In a pickle

Since my early experiments with pickling samphire, I have decided that I prefer vinegar-pickled to lacto fermented for this vegetable. I tried to make vinegar for this, but it didn't go well, so I had to buy some. I looked at the expensive stuff, I looked at pickling vinegar, the nice stuff was about three times the price, so I bought the pickling vinegar.

When I got it home and opened the bottle, it was a bit rough. Oh well, you get what you pay for, I suppose. I used it for the samphire anyway, then wondered what else I might preserve, to use up all that pickling vinegar. It would have to be something with a good strong flavour, to stand up to the rather harsh vinegar.

This was in late October, around the time we might expect the first frost. Walking past my nasturtium plants, it occurred to me 1) that they would soon be reduced to slimy mush by frost, and 2) that they were covered in green seeds. I've heard of pickling nasturtium seeds before - apparently they make a good alternative to capers. Now, I don't eat a lot of capers, but the peppery flavour of nasturtiums would surely stand up well to the cheap pickling vinegar, and if I wanted to try it, I'd have to get a move on. I picked all that I could find, chucked them in a jar and poured vinegar over them.

One small jar of nasturtium seeds, pickling

Shortly after that, I saw a bag of pickling onions for sale in the supermarket for £1, so I bought them. Following Pam Corbin's suggestion, I added some sugar to the pickling vinegar for these, but otherwise didn't do much to them. So I now have pickled samphire, nasturtium seeds, and onions, and still a bit of vinegar left.

The nasturtium seeds are fantastic! I can't see the resemblance to capers, myself. Mind you, I can't think of any other way to describe the flavour, either. They retain their peppery kick, though, and I love them on pizza. The onions are... pickled onions. Pretty good ones. I like them. I still think the samphire is the best, even if it's not quite as good as it would be in better quality vinegar. On a wholemeal biscuit with a bit of mascarpone cheese, it's hard to beat.

I think this might actually have been a chestnut biscuit. Even better.

Dysgu Cymraeg

I've intended to learn Welsh since we moved here, but somehow didn't quite get round to getting started for the first few years. Then Brython, a friend of ours who Ian knows through the community bus service (he's a volunteer driver and committee member), started running a group for Welsh learners. Since he was willing to give his time, I felt it would be churlish not to go along.

I didn't know Brython very well when the group started, a couple of years ago, but he was very pleased that I'd turned up, and was keen to encourage a new Welsh learner. He expressed this by looking straight at me for a lot of the evening, whilst talking Welsh. This was quite terrifying. Other members of the group were sympathetic and said things like, Don't worry, just listen out for the odd word that you know. The trouble was, I didn't know any words.

After that evening, I had a choice: I could give up and run away, and either avoid Brython or feel awkward every time I saw him, or I could put some effort into learning a bit of Welsh before the next meeting a month later. As you may have guessed by now, I chose the latter option.

There are lots of resources available online, as well as at the local library This is great if, like me, you're too skint to pay for actual lessons. Having got over the first hurdle - living smack bang in the middle of Wales, do I go for the North or the South version? (South, I think) - I quite enjoyed the BBC's Big Welsh Challenge*. After spending quite a bit of time with this over the following month, the next time I heard Brython speak Welsh, it sounded quite different - it sounded like language.

This was an indication of quite how low my starting point had been. Unlike French or German, I'd had no prior exposure to Welsh at all, so my brain didn't interpret the sounds as language. We have specialist language-processing areas of our brains, so that language is treated differently from other sounds, and these just weren't engaging for me when I heard Welsh. No wonder I found it terrifying!

That was almost two years ago, and since then I've continued to work away at learning Welsh. It's certainly not an easy language because it's very different from English. I found a very encouraging article on Quora that included the advice:It's not difficult to learn a language, it just takes a lot of time. As to how long, he gives the estimate of 600+ hours of study to reach fluency in French.

Now, I think Welsh is rather more difficult than French, but on the other hand I'd be happy with something less than fluency, so I'll take 600 hours as a guideline figure. Suppose I were to study for 20 min a day, six days a week, for 50 weeks a year. That would be 100 hours a year, so 600 hours in six years. Twenty minutes a day feels doable, and I'd be very happy to have a reasonable grasp of the language in six years, especially bearing in mind that I took three years to even get started.

