Ah, autumn - time of mist, last fruit-stealing opportunities, precious moments of sitting in the sun, investigation of jumper drawer - on the whole depressing - leading to small flurry of buying replacement jumpers from Vinted; hot water bottles, and wood collecting/sawing/sorting.
The first thing we did on moving to the new house was install a wood burner - not a pellet stove; hunting down preformed pellets in the wilderness when society is sliding downhill . . . not great. I know I overreact; one cannot when one spends a lot of time describing the lives of characters at the end of this century. Also, when the seller of said stove came to fit it the fact that he said, you've made the right decision! I sell both types of stove but I wouldn't touch the pellet variety - a future too unknown.
There's just something very reassuring and incredibly pleasurable about sitting in front of a real fire, knowing you have collected the wood to ignite it, and not gone in the car to get a sack of perfectly measured mini-sticks from the nearest DIY shop.
Our old and massive garden was a wood collecting nerd's paradise, containing as it did about twenty ancient ash trees, fruit trees, birch, oak, etc. Collecting wood was a mere pace from the front door. Here, I'm exploring. There are a few failing trees in our small back garden which we will cut back and harvest the wood, but that's a limited supply. A few weeks back I noticed a large sweet chestnut behind the wall of the nearest vineyard yesterday of whose outer limbs had been suffering the heat/dryness of this summer and clocked it as a potential source. This morning I investigated and was rewarded with a large bag of super dry wood, and some surprisingly fat chestnuts. The other thing about autumn - nuts. This area is great for walnuts and chestnuts.
A recipe we invented yesterday - roasted (or boiled) and peeled sweet chestnuts, mushrooms, onions, garlic, all sautéed with a tad of white wine, and served with a morsel of organic steak ( excellent bio producer in the market) and potato slices garnished with butter, cut up carrot tops/celery leaves.
