Tag: chutney

Sometimes we just long for the supermarket in Montaren

The little garden we’ve created on the pavement outside.

Back in the day, and usually at this time of year we would pack our camping gear and drive south about 900 miles to Provence. Of course it was often blisteringly hot there, with the temperature into the 30’s and when things got too much we would invent a reason to go to the supermarket in Montaren where the air conditioning was well worth a couple of bottles of local wine. Nobody seemed to mind a couple of overheated English tourists hanging about the place gazing through the windows at the car park where it seemed as if the surface of the earth might shrivel and peel off. Uzès is a charming town, but you need to get up early in the morning if you expect to go for a walk. And you have to watch out for scorpions which can give you a nasty bite.

So now we’re into the fourth heatwave of the summer in more generally temperate Bath why does it feel so terribly hot when we’ve previously driven hundreds of miles and camped in a tent where it was maybe 10C hotter? We were there during what came to be known as the “canicule” where the death notices of the elderly seemed to be pinned to every tree. In that part of France everything seemed to stop for a couple of months while ridiculously foolhardy young men engaged in bull running through the streets, trying to catch a young bull by the tail and pull it away from its companions. The most exciting thing I’ve ever disapproved of! I suppose it must be because we’re more than a decade older and our thermostats need renewing, but today our strategy is to close the windows and shutters and to think of things to do that don’t involve movement. The closest thing to any seriously energetic pursuit is watering the little garden we’ve created outside and down two flights of stairs or (normally) the lift.

However, yesterday – with the good news from the hospital; (no more BCC’s or anything worse) – I felt full of energy. As soon as I’d got back from the hospital I’d fed the sourdough starter which had been lurking unfed in the airing cupboard for months. Fearing the worst, I gave it a tentative sniff and it smelt wonderful; yeasty, fruity like apples, like autumn. I gave it two tablespoons of wholemeal rye flour for breakfast and 24 hours later it was roaring for more. So the day began with the stupidest plan ever for a heatwave – a day at the stove. My three point plan was to bake a Dundee cake, a sourdough loaf and a batch of plum chutney with the allotment plums that were in danger of going mouldy. Fortunately most of the makings were in the cupboard and starting at nine a.m. I was all but finished by ten p.m. after a thirteen hour bake off. The sourdough loaf takes 36 hours from batter to finished loaf, but the great joy of it is that there’s barely twenty minutes of actual work involved. Mostly it just sits there growing and growing until it goes into the oven with a burst of steam and energy. The chutney was all chopping and boiling and fills the flat with delicious smells and chilli vapours that make your eyes water. The Dundee cake is a favourite for our camping trips in the van and I usually chuck in a few extra glacé cherries for luck. And here they are on the big table:

The past six months have been a bit of a test, what with various ailments on both our parts and Madame’s knee replacement so it’s been something of a dark time what with my melancholic temperament – things like the sourdough got neglected along with this blog at times. My long march towards a million words slowed to a shuffle while I concentrated on cataloguing and recording plants. But progress, however slow, is still progress and with a great deal of encouragement from Madame, my rock, and our neighbour Charlie I’m back on track to accomplishing a million words, a thousand records and five hundred species by the end of this year.

Exactly a year ago today I was very much not looking forward to my routine endoscopy the following day – and in the manner of these things we resolved to go dry, free from alcohol – because we really were hitting it too hard and the booze is always at the top of every list of things to avoid. It was easier than either of us anticipated and the money we saved has all been spent on extravagances like keeping the campervan on the road and me buying second hand botany books. After a long intermission life feels pretty good again and the moment I post this I’m going back to the kitchen to cut a slice of the future.

Meanwhile back at the ranch

 

A rare day of sunshine on the allotment today and so we made the most of it because there’s the tail end of hurricane Lorenzo about to do one final lap of honor around the UK before finally (we hope) petering out. This is a challenging time of year for allotments because although there are a multitude of jobs to be getting on with, the weather often gets in the way.  We used to call these unsettled patterns “equinoctal storms” but the Met Office get a bit sniffy about the term, saying there’s absolutely no connection between the frequent storms and the day length. They just happen at the same time. Often!

But the last of the tender crops need to be gathered in and new ones sown almost immediately to allow germination before the cold weather really kicks in. That  means the ground needs to be weeded and prepared with compost even if you don’t dig.  Any ground that’s not going to be planted up immediately needs feeding and sheeting, or sowing with a green manure crop.  That’s not something we’ve ever done – I’m not sure what you do with the crop if you don’t dig it in – maybe if it’s tares you can cut it off leaving the roots with their nitrogen nodules intact in the ground, and compost all the green tops – it still gets fed back into the earth but a little later.

It’s this time of the year when we get a sudden mass of green material for composting. We’ve already dealt with the bean vines, but today it was the turn of the peppers, aubergines and those of the tomatoes not affected by blight – oh and the giant sunflowers which need sawing into pieces which are then either bashed with the back of an axe or split down the middle to expose the soft core to the composting bacteria. I often chop the vines a bit with a sharp spade – but you need some air circulation, so turning it all into a soggy mess will lead to slimy anaerobic conditions. The trouble with having a mass of fresh green material at this time of year is that at lower temperatures it can sit there sulking rather than composting. This is a great time to use some human urine to get things going.  We dilute it 10:1 for growing crops, but I’ve put it on the compost heap neat with no obvious ill effects. It’s rich with bio-available nitrogen and it really doesn’t smell.  We tell everyone we’re doing it to discourage the fastidious from browsing our crops! And keep the heap covered with old compost bags because it won’t thrive if it’s inundated with cold rain.

