Panettone - Make Your Own

Panettone is one of the most delicious Christmas treats, and it's easy to make. I've been making them every Christmas for years now, originally adapted from this excellent recipe here. 

I hate sites where you have to scroll for days to get to the ingredients, so without further ado, you will need:

• 500g white bread flour

• 250g butter (room temperature)

• 4 eggs

• 50g raisins

• 75g dried apricots

• 100g sultanas

• 100g candied peel

• 50g flaked almonds or chopped nuts

• 100ml milk

• 80g sugar

• Zest of 1 lemon & 1 orange

• 3 teaspoons of fast acting dried yeast

• 2 teaspoons of bread improver

• Half teaspoon of salt

• Quarter teaspoon of vanilla extract

• 50ml rum

So you've gathered your ingredients, now get a tin, oil it, and line it deep, i.e. make a tall tube of baking paper and stand it inside, with a disc of paper in the bottom too. I use a cake tin with a push out base. Then oil the inside of the paper too.

Put all the fruit in a bowl (you'll need to slice up the apricots) and pour on the rum, let it soak.

Put the flour, yeast, salt, butter, sugar, lemon and orange zests, bread improver, milk, vanilla, sugar and eggs into a bread machine or a food mixer with a dough hook. Mix, kneed, make it into a soggy dough. If it doesn't look soggy put more milk in it or another egg. Leave it to rest until roughly doubled in size. In my bread machine that's 45 minutes from turning it on, but your mileage may vary according to how you kneed and raise.

Tip it out, mix in the fruit and nuts (drink the residual rum). This is best done on a well floured surface, spread the dough out with a rolling pin (look out, it's all very sticky), spread some fruit on, mix it in, spread it out again, you get the picture.

Dump it in to the lined tin, cover with a plastic bag (on top of your big paper tube) and leave it to rise, until it's well and truly doubled. Some recipes seem to assume that'll take forever, but with the bread improver powder (basically vitamin C and gluten) that's not the case, it'll be done in a couple of hours.

Brush the top with egg or milk cut a little cross in it to give it space to rise, and put it in the oven preheated to 180C for 20 minutes, then turn the heat down and give it another 40 minutes. It should be done, but if the skewer test says it isn't give it a little longer.

It's traditional to skewer them and hang them upside down to cool, but it shouldn't be necessary. Turn it out and leave it on a wire rack to cool.

And that's it, that's your panettone. As fine a Christmas cake as exists in any cuisine.

Carrot Jam, and Carrot Bread

Every week we pick up a box of scraps from the greengrocer, essentially saving some of the stuff they've got going to waste from ending up in the bin, to give to our hens to keep their diets interesting and fun. It's also great for getting good, tasty eggs with dark orange yolks, you want your hens to have lots of greens in their diets. But we get all sorts in there and sometimes we end up with an excess of something that we'll struggle to get the chickens to eat. This week it was carrots.

Carrot jam (bottom), and bread (toasted, top)

Now they will eat carrots if we cook them first, otherwise they're not fond. So I ended up filling a jam pan up with cleaned, chopped carrots and cooked them until tender, giving a huge bowl full to the girls and saving some more for us. 

I happened upon a recipe for carrot jam in the style of apricot, originally from Mrs. Beetons book of Household Management, replicated by Jane Grigson in her (wonderful) work "Good Things". I've adapted that just slightly, and I'll share that recipe below.

After making the jam I still had pulped carrots left, so I thought bugger it, and tossed it in to bread. I'm delighted I did, it's also delicious. 

Without further ado, the recipes.

Carrot Jam in the Style of Apricot

You will need:

Carrots
To every 1lb (450g) of pulped carrots allow 1lb (450g) of sugar
Juice of 2 lemons (or 1 large lemon)
Zest of 1 lemon
6 chopped almonds
2 tablespoons of brandy
1 drop of almond essence

First, kill your carrots. Scrub them clean, slice them, and cover with water in a large pan. Simmer them until they're soft - like bad school dinner soft. Strain and reserve the water, that'll be invaluable as the basis for making soup later.

Now pulp the carrots, whether by mashing them and putting them through a sieve (old school) or sticking a wand blender in, get them fully pureed. You'll have a pan full of the orangest goo you've ever seen.

Weigh your pulp and add sugar in the ratio described above in the recipe - essentially the same weight of carrot pulp as sugar. Sterilise some jars (clean them, pour boiling water in them and over the lids, pour it out and place them in an oven at 105-110C until you need them). Now boil the carrot and sugar mixture, get it to a full boil and keep stirring while you boil it for around 5 minutes. Now take it from the heat.

Add a mix containing the lemon juice, zest, brandy, chopped or ground up almonds and drop of almond extract, and stir it in fast. Pour this into your sterilised jars and seal tightly. This isn't a jam that'll last years but with the sugar, brandy and lemon it will keep for a while. Let it cool, serve as a breakfast jam or in the middle of cakes. It's quite delicious.

Carrot Bread

You will need:

3 teaspoons of instant fast acting yeast
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of bread improver or vitamin c powder (optional)
3 cups of bread flour
Approximately 2/4 cup of water
1/3 cup cooking oil
1 cup of carrot pulp (see above)
1 tablespoon of sugar

You know how to make bread dough. Add your instant yeast (or your chosen option for yeast, pre-activated if you wish) to the bread flour (I used 2 cups of malted wholegrain and 1 cup of white), with the salt, sugar (to get the yeast going), oil, carrot, bread improver (if you think your flour might need it), and water. Work it all into a dough, adjusting with more or less water as required (this is a variable, I don't know how wet your carrots are!) and kneed it for 5-10 minutes or so, until the dough is good and stretchy. Alternatively drop it all into a bread machine and put it on the dough cycle.

Let it rest until doubled in size, knock it back, and form it into loaves. Leave it to rise again until doubled in size and then bake it at 200C for 28 minutes, and it sounds hollow when tapped on the base. I cooked mine in silicone loaf moulds but it'll be fine as a bloomer or even as bread buns (then you'll have to cook them hotter, say 220C, for less time - about 12 minutes, if you make this into a dozen buns). Let it cool on a wire rack to set up what bread makers call a crumb, and you're done. 

This is a very savoury bread - with butter it's slightly carroty, it's very orange, but with the carrot jam it's quite delightful. 

Falafel and Hummus (and Falafel Burgers)

There are probably as many recipes for falafel as there are people who have written them down, and not only are they all fabulous, they're all right. There's a stall on Cambridge market with some guys from Algeria who sell falafel made the way their families cooked it, and it's quite different to the falafel I ate in a backstreet cafe in Amman in Jordan. And that's different to the falafel I've had cooked by Lebanese and Israeli friends. Indeed, having a set recipe for falafel seems almost weird. 

