Today the village horticultural show took place. I was up at the crack of dawn doing research online to find out how my preserves needed to be presented for exhibiting, making labels and polishing my jam jars with white spirit. As it turned out the village show is slightly more relaxed than that and there wasn’t really any need for such a precise approach.
It was a good turn out. Runner beans seemed a popular category, a sure sign that they will grow no matter what the climate throws our way.
The biggest vegetable categories always hold a certain fascination with huge whopper marrows, a ginormous cabbage and a truss of tomatoes that would hardly fit on the table.
I entered in three categories. The last one was really an afterthought based on my having noticed last year which categories had few entries, so cutting down the odds, or should I say making winning something of a dead cert. Lo and behold I won a first for my scented leaf geranium which only had one other plant to compete with.
My damson chutney won a second and my crab-apple jelly came third but competition was fierce in the jam and chutney categories.
I was thrilled to come home with a first, second and third rosette and it is lovely to take part in such a special village event. The lady that won first for her blueberry and vanilla jam said it was only the second time she had taken part and last year she won a first as well. She obviously has the magic touch, sticky fingers you could say, so I have found out where she lives and intend to find out what her secret is. I have exactly a year to work on this!
With the village produce show looming, the weather has done noone any favours. I was sure that this year I could improve on my last years, first-time-ever entry of 3 courgettes, but with not a single one ready to pick my prospects seem gloomy.
Jam and chutney are my only hope. In fact with a dresser laden down with the stuff my biggest problem could be narrowing down which to enter. There is only one category for jam and marmalade and another category for chutney. I’m presuming that you can only enter once in each category, though someone did tell me that they enter several time in categories under other family members names. My household could be the only one with jam-making cats in that case. Tiddles Nicol’s entry of seville orange marmalade could be a bit of a give away!
Anyway, my challenges for the next few days includes making some crab apple jelly. My new friend Deborah kindly allowed me to pick some lovely red crab apples from the tree in her garden (does anyone know what this variety is?) and I have 2 bags full waiting to be made into this lucious amber gel. I’ll let you know how I get on.
Everyone has food stuffs or flavours that they aren’t particularly fond of. Sometimes we decide early on that we don’t like something when in actual fact we just haven’t eaten it prepared in the right way. That’s what I’m like with blackcurrants. I think my mind was made up after drinking Ribena in my youth and without ever having tasted them freshly picked. My neighbours blackcurrant bushes are heaving with fruit right now and noone seems interested in using it up, so not keen to see a crop go to waste I have decided to harvest the berries (I do have permission!) and find ways of using them that might change my mind.
As I am in jam-making mode I thought I’d start with a preserve and am really thrilled with the result. Blackcurrants are a great fruit to work with as they have a distinctive flavour with a tart kick, quite similar to damsons, which I really love. The recipe that follows is somewhere between a jelly and a jam; it is without the bits, as the skins and seeds are pureed out, but doesn’t need straining through a muslin bag as required to make clear jelly. The resulting jam has more body and texture than a jelly. Rather than the fruit being boiled to smitherines, the cooking time is minimal and so ends up absolutely bursting with flavour. This jam has a lower sugar content than usual which gives a lovely softish set and as the skin of the currants are removed there is no need to cook them first by boiling the fruit in water. It has just the right sharpness to make it ideal as the filling for a chocolate cake and is fab slathered on sourdough toast. This jam has turned me into a blackcurrant enthusiast, it’s that good.
BLACKCURRANT JAM
1 Kg blackcurrants, leaves and stalks removed
800g granulated sugar
1 lemon
Choose ripe or slightly under ripe fruit. Rinse the fruit if you must but make sure to drain off the excess water by patting dry with kitchen towel. Place the blackcurrants, sugar and juice of the lemon in a preserving pan. Gradually bring to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar then remove from the heat. Pour into a glass or ceramic bowl and cover with greaseproof paper pushed down onto the surface of the fruity syrup. Leave in the refrigerator overnight. (I went away for a couple of days at this stage with no adverse effects!)
