Frankenstein's soup: what to do with your pumpkin entrails.

Traditions always seem more important as the winter closes in. As the light diminishes so the rhythms of the year, marked by the round of festivities, seem to get louder. Towards the end of a hectic day working, I ended up excited like a child to quickly carve some pumpkins and put them on the front doorstep ready for the local trick or treaters. My Pinterest and Twitter have been full of classy, refined ways to decorate a pumpkin for the last week - all in neutral tones, fitting in with contemporary room schemes - but I wanted to hack away at some orange coloured flesh and make something fun and traditional - an approach I felt pleased with when one 8 year old announced that my efforts were "awesome". 

But I am a fraud - when it came to what to do with the pumpkin entrails, I went with something far away from tradition. The trouble is, I just find pumpkin bland, and so I decided to throw lots of flavour at this pile of pumpkin gore. The image of Thailand might conceivably be as far away from what we think of as a traditional "Halloween"  as The Seychelles are from Lapland, but they sure know how to throw flavour at food in Thailand. And so my traditional pumpkin has been abused like Frankenstein's monster, and turned into a creation which neither the Thai people nor our own would recognise as traditional. Now I am just waiting for a lightening bolt to see if it comes to life.

Ingredients:

1 large onion

25g butter

1 tbsp olive oil

2 cloves garlic

1 red chilli

3 sticks celery, sliced

1 large carrot, sliced

2 tsp red curry paste

The flesh of 1 medium pumpkin

Half pint chicken stock

Can of coconut milk.

Bunch of coriander, leaves finally chopped and stalks chopped separately

1 leek

1 tbsp fish sauce

Melt the butter over a medium heat with the olive oil. Add the onion and garlic and soften for 5 minutes. Add the chilli, then the carrots and celery and stir in. Add the red curry paste and keep stirring until all the vegetables are coated. Finally add the pumpkin flesh, chicken stock and corriander stalks. Simmer for 20 minutes, adding more water as necessary until the pumpkin flesh is soft. Then add the can of coconut milk and stir through.

While the soup is cooking down, I fry the leeks separately in olive oil over a medium heat, turning regularly. This is because I then whiz the rest of the soup with a hand blender before adding the leeks in whole. I think that food is partly about presentation and texture, and the green of the pieces of leek contrast a bit with the rest of the soup. Once I've mixed in the leeks I season and add fish sauce to taste - beware that the fish sauce is salty in itself so don't overdo the salt - it will depend on your stock how much you will need.

Firelight and Glass

Although complaining about the weather is a national pass-time, I love the seasonality of the United Kingdom. I've been on a driving weekend to Edinburgh the weekend just past, and the beauty of the landscape in Scotland at this time of year is breathtaking. With the nights drawing in and the winds and rains blowing, it is the perfect time of year for snuggling down by the fire with a dram of whisky.






I have been having a great time trying to capture that feeling in our seasonal photography. We've had a lot of new glass items in, and I've been working on the use of firelight with and without some experimental flash techniques to see what effects I can get - under exposing and then filling back in with direct flash or just letting the firelight dance through the glass on a long exposure. Because I do a lot of my photography work from home, it has been a great excuse to spend some time and money improving odd corners of the house and really getting it ready for winter so, during those long cold nights, there will be nowhere I'd rather be.

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These quirky geometric vases by House Doctor of Denmark look great with twigs from the garden in, or paint the twigs white and jazz up with decorations for Christmas















I love the combination of these fairy lights on the copper lidded box. Copper is such a warm and beautiful material, and it reflects the light magically here.

This House Doctor floor vase has been taken using a remote flash to illuminate the vase and twigs - an interesting effect and fun to try and set up.

Candle light - don't you just love it at this time of the year. The warm, natural glow looks great in this photo.

The Mother of Invention

With an audience looking over your shoulder you always do things differently. One of the things I enjoy most about writing this blog is that it encourages invention - encourages me to try new things so that I can write about them.

From an early age I have always loved cooking - a love passed down from my mother, but developed over the years by experimenting on friends, wanting to try new things, by travel, by growing vegetables and by many other aspects of my life. My Grandmother and mother both always kept food notes - their own treasured recipe books with ideas passed from friends to each other. In a day before 24 hour cooking channels and abundant celebrity chefs, ideas and recipes were cooked up, passed on, and often passed down a generation in worn and stained notebooks. Writing this blog sometimes reminds me of those ways of doing things: writing things down is a way of formalising ideas, making you think longer and harder about what you are doing and making something ready to pass on.

