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Stories from the Stove

Tag Archives: Spring

Clearing

25 Thursday May 2017

Posted by Sophie James in Gardening, Not only food, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Allotment, England, Gardening, Nature, Spring, Stories

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I start on a bit at the allotment and clear it: along the border that separates my plot from next door’s, around the rhubarb, thick with last season’s nigella and bindweed, the rhubarb itself trampled by a fox or the man behind’s bulldog – a sweet, lolloping animal that often lies down beside me and falls asleep in the sun.

I edge. Then I collect stones. The earth is thick with them, almost like shingle or scree. I pile them up in flower pots as I go and the idea is that I will eventually pull up the central path that divides one side of the plot from the other and which consists mainly of couch grass and dandelions and fill it with the stones that I find. A crunchy path which will block out the light and suffocate all the weeds, so to speak. Other neighbours have done this and I know it works, and I love the crunch and sharpness underfoot. I am forever figuring out how long I can live with the path looking as it does.

The clearing starts to infect every area of my life – and the shed. The shed with its tiny mouse carcass and debris from two years back. Now it is clean and clear and in order – I have mugs and a gas ring and a kettle and tea. Otherwise known as ‘facilities’.

The shed is a small wooden room and makes me feel child-like when I go in. It’s also a good place to wee and spy on people. I wish I could sit at the table – above, under the kettle – and write and potter about, but the plot exerts a tyranny over me whenever I go because there is always far too much to do. I spend my days longing to be there, And then when I’m there I go at it with such force it’s as if there’s a teacher standing by taking the register and holding a stopwatch.

Today I followed a nice New Zealander to a fallow plot one over from me because it was full of disused timber and it needed to be cleared so it could be offered up to a newcomer. The discovery of wood – branches, planks, logs – has become a source of intense pleasure since I began at the allotment. I scour fields and woodland and skips for wood I can use on the plot. I prefer this to bricks but bricks will do or tiles at a pinch.

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I clear in order to fill the spaces again; I pulled up a small carpet of nigella, as I said, because it had become so wild, and then sowed other flowers – calendula, cornflowers – in its place. What was wrong with the nigella? It is an endless cycle of clearing and filling space and sometimes you have to stop; today I made myself stand up and watch as two butterflies with amazing black and red markings hovered over the herb bed, noticed bees alighting on the flowering angelica. A white moth. A single magpie. Sweet peas like huge green hands full of colour grasping at nothing. That kind of thing. And when it rains – always weirdly a relief – there’s the shed and the respite from going at it, a reprieve from clearing for a time.

Despite once being illegal to grow flowers on allotments, most plot holders now have an area given over to a swathe of nigella, dahlias, a drift of poached egg plants or nasturtium etc. I would just have herbs and edible flowers if I had my way but that’s not allowed. It’s easy and cheap to grow any of these from seed, and do it now: calendula, nigella, borage, sweet marjoram, parsley. They can all be sown direct into previously watered soil. Calendula goes very nicely in salads; scatter the petals, leaving behind the thick bits.

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Weathered

25 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by Sophie James in Uncategorized

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Food, Gardening, Growing vegetables, Operation, Spring

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I seem to have a thing about shoes. Here I am at the allotment on a blissful May morning wearing shoes that are more hole than sole. It has taken me a while to get back here. I never thought it would take me this long but anyway here I am. I worked through the winter and it was just me and my allotment neighbour. There was very little to do because I’m not a fan of brassicas which tends to be the over-wintering vegetable family. I can’t quite remember what I did now; I think I walked around the perimeter edging everything which is a fantastic way to dispense rage. Having an edger slicing through the soil as if it was pizza is one of the great gardening devices and should be given out by the NHS. If in doubt, edge.

So, anyway, I had bowel surgery – ‘your op’ is how it has been renamed perhaps to make it more cuddly – so then when spring came along, I was unable to do anything except watch as weeds burgeoned, spreading over the formerly pristine and frozen bare ground. Finally, the plot became as I first found it: a wildly waving sea of green. There were no distinguishing features except huge rhubarb jazz hands, flopping ears of anemones, ragged tulips, molehills, dry and gorgeously rich. It reverted to its natural state as if I had never existed. Fair enough.

Now that I have been away, there is the temptation to do things differently. To be changed in some hard to define way that will express itself in my writing and in my day to day life, in the choices I make, the direction I go in. What I grow. There is pressure, coming I admit from me alone, that because I have ‘been through something’ – something ‘major’ – things will be different now. For a start, I’m off sugar and any kind of sweetener for the time being. This initially was hard, awful in fact because sweetness is a kind of basic primal need. I understand that carrots are sweet, but so is a slice of almond cake dripping in citrus syrup accompanied by a cup of tea, delicious and ordinary in equal measure. And I’ve never been someone who would take cheese over pudding. I wish I was a savoury person, but I have been known to stare at pictures of pudding for long silent minutes. I just gravitate there.

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The truth is I’m the same but my habits have changed. And carrots are sweet. And though there is something perversely satisfying about pulling out weeds, the long slow rip of threads of a root system, the harmless throwing into the next plot of slugs and snails that I can’t bring myself to kill, the bald earth free of stuff, the wild part of the allotment that remains is really exciting. It defeats me, just looking at it. It is hoary, hairy, it slumps and rises alarmingly. Fruit bushes are hemmed in by unknown green objects. The things I have planted nearby – my dwarf mulberry tree – look genteel and a bit prim. A bit Barbara Pym.