Crazy mad falafel burger in a bun that'll need a damn good squashing to eat 

So I'm going to share my recipe here. Not because it's authentic (whatever that even means), or because  it's better than other falafel recipes (it probably isn't), but because it's easy, simple and always just works. Think of this as a 'basic' falafel from which you can make whatever other variants you like. I'll come on to talking about some of those variants below too.

As for hummus, I'll go so far as to say what I'm going to tell you here is heresy. But, again, this is a basic hummus and it's a way of making it that's great for the purpose to which I'm putting it, in a burger bun.

Falafel

You will need:

2 cups of dry chickpeas

1/2 an onion

4 garlic cloves

1 dessertspoon of ground cumin

Squeeze of lemon juice

Salt and pepper to taste

Drizzle of olive oil

4 cloves of garlic

Oil for frying

Soak the chickpeas the night before. They do need a long soak, you want to put them on before bed to cook them the following evening.

Peel the onion and garlic and drop them into a food processor, and when they're finely chopped drop in the chickpeas, lemon juice, a drizzle of olive oil and the cumin. Now whizz it up, to a fairly smooth consistency. You're not adding any other binder here, so you need it to be fine or it'll fall apart later. 

Now tip your mix out into a bowl, and warm up your deep fat fryer to 170C. If you haven't got one, add an inch of fat to the bottom of a heavy bottom pan and get it hot enough to fry. Form patties to whatever size you like, and drop them in to the fat, turning occasionally until they're evenly browned all over. Yes, you can make nice big ones and call them falafel burgers. 

Serve hot, with salad, maybe a salsa, pickles, hummus, anything you like really. And if you've got any extra you can bung it in the fridge and warm it up in the microwave for lunch tomorrow. Make extra, in fact, and save some for later.

Hummus

You will need:

250g of cooked chickpeas

2 tablespoons of tahini or chunky peanut butter*

Juice of 1 lemon

2 cloves of garlic

1 dessertspoon of cumin

3 tablespoons of olive oil 

Water to preference

Salt, pepper and paprika to taste

If you want to soak extra chickpeas and then either boil or pressure cook them until they're tender (that's my preferred approach - 12 minutes at full pressure) that's great, otherwise you can used tinned.

Slice up the garlic, drop it into the food processor with tahini, chickpeas, olive oil, lemon juice and add the cumin. If you want this to be really stiff and ideal for use in a burger, use peanut butter instead of tahini (this is probably heresy but you're eating a falafel burger so quit whining).  

Now taste it. You'll need to add salt, pepper, cumin and I suggest some paprika. Do you want it to be runnier, more of a dipping sauce? Add water, or if you want to be trendy some of the juice from a tin of chickpeas. 

Tip it into a bowl you can cover tightly, and refrigerate until you need it. 

Variations

There are all sorts of ways of changing this dish up.

I like to add fresh coriander and parsley into my falafel sometimes, it gives the dish a really fresh, zesty taste. Another variant would be to grind it a little less so it's chunkier but then to add an egg to bind it together so you get a coarser falafel. I've even added beetroot to produce a really pink, brightly coloured and sweet falafel. Essentially if you can grind it in with the chickpeas you can make it.

Hummus comes in a gazillion varieties on deli counters these days, and they're all basically just hummus with something else ground in. Roasted garlic works well, roasted red peppers, roasted carrots or sweet potatoes, etc. Give it a go, it won't go wrong. If you've got some black eyed peas cooked as well as chick peas, they can go in, likewise you can use dried peas instead of chickpeas and it's fine. The bottom line is, it's an adaptable and simple method and you can make it any way you like. 

Vegan Almond Blancmange

I started by making rice milk. And I hated it. 

I know, that's an inauspicious start to a blog post. But it turned out to be a good thing. I've been experimenting with plant milks and so far this one is by far the least milky. But I wasn't going to waste it, so I adapted it into a fairly traditional blancmange recipe, which I'll share below. And it's not at all bad.

To begin with, you need your rice milk. Then you can make your blancmange.

The Recipe

Rice Milk

For the rice milk, you will need...

1 cup of cooked rice
4 cups of water

Put the rice into a blender, add the water (or as much as will fit without spilling) and give it a damn good thrashing. Blend it as fast as you dare for three or four minutes. Then pour it out through a fine sieve (not a straining bag), and make the volume up to at 850ml (a pint and a half) with water if you haven't got that much. It'll be quite gel like, and you may need to twist the sieve around a bit to get it to go through.

The Blancmange

You will need

850ml (a pint and a half) of rice milk
4 tablespoons of sugar (more if it is to your taste)
5 heaped tablespoons of cornflour
2 tablespoons of dried coconut cream
1/2 teaspoon of almond extract*

Food colouring of your choice (I used yellow)

Put the milk in a pan and add the sugar, start with about 3 tablespoons, and stir in the almond extract. Yes, you can use a different flavouring, and yes, it's a good idea to add less rather than more. Stir it in, taste it, and sweeten more and add more flavouring if you need to. I've put a star next to the almond extract because not all extracts are created equal - with some you may require more, with others you may need less.

Now mix a little of the liquid in with the cornflour, mix it to a paste, and pour it back in to the mix while stirring. If you're using the dried coconut cream (this is common in Asian supermarkets and a really handy thing to have in) then add this with the cornflour. It's not absolutely necessary, but it'll make the dish a bit richer, and a bit more creamy. 

The word blancmange is obviously comes from the old French for "to eat white", so it can simply be a thickened milk dish. But traditionally it's coloured and often put into quite elaborate moulds, but I was boring and just went bowl shaped, and I like yellow. When you've got your mix in the pan, flavoured and with the cornflour added, mix food colouring a drop at a time until it's a colour you like. Obviously if you're trying to keep this vegan be careful about what colour you choose - cochineal might not be to your taste.

Get a bowl or a mould ready to pour the blancmange in to when it's ready.

And now cook it, stirring the whole time, until it's thickened and when you taste it the cornflour is fully cooked. It won't take long. And at that point pour it out into your mould.

And that's it, you're done. Put it aside to cool, and come back later when it's fully cool and turn it out of the mould. There's not a lot of protein in it, like a dairy milk blancmange, and it shouldn't be hard to get it out. If it is then you can always put the mould into a larger bowl of hot water for a few minutes.

Serve with whatever you want really - we're going to have ours with some left over vegan chocolate sauce that I made to go with soya ice cream. 

