Monthly Archives: October 2016

General of the Gingerbread Army

Goose Fair arrived in the first week of October, and started a train of thought that led to gingerbread.  From Goose Fair, through Halloween, Bonfire Night and until Christmas we will have gingerbread in a variety of forms. It started off with a look at traditional Grantham Gingerbreads. I’ve never done too well with biscuits that spread out, so I decided to look for another recipe and go back to that one.

It’s still in note form at the moment, but I will get round to writing it down properly soon.

These are more like a ginger biscuit when they are done, being crisp all the way through. My research (which meant eating several a day for three days) shows that they keep well. The residents of the Care Home we visited yesterday, and the Men in Sheds today all confirmed that they were good biscuits and had kept well. As these are people with years of experience in biscuit eating I think we will class this recipe as a success.

We also did apple juice and hoopla at the care Home, and talked of other fairs apart from Goose Fair (it turns out that most of the ladies don’t come from round here so we ended up talking of Shaftesbury, Hull, King’s Lynn and  Barnet). All in all it was an animated session even before Julia unpacked her mobile hoopla kit. Once the lure of prizes set its hook even the card school in the corner stopped to throw a hoop or two.

The only problem was that there were a lot of biscuits – forty medium size, forty small, six round and one odd shape. I tested them until I couldn’t test another one and when I went to bed I could still see them, row after row of gingerbread men…

 

 

Piccalilli, preserves and plum jam

Phew, just managed the three P’s. Was just bemoaning the fact that we hadn’t done any pickles when I realised we did have preserves. I say “we” but I gave it a wide berth and spent most of my day pressing apples and tarting up a grant application (yes, the same one we’ve been doing for the last two months – it just came back with lots of nit-picking queries and suggestions). If you want the money, you do the work.

Anyway, it was preferable to working in a kitchen with two women in full preserving mode. Jam making does not bring out the best in my beloved, and as she was trying a new recipe I thought it was a good idea to stay out of the way.

The picture shows Julia and Angela with an array of jars – piccalilli, plum jam, apple and mint jelly, apple chutney and blackberry jam. There are also jelly bags of hedgerow fruits (blackberry, elderberry, crab apple and hawthorn) draining out of shot. They, I’m told, are my project. We could have used sloes and rose hips too but ran out of time to pick more.

We don’t use rowan, despite having them in good numbers, because they are rather sharp. Sometimes we make rowan jelly (a traditional tracklement to accompany game) but there isn’t a great demand for it so we don’t bother these days. Rowan berries host the largest number of insects I’ve ever seen in hedgerow fruit – mainly earwigs and long-legged spiders.

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Angela and Julia with a selection of produce

Just looked up tracklement, as it’s an unusual word and I wanted to be certain I was using it correctly, and find that it’s a word only from the 1950s, albeit based on older words. I first came across it in the 1970s in a translation of Flaubert’s “Saint Julian the Hospitalier”.

It’s strange how things can trigger memories. I’ve seen the word tracklement since then, but I don’t think I’ve ever used it. The first time I do, over 40 years since I learned it, I’m transported back to a story I haven’t thought of in all that time.

The magic of the internet is such that I was able to put Flaubert, mediaeval and hunting into Google and it brought the correct story up.

I’ve also been able to order a copy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apple Juice Time

The group came and the group went. They fed the chickens and  said goodbye to the ones that are going to market tomorrow. They did some tree measuring for the Woodland Trust monitoring project and some tidying too, but I hardly noticed them because I was juicing apples.

It can be a drawn out job at the best of times, but when the people who put it away last year put it away (a) dirty and (b) at random it can be a trial. I still haven’t found the siphon tube or the filter for the funnel, so we improvised. We used a kitchen sieve for a filter and when we had to transfer the contents of one barrel to another we used that old male stand-by known as brute force and ignorance. It worked.

We also suffered delays whilst I found the powdered Vitamin C – if you don’t add it you end up with brown juice. It’s still good, and it’s all natural but the oxidation makes it look unattractive. Three teaspoons in thirty litres of juice (or 52 pints if you still use them) reverses the oxidation and turns it back to a nice golden colour

We now have 40 bottles of juice and another barrel that needs bottling tomorrow.

