I was born in Selfridges. Well not literally, but almost in that I was born just down the road and that’s where I lived til I was thirty. Most of my family have, at one time or another, worked in Selfridges. My First Holy Communion dress was made there (my aunt used to work in the alterations department). So I know lots about Selfridges, and Oxford Street. As I once said to a fishing ghillie, who asked me what sort of terrain I was used to, I’m comfortable with concrete and carpets.

Growing up a stone’s throw from Selfridges, in a two-bedroomed mansion block flat, didn’t teach me much about gardening however. I did have an impressive window-sill collection of plants. And when we went to Italy we had an orchard and my relatives had land. But gardens? Nope.

Three years ago, I bought me a house in Suffolk. We now have just under one acre of land. I have no idea what to do with most of it. The reason we bought our funny little 1960’s house (little being a good, descriptive word here) was because the garden that came with it was the best we’d seen. The former occupants were very keen gardeners. VERY keen. We have lawns, and a little formal garden at the back, and a woodland walk bit and lots of trees (which I’ve learned the names of, mostly) and borders n’ stuff, it’s all very magical and perfect for children to play in.

But I have no clue at all what to do with it. I am not exaggerating, not one single bit, when I say that I can tell a tree, I know what grass looks like and I can identify roses and daffodils. And moss. But that really is about it. People I know come round and say “but darling, look at your cornus controversia traversia fantasia tree, it’s divine, how did you get it so tiered?” and I think “do my gardening for me.”

When we first moved in, driven by keen enthusiasm and with only one child to look after (which let me tell you, is EASY, retrospectively) I decided one day to do some weeding of things that looked, to me, like weeds. To be fair to me, which I always try to be, I did check with my partner, who said “yes them’s is weeds”. So I pulled them all up.

Later I discovered they were poppies. Wild and rude poppies (rude cos they just go where they like) but poppies none the less. It’s taken them three years to recover from my frantic plucking. I like poppies.

In 2008 I could ignore the garden cos I was pregnant, and shuffling around like a Barbar Papa. In 2009 I could ignore the garden because I’d just had a baby (at HOME, a HBAC, yes it is possible people). This year I’m realising that unless we want to end up with a garden like that one in The Secret Garden (except without the possibility of staff, or a TV crew, to make it alright) I was going to have to do some work in it.

But, as I’ve mentioned in other posts. I’m a girl that needs kit before I can do anything. Growing up, I was forced FORCED to work in my parents’ cafe. One of the things I did was the washing up. There is nothing like doing washing up of un-known people’s dishes to really put you off washing up. I remember coming across bits of food floating in the water that, to this day, can still make me retch at the memory. I was too small to wear rubber gloves (are you crying yet?).

These days, when I am washing precious things, things that cannot go into the dishwasher, I will only do so if wearing rubber gloves. I need that degree of separation because I’ve been deeply scarred.

So of course, with gardening it is obvious I need lots of my own kit if I’m to really take any interest in it.

I have my own wheelbarrow, but that has since been stolen by my eighty-year old father who will insist on helping out in the garden. My partner also nicks the wheelbarrow. So I’ve lost interest in it.

I NEED really expensive secateurs, because we all know that will make me much cleverer and more capable in the garden. But until I’ve ascertained which those are to be, I make use of my three other pairs of secateurs, all of which have broken/rusted because I don’t take care of them properly because I haven’t bought them especially for me.

So finally we get onto gardening gloves. It is completely unfathomable that I could garden without them. So three years ago I bought some Briers gardening gloves from Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s old home. They were cream, and leather and really rather good. But they too got ‘borrowed’ and then they hung on the washing line until they turned brittle.

I bought some very good, green, leather gauntlets, reduced to a fiver (from lots more) in Johnny Lou Lou’s last year. But the mice ate them, goddamit, in the garage. Then I ignored my own advice and bought several pairs of cheap gloves from Homebase, all of which were totally rubbish.

Two weeks ago, I put out an appeal on Facebook for good gardening gloves and my online friend Vicky R, told me to try Atlas Gardening Gloves. I was suspicious because I’d only ever worn leather gardening gloves. And these were rubber nylon things. The pictures of them are a bit misleading, because they look like they’d be thick and unwieldly, like a beefed up rubber glove. But they’re not.