One of our success stories this year has been the outdoor chillies, peppers, tomatoes and aubergines.  The peppers were intended to be grown in the greenhouse but as ever we’d sown far too many,  so early in the season we planted some very poor and bedraggled specimens in a patch of sheltered open ground that happened to be empty. They absolutely loved it, and we’ve had our best ever crops from the open ground, leaving the pampered indoor plants standing still.  The only exception were the hot chillies, but they made the most of the greenhouse and they’ve been fantastic.  It’s touch and go whether the Habenero’s ripen fully, but I ate a tiny slice of an underripe one today and it was fierecly hot already. The mildest chillies – the Hungarian Hot Wax are still flowering and fruiting outside even now.

But all good things come to an end and so we came home with a big basket of green peppers, red cabbage and broccoli which is still cropping well plus a large quantity of green tomatoes. I’m looking for a recipe for a green pepper relish now. We ripened a few peppers on the windowsill earlier and roasted them to use as an ingredient in cooking.

The Sweet Cicily I sowed has resulted in a couple of very vigorous bushes so one of them is going to have to live in a container.  The other is on a patch of unuseable land near the greehouse and it’s very pretty and very useful – sweet and fragrant – so it can stay where it is for the time being. One major winter job is to reorganise the fruit cage and move the strawberries to a new spot.  It’s far too crowded, and a faff to get in and out of which has led to it becoming a bit neglected. Access is so important when planning beds and plots.

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Home then, thoroughly knackered with a day of gallery visits tomorrow for a change. It’s amazing, though how after a cup of tea and something to eat we felt energized again, which was just as well because the harvested  vegetables needed preparation and washing before they could be stored. It’s amazing how many slugs can live in a red cabbage, for instance.  But a soak in salted water and a couple of rinses soon gets rid of them and it’ll keep in the fridge until tomorrow evening when I’m baking anyway so I’ll make some spiced red cabbage at the same time.  Anyone for green tomato chutney?

When “just too much” is a moral problem

So today turned out to be something of a day of reckoning in the Potwell Inn pantry, largely on account of the large batch of ragu I cooked yesterday.  It had to be frozen in individual batches today, but our little freezer was stuffed to capacity – not least with 12lbs blackcurrants that went in there when we were too busy to do anything with them. Fridges and freezers can very easily become the slow -food equivalent of the dustbin if you’re not ruthless, and I’m not nearly ruthless enough.

But that brought around another challenge; what should we do with the defrosting blackberries?  Easy-peasy we thought, we’ll make some cordial and some jam.  The elderflower cordial we made in the summer is beginning to run low and in any case the flavour diminishes the longer it’s in a bottle. Already it’s a shadow of the glorious scent of early summer that it possessed when we made it. So what better than blackcurrant cordial for the winter, all that vitamin C to fight off colds.  But then that left six pounds to make jam with, and when I counted our empty jam jars there were just six and I needed at least twice that. The easy thing to do would be to go and buy some more, but I knew there were quite a number of full jars of jams and chutneys being stored in the garage, some of them quite old. Cue head torch and a stumble around in the chaos of a garage repurposed as a dump for yet more things we don’t quite know what to do with since we moved here 3 years ago.  I found 20 jars of various substances some without labels, some with the contents shrunk by 25% and some whose once pristine lids were spotted with rust. Initially, when I got them up 3 flights of stairs to the flat I opened each one and tasted it.  Some were flat-out gone, in some the sugar had granulated out leaving crunchy bits and all of them were, like the elderflower cordial, diminished in flavour. In the end I spooned all the contents into the bin and shoved them into the dishwasher to be cleaned and sterilized. Sadly one of the more recent casualties was some 2016 marmalade which we’ve run out of altogether so we can’t make any more until the Seville oranges come in January.  The most venerable was a jar of 2009 jam that was still edible but devoid of any identifying taste. It was supposed to be gooseberry.

This is a constant problem for most of us in this situation.We wouldn’t be gardeners at all if we didn’t want to eat the things we grow, but the fruit grows generously every year and it’s all too easy to try to use every bit of it up. Freezers and jam making cost money and in truth it would be much better to give the surplus away to someone who can use it. The same kind of argument goes for many of the other things we grow, it all comes in at once and we go into surplus in a matter of a few days.  This is all the more reason for researching the heritage varieties in favour of the F1 hybrids.  What’s the point of having a huge crop all at once when what you need is to have it spread out so you can eat fresh every day for a few weeks.  Today our thriftiness began to feel more like selfishness; twenty pots of jam and chutney that could have fed someone else if we hadn’t instinctively hoarded them again a rainy day that never came. Who’d have thought that making a batch of ragu could expose a moral dilemma?

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