Eventually Using The Parsley Honey

  Writing that post about parsley  for yesterday  reminded me that I'd  written about making parsley 'honey' back in 2023 HERE and still have some in the cupboard. It was too runny to use on toast and I've thought about tipping it away a few times but then hung onto two small jars, 'just in case'. It's still perfectly OK and that old post told me that I was going to bake some loaf cakes and use the very runny honey like you would lemon drizzle mix to pour over the top after it comes out of the oven. I'd completely forgotten that plan.

So that's what I did. I usually do two at a time when making lemon drizzle loaves but thought I'd better just do one honey drizzle cake 'just in case'.....again.

I skewered a  few holes in the cake when I took it out of the oven and spooned over some of the very runny 'honey'. It worked  well. 

Very delicious.

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Parsley

Years ago I always grew parsley from seed every year - that was when I was growing herbs for sale. More recently I've just been buying a pot from the supermarket each spring.

 Usually Parsley grown in one year dies back with the frosts over winter and then comes back a little in Spring before running to seed.

It's been so mild this winter that my parsley is still looking green and healthy and very usable.

It was way back in May last year when I bought this sad looking pot of parsley from Aldi at half price of 39p. Supermarket parsley in a pot is always dozens of seedlings rather than just one plant. I stood the pot in water for a while, divided into three and potted up two thirds putting the other third in the garden with that frame over to protect from neighbours cat digging it up. Poor cat was killed on the road not long after this but I didn't bother to move the framework.

39p pot of sad parsley!

I was able to cut plenty to use for potato salad last week - very useful.

According to the book "The Garden Apothecary" there are other uses for parsley apart from the well known. The Romans used it as a breath freshener after a meal rather than in the meal and it was grown as a fodder for horses and only became a culinary herb in the Middle Ages.

Culpepper the C17 herbalist said

The leaves of parsley laid to the eyes that are inflamed with heat, or swollen, doth much help them, if it be used with bread or meal and being fried with butter, and applied to woman's breasts that are hard through the curdling of their milk, it abates the hardness quickly, and also takes away black and blue marks coming of bruises or falls.

I seem to remember that years ago it was just used as a garnish on a plate - never eaten. Seems odd to say that  now.

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Sad Pot of Parsley

It had a half price label, so I paid 39p for a sad pot of lanky, overgrown parsley from Aldi.

 I stood it in water for a good while. These supermarket growing herbs  are always a pot full of seedlings rather than a plant. I've divided the very root bound clump up into 3  pots.

Cut off some but not all of the tops and will see what happens.

If it's a fail I wasted 39p, if a success I saved a bit more than that!

************

We got so spoiled with the week of good weather that the cold of the last couple of days has been a real shock. I took a hot water bottle to bed again and put away the shorts - hate doing that!

Eldest Daughter is 45 today, how did that happen?

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Sue

And The Final Food Shop of February..............

 ......from someone who never wanted to be a food blogger! but sometimes is short of ideas for blog posts...........

Once I was sure the floods had subsided I did the final February shop which came to exactly £29. After the third shop someone said I'd not spent much this month but this tops up my February food total to £114.70 which is a little below average for an ordinary month.

This last shop of the month was a pot of parsley (79p, for dividing and planting out later), cabbage, carrots, apples, pears and grapes. Cheese, butter and Stork for cakes; Icing and castor sugar, yeast, cashews, pack of three small boxes of apple juice (always in the cupboard for grandchildren); a jar of Malt Extract so I can see what a malt loaf made in the bread maker is like and finally a pound of sausages from the proper butchers, which will be split into twos before freezing. 

Proper sausages are quite expensive so nowadays I make two sausages feed me for two days- one day one sausage goes into a toad-in-the-hole and the next day the other sausage makes two sausage rolls. Every time I do this it reminds me of my Mum saying about our old neighbours that "they are so mean they only have one sausage each!". Two each was the norm in our house.

I don't buy sugar from Aldi - where most of my shopping came from - as I'm not sure of it's origin but at Asda they have Silver Spoon which is made in Suffolk or Norfolk. 

On the other hand Aldi have more British fresh veg than anywhere else. We've got to do more to support our farmers.

I don't eat much meat nowadays but last week had an odd wish for an old fashioned stew and dumplings, something I've not made for probably 10 years. So maybe March's meat purchase will be some stewing steak or even better some neck of lamb chops - I bet I'll get a shock when I find the price!

