I Think It Might Be Autumn

The weather weird-ing continues, one stormy night followed by a day of rain and showers and the daily temperature has dropped by around 12C.  The usual couple of months where the temperature slowly ramps up in spring and then descends in autumn haven’t happened this year which is a great pity as it is those months when most of the outside work gets done.  Never mind, there is always next year

The harvest this year is much less than usual at my place; the cold spring along with the wet early part of summer which then over a couple of days turned to an extremely hot summer with no rain meant not many pollinators made it to my place and the plants themselves struggled to grow.  However in august things started growing so I had some fresh vegetables.

The nectarines were rather small but tasty.  The ones in the basket above are the white fleshed type.  The yellow fleshed ones, which are generally sweeter, only had 2 fruits that made it through to somewhere near ripening and they were both eaten by the hornets before they were ready to harvest.

The peaches though did reasonably well. 

Most of these were knocked off by the wind but I don’t leave the peaches on the tree until soft, again because of the hornets, wasps and ants.  As soon as they start to go yellow, I go through the tree and give each one a gentle twist and take off those that basically come away in my hand.  They are still hard but I found this way of ripening them somewhere on the Internet and it works better than any other method I’ve used.  The peaches are laid out on a cotton cloth and covered loosely with another one.  I check them every couple of days and remove any that are starting to go off but on the whole they soften ready for eating.

This year it was the early flowering almond that got the best of the weather.  Usually it doesn’t produce much as normally it gets the worse weather.  I don’t have anywhere near as many almonds as last year but that will make these even more tasty. 

The wild hazel trees have struggled too.  Most of the hazelnuts above I think are empty – they don’t fall out of their cases – but I will open them just the same until I convince myself that my theory works.

I lifted the shallots a few weeks ago and they hadn’t produced many large bulbs.  I’ve used a few but the majority will be going back in the ground for next year.

With the changing of the climate I think that saving your own seed is going to become more important to ensure that the plants you grow can flourish in your particular environment.  Lets just hope we can stop the EU legislators from banning us from saving and using our own seed so we have to fill the coffers of the mega companies.

The bees are still here too!

The swarm has probably quadrupled in size over the summer so I’m hopeful there will be enough of them to survive the winter; there needs to be a big enough group to generate enough heat to keep them warm and alive through winter.  However, I don’t think they have enough honey so I’ve not taken any for myself and have started feeding them some heavy syrup.  I will keep feeding them this syrup for a couple of weeks as I think they still have time to convert it to honey.  If however the weather looks like it is going to degrade further I’ll have to stop and change to fondant. 

Today though they were out and working and were bringing in a lot of pollen. 

Yesterday when I checked them, I also fitted the mouseguard as part of the winter preparation.  Again the bees were very patient with me despite me faffing about and intermittently closing off the entrance while I tried to get the height of the guard right.  Note to self, fit the mouseguard before filling with bees next time!

They adapted to the mouseguard really quickly and it will serve a double purpose.  Not only should it stop any mice from entering and building a nest to overwinter in the warmth of the hive but it also makes the entrance more defendable.  That point was brought home while I was doing my hive check. 

I’d just opened up the hive when I noticed a hornet taking rather a lot of interest in the bees that were on the crown boards I’d taken off.  Thankfully it was the European hornet and not the Asiatic.  I gave it a bit of a dousing with the water spray and it moved off.  About a thirty seconds later I realised it had returned.  I’d not seen it come back but a couple of the guard bees had wrestled it to the ground and were battling to kill it.  My boot came down rather heavily as I didn’t want there to be any chance of it going back to its nest and telling the others.

Cherry Vodka

It’s raining but that gives me time for a catch-up post on making the cherry vodka back in June.

While the spring here might have left a lot to be desired, the sour cherries took it all in their stride and produced a good crop back in the early days of this summer.  As I’d also had a good crop of the late dark cherries, which are far sweeter for eating, this year these cherries were just for Cherry Vodka and the rest left for the wild life.

Since I first started making cherry vodka back in 2008, the recipe I use has changed a little, basically because I have less time and do it from memory.  It may be simple but it is also very tasty – safety note here, consume in moderation as alcohol is dangerous in excess!

So, all you need are the sour cherries, or griottes as they are called here, vodka, large plastic bottle, and some sugar – as I said it’s really simple but it takes a bit of time.

