Category: static caravan

Posted on

Autumn fare

This will be our third autumn in the caravan, although we should be in the house at last before winter sets in and so it will be our last.

The tiny caravan kitchen space and mini oven have certainly been a challenge, but it’s amazing what you can do with a bit of ingenuity and a single cake and roasting tin. If I’d thought we’d be here so long I would have packed more.

As the season turns and the evenings get colder, my thoughts for food turn to more autumnal fare. Sausages, roasted squash, chestnuts, warming soups.. and wherever possible recipes adapted to work in a small space with the minimum of fuss and need for utensils.

One of my favourite ways to cook at this time of the year is a tray bake. Last nights supper was sausage, butternut squash and apple roasted up with onions and garlic and finished with honey and mustard for the last ten minutes in the oven.

If I’d picked blackberries I would have added those in too. Next time.

A supper like this is a meal in itself, both warming and filling, not expensive to produce, and most importantly, leaving very little washing up.

Birthday cake for a friend

September is also the month in which many local friends have their birthdays (as well as my own), so for the last year my one square cake tin will get pressed into action.

Next year my baking tins will be unpacked and I will have a proper oven, and I’ll hardly know myself! But for now my offerings are slightly lopsided, as the caravan is not entirely level, and always the same shape.

I hope that they’re well received regardless, baked as they are with love.

Posted on

Burnished with righteousness

There’s been a distinct drop in temperature over the last few days. Enough for a sharp intake of breath whilst slipping legs between bedsheets at night. I think we may have to put the electric blanket back on. That alone saved us last winter, I’m sure of it.

Autumn blackberries

The hedgerows are full of blackberries which we must find time to get out and plunder. Autumn isn’t worth having without homemade apple and blackberry pies.

Perched atop our windy hill croft

The shed is now built and it’s so startlingly big that I did warn husband that if we weren’t in the house soon we’d be moving the bed into it. It’s better insulated than the caravan and you could seriously house entire families in there.

One of the bays inside

I know better than to get used to its exquisite emptiness, though. It’ll be full of boxes and building material in no time, and glimpses of the floor will soon become a rarity.

The house build continues after a few weeks hiatus with husbands back problems. We will clear the building materials out over the next week and hopefully continue the electrics, kitchens and bathrooms.

Stuff everywhere

We’ve been testing Osmo oil wood treatments on slips of spare wood for the cladding in the bathrooms. The second coat is drying at the moment then we’ll head in and compare. Everything looks so different in situ. The light makes a huge difference.

Osmo oil

We also made a second visit to Skye Sawmills yesterday to try and source oak planks for our sills.

The challenge is those enormous windows in the living area, which will need 4m long pieces, something that it’s proving almost impossible to find. If possible I didn’t want joins.

Brendan didn’t have oak that long, however he did have something interesting – old church pew planks from a dismantled church in Broadford. They’re at least 150 years old, burnished to a patina with the feverish righteousness of all those worshippers bottoms.

I love the idea of reusing old wood from a local church, and having a bit of history in our sparingly new home, so if the price is right we’d love to take them.

The holiest sills on the island!

Posted on

Plasterboard progress

The two Dereks are plasterboarding for all they’re worth, and we are starting to have rooms emerge from the chaos.

The boot room

Husband has been working long hours to keep pace with the wiring and plumbing. The house is full of strange ducts and metalwork, like something from an industrial post-apocalyptic novel. It’s all slowly taking shape.

It’s strange how a bit of plasterboard changes the aspect of rooms. When we had open studs for walls and you could see through them to the next room, it was difficult to get a real sense of the solidity and space. Now the rooms have opaque, solid boundaries, giving them a feeling of volume. Makes it much easier to visualise fittings and furniture.

The plant room

As I write I’m sitting in the caravan in a burst of unexpected sunshine. It’s streaming through the windows infusing a bunch of gifted, slightly overblown tulips with an warm orange glow.

Spring is coming. Each morning it’s lighter a little earlier.

It’s coming.

Posted on

Soup weather

It all started with a big paper bag of chestnut mushrooms. Perfectly in season, brown, earthy and fresh. Smelling of autumn. That, and a glance out of the caravan window at the rain convinced me that it was definitely soup weather.

