Bake of the week : Autumn Flavours

We used to grow apples at home, and once September got underway there would be a procession of cakes and puddings involving apples. Now that I have to buy my apples in the supermarket, this doesn't happen, but as soon as September comes I do get cravings for apple flapjacks, apple sponge pudding and stewed apple. So this week I decided to make one of my favourite new recipes from last year: BBC Good Food's Blackberry and Apple Loaf. Yum yum...


After smelling the apples, I was desperate to have some apple flapjack, so I made some of that too. In fact, I made it twice, in a vegan version, and a non vegan version. Here is a piece in its all-butter glory (I wouldn't bother making it with vegan margarine, it is just a disappointment).

Girls gone by publishing

I recently wrote about Fidra books, and expressed my delight that so many out of print children's books were being made available once more. Another publisher doing something similar are Girls Gone By Publishing, who I came across when I started collecting Chalet School books. GGBP aim to "re-publish some of the most popular girls' fiction from the twentieth century, concentrating on those titles which are most sought after, and difficult to find on the second-hand market" and have done a fantastic job in making some of the more obscure Chalet School titles available again. I was able to complete my collection of Chalet School books with their help; I would love to own all of the Chalet titles that they have republished, but unfortunately finances have not permitted this, since I can't quite justify owning another copy of a book I have already or replacing a collectable book... They have also published a number of "fill-in" titles, but I have not read any of these.

Other authors who they publish include (the list below should give you links to the relevant bit of the GGBP website)

• Margaret Biggs
• Angela Brazil
• Dorita Fairlie Bruce
• Julia Cotter
• Gwendoline Courtney
• Monica Edwards
• Josephine Elder
• Antonia Forest
• Lorna Hill
• Helen McClelland
• Clare Mallory
• Violet Needham
• Elsie Jeanette Oxenham
• Malcolm Saville
• Geoffrey Trease

I have all of the Antonia Forest books, and would love to have more of the other authors. I loved reading Lorna Hill and Malcolm Saville as a child, and I'm particularly curious to see the book Evelyn finds herself by Josephine Elder having enjoyed the titles by her that Greyladies have republished. The books are only generally available from the publishers, or via independent booksellers, but I was delighted to spot a selection in Foyles when I visited (and came away with an EBD for my collection).

Are there any other publishers re-publishing children's books that I should know about? And are there any authors that you would like to see back in print? (I will follow up with my answer to this later in the week!)

The Anglo-Saxons

Part of the reason for agreeing to do The Great East Swim at the weekend was that it would give us the opportunity to visit Sutton Hoo, a group of Anglo-Saxon burials in Suffolk where amazing hordes of treasure were found amid the graves. I heard about these when I studied the Anglo Saxons in my first term at university. I didn't enjoy studying them at first, I found it all quite impenetrable, given that I had predominantly been studying Hitler and Stalin for the past two years. Despite the fact that my father is a medieval historian, I had little interest in such early history, although I think this was part of a conscious desire that if I was going to follow in his footsteps and go to Oxford to read history, I would do it differently from him.

However, one book made the period accessible and converted me to the wonders of the Anglo Saxon world. This was The Anglo Saxons by James Campbell who is perhaps one of the foremost Anglo-Saxon historians. The book is lavishly illustrated and extremely readable; it synthesises much of Campbell's other work on the period and makes it understandable. However, I think that the book is worth buying for the wonderful photographs alone. The photograph on the cover is part of the armour dug up at Sutton Hoo.

We didn't actually make it to Sutton Hoo in the end as we decided we'd rather come home and sleep in our own beds after the swim, but it should still be there next year, and I'm glad that planning to visit that area of the country made me get this book off the shelf. Plus, it was quite timely to revisit the Anglo Saxons given the news reports of the discovery of an Anglo Saxon hoard in Staffordshire. This is really exciting, and I hope that the treasure will eventually be on display in the British museum.

PS: If you are interested in the Anglo-Saxons, then another must-read is this, Asser's Life of King Alfred the Great (the one who burnt the cakes (perhaps if a bake of the week goes wrong I will write about him)) - it is the account of the great medieval king written in 893 by a monk. It is hagiography for sure, but that in itself is interesting because it tells us about what people were writing about (and reading!) in the 9th century.

Over at Paperback Reader today :)

I'm off to Suffolk, for The Great East Swim, which I was somehow persuaded to sign up to in the heady hours after completing The Great North Swim. I've only just recovered from the GNS (and it took a long bath and a lot of cake and over a week of taking things easy), so I must be completely mad. The weather forecast looks good, and we hope to visit Sutton Hoo on Sunday, which will enable me to write about one of my favourite history books when I get back. And hopefully I'll have another medal and t-shirt to add to the collection.

