After nearly two weeks the worst thing about eating up my stock cupboard has been the boredom. I can hardly bring myself to go the kitchen because there's nothing there that's the slightest bit inspiring and I know whatever I make will be pretty much slop on carb.
Without counting any chickens I'm confidently expecting Mr. Stripey Cat to arrive tomorrow bearing fresh baguettes in a bouquet for our breakfast. So, in theory at any rate, tonight's the last night I'll be scraping around for something nice to eat. I thought it was time for some serious foraging.
Everyone eats nettles and I have plenty so naturally a handful of those were picked but I also saw some extremely fat and succulent looking bramble shoots, the sort of fat juicy spears that head to the sky on their way to looping over the fence and rooting elsewhere. I tried a bit raw, you have to peel off the spines of course but it's easy with a thumbnail to get you started, they just rip away. It was pretty good.
And then, what else do I have a lot of at the moment, rhubarb! Also for the pot, a small handful of the Good King Henry (how have I lived this long before appreciating this plant) and the last of the stock potatoes.
Making a curry is too easy to record. I'd have liked to have roasted and hand ground my spices, grated my own coconut and all the rest but I didn't so I can't boast about it.
After the sauce was made and the cubed potatoes softened a little I added the peeled bramble shoots (like asparagus, just take it from above where it breaks naturally), the blanched chopped nettles and a smallish handful of finely sliced rhubarb. I didn't add much of that because I was worried the end result would be too acid but it wasn't a problem.
The bramble shoots were a huge success. They reminded me of drumstick (Moringa oleifera) in curry and I'm half kicking an idea around in my head to cultivate a blackberry stool just for shoot production.
It's been an interesting experiment. I made no promises for any ethical reasons, it was just that I'm too lazy to make the two mile hike to the village for anything less serious than running out of cat food and there was little chance of that, those cats are spoiled rotten.
I expected that by now I'd have a shopping list a mile long and cravings from here to New York but actually the only thing I've even considered putting on a list is bananas and it's not really bananas I want but greasy golden plantain chips. I can't imagine anything less likely to be obtainable in Normandy so that has to be purely psychological. Oh, but I do need some cooking oil that isn't EVO and I've run out of vinegar, except for balsamic.
2 comments:
Do you make any of your own vinegar?
I bought a ceramic vinaigrier from a French pottery / tourist trap a few years ago, and made my own red wine vinegar on a rolling basis out of the last glass of every bottle of red wine we drank.
Eventually, it got the point where I wasn't remembering to top up the pot so often and I noticed the jar was getting light, so I decanted the remaining drops into an empty port bottle and started afresh with a whole bottle of red. It's been a few months now so I should really check on whether it's ready, and if so, start making another sort.
You must have a ready supply of cider for making cider vinegar? I briefly searched back on your blog to see if I could find reference to home made cider, and all but a few of the mentions are for cider vinegar. So how did the cidermaking go in the end? I was revisiting cix:intheforest recently to remind myself of your address and found the posts about getting helpers for the harvest and pressing, and remembered we'd promised to help and never quite got around to it.
Niles, I do have a vinegar jar back in NP which I started this spring, seems to be working but P has control of it now and he's not a great fan of vinegar.
We looked up vinaigriers and can choose from quite a selection just up the road from here in Noron les poteries so that's an outing planned for soon. I also have a book which suggests you can hurry the process by filtering your wine/cider through fresh beech shavings which we have an abundance of here.
Cider - well, there's a tale. That first year we had great enthusiasm and made 20 gallons or so which then didn't really do well at all. It sort of put us off, all that effort for little reward and for one reason or another we've not got round to trying again yet. We should give it another go.
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