The 52 week salad challenge: several weeks on!

Oops! I got distracted by actually doing, y'know? And I have, honest, and I mostly took pictures while I was doing. Only fair, innit!

So, week 2, I nearly got behind. A little supermarket pot of basil was crying out to me to be rescued, so I bought it, for 70p. It must have been last year's, because there were only two stalks, but they both looked like mature plants, well, almost, so I put them in their own little pots, cut them down to have an easier time, and they're both really happy still - well, mostly happy, I think I didn't quite take off enough leaves.

What I *did* take off, I combined with the sprouted mung beans, and ate. Go me!

This is the little basil plant, ready to be divided.

Done! There's a lot of new growth showing on them now, I'm sure they're going to make it, no basil plant funerals here any time soon. The cuttings are sitting in water at the moment, hopefully they'll take root, and I'll have some more. When I'm ready, I'll buy a couple of supermarket pots and make a little basil forest, but not yet. Happy with this, tho!

The sprouts from the first week went really well with the basil leaves, and this is how they looked together with some chili sauce - thats from Approved Foods, bless them, I haven't grown my own chilis yet.

This week, the project has been to grow some cress seeds - I confess, the seeds were Best Before 2009, but they did eventually sprout.

This is how they looked a few days ago. Today (I'll include an update on the next week's) they're looking more like cress, but I don't like it nearly as much as the sprouting - I'm quite prepared to add sprouting to my weekly schedule, but this isn't great, though I might feel better about it if I used a little layer of compost, rather than kitchen towel **shruggy smiley**

All in all, although I might be one of the least active on this challenge, I'm really pleased I'm taking part - must remember to post over there at the end of the month. And this week's challenge? I have some lettuce seeds. I suspect they're as old as the cress seeds, but we'll see :)

The Energy Now Expo 2012 Exhibition

The lovely Wittgenstein has been chatting to me about smallholding, and when I followed what she was saying around the web, I found The Energy Now Expo 2012 exhibition, to be held at the Malvern Showground in Worcestershire in mid-February.

And looking at the exhibitor list:
http://www.energynowexpo.co.uk/VisitorInformation/ExhibitorList
its fascinating - biomass, anaerobic digestion, hydropower, risk management (uh oh, I wonder how that applies?), the Dulas Coop (the commercial subsidiary of the Centre for Alternative Technology, bless their woolly socks).

It sounds a fantastic place to be, even though there is the odd bank in there, as well as a government minister There's a conference too ...

I'm absolutely sure that some smallholding technologies are suitable for houses - heat exchange, for instance, or any solution to using less fuel. I won't be able to go, sadly, but I'll be watching the news space.

The 52 week salad challenge begins

The challenge is from VP at Veg Plotting, which is a *really* professional blog, with huge amounts of information, both on there and referenced.

http://vegplotting.blogspot.com/2012/01/52-week-salad-challenge-begins.html

And now that we're at the New Year, it seems appropriate to take on a challenge, a practical one anyway - I have enough challenges that need just online or written work to fill a book of their own, which is very aargh.

Anyway, I've Commented on the post I've linked to there, and I did indeed put some mung beans into soak. I'm going to root about (geddit?) on VP's site now to look for quick instructions on sprouting - I'm fairly sure I remember how, but better check, poor little mung beans, it would be sad to do it and drown them and have to throw them away ...

I confess, I hadn't researched the posts carefully enough: I was going to grow in this, just a food tray from a supermarket. But I read the sprouting post, and it seemed the drainage would be a nightmare. The label, by the way, is that classic of the green world, a piece of a plastic bottle. And the beans themselves are on the right, soaking in a little glass jar that held pesto (to which I am addicted - this jar is from the Waitrose version, a nectar indeed).

Then I thought of this, which I bought from Zimbabwe more than ten years ago - I wouldn't normally do that, but I've since had a couple of presents of much more dramatic woven stuff, and a big basket also from Zim, so at least a single use before I get something more appropriate is okay. Though its certainly not two inches high (EDIT - but that doesn't matter because it won't be stacked, d'oh!).

This big basket, it cost about 50p, which even at the time was a bargain. Absolutely unique, especially because of the bent twig for the handle. I bought it from an ordinary little stall at the roadside, which is a great way to buy - *all* of the money goes straight to the woman who made it, after all.

This big square one was a gift a couple of years ago. I think the "crazy patchwork" effect might mean its a more Western approach, but its still hand made by someone ...

I've photographed the reverse as well, as the handfinishing using natural objects is so remarkable - you can see where the stalks or strands or whatever they are have been chopped off in the finishing work, so it will sit straight on a table. Gorgeous.

This one is more accomplished, its made of softer strands, more tightly woven, some of its been dyed and then woven into patterns. Its less striking because of that, but if you look closely (at the rim, on the right hand side) you can just see that its not concentric rings - its a spiral! Thats a lot more impressive, and a lot cooler :) :) :)



This business of whether the sprouts are supposed to root or not is a bit confusing: if its a tray you're using, its good to give the sprouts something to root to; if you're using a bag, you should move the sprouts around to stop them rooting ... I think chaos theory (otherwise known as suck it and see) might operate here.