Soya cream, Vanilla Ice Cream and Chocolate Sauce

Continuing to broaden out my vegan repertoire I've just been making chocolate sauce to go with the vegan ice cream I made yesterday. This all starts with the soya milk I recently posted. It's surprisingly good. The proportions here will give you about 3 dishes of the size shown below (big portions!), or 4 more sensible portions.

The first thing you need to make for both parts of this, the ice cream and the chocolate sauce, is the cream. For this you need...

Ingredients for Soya Cream

2 cups of soya milk

2 dessertspoons full of cornflour

1 cup of sunflower or rapeseed oil 

Take a cup of the milk and add a little of it to the cornflour in a small pan. Mix it to a paste, and add the rest of the half-cup to the pan. Pour the other half cup in the blender for later. 

Heat the pan until the milk has thickened (it'll get really thick) and the cornflour has cooked out so it no longer tastes powdery. Let it come off the boil, let it cool for a minute and scrape it in to the blender with the rest of the milk. Get it it zipping around until it's smooth, push it all back down the sides with a spatula if it seems to be all over the place. Take the little thingy out of the middle of the blender lid, and start slowly pouring the oil in while blending at speed. This is rather like making mayonnaise, it'll thicken up to a soft peak like thick double cream.

When you're done, it should be thick and creamy

If you haven't got a blender, you can make the same recipe with an electric whisk or stand mixer. Or a hand whisk if you're really patient and willing to give it a lot of welly.

For the ice cream

Half of the soya cream (from above)

2 tablespoons of sugar (more or less if you prefer)

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract*

Mix the ingredients together, until the sugar is dissolved. Do this in the blender if you wish. I've put an asterisk by the vanilla extract there because not all vanilla extracts are equal - if yours is a really intense brand you may need a lot less than 1 teaspoon.

After blending all together, taste it. When ice cream is frozen it's always a little less intense - you need the flavour to be a little too sweet, and a little too vanilla, before it freezes. Once you've got it how you like it, pour it into a shallow container with a cover and put it into the freezer. Take it out ever 45 minutes or so, stir it vigorously to get the frozen parts mixed in, and do so until it's frozen. 

For the chocolate sauce

Half of the soya cream (from above)

2 tablespoons of sugar

1 handfull of dark (vegan) chocolate buttons*

1 splash of coffee (filter is good)

Save the remnants out of your morning coffee pot. In fact if you're making any dark chocolate sauce, vegan or dairy, save some black coffee from the morning pot. 

Put the chocolate in a pan with the cream, add the sugar, and warm it gently. Don't be afraid to keep taking it off the heat while you melt the chocolate into the cream. Add the sugar too, and when it's all melted together and the sugar dissolved, add the coffee and stir it in. The water in the soy cream will allow you to mix the coffee in to the ganache like creamy chocolate mix without it splitting. Note that like the vanilla extract in the cream, all dark chocolates are not created equal. You may need lots, you may need a little. If you don't put enough in you can always add more.

Stir it occasionally as it cools. If you've got any spare after serving it with the ice cream, put it in little pots and keep it in the fridge, it'll almost set and it'll do fine for weekday desserts. 

Soy Milk - The Best Non-Dairy Milk?

Why?

I'm not the worlds most committed carnivore, but I'll confess I've never really got on with non-dairy milks. I'd rather drink my tea black than put plant extracts in it to make it 'white'. But in an ever more complicated world in which you'll find yourself catering to vegans, cohabitants doing 'veganuary', vegetarians who don't take dairy, and people who just don't get on with cows milk its a good idea to have a non-dairy solution up your sleeve. And I don't know about you but I'd rather make it than buy it.

I've occasionally experimented with such milks and I think the best is soy milk. Almond milk is absurdly expensive to make and rather fails over sustainability, oat milk is vile, and I while I think coconut milk is delicious I think it's also too strongly flavoured for most of the uses you put milk to. Soy milk hits the sweet spot for usefulness, taste, and cost. So here's how I make it.

First, catch your beans

I would suggest that you'll do better buying soya beans from an ethnic shop than from a major retailer or 'wholefoods' shop. You'll probably have more options that way, clearer labelling, and a better price. You can usually get a bag like this for under a couple of quid. The great thing about dried beans is that they last pretty much forever, if you keep them in a tightly stoppered container in the larder. So don't worry about getting a few extra beans in, they won't go off.

The Recipe 

Dry (below) and soaked (above) beans

You will need:

175g soya beans (6oz if you're old fashioned)
1.4 litres (6 cups) of water (but measure that out later).

To begin with, soak your beans overnight. Soya beans swell a lot when soaking, so start with a nice bug bowl (you'll see why later). 

After soaking the beans swell up enormously. Now drain them, and tip your beans into a blender, and measure out your 1.4l of water (6 cups, if you like). Pour enough of this water into the blender with the beans such that you can blitz it up to make a paste. Something like 2-3 cups of the water will be needed. Once you've got a good paste, then empty the blender out into a large pan. Use a little more of the water to rinse the out your blender and pour that in too. Yes, you can use a food processor if you prefer.

Soy bean paste, ready to boil

Now add most of the rest of the water (keeping back perhaps a cup full) and cook the bean paste, bringing it to a boil while stirring. Keep it boiling for 2-3 minutes. While it's warming up put a clean tea towel into a large sieve, and stand it over the large basin you soaked the beans. Tip the pulp into the tea towel and leave it to cool, straining through the sieve. Once it has cooled enough to handle, pour the last of your water through it, and let most of it drain. Then tie it up in the towel and give it a tight squeeze to get as much juice out as you can. You've now got a towel full of soy mince (this is useful stuff, I'll cover that in another post) and you've got a bowl full of white-ish fluid that sort of smells like paint. It's not quite ready yet, you need to boil it to fully denature the soya proteins and make them digestible and, crucially, not smelling like paint. I can't stress how important this is - if you don't boil it now, if you don't denature the proteins, then it'll split when you pour it into a hot cup of tea or coffee. It's revolting. 

Clean out your pan, put the milk back in, and boil it for 5 minutes while stirring it to prevent it sticking. 

Soy milk boiling and almost ready

Give it a taste, and when you're happy with it turn the heat off, take the pan off the hot ring and put it aside to cool. The longer you boil it, the richer it gets, the 'milkier' it gets, but the less you'll have at the end. Stir it occasionally while cooling, to prevent a skin forming, and bottle it and fridge it when its cool. And that's it you've made soy milk!

Put the soy mince into a tightly sealed box and put it in the fridge. It'll keep a few days and you can use it in sauces, burgers, sausages, all sorts of things. It's a lot better than soy mince you can buy too.

