swallows return. Just in time to feast on the awakening midges. They’re a delight to watch, wheeling and swooping around the house with incredible speed and skill. Such elegant, acrobatic birds, their high keening calls piecing the skies as they dart and dance through the air.

And anything that eats midges gets my vote of thanks.

The wild garlic and bluebells have been stunning this year, carpeting the hillsides thickly in nodding flowers. They’re coming to an end now, their vibrancy fading, and we’re left with fields of yellow from the creeping buttercups.

May is a beautiful month on the croft.

Ticks are disgusting little blood-sucking parasitic arachnids, common to the Highlands of Scotland. Many of them also carry pathogens such as Lyme Disease, which humans are very susceptible to and which require a course of antibiotics.

With long grass and rushes that get brushed past as you walk across the croft, we’ve always been aware that we can pick up ticks.

In previous years we’ve had to remove a few each season despite wearing long trousers, tucked into wellies, long-sleeved shirts and gloves. They have a remarkable ability to winkle their way through and under even tight fitting clothing, and are virtually undetectable until they’ve latched on, and even then take some finding.

This year we’re suffering a plague of them. I’m not the only one to comment on this so I know that it’s not just increased exposure to them because we now have cats bringing them in on their fur.

The cats receive monthly tick treatments which are supposed to ensure that ticks will drop off if they do connect with the cats skin. But we’re finding them on both cats daily, latched on and happily feeding. The plague seems to have developed resistance…

Lots of people have advised that keeping chickens or guinea fowl will help reduce their numbers significantly. Both are voracious feeders of ticks.

We’ve always wanted chickens for their eggs, but now it seems we have another reason to love them.