Savoury squash

Savoury squash: On the rare occasions that people here cook squash, they usually accentuate its already sweet flesh into a dessert. Personally, I find that to be going too far, and prefer to offset the sweetness with other notes – tart, spicy and especially savoury. This baked dish combines all of these.

Ingredients:

200g butternut squash, peeled and diced

200g onions

1 clove garlic, finely grated

30g gruyere cheese

2 eggs

10g chopped parsley

10 ml vegetable stock

10 ml lemon juice

10 ml Dijon mustard

1 dash cayenne pepper

Peel the butternut squash, and scoop out the seeds in the middle. Dice the remaining flesh into squares about a centimeter across. Place a pat of butter and a teaspoon of oil in a pan and sautee the remaining squash flesh for 10 minutes. Add the onions and sautee 10 more minutes, and add some garlic a minute before the end.

In a bowl, mix the lemon juice, the vegetable stock, the mustard, the cayenne, the parsley and the eggs. Turn off the stove and transfer the squash-onion mix into a small baking dish, and mix in everything from the bowl. Shred the gruyere cheese and sprinkle it over the top.

Bake it in the oven at 200 degrees Centigrade for 20 minutes, or until done.

Printed at Grit again

My article "Wild Food All Around" has been printed at Grit Magazine -- check it out.

Autumn salads

 If spring is the time to make salads of linden leaves, dandelions, hawthorn shoots, lettuces, sorrel and all the other new shoots, then autumn presents an ideal time to make salads out of the roots, tubers and hardy greens that are coming to fruition around now.

For some reason, “salad” in the modern Anglo world has come to mean iceberg lettuce, one of the few vegetables with almost no taste or nutritional value; it’s no wonder that so many people think of eating fresh vegetables as they would going to the dentist. 

Many people, when they look at the root vegetables swelling to an impressive size this month, think of the usual roasted vegetables or soups. If you are looking for another way to cook them, however, or think you dislike a certain vegetable, try it as a salad and see if you can’t make it into something entirely new.  

Carrot – beet salad

My brothers and I grew up convinced we hated beetroot, knowing it only as boiled red lumps. When we started growing our own, however, we began experimenting with salad recipes, and found it like a whole new vegetable.

3 large carrots

2 red beets

2 apples

1 tablespoon salt

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

4 tablespoons olive oil

¼ cup of chives

¼ cup other garden herbs, like dill, burnet and sorrel.

Shred carrots, beets and apples. Chop scallions. Finely chop garden herbs.

Combine vinegar and oil in a large bowl, whip into a vinaigrette sauce, stir in the herbs, then slowly mix all other ingredients into it. Let stand for an hour. If you want something more Oriental, you can add soy sauce, ginger and sesame oil.

Potato salad

I used to think of potato salad as an oppressively heavy dish, but with salad potatoes, apples, celery and herbs, and with yogurt substituting for most of the mayonnaise, it can be made surprisingly light.

1 kg salad potatoes

4 eggs

4 apples

300g celery

Fresh salad herbs – dill, borage, chives, sorrel

Green onions

1 cup mayonnaise

1 cup yogurt                   

1 tsp salt and ½ tsp pepper

Boil potatoes till tender, peel and slice as hot as you can manage. Slice eggs and celery, and dice apples. Chop any fresh herbs you have plus 3-4 green onions. Mix salad sauce and add to warm potatoes, and toss gently. Leave to cool and adjust seasoning.

Tomato salad

We’ve had a brilliant year for tomatoes, and some of us are just getting the last ones out now. If you have some that never turned green, don’t throw them out – fried green tomatoes are a delicacy in the southern USA.

8 large tomatoes – diced

1 medium onion (finely chopped)

1 small garlic clove (finely shredded)

Salt and pepper

1 tsp sugar

1 cup parsley (chopped)

1 ½ tbsp. lemon juice

3 tbsp olive oil or rapeseed oil

Chop onions and garlic. Mix other vinaigrette, ingredients, adjust seasoning. Add tomatoes.  

The following are some of the recipes our family uses; of course, you can experiment and see what suits your taste.

