Unfitted kitchens and jam cupboards.

Personally, I like kitchens to feel unfitted - a friendly slightly chaotic jumble of loved crockery, pictures, furniture and - depending on the time of year - garden/gathered fruit or veg waiting to be made into jam or frozen for the less abundant months. I think all the kitchens I've ever owned or shared have had these elements, even the more squalid rental places - maybe not the ex-student share in West Norwood . . . there were natural things in that kitchen, but not things one would want to eat, raw, cooked or otherwise . . .

Our current kitchen is the best so far: large, heated by a sturdy wood stove, interestingly shadowy and cosy in the winter months and very cool in summer. We added flea market sofas, the table that has been with us in various houses these last twenty years or so, and built basic units adding recycling emporium cupboard doors and marble work tops. The huge and ancient dresser came from le bon coin, a very useful second hand site, and was said to have been hauled out from a chateau in the area - true or not, it certainly has great age and is so heavy I doubt it will ever move from its new home.

The latest addition is the strangely slim and tall dark wood cupboard which now resides next to the fireplace. I spotted it in 'Aspire' a charity emporium in our local town, and knew immediately it had a mission to become our jam storage facility. This years crop is filling its shelves: blackcurrant, strawberry, peach, spiced blackberry and marmalade. Next up: pomegranate and fig.

Peach bottling - experimental....

Free food: post number . . .?

I know I've blogged about this many times, but each late summer/early autumn it always amazes me as to how much stuff gets left to rot on trees/bushes around here.
I keep forgetting to take a collecting bag with me on walks - blackberries are in super abundance this year. These plums were stripped from a few trees just down the road, and no one else was interested apart from a few blackbirds. Next up, pears, occasionally apples, and then finally, pomegranates - the finest fruit and utterly ignored here.
Climate heating is definitely making its mark as these fruits are about a month ahead in their ripening time - the jam prep something I usually associate with bright but slightly nippy November days, not late September/early October . . .
Dog walk beckons, this time with fruit bag.

This blog

I've been writing it since 2009 - a lot of posts, a lot of life passed by.
Most of my current writing (novel) is set in post-apocalyptic 2073, and one of the reasons for the world's - or rather its human societies'- imaginary cataclysm is the internet's demise.
In my tale, this particular event occurs in 2038, mainly due to someone attempting to upload a half-hour film of their cat trying to open the fridge - the final straw, in effect.
I suspect that the denouement will be somewhat closer in time - not that I'm a pessimist, I think that nearly everyone must secretly harbour this thought . . .
Anyway, as an old git, and real paper/card/ink/leather, book enthusiast, I'd like to preserve my body of  blog-work into a graspable thing with pages. Not particularly to sell - from my tentative peeks so far, nine years worth of blog to paper is yeekly expensive - more as just a record of our lives in this place called the Hot-house; all the small, mostly unremarkable happenings - dogs and other pets homed, musical/art/writing triumphs and failures/ boy's progression through the various stages of school/art college; jam made, celebrations held/ sadnesses acknowledged and got over, love and laughter treasured, plants planted and passing seasons enjoyed.
So, big correction progress underway - I think my grammar has certainly improved over time . . . should have done! Photos re-jigged, a few posts discarded and forward to the grand loading-up onto Blog-U-Like or whatever site looks easy to use - before the cat and fridge episode is upon us.

                                 

Possibly my favourite photo of this year so far - direct line to God in a Toulouse church.

More free food

November - sweet season of hazy bonfires, russety colours and . . . unpicked fruit.
In this part of the country we are lucky enough to be blessed with the king of fruit, or perhaps, goddess of fruit - the most beautiful, exotic, health-giving, and largely ignored, pomegranate (grenade). Our main tree gives enough to make jam, juice, syrup, salads etc, but we often forage for other overlooked fruits as it seems criminal to waste them.
Oddly, people will buy them from shops(?) - as well as other seasonal 'up for grabs' such as figs, walnuts and cherries; not enough time? too fiddly? I don't know but it seems a crucial part of the passing year however stressed or busy we might be, as much as blackberrying in the UK - also seemingly, largely forgotten when I was back there in the early autumn. Step backwards a little? bit less watching TV about people baking big wobbly cakes, or bitching over other peoples' table decor/dinners and a bit more time out in the wilds collecting the real stuff?

instant silliness

Bob about to enjoy a classy bit of patisserie 

Every now and then I make one of these daft cakes when people come round, preferably more than two layers (cake, not the guests) and with many absurd additions; this one was a tad restrained but I did like the chocolate bears.
Ingredients: something unspeakably awful from the cake section of a supermarket, in this case a 'flan' called a Tropezienne, (From St Tropez, I assume) which was happily already in two halves and coated with cream.
More cream from one of those air-filled cans
Tinned/and or, fresh fruit
Possibly, jam
Possibly alcohol - rum, brandy . . .
Mad sweets to decorate with.

