Tag: isle of skye

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Peachy galette

I’m not the most organised of cooks. I often get a sweet craving come over me and I’ll be tempted to make a dessert, but will have to improvise with what I have in the cupboard or fridge.

Our restricted storage capacity in the caravan fridge is probably what’s keeping me alive and avoiding a massively early death through my over-consumption of sweet things.

Because if I had all possible ingredients to hand I’d probably make a dessert every evening. Which is not good. Note to self: the pantry you’re building may not be such a good idea for the remains of your waistline… Fill it with beans and pickles, woman, if you value your life…

As the clock ticked around to about 4pm today I started thinking about supper, and I really fancied something sweet.

I found a punnet of rather hard peaches and a roll of ready made puff pastry lurking in a dark recess of the fridge. They were behind the bags of kale and chard, which glowed with health and reproachment. I also just happened to have a tub of mascarpone left over from some previous excess. I could make a peach galette!

Peach galette. No judging please..

In the UK, and especially here in Scotland, we don’t have the tradition of peach pies that I often see in the United States. Peaches are a rather exotic, imported fruit here (which I am determined to grow in my polytunnel one day. We must be independent in good fruit. But I digress).

A galette is a rather pretentious name for a slab of pastry, crimped up around the edges of creamy mascarpone egg custard and a pile of sugared, sliced peaches. It sounds so much more exotic than it actually is. It’s raggedy and rustic and delicious.

I couldn’t be bothered with forming a proper pie today anyway. Rough edges and random piles of fruit seemed like a perfect idea. I can do piling and sugaring, I thought.

Nay problem.

The remains..

And so I did. And so we followed a healthy stir fry with a crusty, cinnamon scented, custardy, sweet peach galette.

It gladdened the heart. Which compensates for the expansion of the waistline, I’m almost sure…

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Grasses Galore

We’ve had a warm, breezy day on the croft today. Twenty-two degrees and a clear blue sky. It made our outdoor tasks today so much easier with the wind keeping the midges at bay.

Grass in the breeze

The grass has grown so much over the last few months that the paths that husband had scythed in the spring had nearly disappeared.

This was making trips to the raised beds and the compost heap a daily waist-high challenge.

I wouldn’t normally worry about wading through long grass, but I’m super cautious about picking up ticks and horsefly bites at the moment, and didn’t want to have to start walking about swathed in protective netting like some sort of veiled ninja..

So husband spent a few hours yesterday and today scything swathes through the grass and collecting it up for compost. The breeze helped what was a long, sticky endeavour.

Pathway emerging

Some folk like to cut their grass neatly and very regularly. We have chosen to leave ours wild, and to see what comes up. We prefer it that way, and nature seems to agree.

We’ve found orchids, clover and wild flowers in abundance, and there are certainly plenty of moths, bees, butterflies and insects. Husband has even had to rescue a few small frogs from the path of his scythe…we want to encourage them as much as we can. Natural slug protection!

Once we have an agricultural shed to store equipment in we will need to look at other ways to manage this, though. Even with trees, six acres is too much to manage by hand with a scythe. It’s a fine line between managed meadow and bracken and bramble patches overtaking the land.

We’re thinking at least one annual cut after the summer is over to help seed and keep the rushes down.

For now we’ll enjoy the grasses and the wild flowers from our small, scythed tunnels through the abundance.

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Sea Haar

Sea Haar, or ‘sea fret’ as it is also known in the North East of Britain, is used to describe a cold fog that accumulates at sea rather than on land.

Over the last week we’ve had some spectacular examples over the Sound, with layers of cloud, or fog, lying low over the water like a blanket of snow.

It’s usually burned off with the rising air temperatures by about lunchtime, but it has created some amazing looking scenes that we’ve watched from the house.

Every month brings different weather conditions and changing vistas. Every day this view looks different.

Who needs television?

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Summer eating

This is the season for eating from the croft, and the fresh produce is now coming in with abundance, even from the handful of small grow beds that we have. We are enjoying lettuce, kale, new potatoes, purple sprouting broccoli, chard, onions, peas and fresh herbs.

I’m being challenged to find new ways of serving this bounty, as we can’t store or freeze any produce this season.

This is whipped feta with roasted beetroot, toasted almonds, orange zest, chopped mint and parsley.

