Speros, St Mary's, Isles of Scilly

 It was our first night out in seven and a half months. Now the baby is sleeping through (ish) we were able to ask Mum and Dad to babysit and head off in the boat for a couple of hours to ourselves. We decided to head off island to Speros on St Mary's. It's right on the beach and makes a perfect landing spot for the boat. 

After dropping anchor Richard and Amelia gave us a table out on the patio (you might as well be eating on the beach!) and it was such a warm evening it was the perfect start.

We were both keen to have some local crab as we haven't had any this year so started with a mixed seafood platter. A great big pile of white crab meat with smoked mackerel, smoked salmon and prawns. It was the perfect choice. 

Then I had chicken breast with cured meats, pesto, boiled potatoes and vegetables which was delicious. I love chicken and it's never on menus enough so I was really pleased to have it for once.
We tend to go half and half on desserts but we both wanted the chocolate brownie which was divine (and gluten free!). 



























Speros is such a lovely place to eat on St Mary's. The location in fantastic, the food delicious and the service hard to beat.

And if you've got a boat it's got just about the prettiest 'car' park you can imagine!

Marmalade...

In a way, Scilly can be at its best when shrouded in fog. Your senses aren't distracted by the stretches of beaches and rocky cliffs. Instead you listen to the confused birds singing for their companions. You notice branches drenched in sea mist.

And sometime the jobs you hate can be the most relaxing. I can't say I enjoy making marmalade. It's not my kind of cooking. Soaking, peeling slicing, boiling, more boiling, settling. It's just not for me. But sometimes sitting on a stool thinly slicing orange peel, listening to the radio can be cathartic. When you've got a 5 month old baby making demands of you 24 hours a day it's nice to have a pile of oranges just sitting there, happily waiting to be sliced. 

This is a combination of about 5 friends and families recipes. I don't even use Seville oranges so sorry to the marmalade purists.

My Marmalade (makes about 5 jars)

2kg oranges

2kg jam sugar

About 4 litres of water

Pop the whole oranges in the water and leave overnight. The next morning remove them from the water (but keep the water which now will have the faint smell of oranges.) Peel them and put the insides in a bowl to one side. Start slicing the peel and put into the pan of water. 

Bring to the boil and boil for about an hour until the peel is soft. Add the jam sugar and boil until it reaches 105'c or put a little on a cold saucer and run a spoon across it to see if it makes creases. You can scrape the frothy scum off as it makes the marmalade cloudier.

Pour carefully into sterilised jars and leave the lids off. Leave to stand for 12 hours (as it helps it set better) then put the lids on. 

Back for 2014....

So I'm out of the baby haze. 5 months after the birth of Cordelia Anne I'm finally back at the computer and back to the blog. 

Today we wandered over to Tresco as it was the first proper opening day of the Ruin Beach Cafe. It's one of our favourite places to eat. They have a wood fired oven so we love getting ideas for our garden oven. 

If you're worried about visiting the South West this spring time (post storms) just look at what you are missing...

The food was fantastic as usual and my in laws loved it (it was their first visit).

Thanks for sticking with me (and the nice emails!)

A salad for a sunny spring Scilly day...

The first hint of sunshine and we're making a salad. A salad for lunch, then an afternoon on the boat, then a barbecue. It's panic stations at Samson Hill. We decided to make the most of this sunshine as if it will never come again. (The forecast actually says next week should be sunny but still...) We got our new boat in the water. We've called her 'Per Ardua' as that was the original name of Samson Hill Cottage and is the first part of the phrase in Latin that means 'Through adversity to the stars.' And I love that. 

We drove over to St Mary's with the wind in our hair to wander around Hugh Town with dozens of other people enjoying the warm sun trapped between the granite buildings. We popped into Plowman's Food Co for some fresh beef for a stew this week then we headed back to the harbour. Visitors were walking down the quay with their rumbling suitcases being pulled behind them. The Scillonian was filling up getting ready to head back to the mainland. We darted over to Samson and motored along the shore. 

Although it was cold it felt good to be in the fresh air and it was lovely to be filling our conversations with 'In the summer...' and 'On a nice day let's...'

