Dandelion coffee

At the end of my first summer with half an allotment, I was lucky to be offered the other half of the plot.

Someone had taken it on about the same time I did, but soon packed it in. Shoulder high weeds took over and there were regular mutterings amongst the other plot-holders about "One year's seeds is seven year's weeds".

The allotment officer tried to find someone who wanted it, but no one lasted 3 days after that. This half is right next to the entrance gate, and a portion of it is allocated for the council's compostable waste bins, so it wasn't the most attractive plot. But now it is under my care :-)

My first job was to clear all the weeds and that job gave me my first harvest. Once the tall weeds had been cut back, I found the ground covered with Dandelions. Digging the roots up whole was quite a job, but some of the roots looked quite substantial. I don't like wasting anything, so I ended up bringing a sackful home.

Several got discarded on close inspection - half the dandelions suffered from insect damage, so what hope will my veg have! After a lot of scrubbing, they were chopped and dried and shrank down to just this......

And so they have sat on a shelf for a few months until I decided to try roasting a few for some dandelion coffee. One of my secondhand bargains over the summer was a hand-cranked coffee grinder. Of course now I had something to grind it wasn't going to work!

Undeterred I took it apart and realised it just needed tightening. So within minutes I had some freshly ground dandelion.

It did have a vague coffee-likeness, but was not so bitter and more like Barley cup. Very comforting on such a cold day. "Hedgerow Medicine" by J Bruton-Seal and M Seal suggests grinding a few pods of cardamom with it, or even cinnamon or fennel seeds. It is also good for you as it cleanses the liver and skin.

So if you are looking for a free, healthy, locally-grown, caffeine-free alternative, that you can harvest from virtually any garden, playing field or road verge..... then try dandelion :-)

France

I'm going to be honest - I have at least another week of work to do for the project I am working on. It has been hard to see the end of it and my motivation has dipped to record lows. I have had to strictly prohibit trips to the allotment or writing posts until it is finished, and even spent 3 hours working on Boxing day. But my mind still try's to find other escapes and distractions!

So I spent a few days regularly checking for news from the tragedy in France and watching in horror as the events following the attack on Charlie Hebdo unfolded.



I like France. When my kids ask me where in the World I would like to go on holiday I always say France. Of course they always moan because they have dreams to travel the World and see amazing sights, and as far as they are concerned they have already ticked France off the list several times. But the next holiday I am planning will be in ...France :-)

Why? Because of the fresh croissants in the morning. They are nothing like the pre-packaged ones that you can buy in the supermarkets in the UK. It is worth getting up early and walking to the local Boulangerie, which you will find in every village, just for the delicious taste and texture of soft, warm, fresh croissants. Mmmm......heaven!

The French know this - how important it is to have delicious, fresh and varied food. It really makes you feel good to savour a delicious meal, even if it has taken all day to make, and meant sourcing ingredients from several different farms or markets. Just a slice of bread or a juicy tomato tastes better in France, because everything is about freshness, quality and the pleasure it brings, rather than just for hunger. It feels like we have lost this in the UK....if we ever had it.

And this is what shapes France, in my mind. It is why they still have a culture of lots of small rural farms and markets, and they fight companies like Amazon in order to retain small local businesses. It is why the Farmers have a voice and are quite willing to muck-spray government buildings or dump rotten cabbages outside, if the government ignores their needs. It is freedom of speech and more still. It is a population who reject TV dinners and demand better. It is a population who know that they have the power to object to stupid government or EU policies and to provoke a change. I'm not happy about it, but I am sure we would just grumble behind closed doors in the UK.

This is why it is always fascinating to see where the French stand on World affairs. The UK prime minister just parrots whatever the US have said and votes how they vote. But France doesn't always follow the rest of the flock. Look at the lead up to the war in Iraq, when Tony Blair was falling over himself to please President Bush, but the French had their own opinion and took a lot of bad press from the US for it. I seem to remember there was a boycott of French fries ?!?

