Don’t get to know the farm animals too well – Geordie’s Choice

Posted on 17/08/2014 by hotnsticky

(Don’t read this letter if you’re vegan)

This months red meat meal is lamb.

As part of his work as a chef, our son Geordie, has to go out to farms and collect produce for the restaurant. Last week it was out to the farm where the biggest black truffle in Australia was dig up. The farmer didn’t need a truffle dog to find it. It was so big that he saw it bulging up out of the ground. It took him an hour and a half to expose it and dig it out very carefully. It is the largest truffle ever found Australia, weighing in a 1.2 + kgs. The world record for the biggest truffle is for one found in France weighing in at a whopping 1.3 kg.

So we still have a hundred grams to go!

Recently, Geordie was out at the farm where they source their organic lamb and got to make friends with the very carefully reared little animals. He took a shine to one in particular and asked how much it would be. They agreed a price and the next day after lunch, the abattoir van called in at the restaurant with the weeks supply as well as Geordie’s Choice.

He has done this sort of thing before. Earlier in the year it was a piglet. Since he started at this he has honed his skills. I remember he told me that the first time that he had to butcher an animal. It took him 2 hrs to break it down, section it and have it all prepared and shrink-wrapped ready for the fridge and freezer. He’s a chef, not a butcher.

This time, with more practice and better skills, he has it all in the cling-film in 20 mins. We get a call asking if we have room in our fridge/freezer. We do and he is here shortly after with his cargo. All neatly sectioned and wrapped as leg, shoulder, tender loin, spare ribs, excess bones and trimmings, etc.

The first thing that I do is to make a stock with all the excess bones, and trimmings. I use carrots and celery from the garden, plus a couple of parsnips and some spinach and mustard greens. At this time of year there is a lot less choice in the garden, so we use what we have. This is the life that we have chosen. Our winter mirepoix is augmented with sprigs of sage, sweet marjoram and thyme, all from our herb garden. Then two whole knobs of our own home grown, cleaned, plaited and hung garlic, cut cross-wise to expose the full flavour and tossed in whole, a star anise and a whole bottle of our own new vintage light red wine. I roast the bones for an hour in the oven, while I boil the mirepoix on the hot plate. I add the bones to the veggie mix and let the lot simmer together for another hour more on the wood stove.

The whole lot is left to cool overnight before I skim off the fat, remove the bones and then sieve out the herbs and vegetables. I re-heat the resulting stock the next night when we light the wood fired kitchen stove again.

I reduce the stock down from many litres down to just one. An intense concoction of garden produce flavours and hand tended, organic and carefully raised lamb, marrow-bone jelly and home made, organic shiraz red wine. I can’t think of anything else that could be much more rewarding. Eating form our own garden, cooking what we have at the time. A constantly changing menu closely tied to the season and our own hard work in the garden and orchards.

The next day we have a wonderful, long-term friend call in. We discuss our common interests in ceramics. He teaches me many things, as he always does. He is a wonderful mentor. I learn to be a little more accepting and more forgiving with each visit. I still have a lot to learn, but I’m trying. He is amazingly patient. A good friend and very caring, I admire him immensely.

I cook him a risotto of home-grown mushrooms and garden-produce for lunch. We go together down to the Pantry Field and pick some big, luscious, dark, field mushrooms. I send him home with a bag-full of them, but we save a few for the risotto. We also have some exotic fungi from the local market. They all go in together. Janine comes home from her outing and the three of us greedily consume it. It works out well and we enjoy it together. A rich full flavour, de-glazed with a slosh of our wine, moderated with some of our home made marrowbone jelly stock form Geordie’s lamb.

Risotto Recipe;

I have the choice of arborio and carnaroli rice. The arborio is open, so I use that.

I brown an onion in some local EV olive oil until softened. Stir in a cup-full of the rice and flip it around until properly coated in the oil. Then deglaze with a big ‘slosh’ of local Sauvignon Blanc, add in the sliced mushrooms and finely diced veggies. At this point I’d usually have another pan of stock boiling close by, but on this occasion, I only have just 1 litre of concentrated stock from Geordies lamb bones, so I add it in and as it firms up, I add a little more white wine. The whole lot is consistently stirred and simmered while we talk, until the rice is done.

It has a smooth flowing texture, a lovely red/brown colour, and a warm, fulfilling place in the soul for some human interaction. We really enjoy it.

So that was nice. Possibly better than I had any idea that I knew of. Life is made of such unexpected exchanges.

I am so lucky. I don’t know how lucky I am. I never know quite what is going on in my life, until it is a long time after the event. I seem to only know what has happened to me in retrospect.

We decide to have a shoulder of Geordie’s new lamb for dinner. It’s organic and it couldn’t be fresher. Rested for a couple of days. We get it out of the fridge and prepare it. We collect a few sprigs of fresh rosemary from the cuttings that we grew from bushes that John Meredith had growing in his herb garden in the 70’s. He got his rosemary cuttings from his mother’s garden in Holbrook, back in the 50’s, and from there, they came to us, via his weekender here in the village. These sprigs of rosemary have a direct family tree that goes back into medieval times, or so it seems. The Meredith family tree goes all the way back to the Kings of Wales.

These woody herbaceous bushes that we grew from the cuttings that were given to us by Merro back in the seventies were propagated out into the series of bushes that we still have growing today.

I climb up onto a kitchen chair and then make my way up onto the kitchen table and hook down one of the last plaits of garlic, still hanging up there from last October. There are only 4 plaits left, two at each end of the roof truss. We usually run out about now just a few months short of the full year. We had a good crop last year, so we will have enough to make it through the last 2 months. The garlic that is left hanging up there is a little bit tired. It has started to shoot and is somewhat dry and withered, but it still tastes like garlic when cooked, only just not as strong as it was.

We planted this years crop of a few hundred cloves, back in March, they are doing well and should be ready to lift in October or November when they start to die down.

