Of Snowmen and Spuds

We actually made these the other day but I forgot to post about them. When I was a kid, this was one thing we always did with my gran. She would make meringue snowmen and we would decorate them with liquorice allsorts, it is a fond memory and I had hoped to do it with Ebi-kun as a Christmas activity but we never got round to it. Now I am glad we waited since there is that after Christmas lull in the air. It is the first time I have made meringue and it wasn't very successful, they were a bit flat, more like half melted snowmen :0) And I can't get allsorts her so we just used sweeties from the supermarket and a strawberry as a hat.

To make the snowmen whisk 2 egg whites (that are at room temp - found this out afterwards!) and 100g of sugar, add the sugar slowly. The mix should be thick and stiff, dollop or pipe onto grease-proof paper and bake at 110 deg C for about 2 hours (until dried through). Decorate with sweeties, use some icing sugar and water to make 'glue'.

And on a completely different note, we dug up the potatoes yesterday. Daddy-ebi researched about when to pull the up and apparently if they look like this they are ready...
To grow the spuds we drilled holes in the bottom of the tub for drainage then put in a layer of Mel's Mix (the stuff used in square foot gardening) and some sprouting spuds (don't use supermarket spuds, you need to by some from the home-centre) and more Mel's mix. When that lot started to sprout we did another layer of sprouting spuds etc. I think we ended up with 3 layers in the end.

To get them out we tipped the whole lot onto a tarp and sorted through it. Ebi-kun really enjoyed looking for the spuds and was really interested on how they had grow, the cool thing was finding an old spud with the new ones still attached to the shoot, I should have taken a photo but didn't.

Here is the final bootie, not loads but enough for a few meals and since spuds are expensive here - usually you get 4 or 5 medium sized spuds in a bag - honest! I am a happy bunny. We had some last night with home made quiche, delicious.