Monthly Archives: July 2015

The morning after

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We had a good night in the kitchen, though we did need to enlist the help of an electric fan. I had the fan, the participants had plastic aprons and a wood-fired oven – that really tested their capacity to stay cool under pressure.

In a way it was fortunate that we’d decided to light the fire by committee. I asked the farmer if we could have it lit and he passed the message to Tim. The farmer thought 4 pm was soon enough to light it and Tim was a bit on the cheese-paring side with the wood. All in all, we didn’t end up with the roaring furnace that I would have done, but I suppose we could say they were being careful with the Earth’s resources.

You could also say they were being tight, but as I use TESCO’s cheapest flour and cheapest tomato sauce I’m not one to talk. I’m not known as the Prince of Parsimony for nothing. (OK, I admit I just made that up).

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You test the temperature of a pizza oven by bravely thrusting your arm into it. If the hair on your arm instantly burns off, the temperature is right. Of course, you can only do that around twice a month. Ideally I would have had a variety of dough and casseroles available to cook as it went down in temperature.

If it doesn’t burn off you aren’t up to temperature. I still have two hairy arms. However, it’s a challenge rather than a disaster so you just have to be patient.

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Fortunately everybody was patient and good-natured, but it did take over an hour to cook all the pizzas. It isn’t the fastest process in the world, even using baking paper, but it should have been quicker than that. If we’d used an electric oven the convenience of the eating experience would probably have been improved, even if we may not have laughed so much. We ended up using the electric ovens for the last few anyway. Funny how we’re retro about food, with wood-fired ovens and old methods, but I don’t see anyone sitting on the side of the river bashing their washing with stones.

Just a thought…

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Pizza? What, again?

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We have 16 people coming to make pizza tonight, using the outside oven. Personally I can’t understand the need to regress by a century and feed pizza into a space full of ash and flame when we have perfectly good clean controllable electric ovens. Tonight I could be sticking 16 pizzas in and taking 16 pizzas out fifteen minutes later. Instead I’m going to spend the afternoon getting things up to temperature so that I can eventually feed a procession of individual pizzas into the baking equivalent of hell.

On the plus side, they want foraged salad, and I have just found a new stash of fat hen so I’m as happy as a pig in salad.

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Fat hen

I just need to make some dressing with chive flower vinegar and the job’s a good ‘un.

In the gardens we’ve been interspersing light gardening with sitting under the cafe awning and drinking water from the fridge. One of the lads on the farm is currently off work after becoming dehydrated on Monday, so you can’t be careful. Despite that I will be ribbing him at great length as it’s a stupid thing to do and because we needed him here with a school party. Self-inflicted – no sympathy.

The outside temperature spiked at 35 degrees C for a few minutes, though by the time I’d collected my camera and taken a couple of outdoor shots it was back to 34, which is still pretty hot by my standards. Even inside it’s holding 31.

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In the garden

We’ll be holding a birthday party for the farmer in a minute, though he’s late, as usual. Apart from the fact he’d be late for his own funeral, he fails to grasp that if you tell our group you’ll be here for 2.30, they start getting agitated at 2.31. Looks like we’ll have to make a few excuses.

 

Now I’m merely simmering…

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OK, no more ranting, I’ve been comprehensively lectured on being nice by my wife, I’ve filled up on tea and I’ve just bought the bacon for my breakfast sandwiches so I’m in a mellow place. I’m far from booking my place at the Pollyanna School of Business Management but I can now type without shouting at the screen.

It’s also, accidentally, well over a day since my last post, which is good for calming down.

We had 62 kids making pizza yesterday (amongst other things), which isn’t easy. It called on all my depths of calmness, particularly as the final group seemed to contain the most irritating children of the day. At that point you have to remember that they are only young, and that to say what you really want to say to them would probably result in another complaint from the parents…

After we waved them off and had a welcome cup of tea I reflected on a day spent standing uncomfortably close to four fan ovens blasting out 200 degrees C. Maybe I should have kept my thoughts to myself and not told my wife and another colleague that their day spent out in the open air prodding bees and flowers was easy compared to my day with washing up and timings and an edible end result to produce. At least the resulting atmosphere allows me to use the welcome word “frosty”.

Then the explosions occurred.

The first one was quite small, more of a bang, and the electricity went off.

The electricity returned and we were just saying “I wonder what…” when the big one happened. My wife nearly fell off her chair and the poultry started making a commotion. It occurs to me that I’ve lived all these years and I don’t actually know the word for the noise a flock of agitated chickens makes. Then again, there are lots of words I don’t know, though I can’t tell you how many, as I don’t know them.

Outside on the lane the box on one of the poles was producing sparks like a Roman candle.

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Generator and jump leads – high tech!

And that was why I had no electricity to blog until I got home. When I did get home I had to go shopping for the Wednesday evening visitors, a process made more complex by the failure of the freezers in my local supermarket. Then I had to eat ice cream. It was only at that point that I was able to power up the netbook before falling asleep in my chair.

So that is why the blog is late and I have calmed down since that last one.