I brown the shoulder in good local olive oil on the stove top. The Queen of Yorkshire pudding has lit the stove early, so as to get a good hot oven. She intends to cook a Yorkshire pudding with the juices from the roast and she will need a very hot oven at the end for that, so as to get it just right. We toss in some quartered onions and some of our freshly dug King Edward potatoes. The roasting pan then goes into the oven. We cook it long and slow, with the heat gently increasing as we go, so that the lamb finishes with a nice caramelised taste and the oven is hot, ready for the Yorkshire pudding to go straight in.

Yorkshire pudding, for those who don’t know, is a kind of savoury pancake that is cooked after a roast, in the same pan, using the pan juices. There is just enough time to cook it quickly while the roast rests before carving. I know some families that serve it as an entrée with gravy before the roast, but we have always had it on the plate with the meat and vegetables.

recipe;

2 table spoons full of plain flour

1/2 a cup of milk

2 eggs

This mixture, although quite simple, has to be made up at least an hour or so before it’s needed, so that all the ingredients have time to get to know each other well. An occasional whisking with a fork every now and then when passing also helps. Prepare the mix when you prepare the meat.

Remove the roast from the baking pan and drain all the juices to one end. Spoon off what fat you can from the top of the liquid. Put the pan back on top of the stove and get it cracking hot. Pour in the Yorkshire pudding mix so that it fills the pan with a thin layer. Place it back in the oven for a few minutes at full heat. It should come out all risen and fluffy with a golden crust. It looks great as it comes out of the oven, but soon collapses as it is cut up into sections and placed on the plates. It’s very fashionable these days to cook individual small Yorkshire puddings in a cake tray. Traditionally, Yorkshire pudding was a cheap way to fill a family up while getting the most out of a slim allowance of meat for the week.

When the meat has been in the oven for half its time, we add the potatoes, I go out and pick the Brussels sprouts and broccoli. They are as fresh as they can be, I rinse them and have them ready in the saucepan. When the roast comes out of the oven, the pudding goes in. The greens go on the hot plate with a little boiling water from the kettle. I steam the greens.

We enjoy our roast lamb as it falls from the bone and melts in our collective mouths, with Yorkshire pudding, fresh picked home grown Brussels sprouts and broccoli. These are hot, but still slightly firm straight off the stove top and onto the plates last thing, with our own roasted potatoes, crispy outside, but smooth and soft inside. It’s a very special treat to dine for, that we seem to be able to have quite often — sans the lamb.

It’s Geordie’s birthday coming up soon. We arrange for a few very close friends to go out to dinner. Just the 6 of us, we go to a very special multiple starred restaurant in Sydney, He has chosen it for his own party. He once worked here doing cooking demos. We have various drinks at the bar, while we wait for the seating in the restaurant proper to open. I’m the designated driver, so only water for me,

We eventually go in and are seated. The staff are attentive and helpful. This restaurant is full, even on a Wednesday evening. The prices are expensive in my opinion. Perhaps over-rated for what is on offer. $25 for a small plate of entrée. It seems a bit much to me. But I can’t deny that the place is full, mid week. However , it is the most expensive suburb in Sydney, full of millionaires. So the prices are all-right for them.

The waitress starts to tell us about the specials on the menu tonight. She lists off the dishes one at a time. She starts with the restaurant’s famous lamb dish. The signature dish of the house, slow roasted and served with your choice of side dishes, like steamed vegetables.

I don’t want to sound too much like a toffee-nosed twat, but we had that exact meal last night!

I bet that they don’t do Yorkshire pudding as a special side dish.

with love from the Queen of the hot oven and her Yorkshire Man.

Annabelle Sloujetté, the Dream Weaver

Posted on 11/08/2014 by hotnsticky

Annabelle comes to visit.

She calls in every now and then. Usually at short notice, often unexpectedly. She is buxom and gorgeous and fills the room with her personality. Always bearing gifts of focussed thoughtfulness and appropriate application. Not expensive, often hand made, and by her own fair hand at that. A beautiful creative spirit. She lets herself in. She has her own key.

We awake in the morning to find her car in the garden. She emerges late for breakfast. She arrived quite late. It was a long drive here from where-ever she has been previously. She sits down at the kitchen table and starts to tell me her meaningful dreams. How they inspire her art works and keep her endlessly entertained. She has learned over her lifetime to be able to control her dreams and make them conform to her desires and deepest wishes. I ask her how she does this, but she doesn’t know. It’s something that she can just do. It happens, just like shit happens, only in this case, in the reverse sort of way, and a much better outcome. It’s a great skill to have and she really enjoys exercising it.

It has inspired her latest series of drawings. She’s putting together a show, this time of drawings, so different from the last one of welded, re-cycled metal junk sculptures. She starts to tell me all about the drawings in detail, but stops. Gets up and loads the stove top espresso machine and then starts to tell me more. This is interrupted by her trip to the loo, but she is right back and picks up mid sentence where she was with her pet black cat sitting on her windowsill and wanting to come in or out, whichever she isn’t at the time, while her lover caresses her and adores her. There is a ‘bleeped-out,’ deleted-scene here as the coffee machine hisses and gurgles to its orgasmic conclusion and she ends her tale of fulfilment with a sigh.

Bringing the percolator over to the kitchen table, she places it down and continues. It’s a long story of her younger life on the high seas circumnavigating the Pacific in a small hand made sailing boat. After she ran away from home, over summering in Rarotonga to avoid the hurricane season. The Cook Island girls are the best hula dancers in the world apparently. With special gifts of hip rotation at high speed, mesmerising and hypnotic, if not erotic.

