The darkest time of the year (and a fireplace)

Take several months of financial stress, add seasonal depression, responsibility for a big, stressful event, a period of intense uncertainty (which isn't resolved yet, so I can't tell you about it) and on top of all that, a dead cat... well, it hasn't been the easiest autumn. There are good days and bad days.

On the good days, I've been working on the fireplace surround. This has been a ragged hole in the wall since I attacked it four years ago.

I've had some ideas about what to do here, but most of my ideas involved spending money, which we'd generally rather avoid, and is currently not an option for merely decorative projects. The part I was most certain of was the brick arch. It would be nice to get hold of some attractive bricks, but perhaps not entirely necessary. I started by searching the property for all the old bricks I could find. One was on the driveway, having been used as an alternative handbrake. Several were serving as a stand for the barbecue. Some were just lying around. Those you see in the photo above were the least scruffy/most similar to each other that I could find.

The next step was to clean the bricks as best I could without buying chemical cleaners (to be avoided for several reasons). Online advice suggested that dishwashing liquid might be worth a try, so I tried it, applied using brushes with both nylon and steel bristles. It didn't make much difference. My next attempt involved play dough. I made up a salt dough and pressed it onto the ends of the bricks, then baked them in a low oven until it was hard. The next day, I soaked it off, then scrubbed with dishwashing liquid again. I can't be entirely sure, but I think that quite a lot more soot came off the second time. Whether the play dough had anything to do with this, I have no idea.

Having selected my bricks, I still didn't know what to do with the edges of the fireplace. I'd quite like to leave the bricks bare, but as you can see, the brickwork is far from tidy. My cousin suggested brick slips - bricks made in thin tile shapes, including corner pieces, sold for applications just like this. It was a good suggestion, but.... money. Then a visiting friend suggested a wood surround. This is much more realistic as we have lots of old floorboards. I was sure I could find a couple of pieces that would suit. I even considered carving some decoration into them, but that would be quite a big project, not to be attempted before Christmas. In the meantime, I considered how to fix up a shelf above the fireplace.

I found the old shelf that had been there before, somewhat weathered now, but not necessarily any the worse for that. I was holding this up in position (it's just a little longer than the width of the arch - the ideal size), wondering what kind of brackets would be suitable, when Ian walked by and said, Ah, a mantlepiece! This comment set off a new train of thought. I'd been referring to the horizontal pieces of wood in my mind as a shelf, and shelves are typically supported by brackets. Mantlepieces, on the other hand, are often part of a fire surround, with supports that sometimes go right down to the floor. I wondered whether we might have any pieces of wood that I could use like that? Initially I was thinking of new cut timber that I might carve, but before long I lighted on the idea of using the leylandii trunks I got from cutting down the hedge. Quite a few of these have been turned into firewood, and some still have branches attached, but there were three trimmed and unburned. I selected the two longest and cut the ends straight across. Here they are in position, under the mantlepiece:

Leylandii trunks holding up mantlepiece and hiding scruffy brickwork

I'm quite pleased with this. They're currently held in place with bits of string - I'll fix them properly after Christmas. No, really, I will!

The bad days come with the rain. Not just the rain, but closed-in, up-in-the-clouds weather that blocks out light and warmth and joy for days on end. The air and the ground get saturated with water so that nothing's ever quite dry, and we get puddles in the store room.

Those orange dots at the top of the picture are squash. I'm having to keep a close eye on them so as to eat them up quickly as they start going mouldy.

The other day, some friends and I discussed what the point of Christmas is. We came up with quite a lot of points, and agreed that you can take your pick. My focus is to fend off the gloom and darkness of this time of year, and celebrate the return of the light. When my mood lifts sufficiently to get anything done, I'm focusing on Christmas. Today, I am mostly making sweets and - the reason I wanted the mantlepiece up before Christmas - I have decorations up.

Mouse ears and chocolate pigs

Evergreens and sparkly things around the fireplace

Tonight is both the solstice and the new moon, so it truly is the longest, darkest night of the year. After this, the light returns. Yuletide greetings to one and all!

