Lydia's Roasted Pumpkin and Parsnip Soup with Crispy bacon frazzles

This recipe serves 6 people

What you will need...

For the Soup                                                                                                                                                                 

x1 small pumpkin with the flesh hollowed out (finally something to do with Halloween pumpkins!

x4 Parsnips washed and peeled

x1 Leek washed and diced

A pint and a half of good quality chicken stock

Small bunch of Rosemary and Thyme chopped finely

x1 Tsp of Curry powder

x1 Tsp of Pimento (smoked Paprika)

100ml of single cream

Salt and pepper to taste

*Optional

x1 Clove of garlic, i would use Elephant Garlic as it has a milder taste and does not over power it

For the Crispy bacon frazzles

x8 Rashers of streaky bacon

x1 Tsp of Demerara sugar

How to make it

1.Start by Sweating the diced leeks in a pan with the butter and a little olive oil to stop the butter burning on a low heat until soft

2.Cut the Pumpkin flesh and Parsnip into cubes and place on a baking tray and cover with a little olive oil and salt and roast for about half an hour at 180 degrees until soft.

3.Add the pumpkin and parsnip to the leeks and cook for a further 2 minutes stirring in a pan.

4.Add the thyme, rosemary,the curry powder, pimento, if you would like to add the garlic at this point dependent on choice this is the time to do it.

5.Add chicken stock to cover the veg then bring to the boil

6.Blend with a hand blender and add the cream plus adjust salt and pepper to taste, if you need to add a little more water to make it to the consistency you like your soup to be at, add more at this point.

7.Meanwhile in a pan fry up the cut up streaky bacon with a little demerara sugar until golden and crispy and then drain off the remaining oil from the pan.

8.Serve the soup up in a bowl topping with the bacon frazzles and a little swirl of cream, oh and of course a big piece of warm crusty bread slathered in butter!

©TheSoulPatch

    

Alluims and Stallions

October has bounded around again and this means only one thing....Time to plant out your Elephant Garlic seed! This year was our first year growing this type of garlic and we were very pleased with the results considering we were late planting it due to being uprooted ourselves. This season we have made sure everything (ourselves included) were in the right place at the right time. Our new soil at the new patch is also absolutley amazing and have never seen so many worms in the soil, literally like spaghetti!

Our Elephant Garlic seed delivered

                                                         His and Hers digging stances!

We also supplied our favorite local restaurant No.9 with it and wayne created a fabulous lamb dish with a elephant garlic puree which relly show cased it.

No.9 Church Street Stratford Upon Avon which we are supplying.

www.no9churchst.com

During our little break we had the opportunity to have a little walk around our town and had a look at the competitons baskets towards the end of the season, as a new business in Stratford this year we had the epic task of being the new guys on the block. We visited a lot of local businesses in the town and they were obviously a bit dubious due to it being new and a little bit different but we were delighted that so many were so receptive to our ideas and new business. We have had so many lovely pictures, phone calls and emails sent to us all praising our baskets and flower displays and for our first season i dont think you can say fairer than that!

As you may have read our new patch is actually just outside Mickleton and we have been looking for an excuse to move out to somewhere in the country for ages so we think it would be good to take the plunge in 2013 and make the move. We were very lucky to go and stay out there for the whole week living amongst sheep,pheasants and everything else furry. Not quite the relaxing week i was expecting (visions of walks through the estate ect) as we looked after x2 ex show jumping horses, x25 odd chickens, x12 chicks, x2 Guinea fowl chicks and x2 Bavarian bloodhounds. By the time everybody had had their breakfast there was not a lot of time for mine but i must say i really miss it being back at home now. Neither myself or Lydia have had any experience with livestock and were totally thrown in at the deep end, but the good thing with that is that you learn to swim very quickly, that or you drown! So still breathing and not getting too wet i must say im rather proud of ourselves for doing all that and feel really confident about a lot more things than i did the week previous, plus i loved feeling like Sylvester Stallone in the film Rocky where he chases the chickens for his training, jesus those things are hard to catch!

 This is the rather splendid 20ftx25ft greenhouse we have this year to play in :)

Some of our chickens for the week, (apparantly they love to just fly straight at your face and then leg it!) *Again.... not told about this

Baby chicks about 4 days old at this point

Guinea Fowl chicks about 4 minutes old in the incubator!

And the chickens even started laying whilst we were there so added bonus of fresh eggs :)

This is Eva one of the Bavarian Bloodhounds, what a gorgeous pooch but god is he strong!

