I baked my first loaf of bread (with some help from my mother) when I was around twelve or thirteen – so sixty years ago – give or take. In those days before artisans had been invented, flour was either plain or self-raising and the idea of obsessing over the provenance, the manner of milling or the protein content was unheard of. As for wholegrain, the closest thing had been 81% National Flour for which the demand collapsed once food rationing was ended. That was a shame because 81% or 85% extraction flours are really flavourful and easy to work with. Continue reading “Rainy day – time to make bread and think.”
OK so this is going to be the last Heligan posting, but we were intrigued to see (and to smell) some tons of raw seaweed being used as a mulch – as the photo shows – on the asparagus beds, but on the allium beds as well. 
So what would the “take home” message from Heligan be. I’m not sure that I care for the impression the expression gives – as if all the love and care and experience we encountered in our five days there could be pre-digested and regurgitated into a sentence like philosophical bird vomit. But we definitely found things we wanted to remember and try for ourselves when we got back to the allotments, and here are some of them: 
There’s a reason for changing the usual name of these gardens. We’ve just got back from 5 days in Cornwall which we spent entirely in exploring the gardens – they’re that good. We first visited in the summer with some of our family including the three grandchildren. They raced around having fun and doing what happy children do and we would not begrudge them a single moment of that mad ecstatic reception of a new place -in truth I wish we could all recover it for ourselves. But there was much more than novelty and ‘visitor experience’ going on there, and that was what we spent last week exploring. So this posting may well turn into several as I turn the days over in my mind. 
I thought about replacing this photo with one that was correctly exposed, but then I thought it had a rather Winslow Homer look about it that suited the topic quite well. I especially liked the newspaper background – I mean – just how wholesome can you get in a small first floor flat in the center of a city? But don’t worry I’m pretty normal most of the time!
We’re soon reaching the first birthday of the day we took on the other half of the allotment. We’d been waiting for it for over a year during which it fell into ever greater disrepair, and broadcasting its weed seeds over the entire area. The previous tenant, although he’d completely lost control of it was strangely unwilling to let it go and so we had a number of ‘Uncle Jim’ moments with him including a couple of larcenous visits before he finally disappeared. 