home, sweet smelling home

hope springs

spring is everywhere

and with it brings hope (and oranges)

 it's moving through the land

and finds it way in to the house

Hope of new things to come

wonderful willow

Last year I starting learning how to weave baskets with willow, I cut all the willow back so that I would have fresh willow for this year. 

As chance would have it my dear friend Leen was holding a workshop yesterday, so we cut our willow the day before 

and went off for a day together (what, an actual day off, together!!) and sat in the sun (miracle), I made a basket which I donated to a new friend 

and Rick prepped willow, sharpened secateurs and made some new friends

and it was all very pleasant indeed.

rain, rain go away, come back when I'm not on holiday.....

I'm back in Portugal for a short visit, I was rather hoping for some sun so I could get on with some work on the farm. But as most of the work I wanted to do is weather dependent I have had to abondon my plans for the time being and let the farm get on with what it does best, being organic and making it's own way. 

There are several downed trees, including a magnificent cork oak, a mud slide and two wall collapses.

The vegetable garden, however is quite productive. Before I left in December I planted broad beans, onions and garlic, which are all doing very well. The food left over from last years various plantings is also still doing well, purple sprouting broccoli, carrots, parsnips, leeks, cabbages, asparagus and celery continue to be eaten. 

I shall plant some more carrots and parsnips, but not sure how they will fare without watering later on. which currently seems ironic considering it hasn't really stopped raining here for months.

So, am inventing indoor activities which have so far included clearing the freezers of fruit and turning it into chutney

Plum chutney

750g of plums, halved and stoned

250ml vinegar

400g sugar

2 tsp of dry chilli flakes

1 tsp cinnamon

30g fresh ginger, peeled and grated

2-3 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed

1 tsp salt

usual procedure, bung it all together, cook till you have a set and pour into sterilised jars and seal. Its yummy, even the next day

and cherry chutney

2 1/2 lb cherries

128g diced onion

360ml vinegar

2 tbsp minced ginger

250g sugar

1/4 tsp mustard seed

1/4 tsp celery seed

1/8 tsp ground allspice

1/2 tsp ground coriander

1/8 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp of dried chilli flakes

1 tsp salt

directions as above

Cooking endless cakes and puddings

sticky toffee pudding

175g dates, but I used figs, cos I didn't have any dates

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

300ml boiling water

50g unsalted butter, softened

80g golden caster sugar

80g dark muscovado sugar

2 eggs, beaten

175g flour

1 tsp baking powder

Pinch of ground cloves

75g walnuts

For the sauce:

115g unsalted butter

75g golden caster sugar

40g dark muscovado sugar

140ml double cream

Pre-heat the oven to 180C or put loads of wood in the wood burner, in my case. Butter a baking dish approximately 24cm x 24cm.

Make the sauce by putting all the ingredients into a pan with a pinch of salt and heating slowly until the butter has melted, then turn up the heat and bring to the boil. Boil for about 4 minutes, until the sauce has thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon. Pour half the sauce into the base of the dish and then put it in the freezer while you make the rest of the pudding.

Put the dates/figs and bicarbonate of soda in a heatproof dish and cover with the boiling water. Leave to soften while you prepare the rest of the pudding.

Beat together the butter and sugar until fluffy, and then beat in the eggs, a little at a time. Stir in the flour, baking powder, cloves and a pinch of salt until well combined, and then add the dates and their soaking water, and the walnuts, and mix well.

Take the dish out of the freezer and pour the batter on top of the toffee sauce. Put into the oven for 30 minutes, until firm to the touch, and then take out of the oven.

Heat the grill to medium, and poke a few small holes evenly over the surface with a skewer or fork, and then pour over the rest of the sauce. Put briefly under the grill, keeping an eye on it as it can easily burn. Serve with vanilla ice cream.

Is sticky toffee pudding the perfect marriage of stodge and sweetness, or does the name promise more than the dish delivers? What do you like to add to yours – and do you like it with custard, ice cream, or (shock horror), a dollop of yoghurt?

hot cross buns

and curries, with food from the freezers

potato and spinach curry

800g potatoes

2 garlic cloves, crushed

1 fresh (or frozen in my case) long red chilli, de-seeded and finely chopped

1 tsp garam masala

1 tsp ground cumin

2 x can toms, or loads of frozen ones

150g spinach

90g yogurt

2 tbs freshly chopped coriander

cook the potatoes until nearly done and dice them up. cook onion in a bit of oil, then add garlic and spices, stir in the tomatoes and cook for 15 mins. then add the potatoes for another 5 mins. Add the spinach. Thats it, serve with yogurt and another curry.....