Back Tomorrow

Sue

Rounding Up

No exercise group this week as the village hall is having work done but as there were two lovely days on Monday and Tuesday, I got lots more clearing done in the garden and once again the garden waste bin is almost full just two days after being emptied.

I cleared the Passion flower right back to ground level as it was spreading everywhere and took the insect protection off the Purple Sprouting Broccoli, which promptly all fell over - they are too tall and leaning away from the fence. Might get something edible off them eventually.

It's been a week of endings in the garden

The last of............

..............the beetroot, as there weren't many I've only been eating now and again to spread the enjoyment.

..............the courgettes, one plant has lasted far longer than normal and I took 5 more courgettes off before pulling it up and adding to my compost bin.

.........the autumn raspberries, such a surprise at how many I've had considering there are only a few canes.

.........the tiny plum tomatoes, the very dead plants are now in the council garden waste bin and a bowl of tomatoes in the fridge.

.........the parsley plants, divided from a pot bought in the spring from Aldi, the section I put outside was eaten by slugs(?) and the two in the greenhouse had come to an end. Need to buy another pot to divide and over winter.

My church visits 'happened' to take me close to  Bridge Farm Barns, a cafe/gift shop/vintage shop place to look at what lovely things they have in for Christmas - very pricey though and I bought nothing except a coffee and cheese scone ( it would have been rude not to and I went without breakfast specially!)

When I got home I got my Christmas list book out of the drawer ready to start noting down presents including what I already have for the Christmas Hampers for my sister and sister in law. Checked what cards I have -  seem to have bought rather a lot half price in the January sales - plenty for this year for sure. The problem with having several family birthdays all within a few weeks in October and November is that it's difficult to think about Christmas presents when I've only just asked what they would like for birthdays.

Thursday was wet and as I drove to Diss for shopping I couldn't remember the last time I'd driven in rain as it's been another dry summer and early Autumn for us in Suffolk but the weather has become much more autumnal in the last couple of days.

This week I've been grateful for

• Fine warm weather for garden clearing and to save on heating oil
• Living in a quiet part of the world
• The food from my garden

I'll be back Monday - Hope you have a good weekend

Sue

More About Parsley

 I wrote about growing parsley from a bought pot of parsley from the supermarket earlier this year HERE and said it was much simpler than sowing from seed and cheaper too. Parsley seeds are notoriously difficult to get going, tradition is that they go down to the devil and don't always come back!

 I planned to buy another pot in Spring and divide, which I did and these are the small portions of seedlings that I put in a big pot and a small pot in the green house. The bigger pot full grew rather well! The clump I planted outside is buried under the courgette leaves at the moment hopefully will survive and recover when the courgettes are cleared away.

With such a huge pot full  I had enough to try this recipe which I've wanted to have a go at since finding it in the small book "The Shirley Goode Kitchen", a BBC book published in 1986. Shirley did a TV programme about frugal cooking and managing on a tight budget. (I see it's still available cheaply on Amazon) My copy is looking very tatty now but it will see me out. 

The recipe  sounds improbable  - turning parsley, water and sugar into honey?

Anyway I gave it a try.

Parsley Honey

4oz Parsley (leaves and stalks)

1lb Granulated sugar

1 heaped tablespoon thick honey

Wash the parsley and put in a big pan with 1½ pints water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Strain through a sieve into a measuring jug and if necessary add more water to make 1 pint. Return liquid to pan. Add the sugar and bring to boil stirring all the time, then leave at a rolling boil for 20 minutes. Add the honey and stir until it dissolves. Remove from heat and pot into small, hot, sterilised jars.

I presumed it was supposed to set or thicken a little - it didn't look as if it would so I put the jars in the fridge.

When it was cold I poured some -  it was still just a liquid - onto a piece of toast. It tastes like honey. Or maybe just sugar/water flavoured with honey! But even after days in the fridge it's still just really thin. Had I have thought about it more I could have used some jam sugar containing pectin which might have helped.

I have an idea that it might be good poured over a plain cake like you do with a Lemon Drizzle cake and it would certainly be nice in hot water for a winter drink but it will have to stay in the fridge taking up space until then as it goes straight through toast!.

According to the book "The Garden Apothecary" there are other uses for parsley apart from the well known. The Romans used it as a breath freshener after a meal rather than in the meal and it was grown as a fodder for horses and only became a culinary herb in the Middle Ages.