Sautéed mushrooms

Much as I like a bowl of Heinz mushroom soup as a quick, comforting lunch, a homemade soup is really in another league and is well worthwhile the small effort that it takes.

Mushrooms, chopped sweet chestnuts, garlic, fresh parsley and tarragon are the mainstays of this soup. A slosh of cream or creme fraiche finishes it. It’s warming and delicious, and cooks up in less than thirty minutes.

Mushroom & sweet chestnut soup

As winter approaches I make soup much more often. There’s usually a pot of soup simmering on the stove most days in this weather. Soups are so versatile, and can be made cheaply from the simplest of ingredients.

Amongst our personal favourites are mushroom and chestnut, fresh chicken, winter vegetable, butternut and sweet potato, leek and potato, Cullen skink and lentil soups. Not having a blender here in the caravan, all of our soups are left “au-naturel” and somehow feel all the more of a meal for that.

Served up with warm cheese scones, or good crusty sourdough bread, soups are definitely the food of autumn.

Posted on

Storms and silence

It’s been a while since my last blog post.

The weeks have rustled into full blown autumn here on the island. The hedgerows are full of berries, the heather is fading, and as I often do at the turn of the season, I’m filled with silence and a degree of sadness.

I don’t know why I feel often feel low as autumn approaches. I’m really not mourning summer, but maybe the combination of house build delays, the prospect of another winter in the caravan -which we hadn’t expected- and being a menopausal woman have all conspired to bring my mood down more than normal at this change of the season.

The storms have started, with two weeks of solid rain and wind lashing the croft. I’ve not wanted to leave the caravan. I’ve cooked, baked, read books and cleaned, but apart from that I’ve really not had the energy to do much and haven’t wanted to see people.

I’m looking forward to the screed arriving at some point over the next few weeks for the floor now that we have completed the underfloor heating pipe installation, connection and testing. We are getting there, just very slowly. Our hopes to be in the house by the end of the year are no longer viable and it’s now looking more like summer next year before it will be ready for us to move in. We will survive.

Rainbow over the sound

As with all things, there is often a silver lining. Storms here mean rainbows. Several each day. Small bursts of colour in the washed windows in the grey to remind us that nature and the seasons are full of wonder and magic.

I will try and get out more. Walking is said to be better than Prozac, best friend in France tells me. She has also recommended taking vitamin D and Magnesium.

And there are always pies, which magically lift a mood. Bake more of them.

Pear tart with frangipan

Posted on

Sweet picklin’

There’s something very primal and satisfying about preserving food that you’ve grown yourself. Crazily so. It must be somewhere buried deep in RNA, and it seems to be triggered by the first wisps of autumn or the smell of woodsmoke.

The sweet days of summer are still with us but I can already sense the onset of autumn with my harvests.

Even though there were just a few handfuls of shallots and onions from the croft that could be used it somehow felt important to mark this, our first ever crop, by preserving them.

Small Shallots being prepared

I’ve been pickling onions for years, but have never really settled on a recipe that I love. This year, watching the storm roll in across the mountains of the mainland from the comfort of the caravan, I browsed through the few preserving books that I have here and created a blend of spices that I think may work well for us.

Pickling is a bit of a time consuming exercise at times. The onions have to be harvested, dried off, then peeled and trimmed.

Onions in sea salt overnight

Salting them is supposed to keep them crisp once preserved, so into a bowl with lots of coarse sea salt overnight they went. Nobody wants soggy pickles .

This morning they were rinsed and dried ready for next stage.

Spiced vinegar being prepared

The vinegar that I’ve used is white wine vinegar rather than the usual malt vinegar that seems to be traditional in UK kitchens. It has a 6% acidity count, slightly higher than malt or distilled vinegar. It’s been sweetened with sugar and spiced with black peppercorns, coriander seeds, mustard seeds, chilli flakes and bay leaves.

All my kilner and preserving jars are still in storage so I’ve had to make do with sterilised, recycled jars. They seem to have worked well.

Recycled jars

A kind neighbour has offered me ridge cucumbers to pickle and I’m scheduled to pick them up next week. I’ve kept some dill and dill flowers back ready for this moment…

May you savour the remaining sweet days of summer, and sweet picklin’ to you all.