A bag seems the best alternative long term, but I'll be using the little Zim basket for this helping. I think I might end up actually *knitting* a bag, not sure yet.

This post seems to be much more about basketwork, but you know what, there's an important principle there - how to use those dramatic things we buy on holiday! The little one I'm using to sprout the seeds, thats been my bedside tray for ages, so things don't fall off my chair. The lovely big square one can do that for a while, thats fine. Usefulness!

Wish me luck with the sprouting!

I made my own mincemeat **happy dance**

Oh dear, here's another "consequences of Christmas" blog ...

I love mincemeat. But in the shops, its either crap, or the same price per weight as gold dust. So, I thought, I'll make my own. How hard can it be, in Jeremy Clarkson's immortal words?

Not very, is the answer. I looked at a few recipes online, made a (mental) note of the main ingredients, compared them to what I had in my storecupboard (metaphorically speaking - its a CD rack, the space is long and narrow). And hey presto!

I soaked a full bag of Sainsbury Basics mixed fruit in the juice of 3 lemons (Aldi's best, they must have been waxed, so I just squoze them to get the juice out), and glugged in a miniature of whisky from my tour of the Hebrides a million years ago - Lagavulin? Not sure now, that bit was a while ago...

Then, one fine morning, I chucked the mix in a pan, followed up with mixed spice, some chopped maraschino cherries (oops, ate the rest as finger food at the beginning of December), couple of tablespoons of sugar, some lumps of vegetable suet, and maybe 100g of ground almonds. Let it bubble once it was all together.

I had a taste, and its sooooo good. The suet (even vegetarian suet!) gives it that thick taste, where it slides over your tongue, and the almonds give it that sense that its overloaded with evil things that you love - like its all overflowed the sauce and become gritty. But in fact, almost all of it is incredibly good for you, and whats 3 tablespoons of sugar between maybe 20 helpings anyway?

There's still a little bit left, and from now on, my own mincemeat is a must-do for Christmas.

Some green reasons not to burn a pan ...

As the saying goes, oops!

I wasn't doing badly at all. I needed to switch the fridge freezer off while I was away over Christmas, so I needed to finally make blackberry jam from the 2.5 kilos of frozen blackberries I'd gathered over the past months. I started two days before I left - what can go wrong? I have a proper stainless steel cauldron-type affair, a mahoosive great wooden spoon to stir, all fine and dandy.

Except it wouldn't set! And I was doing it after I finished work and after I'd eaten, so no time to boil it up again *and* wait for it to cool enough to strain it and put it into the jars I'd so carefully sterilised. Do take the careful bit with a pinch of salt, but it was certainly Good Enough.

Anyway, on the evening of the next day, the last before I was due to travel 300 miles, I boiled it up again. I was much more enthusiastic about my definition of a rolling boil, and I thought to myself, I know, I'll reduce it a bit by boiling, that should help.

It helped so well, in fact, that I couldn't strain it to make blackberry jelly at all - it just sat there on the purpose-made strainer on the purpose-made stand, looking ridiculous. What saved me was that that amount of boiling meant that the blackberries themselves had disintegrated, and their texture is what I dislike about blackberry jam - so, with them gone, blackberry jam becomes an elixir! Especially since it was gathered with my own fair hands from countryside areas, or town parks at least 30 yards from a road.

What about the pan? Well, I didn't stir the jam enough when it was doing its determined boil, and I burned it. Certainly didn't have time to do anything about it before I left for my holibob, and since I came back, its literally been pushed to the back burner, gathering dust and other awful items very nicely, please and thankyou.

Today is my first day back at work, and even someone as bad at housework as me eventually has to do something with a burned pan. And this is the result of only five minutes work below:

The ordinary sticky stuff is cleaned off, and about half the burned stuff is scraped off with a knife - I started on it with wire wool, and realised that life is far too short for that, so I went in with the emergency equipment ...







So, the green reasons for not burning a pan:
- in extreme cases, you have to throw the dratted thing away. This is not green.
- you're deprived of the use of a fairly expensive piece of kit for quite a while, if you're anything like me. Inefficiency is not green either.
- you have to put a lot of energy into restoring something that shouldn't have been damaged in the first place, if you'd been, say, following a recipe carefully **whistles innocently**
- you've wasted not only your own energy, but you've wasted fuel (gas, electricity, from whatever source) as well.
- you've also wasted the food that got burned onto the pan - in this case, blackberries, sugar and lemon juice.
- you might affect the flavour of what you've managed to save! I haven't, thankfully, but I might have.

And truly, although I'm already in a "back to business" sort of mode, I wish everyone a healthy, wealthy and happy New Year.


PS - please, please, tell me I'm not alone in sabotaging my green efforts in this way .... anybody got any confessions they'd like to make?