Culpepper the C17 herbalist said

The leaves of parsley laid to the eyes that are inflamed with heat, or swollen, doth much help them, if it be used with bread or meal and being fried with butter, and applied to woman's breasts that are hard through the curdling of their milk, it abates the hardness quickly, and also takes away black and blue marks coming of bruises or falls.

 

 I'm glad I finally got to try Shirley Goode's frugal recipe but wish it had worked a bit better.

Back Tomorrow

Sue

Parsley

 In October last year I bought a pot of growing parsley from Aldi for around a £1. When these are bought they are not really plants but more a collection of seedlings.

I split all the growth into 3 clumps and potted up two. One was kept indoors on the window sill and lasted several weeks, one planted out, but it got eaten by something and one put in a pot in the greenhouse. This was all so easy I won't bother to grow from seed again but just buy a pot and divide and transplant in spring and another in October again.

Parsley is quite hardy and the greenhouse pot has kept going all winter and now looks like this.

This is what I wrote several years ago for the Suffolk Smallholders Newsletter about growing parsley. Pots of parsley were something I grew every year to sell at the gate.

Parsley

Slow to get going from seed, it's the one thing that I make sure to buy a new packet of seed each year. It can be sown quite early and there are all sorts of old wives tales about the best methods of getting it to germinate. I usually pour really hot water over the compost before sowing ( the old way was to pee on it!).Sow quite thickly and cover with a plastic lid then keep it in a warm place.

Somewhere in my books I'd seen a curious recipe for Parsley Honey, I thought it might have been in one of the Hovel books but  eventually found it in The Goode Kitchen by Shirley Goode, a small recipe book of budget recipes dating from 1986. Wonder if anyone has tried it, I haven't. Apparently it makes about 1½ lbs of something that looks and tastes exactly like clear honey.

Parsley Honey

4oz Parsley (leaves and stalks)

1lb Gran sugar

1 heaped tablespoon thick honey

Wash the parsley and put in a big pan with 1½ pints water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Strain through a sieve into a measuring jug and if necessary add more water to make 1 pint. Return liquid to pan. Add the sugar and bring to boil stirring all the time, then leave at a rolling boil for 20 minutes. Add the honey and stir until it dissolves. Remove from heat and pot into small, hot, sterilised jars.

My first father in law always grew a long row of parsley along the edge of the garden. It wasn't for eating but used for lining the box of vegetables when entering the "Collection of Vegetables " class in the village flower shows. He usually won!

Back Tomorrow

Sue

Growing Herbs

I've been growing herbs since the mid 1980s, when I discovered that many were interesting to grow and easy to sell. In the summer of the year before I had Youngest, when the older two were at school I used to pick raspberries to be frozen for a PYO fruit farm and then went on to sell the herbs there and then after we moved to the smallholding I grew for several years to sell at the gate and at the Suffolk Smallholders Annual Show. Eventually I found all the greenhouse space was needed for starting tomatoes, cucumbers and all the other things we  grew for selling and ended up only sowing parsley and basil each year.

Way, way back I wrote a page for Suffolk Smallholders Society monthly newsletter all about which herbs I would grow if I only had room for a few. Back then we had a huge herb garden which was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time but needed too many hours spent on it to be sensible for a busy smallholders. We cleared it all when the Bay tree centre-piece got to 15 feet tall and more than 8 feet wide!

I can't find a copy of the page I wrote years ago so started again and I can't find the list of herbs we had growing - I'm sure it was more than 20 different ones - several were more like weeds than herbs - Tansy for instance.........I had to pull it out from the flower garden for years after removing the herb garden.

Anyway,  if I only had room for a few Herbs they would be............

Parsley
Slow to get going from seed, it's the one thing that I make sure to buy a new packet of seed each year. It can be sown quite early and there are all sorts of old wives tales about the best methods of getting it to germinate. I usually pour really hot water over the compost before sowing (the old way was to pee on it!) then sow quite thickly and cover with a plastic lid, then keep it in a warm place.
I prefer curly leafed rather than flat-leaf but proper chefs usually seem to use the flat-leaf sort. Parsley will often survive through the winter outside in a sheltered spot giving some new growth early before running to seed in June - that's when I pull up the old clump and start using the new plant. My favourite way to use it is in potato salad and fish-cakes.