Put the fruit and syrup through a food mill fitted with a fine disk or push through a sieve held over the preserving pan to remove the skins and seeds. Bring the resulting puree to the boil, stirring occasionally, and cook at a fast boil until it reaches setting point (it only took me 5 minutes). Skim if required and pour into hot clean jars, filling right up to the top and seal, preferably with screw top lids. Cool the jars upside down.
We’ve had a few days of really hot weather and I never think to change the temperature of the fridge to compensate for the extra heat. Subsequently some milk started to go off. It was only a bit off, off enough so it tasted strange in tea. In an attempt to be resourceful and thrifty (not a quality that comes naturally to me) I set about turning it into something else. However I didn’t really think it through. I could have made some scones or added the milk to the mixture when making a chocolate cake but I messed up big time and ended up with a house that smelt disgusting and a dish of tasteless rubbery cheese that would have needed other things added to it to make it even vaguely palatable. I had wasted a good hour of my time and the ‘cheese’ went in the bin.
Perhaps it is just me, but the whole idea of making use of leftovers makes life feel grim and miserable. Just the word ‘leftovers’ is depressing. As the need to be more mindful of waste becomes increasingly necessary, someone needs to rework the subject to make it appealing. We need a new vocabulary that makes food scraps and stale stuff exciting.
While I was scrabbling around trying to find a use for my sour milk I found an old household encyclopaedia that I had collected primarily for its colourful dust jacket. Set out in an A to Z format, for sour milk it says: SOUR MILK This is very good for polishing linoleum. It will remove iron rust from white fabrics.
So next time perhaps I’ll give that a go, not that I have any linoleum in the house. I spent quite some time reading through the book though, which is filled with useful nuggets of information as well as much that is quaint and outdated.
BED to ascertain if damp. Put a mirror for a few moments between the sheets. If it is misty when removed, then the bed is damp.
CHIMNEYS These can be kept reasonably clear of soot if potato peelings mixed with a little salt are burnt in the grate at least once a week. It will form a glaze inside the chimney and thus prevent its becoming clogged.
COFFEE GROUNDS Dry coffee grounds filled into a suitable covering make excellent pin-cushions; the pins and needles struck therein will never rust.
FLY-PAPERS to make. Take pieces of strong, thick paper, smear with treacle, and place in prominent positions. Always burn fly-papers after use.
(You just know your hair will become tangled up in one of these!)
HEDGEHOGS Keep in a cage during the day and release at night if it is desired to use them as beetle-catchers. Feed on bread and milk and an occasional earth-worm.
LAVENDER SACHET Mix together 75 parts powdered lavender, 20 parts powdered benzoin and 1 part oil of lavender.
(This actually sounds lovely and I think is worth trying out. Benzoin has a scent similar to vanilla so I imagine this combination would work beautifully.)
I became a vegetarian in 1972. Since then, at different times, I have explored veganism, followed a macrobiotic diet and been a pescatarian (is there such a word? an annoying vegetarian who happens to eat fish) but have only on one occasion knowingly eaten meat (too long a story!). I was never a great meat eater as a child so never felt I had made a huge sacrifice and it has never been my mission to convert others, I simply made a personal choice and that was that. It has never felt like a big deal but it was outside the mainstream, an approach that has always appealed to me.
In the years since 1972 I can’t tell you how many times I have been turned on at the dinner table by carnivorous strangers demanding I explain my reasons for not eating meat, or the times I have been with meat eaters discussing how every vegetarian they know looks pale, pasty and unhealthy. But I have always risen above it and it hasn’t bothered me. In 1972 it was difficult to eat out anywhere and find anything vegetarian on the menu and in subsequent years it has become much easier. I can remember some woman or other once saying to me ‘it wont kill you’ when I was querying whether a mushroom pizza had bacon on it and me, too shy to say boo to a goose, being embarassed. Most restaurants now offer at least one! meat-free option if not more and the ‘oh, you must eat nut roast then’ assumption has gladly gone. Meat eaters tend to be very concerned about how vegetarians get their protein.
