Loving Penn & Teller on ITV at the moment. We don’t really get to see them a great deal in the UK so having one trick a week is a teaser! Great fun. There should be more magic in the world. Is 29 too old to learn sleight of hand? Might work to keep people interested in lectures/conference presentations. Open with Impact and all.
I bought a nice book too – oddly can’t find it online – it’s Home Brewing by Kevin Forbes. It’s possibly unnecessary since I have my Dad’s book from the 1970’s (wine making hasn’t really changed in hundreds of years after all) but it’s rustic and I like rustic. My local garden centre seems to be the only ones that sell it – unusual! After returning home from the allotments today with two “courgettes”, the smaller of which was 478g, the larger was half as big again and was eaten before being weighed, this book entertainingly includes a recipe for courgette wine. I fear I may need this recipe as the season progresses and the courgette plants continue to produce oversized courgettes (aka marrows). Another recipe in the book looks fab – an alcoholic ginger beer that takes 5 weeks max from start to finish. I shall be starting that next week assuming the yeast I already own isn’t wine specific (can’t remember). For information the big courgette got stuffed a la this recipe, but with stir fry beef instead of minced lamb and wild rice instead of normal. I’m proud to say that the courgette, onions, rosemary and tomatoes were all home-grown (albeit the tomatoes were from last year – frozen and made into passata today), plus I added a few broad beans and mangetout peas (podded) I’d picked today also – only the rice, garlic, beef, cheese, salt and pepper were not home produced, which I think is pretty fair (we do have garlic but it’s not ready). It was ok (in a good way) – kinda what you’d expect of a rice stuffed vegetable.
I’m not sure the allotment is a long term plan – it’s currently a bright orange/yellow blot in a sea of green – basically everyone else’s allotments are producing food, and ours is producing marigolds to a shocking degree. Yes, we have over a kilo of onions drying now, plus the mega courgettes and we’ve been eating broad beans and mangetout for at least 3-4 weekends over the last 6-8, but fundamentally I could have produced that from a well stocked set of pots in the garden. The allotment is 8x9m (this is a small allotment – perhaps a 1/4 of the official “allotment” size). I’m the only one really who goes there and I’m only around on the weekends. Thus I’m a little reticent to invest a great deal of time and effort since if there is a harsh hot week the likelihood is the plants won’t be watered and all my work will be for nought. I have mentioned this today but I suspect they need to see how the marigolds have overshadowed the mangetout and the early potatoes to realise that popping down once a week just ain’t gonna cut it. As the most interested person I’m also actually not really the allotment type – I am utterly addicted to growing my own food and eventually want chickens and all, but my aim is to dedicate my entire garden and every windowsill to the pursuit, not some patch of ground some while away while the garden works on producing fuschias; if you can’t eat it and it’s not a companion, I’m not really that interested (same is true of animals and people btw). So I think I should push for not having it next year.
In which case in the absence of growing things large scale, I need to get my other hobby back in swing – that of producing homebrew. I need to sort out my room in my houseshare so I can get my demijohns back on the go, and start some new brews – specifically the aforementioned ginger beer, since I wasn’t mad impressed by my elderflower champagne (tastes like grass). I think I need some more demijohns, and my buckets have been permanently borrowed so need some more of them, and fundamentally need more space so want to ditch some furniture and rearrange the room. Whether I achieve this or not is another matter, but that is the aim. Given I haven’t used any of the clothes in my wardrobe in the last 8 months I can assume I don’t actually need the clothes, or indeed the wardrobe.
Seriously – is there any use for several kilos of marigold flowers? I can only think of some kind of skin cream…