For an English speaker, Welsh looks difficult. For a start, there are all those consonants - The villages of Ysbyty Cynfyn and Cwmystwyth are both a few miles from here . Then you learn that Y and W are vowels, most of the time, and it looks a lot easier. Then you notice the vowels: They're often strung together, just one after another with nothing to break them up. Lliwiau (colours), for example, has five of them in a row. Here I think it is essential to have a Welsh speaker to learn from, then it's just a matter of getting used to how it sounds when vowels are pronounced one after the other.

The next big hurdle is mutations: The first letter of some words changes in some contexts. For example, the village I live in is called Pontarfynach, which is three words run together: Pont (bridge, same as French) ar (on) Fynach. The name of the river is Mynach (which means monk), so that M is mutated to F (which is pronounced like an English V unless there are two together) in the middle of the name. Then if I want to say that I live here, the P at the beginning mutates, too.

It's all very confusing, but I've found that if I don't expect to learn the mutations as I go, then it's not that bad. In fact, I started with just trying to note, Oh yeah, that'll be a mutation, if I spotted one. My learners' dictionary has three pages of rules on the subject - there is no way I'm ever going to learn that lot. In fact, I'm pretty sure that native Welsh speakers do not learn the rules explicitly. For this reason, I'm aiming to expose myself to as much of the language as possible, in the hope that correctly mutated words become familiar and so feel more right than incorrect words.

I'm focusing on reading, because unlike listening, I can go as slowly as I need to. This endeavour got a great boost when I discovered that the library has Roald Dahl books translated into Welsh and available in electronic format. Since we have a set of Roald Dahl books on the bookshelf, I can read the Welsh and English versions side by side.

Charlie a Ffatri Siocled
(click for a bigger image if you want to actually see the text)

This way of studying is lots of fun, and the motivation to learn (rather than just checking the English all the time) is that I can read the story much more quickly if I can understand more of the Welsh. I'm not worried about getting every word, just enough to follow the story. The goal here is exposure, remember.

In addition, I'm also listening to the radio, which is much harder to follow due to the speed. While I'm doing the dishes, it's usually Bore Cothi** that I'm listening to. Sian Cothi has such a warm smile in her voice that I feel welcome and included even if I don't understand a word. Increasingly, though, I do understand some of the words, and the regular structure of a radio show helps me, as I get to know what sort of thing is coming up next.

Sorry for rambling on about it, but I'm quite excited to be making some progress with this. Last year, while I didn't feel like doing anything much, I did feel like learning Welsh. Having been fairly terrified to start with, and now I can more-or-less follow a book written for seven year-olds. I'm still too nervous to actually say much, though, so I'm going to start a beginners' conversation class next week.

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* I've also found Memrise very useful for learning vocab. The content is provided by users, so is a little hit and miss, but the way the material is presented and tested is based on very sound psychology.

** Bore means morning, so this is a play on Coffee Morning, which would be Bore Coffi.

Bright and cold

OK, so yesterday I didn't manage to get anything posted, and it was because the post got too long and I ran out of time. If I'd just stopped and posted what I already had, it would have just been about stuff that happened two years ago and none of the more recent stuff. Ho hum.

Today, we finally have some almost-wintery weather. It's bright and sunny, and there's snow on the hills.

It wasn't quite so bright at 10:30 this morning.
I love to watch the mist rising in the valley.

As the sunlight chased across the view, I saw a bright green, sunlit field with a bright snowy hill behind it. The camera saw either one...

... or the other.

The railway dog came up to check things out. He may not have been checking the same things as the humans he was with.

Our window thermometer shows the temperature not much above freezing

I was surprised by a noise I haven't heard for a while, the noise of a water pump.

Solar panel display shows a much higher temperature for the panel
(that's Celsius, so about 104 Farenheit).

In direct sunlight, the solar panel heats up well, even when the air temperature is cold. Since the water tank was relatively cool this morning, the panel got warm enough for the controller to switch on the pump. This is very pleasing. Less pleasing is the amount of heat lost between the panel and the house (indicated by 'Pipe' temperature). I'll come back to this.