Things would have gone better if I’d remembered how to use the steriliser, but the temperature control dial is a bit misleading – an embossed black mark on a black dial, which isn’t great for a short-sighted man in a dimly lit shed. Yes, I used the wrong end of the pointer and set the temperature far too low. By the time we’d found that out we had to wait an extra half hour to sterilise the juice in the bottle.

Of course, you can get by without sterilising the juice, as long as you either freeze it or drink it within 3-5 days. After that the natural yeast on the apples builds up enough gas to blow tops off and cause all sorts of problems. A few years ago we had a customer who had his juice put into a 10 litre bags and then went on holiday. I didn’t do the sterilising in those days. The juice fermented, blew the bag up until it started to leak and came back to find his kitchen floor covered with juice and a fine selection of insect life.

That’s why I got the sterilising job.

Towards the end we had bottle cap roulette, which is a game played with a variety of hot recycled bottles containing hot juice. Not boiling, but 80 degrees C isn’t very comfortable. The game consists of heating up the bottles and juice then finding a cap that fits, lifting the bottle out, tightening the top and laying it on its side.

It’s always a relief when you finish that bit with no spills, burns or seepage.

Oh yes, I love the apple harvest. 😉

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The one on the left has had Vitamin C added

 

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Bottles in steriliser – steaming

 

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Ready to drink!

If…

Easy day today, just 12 kids. I was able to set the tables up in the kitchen so that all the mess fell on the tiled section of the floor, though to be fair they didn’t make a lot of mess. Bearing in mind that this was a mixed-age group and some of them could barely reach the mixing bowls, this was a tribute the their careful working practices.

We made scones using my new recipe, though it’s not actually new, and it isn’t mine. It is actually this tried and trusted recipe with a few alterations.

I’ve taken  the cheese and seeds out of the Tear and Share Seeded Cheese scone, and I don’t batch it, so there’s no tearing and sharing. I did try it once but it just fell apart – I think you need the cheese for to to stay together. I’ve added a level tablespoon of sugar and 50 g of dried fruit into the mix. I tried it with an extra spoon of baking powder and it seemed to work well so that’s now a fixture.

We also examined the inside of an egg and made Leek and Potato soup in the soup maker. Where the scones went well, the soup provided an antidote to my complacency. It emerged from the soup maker glutinous, granular and tasting of uncooked potato. Despite more boiling, added seasoning and use of a hand blender I was unable to bring it to a satisfactory state. I still handed it out but there was a lot left by the end of lunch. To be fair, there had also been a lot left at the end of lunch on Tuesday, when it was quite a good soup.

I’m going to attempt to learn from experience.

So there we are, a bit of a Kipling sort of day, as in meeting with triumph and disaster, and treating both imposters just the same.

 

Worms, Cookery and Bread

For tea on Wednesday we had chicken, mushroom and bacon pie with tarragon. Yes, we’re in “tea” territory here, and even if we weren’t I spent my early years in Lancashire, so it will be “tea” wherever I go. On the side we had baked potato and sauteed kale. (It’s stir fried really but people always seem to call it sauteed). Of course, those people know how to access the French accents on their keyboard; I don’t and on my screen the word is underlined in red. We had a proper meal because we left work as early as we could and got home in time to do some proper cooking.

That’s what we’ve been missing recently, time.

We did a bit of easy cooking with the group -jam tarts using ready-made pastry and the jam we made on Tuesday from the blackberries we picked on  Monday. It’s known as Any Berry Jam. I would include a link, but I can’t find it. I’ll try later. There was very little washing up and we had very little inclination to stay longer, so we went home, where I cooked again.

Joy.

Tonight, we will be having soup and a sandwich because we tested sausage rolls for the food blog. I am putting weight on in my capacity of pie tester.

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Quick blackberry jam tarts

It was a very pleasant day, and there were several butterflies on the wing as I drove down the lane. I snapped the two Red Admirals just behind the centre and the very tatty white on the verbena is by the polytunnel.