Once you've mastered making soy milk, it's surprisingly easy to make soy cream, from which it is just a short step to ice cream, and tofu (which is rather like curd cheese made with soy milk). Or just use it as milk in tea, on cereal, etc.

As I've already mentioned, this isn't (in my view) as good as cow or goat milk. But it's better than the other vegan alternatives, and it's at leas a short ingredient list that you're in control of. It's low cost, easy, and healthy, and by far the best of the vegan milk alternatives.

Make Your Own Soap

There are loads of websites telling you how to make soap, hundreds of blog posts that start with massive preambles before getting down to brass tacks of how to do it. So lets do this a different way. I'm going to start with how I make soap, then I'm going to move on to why, and THEN I'm going to talk about whats actually happening.

Ok, tell me how to make soap.

For ingredients you're going to need oils (fats), lye (sodium hydroxide), water (rain water is ideal), and if you want to add some scent you'll be wanting a few drops of some essential oils (be sparing!), and perhaps dried herbs or spices. And if you really must colour it, use a crayon (take the paper off first, obviously). 

For protective equipment (AND I DO NOT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT YOU MAKING SOAP WITHOUT PPE) you want some safety goggles and rubber gloves. You might also consider a face visor if you think you're likely to be a messy worker.

And for equipment to work with, you need a huge stainless steel pan (I use my stock pot). I mean huge. No messing about with a little one, unless you want a disastrous boil over, potentially a kitchen fire and, at very least, a god awful mess. And you need some polypropylene jugs, and the most accurate scale you have - a digital scale working down to the gram is good. You need to stir the mixture as you make it - those rubber spatulas, the silicone ones, are ideal. But get a couple, they'll get hot as you work and swapping them is good. Lastly, you need something to pack the soap into while it sets - I use silicone molds.

Firstly, weigh everything out. My basic recipe is as follows:

400g Sunflower oil (ordinary cooking stuff)

400g Olive Oil (get the cheaper extra virgin stuff)

400g Coconut Oil (again, get the cheap stuff from a Chinese supermarket)

400ml rain water 

180g sodium hydroxide

20 drops of essential oils, spices (optional)

Firstly, mix up your oils and get any other dry ingdredients ready. I often use a mix of nutmeg oil, cinnamon oil, a little pine oil, tea tree, and a hand full of coarsely ground allspice grains. Once these are ready, put them aside.

Now don your safety glasses and marigolds, and slowly pour the sodium hydroxide into the water, then stir it with one of your spatulas until it is dissolved. I've handled some of the nastiest chemicals you can imagine and some biological hazards you really don't even want to imagine, but most often its the every day chemicals that people have accidents with. Sodium hydroxide is one of them, it WILL blind you if you get it in your eyes. So don't. If it gets on your skin wash it off, and keep washing it. 

Put the oil in the big pan, and start warming it up. Use your spatula to get the last of the oil out of what you weighed it in too. And when its warming, pour your sodium hydroxide solution into it and start stirring while you continue heating, being sure you get down to the bottom of the pan and keep the soap from sticking. Very soon, you get something like this...

It'll boil up and terrify you, but keep it on a heat and keep it stirring. If your spatula gets too hot, put it in a plastic jug to cool down and get your other one. Keep stirring, and soon it'll look like apple sauce. At that point, keep stirring...

Keep going. Heat it more gently if you like, but keep going. It'll start looking like mashed potato...

And now? Keep going, it'll start getting really thick and just at the bottom, where its hottest, it'll start to look a bit dry. Its done... 

Now get it off the heat and beat in the other ingredients. This is going to be hard work. But whether thats a crumbled up crayon, spices, oils, whatever it is, beat it until its combined and then start plopping it out into your mold. For this I use the two spatulas, and occasionally I risk pushing it down into the molds with the rubber gloves...

And thats it. Let it cool just enough so you can handle it, pop it out of the molds and put it on a plastic boards to cool. When its cool and hard, its ready to use. 

You're kidding me, its that easy?

Yes. The whole process takes about, oh, I dunno, half an hour or so, maybe three quarters, until you can put the kettle on and wait for it to cool. But easy? You might find it hot, stressful, worrying, if you spill it you've got problems. But yes, its as simple and easy as that.

But why? You can buy soap...

Ok then don't. No skin off my nose. I make soap because its easy, quite fun, I can get just the soap I want with control over whats in it. Quite a rewarding thing to do. I've also always found all the kinds of soap you can buy just leave me itchy all over, this soap doesn't. 

Whats actually happening then?

The chemistry of this is simple enough. You're taking a fat, chemically breaking it up, into fatty acids, and making the salt of that. The process is called saponification, and its quite fascinating when you read up about it.

Can I change the recipe or use other fats?

Yes, you can. You'll want to hunt down the saponification value of the oils you want to use though, otherwise you'll end up making something potentially very dangerous. The internet is full of sites that will give you those values, it won't take you long. But if you're going down that route, find some more in-depth reading first. This is a primer for doing your first batch, not a guide to all forms of soap making.

Is there a safer, lower stress way?

Yes. The process I've described above is hot processing. There is also a method called cold process with is easier and safer, but can take weeks of waiting. There's nothing wrong with doing it that way, but you do need to be able to put something aside somewhere safe and forget about it. Lots of advice about how to do that online, and its a common beginners way in. Maybe start here.

Operation Infinite Yeast - Growing Your Own Yeast

There are lots of ways to make bread, and to be honest none of them are hard. But they all come down to one thing - making a dough that when cooked doesn't become so heavy and stodgy you don't want to eat it. The way we're most used to is to use yeast, and of course thats the bread you're most used to buying. 

In normal times I would suggest buying dried yeast to keep in the cupboard in an airtight container for whenever you want to make bread. Its what I've done for years, but apparently now that everyone has been panic buying you just can't buy yeast. So, you're looking at your last little bit of dry yeast and you're wondering what you're going to do to make bread going forward? Well, you've got lots of options, but if you want something most like a loaf of bread that comes down to four techniques. Soda bread, where you use baking soda to raise the bread, saved dough (as covered excellently by Kate here) so you cultivate yeast in the dough and save some over for the next loaf each time, sourdough which is the use of wild yeast and bacteria cultivated from the flour itself, and lastly you can maintain your own yeast culture. 

Basically yeast is a microorganism, its a fungus but a single celled fungus, unlike the molds and mushrooms you're familiar with. And if you give it the right conditions it will grow, and you'll get more of it. But you need to make sure that its got enough of a run up what you're going to grow it in to make sure that what you get is actually your yeast, and not something else.

So, in a few steps, here's how to make your own yeast culture.