Little things

Sometimes, just a small change can make quite a big difference to your quality of life. In this house, we can't get radio reception, not DAB, not analogue, nothing. On the other hand, we do have a reasonable broadband connection, so we can listen to the radio over the internet, as we do for watching TV. I quite like listening to the radio while washing the dishes, but unfortunately my laptop speakers aren't powerful enough for me to hear over the sound of rattling crockery and splashing water.

Here's my solution: I found some little speakers that used to belong to a desktop computer. I checked that speakers will work upside down without getting upset. I cut denim straps from an old pair of jeans and fixed them to the underside of a kitchen cupboard with drawing pins. I hung up the speakers by their little stands.

No, this photo is not upside down, the speaker is.

It's still more faff than switching on a radio to take my laptop in there, plug in, and switch on the speakers, but not so much that it isn't worth the effort. I can now listen to the radio whilst washing the dishes. This has transformed a chore that I used to avoid until the kitchen was unbearable into something I really don't mind doing. Little things.

Yeast farming and foraging

At some point in the last couple of years - I forget when, exactly - I stopped buying yeast for baking. I'd tried sourdough once before, when a kind friend gave me a starter, but I hadn't managed to keep it alive. This was discouraging and also made me feel guilty, which didn't help. I'd read about getting a sourdough starter going, and it involved a lot of discarding half the mixture. With my hatred of waste, this didn't appeal.

Instead, I just tried to keep my domesticated yeast alive from one baking day to the next. I put a few tablespoonfuls of bread dough in a jar, added more water then extra flour from time to time, and that was about it. Over time, I got used to my starter. With experience, I learnt when it needed feeding and how to keep it healthy. One thing I discovered was that it benefits from adding veg water instead of plain water. I give it the cooking water (cooled) from potatoes and carrots.

Another thing I found worth changing was the process I use to make bread. I'd been following the no-knead method, whereby the dough is made the night before baking and left to develop overnight, then folded in on itself a couple of times before going in the baking tin. This meant adding some of the starter when I made the dough, and topping up the starter at that point with flour and water. Over the course of a few months, I found the starter tended to get less vigorous until eventually I gave up and started a new one.

The change was to make a sponge, or very wet dough, the night before, using all of the starter and only half of the flour, then return some of the wet dough to the jar the following morning, before adding more flour and salt to the dough for bread. This the requires kneading, so it's a bit more work than the other method, but the starter seems to stay healthier.

This has been fine, but I quite like the idea of using wild yeast. Opinions vary on where this comes from; some say it's in the air and others say it's in the flour. I use cheap white flour and I very much doubt it has anything of any value in it. As for what's in the air in my kitchen - well, I think I'd be much more likely to get mould than useful yeast.

Then I read an article that told me an easy way of getting wild yeast: It's on cabbage leaves. I have some cabbages in my garden that didn't form heads, so weren't much use as vegetables. It would be nice if I could harvest something from them. I picked a couple of leaves that had clearly visible white yeast on the surface and put them in a small quantity (I didn't want to waste a lot of flour on a failed experiment) of wallpaper-paste strength flour and water.

After a couple of days, I saw the first signs of tiny bubbles. At this point, I removed the cabbage leaves, scraping as much gloop off them as I could. The mixture did smell a bit cabbagey, but hopefully that would dilute out soon enough. For a couple more days I monitored and fed the mixture a bit, until there were definitely bubbles and a certain sourness to the smell. At this point I'd have to take some out to make space in the jar for more feeding.

With the first extraction of starter, I made a few wholemeal rolls, adding enough flour to make dough but no extra water. I didn't expect much but with a long rising time (about four hours, I think), they came out OK. The cabbagey smell wasn't really detectable but even so, I made the first loaf wholemeal, too, as I thought that would cover any undesirable flavours better than white. I held off making a decision on this new starter until I'd made a white loaf, which I did this morning.

First loaf made with wild yeast

It certainly looks the part, and it tastes just like bread made with the domesticated yeast. No interesting sourdough flavours, just bread. The starters look pretty similar, too: Both are frothy beige gloop.

Two bubbly starters. Domesticated yeast is on the left, wild yeast on the right.