I was so excited to try our first baby beets from the croft that I made this dish up specifically to try them. It’s adapted from one that I found that uses goats cheese.

Scooped up with oat biscuits, it was a light nibble to eat before a main meal with friends, but would easily make a lunch on its own. This will become a summer staple, I think, and I’ve resolved to definitely grow more beetroots next year!

Young onions from the croft

Tonight, kale and purple sprouting broccoli from the croft were the central vegetables in our meal. They were lightly sautéed with garlic, sesame, spring onions, lime, a bit of leftover chicken, and noodles.

Uncle Bert’s kale

Lots of potatoes… cold potato salad, fried potatoes, garlic potatoes, mash here we come!

3kg potatoes dug up this morning
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House build update

I can hardly believe that we’re in July already, but that seems to be where we find ourselves. The house build progress has been slow, but at last we are through the bulk of the sealing, taping, foiling and re-taping of the house walls and have moved into the next stage. Thank the stars that my husband doesn’t give up easily through what has been a marathon of a process.

Floor insulation slabs

He has been laying the insulation slabs on the internal floors in this past week in preparation for the underfloor heating pipes to go down. Then it will be the screed pouring before finally we have a level, warm floor for the house!

Work in progress

We have the plasterers booked in for September, so we need to complete the floors and basic pipe and wiring installation in the next two months to make sure that we secure their time. I know how quickly eight weeks will go, so it will be another busy time.

Our tinfoil-wrapped sitting room!

In parallel, I’m re-examining all the kitchen and bathroom material choices we made over a year ago. Prices and suppliers have all changed, and we need to get selections finalised and fresh estimates in so that we can secure fittings when we’re ready.

We’ve also sourced an excellent local lady joiner to make us custom built wardrobes and bookcases for the main bedroom, hall and sitting room areas at the end of the year. Hugh could build them, but having done everything else by then I suspect he will be on his knees. And the quality of her finished work looks excellent.

I’m especially excited by the prospect of the extremely high bookcase taking up the whole of the back wall in the sitting room. We’ll need a ladder to gain access to the upper shelves! But it will take a huge quantity of books. Just what we need.

Onward and upwards! We will get there.

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Sudden Profusion

It’s all growing well in our raised bed experiment. Except the leeks, which are spindly little pencils so far.

I will be patient.

I’m mainly delighted and surprised by the profusion. It seems to have come all of a sudden. We’re cropping lettuces, potatoes, kale, sorrel, purple sprouting brocolli, chives, parsley, dill, mint, and rocket.

The beets, shallots and onions look nearly ready. The garlic is coming along, and the mammoth red cabbage leaves are starting to turn in. The parsnips are growing, as are the carrots.

It’s the rain, long hours of daylight and mild temperatures. Suddenly everything is leaping up as if wanting to make up for the slow, cold start of our late spring.

First crop of potatoes
Kale, beetroots, red-veined sorrel, onions
Peas
Parsnips
Endive and carrots
Uncle Bert’s kale
Purple sprouting broccoli

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Midgification

One of the main challenges of a highland summer are the midges.

We’re luckier than most being at the top of a windy hill. Midges can’t fly in winds of more than 6mph, apparently, so we pray daily for a good, brisk wind.

Many has been the warm, sunny evening when we would have brought out the firepit and barbecued long into the night if it weren’t for the midges. Once they start flying there’s no escape and no respite. The worst of it is that we want to sleep with the caravan windows thrown open on these warm summer nights, but we can’t without swarms of the little horrors coming in to plague us.

We smother ourselves in Smidge and don our midge net hats to try and avoid the worst of them. I’m counting the months until temperatures dip enough to kill them off. By September, I’m hoping.

The other downside of the croft in the summer with the proximity of neighbouring livestock is horseflies. The locals call these Clegs. I’ve been bitten several times by these horrible things whilst working on the croft, and unlike midge bites, they’re huge and need disinfecting. They land like ninjas, incredibly softly, so that you don’t notice them until they’ve started scissoring away a circle of skin from you.

Giant Dark Horsefly

Husband took a picture of this one on the caravan window a few days ago. It was a good inch and a half long, the same size as a hornet. It was probably a Giant Dark Horsefly, and although I don’t think anything this large has landed on me, I shudder to think of this airbus of the fly world anywhere so near to hand..