Chives
First to reappear after winter, so bits can be snipped to add to sandwiches before there's any other sign of green stuff. Difficult to start from seed but once you have one clump you can easily divide them and re-plant. I like to have two clumps around the garden, so one lot can be left to flower for the bees and another can have all the flowers taken off so there are no thick un-edible stems. Also use this in potato salad and with scrambled egg in sandwiches.

Mint
Either grown in a pot - which it hates, or left to spread in the ground .....depends how much room you have. Another herb hard to grow from seed but once you have a pot it should last years and is ever so easy to propagate from a rooted cutting. If grown in a pot dig out some with a root on to move into a new pot each year. If grown in the ground it might take over but I just  pull out some  each year. If you cut some down when it starts to run to seed in late summer then new growth will appear for the autumn. I use this when cooking new potatoes from the garden and for mint tea. I've tried umpteen times to get Peppermint to grow for me but found it always crossed with the common spearmint so ended up all the same. (I remember a slightly tetchy discussion with a man at one of the Suffolk Smallholder's shows when I had Eau-de-Cologne mint for sale. "How can there be Eau-de-Cologne mint - it's a contradiction and impossible". Oh no it isn't!)

Basil
I love pesto stirred into pasta and tomato/basil sauces also for pasta so always grow some. It needs heat to get started and then a warm place to grow. Some people swear by a pot on the windowsill but whenever I've tried that it's got invaded by greenfly. I nip out the flowering tip when they get to about 9 inches tall to get lots of branches. There are lots of different types of basil but I reckon the big green leaved Sweet Genovese is the most useful. I've seen on youtube that it's easy to take cuttings from basil just by growing in water - must give it a go although I don't need tons.

Thyme
No matter how many times I bought a pot of this to plant in the garden at the smallholding (another herb fiddly to grow from seed) it never lasted more than a few years. Yet in many places in the country it grows in the wild and often seeded itself easily at the smallholding so that I could dig up seedlings to sell. Lemon thyme is lovely but I don't think it's as hardy as common thyme. On moving here I found a patch of common thyme growing in next to no soil right by the paving slabs at the edge of the patio and it's looking well again this year. So maybe at the smallholding the soil was just too rich. Most useful with chicken I used to put a big handful inside the chicken when roasting and more between the skin and breast. Don't use it so much now as I rarely roast a whole chicken.


I've also got a very large Rosemary in the flower garden, some Lemon Balm and Common Sage at one end of a veg bed and lots of golden Feverfew that comes up every year in the rose garden. And of course Laurus Nobilis........... the Bay Tree.

And another good reason for having herbs..........There's a class in the Produce and Flower show for 'A Vase of Herbs' which I entered last year and came second. Hope to do one better this year! And today is the day to decide what to enter as entry forms have to be taken to the village this evening.

Last years 2nd place

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Sue

The Seed Catalogues

They've all arrived, so I went through the seed tin and wrote a list (always a list!). I don't need much but do like to pick the varieties.

D.T Brown are local to Suffolk, have some good choices and cheapest postage. I need beetroot,  tomato, cucumber, sweet red  'pointy' peppers, leeks, curly parsley, nasturtium and basil. Then maybe sweetcorn...... and here's a weird thing........... I could have sworn that sometime last year  I bought a packet of mini sweetcorn to grow to use for stir frying BUT the packet in the seed  tin are ordinary corn cobs. I even mentioned finding them at a car boot sale in a blog post. So why aren't they what I thought they were? ............No idea.

I'm ordering a big plum type Tomato that I've not tried before called Big Mama , a mini plum that I grew last year - Sungrape. and for something completely different a yellow grape variety called Ildi . I've just 2 cucumber Euphya seeds from last year so have ordered some Louisa, another variety I've grown in the past. Sweet Peppers will be Bullhorn Mix. I have a few very old leek seeds so I'll get some new and a new large pack of beetroot to add to the pack of Bolthardy left from last year. The rest  - parsley, nasturtium and basil I can get from anywhere and probably cheaper - as long as I remember to write them on a shopping list.  D.T Browns don't have a mini sweetcorn so I'll look elsewhere for them, my Essex friends love to grow lots of corncobs so I could pass the packet onto them because I don't want to grow the big cobs.

Apart from the above the other things I'm planning to grow are the same as last year...... French Climbing beans and Runner Beans - both from seed I saved from what I grew. Aubergines, chard, Mange tout peas, lettuces and courgettes.I also have  4 butternut squash seeds to hopefully grow better than last year when only 1 plant survived and produced just 1 squash!

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Sue