On becoming a vegetarian, the first book I borrowed from the library was The Natural Foods Cookbook by Beatrice Trum Hunter (first published in 1963). This book includes chapters on meat and fish, but I remember feeling like I was reading a book written in a foreign language. So many of the ingredients were unknown to me, strange grains, weird pulses and vegetables that had never been seen in Lancashire where I grew up. But I was hungry for knowledge and lapped it all up, rereading and renewing this book from the library until I started to make sense of it all. Then, only specialist health food shops that were considered outside the loop stocked some of the ingredients. Seeking them out was also part of the challenge. I have just managed to find a copy on ebay and it is really interesting to assess how things have changed now these ingredients can be found in most supermarkets.
A while ago I was listening to a discussion on Radio 4 about animal rights. A young well-spoken woman made the point that humans are qualified to be considered superior beings because no animal has written a great work of literature. As far as I am aware no animal has written even a rubbish book but occasionally a dog manages to say ‘sausages’ as its party piece so perhaps we aren’t far away from a celebrity doggie chef.
More recently I have started to get annoyed. Annoyed enough that my being a vegetarian has started to matter. Whilst the interest in ethically reared and slaughtered meat improves the lives of animals, which is good, it feels like there is a real blokey, gung-hoe attitude attached. ‘Have you got the bottle to do the deed and slaughter your own meat?’ I like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and loved his in-your-face-title for his book ‘Meat’, (it does what it says on the can), but when slaughtering animals becomes classed as TV entertainment it really depresses me. On his programme he featured a long-time vegetarian who wanted to eat meat again so was being taught how to butcher the carcass, WHY A VEGETARIAN? Gordon Ramsay, who regularly makes jibes about vegetarians also recently fed meat to a vegetarian stating that you must eat meat to follow a healthy diet and has on several occasions given animals reared for slaughter witty names of other celebrity chefs. In the TV listing for the next ‘F Word’ programme, ‘Janet Street-Porter serves veal calves to 50 vegetarians keen to eat meat again!’ I am starting to wonder whether we are being fed propaganda by the Meat Marketing Board, or whatever it is called these days. What’s with all these conversions?
The fact of the matter is that we have a multitude of choices in the west of what we eat. We can live perfectly healthily without meat if we want too. So it is really refreshing when you come across a book like ‘Wild Garlic, gooseberries….. and me’ by Denis Cotter. This book gives me faith that for some, things have moved on in an inspiring and intelligent way. Denis writes about his ingredients so beautifully that in comparison, calling a pig Anthony Worral-Thompson seems pure trailer trash. And strangely, seeing my book from the 70’s beside Denis Cotter’s book there is something not dissimilar about the jackets.
What is so great about gardening is that as a vast ocean of a subject there are always new things to discover and be interested in. You can be passionate about herbaceous borders one minute and then find that your focus has gone elsewhere and suddenly growing potatoes has become all consuming. I do love flowers but right now it is vegetables that really get me going.
I suppose these photographs should be called plant portraits and I like them because they are just shades of green. Plants don’t have to be ‘in your face’, colourful and blousey to be admired and these have the added advantage of being only a short hop from your dinner plate.
The weekend was an important one in our community calendar, it was time for our annual village carnivaL This gives men an excuse to wear frocks and dogs a reason to wear bandanas and everyone is allowed to let their hair down, especially if it is flourescent green or day-glo orange.
The carnival starts with a procession through the village of decorated floats, the carnival queen and her attendants waft past sat amongst a cloud of fluffy crepe paper flowers and there is a marching band, then it is straight to the playing fields where the carnival gets into full swing. It is always good to make directly for the tea tent where every year the ladies never fail to put on a fabulous spread of homemade cakes and fill cups all day with hot tea.
