This Year’s Grape Harvest

I didn’t think I was going to get more than a bunch or two of grapes this year as the chickens devoured the grapes as soon as they started to set.  However, tucked under some of the leaves and in places higher than a chicken can jump I discovered these when starting to cut back the vine.  You can see where the chickens have stripped the bottom halves of the bunches on the table!

So into the kitchen and a short soak in water with a bit of vinegar added.  I believe the acidity of the vinegar helps kill off bacteria but the washing makes sure the fruit is clean of dust and other unwanted stuff.

 

I normally wouldn’t bother taking the grapes off the stalks for steam juicing but looking at the amount of grapes I had, I figured I didn’t have enough to make it worthwhile to process as two batches but thought that if I stripped them I could get them into one batch.

And I did – just!

After steaming for about an hour and a half, I gave the softened grapes a bit of a helping hand with the potato masher to extract as much juice as possible.

And of course a quality control sample had to be tested

I left the grape mush to drain overnight but having previously swished it round with the masher I had extracted more or less everything so I probably wouldn’t bother leaving it overnight next time.  Then it was time to bottle/can it.

Strange isn’t it – the Americans call it canning, the Brits. call it bottling and 99% of the time we are using glass jars; however jarring it doesn’t sound quite right does it?

Because using the masher pushes through pulp and anything else that might have been on the grapes, I decided to strain the juice into the 1 litre jars.  From that one large bucket full of grapes I got a little over 5.5 litres of juice.

Not bad for something I had given up on a month ago!.

As an aside, when the kitchen is full of fruit the fruit flies arrive and proliferate almost before your eyes. 

A quick search came up with this idea: a small dish of cider vinegar into which has been added a few drops of washing-up liquid to reduce the surface tension. 

The fruit flies love it and settle onto the liquid which in normal circumstances they could land on because they are light enough to be held up by the surface tension.  However this is a trap and they drown instead.  The lump of ‘stuff’ in there is a piece of pear core I added as extra incentive to come and drink! 

As you can see it is quite successful.

When Life Hands You Lemons!

Every so often the shops have an offer on lemons that’s just too good to ignore, or you might be lucky enough to be able to grow your own lemons.  If the latter, I’m jealous; while it is warm enough for lemon trees over the summer, it is just a bit too cold during the winter and I don’t have a suitable place to overwinter the trees out of the frost. 

More often than not, I succumb to these offers, using fresh lemon juice at every opportunity but still somehow I’m left with either a couple of wizened specimens at the bottom of the fruit bowl or even worse, one that has gone mouldy and covered all the other fruit with mould spores. 

So now, I don’t take chances and freeze the juice as soon as possible.  I was spurred on by some lovely lemon-shaped silicon ice trays I found; my previous trays were the hard plastic variety and I could never get the cubes out but these are so simple to extract the shape from, it is a real pleasure to use them.

So here we go, making the most of your lemons

First of all I wash and dry the lemons, then I use a julienne cutter I have to remove the zest of the lemon.  I take off the zest in reasonably long strips as it is quite easy to break or chop smaller once it is frozen.  I just pop it into a plastic box and freeze until I need it.

I then halve the lemons, juice them and strain the juice into a small jug.  Straining removes all of the pips, (seeds), which I always find get into the juice no matter how carefully I pour out the juice from the squeezer.

Using the jug, it is then very easy to fill the ice cube trays and before long….
frozen lemon juice!

The first few times I did this, I strained and filled the trays a lemon at a time to enable me to gauge just how much juice one of the ‘cubes’ contained.  With these trays, 4 of the half lemon shapes equalled the juice from one medium, averagely juicy lemon.

But it doesn’t end there, if you want to squeeze even more from your lemons, (sorry about the pun), the squeezed halves can be used to freshen the dishwasher.  In my dishwasher I discovered that occasionally the half lemon skin could jam the lower rotor so I now cut the half in half again so it lies flat on the bottom of the dishwasher.  They last one to two washes after which they head for the compost pile.  I freeze the spare ones so they don’t go off before I use them.