1. Seed Culture

This is a bit of a technical term, sorry for that. But in most practical applications of microbiology one of the most important things to do when trying to use microbes to convert any one natural material in to anything else (here its 'flour' into 'more yeast and bread') is to make sure you've got the right microbe growing very, very fast to ensure it outcompetes everything else. If you don't do that here you'll end up with a sourdough rather than a yeast culture, which is delicious but slower to bake with.

So here I recommend making up a seed culture. Get a clean jar and pour in about 100-150ml of water, and stir in a teaspoon of malt extract, half a teaspoon of yeast extract (marmite) and about a dessertspoon of sugar. Cover it, and let it cool to blood temperature. When its cooled, add in some of your dried yeast, a little will do, and stir it again. Again leave it loosely covered and leave it somewhere warm. 

By morning, it will be cloudy, and probably very, very fizzy. Don't shake it, but stir it very gently or there is a very good chance it'll end up all over your kitchen counter top. And this is your 'seed' or 'starter' culture. Its a big, liquid mass of very fast growing yeast cells, and they're ready to out-compete everything in your flour.

2. First Flour Ferment

To 3 dessertspoons of bread flour, add 2 dessertspoons of your starter culture, in another clean jar. Stir it, cover lightly. Later in the day, when its good and fizzy again and you can see air bubbles appearing, add another 2 dessertspoons of water, and 3 more dessertspoons of flour. And by bed time it will be like the jar of fast growing yeast to the right.

So the fast growing yeast you put in this morning has been making enzymes like something called amylase all day. The job of that enzyme is to turn the starch in your flour into smaller carbohydrates (sugars) that it can eat. Bread flour also contains a lot of gluten, which is a protein, and the yeast uses both of these and all of the trace nutrients in the flour to grow and make more yeast. Actively growing yeast generates gas, which you can see as bubbles, and bubbles make noise which you'll hear if you click on the video on the right.

And this is almost ready to use, but probably not yet, because its almost certainly nearly bed time. You can bake your first loaf with this tomorrow afternoon. Put your jar of yeast culture in the fridge overnight.

3. Wake Your Yeast Up

Its not literally asleep, but it has slowed down over night. If you take this and mix it in to your bread dough its just going to sit there and sulk. To make this work you really want your yeast to be growing very fast, and very actively. At this point I add in half a teaspoon of sugar, 3 dessertspoons of flour, 2 of water, mix it in and cover it loosely and, crucially, leave it somewhere warm. Behind the telly, on a warm window ledge, wherever you have. In a few hours you'll be ready to make bread.

4. Make Bread, and Save Your Yeast!

I use most of my yeast culture up on a loaf, saving about a dessertspoon full, and to that I add another dessertspoon of flour, a little less of water, and I let it grow. When it fizzing again and forming air bubbles it goes back into the fridge until I need it again.

As long as you don't kill it, you've got yeast forever. Feed it up to the same volume you started with before putting it in the fridge, and be sure to wake it up in the morning with a fresh feed before using it, and it'll just work.

As for the bread, well, the worlds your oyster. Its basically a live yeast so you make the dough up any way you like - this was one of my standard malted wholegrains, but it'll work for anything you'd use a bread yeast for. 

And thats it - if you can master this then congratulations, you're a yeast farmer. Good luck, and happy baking.

Composting in a Crisis - Make Your Own Compost Heap

Here in Cambridge collection of our compost bins has now suspended for the next month and a half, to allow council workers to concentrate on making sure the recyclables and black bins get emptied. And while thats an inconvenience, I think we're all agreed that this is very much an example of a first world problem in the face of a whole world crisis and therefore an acceptable loss. Pandemic management or green waste collection? Its not a difficult call is it?

But then what are we all going to do with all the stuff that we normally get collected? Well, I think I need to split this into multiple posts. The first, this one, is about composting. Then I'm going to talk about making your own stock and perhaps frugal cooking. But first, compost.

The internet is awash with guidance on making compost and my gosh do they make it look complicated! It really isn't. It can be, or it can not. I'm going to talk about my garden heap, the allotment heap, and describe how to make your own.

Garden Composter Bin - With Worms!

This is my garden composter.

This is what it currently looks like inside:

And this is what comes out from the bottom of it:

Literally, if you order a composter bin like that, put it on the soil in a corner of the garden (shady is best), and keep putting compostable material in it, thats what you get. And if you scavenge a handfull of tiger worms from someone has them, or order some online, it will go like the clappers. The access port at the bottom lets you extract compost at the bottom while you keep adding matter at the top. As you keep putting more in the worms move in to eat it, leaving completed compost beneath them. Honestly, its as simple as that, its like magic. This compost is fine for most of my potting for vegetables for the allotment, and it works tremendously well as soil conditioner. The white bits, the shelly bits, are bits of egg shell, a side effect of eating a lot of eggs from our own hens.

If you can't get tiger worms, don't worry, it'll still work. Its just slower.

What can I put in a garden worm bin?

Well more or less anything that will rot down. Avoid meat because it attracts rats, avoid fish because its going to stink, and avoid too much citrus and whole layers of onion skins because its too acidic. Other than that - fruit peel and cores, vegetable peel, teabags, used ground coffee, weeds from the garden, egg shells, grass clippings... It all goes in. Its a great idea that if you put in lots of one kind of thing, especially something green, to also add plenty of handfulls of scrunched up newspaper (or that brown packing paper from Amazon, old printer paper, torn up carboard, etc.). Compost nerds will tell you its about C and N balance, but don't let that scare you. They're just saying if there's lots of one thing and not enough of another it goes wrong.

What SHOULD I put in any garden composter?

Urine. Pee on it. Pee on it. Every. Single. Day. Not only are you not then flushing away gallons of water, you're adding rapidly degradable nitrogen sources that give a massive boost to the bacteria and fungi that make your compost. You're also adding the smell of human urine and somewhat putting off foxes, mice and rats. Don't be precious - get out there and if you're a chap you know how this is done, if you're a lady use a jug or a bucket. 

And paper. Newspaper, cardboard, packing paper... All of that is handy in a home compost mix. Not loads, not masses, but every few weeks some scrunched up paper is a good idea because your home scraps are a bit rich, a bit high in nitrogen. 

And if you can get a scoop of well rotting stuff from someone elses compost to start things off, that helps too. It isn't essential but it starts the process off a bit faster.

What if I can't afford a bin?

Compsting just works. A pile of decaying matter under a bush with an old rug on top works. Can you scavenge a few planks or bits of door to make a crude square with an open front? Use that, and put a sheet of black plastic or old carpet on top. Pee on it every day, don't drown it in grass clippings with nothing else mixed in, and it will work. Just remember to cover it over, do it on earth rather than paving, and it will work.

