How to cope with total failure

Self-sufficiency writers have multiplied into a cottage industry, filling whole wings of the bookstore with tips on how to garden, cook, preserve food, learn traditional crafts and build community. Such sales imply an encouraging demand; millions of people really do want to learn this. I fear that many such books, however, inadvertently discourage readers with a passing interest and a full schedule. Take, for example, cookbooks.

A few decades ago a bookstore might carry a few cookbooks that everyone used; now they take up vast areas of shelf space, and whole television channels are devoted solely to cooking shows, yet people eat more fast food and pre-packaged food than ever.

The two trends are not necessarily contradictions; cookbooks are consumer products, and must distinguish themselves from their competitors by having twists, gimmicks, by getting more exotic and ambitious, and showing page after page of sculptures, science experiments and food porn that few of us could reasonably reproduce in our own kitchens, and driving the amateur away from getting started. My meals, by contrast, last a few minutes from garden to pan, and while they won’t win any awards, they don’t have to: they’re healthy, quick, free and I like them.

Most of all, though, most self-sufficiency books don’t prepare the reader for failure. Try learning how to do things at home – make jam and cheese, weave a basket, build a shed or keep chickens – and you fall on your face many times before succeeding, and after succeeding you’ll probably fail a few more times. Many failures, though, can still become something else, if you’re creative.

Take, for example, the wine from our parsnips almost two years ago. All my flower wines have turned out well – elderflower, meadowsweet, cowslip and dandelion. But these were my first vegetable wines, and when I uncorked them a year later, they tasted awful. Another year has not improved them, so Plan B has been to turn them into vinegar.

I purchased some unpasteurised vinegar from a special store in Dublin – which should still have the vinegar-creating bacteria in it -- and am mixing them together and letting them set. They’re well on their way to becoming something strange-smelling, and if it’s not vinegar, I’ve run out of plans.

Failure Number Two was the home-made cheese. All the books that claim that cheese-making is dead simple are, it turns out, correct; getting the right kind of cheese turned out to be the difficult part. My first batch of attempted cheddar became a very nice Parmesan, while the next turned into a reasonably good feta.

Failure Number Three was my compost jelly from last weekend. Compost jelly uses fruit parts we might throw away, as well as this season’s surplus of fruit that might rot on the ground, and lets us preserve the vitamins through the winter, longer than fruit would last. I took the fallen apples from the ground, as well as bowls of berries off the hedgerow and whatever rinds we were going to throw away. The flesh of the apples I pickled, so they will keep without refrigeration for the next several months.

The rest of the fruit parts were boiled for 45 minutes or so, and then strained. I put the right amount of sugar into the strained liquid, and boiled it for the right amount of time to turn it into jelly. Nothing happened. Instead of turning into a nice spreadable consistency, it stayed basically fruit juice. I boiled it for twice as long, then twice as long again, and nothing – pure juice.

Finally, I consulted a friend, who came up with a Plan B. “Boil it for an hour straight,” she said. I did so, and when I had poured the results into a jar, it hardened into … candy. Almost as hard as a lemon drop, only in one giant jar-shaped block. Inside a jar.

Plan C was pouring boiling water over it and chipping away at it, until it dissolved in liquid again … back to being juice. After much heating and stirring, I finally got the concoction to the right jelly consistency. The good news is that such difficult experiments often taste brilliant in the end, perhaps because you’re so relieved to finally be done.

Top photo: Various wines, some of which worked. 
Second photo: apples from our trees, which became  pickles and jelly. 
Third photo:  Jelly that barely let a knife through. 
Fourth photo: The final product.

More Good News

As of this month, I will also be writing for Mother Earth News; I'll let you know when the first articles appear.

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.