I use around 1 pint of cherries for a 75cl bottle of vodka.  I also take the time to stone the cherries as having soaked them in vodka for 6 months, I have no intention of just throwing them away at the end of the process and stoning them now saves having to spit out the stones at a later date when you eat the vodka soaked cherries.

The griottes are quite small and I find it better to use the individual cherry stoner otherwise a very large proportion of the cherries are left with the stone in if I use the table-top one I show back in this post.  I stone the cherries over a bowl and the cherries are then dropped into the plastic bottle. 

I generally use 2 litre diet cola bottles I collect over the year and there is a reason for this.  I’ve discovered by trial and error that if you store these bottles without rinsing them nothing grows in them during storage – makes you wonder about what is in the drink though!  I give the bottles a quick rinse just before I need them and drain well.

Once all the cherries are done I then strain the liquid that has come out of the cherries along with the stones, from the stones and add that liquid to the bottle.

Next step is to add the vodka, but save the vodka bottle so you can refill it with the cherry vodka at the end of the year.  You will need an extra bottle then as the vodka will also contain cherry juice and sugar.

Then I mark the bottle with the contents and year.

After that comes the long bit.  Each day for a couple of weeks or so I invert the bottle once or twice and the colour of the cherries begins to colour the vodka.   Then I put it aside usually until the end of October or the beginning of November.

That's when the sugar is required – I hadn’t forgotten about it!  I think the original recipe said add 300g of sugar but I found that a bit too sweet for my taste so I add around 200g of sugar.  The bottle needs to be gently shaken each day until the sugar has dissolved.  You can then taste the vodka to see if you need to add any more sugar – hic.

Normally at this point of the year I would have to wait until I was adding the sugar to get photographs of the final stages but I forgot to do last year’s batch until just before I made this batch.

Once the sugar has dissolved, separate the cherries from the vodka; pour the vodka into the saved bottles and store the cherries in an airtight container.

The vodka cherries are a wonderful, if rather potent, adult hors d'oeuvre and a few of them with a drizzle of spiced cherry sauce on vanilla ice-cream make a lovely dessert too.

Work In Progress

 

It’s summer, it started today

On the left, the cherry vodka is starting to take on some colour. 

The blackcurrants are from friends in exchange for some cherries and are destined for blackcurrant jelly.

The little bottle has some vanilla pod in vodka.  I read a post on the Homesteading / Survivalism  Facebook page on making it and thought I’d give it a go.

And finally the bottle on the right is the start of walnut wine.  This is a wine, brandy and green walnut concoction which if left to mature turns out a bit like sweet sherry.

Confit of Duck

While I’ve been unable to surf I decided it was time to have a go at making confit, after all I’ve been here two years so I really should have a go. I was also encouraged by there being a really good offer on duck at the supermarket.

I decided to buy the manchons (the upper bit of the wings) and the cuisse (the legs). The manchons were very cheap, 2€60 a kilogramme so I had a go with those first.

The idea is to partially preserve the duck by salting and then to poach the duck in duck fat until it is succulent.


So part one was to sprinkle them with sea salt and fresh bay leaves and ground pepper. They were then left in the refrigerator for 24 hours. They were then rinsed to remove the salt and dried. Being the lazy type, I didn’t fancy standing over the stove for a few hours so I placed them in the slow cooker.


I then covered them in melted duck fat and left them overnight on low to gently stew.

Once cooked to tender, or in my case, until falling off the bone, they were left to cool for an hour and then carefully packed into sterilised canning jars and covered with the cooking juice and fat. I then processed them for a while to ensure a vacuum seal.


There were of course a couple of bits left over and I know I’m a bit biased but they were delicious.

Dried Eggs

While I’ve not been able to post for a bit due to my Internet connection giving up the ghost – I do wonder if France Telecom/Orange France will ever be able to provide anything like the service I had in the UK – I luckily had looked on the web earlier for information about drying eggs. So unable to waste time surfing I set about putting what I’d learnt into practice.

I decided to start with 5 eggs; the idea being to get a thin layer in the dehydrator otherwise it takes too long to dry the egg. As it is, the tiers in my dehydrator are slightly tilted so the egg at the outer edge was deeper than the inside edge.

The eggs were beaten well and then poured onto the lightly greased tray. They were then dried for a bit over 5 hours at the highest setting, around 60°C. One of the posts I read said that this heat and time were essential as this in effect pasteurised the egg as well as drying it.