If anything, the wild yeast is more vigorous than the domesticated, but that might just be because I'm giving it warmer conditions to encourage it to develop more quickly. I'd kind of hoped for a more complex flavour from the wild yeast, but maybe that will develop with time. Even if it's just the same as the domesticated, I'm going to switch over to using the wild, just because I like the idea of having foraged my bread yeast.

I turn my back for one minute...

When putting away cutlery in the kitchen, it's dangerous to turn my back on the open cutlery drawer. This tends to happen:

Rediscovering the garden path

Thanks to months of neglect, the path from our front door towards the road has become very overgrown. This is only a problem because that makes it slippery. Other paths, the ones I made myself, have completely disappeared, but I'm ignoring those for the time being because walking on them isn't essential. The main path needs attention.

The attention I'm giving it involves digging up the top layer of path and separating the plants from the stones, the first going in a bucket and then the compost heap and the second going back on the path. Ideally, soil, worms and other living things also go in the bucket, but that isn't so easy to achieve. It's slow, fiddly work and I won't even try to do any when it's actually raining, so it's done in short bursts, a bucketful or two at a time, in the gaps between the rain.

The trick, I find, is not to think about how much is still left to do, but to focus on the improvement I've made. To start with that was, When I put my foot just there I won't slip. I didn't take a picture at that time, it would have been too disheartening. I did take a picture a couple of days ago:

Even though I'm trying not to think about the size of the job as a whole, it does feel better to have got over halfway along (ignoring the other areas of path and driveway that could do with the same treatment).

I'll just keep at it until either I finish the path or some other task is a more pressing use of not-raining daylight hours.

Blogging challenge: One post a day for a month

Having got out of the habit of blogging frequently, I'm finding it hard to get back to it. I have ideas that I want to write about, but they tend towards rather long posts, and I want to spend time getting them right, and I end up not writing them at all. Or if I do get something written, it's so long that I can't imagine anyone would want to read it.

To tackle this, I'm going to try to post something every day, but keep it short. If I miss a day, so be it, I won't beat myself up about it, but just carry on trying to post something each day until 8th Feb, which happens to be Chinese New Year. With brevity in mind, I'll stop there. Here's a picture of George, being optimistic about dinner:

New Year Ramblings

As I started typing this post the sun came out and shone in through the window*. This feels like a rare treat and I'm tempted to jump up and go straight outside to appreciate it, but Ian's just made a cup of tea, and it's too wet out for sitting and drinking tea. It's been raining almost continuously since I wrote about the beautiful autumn weather we had in September and October. Apart from three or four days, we've had variations on light rain, heavy rain, and that kind of closed-in weather we get here where it's not exactly raining or foggy, but you get wet when you go outside anyway.

Since I usually suffer from seasonal depression, with my mood strongly affected by light, I'd expect to be feeling pretty dreadful about now. I'm glad to report that it's different this year. I'm certainly not enjoying these dark days, but they're making me feel grumpy rather than listless. I feel like a reasonably active human being who could get stuff done if only it wasn't so cold and wet. And if I didn't have a cat sitting on me.

As I've mentioned previously, I've had depression throughout this year, and I've been working through several issues. That is to say, instead of looking at depression as an illness in need of a cure (or treatment of symptoms), I've tried to find the underlying causes and address them directly. I know that for many people, depression doesn't have identifiable, psychological causes, but I suspected that in my case it did. That's not to say it's a straightforward response to currently depressing events, but that there are things buried in my psyche that are causing me problems. Some of the things I found were well buried indeed, relating to the death of my mother twenty seven years ago.

Without much in the way of responsibilities this year, I had the luxury of space to deal with my mental health. Time will tell how much healing has actually taken place but, cautiously, at this point in time, I feel that I've made a great deal of progress. I feel ready to start again with the garden, ready to reconnect with friends - I've been a hermit this year. If I said to you, You must come and visit! I really meant it, I just couldn't quite manage the necessary to make it happen - and ready to put my life back on the internet in the form of intermittent blog posts. In short, it feels like new year, and that looks a lot like a set of new year's resolutions. That makes me a bit nervous, knowing how such resolutions usually go, but hey ho, let's roll with it and see what happens.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of starlings coming in to roost under Aberystwyth pier, on a day of actual sunshine that we took advantage of, shortly before Christmas:

Here come the first of the starlings

Looking south along the seafront, there was a beautiful sunset

and in the other direction, the moon.