There is a brief interlude where the story of the wild Pacific is intertwined with her other life with a publican in an Irish pub two decades apart. The smell of burning peat and the thick black velvety Guinness and Porter, so ideally matched to the cool damp weather and an entire village of characters that flow in and out of this period of her life. The tale so involved and convoluted, that it images the wild growth of the jungle on the Pacific Island where she slept on the beach and lived for a season on fruits and by beach-fishing, where drift wood was burnt instead of peat.

There is a rapid segue into Sydney in the seventies after leaving her post with the Embassy on that hot humid archipelago with all the stuffed-up Expats and their prim and proper wives who’s only conversation was their children and what they would do when they got back to Canberra. How she loved the native children and how they laughed all the time and how everyone in the villages walked just sooo slowly. There was always plenty of time for everything, no one had any money and everyone ‘made-do’. And keeping the wild Pacific Island theme of head hunting and being sought out and ‘head-hunted’ herself by a big advertising firm in the city, which wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. All internal turmoil and not pacific at all. But it brought her obliquely into the world of fine art, and then craftsmanship, where she settled after jumping ship in New Zealand and learned pottery making in Nelson. A beautiful time in her life where everyone was on the same page and working together in a big loosely bonded creative community. There she also learnt spinning and weaving and as she spins her tale I’m woven into the filigree of her life’s fabric.

She swears that we met, when I taught her ceramics at the National Art School in Sydney where I worked for 25 years, or was it at Mackie college, where I briefly taught trainee art teachers, but I never taught an Annabelle Sloujetté that I’m aware of, there was a girl of Dutch heritage whose parents came out after the war and settled here, but I can still remember who that was and it wasn’t Annabelle. Is Sloujetté a Dutch name? Perhaps Belgian? She knows an awful lot about good chocolate and how to work and cook with it.

However, there is something very familiar about that huge flowing mane of thick black locks, lightly tinted with henna. I’m trying to place her in my memory of over 2,000 student that flowed through the place during my time there. I was only casual, working one day a week, teaching ceramic technology. Not all the students came to my classes regularly. Mine was the least popular subject in an Art School where everyone came to be fabulously creative, and to express themselves artistically. I was asked to teach technology and set on a Friday afternoon, when the students returned from a long lunch at the pub. Not every student paid full attention. Some preferring to sit up the back and play air guitar instead of concentrating on the maths and physics of ceramic chemistry. I think that I only got the job, because nobody else wanted to teach it in that time slot.

Annabelle continues her living dream. She put herself through Art School by calling on her old skills and pulling beers in a pub, but this time without the smell of peat, just sticky nylon carpet, stale hops and cigarette smoke. She starts to tell me about the guy who lived upstairs and who was seriously weird and suddenly there are feral Greenies, Black Cats, White Witches, Blues musicians down at the cross-roads at midnight. He said that he would teach her music, but she wouldn’t have a bar of him, he was far too crotchety. His bass nature scared her, but then there’s a brief mention of a fling with a guitar maker during her time in California on the eastern leg of her Pacific odyssey and how she once met Neil Young at a party up laurel Canyon, He was funny, quite dry, and very cryptic. Then she’s off to Haight Ashbury, but doesn’t find any love there. She completely misses Woodstock because she doesn’t believe that it will be any good, and then regrets it, but not for too long.

Always a restless spirit, her story moves on to Swinging London and the Emergence of the School of the Masters of Wine, her admin duties and all the left-over tastings that she got to take home. It was the only way to keep warm in that little, expensive and very cramped bed-sit through the winter. Never seeing the sun, working indoors all day under fluoros and leaving for work and returning from it in the dark. Of being SAD and longing for something more than just a wage packet and a place to sleep. There always had to be some art. That’s what has always kept her going.

She pauses and looks around for the coffee. Apparently it’s still too hot. I’m trying to focus and maintain my attention, but I’m concerned about the coffee, I get up to fetch her a cup, which she refuses, and I miss the bit about the drawing teacher at the Slade School of Art and something that happened there, which is a pity as I really was interested. But there is no going back and her story moves on to the south of France, sunshine and Vineyards, the vendange, so much work to be had everywhere at this time, the money is very poor, but the food is fantastic.

She wants to be involved in the wine making but has no skills, she gets to see the plunging of the cap and the big old basket press at work. She works hard and they like her. The old man asks to see her hands, he can see straight away that she is a hard worker. Without much of the language, she understands that they will keep her on. Her new job is to help spread the spent ‘must’ from the early white grapes back onto the vines. The hillside is steep and the stony ground makes for difficult foot holds. She collapses into bed at the end of each day.

She has been sleeping on the ground next to her scooter, wrapped in a make-do swag, but now they warm to her and let her sleep in the old tobacco curing shed, it has no walls, but there is straw and it is much better than being outside, as the weather is starting to turn now.

She gets to see the conversion of the red ‘pomace’ into cheap spirit brandy by soaking the red spent must skins in water, adding beet sugar and re-fermenting the resulting liqueur into alcohol and then distilling it into spirit. This old farm doesn’t have its own still, so the 2^nd ferment of the ‘must’ is sent away for the distillation. When it comes back as spirit, it’s stored in two huge old wine barrels. Strictly for family use – no tax to pay here. These peasants are canny and frugal. She finishes up washing, rinsing and filling the new wine into the red/brown wine-stained wooden barrels.

She loved France, there was glorious food, handsome men and a stint in a ‘very good’ restaurant where she learnt so much, not as a cook, but as a kitchen hand. Always with an eye to improve herself and make the best of any situation, she observes everything and makes careful notes when she gets back to her little Gité where she over-winters.

From wine to food and her time Cheffing back in London, in that little restaurant where they tried so hard, but her partner drank all the profits. She explains her method of making the best soufflé in the world and now it’s time for me to get out my notebook, but there isn’t time. This international woman of mystery reappears in an artists squat in a densely urbanised city, a living space crammed with little romantic lane-ways, medieval in their narrowness, stuffed with small bars, artists studios, brothels and pimps. Everyone is making some sort living here doing what they can do. She doesn’t intend to stay long but falls in love with a certain man and this place, where everyone speaks with a lisp, just like the King. There is live music every night and dancing. She finds out that he is already married and isn’t interested in any kind of commitment and neither is she, so she’s gone.