Dahl

250g red lentils

400ml coconut milk

a handful of curry leaves

2 medium chopped tomatoes

1 tsp turmeric

2-3 long pointy green chillies , sliced

2 tsp black mustard seeds

2 onions, one finely chopped, one sliced

Put the lentils, coconut milk, the chopped onion, tomatoes, chillies and turmeric in a pan with 300ml water, season and simmer for 20 minutes, until the lentils are tender.

Fry the sliced onion in 4 tbsp oil until crisp, add the curry leaves (or coriander) and mustard seeds and sizzle together. Dish up

chim chimeney

mary poppins is one of my favorite films. when we were kids, i was probably six or seven at the time, one thursday afternoon, after school, following a visit to the dentist, on the way to the bus stop, my mum looked up and saw that the film mary poppins was showing (as they called it then) at the cinema. she asked us if we wanted to go? there and then, it started in five minutes.  i don't think we'd hardly ever been to the cinema, if at all. we jumped at the chance. i don't know if she ever took us again, timings i guess were never right. but what a film, it sort of made up for it. its stuck in my memory. the magic of it. chimney's it seemed were like a portal into another world. a world, i think, a lot of us might have preferred to have lived in.

chimney's are central to what most of us think of as home, hearth and home.  a hearth stone is a place where cooking and heating are often located, and the chimney is the device thru which it all happens. things come and go up and down the chimney, flue gasses, hopefully just go up (unless suffering from back-draft) and bees and sometimes birds have a way of making their way down the chimney.

not so long ago, many people used to put heck, or apotropaic marks on the chimney or post supporting the mantle, to keep witches spirits away, particularly to keep them from entering the building thru the chimney.

this is a close up of one of the mantles, i hewed them (made with axes, not sawn). this is one of my favorite things about this building, there's something about the surface marks left by the axe that's like no other texture, this, for me, is the heart and soul of the building. a direct link to the saxon carpentry from essex, where i'm from. hewing, like archery, is a feeling thing. and this is something i like about the whole approach that i've taken to building this house, its gauged, and felt, and as far away from mass produced as i can make it. its handmade and heartfelt.

although romans used ducting to vent flue gases, the concept of chimneys doesn't really exist until the 12th century in england. prior to that fires are vented thru an opening in the roof.

as much as i like the idea of building a smoke house, i want one for preserving meat, fish and cheese, not for living in.

i thought long and hard about what kind of chimney i was going to build and how? somewhat governed by the availability of materials i guess it was always going to be from schist/slate. as it turned out it involved a fair amount of block work as well, and i varied the stone with bits of granite, quartzite when i could find them, and sandstone.

had i had more confidence in my ability at the start, i would have done without the block work, and just built in stone. also i could've forgone using clay flue liners, particle insulation and heat resistant mastic, and just plastered the flue with clay as i went. this would have reduced the over-all cost of the chimney considerably, and kept it closer to the intention of using only natural materials where-ever i could.

i hewed some very meaty walnut beams for the mantels and chestnut for lintels, where they wouldn't come in direct contact with heat. based on the idea that even in the event of a chimney fire they would withstand longer than either steel or re-inforced concrete.

in the end its been a 2 and 1/2 month marathon to get it done. it was built the old way, with a pile of rocks and a bucket winch, a trowel and a level, even the muck i mixed by hand, i wasn't using enough per day to warrant putting the mixer on.

the stack is 2.2 meters wide by 1.1 meter deep and about 10.5m high from the foundation.

i can only hope the rest of the house gets finished so there can be a house warming, with the first fire lit of the house, in the proper way of things.

my lovely Valentine

Blogs are a curious thing, they are either personal diary type things or subject specific, so I’ve been been in a bit of pickle about whether to continue blogging seeing as I’m not in Portugal and I’m not permaculturing, but I thought well, one of us is still in Portugal and sort of permaculturing,  and whilst it may be a while before Rick writes anything for the blog, I thought what the hell I’ll carry on, writing about whatever from wherever I am, if thats ok?

So, let me introduce you to Valentine, 

she was born on 22nd December, 1983, she’s a Citroen 2CV Special, what's so special about her you might ask, well she’s special to me, we go back a long way, we’ve been through a lot together. She was the first car I ever bought back in 1997, she made me smile, she made other people smile (or was that smirking), she lifted people’s hearts, she made people’s hearts sink......she bought a tear to your eye, you can wind her up when all else fails, you can take bits off her and replace them, you can takes things out of her and sleep in it, you can frighten people in her and outside of her, she’s my lovely Valentine.