And more recently President Hollande has been talking about ending the sanctions on Russia. Once again taking an independent line that is counter to that of the US. Here is what President Holland is reported to have said.

Mr Hollande said Russian President Vladimir Putin "doesn't want to annex eastern Ukraine - he told me that"............
..............."The sanctions must be lifted if there is progress. If there is no progress the sanctions will stay in place," Mr Hollande told France Inter radio.

On 15th January there will be a summit between Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine, which may lead to a decision on sanctions. It will be interesting to see what the French decide to do.

For today though there are mass rallies in France. I worry that it will provide a target for more attacks and I hope that the day remains peaceful and that the worst is over for the people of Paris. My thoughts are with the 17 killed in Paris, and also with the hundreds of thousands killed around the World by extremist forces. Let's hope that 2015 brings peace.

Ready for Christmas?

It is Christmas Eve Eve and I am feeling oddly contented. The last month has been very busy with work and rather stressful. The work isn't finished, I have drawings strewn across my desk still, but there is progress and an end of this project is within sight at last.

My lovely neighbour has just delivered one of her delicious Christmas cakes - a very moist traditional Finnish cake. Everyone loves it and it doesn't last 5 minutes. If my cupboards weren't bursting at the seams with food, I would try to hide it until Christmas day. That is the kind of neighbour I aspire to being - bringing home-baked cakes, but I always manage to fall well short. I haven't written a single Christmas card yet this year, and have wrapped a total of 2 presents! Oh well - still one day left ;-)

My youngest daughter however decided that she wanted to make Christmas cards for her whole class this year. She had a picture in her head and when she told me, I thought that she would never be able to make anything so fancy and certainly not 23 of them in a short space of time! But as always she completely amazed me. I sat and helped stick the tiny windows on, whilst she hand drew all the sleighs and reindeer. It felt really special :-)

Christmas dinner should be special this year too. All the meat is from the local organic farm and it is amazing. For us the taste and texture is always so much better than anything from the supermarket, and when you can see the animals and talk to the farmer and the butcher, you know that these are people that can be trusted.

My experience with supermarket meat is not great. For instance two weeks ago I bought a packet of "skinless and boneless chicken thighs" I did think that they looked quite small, but it wasn't until I was half way through chopping them up and came across white tendons, that I realised it was actually meat cut from the drumstick and made to look like thighs! I don't like to think what else they do to our food to make it more profitable (like last year's horse meat scandal!). Next year I'm planning for more of our meat to come from the local farm instead.

Shamefully I have only been to the allotment 3 times since the beginning of October, but each of those times, there has still been veg for harvesting. Swedes, leeks, fennel, beetroot, chard, kale, rocket and spinach mainly. It is amazing considering the recent neglect.

Thank you so much for reading my posts this year. I hope you have found them interesting. More regular blogging should resume in the New Year.

Wishing you a peaceful Christmas wherever you are.

Judy x

Shakespeare

My son has been rehearsing hard for weeks to perform as part of the Shakespeare schools festival. Simultaneously over last week there were 1,000 schools performing and we watched just 4 of these in one evening. Each school had their own take on a different Shakespeare play and they were brilliant!

The lady sitting next to me watched the whole week's worth at the Curve in Leicester, and had been very impressed. As she pointed out, "Shakespeare is like speaking another language." Yet there were primary school children confidently delivering their lines for The Tempest, and conveying the meaning well enough for those unfamiliar with the play to be able to follow. My youngest daughter was so confused -"I can't understand what they are saying", but she still picked up the storylines conveyed by the acting.

One of the schools performing was an international school, so for them it was like speaking a different language, in a foreign language. They did spectacularly and even though none of their parents were in the audience it seemed like they received the loudest applause. These were young teenagers, and you could see they were glowing with the appreciation.

Did I mention they were Russian? It clearly made not the slightest difference to any one of the people in that theatre, other than to impress them at their language ability. Why should it? We are not in another Cold War, even though those words have been rattling around the news recently. It feels like there is an attempt to re-ignite old memories and old fears. But that adversary, the Soviet Union, no longer exists. Does anyone really feel under threat from Russia?