She’s with another artist now, a tough macho guy, but he’s a hollow man. He mistreats her and he is floored for his inappropriate behaviour. She walks out on him after having held a knife to his throat and seeing all the colour drain from his face, his swarthy complexion turns absolutely white and beads of sweat start to form on his brow. He sees the anger burning in her eyes, and he knows she means it. She sees the terror in his eyes, and knows that he now really knows her, and that she does mean it. It’s a fair exchange, she’s satisfied, but he wont get another chance. She slams the door on him and dumps all his stuff out the window into the street. This is one woman not to be messed with, but she knows that he has friends and that this is his city, so she’s moving on. Fully tanked with life skills now, she knows her way around and this time, it’s time to go, NOW!

While day-labouring on a farm, she finds an old antique BMW tourer in the barn and buys it from the farmer. He doesn’t want to sell it, not to her or anyone, but she wins him over with her soufflé, or so she says. Then sets off overland to return to the Lucky Country, but the bike gets re-stolen in Italy and so she swaps to a big old Lambretta tourer, which she rides across into the middle East. She sleeps on the steps of the synagogue and wakes with a heavy Dew on her.

“I don’t believe that for a minute”….

but she doesn’t stop. She knows that she has got a laugh out of me, and that’s all that counts. I fell for it.

She smokes hashish with the border guards crossing into Afghanistan and bribes her way through Pakistan and into India by trading the last of her instant coffee and razor blades. She does things that she’s not proud of, but makes do as means must.

She always wanted to go to Tibet, but never managed to make the detour. “There’ll be another time”, but there wasn’t.

The story then slithers into The Territory and venomous snakes, cane toads, lay lines and her aunty’s secret woman’s business that I can’t know about, but it doesn’t matter, because I don’t need to know. I’m momentarily mesmerised by her aboriginal connections. Her work with them as a teacher, and how she learnt as much as she taught. Her love of their art and the strong linear motifs in their dot paintings. There is a reference to the similarities of tying ropes on the boat and the tying of fish hooks for beach fishing. The convoluted loops of this story morph into a story of Maori fish hooks and how they were traditionally tied without a hole in the bone. This story of knots and how to tie them is so amazing that I can hardly follow it. When the first white settlers arrived on the scene, The Maori learned to steal the galvanized steel staples out of the fence posts and use these as fish hooks! So adaptive and clever. She tells me of the woven fibre fish traps she saw while working in New Guinea, so simple and effective. She reels me in with a tale of cooking fresh fish on the beach over an open fire, skewered on sticks and later baking the bigger ones packed in potters clay in among the fading coals and ash.

I’m starting to think that her coffee will be way too cold if she doesn’t pour it soon. But I’m reluctant to try and slide a word in edgewise into her flowing narrative, in case it breaks the spell. I’m enjoying this torrent of language and the associated images of a rich, full life. When I look, I think that I can see some Maori influence in her amazing long black hair, so thick, dense and rich with a beautiful sheen. But Sloujetté isn’t any Maori name that I’m aware of. I think it’s Dutch? There hasn’t been any mention of a Mr Sloujetté in the story so far. I’m wondering if she really is of Pacific or Maori decent? If she has any secret hidden ‘tatoos’? But I’m too scarred to ask her to ‘Show us yer tats!’.

She just might!

She has perfected the art of removing her bra while sitting at table without adjusting any of her other clothing. She unclips it at the back and removes each shoulder strap from under her tea shirt, one at a time, while still talking, and without mentioning what she is in fact doing. Slowly, effortlessly, without drawing any attention to herself. Suddenly, the under-garment is in her lap and she sighs in relief as her marvellous breasts fall free. Later, she flips around to make a point and I have to duck, lest I loose an eye from one of those free swinging nipples under her T shirt, bouncing around like a sack full of puppies.

There was a brief episode in a Buddhist retreat and a quiet reflective mood comes over her. She reflects on her love of drawing and the inner calm of mindfulness and its relationship to good draftsmanship. There are deep connections to be followed through with, but she digresses with a few bars of her life with a jazz and blues musician and the few bars that they frequented together in their time. Drunken nights and lost days. Blue notes and a miss-placed G string.

Her story then remembers a summer of lovemaking in an apple orchard. The season is heading into summer and the giving is easy. She kneels to please him, But one swallow doesn’t make a summer. She’s living with the orchardists son in a little batch up-back. The orchardist’s bee-keeping neighbour went on to conquer the tallest summit and got a step named after him, while the tall orchardist father stayed home, because he couldn’t leave the farm, his ageing parents or even raise enough money to make the trip. Her very tall orchardist, so tall that he didn’t use a ladder to pick the fruit, most of the time, loves her for loving him and wants her to stay, She recalls all the hard work and the sore muscles, long soaking baths in a big wooden tub out in the field with an amazing view down over the valley. A wood fired, cast iron stove, fired on the prunings and apple cobblers after dinner with Edmonds agar custard. She stayed on after the summer for the harvest, but couldn’t stand the cold and cut free before the winter pruning, she leaves and follows the sun. Later, she eventually ends up walking to base camp as a right of passage. Maybe she could have gone further if the times had been different, but that was then and those were the times.

As her story rises to its conclusion, she decides that the coffee is now just the right temperature and picks up the espresso machine, flips the lid open and drinks the straight short black directly from the percolator. Then, satisfied that I’ve taken it all in, she wanders back to bed to catch up on her sleep. “To sleep, perchance to dream, and there’s the rub, for in that sleep, what dreams may come?”