What if I need a bigger heap?

On my allotment I've got three pallets nailed together to make an open square, a pile of decaying matter, and a sheet of plastic on top. Many shopkeepers can give you old pallets if you ask nicely, and you are NOT going to need to go bigger than this.

I want to compost but I live in a flat. What do I do?

I applaud your enthusiasm. Essentially you can still use a vermicompost (worm compost) system. This advice here is very good.

What about meat, bone and things?

Hardcore, eh? Well again, I applaud you. Now we're talking about anaerobic digestion and this is not for the feint hearted. I would advise that the first thing you should do is cook the bones and scraps of meat for stock, but if you want to then compost it then the search term you're looking for is bokashi composting. Remember though that however you do anaerobic composting you end up with something that isn't yet compost, its going to need to be added back to a normal compost heap or even buried to make use of it. As stated - this is hardcore stuff. 

Dinner Diary - Christmas MEAT Mince Pies

I've never really warmed to the bought mince pies you get everywhere at this time of year. For my palate they're too sweet, yet somehow insubstantial. The nasty soft, sweet pastry that blandly engulfs a few raisins and sugar leaves me cold. So I've always preferred to knock up a batch of puff paste and make them myself, making light and delicious puff pastry pies. 

Then a few years ago I was reading up on the old fashioned (by which I mean Tudor onwards) versions of sweet mince pie, and it turns out they used to be really quite different. The name 'mince pies' often seems strange, but historically speaking recipes had meat in them until the end o the 18th Century, starting out as mostly meat with some sugar, spice and dried fruit (possibly to hide the fact that by the feasts after Christmas your meat might not be so fresh any more), but as imports became cheaper and cheaper the meat became an ever smaller component.

Modern sweet mince is now typically entirely vegetarian, with the last dubious relic of what they were now being vegetable suet - usually palm oil. Its ok, but again, its not especially substantial and it is cloyingly sweet.

So here's my recipe. Its adapted from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstalls 'River Cottage Year'.

Ingredients
500g Lean Mince (beef, venison or mutton)
250g suet (if you can get it from the butcher, get it fresh and chop it yourself)
500g currants/raisins and sultanas (whichever you like best, but small berries are essential)
500g apples (eating apples), green and hard are good here
100g preserved ginger
4 tablespoons syrup from the ginger preserve
200g dark brown sugar
150g fine chopped almonds
Juice and zest from 1 lemon, and 1 large orange
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon mace
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
250 ml brandy

Method

Clean and sterilise some airtight containers. Jars, tubs, whatever you like as long as the air is kept out.

Chop everything up - currants and raisins probably don't need it but sultanas might, as does the ginger amd the peel. Peel, core, and chop the apples.

Mix everything together, and put it in jars or tubs. I like to add another dash of brandy on top to be sure of keeping it moist. Seal it and wait for two or three days - and thats it. The flavour will improve over the next couple if weeks but don't sweat if you've made it late, it'll be fine. And with the booze, sugar and tannin from the dried fruit, as long as you keep the air out it'll keep. I've been known to make a really big batch at Christmas and store jars until the next year.

 To turn them into pies, roll out your puff pastry, and cut rounds whatever size you like. These are your tops. Roll your scraps of paste from in between out thinly, and cut more rounds. They're your pie bottoms. Put a teaspoon or so of mincemeat on the bases, and some egg wash (egg beaten with a dash of water) around the outside, before pressing the tops on. The egg will glue them. Brush more egg wash on top, and pole a couple of holes with the end of a knife in the middle of the top layer. Bake at 180C for about 17 minutes, or until they're puffed up and nicely browned. 

Serve hot out of the oven with brandy butter (you know how to make brandy butter, right?), or if they've cooled pop them in the microwave.

These pies are deliciously light, sweet, and rich, without being as overpoweringly sugary as bought ones. 

Terrible Uses for Common Plants - On the Cliffs

Sorry for the delay, I've been on holiday down in Dorset. But that did give me some great opportunities for taking phototgaphs of plants that are perhaps a little less common here.

A little reminder of what this blog series is about. We are surrounded by beautiful and amazing wild plants, and those who came before us understood that they had many amazing properties to heal and make us better. Some of that understanding was well founded but, sadly, the vast majority of it is now known to be cobblers and indeed many of those uses are outrageously dangerous.

So with no further ado, here's the second part in this series - plants pictured on holiday, by the Sea, in Dorset.

Vipers Bugloss (Echium vulgare)

I didn't need to go as far to photograph it, but it makes a magnificent display on top of the cliffs near Durdle Door at this time of year so I'm happy I did. 

This is a glorious plant, it has sort of spiky leaves, but for me the stand out feature is blue pollen on red stamen filaments (the dangly 'male' bits int he flower). Its a glorious thing to see a mass of it in a field, although I gather it may be fairly invasive in parts of the world where it is an introduced species. Here in the UK we can simply enjoy it for what it is. 

It thrives on chalky ground, and does extremely well on sand dunes. And it seems quite resistant to pollution, thriving in places like abandoned brick and cement works.

Its one of the borage family, but you shouldn't be putting flowers of this one in your Pimms. It contains a range of pyrrolizidine alkaloids that will destroy your liver over time. Although I should think the occasional flower might not be as dangerous as all that it isn't uncommon to have an adverse skin reaction from handling the spiky, hairy leaves. So it can ruin your liver and give you a rash - best not to touch it.

An interesting thing happens when the flowers fall and leave the seed pod behind. The pod itself is vaguely reminiscent of the shape of a snakes head, and from that we may perhaps have our first encounter with one of the most hilariously absurd concepts in herbalism. The Doctrine of Signatures. 

A whole book could be written on this venerable and ancient nonsense. This pseudoscientific claptrap goes back at least as far as Dioscoridies and Galen, and has been supported by theologians and other quacks over milenna. The idea is that if something resembles a body part or something else, then clearly the purpose to which God or the Gods, or nature, or whatever other force you imagine intended it to be used for that. So the shape of liverwort leaves means it is meant to be used to treat liver problems. Lungwort might treat lung infections. And should you fall upon a fine specimen of Phallus impudicus one might suppose someone could be in store for a very interesting night.

Culpepper said it is the finest cure for any kind of venomous bite (it isn't), and related that Dioscoridies said that it would protect you from such bites (it won't). It had a range of other unremarkable claims associated with it, such as protecting against passions, tremblings or swoonings - the kind of thing charlatans love to say because it sounds good but doesn't mean anything.

