It started with a seed...

...that got caught in Fidget's (the sheep) neck. 

Then some more got caught there, and then Quim the shepherd told me that this is a common problem. Some sheep feed with their heads low down, near the ground - and get covered in the grain that falls out when the rest of the flock eat.

It had become a real problem, so I replaced our tall upright hay feeder with a home-made one, knocked up from scrap wood from around the Croft.

Bits, and a bit of a plan

It's made

It works!

Scrap is SO useful!

Bottling it

I adapted a recipe from my favourite bottling book*, and bottled little Catalan pears in Priorat wine:

• 4 tall jars
• about 1.5kg pears
• 1kg sugar
• 500ml wine
• 500ml water
• Spices (I used cloves, cinnamon and juniper)
• Juice of one lemon

A nice pear

Pour water and wine into a large pan. Add the sugar and stir while cold until as much of the sugar as possible has dissolved. Heat gently, stirring, to ensure that the sugar fully dissolves, then boil gently with the lid off for 15 minutes. You should have a rich syrup. Cool, for about 30 minutes.

Juice the lemon into a bowl. Peel each pear, cutting out stalk and core, and dip in the lemon juice.

Pack the pears into clean, sterile jars. Pour over the syrup and shoogle the jar about a bit to get rid of bubbles. The jar should be filled to 1cm of the rim. Place tops on jars but not screwed tight.

Place jars into pan filled with water to at least two thirds of the height of the jars. I put a dishcloth in the pan to prevent the jars from banging together. Boil with the lid on the pan for 40 minutes. Open the pan lid quickly and screw down the jar lids fully. Put back the lid and leave to stand overnight while the whole lot cools down.

Label and store in a dark cupboard until you can resist them no longer...


*Lasnet de Lanty, Henriette, and Michèle Parfonry. Confits, confitures et conserves. Sens pratique. Neuilly-sur-Seine: Dargaud, 1978.

High protein wheat free bread - recipe

After months of research in my cuisine laboratoire* I have come up with a wheat –free recipe for bread, that works.

Ingredients:

1 level teaspoon sugar

150 ml milk, warmed slightly to tepid

100g oat flour

1 sachet (11g) dried yeast,  or use live yeast if you prefer

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground nutmeg

½ teaspoon salt

50g rolled oats

200g chickpea (gram) flour

50g butter, melted

1 large egg

1 tablespoon warm water, to moisten

Olive oil

Set the oven at 190ºC

Warm the milk to tepid, dissolve the sugar in it. Mix the dried yeast, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt with the oat flour.

Pour the warm milk and sugar mixture into the oat flour, stir and leave to stand 10 minutes.

Beat the egg. Melt the butter and cool a little.

Add the rolled oats, the chickpea flour, the egg and the butter to the mixture, and stir for 5 minutes. Add a little warm water to moisten the mixture – the dough should be hard to stir but not impossible.

Cover with a damp cloth, and leave in a warm place for 2-3 hours. It will rise a little.

Oil a small bread tin, and line with greaseproof paper (baking parchment.)

Put the mixture into the tin. Using the back of a spoon, oiled with olive oil, smooth off the top, spreading a little oil across the top as you do so.

Bake in the centre of the oven for 30 minutes. Check with a skewer – it should come out dry.

Remove from oven and leave to cool for 10 minutes in the tin. Then turn onto a cooling rack and remove the baking parchment.

This is a high protein bread, thanks to the combination of the egg and the chickpea flour.  Using my copy of Eat Well and Keep Healthy (Macdonald, London, a million years ago) given to me by my Mum when I was 18 (which IS a million years ago) I estimate that each slice of bread, weighing in at 50g, contains 8g of protein. That’s more than three times as much as in a slice of normal bread, and about the same, gram for gram, as white fish.

*Yes. I'm joking.

Baking day

I got up early to start the bread oven...

I'm a heavy smoker

...and made all of this...

The busy baker

 


 ...as well as a pizza and a coca de vidre (flat very thin bread with sugar and aniseed, cooked very fast in the hottest oven possible).

The piped biscuits (they look like they've been plopped rather than piped - I'm not a qualified piper) are gluten free. The recipe, adapted from my Good Housekeeping Cookery Book, 1985 edition, is:

125g butter
50g icing sugar
65g rice flour
65g oatmeal flour
A quarter level teaspoon of baking powder
Nutmeg, grated
1 tablespoon of milk, to soften the dough.

Heat the bread oven. In my case this means starting 3-4 hours earlier, burning oak logs in the oven to get it up to temperature. Aim for 190ºC. Line a large baking tray with baking parchment (greaseproof paper.)

Beat butter until smooth and creamy, sift in sugar and beat lots until pale and airy.