One of my very first trips out in her, (other than the practicing around the railway station car-park on a sunday), I drove at speed over a not very level railway crossing, not knowing that it wasn’t very level and not knowing that the chassis was rotten as hell, I broke her. I didn’t know anything had happened until I went to turn right and the car went straight on in a flintstone kinda way....

So lots of expensive mending ensued and a new chassis, she was as good as new, if not better. Those of you that have ever had a love affair with a car will know that after you’ve had a car re-built, you have a deeper understanding of them, they’ve revealed their souls to you, their guts, they wrap themselves around your heart and you know that you will never ever let them go. Thats what so special about “the special”.

It came with much regret when I had to get rid of her. It was one of those awful deals you make with your partner, one's that you know morally you just can’t go back on, even if every part of you is screaming NOOOO. (I think they call it compromise, I call it something else).

“You get rid of your dysfunctional, impossibly expensive to fix motorbike that I can’t even fit on ‘cos I’m too fat and it’s too small... and I’ll get rid of my humiliating, embarrassing “clown car” (his personal name for her)...so I did.

I then spent several years having to drive a very boring, safe car. It gave me no pleasure at all, it made me cry inside everytime I got in it, I hated it so much I seemed to be constantly crashing it, in the end unsurprisingly it got written off, phew....

Now don’t get me wrong I like comfort and safety in a car and I like driving fast, but I also like character and interesting but I can't afford an Aston Martin, so the most interesting it’s gonna get for me is a 2CV.

As fate would have it a couple of years after selling her I inherited some money and decided to call my old 2cv mechanic just out of interest to see if he'd seen my car again and what had happened to her (he understands everything 2cv, so knew how much it had pained me to let her go) and would you believe the people I had sold her to had rung up the day before and asked if he knew anyone that wanted to buy it, knowing that these things don't happen for no reason, I bought her back, it seemed like the right thing to do it would have been rude not to.

Sadly when we left for Portugal I couldn’t take her with me. But it never entered my head that I would ever get rid of her again, I’ve had many arguments with rick about why I wouldn't get rid of her a second time, I just couldn't, I explained that she was my Armageddon car and he eventually gave up asking, and thankfully sticking to my guns has paid off, It is now my Armageddon and I need my Armageddon car.

I've got her back on the road, she's more broken and tired than ever (much like me), She still has a lot of character (much like me), she's very reliable (much like me), she's fun to drive (ermmmm), you can't just kick back and not really pay attention to what you are doing, she requires your full attention... (much like me), she's been round the block a few times (ahheemm), and around the clock too (once or twice, can't remember), but also, she is incredibly cheap to run (much like me). I can now get classic car insurance (not ‘cos I’m ancient), it costs me £22 to fill her up, she does 61 mpg or in new money 4.6 litres to 100 Kms, so we have a lot of similarities me and valentine (except that I am more expensive to insure and you could fill me up for a lot less than £22 and I can't run that fast), but never-the-less we go well together, we're sticking together me and my valentine.

What to do when your teapot breaks

The teapot had been a bit leaky for a while and then in one of those weird moments when one thing happens, taking with it a whole load of other things it did break. The colander fell off the wall knocking ricks favourite mug onto the floor, smashing it into four pieces and then promptly took the spout of the teapot off in one fell swoop. 

The end of an era. 

I am using the broken teapot as a metaphor for what has been happening to us and countless other people the world over. Our world had been leaking for some time, we had stretched ourselves beyond normal limits, hoping that as the build progressed things would heal themselves and life would get better......it didn't. We kept moping up the spillage and still pouring more out and making more (mess and tea).

In the end something had to give, the spout fell off. 

We are having to figure out a new way to make tea. The relationship is in the bin and the teapot is unusable, there isnt a glue available here to stick it all back together.

When we've figured out a way to make a pot of tea again, we will. Until then we are making tea with one cup and one tea bag in two different countries.

roll up, roll up

what on earth do you make an eighteen year old girl for her birthday?????? 

definitely not a tea cosy or pan holder or anything householdy.

 So with much wracking of brains and umming and ahhing...this is what I came up with

A make-up roll, genius

very handy

I stopped my sister-in-law from putting some old children's clothes into the local clothing bank and insisted on waiting at the school gates with said garments draped around my neck.......I really don't care much these days and anyway it was blooming cold.

I knew I could do something with it all, so far this is it :

a round of applause please