When I return from work, she is gone. The spell is broken and the only reminder of her ever having been here are the scorch marks on our lawn, where she did a bit of circle work with her ute before leaving.

It’s amazing how one visitor can fill your week.

Fond regards from the ever so boring ‘stay at home Steve’

13 Years of Hard Work Up in Smoke

Posted on 08/08/2014 by hotnsticky

Winter Delights.

It’s the middle of winter and it’s time for pruning. I spend the morning pruning the dozen or so almond trees and then go on to prune the shiraz grape vines, as they are close together. These young almond trees are just coming into their 13th year now, we have other, older almonds that are 38 years old as well, but they are in another part of the garden, in with the original stone fruit orchard and are quite established.
Once you get into it, it’s an easy, mindless job. The sun is warm on my back, as there is no wind this morning. It’s a nice job, so much better than cleaning out the kiln firebox. My only difficulty is when I’m working around the trees and have to prune into the sun, which is low in the sky and makes me squint with it’s brightness. If this is the only thing that I can find to whinge about, then I am a happy man.
While I’m at it, I can’t help but recall Peter Mayle’s fictional neighbour ‘Massot” who he encounters while ‘Massot’ is pruning his vineyard. He has been pushing a wheel barrow along the rows depositing all the prunings into the wheel barrow. There is a small fire glowing in the bottom of the metal barrow and as each new collection of cuttings is deposited, it is ignited from the coals and ashes of the previous vine. As it is described, I can visualise that it’s a beautiful system of ancient ancestry. It removes the dead wood from the vineyard. It doesn’t require any cartage. It sterilizes the woody plant material that might otherwise spread infected material from vine to vine and as there is a hole in the bottom of the barrow, all the ash from the fire is slowly drained out along the rows of vines as soluble fertilizer for when it rains. A pretty perfect system. Beautiful in it’s simplicity. I’ve thought about burning my prunings in one of our metal barrows. Sending 13 years of hard work up in smoke.

Mayle takes great pleasure in humiliating his hard-working peasant neighbour for his earthy roots by pointing out that he has seen small bundles of vine cuttings for sale in posh English department stores, sold as kindling – selling for 10 Euros per bundle. Massot looks back along the long rows of vine trellises and can visualise hundreds of Euros of kindling gone up in smoke. It’s meant to be funny, but maybe it can be read in a different way. Perhaps it illustrates that Mayle feels inferior to the local French man in his natural environment. Mayle can’t see the beauty of the system, only the money and we know that the peasant isn’t getting the money, he has a life deeply embedded in the terroir. Mayle will never be part of this environment, never really comfortable, never naturalised into it, always the expat, his clean hands will always tell that he is from somewhere else.

I bundle my prunings, not for sale, but for kindling in our own fire place. Often used to start the kiln. I like the symmetry of the closed loop. Use what you’ve got. The prunings have to be removed from the orchard and vineyard. The best way to deal with the issues of disease is the burn them, but rather than burn them for no beneficial outcome, using them to start the kiln is a positive use, appropriate for a post-modern peasant-potter.

I water the big potato patch down in the Pantry Field and find that they are still growing wonderfully well, as are the field mushrooms in among them. The tall tree cover has worked wonderfully well to keep the frost off. I wasn’t fully aware up until now just how warm it was down there in that secluded little clearing. I collect a dozen big mushrooms for dinner from in amongst the spuds. We’ll have mushroom soup tonight. A few bunches of herbs and an onion browned in olive oil till soft, then the diced mushroom added and sautéed, some marrowbone and garden mirepoix stock added in and all left to simmer down and reduce, lastly a little flour and oil Roux to thicken it up a little, some pepper, a lovely warming and filling garden delight on a winters night.

We have a huge pile of stumps, old logs too big for the chain saw and too heavy for the tractor to move around, These massive sections of pine tree trunk were given to us to burn in the kiln by my friend’s Mother, when a hundred year old pine snapped off in a severe storm, crashing down in her garden narrowly missing her house. The tree was 1.8 metres across and each section weighed more than a tonne. It was delivered by bobcat and tip truck, 20 tonnes of it over three trips. I cut up what I could manage by myself, the section up to 1.2 metres, but some of the larger base sections were just too big. Now, after 3 or 4 years, the white ants and wood rot have set in, so I have to deal with it. I get the bobcat back and get what’s left pushed up into a pile. We add some nasty weeds that we don’t want to seed around the garden and woody garden waste too thick for the shredder, but too small for hob wood. It’s all piled up on the spare block, where we stock pile our kiln wood.

As the weather is clear and fine with no wind, it’s winter and there are no fire bans, we decide to burn off all this otherwise difficult to deal with herbage. In the evening we light it and it goes up like a Guy Fawkes’ night celebration. We have the long fire hoses ready and the high pressure fire pump going. It’s a good chance to give it a run and check that everything is in working order, ready for the summer.

We crack a bottle of home-brew beer, congratulate ourselves for a long day of hard work and watch it burn, The flare of light tinder is all over in half an hour, but the massive stumps and log sections remain glowing and smouldering into and through the night. Janine is up at 1.00 am to check it and I’m out there again at 6am.
In the early morning light there are three separate collections of smouldering lumps. I get the tractor out and push them all together, back into one big pile and they burst back into flames and continue to burn throughout the day. I hate to waste wood like this, but without the machinery to deal with such big lumps, there doesn’t seem to be any other option for me. I can’t afford to pay the bob cat driver to come and work here regularly, while I work my way through the pile, I don’t want to have a massive termite nest on my door step and now that it has spent a few years in the weather, what’s left of this spongy pine has all gone quite ‘manky’, and lost most of it’s calorific value. A fire seems to be the best way.

We spend all of the next day tending and supervising the fire. Cleaning up a lot of small rubbish, rotten wood and weeds. Someone has to stay with it all of the time, just to be safe. There might be some good ash to be collected, if there isn’t any wind or rain before it all cools down, so that I can get to it.
I cook tofu in sesame oil for lunch with garden vegetables, broccolini and coriander. A little bit of fish sauce makes it sing.