Anyway back to that salad. The rocket is still going strong at Hillside Farm. I bought a big bag yesterday and decided to use it all today for lunch. It was my favourite lunch this year...

Bryher rocket salad with Cornish blue and St Agnes honey dressing (serves 2...)

 2 big handfuls of rocket

3oz Cornish blue cheese

2 small pears

2 tbsp garlic infused oil (or olive)

2 tsp balsamic vinegar

1 tsp St Agnes honey (usually available from the local produce market in the autumn)

6 small slices baguette or bread

herb olive oil

First for my herb olive oil. I've started blitzing herbs from the garden with oil and keeping it in my fridge for a few days. At the moment it's mint, sage, fennel and thyme. It's brilliant for spooning over omelettes and makes blander meals look and taste a little bit more exciting. 

Preheat the oven to 180'c. Slice the baguette into rounds and spread a tsp of the herb mix on each round. Put in the oven for about 5 minutes until crisped up. 

Put the rocket in a large bowl. Peel, core and slice the pear into matchsticks and toss in with the rocket. Crumble the blue cheese in too. In another bowl whisk the oil, vinegar and honey and drizzle over the salad. Give it a good mix with your hands or salad tossers. 

Serve with the herb toasts. 

Bananatoffeerama....

Buds are starting to appear on the fruit trees, ferns are bursting through the ground and there's the coconut  smell of the bright yellow gorse flowers whenever the sun shines. We've made use of the sunshine by clearing the garden. It's stage two of the garden plan which should take us about five years to get looking presentable. This week we had friends to stay and they helped Gareth put in the chicken run. (These chickens are going to have one of the best views in the world.) They'll arrive once the passenger boat starts running in the next couple of weeks. 

I've been working on the old entrance. I've been clearing brambles as thick as a 50p piece and as long as swimming pool. I'm constantly followed by a robin and a fat blackbird taking advantage of all the bugs and worms that are exposed as I pull rocks back. 

Then this week the sunshine stopped. The forecast said snow (which we kind of ignored as it's so rare.)  But it did snow and very heavily. Unfortunately it didn't stick. I had high hopes of building a sledge but there wasn't even enough for a snowball.  

On our friends' last night we cooked pizzas in the wood fired oven. We had a few black bananas left and between them they came up with this recipe....which may become a post pizza tradition.

Wood fired bananas with fudge, chocolate and biscuits (serves 4)....

4 bananas

4 chunks of fudge (preferably Veronica Farm Fudge available here) 

8 chunks of chocolate

4 chocolate digestive biscuits

Chop up the fudge and chocolate. 

 Make a slice down the middle of the bananas (leaving them in their skins.)

Stuff the bananas with the fudge and chocolate. 

Wrap them tightly in foil. Pop them in the embers of the woodfired oven or barbecue for 5-7 minutes (or a 200'c) oven for 15 minutes (using oven gloves). Crush the biscuits in a bowl. 

Carefully take the bananas out and very carefully unwrap the foil using oven gloves. Sprinkle the crushed biscuits over the top. 

St Piran's Day Cornish Blue Pasties...

Happy St Piran's Day for tomorrow. St Piran's Day has become so much bigger in the last few years. (Here's the history). There is only one dish fit for the celebrations and that is a pasty lunch. I got really excited because I had loads of Cornish Blue cheese to use up and thought I would make Steak and Cornish Blue pasties. I did a bit of googling around to see whether there were any recipes anywhere and couldn't find one. Then I felt a bit smug that I was going to put a recipe online, only to realise yesterday that Chough's won World Champion Company Savoury at the World Pasty Championships at the weekend for the same thing. 

So the idea isn't original but it was delicious. If you don't want the blue cheese in it just leave it out. 

I also experimented using strong white bread flour instead of plain and I actually preferred it. Which is handy as I've got 8kgs to use up.

Cornish Blue and Steak Pasties (makes 4 or 6 bite size)

450g strong white bread flour

120g butter

120g hard white vegetable fat or lard

120g butter

up to 200ml cold water

200g beef skirt (I only had chopped beef)

100g Cornish Blue cheese

1 small onion

100g slice swede

120g potato

salt and pepper

2 tbsps clotted cream 

Weigh the flour into a bowl and season with some salt. Grate in the butter and vegetable fat. Rub the fat into the flour until thoroughly combined.