Published at Grit

More good news: my piece on global food waste has been published at Grit Magazine: 

"Several years ago a study found that up to a third of all food sold was thrown away uneaten – inexcusable in a country where farmers struggle and children go hungry. That country was the United Kingdom, which has a generally good record of conserving its resources, so pundits wondered what a global study would find. 
Such a study was released earlier this year – by the Institution for Mechanical Engineers, somewhat surprisingly – and looked at impoverished Third-World nations as well as the prosperous West. Unfortunately, their findings revised the figure … upwards."

End of summer

After years without a proper summer, Ireland finally saw months of warm weather and sunshine; even into September we were wearing shorts. The weather finally broke today, with torrents of cold rain falling around our house in the encroaching darkness, but we had a full season to remember and sustain us.

Published at Low-Tech Magazine

For those who don't know about it, Low-Tech Magazine has carved out a unique and desperately needed niche on the internet -- well-researched papers, often historical, dealing with old and largely forgotten technologies that allowed societies to do more with less.From aerial ropeways to optical telegraphs, modular hardware to timbrel vaults, Low-Tech gives you the esoteric craftsmanship of the world that existed before everything became cheap, short-lived and easily discarded.

I was honoured to write a piece for them last year, on basketry, and I'm delighted to do so again. My article on lime-burning kilns, "Burning the Bones of the Earth," will appear here eventually.

Photo: Lime kiln near our home.

Projects

We boiled the ink cap ink to reduce it, and have tested it on paper:

... and now we'll see how well it stands up to sunlight and time.

Other projects we have running right now include:

We dried all the peas for sowing next year, and I'm preserving eggs in limewater. We'll be cracking them open soon to see how well they lasted.

Making ink

In other news, The Girl fell behind us in the bog to look at the occasional mushroom, and I didn’t mind – when we and several adults went into a forest to find mushrooms, she found more than everyone else combined. It must come from being so close to the ground.

Mushrooms are supposed to be quite scarce in bogs, but The Girl found a lactarius, a boletus and a puffball, the latter two of which were edible. We also found, in our own yard, an Ink Cap mushroom -- edible when young, although they become toxic when drunk with alcohol.

These were a bit too old to eat, but I remembered that monks in the abbeys around us used to soak and boil them to create ink for their writings. Thus, The Girl and I have tried to do the same.

I let the mushrooms soak with cloves for a few days, and then simmered to reduce the liquid. We've been able to use the resulting ink, but we don't know yet how long it will last.

Gathering the turf

The Girl and I spent Saturday walking to the bog and gathering our turf for the winter, with the help of our neighbour and his tractor. For those who don’t know, we live in a dry patch along a canal in one of Europe’s largest peat bogs, the Bog of Allen.

“Turf” is the peat that lay submerged for centuries, now exposed like red earth after the bog was drained relatively dry. It is cut – by tractor these days, but until recently by hand – into strips that lie like giant ribbons of liquorice. Across vast areas of land around us the turf is still mined on an industrial scale, and packed into bricks sold for winter fuel at every petrol station and hardware store.

More importantly, however, it is burned in giant plants that furnish much of Ireland’s electricity. At the same time, turf-cutting is being restricted by the government to protect the bogs as wildlife habitats. Between the turf industry on one side and the cutting bans on the other, the local farmers who cut their own turf are growing rarer, squeezed in the middle.

For now, though, most of our neighbours spend autumn weekends driving their tractors into the bog, the fathers at the helm and the wife and children sitting in the trailer. You see them driving home at the end of the day, their trailers loaded deep with turf and the wife and children hanging onto the sides as they drive down the road.

We bought a modest strip of turf from our farmer friend last spring and had to “foot” it – break up the liquorice and stack the pieces cross-ways – several months ago. Now, as the days grow shorter and the rainy season sets in, it was time for The Girl and I to load up the now-dried bricks – if you can picture bricks being maroon, shaggy and misshapen – and cart them back to our land. Our neighbour drove his tractor on a winding path out of the bog, through clumps of forest and cow pasture, with me running behind in the distance and The Girl behind me. We dumped the turf – which we should be able to stretch out at least three winters – into a giant pile in front of our very bemused chickens.

Now to be published at Grit Magazine

Good news, everyone -- I've been invited to be a regular contributor to Grit magazine, so my articles will start showing up there soon.

Grit magazine deals with rural life; gardening, raising animals, preserving food, cooking and all kinds of traditional crafts. It's owned by the same people who create Mother Earth News and the Utne Reader, so if you like those publications, you'll probably like this. My first articles should show up in a few weeks -- I'll keep you posted.