I confess I was a bit disappointed when it came to straining the grape skins out of the must. There, down in the garage was our lovely new press, courtesy of Nick and Kate who now own a gigantic hydraulic number, and there was me in the kitchen making the most desperate mess and squirting wine and grape skins all over the place, trying to extract the fermenting must a ladleful at a time through an old bag left over from my beer making days. It didn’t take long to work out that without using the press we’d waste most of the fruits of our labours, however Madame had been implacably opposed to using the press in our flat for fear of wine running across the floor and dripping out of our downstairs neighbour’s light fittings. Continue reading “Chateau Victoria (Park) update”
Category: Food
Bit of a breakthrough on the sourdough. Can it really be time to reset the propagator?
I gave the bread 8 hours to mature before I cut it this morning. I was looking for a better structure and a thinner crust and I think I achieved the first aim and I’m on my way to achieving the second, so I thought I’d better make a note of what I did because I’m bound to forget. There are two principal changes. Firstly I diluted the strong flour by substituting 25% organic white soft flour. This was an idea that came from the Shipton Mill website which says that (home) bakers struggle to achieve a good result with because apparently most strong bread flours are all a bit too strong, which seems to suit industrial bakeries but makes such a strong dough that it can’t really expand into the big open textures we all like. The 25% figure was a pure guess and it would be worth experimenting around that percentage and maybe also trying different flours. I addressed the issue of tough crust by giving the loaf a 15 min blast at 220C with maximum steam and then turning it down to 180C (opening the door for a moment to let some of the heat out), for a further 15 minutes and then finishing with five minutes with the oven turned off and the door ajar by a couple of inches. The crust is definitely thinner – still crisp, but not tooth-breaking hard. I think I must have been cooking the loaves too hot. On occasions with wholemeal loaves I’ve had brick hard crust but undercooked crumb at the centre.
Meanwhile the propagator has been brought back into the kitchen and filled with coir pellets sown with winter lettuce, chard and spinach. The coir pellets have been a great success and have enabled us to avoid peat based sowing composts. They’re less messy and even beetroot seems to develop naturally from them. My only misgiving is the material used for the fine netting that surrounds them – is it biodegradable or are we in danger of loading yet more plastic into the earth. A bit of research on the internet suggests that the peat industry is sponsoring a fightback through so-called independent websites, suggesting that the netting surrounding Jiffy 7 pellets doesn’t degrade. There’s a lot of confusion about degradability in any case. The ‘degradable’ bin liners we all use don’t degrade in normal domestic compost heaps but only in commercial high temperature industrial composters and so the many that I’ve used in our heap seem undiminished even when the heap reaches 40C. It’s a fraud on the gullible who hope to save the world by buying something different and the manufacturers are getting away with it. Then there’s a distinction between biodegradable and photo degradable plastics. If the Jiffy 7 netting is only photodegradable it’s never going to decompose while it’s under the soil surface. Coir pellets only need to to be contained until the seedlings are planted out – so maybe five or six weeks maximum – and then they can biodegrade as quickly as possible. Don’t we have any suitable materials to to this? and could we not use a form of woven cotton to achieve the end we all want. The problem I suspect is that the highly compressed pellet (light, robust and cheap to transport} doubles or trebles in size when it’s soaked prior to sowing and so the coating fabric needs to be able to expand accordingly. Some form of extra fine cotton crepe or sheeps’ wool might do it but would probably need developing. As ever it’s cheaper to use weasel words on the packet than to do the research and development. I think this is calling for an experiment. It would cost more than a penny to bury a few pellets and to expose some more to sunlight and weather, and I could find out for myself.
Later we decided not to go to the allotment but to go for a walk along the canal. It was a great decision and we both enjoyed it enormously, especially when the skies cleared a bit and the sun came out just as we came to the refreshment hut above Bath Deep Lock. So we walked up to Sidney Gardens and back along Great Pulteney Steet.
Then home and I made a salad of mango, smoked chicken and a thai style dressing on our own salad leaves. I chucked a few cooked salad potatoes in underneath for a bit of padding but there was ample for both of us. I even managed to use one of the Apache chillies without making th whole thing too fiery.
How hard can it be to make dill pickles?
The cucumbers did amazingly well this year. Last year we planted them amongst the tomatoes and they got swamped. I think we had a very few and so the question of preserving them never came up. But this year we ran the propagator and grew nearly everything from seed, under lights in the kitchen. For several months the whole flat looked like an overfurnished greenhouse but it resulted in many more young plants than we’ve ever grown before. In the end we gave many of them away but we still planted out half a dozen plants and they generated a surplus that just cried out to be preserved in some way. Continue reading “How hard can it be to make dill pickles?”
Chateau Victoria (Park)
Last year one of our neighbours picked most of the grapes along one edge of the allotment before we took it on in October and so this year it’s been a bit of worry whether he’d claim squatters rights on them and take them before we could pick them ourselves. Today wasn’t a perfect day for picking, with torrential showers and winds gusting at over 50mph, but when we turned up to check that the bean wigwams were still standing we saw his friend’s car there and we could see the two of them picking on his allotment and we had no alternative but to pick our own before he headed towards ours with larcenous intentions. Continue reading “Chateau Victoria (Park)”
This year we will mostly be growing navets
This season we’ve grown turnips for the first time, and Madame (who doesn’t like them) brought a few of the thinnings back to the flat. They were tiny – barely 3/4″ across- and I just steamed them in the same pan as the carrots. She still didn’t like them and so I got to eat them all. They were little flavour explosions, an entirely new taste to me at least, and now I’m watching the bed they’re growing in to make sure I get some more before they turn into cattle fodder! Continue reading “This year we will mostly be growing navets”
Christmas incoming
Date: 16 August 2018 at 19:41:38 BST
Weather: 16°C Mostly Sunny
Suddenly it’s nearly autumn and the kitchen is calling to me.Maybe it’s just the way of things, but here we are, halfway through August and yet there are hints of autumn lurking behind every hedge. When I think about it, I can recall easily that each season carries the remnants of the old and harbingers of the new. In deep winter the trees carry their buds even as some late and decaying leaves still cling to the twigs. Continue reading “Christmas incoming”
Suddenly it’s nearly autumn and the kitchen is calling to me.