More starlings heading for the pier...

... and down to roost under it.

One more picture of the moon, with lamps and a few late starlings.

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* This event was remarkable enough to make the news. I say news - this is a joke news site, but still, they were very quick to report this remarkable sighting!

How much CO2 does fermenting wine give off?

We have a couple of demijohns of elderberry wine bubbling away noisily in the sitting room. They were in the kitchen, but that's next to the bedroom and the bubbling was keeping us awake, so I moved them. As we sat down for the evening the other day, Ian asked me what gas it is that's bubbling out so vigorously. Carbon dioxide. Hmm. That does seem to be rather a lot of carbon dioxide. I wonder whether it's enough to be a health risk?

My attempts to find the answer to this question via Google led to one Daily Mail article about a couple of Frenchmen dying of suffocation while treading grapes, but not much else. I decided to measure it for myself, so here is what I did:

1. Find a piece of plastic tubing and bend it into an S shape using hot water to soften. This was not easy because it kept buckling.
2. Take a graduated jam jar (I marked lines at 100ml intervals) and completely fill with water, then invert in a bowl of water. This was not easy because the jar was taller than the bowl, so the whole lot had to be submerged in a bigger bowl to get all the bubbles out.
3. Faff about for ages trying to raise the jar off the bottom of the bowl so that it wouldn't squash the plastic tube, before realizing that it wouldn't squash it anyway.
4. Recognize that the jar wouldn't need to be horizontal all the time, just when the measurement was taken, and I could hold it for that bit. Considered a spirit level, then decided that would be going a bit far (!)
5. Bring a small table (for the bowl/jar), blu tac (for sealing), and mobile phone (for timing) through to the sitting room.
6. Assemble the apparatus, connecting the plastic tube to the air lock with blu tac, and start timing.
7. Notice that the tube has filled with water again, reseal the blu tac, and hope not too much gas was lost.

The tube takes the CO₂ into the water-filled jar, hopefully catching it all

Here's a closer view of the jar-in-a-bowl assembly. If you look closely, you can see a bubble rising between the two marks on the jar. Please do look closely; it took me several attempts to get this picture.

Look, a bubble! More to the point, lots of gas collecting at the top of the jar.

The idea was to see how long it would take to produce 100ml of CO₂ and then work out volume (or weight) produced per day, and compare that with what a human breathes out, or maybe a cat. I did wonder whether the extra pressure of the water might slow down the bubbles, but they were still coming out at much the same rate as the other demijohn, so that was OK. Holding the jar horizontal was a bit of a challenge, as everything else in the room, and particularly the cupboard behind, is on the skew.

And the result was... about 20 min for 100 ml CO₂. It took 22 min for the first 100 ml, then the second 100 ml, which I expected to be slower due to the extra weight of water, was actually quicker and I missed it. At 43 min, there was already more than 200 ml gas in the jar. This may be due to a bit escaping when the seal broke at the beginning, so approx. 20 min will have to do. That's 300 ml per hour, or 7.2 litres per day.

I found a few different figures for the amount of CO₂ breathed out by a human, of which this page includes the lowest estimate: An inactive person (as they would be, in a sitting room) breathes out 350 litres of CO₂ per day. That's 48.6... almost 50 times as much as my gallon of fermenting wine.

I couldn't find any information on other mammals, still less on cats, specifically.* If amount of CO₂ exhaled is proportional to body weight (which it probably isn't) and cats are about one twentieth the weight of an adult human, one cat would be breathing out about two and a half times as much CO₂ as a gallon of wine. Even with two demijohns, George is probably still breathing out more CO₂ than the wine is. Daily Mail notwithstanding, I'll stop worrying about suffocation from fermenting wine.

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* Though apparently there is a myth that cats breathe in carbon dioxide, and this is linked to the myth that they smother babies. Surely if they're breathing in the CO₂ that would be a good thing for the baby? Not only does that myth take no account of biology, it's not even internally coherent.