Blimey the look enormous. I promise I haven’t got Shrek hands. Photographed here on yet another stainless steel surface in my kitchen.

God they’re fantastic. I mean, I know it sounds completely mad to rave about a gardening glove, or anything, in that ‘they’ve changed my life way’. But they have. Here’s why:

They’re really sensitive, so you can do almost anything in them, from coaxing out a weed root, to handling really rough weeds. What the pics don’t really convey is that they’re really soft, you can scrunch them up in  your hand.

They scrunch up small, not particularly useful per se, but means they’re flexible, which is.

Because of this: they’re not so tough they’d be able to handle super hard thorns (you can get some others for that, which I’ve yet to try) and I have stung myself on the back of the hand with a nettle (although that’s good for you in the long run init, protects against arthritis) because the back of the glove is less protected to make the glove more flexible. But I lived.

They come in all different colours, which I like, so I know which are mine.

They’re washable.

They’re cheap compared to leather gloves. But actually, so much better I think.

Sizing: I have fairly small hands, and I got a medium, which fit fine, but with room. I may go to a small next time for uber sensitivity and pretend I am a garden surgeon. They’re not like rubber gloves in that hard to get off way if they’re too small, because they feel like fabric.

So the upshot is that I have been out in the garden pulling up actual weeds (since that is the only thing I am trusted to do) regularly.

Vicky gets them from eBay where they are cheaper. But I got mine direct where there is more selection.

So there you have it.

I’m aware this is my second food post in as many days. And I want to stress this isn’t a food blog, but just random things I use and consume that come into my head.

Vanilla ice cream is the most basic of flavours, and because of this, it gets overlooked. I’ve made many vanilla ice creams and they have varied from too vanilla-y to what tastes like little more than flor di latte (which means flower of the milk and is the plainest ice cream flavour you can get).

Heston Blumenthal has a recipe for vanilla ice cream that involves coffee beans, and sounds interesting, but I haven’t made it yet because it involves six vanilla pods. Heston’s recipes are amazing, but they don’t work out cheap (he has a current recipe in Waitrose for Banana Eton Mess which works out at £18 for the ingredients, Heston love, don’t you know there’s a recession on??).

My beloved Panasonic ice cream machine came with a humble little paper recipe pamphlet that, nevertheless, has proved to have some of the best ice cream recipes on it (I still think its chocolate ice cream recipe is unsurpassable).

This is what it suggests for vanilla ice cream:

120ml double cream
2 large egg yolks
50g granulated sugar
80ml milk (I always use semi-skimmed, to no obvious detriment)
1-2 tsp vanilla extract

You beat the egg yolks and sugar together, until pale and fluffy. If you don’t want to do a big work out (and really, you should, it’s the little jobs like this that our grandmothers did that all added up to keeping them fit, that and washing clothes by hand and turning mattresses etc). Add the milk and mix together well. Place this mixture in a saucepan and stir over a low heat. Don’t boil (but if it starts to boil a bit don’t panic, just turn it down and mop your brow and pay more attention next time). When its thickened to form a custard (which I find needs quite a vigorous heat), remove it from the heat and let it cool. Make yourself a cup of tea or something.

In a separate bowl, whisk the cream up, then add the vanilla extract to the custard mixture, then the whipped cream. Chill then churn in the machine.

Now a few notes about this recipe. You’ll see it tells you to whip the cream and then add it. I’ve done it without whipping it and the result has been the same. But try it the proper way first (I find the whipped cream flattens anyway when you mix it into the custard mixture). You’ll also see later that, although similar ingredients are used in other recipes, the way they’re put together varies. I guess it goes to show it all amounts to the same thing.

I found 2tsp of vanilla extract waaaaaaaaaaay too vanilla-y for this amount of ice cream (which doesn’t give you much, but just scale it up for more), so you may need to experiment.

This recipe above was my standard vanilla ice cream recipe for ages.

Then I started getting lots of books about ice cream. One which is pretty good is called Ice Cream. In it there is a recipe for vanilla ice cream which uses:

300ml full cream milk (again, I say, I always use semi skimmed milk and it’s just fine)
1 vanilla pod
4 large egg yolks
100g vanilla sugar
300ml double cream

What you do with it all is put the milk and the vanilla pod, which you’ve split in half length ways, in a pan and heat gently then remove it from the heat and let the pod infuse for 15 mins. With this one, in a separate heat proof bowl, you beat the egg yolks and sugar until thick and pale.

Remove the pod from the milk, scraping out all the seeds and slowly beat the milk into the egg mixture.

Place the bowl over a pan of simmering water, stir mixture until it coats the back of a wooden spoon (which it pretty much does straight away but you can carry on stirring as it’s fairly calming and you can day dream, the mixture won’t come to much harm as it’s in a bain marie).

Remove bowl, cover surface with cling film or grease proof paper (I am so lazy, I have pre-cut baking parchment circles for cake making and I use one of those) and let it cool, then chill for an hour or so. Then stir in the double cream and sling the whole lot into the ice cream maker.

All good. Ish. The ice cream is perfectly fine, but nothing special. A few notes about the ingredients. Vanilla pods annoy me. They’re expensive, sometimes, even if correctly stored, they go brittle and don’t work with you. I manage to leave behind half the seeds and all in all, I think are a pretty imprecise way of using vanilla. Do not buy vanilla sugar! It might as well be labelled “food stuff for stupid people with too much money”, just get a container, put some caster sugar in it, and lob a vanilla pod in it.  Keep it like that forever and ever. When you take some sugar out to use it for a recipe, put a bit more caster sugar in. Vanilla pods are great at this, they infuse the sugar with their bossy vanilla-y-ness. When you remember, replace the pod with a fresh one. If you’re reading this recipe and thinking “but I want to make vanilla ice cream NOW and I don’t have time to infuse my sugar with a vanilla pod”, then I applaud your enthusiasm but say: just use regular caster sugar this time. I swear you won’t notice much difference, which just goes to show what a terrific waste of money shop-bought vanilla sugar is.

So I decided to slightly adapt the above recipe. And when I say slightly, I really do mean slightly.

I bought some vanilla paste.  The one I used is by Taylor and Colledge and I buy it from Waitrose. It’s not a cheap alternative, at about a fiver for a small pot but I reckon you get more value from it as you can  use the whole product, none of that scraping etc, see above.

Now, my Ice cream books says that one tablespoon of vanilla paste equals one vanilla pod. The Taylor and Colledge website says one teaspoon. I used one tablespoon, which did seem like a lot. But for just over a pint of ice cream, it resulted in a very, very good vanilla ice cream. It was speckled, pale yellow, very vanilla-y tasting without making you want to grab the table for support; overall, almost buttery. In the way that people use buttery to describe something delicious, I don’t mean it tasted buttery literally as that wouldn’t really be that great. You experiment with how much vanilla paste to put in according to taste.

Try it and let me know what you think and also, what’s your favourite vanilla ice cream recipe?

I’m not a huge fan of banana chips. This is due to a legacy of over dosing on them when small (sadly the same effect was not forthcoming for cake, or chocolate). They – the banana chips – sort of suck you in with their super sugariness, fooling you into thinking they are in any way healthy (I’m talking about the coated ones) when they’re not.

My daughter regards banana chips as the ultimate treat. I am not sure how I’ve succeeded in conning her into believing that dried fruit trumps Haribo* sweets (which I never, EVER buy her since they have zero nutritional benefit unless you’re stuck in a lift and about to die and they’re all you have in which case I guess the sugar would keep you alive) but I have.

Every Saturday we go to the local market and I let her buy 20p of banana chips, which are of the coated variety and taste, to my mind, of shite. But she likes them and the occasional treat ain’t bad. When we go to Waitrose she sometimes asks if she can have the more expensive banana chips in packets and which aren’t coated with loadsa sugar, which I sometimes let her have even though they are, have I mentioned, expensive: like £2 for what amounts to about five pieces of dehydrated banana, which gram for gram must surely make it more expensive than, perhaps, gold or something.

Last week when we were in London, we went to the John Lewis Food Hall, aka the poshest Waitrose you can get and I bought her some Slow Dried Cavendish Banana. They aren’t chips at all (sorry about the misleading title, but “banana bits” might not have registered in the same way) but chunks of banana that look, frankly, like shite.