Because of the difference in thickness across the tray I set the original time to 4 hours and then stirred the mix, then continued dehydrating until all the egg was dry.


Once all the egg had dried I then ground the egg to a powder in an electric grinder and transferred the resulting powder to an airtight jar for storage.


Other ways described to store the egg is in the freezer, vacuum-sealed or in zip lock bags. Once I’ve got my Internet connection back I’m going to do some more research into the storage but for the moment the jar is going to live in the fridge.

To reconstitute the egg, it’s one tablespoon of dried egg to one tablespoon of water and that’s equivalent to one egg that can be used for cakes, omelettes or scrambled eggs. The next job is to try it out.

Pork Processing – Belly Pork

Above are my pork purchases; the ham and two belly pieces. I also bought from the local farming supply shop the salt, the cotton sack and the 30 litre bucket ready for my few days of pork processing.

I was very pleased with the two belly pieces, as they were both quite meaty. The one on the left was earmarked for the rillettes while the one on the right for green cure bacon. The piece on the right also had the ribs too. Since neither piece was longer than 50 cm, I would guess that the right was the front half of a belly while the left the back half.

First of all, I cut out the ribs from the piece for bacon and then cut it into pieces that would be convenient for me to use. I then packed the pieces into a bowl and covered with a brine solution for 24 hours. The bowl was places out the back where it is very cool and the pieces held under the brine using a weighted plate.


Once the 24 hours was up, I dried the bacon pieces and wrapped then in pieces of the cotton sack, which is like cheesecloth and hung them up to dry for a day or so. They will only stay fresh for a week or so in the refrigerator so they will be transferred to the freezer although I might invest in a slicer and slice them before freezing.

The second piece of belly I skinned and then cut into thin strips. In the picture, the bacon pieces are at the bottom left: at the top left is a bowl containing the pork ribs and the skin from the belly. In the wok at the top right is the skin from the ham (processing in another post) and any fat I trimmed off ready for rendering.


I packed the slices of belly into a casserole along with lots of ground black pepper, some garlic and herbs. More pork fat is then added – since I make this quite often I had the fat drained off from a previous batch that’s already flavoured too. I then place a piece of the skin I remove over the top of the meat to protect it from drying out before the fat has liquefied.



The casserole is then placed in a very slow oven to let the fat flow and the meat is poached in the fat until it is falling apart. About 24 hours in my case as the wood range runs cool on plum wood.


Once the meat is cooked it’s placed in a sieve and the fat drained off. As I said above, I save the fat for next time, separating it from any meat juices that can be used as a base for gravy or stock.

The meat is then shredded; I have used a food processor for this but I prefer the more labour intensive method of using 2 forks, I just prefer the rougher texture. Before I’ve cubed the meat as suggested in a couple of recipes I have but I did find the shredding a lot easier this time after thinly slicing the meat first.


A final check on the seasoning and then the meat is packed firmly into jars. The top of the rillettes is then covered with a layer of melted pure pork fat. This is why I save the skin and fat I trim off; I render my own pure fat. Again the fat I was using was the fat I rendered for the last batch I made. This years is currently in the slow oven as I write. A word of caution though, remember that liquid fat is slippery especially when trying to hold a glass jar. The one in the picture was pretty near full when I tried to put it down onto the work-surface; it slipped and tipped over and it’s taken about half a day to try and clear up the mess!


This time I also heat processed the jars; not necessary if you are going to eat it over the next week or so but I make larger quantities and want it to last. I cooked the pots for 15 mins at 15 lbs pressure, which I hope will be sufficient.



While the meat was cooking I turned the ribs into Chinese style ribs. The recipe is just so simple.

Chinese spare ribs
2lb spare ribs
6 tbsp soy sauce
6 tbsp sugar
2 tsp ground ginger
1 onion peeled and quartered
3 tbsp wine.

Put all ingredients in a pan with 1 1/2 pints of water, bring to the boil, simmer for 45 minutes, turning the meat occasionally. Turn up the heat and boil for 20 mins (uncovered) to reduce the sauce, it will become thick and sticky!!!! Serve.

You can freeze them like this once they have cooled.



That’s it for the pork bellies, I was thinking about other ways to use up the fat I get from the rendering as re-using the flavoured fat means I use very little of the fresh fat and my mind wandered to soap making. I also have large quantities of wood ash with the wood-burning cooker so that will be another project to think about. Who knows maybe I can come up with a recipe to use the squeak too.