Anyway, in the absence of a proper blog post here this weekend, I've written a Guest Post for Paperback reader which I hope you'll enjoy.

Some bookish postcards

I just can't think of what to write about today, not because there has been an absence of book buying, book borrowing or book reading (although being back in the swing of work and trying to do fun things as well as keep up with the housework has cut into my reading time), but because none of it feels exciting and interesting enough to share.

So here is a picture of three wonderful postcards that I picked up in Heffers bookshop in Cambridge earlier this month. What fantastic quotes!


(I'm sorry that the picture isn't better quality, the cards are very shiny and difficult to photograph)

Notwithstanding : stories from an English village (Louis De Bernieres)

I sometimes feel that I am the only person left in the world who still hasn't got around to reading Captain Corelli's Mandolin. However, I have heard such good things about Louis De Bernieres that when I was offered a copy of his latest book by Harvill Secker (to be released on the 1st October), I had to say yes, to find out more about this writer, even though it is a book of short stories and I am not a great short stories fan.

Before I go any further, let me just say that saying "yes" proved to be a good decision, and may even have changed my feelings about books of short stories. These are not discrete short stories, but connected by the village of Notwithstanding in which they are set and characters reappear throughout the stories which builds up a picture of the whole community. Many of these stories have previously been published in various newspapers and magazines, but some have been written for the volume, and one would not guess that it had not been writen as a whole.

The tales from the village of Notwithstanding draw upon the experiences of Louis De Bernieres childhood in the south of Surrey in the 1960s and 1970s. According to the afterword, he chose the name because he felt that the rural idyll that he remembered had "notwithstood". But actually, the more he thought about it, some elements of the village were still there. I grew up in a small Devon village in the 1990s, and the book was strongly reminiscent of life there.

The coincidences of every day life are brought out in a most amusing fashion. This is particularly apparent in my favourite stories: The auspicious meeting of the first two members of the famous Notwithstanding wind quartet, The auspicious meeting of the third member of the famous Notwithstanding wind quartet with the first two and The auspicious meeting of the first member of the famous Notwithstanding wind quartet with the fourth, which describe the happy circumstances whereby two musicians eventually find a bassonist and flautist to join them in forming a wind quartet.

The book also makes reference to changes in the village, for example the influx of newcomers who aren't wholly at one with the country life: "They moved here in search of picture postcard Englandand are uncomfortable with a real countryman who knows how to wring the neck of a chicken and has no compunction about drowning kittens in a bucket"

I loved the story about The Girt Pike, in which young Robert is promised peanut butter sandwiches by Mrs Rendall if he can catch the pike from her pond which is eating all her baby chickens and ducklings.
""Please do come up and catch it. I'll bring you cups of tea and as many sandwiches as you can eat, I promise."
"Peanut butter?" asked Robert, aware that posh people sometimes put truly revolting pastes made of rotten anchovies into their sandwiches.
"Peanut butter, or jam or anything," said Mrs Rendall, much amused.

Other stories include Broken Heart, in which an elderly gentleman is persuaded to move away from the village by his daughter to raise some capital and sadly dies because he cannot bear no longer living there and Obadiah Oak, Mrs Griffith and the carol singers which describes a lonely woman who for once decides to be hospitable to carolling children, only to find herself not visited this year as she has not been welcoming in the past.

I thought this book was truly wonderful, and the stories are definitely ones that will stay with you for sometime. It's a book to dip into or to read in a longer session, and I certainly hope that this book will be as popular as his other works. I am now very keen to try one of his novels. The obvious one is Captain Corelli, but I wonder if anyone else would recommend any of the others?

Bake of the week: Chewy gooey flapjacks

This week's bake of the week was an Autumnal themed cake, but unfortunately it all got eaten before I remembered to take a picture of it. So it was back to the kitchen, and time to do one of the recipes from my "wish-list". I recently acquired two new books on baking - BBC Good Food's 101 Bakes and cakes and Mary Berry's Baking Bible - and drew up a list of things that I want to make this Autumn. First up, the Chewy gooey flapjacks from 101 Bakes and Cakes. Essentially these are banana flapjacks, only involving fresh banana rather than banana chips which seemed to be an interesting idea. Pretty yummy, but not quite as good as my favourite apple flapjack. Hopefully we'll have some left to take with us for the Great East Swim on Saturday as I think they are the perfect swimming fuel...

Miss Read

The onset of Autumn makes me feel a bit nostalgic for my childhood, particularly for new things for school and for living in a village. Somehow, the change of the seasons feels less significant living in a town. So I've been re-reading some of my favourite village life fiction by Miss Read, and as I haven't seen much written about her I thought I would encourage you all to seek her out.