Hendrix catching up on a bit of me time in front of the fire

Little and Large (i think Hendrix may have had an inferiority complex the whole week, best buds though

 Going for the lead role for the new remake of Dumbo is Eva

Just some of the views of the beautiful Burnt Norton Estate which we were lucky enough to call home for the week

Signing off for another few weeks as we have many many projects coming up at raspberry corner including, ploughing up the raspberry field, renovating the farm shop and planting out lots and lots of beautiful vegetables! i shall leave you with one last thought, enjoy x

http://youtu.be/SIaFtAKnqBU

      

Chutney Day!

Lydia's lovely brother and my wonderful brother in law who is a chef at one of our local restaurants 'The Church Street Townhouse' let us in on his tips for making three different types of chutney out of what we had left over from our season this year. A great oppourtunity to make up batches of what you have left or a glut of and best of all keeps for ages!

Here is Jamie and the Head chef at the Townhouse Nick Rowberry cooking at the 

Stratford-Upon-Avon food festival last weekend ;)

        Our Heirloom tomatoes were not all that great this season, i dont think many people have had large crops this year from what i have seen and it all seemed very late but we did have a few so we have kept all the seeds and are going for a bumper crop next year (isnt it always about next year!)

                                                                   Diced and sliced

 Jamie and his lovely girlfriend Natalie helping out with the onions that made us all cry!

 Saving the seeds

We decided in the end to make two chutneys and a jam, we ended up with a red onion and balsamic chutney, an apple and spice and all things nice and a heirloom tomato and apache chili jam that is pretty spicy but so so tasty! We are hoping that by doing little trials like these we can eventually start selling from our farm shop once our recipes have become perfected, in the meantime i will be chomping at the bit waiting before christmas to come so we can crack out the cheese and biscuits!

                                             Soul Patch Summer Blog

First of all apologies for being off the radar on the old blog, it only dawned on me the other day how long it was since i checked in and that was at the beginning of our first season!

Well if we could have started a new business in any year and with us being us it would have had to be the year we saw the driest winter, the coldest and wettest summer in a hundred years, and all of the usual steps to growing we were so keen to use that we had spent all winter learning did not apply as no one had ever seen a season like it. We were featured in the Stratford Herald which helped out a lot with new customers and a lot of people came down to the Soul Patch shows after reading about our venture.

                                      Our picture in the Herald

We did it though, and although it was far from perfect we were able to do everything we set out to do and sell almost everything we grew which certainly was not bad for a new business in its first year and on a steep learning curve.
As an unexpected twist we managed to develop a great relationship with our favorite local restaurant No.9 on Church Street supplying them with our Elephant garlic, which Wayne designed a lamb dish around for the national chef awards and it went on to stay on the menu :)

                                               Elephant Garlic 2012

                                              Our sage flowers this year

It would seem everytime i write on here about  finally securing somewhere for our business to grow it has gone terribly wrong and it has not worked out. One thing that we really didnt count on when we first started was that land to let is rarer than del boy paying the taxman! After 5 dissapointments we were forced to go a bit further than stratford and have landed on Mickleton as our home on a piece of land known locally for the last 30 odd years as Raspberry corner. It is just under an acre and has been either allotments since the 14th century and later being used to grow an abundance of raspberries with a farm shop on site. It is just between Mickleton and Weston Sub-Edge on the Broadway road and is a busy old road for passing traffic!

We also had the great honour of being asked to do the flowers for the the Dirty Duck pub in Stratford this year and as they are one of the most well known pubs in our town we recieved so many compliments and other new business from new customers who had seen our display and were all keen to get the same look!

                                 Jubilee Flower display Dirty Duck 2012

                              Just one of our beautiful baskets sold this year!

So with our new piece of land being 10 miles away from where we are living at the moment and now knowing how much our plants need looking after we have decided it would be for the best to make a move that way and towards the sensational cotswolds. Us being us we thought it would be a great idea to go for a camping weekend and have a look around the villages and do some 'research' on the best villages with the best pubs! We also found our way to the Cotswold wildlife park and had a look around some beautiful gardens and sown meadows and very much look forward to moving out that way when a few more things are sorted out :)

                                  Lydia's new tent that was her birthday present

                                 Beautiful meadow at cotswold wildlife park

                                     The green man of the forest

                               Johnnie and Hendrix checking out the rhinos!

                                 Beautiful baskets outside the reptile house

 Soul Patch Shows

Welcome to the summer! Well not quite yet, as i write this weather reports are telling me that 20 degrees is on the horizon tomorrow so the BBQ is getting a dusting off and scrubbed down and thoughts of home made burgers and sausages are flooding through my mind. 