For now I’m going to let this second half of the plot be, there’ll be a bit of binary going on. There is the right side, which has now, thanks to some elbow grease and some dainty plantings of potatoes, French climbing beans, sweet peas, a renewed herb patch become respectable and will pass muster with the allotment manager. And there is the left side, a wild and unkempt mess of weeds throttling the fruit, a prairie of long grasses, dandelion clocks and nettles and clover. I can’t yet bring myself to rip it all up. It is doing a job.

And there’s no rush. I suppose what is to be relished here, at the allotment at 8am on a Monday morning, is that there is nothing to be done. Apart from the fact that there’s a lot to do and tricky, life-defining things happen and you’ve got to seize the day and we are all so fragile when you come to think about it. I love the allotment because it makes me feel so overrated. I know I should crack on, but maybe not today. Whatever, really. My aim is to live whateverishly for a while.

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Give peas a chance

07 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Cookbook, Cooking, Elizabeth David, Food, Ingredients, Italy, Recipes, Spring, Yoghurt, Yogurt

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There is something quite lovely about peas. You can grow them easily and their tendrils are pretty, curling things that latch on to poles and wind their way upwards and sideways as if trying to escape the garden, and their fate, in slow motion.

If you’re feeling in any way disconnected from nature, or yourself, sitting down to shell a mound of pea pods will slow your heart rate and give you room to ponder. You can watch the news and get a good rhythm going, with a pot for the empty pods and one for the peas. Use the empty pods for broth and wrap the peas in a damp towel so they don’t dry out. I was surprised by the colour and the taste. We have been seduced by the frozen pea’s excessive sweetness, its nursery softness, and now it’s hard to go back. Pretend you’re Edwardian.

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I am not decrying frozen peas – I love them and would happily live on them all year round.  But it’s a shame in the spring to pass by peas in the pod. Their tendrils are sold by the wodge at farmers’ markets here (above in their fetching blue rubber bands).

You can use the leaves as a salad ingredient or wilt them in butter. They’re lovely in a frittata along with some peas and scallions. And then there is bacon, of course. Or pancetta, if you’re a bit posh. And ham, properly thick and strongly permeating. Peas also have a natural affinity with ricotta – or perhaps it is I who have the affinity.

Ricotta (meaning “re-cooked” from the whey of semi-hard cheeses) is a soft, sheep’s milk cheese originally from Rome and is at its best in spring, eaten spankingly fresh with a little salt and black pepper. It has a wonderful blankness, aerates easily and doesn’t smother like cream can, meaning that the peas remain the star of the show. I know people make ricotta; so much is dependent on the quality of the milk. I made ‘yoghurt cheese’ instead (also known as labneh), and treated it in a similar way, along with some lemon zest and a touch of rosemary.

Both recipes below are inspired by Italian Food by Elizabeth David, a book I can’t read for long without the need to rest my head in my hands and inhale memories of my time there. It is almost impossible not to feel longing. I love food, what can I say? And Italy is where for me the heart of good food lives. Espresso and cake, olive oil, vinegar, leaves, lemons, hot cornetti steaming at midnight from a paper bag, tomatoes crackling with salt. Thinnest of thin pizza, charred and warm. I am a ruined woman.

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Piselli al Prosciutto (green peas and ham)

Adapted from Elizabeth David, Italian Food

2lbs shelled or frozen peas

A small onion

1 oz (or a small knob) of butter

3 oz of very good cooked ham cut into strips

Melt the chopped onion in the butter, and let it cook very gently, so that it softens without browning. Put in the shelled (or frozen) peas and a little water. After 5 minutes, add the ham. Add a little more water here if it needs it. In another 5-10 minutes the peas should be ready.

Yoghurt cheese with lemon zest and rosemary

Adapted from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Easy Cheesy, The Guardian

Makes about 350g.  If you want this for pudding instead, withhold the pepper, serve with a scattering of berries, or dried fruit, some toasted nuts and a drizzle of honey.

1/2 tsp black peppercorns

1kg whole milk organic yoghurt

1 tsp of salt

1 small sprig rosemary leaves, finely chopped

Zest of a lemon

Extra virgin olive oil, for preserving

Crack the pepper in a pestle and mortar, or with the end of a rolling pin in a bowl, until it’s slightly coarser than if it came from a pepper mill. Stir it into the yoghurt with the salt, lemon zest and rosemary, then spoon the mixture into a scrupulously clean jelly bag or a double layer of damp muslin/cheesecloth (or a sterilized hankie). Place in a sieve resting over a bowl or jug in the fridge (or suspend it over the sink or hanging from a door knob somewhere cool), for two days.

Discard the whey. Lightly oil your hands and roll the yoghurt cheese into balls and place in a sterilized jar. Pour enough oil over to cover. They’ll keep in this way for a few weeks in the fridge. When you’re ready to use a ball, you could roll it in some finely chopped herbs and a further scattering of zest. Or if you want to go the Labneh route, you could roll them in spices such as cumin or paprika.

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