Taking Pictures of Your Obsessions

So, it's mid-October, and the annual Pumpkin Obsession is in full, terrifying swing (fuelled by farmers markets & roadside vegetable stands selling monstrous orange things for £1.75*).
So far there have been Harlequin, Acorn, Kabocha, Buttercup, Butternut, Big Orange Things Of Dubious Taste, Red Kuri, Sugar Pumpkin & my beloved Crown Prince.

So expect to see some recipes up soon.

Yum.

*I mean, come on, how can you say no to that?!

Dig, Lazarus, Dig

Perhaps it is because I am, as has been previously noted, Peculiar, but I enjoy digging.

No, really. I'm not making it up.

Ever since I was old enough to wield a spade without the threat of chopping off a toe* digging was something I loved to do. As a kid it was an excuse to get muddy without reprisals**, but as I got older, and had my own garden, it became a way of connecting with the soil I was working with. Getting my fingers in the dirt & learning the peculiarities of the land. This area is prone to frost pockets, careful what gets planted there, that area gets waterlogged & needs organic matter incorporating into it. Building a relationship with the soil, learning its needs & tending to them. Gardening has always been a spiritual pursuit for me (I heard a theory once that shepherding societies were prone to monotheism, of the belief of a solitary deity that wanders with them, whereas societies based on agriculture were more inclined towards polytheism, and a deity for everything), the contact with the earth grounding & centering, even in my vaguely Pagan crackpot view of the world.

Over the last few weeks when I haven't been involved in the making & selling of beer (which, rather surprisingly, involves a lot of digging), I've been digging. A lot of digging. new muscles have formed in my back & shoulders purely for the purpose of aching (the Random Twinge in the trapezius & the Dull Ache in the Latissimus dorsi are my personal favourites), what started out as a few blisters on the hands have become spectacular calluses. Having said that, if you're doing any digging proper posture & Not being An Idiot should keep any back pain to a minimum. To quote Alice Cooper - back straight, lift with your knees. If you're not accustomed to a spot of digging, take a break every ten minutes or so & do a few stretches, preferably while grumbling within earshot of loved ones.

Tiger balm is a pungent, dark red ointment made with camphor, clove & cinnamon oil in a petroleum jelly base available from Chinese supermarkets & some chemists. It is an excellent, soothing rub that relieves muscular aches & pains, and all the ills that come with overdoing it (there is a milder white version, if the red stuff is too pungent for you. A dab of it on the forehead or temples works wonder for hangovers & tension headaches). A hot bath with a few drops of lavender & tea tree essential oil will soothe aching muscles too.

There is still much more digging to be done, preferably (but not bleedin' likely) before winter sets in. I prefer to dig in the autumn, or early spring. Digging in the summer is a miserable experience. heat, small creatures that find me delicious, sweat & chafing. Ugh. But cold weather means heading out with your shovel & gloves in sixteen layers of clothing, knowing that pretty soon you'll be in your T-shirt and overusing the term 'Soft Southern Shandy' at passers by. Plus there's the occasional break for a cup of tea and quiet admiration (or loud, if there's other people to hear it)

Until next time, which will probably be about parsnips. Or beetroot. Or something.

*And other parental paranoia's experienced when seeing your barefooted, semi-feral youngest child arsing around in the mire

**Any other situation that got me that filthy; falling in the canal (which happened with distressing regularity), hiding in the coal store, attempting to dig a bomb shelter etc all got me called a little diddikai and sent to an early bath.

The Wilderness Years

Hello blog. I missed you. How have you been, it's been ages. You look good, have you lost weight?

Ahem.

So it's been a couple of months. Busy months. Cram everything we really need but not necessarily everything we own into a van & head north kind of busy.
So operation Get Out Of Dodge has been a success, and we're now settled in a modest pile of bricks somewhere left of the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields, fields, more fields and the occasional tree. The last month has mostly involved getting the new place (home of the Crazy Scheme*) hauled into the 21st Century (simple things, you know. Hot water, a phone line, a toilet that flushes, a damp course, furniture, a cooker. That sort of thing. And finally internet. Yay!), and working on the garden.

Ah, yes. The Garden. We had a large-for-a-city-garden in Sheffield, but here we have something 4 or 5 times the size (more info will be forthcoming), mostly made of weeds with islands of rubble** at the far end. The place had been empty for a year before we moved in, but the previous owners only had lawn (Grass! Bloody grass! You're in Lincolnshire, with the most gorgeous soil a person could wish for, and you go for a bleedin' patio-and-grass garden!). So the turf is being taken up & put into piles & covered with old blankets. In a year they should hopefully have turned into some good potting compost. Less foolish people would probably employ machinery to do this, but I'm favouring the spade & ibuprofen gel approach. It's a lot slower, but lets me get contact with the soil, and all the beasties within (snails, slugs, beetles & the occasional, rather surprised, toad).
That leaves the question of what to do with it all once it's cleared. MikeyFox has (rather unhelpfully) pointed out that we have room for 24 apple trees (after some negotiations, this became a compromise of 6 or 7 fruit trees, no less than 3 apples. As there are over 7,000 varieties of apple out there, it may take a while to, um, decide on which 3 apple trees), or 14 apple trees & a Really Big Polytunnel. So we're currently flicking through The Polytunnel handbook by Andy McKee & have made a garden plan out of fuzzy felt.

