Hello everyone!
I still think of you as my shedders, although the shed has been demolished by Unbound. Nothing else has been demolished, though. Not my enthusiasm - or yours, I trust!
Now, since I was last in touch, the book has gone into production and I'm busy on the copy editing comments. A very nit-picking copy editor (this is a great compliment!) has been going through my book, making comments and asking relevant questions and I've been happy to reply to these. But there is another requirement, in my mind, at least. Although it's not a cookbook, I have dotted in some recipes here and there and I want to be quite sure they all work! This means following the recipe a couple of times to make sure it's foolproof. So far, so good. I've made some brown bread, and here's a photograph of it.The tomatoes are not mine, but the peas are from the garden!
And then I made some oatcakes. The ones I made were rather chunky, as I didn't roll them out thinly enough, but they tasted really good. Here they are:
And I made some potato cakes with dulse. Wanna see them? No sooner said than done.
Will that convince you that I am beavering away? I am still feeling the love for all my pledgers and feeling excited about the book coming together. Julian, who is doing the illustrations for the chapter headings and also for the all-important jacket, has sent me a rough draft of the kind of thing he's thinking of and I love it. Think Edward Bawden. And if you don't know the work of this late, great English artist, then you'll have a treat looking him up.
That's all for now. I'll get back to you soon with news of my adventures with carrageen. Seaweed is all the rage at the moment (like gin) but it's been a part of Irish culinary history since time immemorial, so I've plenty to go on.
I know that the book is fully funded, but it's even better if you can think of anyone who'd be interested. Their pledge is absolutely guaranteed to bring results and the more the interest in Ireland's Green Larder snowballs, the better it is all round!
I'll be back!