Voila the packet, they cost £1.99 or so for 200g. For those of you interested in such things, they contain 385kcal per 100g, 3.9g protein, 82g carbs (of which 74g are sugars), 1.8g fat and 7g of fibre.

This is what’s inside. Looks like a piece of poo init? But trust me much more yummy.

But God they were delicious. They’re ‘slow dried’ and don’t have anything added to them, but they’re chewy, naturally very sweet and just really pretty fucking delicious. So much so that I ended up eating way loads more than I planned and ended up with really sticky fingers before I’d even got back up to ground floor in John Lewis, which I then plastered all over the escalator rail (sorry about that).

In fact, as I photographed the packet, there are two pieces left which I would have snaffled and stolen from my own flesh and blood, had I not just eaten two pieces of dark chocolate.

Talking of chocolate, and talking of Zotter chocolate as I was last month. When I was back at the JL Food Hall I bought another flavour: 70% cocoa with wine and pumpkin. It was just GREAT. Although my parents weren’t impressed. My mother took one bite and it launched her into a tale of some chocolate she once had which “wasa so awful, I hadda to spitta itta out”.

You really have to try this – Zotter – chocolate if you come across it.

Anyway the banana bites/bits. Would be really good for packed lunches and the like. So, er kinda topical in that tedious back to school way…

*When I was chamber-maiding during school holidays I once went in to clean someone’s room and they had a packet of Haribo sweets and I couldn’t stop eating them, so much so that I ate about 3/4 of the packet and had to then carefully position each sweet in the packet to make it look like there was more than there was. I so get how people like the chewiness, very addictive. But I still won’t buy them for my children.

Some years ago, I bought this great mac from Mini Mode the now (almost, as of the end of this month) defunct brand you could only get at Boots. It has a hood, which you can’t see, and was pretty hydrophobic and it looked good with most things. I always got asked where it was from. I loved this mac. My daughter loved it (although if I remember rightly, like most things, she had to be coerced to wear it). My partner/her father loved it. Even my parents thought it was pretty cool, although not actually pretty cool as that would reinforce their idea that I don’t dress my daughter warmly enough, ever. It had done many years sterling service, but even if Mini Mode were still going, it only ever went up to age six and my daughter is nearly seven. So the hunt for a new mac was on.

The lovely mac from Mini Mode which did gave many years of service through snow ‘n’ wind ‘n’ rain.

Nice, stylish girls’ macs are not easy to find. They’re either too cutesy, too pink, too branded or just plain rubbish. My mother, when not feeding my daughter two Bahlsen plain chocolate biscuits sandwiched together, had, she said, spied a really nice mac in Zara but hadn’t bought it yet.

Last week my eldest and I went to London. She came with me whilst I went on my appointments, aka going to get my hair done at John Freida and meeting up with the totally fabulous perfumier Roja Dove at the reading rooms in Claridges (ha! you thought my life was all making bread in Suffolk, wrong, wrong, wrong!). Because we then decided, quite ad hoc, to stay the night in London I decided to go shopping with her for school shoes at Johnny Lou Lou’s. As we were leaving there I spied Next.

Now, lots of my friends seem to find nice children’s clothes in Next. I never do. But that’s mostly cos I don’t really look and I don’t order from the catalogue because last time I did they opened a credit account for me and started sending me scary statements that made me fearful and it took me ages to cancel it.

Anyway. I thought I’d give it a go by actually going in there and looking around properly. And I found what I think is a great little mac/trenchcoat for girls. It’s camel coloured (so, like, bang on trend for this season if you care about such things, which I really do not), has little details like slightly puffed sleeves and a dotty lining. It’s really cute, and looks well made and isn’t too expensive.

It’s 100% cotton and is billed as ‘shower proof’ and is of course washable at 40 degrees.

“Stone Trench Coat for girls” by Next, in sizes to fit ages 3-16 and costs  from £21-£27.

I’ve installed various things on here and this is just to see if they work. Which I’m sure they won’t. If anyone understands Google Analytics and/or how to get my ‘subscribe to this blog via email’ thing to actually work, please tell me!