Day 3 of our fire sees very little left of the pile. Just one big block that started off as a 1.8 x 1.8 metre stump, weighing several tonnes, is now mostly gone. We have to drag in other pieces of wood to keep it alight. It’s a chance to clean up the back block and the little lane that wanders through the centre of our land. This pretty little wandering bushy lane was once the main east west road through the village. It was never legally gazetted, but just used by the locals as the shortest route between A and B. There were 3 attempt to make an access path through to the east ridge and 2 of them went through our place. They were both abandoned because the land there is so low-lying and boggy in wet weather. Parts of the lane were paved with stones to try to overcome this, but never satisfactorily. Eventually a legally gazetted road was built in the right place, but it meant a lot of very expensive earthworks.

Our small lane is almost completely over grown now. We’ve seen to that by blocking it off at both ends to stop weekend 4 wheel drivers winching their way through our land without asking on long weekends. It’s a very pretty place to go now, and as it isn’t used anymore, except by us to get to the back of our land to collect firewood, it has soon become over-grown. I decide to take the tractor down there, mow it and clean out all the dead wood, and while I’m at it, I cut up a few dead trees that have fallen down along the track and up on the dam bank of the ‘Max Lake’ out biggest dam, The one that we had built in order to collect and store water for irrigating our vineyard.

Janine has a stroke of genius in getting onto the hot smoldering coals and hot ashes to poke at the fire and shift logs with her rake without melting her shoes. She places thick sheets of stringybark bark down on the ashes first then steps onto them to do the work. She then retrieves them before they burst into flames. I have ruined one pair of old boots by working in the hot ashes and melting the soles.

As it’s Friday and the end of the week, we celebrate by not eating any mushrooms. We have lightly fried tofu again with more garden greens.

So that’s what ‘s been happening this week with the hot-footed, self-reliant Guy and Girl Fawkes, who are lighting the blue touch-paper and standing back to wait and see what happens.

With fond regards from his Naked Flame and her Rake

Go Slow, Look fast

Posted on 06/08/2014 by hotnsticky

The Pots from our own firing a week or so ago have all been cleaned and sorted out now in the spare-time that we can find between weekend workshops and work in the garden and orchards. We forwent the leisurely mushroom, egg and bacon brunch and got stuck into cleaning pots early instead. There’ll always be time for that leisure day sometime in the future – when I find myself bored and with nothing to do!

Janine got some really nice little cups with dramatic carbon sequestration and loads of natural ash deposit all over the fire-face. The clay body flashed red and the carbon inclusion is dark charcoal grey and black. A really lovely dramatic result for her. I think that they are stunning little gems.

She has used one of her older North coast, wild beach, pumice glaze. It varies from batch to batch, just as ‘wild’ glazes should. Varying from pale green celadon-like, through darker bottle greens into this transparent ‘honey’ brown on this occasion.

It’s a complex function of the natural variations of the materials, where they are collected and how they are processed, but also what they are blended with and in what proportions, plus the firing and the wood. I love this unknowable and unpredictable quality, so have absolutely no intension of trying to regulate or control this wild beach girl.

I love the way these little cups have flashed to a lovely warm red and yet picked up so much grey carbon during the firing, making for such a great contrast.

Some of these cups are so grey with sequestered carbon, that it makes them look as though they are on a dark clay body. but they’re not. In fact they are only glazed to half way, and the wood ash during the firing has glazed them all over in some places.

I have some nice rough country kitchen plates, glazed with the fluid blue/cream ash glaze. Some very nice ikebana vases fired in the front of the kiln in the ‘Zone of Death’ for the exhibition in Taiwan and three lovely tea bowls for the exhibition in Singapore. Plus two nice faux shino tea bowls for a group show at Kerrie Lowe Gallery in Sydney. So the pressure is off. I have everything that I need and more. This life of self-reliance and DIY seems to have worked out OK for us. However, it’s a bit late now after almost 40 years together and living here to go back and make any changes. We have committed to this life and it has been good to us.

The ash glazed plates will mostly go into use in our kitchen, but there will be a few for sale in the pottery and on our ‘Gallery’ menu on the blog, when I get around to it. I threw them with a feeling of being fast and loose so that the throwing marks are quite distinctive. They were actually thrown reasonably slowly, I just wanted them to look ‘fast’. This was to show off the pooling effect of the ash glaze at high temperature. They have turned out well and I’m happy with them. I wrote about making them 6 weeks ago in ‘Give Peas a Chance’, when I was throwing them.

There is an inevitable time lag between throwing the wet clay on the potters wheel, drying it to leather hard ready for turning the bases into a smooth shape and creating a ‘foot’ ring, if required by the form, then thoroughly drying them out before bisque firing. The biscuit firing is heated slowly up to 1000oC in the solar powered, electric kiln. Then after slow cooling, the pots are unpacked, fettled and prepared for glazing. The water based glaze mixture is made from sieved wood ash from the kiln and/or kitchen stove firebox, mixed with ground up local stones. In this case the application is quite thick because the glaze runs and pools at high temperature. After the glaze is dry, the pots are packed into the wood fired kiln to be heated up to 1300oC in reduction atmosphere over approximately 20 hours of constant stoking.

It’s amazing that potters will actually come here to work through the night firing the kiln with us and be happy for the experience! Potters?!!

The pieces below were in fact fired in my own firings, squeezed in-between the regular weekly workshop firings.

These 3 Ikebana vases have come from the kiln looking pretty good. I’m very lucky! They all say wood fired, but they are each different in their own way. The first 2 are made from my washed basalt gravel sediment paste body. Black and mat and exerting a strong influence on the glazes that I apply over them. The 3rd from red flashed stoneware that has picked up a lot of carbon inclusion during the firing.