Bath, England, United Kingdom Thursday, 16 Aug 2018, 7:41 pm BST 16°C Mostly Sunny
Maybe it’s just the way of things, but here we are, halfway through August and yet there are hints of autumn lurking behind every hedge. When I think about it, I can recall easily that each season carries the remnants of the old and harbingers of the new. In deep winter the trees carry their buds even as some late and decaying leaves still cling to the twigs. In the spring, there are days of hope as the sun breaks through and then nights of frost that remind you that winter’s not done with yet, and in late summer my mind resonates with the shrinking hours of daylight and applies itself, like a squirrel, to preparing for the winter. It’s a favourite season and yet the harvest touches my melancholic soul every year by modulating from the major to the minor key. Jams, pickles and preserves become the centre of focus and I’m drawn to the kitchen. The fruits and vegetables that are coming off the allotment each day are almost overwhelming in their richness and numbers and finding ways of cooking or keeping them becomes an obsession. But there are only two of us and my deepest atavistic urges are to feed a family of five, or eight or ten. Today I thought of Christmas for the first time even though we’ve not finished sowing for autumn. It’s raining as I write this, and we’ve had plenty of rain in the last week. We longed for rain yet when it arrives like the Seventh Cavalry to rescue the besieged vegetables I think that somehow, if we could have just one more glorious day, I’d find the energy to go on watering. Never satisfied! I can hear my mother saying it.
In the Guardian this morning there was a piece about the way our culture is rapidly losing its cooking skills. The writer cited Jane Grigson’s “English Cooking” and wrote that it doesn’t contain any recipe or instruction for making pastry because she didn’t think it worthwhile wasting print on something so well understood it needed no explanation. The proofs of the article apparently came back with innumerable queries and questions from young subeditors who had no idea of the basic skills. Our three sons are all good cooks and two of them are professional chefs, but their various partners over the years have seemed suspicious of the very idea of cooking from scratch – as if it were a sign of domestic servitude.
In another piece yesterday George Monbiot explored the reasons behind the epidemic of obesity and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that in our overstretched, overstressed lives, the food culture that embodied so much more than food has been systematically eroded – quite deliberately – by the food processing industry, and the results are as depressing as the results of any other kind of addiction. We have simply moved from one form of servitude to another, and the much cited ever increasing life expectancy has turned out to be yet another fraud. We’re sadder and sicker and lonelier than ever.
On the radio yesterday there was a piece on a new computer game craze, discussing whether it was a good or a bad thing for children. By all accounts it’s borderline addictive with children forsaking almost anything else including face-to-face contact with other children in order to play for hours. As a retired parent I don’t have much trouble deciding that children spending hours slaughtering even virtual people is a bad idea. One young woman working in the billion pound industry even ventured that to deny your children access to these games would ruin their carer prospects. Well, in Mandy Rice Davis’ phrase, she would say that wouldn’t she.
Do all these things tie in together? Is it just the usual self indulgent longing for the past that always afflicts old people like me? I can’t help thinking that these disappearing cultural values and their associated skills are as important as they ever were, and somehow we need to hold on to them for the future when they will be needed by another generation.
Today we cleared half of the sweetcorn away and I prepped the second cold frame with SylvaGrow as planned. But I’m getting cold feet about sowing carrots there as we’re so far behind and I really can’t see them coming to anything. It would be more sensible to postpone the experiment and fill the frames with stuff we really know we can grow, some spring onions for instance and winter lettuce. We’ve grown so many lettuce and salad leaves this year but the supply we’ve created outstrips our appetite so much it feels wasteful. I’m not that keen on green salad leaves and frankly some of them taste bitter. So that’s a matter for further discussion. But we picked lovely beetroot grown in coir pellets and simply planted in. I think we can call that experiment a complete success, We also picked runner beans, radishes and cucumbers, and had an improvised tasting of the chillies. The apache chillies are very hot indeed, and the pearls quite tasty and mild. The Jalapeño I picked wasn’t really ripe enough to do justice to its eventual flavour and heat.
We’ve reached the tipping point in the year when at last we’re clearing ground faster than we can plant it. Charles Dowding’s book on winter veg arrived today and it’s clear we’ve missed the boat on quite a number of opportunities. Next season we’ll do it better. In the evening I cooked a flan with the calbrese we picked yesterday. The plants are doing well and will give us some good meals. We had shopped for wholemeal flour to make pastry and I made some tonight. It’s very hard going and I almost abandoned it while I was rolling it out as it splits so easily and has next to no plasticity, like working with porcelain or perhaps heavily grogged crank mixture. But with a bit of cursing, persistence and some running repairs glued in with egg white it all came together in the end and tasted delicious.
But the last word on the day belongs to the Sweet Cicily which Stella discovered growing once again. For such a frail plant with a history of abuse and neglect, not to mention being felled twice by slugs, it just keeps coming back. Like Robert Bruce’s spider it never gives up – an inspiring end to a slightly melancholic day.