beetrootle tootle

We are going on holiday next week, hooray. But we also had a glut of beetroot come ready at the same time, which we didn't want to go woody or get eaten by slugs. So I spent what I intended to be a day and ended up being the whole weekend in the kitchen. And as well as beetrooty things (pickled beetroot, beetroot relish,beetroot lip balm and roast beetroot hummus), I made mint syrup, piccalilli, and bottled apple and rhubarb.

Here are the results:





The inspirations came from a bunch of sources. The Mint syrup recipe was from make grow gather

The other recipes came from the Soil Association preserving book, which is amazing and I highly recommend it. And the beetroot hummus inspiration is from the River Cottage Everyday cook book.

The three books below seem to be where I'm drawing a fair bit of inspiration lately:



One was a wedding present from lovely friends in northern Ireland, the other a Christmas present, and one was a no-particular-reason present from Malcolm. I love the ease of the internet for recipes, but nothing beats leafing though a beautifully put together recipe book.

I love the colour of the beetroot hummus, wow, it's surreal. Looked great on the plate next to my parsley and sunflower pesto, with roast veg.



Here's the beetroot lip tint - World sweet world posted a project about this, but rather than follow their recipe I just pinched the idea and added a boiled down concentrated beetroot juice to some of my moisturiser - made a few months back, except with double the beeswax in it than the original recipe, so it's solid at room temperature and melts to touch. scrumptious colour, it just stains your lips, and it tastes sweet and beety.



Finally - look at this gorgeous fat spider living in our tomatoes. He spins lovely webs, but when I saw him this particular evening, he was feasting on some unfortunate ladybird.



I know I promised to put some felting on next, I have some sweet little projects recently completed - however, today I handed them over to Jo at Darn it and Stitch to photograph to advertise our upcoming felting workshops. This lovely and enterprising lady has focused her love of crafting and has opened a much needed haberdashery shop in Oxford. She has great taste and stocks a small but lovely selections of trimmings, fastenings and other crafty goodies. Whoop whoop - will blog about felting after our holidays. Till then....