Sift in flour and baking powder, add nutmeg and beat. Add a little milk to soften the mixture. Put into piping bag and, er, make a splodge onto the baking parchment. And then lots more splodges until you've used it up. Bake for 20 mins approx.

She wept

I pruned the vine today, far too late into a warm spring.

She wept:

Sapping experience

So I stopped. 

We'll get plenty of grapes, whether I prune or not.

Boxing birds

We spent yesterday cleaning out and replacing the bird boxes. We had 100% occupancy in the three boxes we have around the Croft, so I'm putting up more. Bird boxes are so simple - but they are a productive part of being a natural scientist.

Moving home

Second hand home - one lady owner

These did not hatch

We spent yesterday fencing with a donkey. Foiled him.

Arran Grazing Hazel

The posts are from Desperfo, in Sant Marti Sapresa. They are chestnut (Castanea sativa) and are sharp and strong.

They have a big pencil sharpener

Nae flies on me

The flies are everywhere this Autumn - demonstrating how they evolved before us and will survive our Armageddon.

They are everywhere on the poor donkeys too, however, so I've had to mix up a fly repellent that works. This is an adaptation of a recipe from The Barn Equine Surgery, www.barnequine.co.uk, with the addition of a little piperine, extracted from black pepper.


Put 20g of whole black peppercorns into a tall sided pot. Add 150ml alcohol (from the pharmacist). Using a  hand-held liquidiser, liquidise the pepper in the alcohol. Leave to stand, covered, for an hour. This will extract a little piperine, which will help to drive the flies away.

Home chemistry. No naked flames, please

Mix up the other ingredients:

200ml Citronella Oil BP
120ml vinegar
30ml washing up liquid
450ml strong black tea

Pour the pepper and alcohol mixture into the other ingredients using a filter (I use a cloth filter) so that the pepper itself does not enter the mix. This is to help prevent the sprayer from getting clogged with pepper grounds.

Dilute up to three litres, with water.

Shake before use. Spray on the animal, avoiding the eyes and mouth. (And avoiding your eyes and mouth - this is, after all, pepper spray as used in self defence...)

On Gluttony

The fig trees are in fruit. Not one tree-full, but the whole lot - seven large trees all producing ripe fruit all at once.

Eat me

I can eat a lot of figs - but really, this is gluttony. So we share them out with the birds, the donkeys and sheep (who take those they can reach) and with Papilio machaon, appropriately called the Swallow Tail Butterfly; gluttony comes from gluttire, to swallow.

Papilio machaon - I'd Swallow my Tail

So far, I have bottled them and made jam - in a moment of madness I made five separate jams from the fruit of five separate trees. Next comes chutney. And then really, no more figs thank you, till next year.

I, bee

I've started to co-habit with bees. "Keep" bees is not the right phrase - they are free to go, or come, as they wish.

Miguel gave me my first lesson today, as we transferred a few of his lovely wee black Montseny bees to my shiny new hive:

The place to bee

A few got away and made a sort of mini-swarm (it's in the centre of the photo, though you will have to look closely to spot it):

's warm, here

Cherry harvest

It's time for cherries at the Croft:

Cherry d'amour

I've made my version of cerise confite. It's built from a recipe by Henriette Lasnet de Lanty and Michèle Parfonry in "Confits, confitures et Conserves", Dargaud Éditeur, 1978.

2kg cherries

2kg sugar

Juice of one lemon

Remove pips from cherries. Crack open at least 12 and preferably more pips and extract the kernels. Cover cherries and kernels with the sugar and warm slightly so that the sugar dissolves in juice. Leave to stand 24 hours.

Remove cherries and boil down the syrup to 107ºC on the sugar thermometer

Add the cherries. Boil and count 2 minutes. Take off the heat for 2 minutes. Put back on heat and boil 2 mins. Take off for 2 mins. Put back and boil for 2 mins - in other words you do the hokey-kokey on-and-off-the-boil thing three times.

Put the cherries into sterile jars. Reduce the syrup again to 107ºC, then fill up the jars. I normally finish off the whole thing by sterilising the jars in a bain marie.

These cherries are really good for using in cakes and pastry afterwards. They are a little like prunes (pruneaux séchées if you are reading this in France...)

Free-range lamb

We will shortly have lamb for sale - free-range lamb from our smallholding flock, here in the Natural Park of Montseny.

We provide lamb as a side of lamb - leg, rolled shoulder joint, and lamb chops - freezer-ready and weighing a total of around 6kg. We can deliver to your home in Barcelona.

Contact the Crofter at chrisfactary@yahoo.com for details of price and delivery schedule.

Cheese, Muck and an Olive

We've been busy on a new Spring cocktail here on the Croft; cheese, muck and an olive. 