Ours is the one on the left.

*Lets Leave The City & Steady Jobs To Live In The North Lincolnshire Countryside, Start A Brewery & Be Self-Sufficient-Ish

**Oh how we marvelled at the bathroom extension on the house when we viewed the place, little did we know that the old bathroom was in a pile at the end of the garden under the nettles...

Plum Crumble Pie (yes, I'm still here)

Maybe it's the British tradition of Rain In July. Maybe it's spending the last 3 months on a diet (albeit the kind of diet that includes pizza, Tyrrells crisps and tempranillo* and you still lose 3 stone**). Maybe it's watching Pushing Daisies that is giving me the urge to make pie.
So, since plums are cheap at the moment, and TV executives will always cancel the good TV shows in favour of the lousy-but-cheap,*** here is a recipe for

Plum Crumble Pie.

The play-doh pastry for this pie is made with a bit of polenta, which gives it a bit of crunchiness. Om nom nom!

Ingredients
115g/4oz/1 cup plain (or all purpose) flour
115g/4oz/1 cup wholemeal flour
150g/5oz/3/4 cup demerara or muscovado sugar (or golden caster sugar. White sugar will work, but it won't have that toffee-fudge flavour, or crunchy texture. Being a tree-hugging, yoghurt-eating no-good beatnik, I use Fairtrade demerara)
115g/4oz/1 cup polenta (cornmeal, not to be confused with cornflour, is made from dried ground corn)
150g/5oz butter
1 egg, whisked
1 tbs/15ml olive oil
1 tsp/5ml baking powder

Filling
25g/1oz/1/4 cup rolled oats
2 tsp demerara sugar
450g/1lb plums

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/G4. Mix together the flours, sugar (reserving 1 tbs sugar & 1 tbs polenta for the next stage), polenta & baking powder in a large bowl. Rub in the butter with your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Stir in the egg & olive oil & enough cold water to form a smooth dough. This dough isn't the kind of dough that you can roll out, it's soft & clay-like. Take about one third of the dough, wrap it up in clingfilm & put it in the fridge to chill. That will, with a bit of jiggery-pokery, become the topping. Grease a 23cm/9" spring-form cake tin.
Take the rest of the dough and pull off little pieces & press evenly over the base & sides of the cake tin. You'll need to make it quite thick, about 1cm deep will do. Sprinkle the reserved polenta & sugar onto the base.

Halve the plums & remove the stones, then arrange cut side down on the pastry base. Take the saved one third of dough out of the fridge and crumble between your fingers into a bowl. Add the oats & mix it up with your fingers. Scatter over the plums and top with the sugar.

Bake for 50 minutes, or until the topping is golden. Leave to stand for 10 to 15 minutes before attempting to separate pie from tin to give the pastry a chance to firm up (it's a bit fragile when hot). There are probably loose bits of pastry rubble that you can pick off the top while you wait. Gnom.

Serve with ice cream, cream, custard, a cup of tea or sneakily out of the tin while no one is looking.

Om Nom Nom

*I can resist many forms of temptation, but never a bottle of wine with Don Quixote on the label.
**There will no doubt be a rant in the future about fad diets & Not Being An Idiot. But basically if you want to lose weight, drink more water & get your arse off the sofa.
***Damn you to hell and back again!

Getting The Hell Out Of Dodge - An Update

Despite the Financial Crisis we're all supposed to be in the middle of, great and unexpected things have been happening at the House At The Top of The Bloody Great Hill. The first being the selling of the aforementioned lofty abode, the second being the purchase of a modest pile somewhere in the middle of the wheatfields of Lincolnshire.

Yes, this is a long winded way of saying the house has been sold, and we're moving further north. I am preparing for a future of splendid isolation by planning what fruit trees to plant and listening to Neil Young.

So the last two months have been mostly spent showing bored people around the house, being shown around peoples houses, tidying, filling out forms, not shouting at Estate Agents, phonecalls, photocopying, filling more forms, spending more time in a bank than is reasonable (unless, of course, you're planning a caper) and signing many virtually identical pieces of paper.

Soon the solicitors will sacrifice a rocket & mozzerella paninni to their arcane gods, and we will experience the delights of moving all our stuff, plus 3 cats that don't like being in the same room together.

But we still have Neil Young.

It's Not A Lefty, Organic-Veg-Growing, Make-It-Yourself Blog Without One Post About Yoghurt (or cat photo's)

Since the relentless downpour outside is keeping me from potting on the courgettes*, I will blog about yoghurt instead.

Okay, so yoghurt is a bit lumbered with the whole hairshirt-wearing, bean-eating, hand wringing liberal brigade (uh. Such as myself), but making your own yoghurt is really easy, and the results are delicious.
So, on to the technical stuff.