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The People Summer

The days are long and filled with light. It’s also been a week of warm, hazy weather so we’ve been making the most of it with friends whilst it’s here. We’re never more than a few days away from rain here on the island!

A fellow Instagrammer bought a cottage here on the North of the island for renovation at about the same time that we purchased the croft, and he and his family drove down to meet us yesterday to take a look at the house build and what we were doing with the land.

The car scrambled up the drive to the top of the hill, its doors opened, and out burst five gorgeous kids, the parents and two dogs. It was a complete explosion of sound and energy as we rounded up enough tumblers for drinks, answered questions, watered the dogs and showed them around.

For two people normally unused to groups of people and the sound and motion that accompany them, especially after a quiet and pretty isolated last six months, it was quite exhausting, albeit in the nicest of ways! I am in awe of parents who can cope with such levels of energy. We have become unused to people…

We sat in what was left of the sun with a vegan BBQ (simple chickpea patties, vegan sausages, garlic fried potatoes and grilled red peppers) and watched the clouds gather over the mountains of Knoydart.

Sweetness was added with a vegan strawberry trifle made in the biggest salad bowl I could find. Minty, their daughter, made delicious chocolate cupcakes.

A lovely day. The rain did start towards the end of the afternoon and we had to decamp to the house, but it didn’t ruin anything.

As we waved them off we reflected that since living here we’ve spent time with more people in the last six months, despite all Covid restrictions, than we did in the previous five years in London. For two massive intraverts, that’s astonishing. It’s been a summer of people.

Jonathan is a brilliant photographer and he took these iconic pictures whilst here. You can find more of his images on Instagram @skye.cottage.

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Chunky living

One of the things that having no kitchen tools here in the caravan has meant is that we don’t “process” any foods. This simply means that nothing we eat is smooth. Everything is chunky.

For example, when I make a vegetable soup, which I often used to blend to a silky puree with a stick blender or food processor, I now leave it au naturel. I’ve got quite attached to real chunks of vegetables in my soup rather than a blended uniformity.

Hummus

The same is true for hummus. I often make this by hand because it’s cheaper and I think much more delicious than shop bought. I can control exactly what goes into it. I add tahini, lemon zest, garlic, fresh parsley and good olive oil.

However, I’ve been used to zapping it up in the food processor to the usual smooth slurry we’re all used to seeing in the deli counter tubs.

Now I’m having to hand-crush chickpeas with a fork, an undertaking not for the faint hearted or weak of thumb. It creates a rustic, very chunky hummus, which was a bit of a shock to the system to start with, but which I actually now prefer.

So, once we are in the house, with a real kitchen with appliances once again, I shall remember these learnings.

We will keep to our chunky living. Life isn’t all smooth. We may as well enjoy it whilst we still have our own teeth 😊.

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Salad days

Another significant milestone. Our first salad from the croft!

For you rampant food producers out there with your polytunnels, greenhouses and fertile growing beds this is going to seem a bit of a damp squib, but we’ve just cropped our first bowl of salad from the croft and I’m doing my happy dance!

Salad leaves

It’s a mix of endive, red lettuce, red veined sorrel, Uncle Bert’s kale, mint and beetroot leaves. All grown organically outdoors from seed here on the croft.

Other things are growing too in these long, light filled days of summer. I can see a few purple heads of sprouting broccoli emerging, and the potatoes will be ready in the next few weeks.

Parsley grown from seed

The leeks have been a big fail – they’re still tiny and very slow growing. Kales, cabbage, garlic, beetroot, potatoes, herbs, and salad leaves have all grown well. The carrots and parsnips are small yet but time will tell. The globe artichokes are tiny plants, a few leaves apiece, but they seem to be surviving. I’m hoping that they’ll muscle-up and come into their own next year. The berry bushes are establishing. The borage and comfrey are flowering.

Wonderful comfrey

I’m just relieved that it hasn’t all been some monstrous failure. We’ve had one meal from the croft at least!

The key learning so far is exposure. We knew it, but just didn’t have the time to do it. We need to get windbreaks up and hedging in this autumn before the main growing season next year.

Small milestones on our journey. Forgive a woman’s unseemly crowing.