Add the water a little at a time and bring the dough together with a knife. Give it a little knead and bring it together into a ball. Wrap it in cling film and pop it in the fridge for about 40 minutes. Preheat the oven to 200'c.

Peel and chop the onion and separate the chunks. Peel and slice the potato and swede into slices about as thick as a pound coin. Chop the cheese and beef into rough chunks. (Make sure you haven't got chunks of fat on the beef.)

Take the pastry out of the fridge and chop into four (or six if making smaller ones). Roll out into four circles the size of a small dinner plate (about 25 cms.) Layer up the pasty filling in the centre leaving a good sized edge, seasoning with salt and pepper as you go. Top with some little blobs of clotted cream. 

Fold the pastry over so you have a crescent shape and press down the edge to keep the ingredients in. I could now tell you how to crimp but I'm rubbish at it. (See below). However, there's a good masterclass here that's much better than I could do.

Brush with a little milk and put in the oven for 30 minutes. Leave to cool for 5-10 minutes. Serve on it's own. Not with mayonnaise and ketchup as my other half did. 

The other two pasties I put in the freezer so I can defrost tomorrow morning and have a proper St Piran's Day lunch. 

You can find out more about St Piran's Day and get in the spirit by following @stpiransday on twitter.

Perfect Sunday pancakes....

There's little Spring breakthroughs at the moment on Bryher. Beautiful sunsets turning the buildings on Tresco pink, sunny days which trick you into thinking it's warm enough for a picnic and flowers and buds bursting to life in the garden. 

But there's a cold easterly windy blowing into Samson Hill making gardening hard to tolerate. This week we've had our first visitors who had three days of sunshine. They also had the extra low tides which meant they walk to Tresco two days in a row, stopping to chat to people walking the other way. The house suddenly seems much quieter now they have gone. After a winter of cereal and toast I decided to get up early and do us a cooked breakfast to warm us up for a day clearing the autumn bracken and brambles as long as our kitchen. 

My mum's scotch pancakes and bacon (serves 3-4)

225g self raising flour

1 pinch of salt

1 egg

25g very soft margarine or butter

25g caster sugar

225ml milk

spray oil or a little butter

8 slices of bacon (I used Troytown which are like slices of heaven) 

maple syrup 

 Preheat the oven to 200'c. Put the bacon on a baking tray. Pop in the oven. While the bacon is cooking, sieve the flour into a large bowl. Add all the other ingredients and mix with an electric beating until smooth. 

Spray a frying pan with spray oil or add a little butter. Heat the pan up and add a tablespoon or so of the batter. Once it starts to bubble, flip over with a fish slice. You will need to do several batches. (I keep them warm by getting another big bowl and putting a clean tea towel in it and then I wrap the pancakes in it.

Put the pancakes of a warm plate and serve with the crispy bacon and lots of maple syrup. 

A load of pollocks.....

Yesterday I saw a swallow fly over Samson Hill. Swooping over the garden, gliding in the sunshine. It flew off towards Tresco like it was doing a rekke of the islands before the mass migration from Africa begins and you see hundreds on a daily basis. After a day of showers, this week's been beautiful. You can find a sheltered spot, put your face up to the sun and imagine summer barbecues.

Gareth decided to go fishing yesterday with some of our guests and took a boat to the south coast of St Mary's. They caught a bag full of pollock and a tiny mackerel. Maybe it's the sunshine, maybe it's the swallow, Scilly seems firmly in springtime.

Pan fried pollock with lemon butter sauce....(serves 2)

2 pollock fillets

a tbsp flour

salt and pepper

Cornish rapeseed oil

1oz/25g St Agnes butter

a squeeze of lemon juice

On a plate, season the flour and place the fillets skin side down. Heat up a heavy frying pan on a medium heat and add a tbsp or two of oil. Add the pollock skin side down. In another pan put the butter and lemon and put on a gentle heat until melted. Whisk together and put aside.

Once the pollock is cooked halfway up the fillet (about 4 minutes), flip over and cook for another couple of minutes.

Serve with the hot lemon butter sauce and a little fennel.