We were given 5 litres of goat milk by a friend and so we made curd cheese. It's very, very easy. Just boil the milk, allow it to cool a little from boiling, add the juice of 2 lemons and leave overnight. In the morning you'll find a pan full of thick curd, and yellow, sweet  buttermilk.

Cheesy, easy

Put the curd into a cheese cloth and leave to drip for most of the next day. You can move the curd around in the cloth a bit to encourage it to drip more. Then eat, on fresh brown bread. Yum.

Meanwhile at the other end of the scale I have been Spring cleaning our sheep enclosure. Keeping cuddly, attractive lambs is not all sweetness and light. It's hard work clearing a sheep shed:

Where there's muck, there's more muck

And up at the top of the land, still overgrown with climbers, I found another olive tree, and cut away a pine to give it some breathing space. A hundred years ago the Croft was a producer of olive oil and wine. The pine (I counted the rings) started growing 30 years ago - in 1983, the point at which the olive grove was finally abandoned.

Olive sees the light

Burgers, burgered

This is why we grow our own meat here at the Croft.

Horse trading, European style.

The map, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21335872, shows the trade routes used to make burgers for British supermarkets. These burgers include horse meat from Romanian abattoirs...

The Enclosures

We're doing a bit of enclosure, with one of the Croft's communards - who has a lifetime of experience in fencing - building the most solid sheep fence I've ever seen, including this clever box brace: 

Crofting and enclosures are uneasy partners - the Crofter Act of 1886 (source: http://www.highlandclearances.co.uk/clearances/postclearances_croftersact.htm) was the result of street protests in the 19th Century by the Highland Land League against the injustices of the Highland Clearances (Fuadach nan Gàidheal, the "expulsion of the Gael", source: Wikipedia.) Land was enclosed by wealthy or hereditary landlords, and people driven from their smallholdings. 

Now, ironically, we're enclosing in order to stay, more efficiently, on the land.

Ça va, savarin

My Christmas surprise was a savarin, made in our wood-fired bread oven (baked in a slightly too hot oven, it was done in 10 minutes):

Syrupy savarin

300g flour
4 tablespoons warm water
15g fresh yeast
4 eggs, beaten
5g salt
25g sugar
150g unsalted butter
Some brandy

For the syrup
250g sugar
600ml water
Peel of one lemon
3cm piece of vanilla pod, or a chunk of root ginger
Juice of half a lemon

Make a dough with the flour. Make a well in the centre of the flour and crumble in the yeast and add the water. Leave until the yeast goes gooey. Then add salt, sugar and eggs (NOT the butter) and stir together. Now start a process of lifting and dropping the dough with your hand (it makes a good slapping noise) to get as much air into it as possible. Keep this going for 5 minutes until the dough is really elastic.

Cover the bowl and stand in a warm place. I allowed mine to rise overnight, and then beat it back in the morning.

Warm the oven to 200ºC (or, in my case, start a fire in the bread oven and leave to burn for about 3-4 hours.)

Warm butter so that it is soft, and beat the butter into the dough. It will go quite shiny.

If you have a circular baking tin - the type with a hole in the middle - then use that. Otherwise aim for a relatively shallow tin so that your cake ends up wider than it is tall.

Butter the tin generously.

Spoon dough into tin, and sit in a warm place for 45 minutes to rise again.

Bake for 20-25 mins, or until the savarin is brown and shrinks away from the sides of the tin.

Remove, cool a little, remove from baking tin.

Meanwhile, prepare the syrup by boiling the water with the sugar, the lemon peel and the vanilla pod for about 5 minutes. Cool a little, and add the lemon juice.

Now place the savarin into the syrup (that's what's happening in the picture) and spoon lots of syrup over it. Keep doing this until the savarin has swollen a lot.

Pour a little brandy over the top and serve to ooooohs and ahhhs of your satisfied audience.

An Arabian Feast

It’s Eid al-Adha, and I have been cooking Al-Andalusian-Catalan food again – this time, “Panellets.”

These are small sweetmeats made of marzipan and covered in almonds or pine-nuts. The marzipan,  “masapà” in Catalan, comes from the Arabic mahsaban, which means “wooden box” according to my Diccionari etimològic. Perhaps this was the wooden box in which the sweets were offered. (Wikipedia lists a lot of other possible origins for the word, including the Arabic phrase "the king who sits still." Hmmm.)

Back to the cooking:

First, make the marzipan:

200g    finely ground almonds

200g    sugar

20cl     water – about a wine-glass full.