Preparation time: not very long. In fact best done while everyone else is yakking and the glasses of wine you have already consumed make for a more . . . spontaneous and artistic dessert.

Fruit wars, and laws

I have always been under the vague impression that if a fruit tree's branches hang over the owner's wall/fence, then that's pretty fair game for anyone to help themselves.
Yesterday, on one of our free-food forages we discovered that this is possibly not the case - or perhaps just that the woman standing snarling at us, hands on hips, was a miserable old sod.

THE apricot tree

Every year, I observe this particular apricot tree (down our road) in its various stages, and wonder whether this season the couple who own it will bother to collect their fruit.
The year before last we took some of the apricots (hanging outside the garden, bien sur) noting that most of the tree's offerings were scattered on the ground.
Last year the owners had pruned it to a quivering heap of sticks, but this year it had jumped back to life, loaded with fruit.
Too tempting, and again, no sign of any fruit collecting going on, so . . . why not?
We walked the dogs up the ally, observing with admiration the almost industrial garden; crammed with rows and rows of perfect looking tomatoes, beans, lettuce, etc that Mr McGregor would have been rabidly proud of.
The woman was watching me from her back door-step; I could feel her anger radiating over the honeysuckle - just you dare, go on . . .
So we did.
I walked up the bank, shook open my Foyles Bookshop plastic bag, and before you could say Tarte aux abricots, she had machine-gunned a great many words in our direction.
"Ne vous genez pas, surtout," and, c'est propriété privée! C'est pas vrai, c'est pas possible, laissez nous en paix," etc.
"Oh, don't inconvenience yourself, will you? (quite sarcastic for French person) This is private property, it's not true! It's not possible, leave us in peace!"
I then pointed out that her house-coat was quite appalling, and that she had the face of a toad's arse.
Actually, I pointed out that they never seem to use the fruit, and what was the harm in taking a few before they fell to the ground, thus preventing a potential wasp problem, and possibly people slipping - leading to litigation in the high courts.
She was not deterred in her mission to show how much power they had by owning fruit that could be ignored.
"But, Madame", I protested, "look, the ones inside your fence have fallen and have become mushy, have they not."
"I was about to collect them," she retorted; "now be off you vile bastards," (or similar).
Ezra dragged me away at this point as I was enjoying myself so much that I might have gone into the garden and ripped her house-coat up into many tiny NYLON BLOODY PIECES! and sod the consequences.
In order to calm down and regain the well-beingness of free fruit-gathering, we went to raid a lovely yellow plum tree further down the road that is certainly not, in/hanging over/under or above anyone's land.

                                                                       Free plums

This morning I cast a nonchalant eye over her tree and garden - the apricots were still there in a now-mushier pile and the branches bending under the weight of pale orange spheres (sob).
Mark, being quite a bad boy sometimes, is keening to strip the tree bare after dark, and leave a small notice: merci, Madame, vous êtes bien aimable.
I must stop him as we do not want to feature on some reality TV program with air rifle wounds. Instead we will make plum jam; I might even take her a jar and inform her that I remember her apricots being distinctly over-fibrous from the jam batch we made two years ago. Ha.

bored games

We have a game inventor in the family. Son, Ezra has always been fascinated by board games, his first ones created at the age of seven or so.
He would appear clutching a box full of small assorted cardboard shapes and proceed to tell me the rules at length. A minute into the monologue I would have switched off . . . nothing much has changed . . . however, this applies to 'proper' board games too. He loves them; Mark also, to a certain extent, although he'd probably say chess is by far the best game. I think he's probably right, but what would I know? I can only think of one move ahead before my thoughts start to wander - did I remember to check the car's oil  / feed so and so's cat / ring the dentist / I wonder what Peter thing from secondary school is doing now / should we make more cherry jam?/what's that chewing noise coming from the wall?/how are clouds actually formed . . .
"What? Oh, sorry . . . my go."
Mark: "Checkmate."

