tasty and natural

I was surprised to see elder growing here, I had imagined that the climate would have been too hot and dry, but I was wrong.  They were flowering as I arrived at the convent and my hosts  had already made elderflower syrup this year.  We chatted about other uses and ended up gathering bafulls of flowers that we set to dry as an ingredient for herbal tea, either on its own or to blend with other herbs.  

The plants cling to the wettest places and are found alongside streams and in damp valleys where they can thrive.  We drove out into the countryside and spent an enjoyable couple of hours harvesting and chatting in the warm spring sunshine.  Whilst chatting, it transpired that they had packets of seeds to sprout, that they had never dared to try, so were excited to hear that it was something that I regularly did.  That evening we set to soak three different sprouts, mung beans which give chinese bean sprouts, sunflower seeds and cress.  A week later they were nicely sprouted and we enjoyed them in salads accompanied by fresh leaves and shoots from the garden.

seeds put to soak for sprouting

elderflowers ready to dry

combing elderflowers of their stalks

rocket stove cooking

I love my Rocket Stove.  I’d seen them here and there before, mainly home made affairs, cobbled together with old baked bean cans and old oil canisters and I’d had it in mind to build one of my own one day.  In Dorset I was caught with my guard down, at the Scythe Fair, where I saw a professionally forged, easily transportable, robust affair which I bought it without a second thought.  

How right I was.

Since getting back to France I use it most of the time for cooking meals, not just for myself but for four or five people at a time.  Mainly pot meals that require simmering for a while, but also fry ups and dishes that require a proper amount of heat.

Lighting it was tricky to start and then getting the burn temperature right.  I’ve since improved my wood drying technique and shan’t ever need to cut down another tree to cook with it.  It’s a joy to gather those fallen twigs and small branches and know that they have a serious role to play and also to be able to cook on free, easily gathered material at almost a moments notice.  I’ll need to be more prepared for when the weather turns and keep a good supply of well dried twigs available for cooking.

Thinking about how much wood I would use on a traditional fire, or the gas I would burn to achieve the same result is absurd.  A small bundle of kindling is enough to cook dinner and provide a nice cup of tea to wash it all down.  I’ll be heating my shower water with it soon and filling my hot water bottle with it when the nights get cold.  The gas stove will always be a welcome alternative for when the weather is foul, an oven is needed or speed is of the essence, but ongoing, my rocket stove cooking is becoming an integral part of my daily routine.  

The wheelbarrow in the photos is a makeshift wind deflector, self standing, easily positionable and has many other uses.  Ideal

dinner in the making

the twigs are burning within the metal tubing

a mini furnace

a near complete burn with no smoke and hardly any ash

MMMmmmmmm  lentil, tomato and nettle stew nearly done

leaves and bin bags

How do you fill bin bags with leaves easily when there is no one to hold the bag open?

Here’s how....

find a cardboard box that fits inside the bag whilst in the shape of a box

pop out the bottom of the box, flatten and fold the box to get it inside the bag, then reform the box
fold the top of the bag over to keep the box open and in shape

fill the bag with the help of 'big hands' pieces of scrap wood that are used as large tongs to lift
large quantities of leaves at a time.
Fill the bag, allowing enough spare to tie off, remove cardboard box and start
all over again

one tidy village.  Thanks for the leafmould Vieuzos

revisits to Nic and Brigitte and on....

And then to Nic’s for a week, more of a catch up visit and to see how he’s getting on with the various projects that he has on the go.  I haven’t been to the tower for a couple of years so it’ll be interesting to see the changes.

In fact Nic has been concentrating on another property he has in the village with the idea of selling it on to finance further developments of the main building, that way he can do it properly without scrimping to get decent materials.  He has spent most of his time refurbishing the house, which is coming close to being ready to go on the market.

It has been a great week,  sorting out the ground outside and sowing grass seed for a lawn, scraping ceilings in preparation for a coat of paint, putting up stair banisters.  He enjoys me being here as I take over the kitchen and give him a good break from cooking, which he finds tedious and struggles with inspiration for meals.  I’ve loved throwing together meals with minimal ingredients on an ever more healthy theme.  Each time I visit, we find that our knowledge of food has increased and we both err towards a more natural, home produced diet.  This time cows milk products have been struck off the list, goat and sheep cheeses and yoghurts are still allowed, the reasoning being that unless very locally produced, the poor cows are now fed an increasingly unnatural diet of grains, industrial food processing waste, live inside for most of the year and are kept going with antibiotics and a range of productivity enhancing drugs.  The natural grass diet of a cow is becoming a rarity rather than the norm.

