Tag: pickles

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.

Controlled rotting resumed in the kitchen

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Here we are, back home and that means two posts today with a bit of luck and some time. First off, ‘though, there is the revival of the sourdough starter and the kefir to think about. The Potwell Inn is a plain sort of a place – or it would be if it existed –  and here we try to avoid mystification, and when it comes to sourdough starters and their care, there’s enough ordure written about it to keep our allotment fertile for the next ten years. So here’s the key principle: wild yeasts are are ubiquitous – they’re everywhere and they’ll still be there centuries after the last lobbyist declares that chemical X will save the world, thereby ending the world. I’ve only killed a sourdough starter once and that was a deliberate experiment to see how long I could neglect it before it died.  The answer was that I couldn’t kill it at all, but under the anaerobic conditions of its container it turned into another life-form so powerfully smelly that I had to throw the container away.  Second point is that getting a starter going is so easy you wonder how the hipster artisan bakers have got the nerve to sell the knowledge for £150 a morning. Get some dark rye flour and stir it into some tap water and leave it in a warm place until it starts to bubble (could be days – don’t wory).  Then throw half of that away and add more flour and more tap water, give it a stir and keep going like that until it’s ready to use.

So getting back from North Wales means the neglected starter needs a feed because it’s been neglected for a fortnight and it’s sulking. I do use organic flour; my favourite is Bacheldre Mill, but I don’t fuss about water.  By all means waste your money on organic single malt virgin water brought over from the Isle of Sky in a coracle but it won’t taste any better.  I do not employ holiday starter sitters to stir the infant broth daily, even on minimum wages. I have not scoured the antiques markets for authenic barm pots and neither do I subject the infant starter to any ceremonial prayers or position it on a lay line. Most particularly I would never dream of shelling any money out for someone else’s starter, but if you happened to know where the Potwell Inn is (which for reasons already described would be difficult because it doesn’t exist), but if you should happen to pop by at the back door of the pub I’ll gladly give you a bit.  It’s lovely and it smells like apples.

As for the second exercise in controlled rotting, the kefir was in an even more perilous situation because I’d forgotton about it for weeks.  You know how it goes with kefir – drinking it every single day for ever would bore you stiff. So it’s been languishing at the back of the fridge waiting patiently for someone to show it some love.  Today I showed it some love and I strained it and washed the grains off (with tap water) and and put it in a clean container with more full cream milk. Once again it’s organic milk because that’s what we use. Because I’ve washed it and possibly because the chlorine in the water is a bit of an inhibitor, it will be slow to recover, but it will recover.

The pantry is full of various other vegetable bits and bobs undergoing their own lacto-fermentation and they too will cope with whatever life throws at them. I don’t sell this food so any public health inspectors reading this need not trouble themselves to Google up the Potwell Inn and attempt to pay me a visit, and if I do suddenly expire one day from some unexplained cause it’s vanishingly unlikely that the wild yeast will have done it!

How hard can it be to make dill pickles?

2018-07-02 20.28.42The 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?”