Bluntly you shouldn't be using this plant to treat anything internally or externally. There is no evidence of efficacy, and it can be seriously poisonous. It is, however, quite beautiful. Leave it where it is.

And if you're bitten by a snake, call an ambulance.

Wild Cabbage (Brassica oleracea)

Perhaps I'm easily pleased but of all the wild plants I find by the coast, this is one of my favourites. Its an incredibly variable plant, due to hybridisation with the innumerable cultivated cousins. Its basically the same plant as cabbage, kale, cauliflower, sprouts, broccoli and their huge variety of overlapping forms, and of course that breeding has impacted on the wild population. But to an extent the breeding of these plants must also be playing upon variability that exists in the genomes of wild plants. The wild cabbage I've found on cliffs in Dorset isn't the same plant as the cabbage growing on steep slopes by the steps up to Whitby Abbey. And the so-called Monks Cabbages of Tynemouth do not resemble those clinging to clifftops in Kent. 

Its a fascinating plant. It grows a rosette of leaves in its first year, which are thicker and more succulent than those in any domestic variety. In its second year the store of nutrients in those leaves support a huge effort to produce flowers and seed. Opinion is split among foragers as to whether it should be gathered, and although to the best of my knowledge it has no specific legal protection, I would be cautious. Unless you know the site your're on and its history, leave it alone - how awful would it be if you were part of the decline of one of the very, very few truly wild sites. And in all honesty if you're by the coast you'll find plenty of other delicious wild edibles so that isn't a problem.

In herbalism, cabbages have been put to such a bewildering range of uses that, were they to all be true, it would be astonishing that anyone ever died at all. Culpepper had the most wonderful sentence "The cabbage or coleworts boiled gently in broth, and eaten, do open the body , but the second decoction doth bind the body". So it makes you shit and then stops you shitting? That doesn't seem entirely reasonable. It also stops you being drunk or sobers you up, cures kidney stones, resolves menstrual problems, protects against consumption, cures scabs, I mean the list of things it can do is amazing. Even if you've got sore joints, burn a cabbage and mix the ash with pig fat before rubbing it on. 

Eating cabbage was more or less universal in Britain until very, very recently. Indeed cabbage and kale formed such an important part of our diet that parts of cities were given over to the cultivation thereof, and for much of the year one might be subsisting on potages containing kale, withered root vegetables, grain and little else. Yet people suffered from all of those ailments. It doesn't work. 

Cabbages, in all their forms, remain a wonderfully useful and healthy foodstuff. But don't be fooled - they aren't a herbal panacea. Wild or otherwise.

Birds Foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus)

   

This unassuming little wild flower was one of those that first opened my eyes to wildlife. It likes exposed ground, seeming to thrive on slopes by the sea and inland. For such an unassuming plant it has a bold yellow flower, making it easy to spot and contributing to its plethora of local names. It was called bacon and egg plant where I grew up, but wherever you are if you're in the UK you'll find another name for it. Ladys slipper, cocks and hens, butter and eggs, take your pick. While it thrives in many locations, it is near the sea where it can produce some of its most magnificent displays, with wind swept slopes above cliffs often producing aromatic, bright yellow banks of flowers. This is where it is truly most at home.

And like most ubiquitous wild plants it has found many herbal uses over the years. And they're all bad, without exception. Like most very common plants it seems to cure nearly everything, including anxiety, depression, insomnia - all things that are hard to measure so are great claims for disreputable charlatans to make. But the use that really should worry you is that some herbalists recommend its use for tachycardia - thats rapid heart rate, to you and me.

Lets assume you've got a fast resting heart rate - you're sitting, feeling uncomfortable and your heart is going a mile a minute. You could go to a doctor but instead you look at an online herbal site and it tells you that a tea made from this plant will help. I've got that outside, you think, so you go and gather it in and put the kettle on. What you haven't been told is that the plant contains a significant concentration of cyanogenic glycosides. Its a big scary phrase, right? Well what it means is simple enough 'cyanogenic' means it makes cyanide, 'glycoside' is single sugar molecule. It contains variants of sugars that when metabolised make cyanide. Or in other words as this plant is crushed up and gets into you, you make cyanide out of it. And now things are going to get a bit nasty.

Once you've got cyanide in you, histotonic hypoxia comes next. That means the enzyme you have that has the job of making ATP, which you need for everything where you spend energy, can't do its job, cyanide stops it. You can't now use oxygen to make ATP, and your cells respond as if they're hypoxic - and your heart starts beating faster to make up the shortfall. But that doesn't help, you aren't really short of oxygen, you just can't use it...

The result? Well for most people, they get better in half an hour or so. Thats why you can eat some apple pips without it killing you, they also contain cyanogens. But lets be clear - giving a cyanogen containing tea to someone with an abnormally fast heart rate can very easily kill them. Don't do this. In fact don't do anything because a herbalist says so on the internet.

Terrible Uses for Common Plants - In the Garden

You know when you suggest doing something almost as a thought experiment, and then everyone gets all excited so you have to do it? And you know that moment when you think about it and you realise its a much bigger project than you thought it was going to be? Yeah. That.

To cut a long story short someone tweeted some really, really bad advice about injecting herbal abortifacient herbs. The kind of advice that could very quickly lead to death if followed. And I suggested, half in jest, that I should take pictures of garden and wild plants and blog about some of the truly dumb uses to which they have been put. And everyone loved the idea, so now I've got to do it.

But its a bigger job than can be done in one blog post! So I'm going to aim to do maybe one of these every couple of weeks, the brief being very simple. (1) I need to find the plant somewhere and take a picture of it, (2) I'll talk about the plant, where its found, maybe some folk lore and (3) I'll point out at least one truly awful use to which it has been put.

I'm going to start with some of the most mundane plants imaginable. In fact, they're all in my own garden. And their herbal uses range from reasonable through to terrifying and just plain silly.

Here goes...

Southernwood (Artemisia abrotanum)

This is one of my favourite garden plants, being wonderfully aromatic, pleasingly rugged, and providing a greyish green textural splash of colour. Its also easy to cultivate from cuttings and tolerant of most garden situations. I always keep some of it growing on the outside of my front hedge where it can be rubbed for the smell. Some years the children playing in the front street rub most of the leaves off for the smell, which is fine, thats what the plant is for. It is NOT for abortions. Thats a really bad idea. But I'll get to that.

Some of the common names give away its historical uses. It has been called 'garderobe', due to the smell supposedly putting off clothes moths and other insects. Does that work? Not in my wardrobe. And it has also been called 'old man' and 'lads love', probably referring to the quaint notion that it might promote facial hair if burned and applied in a lotion (spoiler: it won't). 