Let me tell you a little more about the play that they performed. It was Othello, and a very brief synopsis is that Iago tricked Othello into believing that the woman he loved, Desdemona, had been having an affair with Cassio. Iago did this by deception and lies, making innocent conversations appear to mean something else, planting false evidence and trying to silence anyone who could reveal the truth. Orthello believed the lies and tormented by jealousy, murdered Desdemona, the woman he loved. In case you haven't guessed.....it is a tragedy. Though not quite as tragic as King Lear, which seemed as if most of the cast ended up dead!

This plot may be written over 400 hundred years ago, but the same lies, deception and false meanings are still in use to blind and mis-direct us. For instance, why are protesters in Hong Kong called "pro-democracy protesters" in the press, yet in Ukraine the people standing against the current government are called "pro-Russian separatists". (It is such a mouthful that it could easily be shortened from "pro-Russian separatists" to just "Russians".) Were the Scottish Yes supporters labelled "pro-Scandinavian separatists"? How ridiculous does that sound? Yet they were voting to be independent of British rule, just as the people of Donetsk have voted to be independent of Ukraine. The difference of course being that Scottish independence was out-voted, whereas Donetsk had a clear majority for independence. Plus the Scottish vote is considered legitimate and for some reason the Donetsk vote isn't. What is Democracy if it isn't about giving the people a vote and a voice?

If the majority of people living in Donetsk don't want to be part of Ukraine, how would you try to change their minds? Attacking them until they abandon their homes and become refugees can't be the only option.

I am not saying that I can unscramble the truth from the lies, but I do like to hear the story from all sides. This BBC interview by John Simpson of Dmitry Peskov, Putin's chief spokesperson, seems to give a glimpse of the other side of the story. I found Dmitry Peskov quite compelling. He really can't believe that John Simpson thinks that there are Russian troops in Ukraine. (Here is another interesting snippet from John Simpson from the same event)

There does seem to be a lot of accusations flying with little solid definitive evidence to back it up. Dmitry Orlov wrote in his post 'How can you tell whether Russia has invaded Ukraine?' describing what a Russian invasion would actually look like.

"....the Russians operate in battalions of 400 men and dozens of armored vehicles, followed by convoys of support vehicles (tanker trucks, communications, field kitchens, field hospitals and so on). The flow of vehicles in and out is non-stop, plainly visible on air reconnaissance and satellite photos....."

That clearly isn't happening, but at the same time how can Russia stay neutral about what is happening on their border? With most countries in the region reliant on Russian gas to see them through the winter, the picture of an isolated Russia backed into a corner doesn't ring true either. It may be the reality of energy supplies that brings the situation to a head - a cold Cold War you might say ;-)

And maybe in true Shakespearian fashion the truth will be unveiled as the tragedy ends.

Low Energy Event

I have been baking today, lots of lovely cakes for the Transition Energy Event tomorrow. Below are my delicious cookies and Nigella's famous clementine cake from the 'Green & Blacks Chocolate Recipes' book. It hadn't occurred to me before, but the clementine cake is gluten free, so must be totally healthy despite being coated in Green & Blacks chocolate ;-) I have also made a carrot cake and Mrs Thrifts Chocolate Courgette Traybake, although I was low on some ingredients by then so there was a bit of substitution involved.

If you are near Loughborough and don't have any plans for Saturday afternoon, why don't you drop in to the Transition Loughborough Energy Event at St Peters Community Centre. There will be free homemade cakes and refreshments! If that isn't enough to entice you, there will be advice on how to save energy without spending money, and also examples of some low cost solutions. With talks from Dr Tina Holt the super-insulated refurbishment guru, and Caroline Harmon local expert on energy efficiency measures and grants there is bound to be something of interest for everyone. This informal event is open from 1 - 4pm, so if there is anything you want to ask about energy bills, draught-proofing, grants, solar panels or insulation then come along for a chat and some cake :-)