There are displays of school children doing cheerleading routines, tug-of-war teams battle it out to even scores from the year before and a lucky dip to win a jar of pickled onions or a bar of soap. This year a chocolate fondue stall made an appearance with skewered strawberries ready for dipping as well as marshmallow kebabs.
A good day was had by all. Now it is looking forward to the next big event, the local produce show in a months time. Last year I entered 2 courgettes in the show, my first time ever taking part. Of course I didn’t win anything but this year… it is going to be serious.
NIPpaysage are four landscape architects in Montréal whose striking projects currently include a garden, commissioned by Hydro-Quebec electricity company, which is part of the International Garden Festival at les Jardins de Métis, Reford Gardens in Quebec. The garden is bounded by fences made of parallel strung electricity wires on which perch thousands of birds to illustrate the many uses of hydro wires in the landscape. The Laundry supplied the 5400 bird pegs required for the installation. Thank you to Mathieu Casavant at NIPpaysage for sending me this photograph.
Find out more about the festival here.
The International Garden Festival is on until October 5th.
Now that summer has arrived, me and my neighbour John, were starting to become concerned that our favourite roadside produce stall might have packed up shop. This is one of those lovely quaint country things, the produce stall beside the road that you just happen upon by accident. It has taken me two years to remember where our favourite roadside table is as it is tucked away down a country lane in a very out-of-the-way place.
Last summer it provided us with a fair amount of conversation throughout the summer; which of us had passed it, what was for sale and more to the point, what had we bought to bring home. This table is always unattended, handwritten labels let you know how much everything costs and a wooden money box, padlocked to the table, sits there waiting for you to post your coins through the slot. Depending what is in season and what time of day you go there, you’ll find a different assortment of produce for sale, freshly dug potatoes, home made jams and chutneys in wonderfully unshowy jars, free range eggs, bunches of fresh herbs and sometimes vegetable plants in pots ready for planting in your own patch when you get home.
So I was thrilled to see the table set up again for another summer of business. Sometimes there isn’t a lot there for sale but the vegetable and fruit print sticky backed plastic that covers the table, makes the display look more abundant however few things are on offer. A 60’s fringed bedspread provides some shade for the goods as the sun moves around during the day. Today I bought a jar of gooseberry and elderflower jam. I have only ever seen someone restocking the stall on one occasion otherwise it is just there on its own upholding the value of trust, and long may it continue to do so. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you where it is because it is a secret.
When Anita Roddick died last year I started to read up on the web about her life, one jam-packed with considerable achievements. One thing I spotted which has stayed in my thoughts ever since, was that she never had bottled water in the house. I wasn’t sure exactly what her reasons were for this but presumed that as she travelled the world she had witnessed the problems of people without access to clean drinking water, thus making the shopping habits of us middle-class westeners seem a tad distasteful. Whatever her reasons, if it wasn’t good enough for Anita, it’s not good enough for me.
As a person who got through my fair share of Perrier during the 80’s (there, it’s out in the open now), I, like many others, bought into the big bottled water consumer boom but over the years I have bought less and less. I do have the occasional yearning for a glass of good old Perrier though, which to my mind now has a retro charm. I hardly see the point these days of buying still water at all and can never remember which, natural spring water or natural mineral water, I should choose as I know that one of them, quite likely, has simply come straight out of a tap. Perhaps if I drank more water I would be able to remember this vital information.
Now as well as ‘spring’ and ‘mineral’ waters we have Drench, ’21st century’ water, brought to us courtesy of Britvic and 21st century water is of course what we need to hydrate our brains. Mind you, I am prepared to forgive them anything after seeing their new TV ad which is fantastic. I was talking about the ad to my brother today and he thought it was an ad for Specsavers, so Britvic, that was money well spent. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it have brand loyalty.