A real lemon rinse!

Homemade Deodorant

 

In an attempt to reduce the cocktail of synthetic chemical I’m enticed to apply to myself I decided to give a more ‘natural’ set of chemicals a go. Chemicals are chemicals but some have been used for longer than others on humans, with no known or suspected side-effects and are a component of the world we’ve evolved in rather than something cooked up in a test tube and that has never existed in the natural world.

Step forward sodium bicarbonate, (bicarb).

A quick search of the Internet for homemade deodorant, came up with this site and I decided to give it a go. I couldn’t be doing with messing about with a 2 part product so I opted to just use the dry part.

An offer in the supermarket, (they do have their uses ), came up with corn flour, (maize flour) on promotion so I had a good supply of that and as for the bicarb well I had previously balked at paying the asking price for the little packets supermarkets sell. At that time I was sourcing bicarb for cleaning purposes and would have used half the packet in one go. I then discovered that the local animal feed suppliers had bicarb in 25 kg bags. The price comparison at the time was around 2.50€ for 400g food grade in the supermarket or 14€ for 25 kg in the feed suppliers – no contest.

The bicarb has got a little lumpy over time but a quick wiz in the liquidiser soon sorted that. It’s something I would have done anyway as one difference I noticed between this bicarb and the food grade one is that the animal one is a little coarser.

 

Then I stirred together 1 cup of bicarb with 1 cup of corn flour and a couple of drops of lavender oil and put into wide mouthed jars.

And as you can see, it makes quite a lot of powder.

I was a bit dubious about relying solely on it so started off only using it on days I was working at home.  I just use my fingers to apply it so it’s a bit dusty but no more so than talcum powder.  I was really pleasantly surprised to find it worked extremely well.  It is a deodorant not an antiperspirant so you do still sweat – essential on really hot days. 

The only thing that I could vaguely be classed as a problem is that the first batch I made, which probably had a little more corn flour in it, did leave a light yellow stain,(from the corn flour) on my underwear.  Nothing dramatic but it was there, but it washed out really easily even in a cool wash.

One unexpected side effect I’ve found is that it also seems to discourage the aoutas, (harvest mites or chiggers), and that is something worth its weight in gold as anyone who has suffered from them will tell you.

Losing Trust in Mega-Organisations.

For a long time I naively believed government and large companies were ethically bound to protect me, the consumer, but experience and the resulting rapidly increasing cynicism, lead me to now think otherwise.

There are just so many scandals; the recent horsemeat as beef for one. The real problem wasn’t so much that horsemeat was being used as that the meat was not traceable and therefore no-one could know what was in the meat or whether it was fit for human consumption.

This struck home here in France because only a year or two before, (I think that’s the correct timescale – time dilates a bit these days!), it was discovered that meat labelled unfit for human consumption was exported to another country where it had been processed, supplied with false origin documents and then sold back to France as food for human consumption. The result was an outbreak of Listeria – I was one of the people who suffered and it was not pleasant. I can only say that my consumption of raw milk and unpasteurised cheeses over my lifetime probably helped me a lot. I have undoubtedly ingested a mild dose of the bacteria over time and would have a slight immunity.

Mega companies are just there to make as much money as they can out of you, the consumer, and as long as you don’t die straight away from using or eating their product they will uses as cheap an ingredient, or labour or processes for that matter, as they can to maximise their profits.

The governments, who you would think are there to protect you, are made up of politicians who are only elected to that office on a very short term. They have no interest in the long term in so far as it effects you the consumer. Added to that, a lot of them are looking to their futures; when they are voted out they will need another job and a nice place on the board of a mega company will do very nicely thank you!

In a similar vein to the food companies are the drugs companies. There are lots of ethical arguments as to whether life-saving drugs should be rationed out depending on your income and ability to pay but I’m not going into that here. I’m more interested in the contrived market of cosmetics and non-essential drugs.

I watched a really interesting programme lately – ‘The men who made us spend’, BBC 2/Open University, where they highlighted the companies ‘dilemma’. If the product they produce cures you, you no longer have a need for it and therefore don’t buy it. So what they needed was something that all of us can get but doesn’t need curing and we can be persuaded to repeatedly purchase an over-the-counter treatment.