Enough of that for now.

I continue writing ten days later, having not had chance to use the wifi before moving on.  

The last week at Brigitte’s was wonderful, so nice to return and help a lovely lady and good to see that she is well on the mend after a winter of illness.  The aim was to help get the garden up and running again, but I was beaten to the post by Gareth who had arrived earlier in the year for a couple of weeks  but has decided to stay, almost indefinitely by the sounds of things, and is busy settling into the region.  

Gareth is a great gardener and he’d gotten most of it under control, a botanist by training and brilliant at wild plant foraging, so as you can imagine, our conversations were in-depth, endless and fascinating for the two of us, both learning loads from each other.  I don’t think I have eaten so many different wild plants in such a short period ever, mainly a tasting, but occasionally more of a meal, including the ever popular nettle soup and several almost completely wild salads.  

We got on and did several jobs that were much easier done with a couple of pairs of hands.  Replacing the roof on a sun terrace awning, clearing and strimming an enormous patch of semi wild land near the property and burning loads of garden waste, chatting on for most of the time. A third helper arrived too, Trina, a canadian, who helped out more with spring cleaning and sorting out the cellar and summer house whilst I was there.  It was as interesting week language wise, with Brigitte and I being accustomed to speaking french to each other whilst Gareth and Trina in the early learning stages, we swapped back and forth between english and french continually which was great for everyone.  

I was sad to leave after a week, two or three would have been much more agreeable, but I was on a promise and have had a long long drive to get where I am now.  It’s not that far on the map, as the crow flies, but climbing mountain roads takes time in a van like Percy, going up is slow and down is no better, gently does it so as not to overheat the breaks - it smells terrible and is slightly worrying when smoke billows from the wheels when you stop, so a low gear is more the order of the day.  1200m was the first pass then a long descent before climbing almost immediately to 850m and down again.  

I’m somewhere in the Ardeche, south of Lyon, high in the hills with marvelous views, helping a Belgian family build their first ever straw bale house that has only just begun.  I’ll tell you more next time......

finding things

Perhaps it’s time to change tack a bit here on the blog, focus a bit more on lifestyle than travel as I appear to be settling down for a while.

I’ve spent plenty of time in Vieuzos on the land, musing and dreaming and trying to decide what to do, how, when and in what order.  Until I am actually there I don’t think I can really get stuck in, but I have made some interesting discoveries.

There are an amazing variety of plants growing in this abandoned plot, a good few of them good forager fare:

nettles

dandelion

hairy bitter cress

I tried to get a close up but it obviously didn’t work.  So here’s a link to a fascinating blog that explains how it can be used and has some helpful pictures to help with identification  http://huntergathercook.typepad.com/huntergathering_wild_fres/2013/01/hairy-bittercress-pesto.html

lime

beech

fig

apple

pear

sloe

elder - flower and of course berry

wild strawberry

blackberry (a few too many)

to name a few.

I really must make a list and make sure that they are well used in season.

Another time I started clearing the brambles a bit, in the hope of finding some hardstanding to put a shed on.  I chopped and pulled at branches for several hours, though with the amount of fallen debris, had difficulty in reaching solid ground.  I did, however find the remains of a car, some pig sties and enough abandoned knick-knacks to start a museum.....

pig sties

apple juice

Apple juice is something that I have wondered about for ages, how is it made, what do you have to do to the apples before they are pressed and how much do you get for your harvest?  I expect that commercial presses are much more high tech, but for home use what we did here was superb.  Three decent baskets of windfalls, none too bruised, the wasp and bird eaten ones are fine so long as it remains fairly clean.  A fairly robust mincer a small multipurpose press and some sterilized bottles.

We shredded the apples

Tipped them into the press

Added the top of the press with additional blocks of wood to help maintain pressure

turned the screw threaded head until the juice started to flow

continued till winding until it was too difficult and there was no more juice to flow filling bottles as we went

Opened the press, chucked the pressed apple ‘cake’ onto the compost, hosed everything down and left it to dry in the sunshine.

