Garlic at the Equinox

Over at Fahrenheit211 a personal explanation of why a person would spend precious time tracking stories with no financial reward and, it sometimes appears, little effect on the world.

In response I give you.....garlic.

Seeds and seed bulbs harvested for next planting

Mr Raft has just harvested several large bulbs which are being used, stored, admired and generally enjoyed.  There will be garlic with our Yuletide dinner.  I might see about putting a few prepared cloves in to oil as that is another way of storing them. 

They came to be planted as a  result of a suggestion by another writer known for his sunny disposition; the unmissable Mr Ishmael.   He said out that planting garlic is easy - you just put a clove in the ground and wait.  He also mused that preparing rhubarb in syrup was intrinsically rebellious, reminding us of skills which we once had.

Mr Raft has also let some bulbs go to seed for the next generation so I'll pop them in the earth now in the belief and expectation that there will not just be this autumn but another when the wheel of the year has rolled all the way round, through all those moons.  

Blogging also has to be about optimism, a belief that any small act of defiance is better than none.

H/T JuliaM at  Ambush Predator for the link to Fahrenheit211

Summer Sponge Pudding

Despite the rain the garden has given usable fruit.  A dish of pearly blackcurrants, emerald gooseberries and ruby wild strawberries.  

Two or three cups full, that's all you need for a summer sponge pudding.


Wash and prepare the fruit, place it in the bottom of a pudding basin and add a decent dredge of sugar.  Put it in a cool oven while you mix up the sponge.  If you do this, it makes the cooking time more reasonable.


Mix up sponge topping made from;
 2 oz sugar
 2 oz butter
 1 egg
 3 oz self-raising flour
 and a splash of milk.  

The consistency should be soft so that it drops off the spoon.  Take out the warm fruit, turn up the oven to about gas mark 5, and add the sponge topping . Add an extra sprinkle of sugar on the top for prettiness. 

Bake at gas mark 5 for about 30 minutes. Check that a knife comes out of the sponge cleanly. If not, leave it for 5 minutes longer until it is ready.   

You can cook this on cold fruit but it seems to take much longer to reach the temperature which makes the sponge puff up. 

Serve with cream, custard or ice cream.

Cluck cluck CL*CK

That's what the noise was about.

Sinister plot.....

....discovered in supermarket.

Desserts - Michel Roux

Inland to Toppings Bookshop in Ely for the book launch of Michel Roux's latest work, Desserts.

A gust of oestrogen knocked me over as I walked in to the hall they were using for the event. You can keep your interfering hyper-active bully-boys with their pukka pasta. If you want to see a babe-magnet in operation and grown women going giggly - and I'm talking about from 18 year olds to 80 year olds - Michel is your exemplar.

He doesn't appear immediately as there is a lunch first. Substantial quiches, salads, wine or elderflower presse are balanced on knees while people pre-buy books and browse through a selection of his other titles. Roux has a regular editorial team, including his wife who does the proof reading, and they are all credited. He produces books with the same values with which he cooks - just as he wouldn't ask someone to eat food he wouldn't eat himself, so the book has to satisfy him as an object, as a work in its own right. Later he emphasizes that he knows every page number for every recipe - it's his book, his name is on the cover.

Eventually Mr Topping - who has been toting boxes for days now and is nearly melting in the lunchtime sunshine - stands up and begins to tell of his joy at hearing someone say the bookshop was 'just like the one in Notting Hill'. Ha! That means he is equivalent to Hugh Grant. However, the bookshop in Notting Hill has just closed, as have dozens of others.

Toppings in Bath and Ely has bucked that trend by adding value as a retailer. They hold a book club each month and well-organized events where the authors are expected to turn up and perform. They also offer you fresh tea or coffee - for free - and don't mind browsers, so it's rare that you get out of there without something you didn't know you wanted. The lunch is to develop a trading relationship with the customers, so for £15 you get lunch, a literary cabaret, and a signed copy of the book.

Then comes the treat. The ladies come in with trays of desserts made by Michel's very own hand. On each white plate is a slice of chocolate raspberry roulade (roule marquis, page 168) and a shot-glass sized fig and honey pannacotta (page 76). There is cat-like purr of five dozen women simultaneously licking vanilla ambrosia and forgetting there is a world outside.


The audience is now as pliable as a sheet of soaked gelatin and the star comes out of his kitchen to great applause.

Time has been kind to Michel Roux. It's been more than kind; he is a Frenchman with a big nose and he's 70 so it isn't fair that he looks better now than he did twenty four years ago when he and his older brother Albert bickered their way across the nation's TV screens to challenge the worthy approaches of the kitchen divas such as Delia Smith. Michel remains slim and obviously active, no stoop, tanned, with white teeth and blue eyes. Even his hair has swept itself back in to a chic silver bardic mane which he certainly didn't have in 1988. I have the picture here - in those days he had to make do with an ordinary mousey fuzz of a barnett.

Being French he feels there is an obligation to show Italian men how It Is Done. There has to be a quality of casual effortless grace which leaves the Italians looking over-polished and fussy. "'Ow to understand a woman?" he shrugs Gallically, and the Italians would seethe because they know he does. The Brits nod sagely, interpreting it as a shared take-my-wife joke. There, right there, you have Europe on a plate.

There are barely a handful of men at the launch, which is strange when you consider how Roux's work is either neutral or masculine, grounded in the professional kitchen and the concepts of aristocratic food, not peasant pottage. It can't only be women who manage to get away from the office or the home at lunchtime.

Michel opens with a cautionary tale. He had hoped to show the signature fruit meringues he is proud of but they turn out to be very sensitive to air humidity and the quality of the oven. He waves one, explaining how disappointed he was with the texture and uneven quality. The encouraging moral is: even Michel Roux has disasters. None the less, he urges us to give plum meringue, page 150, a whirl. "Plums are cheap, you must dry them well, meringues are cheap if you have just made something with egg yokes".

Considering his name is linked with expensive food and he's obviously not short of a bob or two being domiciled now in Switzerland, it is surprising how many times he refers to the cost of food. It is preying on his mind - but then, being born in 1941 and growing up in the austerity years after the war with an unreliable father, he must have experienced what it means to be worried about food and its price. Perhaps that's why he cares so much about every mouthful; the ghost haunting him is not bad food, but no food.

He advises not starting with the book, but to go to a market, find what's cheap, then go back and look up a way to cook it. There's nothing special about that advice but it cuts through the marketing nonsense about wandering round a supermarket with the recipe their celebrity chef has suggested which just so happens to require five of their premium pre-packed ingredients.

The advice goes on. An omelette takes between 1 minute and 90 seconds. He advises scrambled eggs with a scoop of cream, Albert says two scoops. If you use milk the eggs will be a little wet but that may be the best way for you, if you don't want to use cream. Do not mix spices in desserts - stick to only one - two if you must - to avoid confusing the flavour. Fresh fish is a live food and very good for you. Meat is already very dead and if you cook it wrong, it can be twice as dead. A Christmas pudding is a wonderful thing and he believes that his own are the best in the world. (Although it doesn't appear to have made it in to this book). Don't use more than about six ingredients in a dish, unless you have a special reason - it is too much, too confusing. A cook must have a glass of wine while working, or at least water if you are not a wine drinker. Despite this being a book about desserts and therefore not without calories, the use of fruit and a reduced quantity of sugar and fat has been recommended . The trend is for lighter desserts, he says.

There is a lively exchange of views about the storage of eggs resulting in Michel being exasperated about too-low storage temperatures and the lack of larders in the modern house due to the EU. It's not clear to me precisely how they are responsible for that but sometimes his French accent is still hard to understand, even after all these years. "I'm in favour of the common market" he said, echoing so many people over the years "but not this EU".

Neither I nor any other lady there cares tuppence about understanding every word - he can read out the phone book as far as we are concerned, and it will still sound like ginger creme brulee (page 75), but it brings an interesting thought about the book. Roux writes in French because he says it is still quicker for him. The translator, Sally Somers, then puts this in to crystal-clear English, but in doing so it is impossible to avoid rinsing out some of the warmth and poetry of his Franglais phrasing.

One day he should write a book with the French on one page and the translation opposite, perhaps a considered guide to shopping and stocking a kitchen without over-spending or wastage, but getting value for money. If that's where good cookery starts, it is time he addressed the subject directly in his own signature grammar.

Plastic pots, plastic education

Clearing out the back of a locker I came across these grotty plastic pots and had a Proustian moment. They came from the days of cookery lessons, or 'food technology' as it was more properly called because it wasn't anything as honest or useful as cooking but it wanted to get itself up as on a par with the technologists (wood work, metal work, chemistry) who in turn wanted to get themselves up with the physics and maths department.

With only one period and a class full of giddy teenagers, the food technology teacher resorted to sending letters which pleaded with the parents to send ingredients weighed out. These would be lightly combined and, if time permitted, heated in some fashion. Sometimes a raw assembly would come back. An uncooked pastry twist is not improved for sloshing about on the bus home.

The constraints made the ingredients very limited. I had no idea you could get an entire curriculum out of wheat, fat and sugar. Fruit was sometimes mentioned and if the teacher was feeling flamboyant, a request would come back for an egg or some milk in a little jar. Once they even asked for garlic, the mad impetuous fools. It meant mashing bottled garlic paste in to butter to make garlic bread. The bread came back - a shop-bought baguette - having had garlic butter surgically introduced. We still had to do the heating, though.

I should have protested when I saw the 'design sheets' for a pizza topping, solemnly planning where to stick the sausage circles on the pre-baked pizza bases. I should have demonstrated. A braver person would have said "If you can't teach something useful, let's sack you and buy some more maths hours or maybe a teacher prepared to do spelling tests and explain punctuation".

But I'm not brave. Besides I just felt so damn sorry for the teacher. It's always the fluffy ones who end up teaching this subject and they have that trembling tearful look of someone who means well but who, for their pains, has been lumbered with all the worst pastoral work. Armed with only a couple of sandwich tins they are supposed to be able to effect profound motivational change. It's not going to happen, is it? Even Jamie Oliver found that trick was harder than he imagined.

So I supervised the measuring-out of ingredients, chaffing that this too was something schools used to teach. Despite my whinging the results must have been alright. At any rate, the greedy beggars ate all the good stuff on the bus home.

Woodstore

A woodstore several days ago.

I keep a lookout for these now and note the rising popularity of wood burners. In a stand of sensible, although superior, new-build houses a small woodstore was provided as a standard next to the dustbin.

This was a grander one cut in to a hill in woodland - presumably contributing the fuel - so it had a bluebell wood just above it.

Gate

One autumn the wind blew so hard that it pushed the garden gate, which opens in to the back lane, over its rebate, sticking it fast. We were trapped.

Aieee! Trapped!

I checked the chocolate biscuit supply and reckoned that so long as you didn't mind a walk, we could manage with just the front door and go along the main road.

The back gate was dodgy all winter, a constant menace as to whether, having let us out, it would let us back in.


Eventually, the weather turned and it was possible to take the gate off and repair it. While Mr Raft sawed and sanded and chamfered and drilled and glued and screwed, I made the tea.

Standing with a mug of tea and admiring his exemplary handiwork, I looked at the other end of the garden where the bushes grow.


That gate, the other gate, the secret gate, was working the whole time.

Rock 'n' Stroll

Over in Ishmalia, Mr Smith is musing on the meaning of furniture; its significance beyond the functional which often turns out to be the least of its jobs.

This piece, however, is all about function. It is a rocking shoe box. You keep your gear in it - brushes, polishes, cloth, special magic things for making shoes fit, spare shoe liners - hence no more lost shoe-care frenzy.

Before you go out you step on it, one foot then the other, and give the show a quick once-over. The rocking action immediately demonstrates its superiority over fixed shoe-boxes; it adjusts easily to your stance. It is light but strong. Best not to use it on a highly-polished floor, though, as there is a chance of it skidding away.

The box has the air of a successful woodwork project by somebody - look, it's obviously a male manufacturer, it just is - who wanted to learn how to cut, join and fit wood. It is the next project on from making a simple rocking crib; it has two hinged lids which shut snugly. It is the way it shuts properly, has not warped or split, even after many years of being stepped on, which suggests that it was done with pride. The person wanted to make a really useful thing while learning the craft, and they did.

I don't know who it was made for or what happened to them, but I do know who it was made by because their neat pencil name is still in there. M. Chamberlain.



It's possible "Mike" - that's how I think of him - was a 4th former when he made it, but the number might just be a note to himself for some other purpose, such as assembly order or project number.

Woodwork projects are often given away, usually to mothers, but it is possible M Chamberlain kept his box and used it for his professional footwear. The neatly folded cloths, the sets of shoe laces, one tube of sports white and the parade gloss which were already living in there were huffy when I introduced suede-cleaning blocks, a nu-buck cleaning spray and gel footpads.

Now, after finding it in a charity shop, it is back where it belongs, where it ought to be and where it deserves to be, sitting in front of a mirror so that it can supervise that all-important wardrobe check before facing the paparazzi : Have You Cleaned Your Shoes?

Thank you, M Chamberlain.

The "Can't Do" Culture

MPs famously bought goods from the John Lewis list for the same reason the rest of the Waitrose-classes do; they are supposed to make the whole business of buying homewares very simple. You - or we- pay them, they deliver and set up.

Hoping to experience what life is like in the Nomenklatura, I purchased a washing machine and paid the fees accordingly. Could I have got the machine cheaper by going through the warehouses? Yes, and saved at least £84, but the point about John Lewis is they are supposed to make life like their adverts.




The store offered me a delivery 'slot' of 7 hours, somewhere between 7am and 2pm. Fortunately, I don't have anything else to do but wait for deliveries - it's not like I've got a life or anything - and, anyway, the weather is a reasonable excuse for delay.

At just before 12pm - note, five hours in to the delivery 'slot' - they called and so when they arrived the door was open, the old machine had been drained (as far as possible) and disconnected, ready to go. The space was clear and clean, all the little valves were turned off.

The new machine was brought in, unpacked, the hot-fill pipe capped off with a brass screw-cap (it's all cold fill now) and the cold-fill hose offered up to the opening in the side of the sink unit. Due to an anti-flood device on the hose, the hole was approximately 3mm too small and need to be relieved .



"We can't do that, we aren't qualified" said the man. Things went very bad from there on.

It inspires utter contempt when a grown man says he can't file the edge of a hole in chipboard. It's not cabinet making. It's not even woodwork. It doesn't matter that strictly speaking, it's not their job. I could not hold myself out as a man, allegedly the possessor of a gentleman's plumbing, if I were unable to slightly enlarge a hole in a material which is only one-up from cardboard.

I would not expect to seduce women if I could not do even that. Heck, I would not expect to seduce men if I could not do even that. I would expect even the dogs and sheep to run away laughing, spurning my sexual advances when they found out I could not ease a hole in chipboard in a non-visible part of a kitchen.

We aren't talking about 3ml all the way round or making a hole from scratch; we are talking about nibbling at a couple of points on an existing hole so the anti-flood device - roughly the size of large matchbox on the end of the cold-fill hose - goes through.

"We can't do that" repeated the mis-named installer, sticking rigidly to the John Lewis liability line.

Thoroughly bad-tempered words were had with the customer service moppet at John Lewis, who asked if I didn't have somebody who could help me make holes in chipboard? I told her that as I had been waiting for five hours, if they had said they needed a 7.5mm hole, I'd have nibbled it out ready with a junior hacksaw.

We were talking, I repeat, about removing a couple of millimetres of chipboard on the edge of an existing hole. You could probably do it with determination and steak-knife. A century of feminism and 130 years of public education for all, and somehow it strikes an otherwise capable young woman as inconceivable that a mere female could slightly enlarge a hole in chipboard for herself if given due warning of the necessity of access. No, she must perforce throw herself on the mercy of her saw-bearing male relatives.

Miss Customer Service has probably passed all the customer communication courses but still failed to predict that "Haven't you got anyone who can help you?" is a) beside the point and b) tantamount to calling the customer an ugly old bag who can't get a man. This is unlikely to elicit a warm response, especially if true. We aren't here to argue about how well-connected I am to a tribe of obliging hole-enlargers; that is irrelevant. JLP charged a premium for the machine plus an installation fee then, faced with a few millimetres of awkward chipboard with photocopies of wood on top, gave up and ran off for an early lunch, looking for an excuse to not do their job but still get paid.

I then proposed to enlarge the hole myself and wanted to know when they were sending the installers back.
"They've gone to the next job now" said the woman.
"No they haven't. They are having a shufty fag as they've got some spare time now and I can see them over the road".

The young woman then made an offer she obviously thought was supposed to have me grovelling "Well, provided you can do it Right Now, we'll send them back".

I got the saw from the tool box and set about the nibbling. Thirty seconds later the installer appeared at the front door and asked when I'd be finished. I said - and I accept this was inflammatory - "Between 12 and 2" and told him to wait in the van until I called him. For some reason, JLP does not seem to like waiting for the customer, although of course, it's alright if you wait five hours for them. He very well knew it was about a ten minute job. He was scheduled to run a test wash - to make sure nothing was leaking - so all that stuff about having to go immediately was utter bollocks. He was skiving and was narked about being caught out.

"Well, if that's your attitude, I won't try to help you"

At this point I just stared and said "Help?"

Did this man think was doing me a favour, that he had not in fact been paid the agreed price to install a machine but was here as a voluntary washing machine installer. How he was helping? Helping would have been to whip out a Stanley knife such as they use on the van to slit the packaging (not that he thought to bring in a pair of scissors to cut the polythene) and set to relieving the hole that few millimeters, possibly whilst saying 'This is not really my job, but if you don't tell anyone, I won't'.

Or, if feeling very worried about the company line and possible liabilities, then he could have said 'Look, can you cut out that bit quickly? Only I'm not insured. I'll have a sandwich as it is snap time, then do the installation'. A brave man would have done the former, even a lawyer would offered to do the second.

This was waiting for the customer to sort it out and then trying to act like the big man for finally, finally condescending to do one's job, but only under perfect conditions. This is the Can't Do Culture.

I've known fey gay hairdressers to have more guts. 'Pass me the Big Rasp, Julian, the one we normally use for your toenails, I just have to adjust this access port'.

You wouldn't get a Pole talking cobblers about it not being his job; he'd punch a hole with his bare fist and then shrug: 'You want hole bigger, I make hole bigger. In Poland we have hardwood kitchen, not chipboard, not since Soviets.'

You wouldn't get an Afghan tribesman taking nonsense from a kitchen fitment. Admittedly their standard answer is to shoot the hole bigger with a Kalashnikov and then wonder why the cold water is spraying everywhere, but they would hold their manhood cheap if intimidated and defeated by 3mm of compressed sawdust.

Since I refused to give his ego a blow-job and be abjectly grateful for being allowed a few minutes of his valuable time, the installer flounced off. I'm not really sorry; I didn't trust him to do the job at all.



This is the job being done. I nibbed out the unwanted material, cutting it in little triangles. Following the installation instructions I completed the job (the transportation bolts had already been removed but I found I could have managed it as they give you a special spanner) then called a grown-up plumber who stopped by to check I'd done it correctly. It is three connections, four if you count screwing the cap on to the redundant hot water valve. Anyone can plug in the electricity. Screwing in the cold valve is fiddly, but no worse than a bottle-top. Connecting the waste hose is just pushing a hose on to a tapered pipe so that it fits snuggly. A spirit level helps tell if the feet need to be adjusted. You can tell when it is working properly; the clothes get washed and the floor does not flood.

The most difficult part turns out to be the sheer handling of the weight and tomorrow I will get glides to help move the machine in to its housing.

Climate of Fear

Kitchen Cabinet review of threats

1) The climate is going to collapse if I drive over to see my mum, so I'd better stay indoors and eat turnips for the rest of my life, except when going out to pay tax.

2) Terrorism. We'd better not say by whom, or how this particular source is a competitor ideology got up in the garments of a religion. Even though it has been documented for the last thirty years at least.

3) Banking Crisis. There's no money and there won't be for at least the next 150 years. That's not a threat - it has already happened.

4) Health scares. Did you know fat is contagious?

So pfft to any measly threat of invasion. Don't I realize that eco-famine, unpredictable violence and the Dreaded Lurgi, plus the country being flat-broke, are going to get me long before the police can suicide me for being insufficiently obsequious or out after curfew without offering them a blow-job?



I was going to suggest knitting something for comfort, but having looked at my last attempt, another suggestion might be better.

One thing restores a sense of control over the immediate threatening chaos. Soup. That is why witches make it in a cauldron. The cauldron represents the world so if you've got control over the cauldron, that's one tiny model of the world back in working order.

However, a freezing river fog has descended and if anybody thinks I'm mucking about trying to light twigs in air as wet as a haddock's handbag, they are very much mistaken. Soup will be indoors and a level of abstraction will be used to liken ordinary pans to ritual vessels.

Vegetable soup is the simplest, according to what you have laying around. I happened to have a butternut squash, four small onions and a lonely cooking apple.

The easiest way is to roast everything before it goes in the soup as this intensifies the flavour. Cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds, then lay it flat-side down in a little oil on a roasting tray. Surround with roughly-chopped onions. Roast for about 15 minutes on a high heat; remove the onions to the soup cauldron before they frazzle. Check how cooked the squash is. The chances are it will need another ten minutes, turned over on to its round side. Add the peeled apple slices at his point. Apple roasts very quickly.

When the squash and the apple are done, scoop out the soft flesh and add them to the onions, along with any oil which might be hanging around in the roasting pan. To turn them in to soup all that is needed is water, seasonings and spices to your satisfaction. You might want to add vegetable stock, depending on your tastes. (I like it).

Now, as squash can be fibrous it is preferable to liquidize the soup with a stick blender. This matters less with starchy vegetables such as carrots and potatoes which will settle for being mashed. If you use a stick blender it is important to add cold water to the veg because hot soup .... well, I'm sure some clever-clogs already worked out how hot liquid affects plastic-sleeve blenders.

You now also have a pile of squash seeds. You can have a go at planting them next spring or roast them as a snack. Wash them and pat them dry, turn them in oil and roast on a high heat for 15 minutes until about half have popped. They aren't too bad, but I can't see them challenging other snack foods. Too husky.



The purpose of the soup ritual is to provide a breathing space against the onslaught of the times. Perhaps it is an illusion, but often it seems that something, or somebody, is trying to scare us out of our wits in order to gain our acquiescence to any number of repressive measures.

Down at the old Bullen Bush: Sloe Gin

This is a bullen bush. You have only a few days left to find one - usually on the edge of a park or wasteland - and harvest the berries. They've had all the sun they are going to get and now have the maximum sweetness a sloe achieves, which isn't very much. The frosts should have encouraged the interior cells to burst, which is quicker than mucking about with a fork. When the berries are perfectly ripe they will slide off the branch between the wicked thorns, which saves having to pick out their little stalks. As the wind has combed the leaves off the bushes now it is easier to see where the knife-thorns are.



Take care when gathering the them; blackthorn is notorious for spikes which easily turn septic. It is not a suitable job for children. Always promise the bush that you'll plant a few of its cherries in a new hedge and wash hands very carefully when you get back. I'm surprised it isn't more widely used as a security plant as it is graceful and doesn't go dropping dead every five minutes. When the leaves are off it is easy to see its Gothic architecture and it would be a simple matter to prune it in to shape. The dry twigs are said to burn with a bright smokeless fire.



Wash the berries, discard any remaining stalks or leaves, and either freeze them in 8-ounce portions or get ready with a lotta bottles. 8oz is approximately the volume of 40cl. It is the interstices between the berries which determines the amount of sugar you can cram in. This is chosen purely because the bottles I'm using happen to be 70cl.



For the next trick you will require two 70cl gin bottles; one full, one empty, and a calibrated jug as this recipe works by volume. As you are going to add berries and sugar the most basic safe supermarket spirit is suitable. A funnel will help enormously with getting the sugar in to the bottles; use a paper cone if someone has run off with yours.

Having either set about the berries with a fork or open-frozen them to burst the cells, post 40cl or 8oz of berries in to the empty bottle, pour over 35cl of gin and top up with sugar, then replace the caps carefully to be quite sure they don't dribble. Visit the bottles every few days to give them a shake and help the sugar dissolve. They'll be ready for the New Year party or can be laid down for a year.



As I had a pair of 75cl jars I made a thicker syrup and buried a cinnamon stick in. This will be suitable as base for other recipes where a fruity spiced syrup is required e.g. punches, pudding sauces, or to sweeten oil and vinegar dressings. The proportions here are 40cl berries, 35cl gin, one cinnamon stick and a great deal of sugar to fill up the space. Some people like other flavourings such as cloves.

The berries should steep until the New Year, but they can be tested at Christmas. It is best used, in my opinion, as a spritzer base as the berries and the sugar are a sure recipe for a terrible headache if drunk to excess. Sloe gin can be laid down for a year and many authorities think it should be, while others think the best thing to do is ignore the sloes and use damsons or make blackberry vodka instead. Maximum keeping time is 3 years.

Approximate proportions:
A shade more than half the volume of the bottle should be filled with berries, then covered by a more precise half-bottle of gin. The amount of sugar is determined by the displaced space between the berries and is roughly one-third of the total volume.

For anyone who has not handled the berries before: do not attempt to eat them as they have a gravelly stone. No matter what you might have heard they are not suitable for eating. Yes, I have done the experiments. If the gin comes out very thick, sieve it through a tea-strainer. If it comes out fairly thin, consider running it through a coffee filter paper to clarify it. The sugar may look like a lot, but it is the sugar which draws out the sloe flavouring in to the gin.

This preparation uses very little time beyond the collecting of the berries, and that counts as exercise. It produces sloe gin at roughly two-thirds the cost of a commerical bottle.

Poppy

Q. What is missing from this picture?

A. Poppy seed heads.

Each year flower arrangers grow a number of plants for harvest very late in the year where the main aim is to get dried stems which will stand in a vase and can be sprayed gold or dipped in glitter.



There is an element of luck involved; the fragile stems often break when handled or the quilted heads go the ugly shape of tumours instead of the magical little pumpkins with their mathematically perfect but whimsical shells.

Ceramic sculpture of poppy seed-head

What you don't expect is either some self-appointed DEA person who is supposed to harassing poppy farmers in Afghanistan, or some lazy-arse local who can't be bothered to grow their own poppies, to come and snip the heads off while one is out. The chilling thing is that somebody has been observing this patch of flowers carefully as they aren't easily visible. There are only a handful of people who know the plants are there, so this breeds distrust of neighbours. Unjust, but inevitable.

The thief has come in with a bag and pair of secateurs and systematically ruined the future display. The two pods in the picture are the only survivors. I doubt this will give enough seeds for a colony next year, and anyway, there is an argument for not growing them if it attracts undesirables.

The sooner we get this drug regulation sorted out and the Afghani farmers paid properly for their crop, the sooner the flower arrangers of the world can take down the barbed wire and machine-gun nest which I now feel obliged to install.

They aren't pinching my figs.

Reader's Wife's Big Jugs

Pay attention, the following could save your life.

A most useful object in the kitchen is the glass jug, made of borosilicate glass to withstand extremely high or low temperatures. Tough, easy to clean, hygienic in its impervious surface, elegant in its easy-to-handle functional design, it is the angelic expression of industrial magic.

But it's not immortal. The rim of the glass, particularly the pouring lip of the jug, can eventually develop cracks. If that happens shards of glass break off. Invisible glass knives.

This eventually happened one day in my gravy, very nearly my grave-y

I made the gravy as normal and poured it in to the glass jug, giving it a whack with a spoon. The jug was very old by then - a wedding present IIRC, those were the days lass - and must have developed tiny fractures which finally joined up and cracked slivers off the pouring lip in to the meat juices.

At the table I poured on the gravy and tucked in.

As the sliver went in to my tongue I first thought "bone?" and then looked down at my dinner to suddenly recognize glittering gravel poking up as the gravy-pool subsided. I opened my mouth and let the gravel tip out. With a flash of self-preservation I realized that it was important not to spit, not to move in any way which would result in the glass going further in to my tongue. I was able to pull out the main spike, a wicked flechette, and blood began to ooze out and drip on to the tablecloth.

Mr Raft must have also had a psychic experience because instead of jumping up or shouting, he moved very smoothly, realizing that I wasn't in a position to explain. Despite the horrific looks of it, once the main culprit was out, the rest was a matter of very carefully rinsing so that no other splinters of glass were left in my mouth and none got down my throat.


The moral of the story is: always run a finger round the rim on glass jugs, checking for un-evenness or broken slivers, hold it up to the light to give it a brief visual inspection. If it is in the least bit damaged, buy a new jug because there may be microscopic invisible stresses in the material.

It is also fair to point out that this is the only time such a materials failure has ever happened in all the years I've been using glass jugs, and it might not have happened at all if I'd been more careful about using wooden spoons instead of carelessly batting around with metal ones.

Wooden spoons and big jugs, that's what you want.

It's only a coffee-table, Ingrid.

A coffee table needed cleaning and polishing. I read that vegetable oil was as good a cleaner as anything else. That didn't sound right, so I checked online and blundered in to a huge professional argument where people bandy words such as "disaster" and the word 'Philistine' hisses beneath the genteel rhetoric of furniture restoration.

The major controversy is the Conservators -v- Modernists. The Conservators' motto is "nothing you can't reverse" which sounds sensible. They do not like anything in fine wood finishing which has happened since 1930, with the exception of the vacuum cleaner with a soft brush. They are such purists, they do not like what happened in the entire Victorian period. Do not say "linseed oil" to these people, except in relation to cricket bats.

The Modernist thinking is that technology has moved on, and while material ought to be matched to period in restoration, there's nothing spiritually wrong in using new wax and solvent blends, especially as they are extremely consistent products which produce stable, tough surfaces even when applied by amateurs. Not every house has to be a museum.

What they were broadly agreed about was that the third, and perhaps the largest group of consumers of wood cleaners and polishes - that's us, householders - are chumps who have been had over for years by polish manufacturers, and deserve to live in a world of chipboard and plastic laminates for our crimes against furniture.

First distinguish cleaning, which is the matter of removing dust or other things you don't want on your furniture, from polishing, which is either smoothing the existing surface or adding a removable coating which acts as an ablative shield.

