Camping out under a harvest moon

To get myself through the grey days at the start of the year I  dream of summer (past and future). This August we camped on a friend’s farm just below Dunkery Beacon, the highest point on Exmoor. We pitched our tents in a wide, open field with the moor stretching up and away behind us. The first thing we did was dig out a large rectangle of turf for our fire, making sure to stack the sods neatly so that we could replace them when we left and leave the field as we found it. We edged the fire pit with some large flat stones and whilst we waited for the fire to burn down to cooking height we got our tents up. The first night we cooked a flattened chicken that I marinated before we left home. Saffron and chopped red onion are combined with the more usual lemon and oil mixture to add a Persian feel to an English summer evening.  Whilst we ate our chicken we watched a huge harvest moon, opaque and orange swim out from behind the trees at the edge of the field and glide upwards.

Grilled chicken with saffron and lemon

Ingredients
1 free range chicken

1 red onion chopped finely

a pinch of saffron threads crushed and steeped in a 1 tbsp of boiling water

3 tbsp olive oil

juice of 1 lemon

salt and pepper

long green pepppers for grilling

Cut the chicken down its breastbone and lay it on top of a chopping board. Using your fist break the joints and flatten the chicken out. In a large tupperware combine the marinade ingredients and add the chicken, mix well and refrigerate until you are ready to use it. For campers a cool box should be fine.

When the coals are glowing nicely put a grill over the fire and allow any residue to burn off. Place the chicken skin side down and cook for a good ten to fifteen minutes on each side you can cook a pot of rice alongside the chicken and some long green peppers. We ate the chicken and the peppers torn up in great oval flat breads from the Turkish bakery.

Are you a boiler or a slicer?

Late January means one thing to lovers of home made marmalade - Seville season. The sour, pippy fruits that make such delightful breakfast fare are around for such a short time that one must snap them up the moment one sees them. So like so many other marmalade fiends  I am currently overseeing a  bubbling pan of peel and filling the house with wonderful citrus oil steam. I am taking advantage of the hour and half needed to get the peel really soft to write this up but when I add the sugar I will be giving the pan my full attention.

Marmalade makers can be divided into two camps - boilers and choppers.  Some boil the fruit whole and then slice while others slice first, soak then boil. It depends what kind of marmalade you like I think the initial slicing results in a fresher tasting, lighter conserve. Actually now I think about it, it might be three camps if you count the hand chopping versus food processor debate. I cut my peel by hand it takes time but good marmalade is worth it and gives you greater control over the size of peel in your marmalade.

 I always make sure to buy twice as many marmalade oranges as I need. They freeze beautifully and by June when I have run out of marmalade I boil them up whole up and make another batch (the peel goes a bit spongy making it harder to chop). This means that by the end of the year I am a member of both the boiler and slicer camps. Tonight I am chopping, boiling, pouring, skimming, testing and praying it will turn out to be a clear, wobbly jelly. It may sound strange but spending a few hours in a warm, steamy kitchen listening to Edith Wharton's The Custom of The Country on Radio 4 is one of the most delightful evenings I can imagine. Will my marmalade set? You will have to wait til tomorrow to find out.

Sunday morning

Well I don't like to boast but my marmalade  has set beautifully, a glorious amber with the slices suspended as if by magic with a lightly wobbling jelly. I won't give you a recipe as everyone has their own, I use Marguerite Patten's Sweet Seville Marmalade recipe in her fantastic book on preserving (part of Grub Street's excellent The Basic Basics series).  My only advice would be boil hard, use a thermometer and test early, my marmalade reached its setting point at just 17 minutes (once past the setting point it will never set no matter how long you boil it).

Steak and vine

It’s hard to think of cheering jobs in January. Everything is frozen and wilted and Spring seems a long way off. One job that does hold out the prospect of happier, sunnier days is pruning my vine back. I found an old vine strangled by brambles but still growing at the very back of my plot. After a hard pruning I trained it over a little structure to the left of my shed. As well as producing a mass of tender green leaves for making stuffed vine leaves it provided heavenly glaucous shade in more scorching summer moments. It also provides the makings of great barbecue as the vine trimmings can be used as fuel.

Cooking over vine twigs is nothing new. On the continent vineyard workers have long known that the dry resinous stems of the vine give a wonderful taste and aroma to meat grilled over them. This summer we cooked a t-bone steak over vine twigs in the back garden. It was an evening to remember. The air was warm and clear and after building a fire with ordinary coals I let them sink down to a warm glow before putting on  the vine twigs and then the steak. The twigs flared up quickly with bright orange flames then glowed red in a delicate mass before collapsing into a cloud of grey ash. The latter I later fed back into the soil (wood ash is very good for soil). We ate the steak with freshly grated horseradish mixed with cream and black pepper and some waxy yellow charlotte potatoes dug that afternoon.

 After reading the great herbalist, soil doctor and anthologist of gypsy lore, Juliette de Bairacli Levy’s entry on the vine in her indispensable, Illustrated Herbal Handbook for Everyone, I will now be picking and eating the vine tendrils whenever I visit my allotment. She makes high claims for the vine which she calls the “supreme food and medicinal herb” and whose leaves she describes lovingly as being like “cool, green, healing human hands”. According to Bairacli-Levy the vine is a general tonic for the whole body but in particular anaemia, infertility, impure blood, eszema, lymphatic ailments, dystentery and constipation.

She goes on to say that “when the human body has become sick almost beyond reasonable hope of recovery, there is still, to my mind, one recourse: for the patient to retire to the neighbourhood of some vineyard where grape are cultivated by natural methods and there to follow a grape cure, living only on the fruit (with a few vine leaves and tendrils also) and drinking only pure water and perhaps fresh goat or sheep milk.” It may not have been scientifically proven but it’s encouraging to think I have such powerful medicine readily at hand

My Compost Shame

It's time to confess all. I am absolutely  rubbish at making compost.   So far all I've managed to make is a giant stack of stalks and mould. I could blame my husband but that would be too easy. He was the one who made the bin but when he nailed the pallets he neglected to leave one side open for easy turning. Actually I probably wasn't very clear about just what it was I wanted.  A few years in I tried hacking a hole in the side with a rusty old saw but that didn't really work. What I have now is a top loading square bin to which my neighbours happily add their woodiest waste ( lots of cabbage stems and sweetcorn stalks) whenever my back is turned. An ancient vine and a mass of convolvulus have grown up over it making it hard to get too. It's dispiriting and as a result I don't really bother using it. I can't get down my allotment every day or even every other day so kitchen waste builds up quickly. In summer it rots and even when I do go I invariably forget to take the reeking bucket down. This may have something to do with the fact that carrying a pungent slop of half rotted vegetable matter on your back whilst cycling is pretty unappealing.

Not being able to crack the secret of great compost may not seem such a dark and dirty secret but as someone who loves both cooking and gardening it has always seemed singularly shaming that at the place where those two worlds meet (the turning of kitchen scraps into rich, crumbling, soil-enriching humus) I should be such an abject failure. But no more, our new house has enough garden to house a modest compost bin. I have turned my back on the plastic Dalek like bins which seem to make a tower of woody waste. Instead, in the spirit of the allotment I am doing it on the cheap, by making a circular bin of chicken wire held up by posts of salvaged wood then lined with cardboard. It will be a small and hopefully not too smelly bin popped out of sight in a corner of our back garden. This may not seem much of a New Year's resolution but if I can  produce something worth putting back into my garden I will finally feel less of a kitchen gardener imposter. With the help of a Christmas present (Joy Larkcom's classic "Grow Your Own Vegetables" which has a long and very clear compost chapter) I hope to wash away the year's of non-composting shame.