Tonight's supper might still be considered a work in progress. I'm not sure if it is cooking or an adult version of kids making lotions and potions in the garden. I've thrown coriander, sugar, lime juice, mustard, sugar, root ginger and toasted cumin seed in the blender, blended it together and then slowly added sunflower oil whilst the blender whirls to make a thick, gloopy dressing. We have the very final tomatoes and runner beans at the allotment at the moment, and I wanted something to go with a quick prawn curry. One of the best curries I ever had was a prawn Jeera, packed with cumin, and I guess my thoughts have been wandering that way, but I also like the crunchy tomato salad that is often served with poppadoms. With this in mind, I have blanched the beans and very finely chopped a shallot and some celery. I have diced the tomatoes and I am going to mix this with some of my invented dressing, tasting as I go, and hope that somewhere in there my child-like attempt at making lotions and potions will actually turn out to be rather magical and worth the effort put in to growing the tomatoes in the first place.

Picture Credits
Geronimo pasta bowl by Bliss Home
Acacia wood chopping board by House Doctor

Welcome to Autumn

The last of the tomatoes and beans are available from the allotment and garden still at the moment, but the skins are becoming a little tough on the tomatoes. My big sister invented this smoked haddock and tomato stew one year when we were all supposed to be dieting, but although it is an extremely healthy meal, it feels anything but a diet food with it's warm, rich flavours. I love this smoky stew as a welcome to Autumn – using up some of the harvest time produce, the smoky flavours hark forward to bonfires and fireworks. Pretty simple and one of those dishes you can chuck different things in, basically it is a fresh tomato soup in which you poach some smoked haddock chunks.

Basic Quantities for Ingredients (vary as available):

15 ripe tomatoes; 2 medium onions; 2 cloves garlic; 1 stick celery; 1tsp smoked sweet paprika; 1 cup stock; 0.5 tsp cayene pepper; handful of green beans; 300g smoked haddock; 1/2 a can of chickpeas to serve 4.

As with a lot of dishes, I start with finely chopped onions and garlic, which I sweat down in olive oil until they are soft. I then like to add a teaspoon of smoked paprika to bring out the smokiness and a teaspoon of ground cayenne for a bit of a kick. I then add finely chopped tomatoes (I rarely bother skinning them – it is a rustic dish and seems a waste of time if you are chopping them anyway). I add stock, wine or water depending on what I have in the fridge – I often add some very finely diced celery too as it is a good flavour enhancer. I cook it down for half an hour adding water as necessary to make it the consistency I fancy. A good long time cooking brings out the sugars in the tomatoes even if I do have to keep adding water Ten minutes before I want to serve, I add half a can of chickpeas and some green beans, then for the final 5 minutes, cubed smoked haddock to cook through.

If you've got potatoes going over, you could add those instead of the chickpeas, or add leek or carrot earlier in the cooking, but the basic idea of a smoky tomato and fish stew makes one of the best welcomes to Autumn, and I find myself regularly coming back to it at this time of year.

Picture features:

Ceramic two-tone Portugese tableware by Rice of Denmark

Backgroud: Copper lidded storage jar by House Doctor

Foreground: Acacia Wood chopping board by House Doctor

Jobs to Dwell on and Jobs to Speed Up

One of the most rewarding parts of my job is shooting photos for new stock. Choosing and buying stock is fun – we're now good friends with a lot of people from companies we deal with and getting together at trade shows to discuss new ideas and the coming season is great – but once the stock arrives I get my own creative kick by working out the best way to display items; the best story to tell with them. While the business was young and growing, most of this was done in the shop, but over the years much of that has been passed on to the hard working team I have there. My time is now often spent trying to give our online customers the kind of experience we give our shop customers. My home office is always full of stock samples and the kitchen is regularly turned into a photo studio for the day.

Although many suppliers provide stock photos, I love to do our own lifestyle shots. It gives us a chance to take items from different suppliers and put them together and gives us a stock of unique images and ideas for people. I come from a creative family and my Dad is a great photographer, so often helps out. My little sister is an artist - if I can get hold of her, Alice makes the best stylist. For me, running a small business is all about the variety, but this is definitely one job I regret having to rush when we are busy. Producing online content is my chance to communicate with our customers, provide the chat about products our real world customers get, show them ideas we have seen and loved. That's the best bit of running a real world shop, and it is also the best bit of running an online operation.

Below: I have always been a bit of a geek too – my latest fun thing to do is timelapse photography on my phone. Having had an interest in technology since I was young, I am amazed at what powerful little tools we carry around with us all the time now in the form of a mobile phone. High quality cameras, powerful computers connect to the endless knowledge available on the web. They can even speed up time, it seems.

And some of the resulting photographs for our Christmas section: