Farmhouse Breakfast Week Day #3

Today I thought I'd share my default breakfast. This is the breakfast I have most mornings. Despite appearances, I do not in fact spend every evening up to my elbows in bread flour, or lovingly composing home-made granola. This is a very quick, and not really home-made sort of a breakfast, but it's still very good, and very good for you. I started on this when I was trying to lose a bit of weight. It's not exactly low-calorie; it's more of a portion size thing - you don't need much of it to fill you up, and it keeps me going until lunchtime.

So, here it is: rye bread - the pumpernickel kind you buy in a dense brick that is pre-sliced into long thin slices. It keeps for ages unopened, and lasts a week opened, so I pick one up with the weekly shop. My favourite is an organic one with sunflower seeds that I get from Sainsburys. I keep meaning to try making my own, but I haven't got around to it yet - watch this space! I like it toasted, then a scraping of butter, some honey and a banana sliced on top. And that's it.

Not a great deal of vitamin C going on there though, and at this time of year I definitely need a bit of a vitamin boost to get me going in the morning, so I decided to inject a bit of zing into the day with a smoothie as well. I have some lovely pink forced rhubarb in my fridge. Rhubarb smoothie? Sounds weird, but if Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says go for it, well, who am I to object? I added a few frozen raspberries to this, mostly in an effort to cool the rhubarb mixture a little more quickly, but otherwise the  recipe is as in the link above. It's good, and most definitely an improvement, aesthetically speaking, on MrB's super-smoothie. Look at that lovely orangy-pink pastel. Like a winter morning sky.

Note to self: I really must buy some more photogenic plates. Everyone else's blogs have lovely chintzy florals or willow patterns, and my bog standard Denbys are looking a bit institutional in all these pictures. They are actually rather nice in RL, all blue on the outside, but the photos are really not doing them, or my cooking, (or in this instance, my 'cooking') justice. I feel a charity shop mission coming on.

I'm having a day at the stove today, so new treats to come tomorrow!

My new beehive!

With super efficient speed, the BBKA sent my Adopt a Beehive pack (it arrived the very next day) and here are some of the goodies that came with it:

There's even a photo of the bees that I've 'adopted' (you can just about see it on the right of the picture) - I seem to have got a free beekeeper into the bargain - he's called Phil.

Now, you will also notice that I got a pot of honey in the pack, so I've been thinking of something I can make to spread the honey on. It's been a bit of a manic week, and next week's not looking much better, so I'm thinking soda bread.

We once spent a very exciting week in a cottage on a farm in Dumfries and Galloway. Exciting mostly because the farm caught fire on the first night we were there (yeah, see? Told you it was exciting), and MrB was forced to be all manly and go and help the farmer try to contain the fire until the emergency services arrived. You can probably imagine the bitter disappointment of two small boys waking up to discover that they had not only slept through a FIRE, but also through the arrival of a giant red fire engine. They've never quite forgiven us for not waking them up.

Anyway, the upshot of all this excitement was that the fire knocked out the electricity in our cottage for a couple of days, but the lovely farmer's wife kindly kept us supplied with fresh eggs, and soda bread which she'd baked in her Aga. I always associate soda bread with rural living (the Irish connection, I expect), so it seemed very fitting to be handed a lovely warm loaf all wrapped up in a clean tea towel each morning. It really needs to be eaten fresh, so supermarket soda bread is always horribly dry in my experience, and not worth buying. It is, however, an absolute cinch to make, because it doesn't contain yeast, so there's no sitting around waiting for the dough to prove. On the contrary, in fact. Because the bicarbonate of soda (which is what makes it rise) starts to react as soon as the wet ingredients are added, it's best to form the dough and get it into the oven as quickly as you can. So, if you have never made bread, then I urge you to try this.

I fancied a slight twist on a normal soda bread, so I used oats in mine. This is Dan Lepard's recipe from Short and Sweet, as featured in The Guardian. Just the thing for breakfast, with butter and honey, or for lunch with a big chunk of good cheese and a pint, or a bowl of soup, or some smoked fish. The possibilities are endless!

Oh, and by the way, and nothing at all to do with soda bread or honey, I've also just taken delivery of these two handsome fellows, beautifully packaged in little boxes (I'm coming over all Dr Seuss with the foxes and the boxes...) from Mrs Fox's. I can hardly wait to get the Christmas tree now! Their online Christmas shop on Folksy is just lovely - really worth a look.

I'd like to be, a busy busy bee...