Miss Read is the pseudonym of Mrs Dora Saint, a school-mistress born in 1913, who wrote two series of novels between the 1950s and 1990s which were set in the first half of the century. These are set in the two fictional villages of Fairacre and Thrush Green. I think the Fairacre books are my favourite because they have an obvious autobiographical element; the principal character is "Miss Read", an unmarried school teacher in the village school. Both of the series deal with village life and the characters therein and are wonderful evocations of the countryside, nature, the changing seasons as well as involving a degree of social commentary on the villages and some gentle humour.

"The first day of term has a flavour that is all its own; a whiff of lazy days behind and a foretaste of the busy future. The essential thing for a village schoolmistress on such a day is to get up early. I told myself this on a fine September morning, five minutes after switching off the alarm clock. The sun streamed into the bedroom, sparking little rainbows from the window's edge, and outside rooks cawed noisily from the tops of the elm trees in the churchyard" -- Village School

I've just discovered that you can get a preview of Thrush Green and Village School, the first book in each series on Google Books (just search for "Miss Read") and hopefully that might be enough to tempt you. The books were originally published by Penguin, in a variety of editions (see below) but have recently been republished by Orion (bottom picture). Penguin also produced compendium editions, which would be wonderful to get your hands on if you spot them in a second hand bookshop.

The Ultimate Student Cookbook (and bonus bake of the week)

When I stopped being a student and started living by myself and working, I had to start cooking. Luckily, I had an excellent vegetarian student cookbook which I'd acquired as a student but never had the opportunity to use (3 course formal dining 6 nights a week in Oxford for £1.60 (this was 5 years ago!) made the need/desire to cook a little superfluous), called Beyond Baked Beans Green by Fiona Beckett. This is part of a series of books aimed at students (or those wanting easy to follow recipes that don't involve complicated ingredients/procedures/equipment) called Beyond Baked Beans.

Beyond Baked Beans has an excellent website, which is worth checking out at the moment as they are running a series of articles under the theme "Students can cook" which includes a number of recipes donated by celebrities (I'm particularly looking forward to trying the River Cafe Tomato soup). And they also have a page on Facebook involving debate about cooking and where students (and others, such as myself!) can post pictures of recipes made. It is an excellent resource for seeking advice on cooking, sharing recipes and talking to others about food!

As a result of my involvement with the Facebook page I was sent a copy of The ultimate student cookbook. This takes recipes from the three Beyond Baked beans books and puts them together with new ones and loads of advice on how to cook to produce what is literally the Ultimate Student Cookbook.

I was pleased to see that some of my favourite recipes from Beyond Baked Beans reappeared such as the Moroccan spiced chickpea recipe and the Sad Unloved Vegetable soup, and not owning the other books, many of the other recipes were new to me. I'm particularly looking forward to trying the Spiced sweet potato, pepper and aubergine bake.

The author, Fiona Beckett, is an established food writer, and this really comes through in the book. The book also incorporates the recipes and advice of three student co-authors, James, Sig and Guy, and I love the way that each recipe has a comment by another one of the authors, suggesting ways to serve it or vary the recipe or including a tip for successful cooking.

Anyway, given that my favourite sort of cooking is baking, I figured that I should start with a recipe from that category. I made the Chewy Chocolate Cookies (pictured on the left of the tin) and I also made the variation of the recipe, which involved adding a spoonful of cocoa and replacing the dark chocolate chips with white chocolate chips. I think I cooked them a bit too long as they weren't exactly chewy, but more biscuity, but I dispatched them with Ken to his work on his birthday and apparently they'd all gone by 10:30 and everyone was very complimentary. I next plan to make the Chocolate and raspberry brownies....mmm...I'll post pics when I've given them a go!

Getting rid of books (and acquiring books in charity shops)

Shelf space has reached crisis point in Cardigan Girl's Flat (and I am still feeling extremely guilty that the majority of my boyfriend's books reside in boxes in a storage unit). Although I have made some temporary measures, I did also get rid of a few books the other day. It was a bit strange deleting them from my librarything account, but it does mean that the day that I reach 1000 books is a tiny bit further off. I contemplated offering my rejects on here, but I'm not sure about the principle of providing booklovers with books that I didn't like/didn't want to read. So I took them to Oxfam.

Thinking about getting rid of books also made me think about the stock in charity shops. Obviously many of us find wonderful things, but surely in the majority of cases they are other people's rejects - books that have been read once but not loved enough to have house room, or presents which have not been touched at all. I suppose I should be more discerning and think to myself "someone didn't like this" when I pick up something in a charity shop, but more often than not I am just grateful that someone else didn't like a Virago Modern Classic very much.

Do the rest of you ever get rid of books that you didn't enjoy reading/know that you'll never get around to reading? And what do you do with them?