I made a number of these vases, so I have a few to choose from. I will put these others up in the gallery.

The tea bowls that I have selected for the exhibition of ‘Chawan’ in Singapore are a mix of shapes and styles.

This bowl is of the more open ‘summer’ style of tea bowl.

It is gently undulating with a softness of form and surface, but with superb strength of character. It speaks quietly but looks as if it knows something about a big stick.

It is made from my washed basaltic gravel sediment body paste. It is very unusual. It fires dark charcoal grey to matt jet black. The extraordinarily high iron content makes it quite tricky to fire to high temperatures in reduction without melting it. When it survives, it is amazing. I love it. The body seeps its iron into what ever glaze is covering it and it changes them. In this case the glaze is an ash and rock combination that fires to a mushroom pink colour, with hints of grey and chocolate. Where the wood ash from the flame during firing impinges on the surface, it can bleed into the glaze base and turn it transparent so that the black body underneath is revealed. This bowl was very fortunate in the kiln. It was enhanced beyond what I put in the kiln, through the firing experience and emerged with a range of surface colours from matt pink to perlucent grey through to transparent black. The rim shows a saturated iron chocolate brown, where the glaze has run away from the rim during firing.

The surface exhibits four seasons, dry matt black, clear glossy transparent black, soft satin pearlescent blue/grey and densely matted soft mushroom pink. I love it!

This bowl although new, looks old.

It has had a tough short life and shows it experiences clearly on its surface. However, it still carries itself with grace and poise, despite its scars and marks of surviving the experience of the firefront. A bit like life.

It has superb strength of character. A strong, beautifully textured foot that illustrates the roughness of the clay beneath, while draping itself in a luxuriously soft, satiny, pink/grey cloak of wood ash and granite glaze, with highlights of runny pale blue opalescent ash glaze. It’s a closed ‘winter’ bowl and feels wonderful in the hands.

This ‘winter’ bowl is glazed from my local native ‘bai-tunze’ porcelain stone body, converted to a glaze by the addition of our local limestone deposit and a small amount of ash. The resulting glaze is of the ‘guan’ / ‘celadon’ family of glazes. it is pale blue/turquoise green where it is applied thickly over a pale clay and a more sombre grey where thin. this stoneware body has a small amount of iron present, just enough to colour the clay grey in reduction with a charcoal carbon inclusion where it is exposed directly to the wood fire flame. the ash that has melted over it during firing varies from golden yellow to mat brown and contrasts beautifully against the thicker turquoise glaze on the rim.

It has a quiet contemplative feeling and a subtle restrained beauty.

I’m quite happy with these three different bowls, made from 3 different ground or washed rock bodies and with 2 different wood ashes and ground rock glazes.

This next bowl is a response to some wonderful work exhibited by Toni Warburton, where she re-imagined traditional grey shino with a completely contemporary take that involved making grey shino images, textures and colours at earthenware temperatures. These were ceramic paintings/sculptures that imaged the aesthetics of the old wares. They were exhibited at the Australian Ceramics Assn. exhibition; “The Course of Objects – The Fine Lines of Enquiry”.

I really liked this work very much. I couldn’t have thought in this way. But, once having seen it, it spurred my imagination. I’ve always had a reluctance to try my hand at shino. It’s been so overdone and especially by wood firers, and why not? it’s an amazingly good and ever so attractive glaze surface. But, exactly because everyone is doing it, or has done it, it suffers from over exposure. I don’t want my work to be indistinguishable from everyone else’s.

I really admire the original pieces made in Japan in the Mino area in the last two or three generations by Arakawa and his followers and imitators. If Shino is what happens when you take the local stone and apply it over the local clay, then that might have some area left to be explored here in the Southern Highlands and its surrounds. It won’t be shino, but it will be one of the local aesthetic variations that are possible to conceive of in this place, at this time.

I decided to try my local granites. aplite, porphyry and other acid volcanics and their derivatives, just to see what would happen. I even drove out of my shire to access some acid volcanics next door.

I’m thinking that if I apply this simple formula of ‘use what I have’, then do the best that I can with it. I just might get something interesting.

So this is what I have started to do. I don’t know what I’m doing with shino, I’n a novice, but I know my materials, so something has to happen. Let’s hope it’s good.

This winter bowl was fired in the ‘Zone of Death’ at the front of my kiln firebox. It’s blushing with embarrassment at being so lucky to have survived the ‘zone’ in a first attempt at Faux Shino.

It’s called ” Me No Know Mino”

I think that there is a bit of potential here.

Watch this space.

This new work will be shown at the Kerrie Lowe Gallery in Newtown in a few weeks time.

Best wishes from the slow moving Faux Peasant and his Wild Beach Girl.

Old Slag and a Tosser

Posted on 05/08/2014 by hotnsticky

We have another weekend wood firing workshop. Another amazing group of wonderful people. Everyone so engaged and enthusiastic. I have to cut split and stack more wood. Prepare the kiln and its furniture, kiln shelves and props. Check out all the fittings and structural elements to make sure that it all goes smoothly. The fire box lid lining is on its last legs, but will last a few more firings. It takes a few hits from our enthusiastic new stokers, with well-meaning, but miss-placed logs at high temperature.

Before we can fire the kiln again, There is maintenance to do. I have to get inside the fire box of the kiln to chip out the molten ash glaze slag from the last firing. This has to be done after every firing. The ash from the firing collects in the base of the firebox and accumulates to the point that it melts into a molten slag at the high temperatures at the end of the firing. It forms flows of liquid natural ash glaze that pool into the floor bricks. This is the same natural ash glaze that decorates our pots during the wood firing and gives them their distinctive wood-fired look.