Our first #SoulPatchShow was last Sunday at the Holy Trinity parish hall and many of our friends and the local community descended on our show, buying baskets, garden veg, slurping freshly pressed apple juice straight from our brand new press and eating their way through loads of lemon drizzle, victoria sponge and of course chocolate cake!

We had great coverage in the form of our local paper The Stratford Herald which got the word out to the masses in the town and of course helped boost sales on the phone. We have been truly humbled by the way people in our community have chosen to buy from us and support us in our first year, and doing these shows we have had a unique opportunity to connect with our customers as growers, advise them, talk about our grand plans and hopefully create a long lasting relationship with them :)

We had special guests Transition Stratford with their stall promoting The Plastic Challenge idea (see previous blog) and beautiful Pashley bicycles (and Ian even managed to flog one!) Judith from Shakespeare's sister soap also brought down her fantastic home made soaps which were a hit with the ladies of the day :)

We were so pleased with our new press and after a serious session of scratting the apples, we had the most delicious tasting juice we, and everyone else that tried it had ever tasted. We are going round the school fetes this year with Freeda the pick up truck decorated to the hilt selling fresh juice and our other produce which we are convinced the kids are going to love.

Pashley bike stand

Tiddington #SoulPatchShow was all together a different vibe as it was just us but we met so many different people yet again all having great ideas about new ways of living, earning money out of the rat race and generally having a better life. We have signed up to do a few more 'pop up' markets this season which seem to be going down a real storm with the general public.

Oh and i also decided that it would probably be best if people knew where we lived so i thought i might make it completely obvious and put up ''a few'' baskets!

And for no other reason than i think 'Salad head' will be the next big thing on the catwalks of Milan i thought i would let you in on Lydias secret.

Hope its as hot as i think its going to be tomorrow and it is where you are and hopefully we can start our Summer. I sure hope so because  i have more than a few camping trips planned this year!!

Much love

The Soul Patch

The Big Plastic Challenge

A most interesting challenge and one very close to our hearts here at The Patch, Transition Stratford's Big plastic challenge is set to commence on Monday the 12th May.

Their aim......Transition Stratford’s Plastic Challenge is simple. In Week One, starting Saturday12 May 2012, we will shop as normal – but collect together every bit of plastic packaging that comes home with the shopping. Keep a note of how much packaging comes into your life.

In Week Two, starting Saturday 19 May 2012, we will aim to avoid as much as possible of the throw-away plastic we brought home in Week 1. To do that, we’ll need to change the way we shop – in particular avoiding single-use plastic packaging. We won’t eliminate the plastic in our lives, but we will see where we can cut back on avoidable plastic and reduce the amount of plastic that just goes to waste.

Now we all recycle these days and from a personal view my recycling bin is brimming with things to be sent off for the council recycling plant and this is a good thing.

 For many years landfills and our oceans have been brimming with polythene and polyurethane that takes an awful long time to decompose and sits in the ground or is washed up on our beaches thousands of miles away from its original source, god knows what truly lies beneath all that water but i bet it ain't good!

 We think this is is a great idea to get the average joe bloggs to actually realise how much they could avoid even putting in the recycling bins all together, by reusing existing bags, boxes, cartons and the like and take positive steps to saving a bit of mother earth and even save a few quid whilst they are doing it :)

  The real problem lies with the plastic that cannot be recycled and it's a surprising amount, from looking on the back of packets of supermarket bought sausages, mushrooms and even trays of salad, it all bears a label of non recyclable....

   

So if your up for a bit of a lifestyle change, I'm not saying that you have to, or preaching to anyone that doesn't fancy it, but if it turns out that you like buying from the local butchers with zero packaging or from your overly enthusiastic veg chap down the friday market who offers veg, just veg and a paper bag, you might cut down on a little of the non essential plastic and your kitchen bin doesn't need to be emptied three times a day!

See what you think, all the info is on Transition Stratford's page

http://www.transitionstratford.com/wordpress/?p=226

 Or find them on the almighty Facebook and drop them a line http://www.facebook.com/pages/Transition-Stratford/184114821607551

  Either way we are fully behind them and if you already have lots of non recyclable trays in your bin, dig them out punch some holes in the bottom of them, add a little compost and grow some salad or herbs in them on your window sill or greenhouse. Easy as you like and tastes great :)

All the best The Soul Patch Soapbox xxx