Yoghurt (or yogurt, youghurt or any number of spellings containing an unnerving amount of vowels) is a dairy product made by adding a bacterial culture (usually lactobacillus bulgaricus or streptococcus thermophilous, great words for playing Hangman), Bio yoghurts contain extra bacteria to help keep your digestive system healthy (so if you've been on antibiotics taking bio yoghurt will restore the lost essential bacteria). Yoghurt is rich in protein, calcium and vitamins B6 & B12

Making your own yoghurt is really easy, and doesn't need lots of equipment (people have been managing to make it for 4,500 years). You can buy a yoghurt maker, which does all the work for you, but since I'm a cheapskate, I use a thermos flask. To make yogurt you need a starter culture, which is a fancy term for 1 tablespoon of live yoghurt (live meaning that the yoghurt hasn't been pasturised, and still contains active cultures, not that it's getting frisky.), most plain yoghurts you can buy are live yoghurts, and will state if they are on the label. You'll also need some milk (preferably fresh), what milk you use is up to you, full fat, skimmed, cow's milk, goat's milk, whatever takes your fancy.

Fill your thermos with milk, and pour into a saucepan (if you're doing this in the microwave, pour into a suitable container), and bring to the boil (making sure it doesn't boil over). this will kill off any beasties that might spoil the milk. remove from the heat and allow to cool to 43-50°C (110-122°F). I use my old sugar thermometer, but any thermometer will do. If you don't have a thermometer, stick a clean finger in the milk, it should feel slightly hotter than is comfortable, but won't burn you. Add 1tbs of live yoghurt to the hot milk & stir or whisk in. Pour the mixture back into the thermos (if you don't have a thermos, cover the bowl with cling film & wrap in several layers of dishcloths, and place in a warm airing cupboard), seal the top & put it somewhere a cat won't knock it over for 10-12 hours (I usually make it in the evening, so it's ready in the morning). After the wait, you should have yoghurt! Woo!
You can pour it into a container & bung it in the fridge (hot yoghurt is a bit unpleasant), or you can make some strained (Greek) yoghurt, or yoghurt cheese. To strain your yoghurt, place a colander over a bowl & line with some muslin. Pour the yoghurt into the muslin & leave for 2 hours. If you leave the yoghurt straining for a couple more hours, you'll get yoghurt cheese. Add a pich of salt, a dash of pepper and maybe a few chopped herbs & you'll have a soft, creamy cheese. Yum.

*Oh great tentacled cephalopody beastie, please protect these little green leafy things from mine enemy, the vile gastropod, and smite its squishy body with your many tentacles, so that I may one day know the terror and joy of a courgette glut.

How To Knit A Long Distance Hug...

... Or a shawl, as it's otherwise known.

My friend Cynthia has been having a rough 2009. Ordinarily, that would mean getting on a bus with the biggest chocolate cake Sheffield has to offer and Being There. Unfortunately she lives a bajillion miles away (which wouldn't stop me, being an I-would-walk-500-miles kind of girl*), and there's the small matter of the Atlantic too. So since I can't get to her to give her hugs & chocolate cake she needs, I needed to make something to do the job for me. After a brief dalliance with the idea of a crocheted 10ft tall Golem (with Emet embroidered in shiny silver thread on its forehead), which was abandoned** in favour of making a shawl.

Shawls are an excellent hug substitute, quick to knit or crochet and can be as complicated or as simple as you like. This is my first shawl, so went for the simplest pattern imaginable, a basic triangular shaped shawl. So what you need to do is go out and find yourself some nice wool. And I mean the fluffiest, cuddliest, snuggliest yarn out there. You can go for something pretty and delicate, something big & chunky, wispy mohair knitted on oversized needles to make something lacy-ish, eyelash yarn to make something big & fuzzy, like if a cavegirl went to a '60's disco. I used Wilkinsons Soft'n'Fluffy fancy yarn in purple, which is more exciting than it sounds, see!

This shawl took 6 50g balls of yarn, though you could use a couple more, or one or two less, depending on how big a shawl you're after. I wanted a BIG shawl
So now you have your yarn, you'll need the appropriate sized needles. Most balls of yarn will tell you the recommended needle size (I used a pair of 8mm needles). Also, you don't need to knit a gauge for this. Yay.
Cast on 3 stitches. When you start the next row, increase 1 stitch. There are lots of different ways to increase stitches, use whatever you're most comfortable with (there's some clear diagrams & information on increases and lots of other knitting info here).
And that's pretty much it! Just knit to the end of the row, turn & increase the first stitch, and knit to the end of the row. So your first knitted row will have 4 stitches, the next will have 5, the next 6 & so on. Just knit & knit & knit until you think it's big enough. Then cast off, weave in the loose threads, stick in an envelope with some chocolate & put in the mail to anyone you love who is is far away but in need of a hug!


*Damn. Now that song is never getting out of my head.

Ba-da-la-da

**Partly because, even if I used fluffy purple wool, a gigantic formerly-fluffy-but-soggy-from-the-swim HugMonster may not be all that comforting. More terrifying really. Also, I'm really slow at crochet.