Ezra, as a board game geek, claims that Monopoly is rubbish. It's true that it does go on, and on, and on, but it's probably the only game that I feel affection for: all those Christmas days or dark winter evenings when the red box came out and I would nab the little metal dog. It's just nostalgia, I know that; and it has to be the London version - The Old Kent road, Vine Street, Park Lane, etc.
Oddly, I always went for the Vine street set; I don't know if it was an early fascination with all things mediterranean, or just the friendly 70s orange colour . . .
He (Ezra) doesn't like it because it's a game mainly based on chance - you roll the dice, you move and you take the cards . . . It's good for me because I don't have to think too much ahead; I can wonder about how tapioca is made, invent story plots, move my piece and still be part of the game. Ezra likes games that involve strategy and planning like 'Small World' and a new one that appeared from uncle Amazon the other day: Alien Frontiers.
Panic filled my person as he set up the (very beautifully designed, it must be said) board, cards, space ships, counters, Alien-cards, et al. No off-stage musing with this one, it needs full-on concentration and lots of forward planning. We played and I dutifully tried with Ezra helping me; I suppose I could learn to block out the other stuff roaming about, but I think my brain is just like that.
We share many similarities, but his brain is wired differently to mine when it comes to gaming: Pictionary - yes, love it! Charades, wonderful; anything that's inventive, spontaneous and requires no forward thought. Suppose I'd rather just sit about and chat really . . .
A few days ago, he appeared with a Ezra-made game. This hasn't happened for a couple of years and I was slightly dreading the rule list, his probable frustration as something in the game didn't work out as he had imagined, the huff, and eventual sound of clay pieces hitting the floor.
It was a revelation.
He had worked out a highly sophisticated game about mining, complete with strategies involving market forces, different metals, monetary systems. I enjoyed playing it! Possibly as he had made it, but I think more because it was well thought out.
He's going to send it out into that huge world of rejections, but he may just have a chance, and if not with this one, certainly another in the future . . .  

Sticky situation

Early summer means JAM: lots of it.
Added to the hoards of cherries this year, we have discovered a new (to us) fruit: the Locquat.
I have been passing these dark-leafed trees up our road for years now, and wondering if the small oval yellow-orange fruit they bear at this time of year are edible, and why, if they are, does no one pick them.

Trawling the net, I discovered what they are, and that they are indeed edible. A favourite fruit crop in Japan, they can be eaten raw in fruit salad, jammed, chutnied, and probably made into lethal liquors too.

This was our first batch yesterday, following closely on from cherry jams including the traditional red, the piebald yellow-red 'pigeon breast' variety, and the small 'bird cherries' or possibly Acerola, which seem to be totally ignored here, and make wonderful sweet and sour jam.

Late summer

Or is it Autumn yet? Mixed days of glowering cloud and surprisingly hot sun. Grape jelly has been made, lemons are gearing up for being yellow in January, and these mad hibiscus flowers are making their blousy appearance - much to my joy and that of the big black bees still buzzing around like small private planes.
All those Autumnal jobs are gathering on the horizon: bonfire's curling blue smoke in the chilly evenings and endless cutting back of straggling plants. Chutney, jam, chimney-sweeping, investigation of last years old woolies.

A few more weeks of no socks, and breakfast on the terrace —  I hope.

I hope you like jamming' too

It's the height of jam-stress in the compound. All around are trees laden with this wonderful fruit, and nobody except us seems to be collecting us. This mystifies me each year . . .

We missed the 'nefler' season this year; really, no-one collects them: odd small, orange/yellowy fruits that have a interesting acid sweet taste, and amazing seeds like burnished gold. Next fruit will be plums then a gap until pomegranates. Looks like a good year, the bushes are already full of miniature green-red grenades.

Art bazarre chez Garth.

Roll up, roll up folks! Experience all that is cozy and Christmasy in contemporary art things/brocante/jam /music/Bing Crosby and much more . . .

23 Grand Rue, Roquetaillade, 20 Decembre.