Add the sugar to the water and boil to make a syrup. My recipe from Cuina Catalana by Ana Maria Calera says boil the syrup to what she calls the “hard ball” stage. This means 116º on the sugar thermometer, but frankly this seems a lot of fuss for a sugar syrup, so just boil for a bit…

Cool, and add the almonds. At this stage you can also add flavouring – the scraped inside of a vanilla pod, or some grated lemon peel or pretty much anything else you like that will taste good in marzipan.

Add an egg.

Stir a lot, then put onto a marble surface and knead, for 10 minutes if you can bear it.

Second, make the panellets:

You’ll need about 200g of chopped almonds and 200g of pine nuts.

Thoroughly butter a baking tin

Heat the oven to 170ºC.

Make small balls of the marzipan – the size of a Brazil nut – and roll in the chopped almonds or in the pine nuts.

If you are in a hurry, just pop them onto the baking tray. If you are not, then dip the panellets in egg white and give a coating of icing sugar. Really, darling, the calories…

10 minutes in the oven, and you should get this:

Now resist eating them. Impossible.

Quince, walnut and fig flapjack

It was a rainy weekend, so I did some baking.

Jelly on a tree

The quinces (Cydonia oblonga) are out, and so are the walnuts (Juglans regia) and figs (Ficus). Here’s a recipe, adapted from Good Food magazine’s 101 Cakes and Bakes, that combines the three:

• Quinces           450g, peeled and cored
• Brown sugar    25g
• Lemon 1
• Fresh figs        100g
• Butter  140g
• Light brown sugar       50g (yes, I know. I didn’t use “Light brown” – I just used “brown.”)
• Honey 140g
• Oats    250g
• Ground cinnamon       half a teaspoon
• Ground nutmeg           half a teaspoon
• Walnuts           25grams, chopped
• Preheat oven to 190ºC.

Slice the quinces, add the brown sugar, the fresh figs and the lemon juice, and cook over a very low heat until the mixture becomes quite dry. Use the liquidiser to produce a paste – it should be the consistency of a good paté…

Melt the butter, light brown sugar, honey and add the oats and spices. Add about half of the walnuts. Stir.

Thoroughly butter a 20cm x 20cm (approx.) baking dish. Press half the oats/honey/butter mixture into this. Spread the quince/fig paste on top. Now press the remaining half of the oats/honey/butter stuff on top of that – so it’s a sort of quince sandwich.

Sprinkle remaining walnuts on top.

Bake  approx. 30 minutes.

Mark with a knife into squares while it is still hot.

Leave to cool completely.

Eat. Leave a little for your friend.

Granola, from the Isle of Lewis

I've just made another batch of granola. It looks like the landscape of Mars, but tastes great:

It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.

My recipe comes from Ravenstar, a B&B in the Isle of Lewis. I’ve adapted it to the Mediterranean:

• Olive oil           4 tablespoons
• Runny honey  2 tablespoons
• Vanilla pod      the seeds and goo from inside a 1 inch piece of pod
• Porridge oats (small, rolled, oats)       120 grams
• Oats (large, rolled, oats)         120 grams
• Sunflower seeds         60g
• Walnuts and almonds 120 grams total
• Dried fruit – I use dried figs, apricots and raisins        120 grams total

Preheat the oven – I use the lower heating element only to avoid over-toasting the granola – to 190ºC. Oil a large baking tin.

In a pan over a low heat, mix the olive oil and the honey. Add the vanilla seeds and goo.

Add all the other ingredients except the dried fruit and stir a lot, and then tip into the baking tin.

Place in oven and bake for 20 mins, stirring every 5 minutes.

Turn oven off.

Stir in the dried fruit and put back in the oven for 10 minutes more.

Leave to cool completely, and then store in large jar.

Delicious with milk or yoghurt, any time of the day.

Chutme

Our fig trees are in full fruit, so it's time to make some chutney. I've used a combination of recipes - from the up to date River Cottage Cookbook and the very venerable Constance Spry Cookery Book - I have a 1956 edition, published a year before I was born and four before old Constance died. It's great - full of mysterious references to what "RT" would cook in certain circumstances, and packed with a mix of French, English and Indian Colonial recipes.

My gallimaufrey of a recipe is:

1.5kg fresh figs
500g squash, cut in small cubes
500g onions, cut in small dice
500g sugar
350g raisins
100g garlic
600ml white wine vinegar
50g dried tomatoes, rehydrated (I threw in the water they had soaked in too)
100g fresh ginger root, sliced
2 teaspoons of peppercorns
50g mustard seed
1 teaspoon cardamons
1 cinnamon stick, crumbled
12 cloves
25g salt

Put the whole lot into a big pan, bring to the boil, and simmer gently for about 3 hours, making sure it does not stick to the pan.
Pot into clean jars and seal. Label. Store for at least 3 weeks, preferably longer.

Looks weird, tastes wonderful (the story of much of my cookery.)