Mother of Vinegar

Since the summer I’ve had a couple of bottles of wine with the dregs left in sitting in my kitchen waiting to grow a Mother of Vinegar. Today I looked in both bottles and this is what I found in one…

The wine has turned to very nice vinegar. I’ve now transferred the mother and the small amount of vinegar to a bigger crock and have added a bit of the cooking wine. From now on, any red wine dregs will be added so I have a supply of home-made red wine vinegar. I’ve followed the instructions on Rhonda Jean’s blog, down-to-earth, if anyone else wants to try.

In case you are worried you won’t know if it’s formed a ‘mother’ or if it’s gone bad, this is what came out of the other bottle. No problem deciding which one worked I think.

Cherry Update

All the cherries from the sawn off branches have now been picked in what was a race against the slugs and snails. I haven’t weighed them but guess I had 3 or 4 two-gallon bucketfuls; now the race is to process as many as possible before they go off.

The David Lebovitz candied ones, about a pound starting weight, are done and in the fridge. They aren’t what I would call glacé but more like ones you would get in jam. I won’t be using them in cherry sponge but I think they will be really nice with ice-cream.

The 7lbs I’m candying using the long process look and taste far more like glacé cherries – I’m just on day 4 at the moment.

I’ve a batch of the No-Recipe jam on the go too, no idea the weight of cherries used but it was a layer of 2 and a bit inches in the bottom of the jam pan which made about 2 and a half pints of liquid and cooked cherries.

Following the old adage of waste not want not, I zested the lemon before adding the juice so I’ve lemon zest for cakes or maybe a batch of lemon shred marmalade and the squeezed halves are going in the bottom of the dishwasher where they act as deodorisers and rinse aid.

I was going to make some cherry syrup with the remaining cherries but I’m going to have all the syrup left over from the candying process so the remaining cherries are going to become cherry jelly as I can’t be bothered to stone any more – just cook, squidge and strain, a lot faster.

And I’ve 1 lb of cherries sitting in a bottles worth of vodka destined to be cherry liquor in 8 months time.

There are still a few more cherries on a couple of the trees but I’ve strawberries to pick tomorrow so I don’t know if I will be doing anything with them yet. If I do I think it will be pie filling but at the moment I getting close to my limit of cherries, I even see them in my sleep.

Sour Cherry Recipes

I was going to leave this post until I had the final picture but I think that the cherries will be over by then and the post wouldn’t be of use until next year so here goes:

Glace Cherries

This recipe is taken from one of my favourite cookbooks, ‘The Complete Book of Preserving’, Marye Cameron-Smith; it’s old, battered and falling to bits but the recipes are good.

It says choose fresh firm fruit so I guess slightly under-ripe sour cherries would be good. I use ripe ones but they do produce a lot of juice, which doesn’t help the candying process.

Rinse and dry cherries and then stone. I started off last year with one of the hand-held stoners and very quickly decided it was worth investing in the model shown in the photograph. This is a very messy business, lots of cherry juice everywhere and don’t be fooled by it’s clear or slightly pink colour, cherry juice stains dark brown. I’d been using a towel to dry my hands and later wondered why it was stained all over, then it finally dawned when there were the same stains on the cream covered throws I use on the settee – I’d sat there to stone some when watching the news.

So in the picture below are the essentials, a mass of freshly picked cherries, on the floor a bucket for any waste, on the table a heatproof bowl for the stoned cherries and a nifty cherry stoner. The cherries are loaded into the hopper and they fall (eventually) into a depression below the plunger. Depressing the plunger stamps the cherry stone out through the cherry and then the cherry is lifted slightly and falls onto the discharge chute where you have to catch it. On the table too is the essential cloth to mop up all the cherry juice and to dry my hands on.

Weigh cherries and place in a pan. Cover with hot water and bring to the boil, simmer until the fruit is just soft.

Drain the fruit into a heatproof bowl and reserve the cooking liquid.

To make the syrup, for every 450 grams of fruit make a syrup using 175g sugar and 300 ml of the cooking liquid. If you run out of cooking liquid, use water. Dissolve the sugar in the liquid over a gentle heat, then bring to the boil and boil until you have a thin syrup. I have no idea what they really mean here so I boiled it for about 5 mins.

Candying Process – the book notes at this time that this is a long process.