Do you remember dear old Arthur Askey singing The Bee Song?


 
"Oh what a glorious thing to be, 
A healthy grown up busy busy bee, 
To be a good bee 
One must contrive, 
For bees in a beehive 
Must behive. 
But maybe I wouldn't be a bee, 
Bees are all right when alive, you see, 
But when bees die 
You really should see 'em, 
Pinned on a card 
In a dirty museum."





You may remember that a while ago I posted about honeybees in France producing luridly coloured honey. Since then, I've been reading A World Without Bees by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum, about the decline of honeybees and the threat that this poses, not only to honey production, but also to the pollination of crops around the world. According to the British Beekeepers' Association, one in three of the mouthfuls of food we eat is dependent on pollination, so when you're eating your breakfast, even if there's no honey involved, honeybees almost certainly are.

This year, of course has been even more devastating because of the monumentally lousy summer we had here in the UK. Don't laugh, non-UK readers, this one was really bad, even by British standards. Overall honey production at the end of September was over 70% down on last year, from about 30lbs per hive to only 8lbs. Not only this, but the poor weather is likely to have a longer term impact. Queens mate on the wing on fine summer days (doesn't that sound lovely?), so the poor weather is likely to affect bee numbers next year.

So, what can be done to help save the honeybee? There's not much we can do about the Great British Summer, more's the pity, but there is a need for wider research into the more general decline in honeybee numbers, which have been badly affected by colony collapse disorder and varroa mite, not just here in the UK but in Europe and the US as well. To help fund this, the BBA is offering an Adopt a Beehive gift pack in their online shop. All the proceeds go towards honeybee research and education. For £30 you get to pick a hive and also get:

*A mix of wildflower seeds specially selected from HabitatAid, so that you can create your own bee-friendly patch
* Pocket guide to the honey bee   
* Burt’s Bees lip balm
* 20% off Burt’s Bees voucher  
* Set of  beautiful bee cards  
* Hive Talk – 3 Seasonal newsletters with updates from the Hive   
* Plus your choice of either a  jar of British honey or a  jar of honey mustard

Now, in principle, I am not generally in favour of buying charity donations as gifts. I believe that charity is a personal matter, and buying someone a charity goat seems to me to be more about the giver than the receiver - a bit holier-than-thou. 'You have enough, so I'm going to donate to charity on your behalf. THINK ON, small child'. I don't like that. So, I'm not going to suggest that you all adopt a beehive for your loved ones. Unless they are fanatical bee fans, in which case, go right ahead. However, with Christmas coming, I've just had a L'Oreal moment and adopted myself a hive as an early Christmas present. If you have the means, and are interested in the plight of the honeybee, would you consider making a donation as well?

Alsatian Bees

No, not some freaky dog-bee, but the poor old bees of Alsace-Lorraine in France. As if varroa mite, colony collapse disorder and a really lousy summer weren't enough, now this. The bees have been chowing down on waste products from a factory making M&Ms in France, and the resulting honey is bright blue and green. And since most people don't fancy bright blue honey on their toast, the beekeepers are suffering too.

I've been fascinated by beekeeping ever since I read Far From The Madding Crowd as an impressionable teenager. That wonderful scene where Bathsheba Everdene is hiving the bees has stayed with me ever since:

'She had dressed the hive with herbs and honey, fetched a ladder, brush and crook, made herself impregnable with armour of leather gloves, straw hat, and large gauze veil - once green but now faded to snuff colour - and ascended a dozen rungs of the ladder. At once she heard, not ten yards off, a voice that was beginning to have a strange power in agitating her.'

My dad was an entomologist, and we used to go and visit one of his colleagues, a man whom my brother and I insisted on calling Mr Baldabins (his actual name was something far less exotic). Mr Baldabins kept several hives in his garden, and I remember feeling thrilled, a little frightened and very intrigued by all the veils and masks and smoke involved in the beekeeper's magic art.

But bees are really suffering now. Apparently the terrible washout of a summer we've had means that the UK's honey supply is going to be very badly affected, particularly Scottish heather honey, which I particularly love. A tragedy not just for my toast, but also of course for the bees, who need the honey to keep going through the winter. But the bigger picture is even more scary. One third of US hives collapsing for no apparent reason, and the devastating varroa mite are much more of a threat than a winter of highly-priced honey. One has to wonder whether our dependence on pesticides and fertilizers is partly responsible for the decline of the honeybee, but whatever the cause, I do hope they can be saved. A world without bees would be a sorry place indeed.