Posted on

Caravan food

The caravan has a tiny kitchen, with three working gas burners and a very small electric oven. It’s lack of storage space has meant that we have no room for electrical appliances like mixers or blenders, making everything a manual process when it comes to food preparation . So, meals have to be simple.

But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be good. We’re working hard on the house and croft, and we need sustenance. An army marches on its stomach!

I’ve looked back at some of the meals that we’ve produced in the caravan with our one baking tin and I’m pleased to see that we’ve actually managed OK.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that we seem to be heavy on the sweet treats! No apologies for that. It’s true to say that this build is being fuelled by cake…

Bakewell tart
Sourdough from the Mallaig bakery with homemade houmous
Strawberry slab cake
Lunch butties with crispy chicken
Turkish bean salad
Chocolate cake
Teatime flapjacks
Cheese and chive scones
Local rope grown mussels
Lentil, garlic & veg soup
Pear pancakes with Greek Yoghurt & Honey
Soy marinated sesame salmon
Cranachan
Lentil dhal
Baklava
Thai salmon ready for baking
Local langoustines
Breakfast of champions
Posted on

Small steps back to normality

Our lives here on the croft are by nature pretty quiet. We spend our days mostly working on the house build or the land, only going out to do food shopping or to collect building or garden supplies.

As things start to open up here in Scotland again after a year of lockdown, however, we are seeing a slow return towards normality.

We managed a lovely lunch at a local restaurant with friends last Sunday. Although the venue wasn’t able to serve wine with the meal as we were eating indoors (which regulations don’t permit) it was still lovely to have food cooked for us and to have good company whilst we ate.

This weekend we also attended a market in Armadale Castle’s grounds. The locals were out in force to support it, and it was fun to browse the stalls and to sit down and have a coffee and catchup blether with friends.

We didn’t need, or buy, much. A loaf of artisan corn bread and some delicious pear frangipane tarts from the Isle of Skye Baking Co. and a few chive plants from Hamish’s plant stall, but really it was all about the meeting up with friends and neighbours after months of isolating in our cottages and crofts.

Small steps back to normality. There are further easing of restrictions over the coming month. We’re so looking forward to seeing the kids once we’re able to. They still haven’t seen the croft due to lockdown, and we haven’t been with them since last summer. Soon now.

Posted on

Easter Bread – Tsoureki

Tsoureki is a sweet, soft, fragrant Greek Easter bread which I first made last year in lockdown, having been unable to get Easter Eggs delivered.

We loved it, and it seems to have stuck as a tradition.

Of course, last year I had a proper kitchen, and a kitchen machine with a dough hook to take the strain. It needs a good fifteen minutes of kneading! This year was rather different.

I think that this was the most challenging thing I’ve tried to make in our tiny caravan kitchen so far, but it worked well, and we feasted on it for breakfast yesterday morning with enough left over for today too.

Rich with eggs, orange zest and mahlep, a spice made from ground cherry stones, it’s sweet, fragrant, soft and delicious. And all the more enjoyable for being a time consuming thing to make, and a once-a-year-treat.

Husband enjoyed his straight with no embellishments, washed down with a cup of coffee. I decided to Northern Up my slice with butter and rhubarb jam, Yorkshire style. Which was unutterably delicious. No judgements, now!

Here’s a link to the recipe I used if anyone wants to try it.
Tsoureki https://www.mygreekdish.com/recipe/tsoureki-recipe-traditional-greek-easter-bread/

Happy Easter to you all!

Posted on

The Mandrake Babies

There’s something so intriguing and otherworldly about growing beans.

Best friend in France sent me a pack of organic borlotti beans, (not from France, from a UK seed company) and I popped some into seed compost five days ago in the growing room in the caravan, not hoping for much, to be honest.

They germinated within two days, splitting the soil and unfurling huge, robust stems. It was seriously like watching a triffid grow. I could almost see them get bigger by the hour.

After four days all of them had leaves. They’re sitting there now, waving their stems about, looking a bit menacing… 😊

I think I’ve hatched mandrake babies by mistake. Someone get me some ear defenders..