1. Pour the hot syrup over the fruit ensuring that the fruit is covered. If there isn’t enough syrup, make up another batch until the fruit is covered. This hasn’t been a problem as the cherries produced a lot of juice.
2. The next day, drain the syrup into a pan and add 50g of sugar, bring to the boil and pour back over the cherries.
3. Repeat for two more days remembering to add 50g of sugar each day
4. On the 5^th day, drain the syrup and add 75g of sugar, then add the fruit and boil for 3 minutes. Return the fruit and syrup to the heatproof bowl and leave for 48 hours
5. Repeat step 4 but this time let the fruit soak for 4 days. At the end of the 4 days the syrup should have the consistency of honey (my guess is that they mean runny honey not the set variety). If it isn’t very thick, then repeat step 4.

After that it needs to be dried, so remove from syrup with slotted spoon and dry somewhere no higher than 50°C. It is ready when it is no longer sticky although I left my last lot of cherries a bit sticky.

I’ll try and remember to update this as I go along with this year’s batches.

Edit. Last year as I said the syrup didn't get very thick at all and thinking about it this year I only added 50 g sugar where stated even though I'd made up more than one batch of syrup so this year I'm adding the said amounts of sugar per lot of 450 g fruit I used e.g. Where I had 3 x 450 g fruit I'm adding 3 x 50 g sugar for the first 3 days, adding 3 x 75 g sugar on day 5 etc.

Other recipes I’m going to try this year.

One of the blogs I drop in on is David Lebovitz and by chance one of his latest blogs was on sour cherries. I’m not keen on the idea of pickling them but here’s the link to his version of candied cherries which is much simpler but I’m not sure if they are really glacéd – I’m going to try a batch though – and a recipe for cherry jam which again looks nice and simple and is one that is for any amount of cherries.

Also from that entry is a link to another blog, Chez LouLou, where there are a few more recipes and I’m looking to do the Sour Cherry Liqueur, the recipe for which is given in the comments.

And the nice things about the blogs is that I’ve learnt that the sour cherries are called griottes.

Elderflower Time

Time with A is slipping by really fast, catching up with all he’s been doing over the last year and discussing the options he’s hoping to take next year but we’ve still been getting on with a few things. A couple of the wall units for the kitchen are now built but I didn’t have suitable screws and plugs to put them up. So today was a trip to get them that we combined with a quick visit to the place selling the baler. The baler is there and it looks fine, a bit of paint worn off as you would expect with used farm equipment but the rest looks fine needing nothing more really than making sure all relevant pieces are oiled and greased. It is being delivered tomorrow along with the ‘turning over’ thing. He also thinks he will have a suitable cutter next week too so hay making here I come.

Today was dry and sunny so an ideal day to pick the elderflowers for elderflower cordial. I made some last year using a recipe from Self Sufficientish and it was really nice. It uses Citric Acid, which you now need to ask for at chemists in the UK since drug addicts now apparently use it. I think it’s the same here too; so I eventually plucked up courage last year and went into a chemist over in the Lot and eventually came out with 90 grams of the stuff. When I need some more I’ll feel a lot more confident going into my local chemist and asking now.

The bush, there is only one in my hedgerow, is flowering prolifically this year so I decided to pick with A’s help (he’s a lot taller than me – well all my children are and have been since their early teens), a few more flower heads and give Hedgewizard’s recipe for elderflower champagne a go. There are still plenty of flower heads left plus some still to flower so there should also be lots of elderberries too this year.

It’s Sunday Again

I think my idea of taking it easy on Sundays just isn’t working. I generally remember it is Sunday half way through the afternoon by which time it’s a bit late. Today was a little different, the weather is due to break from tomorrow and rain is forecast so I wanted to be outside as much as possible.

The aim was an early trip back to Gamm Vert to get the things I forgot yesterday. I’d also acquired another jeton so who knows I might win one of the big prizes this time. The early start was thwarted by a flat battery; I’d managed to leave the ignition (and radio) on yesterday afternoon. So I spent a couple of hours serping the wood on the front lawn while the battery charged.

I just made it to the shop before it closed (it is only open this Sunday morning as part of the inaugural weekend) and bought amongst other things the petrol can I needed. However by now the local petrol stations had closed so I still don’t have petrol for the lawn mowers. Did I win another prize – yes, another packet of the same seeds!

For the afternoon I decided to do something I’ve always wanted to try and that is make crystallised violets. There are quite a few growing in the lawn and they are only going to end up in the grass collector sometime this week. Additionally there are quite a few patches of them around the farm such as these growing in the ditch on the drive.