Goodbye, Pebble

We went to visit Ian's parents in Devon last week, returning on Friday evening. Pebble greeted us at the door, had some dinner, then raced around like a mad thing for a while before settling on my lap. A little later, I got up to get our dinner and not long after that she started complaining. At first we thought it was just because we'd switched the heat off on her bed (seed propagator at other times of year) but it soon became obvious that she was in pain. We called the vet, monitored the situation for an hour or so, then decided she really did need medical attention urgently so arranged to meet a vet at the surgery. He couldn't give us a definite diagnosis until morning, but said that the symptoms suggested rat poison. We left her with him to do what he could for her, but by morning she was dead.

Today, we buried her in the garden, where I'm planning to plant an elder tree. She did love elderflowers.

Here are some memories of a beloved cat.

Ugh

The thing I hate most about depression - apart from the sluggishness and not caring about anything - is that it makes me stupid. I can't concentrate, I get (even more) absent minded, I forget things. Then stuff like this happens:

Glass cover removed from solar panel when it was sunny, forgotten about, then blown over when it was windy.

Then I hate myself for being so stupid, and I just want to cry.

Sauerkraut and other fermented things

This may make me sound a little odd, but I really like cabbage. Not when it's been boiled too long and served plain, a la school dinners, but steamed until just tender and served with a little acid of some kind - lemon juice, vinegar, apple sauce, and chutney are all good - it makes an excellent side vegetable. My favourite kind of cabbage is red, with the tightly-formed heads. I'm not sure whether it really tastes any different from white or green, but it's so pretty when it's cut.

Sliced red cabbage

It's hardly surprising that I should like sauerkraut, since this is essentially cabbage in acid, specifically lactic acid. Even better, from the point of view of making it, is that I don't even have to buy the acid myself, since, with a little encouragement, bacteria will make it for me. The process goes like this: I add a layer of finely sliced cabbage to a jar, sprinkle on a little salt, press down with a pestle, and repeat until the jar is full. There are no precise measurements involved, or indeed any measurements at all.

To reduce the chance of mould growing on the top, I weigh down the cabbage with (washed and boiled) beach pebbles, which I sprinkle with more salt then top up with water before closing with an air locked lid. This might sound like overkill, but I get a lot of mould growth. It's all very well saying, Just scrape off the mould and discard the top layer, but if you ferment in relatively small jars, as I do, that top layer can be quite a high proportion of the total.

Stones and extra salt

The other appeal of red cabbage is that the pigment is an indicator, so it displays the acidity. Here are two jars, one freshly filled, one after a couple of weeks of fermentation:

Sauerkraut, before and after. Such pretty colours!

As for the other fermented things, I've come to the conclusion that lactofermentation is not the best treatment for everything. It works well for cabbage, which is why this is a classic, and for unripe sloes, which is totally obscure (I haven't heard of anyone else trying it) but make a good alternative to olives. The important thing to bear in mind is that the fermentation process alters flavours in other ways than just adding acid. To my surprise, it completely destroyed the aniseed flavour of Alexanders. Wild garlic leaves work well, but the result is not a substitute for garlic, it's an entirely new flavour. Samphire kind-of worked, but the result was disappointing. I'll stick to vinegar for preserving this in future. Courgettes were successful, but I found that I don't really want to eat pickled courgette that often. Do you ferment things? Have you come across anything that works really well?

Overall, I've found that lactofermentation is a useful preservation method for some things, but it's not universal in its application. I still think it's magic, though.

It's that time of year again

With the rapidly shortening days around the equinox, my SAD hit me again. At least this year I noticed it quickly, instead of spending a month wondering what was wrong with me. On top of this, for the last week or so the weather has been miserable. The clouds surround us, blocking out the sunlight and filling the air with moisture. Everything is dark, cold and damp. This doesn't help. So, um, sorry for the recent lack of blog posts.

It hasn't all been bad. This morning we had a few hours of sunlight, which lifted my mood enough to put these together:

Flyers for our next (and last) gig

On Friday a friend of mine posted some pictures of mushrooms on facebook, wondering what they were, and sent me a private message with their location, in case I was interested. I couldn't be sure from the photos, but they did look like ceps, so I went to see, and...