The marigolds are having one last hurrah, whilst the Cape Gooseberries (or physalis, ground cherries or Inca berries if you prefer) are still struggling to ripen. The ones that were left from the vicious attack last year are a little behind the ones we grew from seed.

The last wheatsheaf loaf broke. This year they all seem to have deformed as they dried out and have actually broken instead of cracking as they normally do. I think it may be because I should let the dough rest more before use.

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Sad fate for Wheatsheaf Loaf

The wormery is going well, though we will probably release them after tomorrow’s session. They have produced tunnels, they have dragged bits of grass down and they have even moved a paper triangle, though not as impressively as in Darwin’s original experiment. In their defence, my worms are smaller. 😉

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Wormery, with paper triangle showing

 

 

School visit

It was an intensive session today – the underground world, cheese scones, soup (using potatoes from the school garden), apple pressing and microwave jam making.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so help yourself to a few thousand. 😉

Yes, it’s a lazy blog today…

The worms

The wormery is working. It’s a bit messy (that word again!) but it’s showing what we want it to do. Here are some pictures showing how to layer it up with soil and sand. After that you put worms in and sprinkle some dead leaves and grass on top. Slip the outer case on and let them get on with it.

The final picture shows the vertical worm tracks and if you look closely you can see some of the grass pieces have been carried down into the “earth”.

Darwin was something of a worm expert, and his book  The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations of their Habits is notable for selling better than On the Origin of Species when first published.  I bought a reprint out of curiosity and found it to be more interesting than the title suggests.

One day I must try the paper triangle experiment he suggests.

 

While I remember…

My father-in-law, who reinvented himself as a humorous poet after 25 years in the Royal Navy and many more working as a physio in the NHS, wrote a poem about memory loss and senior moments. I wish I could remember it…

I forgot to mention in my last post that I scored another pointless answer whilst watching “Pointless” on Saturday. The subject was “Wimbledon” and the answer was Minuetto Allegretto.

UK readers of a certain age are now  humming a variety of Wombles songs. The rest of you have no need to worry – you really aren’t missing anything.

I’m not sure whether to be pleased at getting a pointless answer or ashamed of the knowledge that produced it.

I had another one last night with korfball, which I feel is slightly more respectable.

I also forgot to give you the answer to my Doctor Who question from some time ago. The question was along the lines of what have Doctor Who and Wakefield Trinity got in common (apart from the fact that they both used to be better when I was younger).

The answer is contained in the film This Sporting Life, where William Hartnell first came to the attention of Verity Lambert. When she was casting for Doctor Who, she remembered him. Last time I was there his picture was still in one of the film stills on the stairway in the main stand.

The photograph shows one of the cockerels in the yard. Most of the poultry is being rounded up and sent to market next Monday. They cost money to feed and they make the place look untidy. Those, according to the way the place is now being run, are undesirable qualities.

Don’t get me started on this subject.

A day of strange events

It’s been a funny old day.

It started normally, and as I parked to collect a prescription, although I did notice a police car parked by the side of the road. That’s slightly unusual.

I collected the prescription and drew cash from the nearby cash machine, which gave me four £5 notes with my cash. They don’t usually dispense fives, but these are the new plastic ones and I imagine they are trying to get them into circulation quickly.

Then I crossed the road to the jeweller’s to see them about some earrings for Julia, to find them giving statements to the police after fighting off an attempted hold up.

After buying the earrings I drove past a public toilet that appears to have been converted to a coffee shop (though it was closed). The link shows the sale was over a year ago, but I’m sure it was still up for sale last month. Maybe it was a matter of convenience, though there was reportedly no chain. I hope the new buyer is flushed with success.

Then, at the narrow entrance to the supermarket car park I had to take avoiding action as a determined elderly lady insisted on driving the wrong way and using it as an exit.

In the shop I discovered I had won the lottery last week. After buying a ticket for tonight I had sixty pence left. I’m still deciding whether to blow it on partying or invest it for my old age.

Finally arriving at work, I did some paperwork and assembled the wormery for next week (which will be described later) the day became more normal.

 

 

 

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