The vacuum cleaner with a soft brush is a boon. The aim is to remove the dust. If the surface of the piece is water-soluble then it gets wiped with a dry lint-free cloth, but a waxed surface can be wiped with a slightly damp cloth, if it is dried immediately. A very dirty item - perhaps reclaimed from a garage - may have to be washed. The Conservator's choice is Vulpex liquid soap. If it's more difficult than that, especially if you suspect you have a piece which has been French polished, then don't muck about with it. If it turns out to be a water-sensitive surface and you'll end up causing even more damage. Leave it to a specialist and remind yourself that furniture should reflect life.

Anyway, what's wrong with a few scratches, rings or mottling? So long as things are not sticky with spilt drinks, it is a marketing hype that surfaces have to be mirror-perfect and it will drive you bonkers trying to achieve it. Also bollocks are terms like 'feed your wood' and 'prevent waxy build-up"; these are emotional hooks which are designed to get fools like me to part with pounds for a product which costs pennies and may ultimately be more of a problem by the time it has reacted with the existing finish, got in to the wood and discoloured it, or turned gloopy and stuck to the dust in the air. The simplest way to look after your furniture is to vacuum more frequently and wipe over with a nice dry, lint-free duster. That's it. Job jobbed for the most part. Go on, go out and enjoy the money you just saved.

However, you might want to keep a household polish as a protective coating, so which one?

Number one hatred was any polish with silicones in it. They make dusters glide but they get in to any wood finish and make it cloudy. When the Conservators take over the world, these products will be treated like Class A drugs, available only on prescription to automotive workshops. Even the Modernists don't like these in the domestic environment; they regard them as escaping convicts, just waiting to get in to good pieces and ruin them. They were also agreed that they didn't trust the cream polishes which might involve water. For one thing you don't know exactly what is in them, for another any 'wet' finish, whether oil or water, is likely to be softer for longer and will make dust stick to it. In certain situations a cloth with a smear of oil can be used to clean a surface in the same manner as cleaning make-up off the skin, but the oil will have to be polished away immediately. They didn't care for aerosols; you don't know how they are going to behave over time but it's a fair bet that this will be 'badly'.

The major agreement was that furniture - except French polished and lacquer pieces which are already finished - is best protected by a thin layer of a hard wax paste which lays on the surface can can be removed. That's the point; you revive the sheen by rubbing away a thin layer of wax until the coat is all gone, then you re-coat. Polishing in the sense of applying a coat should only be necessary twice a year. That's why you don't get waxy build-up; you are always removing it.

The formulations thereafter illustrate the religious differences. The Cons will expect a varnish (based on oils) as colour topped off with a hardened beeswax coat. The Mods will point out the advantages of polyurethane stains and sealants, protected by a coat of microcrystalline wax. In general, the modern formulations tend to be harder and are easy to use.

It isn't possible to make a modern microcrystalline wax polish at home economically or even safely. It means mucking about with dissolving petroleum-derived wax powder and other waxes in toluene. It's much quicker and cheaper to just buy a tin of Renaissance wax and that way you'll get a stable, standardized, repeatable product which won't scramble your brain. Yes, you'll have to rub it on, wait for it to dry, then buff it with a clean cloth, but it won't be difficult, it only takes a few minutes. Fans of the Renaissance range argue that it is even less reactive than traditional polishes, so fulfilling the requirement of not changing anything.

If you are a stickler for tradition be careful of the marketing on some polishes. Yes, there is bound to be beeswax in a product, but there is dispute about what else is allowable in there. The general objection is that things which make the polish easy to spread also make it a soft goo which never dries properly, is likely to penetrate the wood and change the colour, and will darken over time. This is disputed by the linseed and soap fans, who say that if it was good enough for Queen Victoria to have in her polishes, it's good enough for us.

If you like household alchemy, this is the simplest recipe for beeswax paste polish.
Melt 3 parts beeswax with 1 part carnauba wax.
Remove from heat, stir in 3 parts of turpentine.

The carnauba wax is crucial; it is what makes the coating hard. You could also add a few drops of lavendar oil for fragrance. When heating wax, don't do it directly; use a basin in a pan of water. If you have one, a slow cooker makes the perfect bath which keeps the water even and below boiling point. This recipe contains no linseed oil in deference to the conservation controversy, however best-selling Sheraton Beeswax Balsam, for example, contains linseed oil and has many fans.

Having compared the technologies, I'll treat myself to a Care Kit, if I can find a UK stockist.