Cep, with cat for scale

... they're huge! That's not a trick with perspective, that mushroom really was that big. Unfortunately, it was also rather full of maggots, but they weren't all. My drying rack is now full of sliced mushroom - if only the humidity was a little less than 100%

I made some progress with the solar panels, then stopped when it got difficult. I'll tell you about that when I get back to it. Right now, the need to creosote woodwork does not sit well with the presence of mushrooms trying to dry in the same space.

I have harvested the sugar beet - a smallish barrow load (I haven't weighed them yet). This doesn't feel terribly positive right now, because the next task is to clean them.

Filthy sugar beet. They're not all this big.

One positive side of all this damp weather is that when the clouds do break, we often get very nice rainbows.

Mushroom paté

Having dried some mushrooms to a crisp for storage...

Jars of dried mushrooms. Ian says the chanterelles look like small, dried octopi

... I got to wondering what I might do with them in this state, apart from rehydrating and adding to stews and suchlike. As a first step, I tried powdering them, potentially for using as stock. It turns out that a pestle and mortar makes short work of this job. I haven't yet tried it, but I imagine I could make a pretty good smooth mushroom sauce from this powder.

Today, I had another idea. I had an open tub of mascarpone cheese in the fridge, which I'm quite partial to at the best of times. I took a large dollop of that and mixed it with my powdered mushrooms - about half and half cep and chanterelle - and, um, that was it. It took quite a bit of mixing, and the result is a fairly firm paté, as the dried mushrooms absorb moisture from the cheese.

Mushroom paté

Wow, this is sublime! Of course, the crucial part is finding the right mushrooms in the first place (and note that this is only suitable for mushrooms that can be eaten raw), but once they've got as far as the storage jar, this is a very easy treat. I'm counting this one as a success.

Mouli review

I spend quite a lot of my time pushing stewed fruit through a sieve, especially at this time of year, when there's so much fruit in the hedgerows. It's very hard work and I've broken several sieves in the process, so as the most recent victim parted company from its handle, I wondered whether it might be time to invest in something that's actually designed for the job of pureeing fruit whilst leaving skin and stones behind.

Discussion on the selfsufficientish forum had alerted me to two possible options, a mouli and a passata maker, originating in France and Italy respectively, the latter being designed for processing tomatoes. I sought advice on which would be best, and found that our local cookshop had a reasonably priced mouli for sale. I discussed it with the shopkeeper, and neither of us thought the screen fine enough to sieve out blackberry pips, so I went back to the forum to ask and, reassured, returned and bought the mouli. I do love that shop - I wish I could afford to buy kitchen equipment for often, but perhaps it's just as well I can't, for the sake of my cupboard space.

Anyway, here's the new gadget:

Mouli, in pieces

It comes apart into three pieces, or five if you count the spare screens with different sized holes. There's a bowl part into which the to-be-pureed food goes. In the bottom of this is a disk/screen with holes in, and this is held in place by a third piece, which fits into the bowl and includes a spring to hold the screen down, a blade (not sharp) to push the food against the screen, and a handle to operate it. This might be clearer if you see it in action:

Stewed damsons in the mouli. I chose the medium screen for this.

One feature of this particular mouli is that it doesn't have legs on the bottom for standing it over a bowl, just hooks at the top. This means that if fitted over a bowl, there isn't much room for the puree to come out at the bottom. Luckily, it fits very nicely over a ten litre bucket, though it is a little difficult to find a comfortable working height.

My first attempt was stewed damsons, as shown in the picture above. The stones are relatively large, which I find difficult to deal with in a sieve. Recipes often advise taking the stones out before pushing it through a sieve, but that takes ages. So how did the mouli handle it? Brilliantly! This is definitely the right tool for the job. It's still a manual tool, so it's not effortless, but it's a lot easier than the sieve, and it does the job very effectively. I found that the handle needs turning in both directions; clockwise to push the mush against the screen, then anticlockwise to lift it away again. It's also necessary to use a spoon to push stuff down to the bottom, especially as it gets drier.