Easy.

fat hen

Chenopodium album is the botanical name, in england we call it ‘fat hen”, there are probably numerous other local names, but this is the most common.    The reason being that it was used to fatten hens for the table.  In france it is known as “chenopode” and is used just the same.

young Fat Hen leaves

A combination of prior knowledge, a handy reference book that Aimee and Marc had with them and some of Marc’s archaeological facts have been combined to tell you these facts.

Fat hen plants love colonising disturbed soil, so since civilisations began, this plant has been growing close to humans.  It grows quickly, providing plentiful fresh green leaves that are rich in vitamin A, calcium, potassium, and phosphorus, they are also a good source of protein, trace minerals, B-complex vitamins, vitamin C,  iron, and fiber. These have been harvested, eaten raw and cooked, until recent times, when larger leafed spinaches and leaf beets became more popular and stole the show.  After many centuries of culinary participation, fat hen became a weed.

close up stems of drying seed

A resurgence in foraging and eating the free bounty that nature provides has us (well some of us) leaving this delicious plant to grow amongst the vegetables and around the the garden for later use.  It can be harvested from spring through to the first frosts and eaten raw in mixed leaf salads or prepared in a similar fashion to spinach, steamed or sauteed and served hot with butter and salt.  By harvesting the younger leaves, the plant then shoots again to produce more tender growing tips again and again and again.  Stopped only by drought, frost or being weeded out completely. Even then, it goes to make good compost.

The leaves of fat hen are not the only part of the plant that is eaten.  The seeds too, were eaten fresh from the plant and also dried and stored for use throughout the leaner winter months.  Archaeological evidence shows that an early settler of the British Isles, perfectly preserved in a peat bog, had been fed a meal of fat hen seeds amongst other things before he was sacrificed all those years ago.

a large clump with new seed forming

There is ample fat hen going to seed around the garden at Nicolas’ so we have been harvesting it by the handful, dry roasting it in a frying pan to remove any residual moisture before storing it away in sealable glass jars for the winter.  Aimee has been adding plenty to the bread that she bakes every morning, giving it a good nutty crunch.  It also finds itself in the homemade salad dressing, which goes very nicely with a bitter leaf salad and any other dish that we see fit.  It seems a shame to let such a flavoursome and nutritious freebie go to waste when it is so easy to use.

young archaeologists find

Marc looking for treasure

Still at Nicolas’.  Marc phoned to see if he and his wife could come and have a look round the tower and possibly stay for a night or two.  They have just set off on a trip walking to Milan, Italy, then on to Georgia, after an interlude in India (from Milan) for some archaeological work that Marc has already lined up.  

Aimee, Marcs’ wife, a trained ceramic artist, now prefers to pot and is hugely interested in herbalism and has a fantastic knowledge of plants, both cultivated and wild, that are of use in nourishment and healthcare.  We got on like a house on fire, sharing knowledge by the bucketload.

shiny new steps and excavation holes

We got through so many tasks, refurbishing the chicken run in its entirety, varnishing steps, harvesting more garden produce, collecting sand from the quarry - no mean feat as the red sandstone rock has to be hacked from a small cliff and loaded into a trailer before being carted back to the tower.  It is later reduced to sand with the use of a   sledgehammer and more brute force.  

Marc was challenged to use his archaelolgical skills to find the corner of an old building that once stood on the site.  It started with a small trench, that got larger and substantially deeper than I had expected.  A second trench was later started in the same location that I had discovered the foundation of the wall two summers ago.  Marc dug and scraped for several days whilst Amiee and I got on with our respective tasks.  My quest with brambles and nettles is truly never ending.

siesta time

The young couple fitted in wonderfully, both at ease with the rustic living.  It was probably much easier here than their last place of work, an educational centre in Devon that demonstrated life during Anglo Saxon times.  

been shelling

Escot Village   LINK    is a village built in the style of, with the tools available at the time, in an effort to demonstrate how life was back in the day.  It’s impressive hearing the stories of what life was like and how our ancestors coped with day to day life, not only before electricity and running water, but before potatoes, tomatoes and many of the foodstuffs that we now take for granted.  Who knows how long our current, privileged way of live will last and what will take its place.  Evolution is an amazing energy.

A week passes before the two of them decide to move on.  Marc has made some amazing finds, including plenty of Roman tile pieces, although no definite corner to the building.  We have eaten our fill of fat hen, harvested apples, pears and blackberries galore from the countryside.  Had a couple of great cycle ride excursions and many interesting discussions.  Long live the village people.

impressive menu options