Southernwood is one of the wormwoods, closely related to plants like mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) and has many of the same sinister traditional uses. It is when we turn to how this plant is viewed in intimate relationships that encounter bitter sweet names suggestive of  more a sinister use. 'Lads Love', 'Maids Ruin' and 'Lovers Plant'. It was believed that this plant was an emmenagogue, or in other words in large enough doses it is meant to stimulate menstrual flow. Yes, thats right, if you were late for your period you might take an enormous dose of this plant in the hope that you might recover the situation by, errm, bleeding. 

The wormwoods contain compounds such as eucalyptol and thujone, which both stimulate fluid flow at mucosal membranes and act to stimulate uterine muscles. The word 'emmenagogue' is a good one to look out for in old herbal texts, because while it literally means 'to bring on menstrual flow' it is usually used euphemistically for 'to bring on an abortion'. This up an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do, risking neurological damage in an unborn child (if it doesn't work as an abortifacient) and permanent harm to the woman attempting an abortion this way. It is worth remembering that in days gone by options for women seeking to control their own fertility were few and far between, and while individuals were no more stupid than they are now the degree of desperation an unwanted pregnancy could cause in an era when that could mean ruin drove people to extreme remedies.

While a small amount of southernwood in liver gravy is delicious, rather like a little sprig of its wild relative mugwort is likewise a fine and according to some a traditional ingredient in a tomato pasta sauce, please remember that Artemisia can cause internal bleeding, nausea, and even potential neurological damage so eating these plants in best avoided. Its impossible to know how many people, historically, were harmed by this, or indeed how many were made to look ridiculous by wearing it on their faces in place of beards. But please, please, please, if you have a morning after 'situation' to handle, go to a pharmacist. For the love of spaghetti, don't attempt a home herbal abortion.

Thyme (Thymus vulgaris) 

I go back and forward as to whether thyme is my favourite culinary herb. Its certainly delicious, in all of its forms. I've gathered it wild on mountains in Crete, as a garden escapee in Northumberland, and I'm never without a few plants in the herb bed. You can buy a pot of it from the supermarket for about a quid, split it into multiple pots, harden it off in Spring and plant it out. It will thrive anywhere with some sun. In the kitchen it is wonderful with chicken, beef, pulses, root vegetables, indeed its hard to think of what it doesn't go with. But thats not to say that some of the purposes to which it has been put aren't, well, stupid.

Wild Thyme, Thymys polytrichus in Dorset

Cultivated Thyme, Thymus vulgaris

The Thyme you'll most likely encounter is of course the culinary kind, and whichever variety you're growing its a variant of Thymus vulgaris. Of the three wild species in Britain the most common is T. polytrichus, which I find to be almost as tasty as the culinary type. All species contain the compound thymol, which is a phenolic compound that is a passable antiseptic, and which imparts the aroma and flavour of the plant.

While its not likely that you'll ever do yourself any harm eating it, I wouldn't recommend following any of the ancient herbalist advice. It isn't going to cure you of whooping cough, as was once believed, nor is it going to 'release trapped gas' or act to protect you from having nightmares, as Culpeper suggested. Nor is it likely effective against warts or sciatica. Gerard insists that it will cure leprosy (it won't - Mycobacterium leprae is a hell of microbe to take on armed only with herbs). And whatever the ancient Romans or Greeks believed, burning thyme as incense won't make you more courageous in battle.

Rosemary (Rosemarius officinalis)

Another essential cullinary herb, and another that is easy to grow and to use. Best grown from cuttings, and its a good idea to do so every couple of years because it has a habit of growing to full size, thriving for a while and then unexpectedly dying. It was, hilariously, believed that it would grow for at most 33 years until it reached the height of Jesus, and that its blue flowers were obtained when Mary spread her blue cloak over the bush en route to Egypt.

Most of its herbal uses are relatively harmless. Its likely that the phenolic compounds extracted from it can have some antimicrobial activity, and as an ingredient in soaps, hair washes and the like it is most pleasant. Perhaps this is why some of its more bizarre supposed characteristics are to do with how men and women interact. It was believed that a man who was unmoved by the smell of rosemary was incapable of loving a woman. And as if that isn't weird enough, it was also believed that if rosemary thrived in a garden that was a sign that the man was not master of the house, but that the woman was. Now what precisely this alludes to is somewhat lost in time, but the link between rosemary and sexuality may also be part of why in it formed part of wedding bouquets up until the renaissance.

Just in case it isn't clear - in real life Rosemary neither knows how tall Jesus was and is not a determinant of how 'manly' a man is. It is in fact just a very tasty, very easy to grow herb that is quite agonostic as to your gender. 

Parsley (Petroselinum crispum)

Few herbs get more of a bum rap in folklore and traditional use than parsley does. I mean to us its a harmless garnish and unsung hero of many a cooked dish. But to the ancient and indeed medieval mind it is a far more sinister creature. The Greeks saw it as emblematic of death, and in Britain this is another herb associated with women being in charge of a household, although confusingly if a virgin germinated the seeds she would be doomed to have the devils own children. And if you're not a virgin you should still sow nine times more seed than the plants you require (because it has to go to hell and back nine times to germinate), and only on Good Friday, because then the Devils link to the plant is broken by that. But, in truth, whichever variety you grow (be it one of the old English curled leaf varieties or the trendy Italian flat leaf) its an easy plant to grow by sowing in modules in Spring, and plant it out wherever is most convenient for the kitchen. Yes, I know, I'm tempting (traditional) fate by transplanting it because that brings bad luck for, oh, I dunno, reasons. Something to do with the spirits that protect the plant.

If the fish in your pond were sick, Pliny believed that Parsley would cure them. And Gerard informs us that if you boil up the roots and the seed you've a cure for poisoning. Neither of these claims seem to have any truth to them. 

It is tempting to assume that much of this lore is associated with parsley having a wide range of lethally dangerous relatives. Many in the carrot family (to which this belongs), including things like hemlock and water dropwort, are immensely harmful. Or perhaps it could be because one of its constituents, apiol, is responsible for the fact that some in ancient Greece used it as an abortifacient (as noted by Hippocrates). In fact apiol in various derived forms was sold for this purpose until frighteningly recently, as can be seen from cases of death as a side effect of apiol abortions described in the Lancet as recently as 1957. It can cause liver and kidney damage, and many deaths were associated with it.

As ever, and I can't believe that anyone on the internet maintains otherwise, I must advise that herbal abortions are a bad, bad idea. But lets be ever so glad that, for most of us, in most places, there is no longer a need for this.