My next attempt was mashed potato, as I've heard people say how much nicer it is made with a mouli (I'm skeptical). Optimistically, I wondered whether I might be able to boil small potatoes with their skins on then have the mouli extract the skins as it mashes them. No, it doesn't. Oh well, it was worth a try. I also found that, for a meal-sized quantity, transferring the potato to a metal mouli, and then into another container, cooled it a lot. On the other hand, if you have a quantity of blighted potatoes that you want to mash in large quantities to freeze, it's just the thing.

Mouli'd potatoes, through the largest screen

For the third test, another batch of hedgerow fruit for fruit leather, this time crab apple and blackberry. Can a mouli really sieve out blackberry pips, even using the finest screen?

Fruit leather, drying on the rack in the conservatory

Yes. Yes, it can. At least, I haven't found a pip in the pulp I've sampled so far.

EDIT: Now the leather is dry, it's clear that a few pips got through, but I still think it's not bad.

A few blackberry pips got through

The only problem I've come up against is that this gadget processes such large quantities (the one I bought is big; smaller ones are available) that I don't have enough baking sheets to spread the pulp out on.

As you can probably tell, I'm very pleased with my new gadget. It takes more washing up than a sieve, but with just three parts it's not too bad, and it more than makes up for it in labour saved. It might even make it worthwhile to pick haws, as I'm curious to try hawthorn ketchup.

Spud harvest

At some point when I was looking the other way, my potatoes got blight.

The dead stems of the King Edwards are there, in amongst the weeds, if you look closely enough

We had a spell of cold, wet weather, which probably encouraged it, and I don't suppose those weeds helped, either.

Still, all is not lost. I dug up three bucket-fulls of spuds. I haven't weighed them all yet to see how this compares with previous years, but I think it's quite a bit down. Still, it's a lot to process all in one go. Why bother processing? I usually just put them in sacks in the store room. You see, the thing with blight is that if it's infected the tubers - and with that rain it's sure to have washed onto them - they rot in storage. I found a few rotten tubers in the ground, but most were fine. The only sign of blight was tiny brown spots, in some cases only visible when I peeled the potatoes. They're perfectly good for eating now, just not for storing.

You can't see the blight, but I know it's in there

If I want these to last, I need to do something with them. I have plenty of freezer space, so that's the obvious option, but raw potatoes don't freeze well. That it, they freeze just fine, but then go black and slimy when you thaw them, which is less than appetizing. They need to be at least par-boiled if they're to be frozen and thawed to an edible state. I thought I'd go a little further. If I'm bothering to wash, peel, chop and par-boil three buckets of spuds, I could put in just a little more effort so that I have something ready to put straight in the oven (or possibly microwave) when it comes out of the freezer.

We usually eat potatoes in three forms: Mashed, roasted, or chips (fries). I've been making frozen chips for several years, having figured out how to do it in response to a previous blight incident. I hear that mashed potatoes freeze well, so I boiled them up in large batches and deployed a new kitchen gadget for mashing them, of which more in another post. As for roasties, well if Aunt Bessie can do it, surely I can too? I usually par-boil them then roast in oil in the oven. For freezing, I par-boiled then applied the hot oil in the frying pan.

Trial batch of to-be-frozen roast potatoes

I tested the theory with a small batch of King Edwards, which cooked from frozen in about half an hour and were pretty good - perhaps a little dry, but we usually have gravy with a roast dinner, so that's not really a problem. I'm not sure whether the Desiree will be as good - they seemed less crisp when cool, as they went into the freezer, but hopefully they'll crisp up again when cooked.

This is a work in progress. I tried bracing myself to do the whole lot at once, but it seems that I don't have sufficient stamina for the job. With all that hot oil and fat, it takes a lot of concentration. This is tiring! Also, with the harvest moon this week, I've been harvesting other veg too. The stock of frozen peas and green beans is increasing, and I cut my first ever cob of sweetcorn.

First sweetcorn

Hm, not quite what I'd hoped for, but better than it might have been, and it was tasty.