Indigestion or heartburn fall nicely into this category; it’s something we are very likely to get sometime, we all eat on the run and in this time of overconsumption we frequently over-indulge and our bodies complain. Enter the treatment, we can now continue with our destructive over-consumption and mask the warning signs given out by our bodies. Added to that, I read somewhere, but sadly can’t remember where, that frequent and regular uses of these anti-acid compounds causes the stomach to over produce acid as it vainly tries to return the acid balance in the stomach to what nature intended. This over production causes more heartburn so we take evermore anti-acid product and the pharmaceutical companies show even higher profits ad infinitum.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to return to a world where a small scratch is likely to turn septic and kill you, (although with our overuse of antibiotics we may be closer to that than we would like to think), but I do really resent being looked at as an object to be milked of money just to fill the wallets of a few others especially as their ‘benign’ treatments can turn out to be anything but that.

Case in point being Radium. After it was discovered by Marie Curie, it was hailed as a cure all and put into everything; the effects of radiation poising not becoming clear until much later. Closer to me is the use of aluminium salts in deodorant/antiperspirants.

I grew up at the time these were placed on the market. The fear of Body Odour (BO) was then instilled in us – OK it’s not pleasant to be near someone with BO – but also the fear of sweating, a perfectly natural process which is essential to our health. Riding to the rescue came the pharmaceutical companies with their perfectly safe product containing high levels of aluminium salts. Now, 40 years down the line these ‘safe’ products are linked to the increase in dementia. Short term they cause no problem but it’s not in a company’s interest to do long term studies. They want instant profits.

So these days I’m sadly far more cynical about what I’m marketed and look at more ways of controlling what I eat or apply to myself.

Home-Made Bread

This is the recipe I’ve evolved to make my bread relatively cheaply.  The ingredients are shown in the picture above and are:-

• 1Kg of  specialised bread mix (used to get the type of bread I want)
• 1Kg of plain, (Type 55) flour (basic and cheap, don’t use pastry flour, Type 45 as that’s too soft)
• Tablespoon or 2 of any other grains I want to add, sesame in this case
• Olive oil
• Sea salt
• Live yeast – 2cm by 2cm by 1cm approx.
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• Water, tepid and approx. 600ml to a kilo of flour

The amounts of flour used are fixed, one kg packet of each, the amounts of the others are flexible.

I rarely measure any of the others; The yeast is sold in 42g blocks which I buy 5 or 6 at a time, cut approximately in half, and freeze using half a block at a time.

The salt is a small amount in the centre of my palm done twice, I would guess it’s about a scant teaspoon in total and the oil is I would guess between 1 and 3 tablespoons (15ml spoons) depending on how I feel.  The same with the sesame seeds.  The bread is slightly different every time but variety is the spice of life!

I let the frozen yeast defrost for about half an hour in the jug along with a teaspoon of sugar.  Once the yeast can be creamed with the sugar I add around 400 ml of the tepid water, mix and then leave for another half hour or until small bubbles can be seen when it is stirred showing that the yeast is working.

Lately after abusing my wrists while working on the farm I’ve started to suffer with Carpel Tunnel so I now rely on my trusty Kenwood Chef to do the first mixing.  I throw in around half of each packet of flour, half the yeast mixture and half the total amount of the other ingredients.  I then set the Chef to work at the slowest speed to get it combined adding a bit more liquid if necessary to get a soft dough mix.

I then take that ball of dough out and do the same with the second half.  When that is combined I mix in the first portion until it is all combined.  I do it this way to stop flour being distributed throughout the kitchen as I found happened if I put the 2kg of flour in all at once.  I then check the consistency either adding a bit more warm water if it is too dry or a bit more plain flour if it is too wet.

