Chillis!

I LOVE CHILLIS!!  They really are amazing; such a huge range of different flavours and heats.  I know very little about them other than there are loads of varieties and diferent chillis work better for different recipes.


And living in Scotland it's not like there's a chilli farm round every corner!  However, the good news is that here in the Kingdom of Fife we've had the lovely ladies at Chillilicious around for quite a while now, they make lots of lovely chilli based goodies (I get twitchy if I don't have a pot of their chilli piccalilli in the fridge) as well as chilli inspired fused glass in their workshop in Ceres.  Read about their yummy goodies in my old post here.

But now for the GREAT news!!!  My little corner of the Kingdom is now home to a new up and coming chilli farm! YES! Right here in Dunfermline, Alan Stenhouse is working hard to bring us Spice of Fife!  It looks like it's going to be a great thing for the area if you like using chillis, he's got greenhouses packed with beautiful, flourishing chilli plants and lots of different varieties.  Have a look at the Facebook page for some great photos of the plants developing.  The recent warm weather has created a little tropical paradise (well, if you're a chilli plant!).  And he knows his stuff, if you're not sure which variety of chilli will work best for whatever you are making, ask him! 

You can find him on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/SpiceOfFife
on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/SpiceOfFife
and at the website here:http://spiceoffife.co.uk/

If you are planning to go to The Great Scottish Brave Harvest Chilli Festival 2013 at Scone Palace on 21st and 22nd September (yes, a chilli festival in Scotland!!), Alan will be there with lots of chilli goodies.  I've been lucky enough to try his strawberry based hot sauce, Chilli Berry Punch, as well as his Chilli Sookers - hard boiled sweets in a variety of heats to suit every chilli lovers taste buds!

We all loved the hot sauce, the strawberry base is really unusual but works so well with the chilli heat. We've had it with slow cooked Mexican beef, on cheese sandwiches, I even mixed some up with some cider vinegar to make a salad dressing! And the sweets were fab, really different and sweet and hot all at the same time, lovely!!

As well as these products, there's also strawberry, black pepper and chilli jam (delicious!), chutney, chilli oils (using Scottish rapeseed, and since I'm always banging on about how great this oil is that makes me VERY happy!), and chilli toffee.  They can even make little pots of jam and chutney as wedding favours for your big day; almost makes me want to find a husband.  Almost... Nah!

There's lots of other yummy stuff in the pipeline too, including chilli cheese, chilli chocolate and chilli ice cream which I'm particularly intrigued by!

But even more exciting than all of the chilli products is the fact that Spice of Fife are developing a chilli club in the area.  Membership will be restricted to 100 members in 2014 and for a one-off payment of £27.50 you will receive the following:-

• A Personalised Gift Card for 2014 Membership
• Selection of Chilli Seeds to grow your own
• 3 Chilli Plants (April/May)
• Bottle of Chilli Liquid Feed to help plants grow
• Bottle of Spice of Fife Chilli Oil
• Jar of Spice of Fife Chilli Jam
• Bottle of Spice of Fife Chilli Hot Sauce
• 10% discount on any product purchases made in 2014
• Free Delivery to KY11 / KY12 postcodes

Now, I have tried to grow chillis before and I did actually manage, but then went on holiday and the plants got fried at the window. Oops. I really am not green fingered! But for those of you who manage to keep things alive (I have succeeded at keeping a boy and a dog alive, that's my limit!) and love chillis this is a great thing. You can also buy individual plants from Spice of Fife at the moment, get in touch with them to see what is available.  You might just pick up a variety that you wouldn't be able to buy in a local garden centre. 

All very exciting!

All of this has reminded me that I have a little pot of strawberry, black pepper and chilli jam in the fridge. I'm thinking a wee cup of tea and some toast and jam could be the order of the day... :)

Salads!

I would love to say I haven't written for a while because I'm such an incredibly busy and important person (oh go on, it's a little bit true, in MY world!), but mainly it's because I'm lazy!

I go through phases of feeling the need to write and then once it's out of my system it can be a while before it sweeps over me again.

Today, I just felt like having a wee chat about salad dressings. As one does!

Supermarkets are choc-a-bloc with every kind of salad dressing you can think of: creamy ones, low fat ones, spicy, citrus, herby, fruity... there's just hundreds of the damn things - and the price of some of them, ooft!!!  But my favourite is a good glug of rapeseed oil, a squeeze of lemon juice, some cider vinegar (about 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar as a guide), a blob of dijon mustard, some salt and pepper then give it a whisk together or put it in a container with a lid and just give it a good shake.  Tastes better than the bottled stuff and if you have the stuff in the house anyway it costs pennies to make.

Have a play around with it to see what you like: try different oils, even flavoured oils.  I like rapeseed as, aside from just preferring the flavour, it's homegrown and it has around half the saturated fat of olive oil.  There's loads of vinegars, red or white wine vinegar and balsamic vinegar make great dressings too.  Maybe switch to wholegrain mustard, add a teaspoon of honey, pop in some garlic or ginger... the possibilities are endless!

I just finished a bottle of my lovely lemony mustardy one so I don't have any decent photos but here's our lunch from my birthday last week, I wanted a plate full of my favourite things!  We had quesadillas filled with buffalo mozarella, chorizo and taleggio cheese, plus a salad of baby leaves, watercress, spinach, rocket, figs, olives, feta cheese, baby plum tomatoes, grated carrot, and lemony mustardy dressing - a bit of a mish mash on a plate but perfect!!  Salad has come a long way from the lettuce, tomato and cucumber with a blob of salad cream (although I do LOVE salad cream!!), put whatever you love into it.  You get really good jars of veg in oil in pretty much any supermarket now: roasted peppers, artichokes, mixed mushrooms - all sorts. Give them a go, bung a few in with a bag of mixed leaves, put a bit of home made dressing on, just enough to coast the leaves but not drown them, and see what you like.

Other things you might like in your salads are grains - quinoa, couscous, bulgar wheat etc are so readily available these days, and although fairly plain in taste they do take on the flavour of other things well.  I love cous cous with red onion, coriander, fresh chilli, lime juice and a bit of salt and pepper in it - pretty much fresh salsa mixed with cous cous.  But that's lovely mixed in with salad leaves too.

Salad doesn't have to be dull, even with something in it a bit more calorific like a bit of feta and a bit of oil based dressing you can still pack it full of vitamins, antioxidants and all sorts of good stuff.  And just because cheeses and oils are higher in calories and fat, remember that there are good fats out there!

Hope you are all having a wonderful summer, we certainly are!