Wine yeast experiment

On the 'ish forum, we were discussing different kinds of yeast that can be used in brewing. Last year I used lager yeast (from a beer kit) throughout the year, keeping a bit from the bottom of the bucket after each brew and using it to start the next one. This year, not having a beer kit to hand, I looked at sachets of brewing yeast, decided that a pound for a little sachet of yeast was a bit excessive, and bought bread yeast instead, which is much cheaper. I think at least one person in that forum conversation was a bit horrified by my inappropriate yeast!

So far, I've had excellent heather ale and elderflower champagne from that yeast, but I none of the wine is ready yet, so I don't know how that will turn out. Since wine yeast is bred to tolerate higher alcohol concentrations, the bread yeast is likely to give up the ghost at about 12% abv, possibly before all the sugar's fermented. This is fine, as I'm not aiming for strong wine, but there is some concern that as it struggles in the toxic, alcoholic environment, it might produce off flavours.

In the interests of science, and taking advantage of the abundance of blackberries, I decided to make a second batch of blackberry wine, this time investing in a sachet of wine yeast. For my record, here are the details:-

• Two 2 gallon batches, each made with 8 lb blackberries and 2 kg sugar.
• The first batch uses bread yeast, previously used for mugwort ale and washed in sugar and water in between. The second batch uses half a 5g sachet of Young's red wine yeast.
• For the first batch, berries were picked on Sun 17th and Mon 18th Aug (4 lb each day); fermentation of 1 gallon started on Sun.
• For the second batch, berries were all picked on Tue 19th Aug and fermentation started that day.
• The first batch went into demijohns on Sat 23rd Aug and the second batch on Mon 25th Aug (late in both cases)

I now have four demijohns of blackberry wine bubbling away.

Blackberry wine, or at least potential blackberry wine

By chance, I used two different types of airlock for the two batches, so I can use that to identify them. The ones on the left, with the old, one piece airlocks, are the first batch, with bread yeast. The ones on the right, with the new, two piece airlocks, have wine yeast. I'd only just filled the second batch, so you wouldn't expect it to be frothy yet, but in the buckets, it did seem that the bread yeast was a lot more lively. I suppose it's bred to produce bubbles, so maybe that's not terribly surprising.

These will stay in the (relatively) warm kitchen for a few days before I take them down to the cooler store room. I might even take the first batch down first, to keep everything as similar as possible. Then we'll just have to wait and see what happens. I will conduct blind taste tests, and I'll let you know the results in a few months.

Mushroom season

Autumn arrived here last week. One day it was warm and sunny, the next there was a distinct chill in the air. We can't complain, because we've had a glorious summer, but it's a bit early, and it was very sudden.

I've always loved autumn, and now I have another reason to love it: Mushrooms! There's a field near our house where the occasional field mushroom can be found. Coming home with a couple of these last week, I got chatting to a neighbour, who told me where he used to pick field mushrooms in great quantities, about thirty years ago. A few days later, I set off in search and sure enough, found field mushrooms. Not vast quantities, but a reasonable haul. I ate quite a few fresh and dried the rest.

Field mushrooms on the drying rack.

They were drying pretty well on the rack in the conservatory, but then the weather changed. Surrounded by humid air, the dry mushrooms started absorbing moisture again. Luckily, this only lasted a couple of days before the sun came out again, but I didn't want to risk that happening again. Once they were nearly dry, I brought them in and finished them off in a cool oven, which only took a few minutes.

Look what I found the other day:

Cep

Isn't it a beauty? Over a couple of days I found four of these. One went on pizza (not the best way to appreciate its delicate flavour), two went into mushroom tarts that I took to a party, and one is drying.

This morning I went out again, and found all of these:

Basket of wild mushrooms

That's two more ceps, two greencracked brittlegills, two redcracked boletes, and three blushers. Not bad for twenty minutes' foraging. The ceps have joined the other one on the drying rack, and the rest I chopped and cooked with a few lentils, spring onions (I don't have any of the other kind at the moment), celery and a bay leaf. This should make a good mixture for padding out meat in stews or pie fillings. Of course, it would make a pretty good veggie stew in its own right, but my husband is not a veggie. Don't tell him I'm feeding him mushrooms, will you?