Having finished the violets I decided to have a look at the fruit I planted over last year. I’m a bit concerned that some of the trees have failed to establish, they don’t seem to be producing buds yet but I shall give them a bit longer. The poor old quince tree that spent all last summer in a pot on the patio does seem to be fine and is already to burst into leaf.

At the top of the fruit garden the alpine strawberries are already in flower, they only stopped fruiting in November. The kiwi fruit plants whose bed they share are showing signs of growing as well. Having bought the extra poles to finish the kiwi supports and to make the raspberry ones I made a start on those. They are only lightly in just using the lump hammer. I’ll get them in properly with the post rammer during the week. Then I’ll sort out the straining posts, put the wires on and plant the raspberry canes.

Finishing up the day, two more photographs presented themselves. Firstly, when I took the lamb granules down to feed the alpacas, I stopped off to get some more hay. Cid decided they were just what he wanted. Cats do have strange tastes don’t they. Snowy is very partial to Cantal cheese, but so am I so she has to fight me for that.

Then on my way in I spotted this dandelion, I counted five flower heads fused into one stalk.

Crystallised Violets

I love violets, I love parma violet sweets too and was overjoyed when I found violet ice cream here last year so when I saw all the violets in the lawn, I thought it would be sad just to mow them as they are so pretty. I though about picking a posy for the house but the stalks were not long enough for me to be able to place them in a vase. I’ve always wanted to try crystallising violets so this seemed like the ideal opportunity.

There are two methods given to crystallise violets. One requires a mixture of rosewater and gum Arabic that needs to be painted over the petals and then the petals are dipped in caster sugar or powdered sugar and left to dry. The second method is to boil them in sugar syrup. I decided against the first as I didn’t think I would have enough time plus I didn’t have the rosewater or gum Arabic either!

It didn’t take too long to pick a reasonable quantity of violets; I then trimmed all the stalks to just behind the flower head. While I was trimming off the stalks, I put the syrup on to boil for 5 minutes and then added the violets. The violets were ‘cooked’ for a minute and then I removed them from the syrup with a slotted spoon onto a plate.

This is where the fun starts, each flower had to be separated out and left to dry on a non-stick surface. It was quite difficult sorting out the individual flowers and most of them just look like purple blobs rather than flowers but then most things lose their shape if boiled. I suspect that it I want perfectly shaped flowers I will have to use the painting method so I think I will be keeping to purple blobs.

I’m now wondering about having a go with the pink plum blossom too. I’m pretty sure that they are edible and that it’s only flowers from bulbs that are poisonous.

Beetroot Bonanza

Well yesterday came and went in the blink of an eye. Needless to say, Mr Tibbs didn’t make it to the vets. I picked him up but he was just too strong and wriggly to get into the cat basket and he raced off out of the loft. Before he dived through the gap in the wall he gave me one long look that sort of said ‘but I trusted you’ and disappeared. I thought that would be the last I would see of him but thankfully he was back an hour later and even let me stroke him again. At least he won’t be having kittens so I’m going to try and persuade him to come and live downstairs before trying to get him to the vets again.

The rest of the day was taken up with collecting and preparing more wood with Ann in Regis’s prunery. We’ve more of less finished this one but there are two more larger ones to do still. Next year, the trees will only get a light prune (no pun intended) so there won’t be any burnable branches as there is this year.

The moles have been at work again. I rake the molehills over the hollows in the lawn and it all goes quiet for a time and I think they’ve gone. Then a week or so later, more molehills. Still I suppose it saves having to aerate the lawn.

After finishing the wood yesterday, Regis gave me a beetroot; a big beetroot!

So today was pickle the beetroot day.

Tomorrow Regis and Ann are coming over to help me replace the kitchen window. I need a shorter window as the one currently there goes down below the level of the work surface I will be putting in. I could get away with leaving it if this were the UK but in France, and much of the continent, the windows open inwards – easier to clean and it means that you can have the shutters closed while the window is open, essential in hot weather.

In preparation for that I’ve been moving some things out of the kitchen. This is some of the produce from last year. There are 5 large squashes, 5 spaghetti marrows and a collection of butternut squashes along with the two types of beans I grew and dried. I have to say; the beans are nothing like the commercial beans you buy. These are so soft when you cook them, I suppose it’s because they’ve not been hanging around for ages in a warehouse.