How much water is used depends on just how much each batch of flour absorbs and can change each time.  Getting the consistency right was a matter of trial and error.  The error for many of my first batches was making the dough too dry, more like a pastry consistency.  This resulted in bread that was more akin to a brick than a delicacy.  I also had a few batches where I added too much water so got a ball of dough swimming around in a sea of flour glue which took forever to clean up from the work surface but eventually I got something that worked!

At this point I dump the whole batch on the table and kneed it a bit more until it is nicely stretchy and springy – very therapeutic.  It’s than put in a large bowl,  brushed with a little water to help stop the surface drying out, covered and left to double in size.  If it’s not a very warm day, I pop it into the car which acts as a small greenhouse and creates a lovely warm temperature.

At this point it’s already smelling warm and yeasty.  I then turn it out and knock it back with a short kneed and divide it read for the second proving.

If I have time I divide it into 100g portions and have discovered that the silicon fairy cake moulds are ideal to cook the buns in.

If time is short, as it was with the above batch, I’ve found the cast iron and enamelled ware I inherited from my mother, which can just be seen above the bowl work better than any loaf tin I’ve used before.  I just oil them and dust with plain flour.

The dough is then left to prove for a second time – around half and hour usually suffices this time and then they are baked at around 190C for 25mins.  Again this is only approximate as it depends on your oven, the water content of the dough, the size and shape of the loaves you are making etc. etc.  The bread is deemed cooked when it sounds hollow when knocked on the bottom.  If is still sounds a bit dull then return it to the oven but upside down this time and cook for 5 mins longer then test again.

The picture below shows the general consistency of the bread – this batch was a little undercooked as I was working on other things at the time and hauled it out as soon as it was just OK.  I’d also used the whey left over from making paneer as the liquid in this batch trying to minimise wastage.  The picture also shows the ingredients list for the flours which hopefully is relatively innocuous for processed food . 

Bread, A Staple Of Life?

Over the last few years I’ve been making my own bread. I’ve made bread on and off for many years when it was a novelty activity. After moving to France, and as much as I love baguette, I really missed granary bread. It is possible to buy it here as a speciality loaf but it is a minimum of four times more expensive than the baguette so I always baulked at buying it.

I, as I’m sure a lot of other people too, have noticed that bread today doesn’t react the way it used to. If you buy a pre-packaged sandwich loaf I will still be moist and soft 2 or more weeks down the line. A baguette, or bread from my youth, could be used to hammer in nails after a couple of days!

So what’s changed? Manufacturers will tell you that they’ve introduced an additive to reduce waste by prolonging the shelf life of the bread and making sure you, the consumer, are better off by not wasting so much, and we are completely taken in by it thinking they have our best interests at heart. We are so easily deceived.

I was horrified to discover that a chemical extracted from chicken feathers or human hair is what is used to keep the bread moist. OK, I will admit it’s not the feathers or hair that is added but having seen in exposes the conditions chickens are often kept in and the poverty that drives people to sell their hair, even processed feathers or hair are not a welcome addition in my bread.

Added to that is the Chorleywood process used to produce the bread. Again, hailed because it is fast and can be mechanised and therefore good for us as it means cheaper bread. However, it put people out of work, (without a salary even ‘cheap’ bread can be expensive), and wheat with a lower protein level can be used which to my way of thinking means it is less balanced nutritionally. It also requires more yeast and other ‘aids’ to help the rising to happen in the shorter time and I think it’s hardly unsurprising that Candida overgrowth is now reported as an epidemic. And I am not alone in this belief that the staple of life is now less than healthy.

So, I now make my own bread most of the time, as described in the following post:-

A Bit About This Blog

Over the years,- and there have been many years, - my views have evolved and changed. Experience, age, children, financial state, where I live and science are some of the things that have contributed to the continual development of what I think and what I want to do.

Where I am at the moment is probably nearing anti-consumerism, however being a child of the 60’s and 70’s, (I did say there had been many years ), I do like my creature comforts so this blog is about my attempts at a gradual weaning away from the heavily materialistic and consumerist society we inhabit.

I currently live in south west France on an old farm of around 6 hectares along with an assortment of cats, camelids (alpacas), chickens and carp (goldfish).