There is alway some minor repair work required after each firing . Sweeping out the dusty ash and charcoal, chipping out the slag that threatens to block off the air holes. This is normal maintenance. However, when I get inside the firebox this time I see that the last firing had such fluid ash glaze formed at the end of the firing that it has run and pooled into the very important mouse hole in the base of the ash pit. This hole is most important to keep the ember level under control during the firing. It has to work properly, otherwise I can’t control the fire as easily and everything could go pear-shaped.

On close inspection I find that the ash glaze slag has completely filled the air hole and sealed it off completely. To avoid this occurrence, I place a special little kiln shelf ‘lid’ over the hole to deflect most of the ash to the periphery of the hole and this usually works. But the combination of wood that I have used this last time has created a very fluid slag and every thing had disappeared into a grey/brown puddle of lava. I can’t even see the ‘lid’ or the hole beneath it. I work on the principal that I know that it is under there. I have to climb into the firebox base armed with a 2 kg hammer and cold chisel, a crow bar and a skutch hammer. I have protective goggles over my glasses and a dust mask as I set to work in this cramped space, hammering and chiselling as best I can without being fully able to swing the hammer properly. I bash, chip hammer and prize my way through the glassy, lava-like slag. It is brittle and smashes into jagged, conchoidal, shattered spalls. Bits fly everywhere. It’s in my hair and all through my clothes. I have to be careful not to cut my fingers trolling through the pieces, tossing them back into a bucket in the kiln chamber. I finish by sweeping up the small fragments and dust. It’s a crap job, stuffed into this small space with all the dust and sharp edges, but it has to be done and no-one else, including the kiln fairy, is likely to volunteer. I keep putting it off, hoping that the kiln fairy will do it, but no such luck there. It’s all part of being self-reliant. I often put it off till the last minute, because I just don’t enjoy it, other times I get stuck into it first thing. It all depends on my energy levels and state of mind. There is no avoiding it. It just has to be done.

Although it doesn’t look it, it’s actually all cleaned out and ready for more work.

I’m lucky and very grateful that this is the worst job that I have to put up with. It’s certainly the least glamorous job in the pottery. It’s all very well, sitting in the sun being creative and making lovely things that are visually engaging and wonderfully tactile. Unpacking the kiln is like Xmas, but no-one daydreams of all the hard graft that goes into ‘creativity’. Don’t give up your day job!

We have a -2 oC frost overnight, during the firing. It keeps us sitting up close to the kiln during the midnight to dawn shift. Our European friends will call us pathetic wimps. That isn’t cold! Minus 40 is cold. I know that, but we are in Australia, the land of heat and sunshine, draughts and heat waves and not used to the severe European cold. Minus 2, certainly felt cold enough to me. If it got colder than this on a regular basis, I’d build a different shed. One that had walls!

A quick walk around the garden reveals that the last 2 rows of very late potatoes in the garden have now had it. The frosts are coming regularly now. Not severe, but light and regular. I think that this must put an end to these spuds, but they still have a few green leaves. I don’t need the space just now, so will leave them to their own devices, till spring. I can’t see anything coming of them. However the single red Flanders Poppies growing among them seem to love it.

There are lots of pretty images in the garden of leaves tinged with white frost and ice crystals. The ground crunches under foot as I walk about. There have been several frosts like this one now. It’s good. It will finish off a lot of bugs like the fruit fly, that can over winter in milder climates. This ‘chill’ will help all the old varieties of fruit that need their winter chill to become fertile in the spring.

I walk down to the Pantry Field garden. It’s situated down at the bottom of our land, in a clearing in among the tall eucalypts. the tree cover of the tall crowns gives a modicum of protection. I have a quick look around and see that the frost hasn’t penetrated here as yet. The big potato crop is still doing just fine, no frost damage. But on closer inspection I see that a lot of the tender tops of the plants aren’t burn’t off, but completely missing. Nibbled off by our resident Eastern grey kangaroos that wander through here attracted by the grass, tree cover, undergrowth protection and the availability of 4 dams to choose from for water. No wonder that they hang around. They treat the place like they own it, and they do! They were here first. We haven’t fenced our land at the boundaries at all. It is all open for them to pass through and enjoy. What we have decided to do is to fence off the various islands of garden and orchard, to keep some possibility of getting a crop to ripen. These plants haven’t been attacked till now, so now is the time to do something about it, If I don’t, they all be gone in a week or so.

I make it a priority to extend the fencing wire up to 1.5 metres. Up until now we had got by with only rabbit proofing fencing. Wire mesh that we could step over. Now I need to make a taller fence with a walk in gate, plus an openable end to allow the tractor to be able to get in and out for tilling once a year. While thinking all this through I see that there are another crop of mushrooms coming along. I can count about twenty or more. We’ll be changing our diet slightly now and for the next few weeks to include Mushroom soup, mushroom sauces, mushroom risotto, mushroom in white sauce and eggs and bacon for that leisurely late brunch. If we can find a day that we can declare to be leisurely?

Fond regards from the old fun-gi

A brief History of Thyme

Posted on 31/07/2014 by hotnsticky

In the few days between workshops, we spend a day in the garden with Our Lovely Wwoofing Friend Kate. She is a good worker and keeps us going all day. She is full of energy and good ideas. No slacking off with Kate in charge. The two Lovelies go down to the pottery and make some 50 odd ceramic buttons for kiln building and repair work, while I take the truck down to the mushroom farm to get a load of spent mushroom compost to spread around the fruit trees and various vegetable plots so as to stifle weed growth. It works as a great mulch and weed suppressor, while it also has some fertilising effect as well. Best of all it’s cheap! Most plants seem to thrive with it around them. It is a little bit alkaline, so I don’t use it on any of the acid dependant plants like blueberries.

Janine harvests a couple of small rows of potatoes, left over from the late summer. With what we already have in store, this will be enough to see us through to the end of winter. She cleans them and dries them in the sun before she packs them away in a dark place.

I’m back late morning and we clean out a few garden beds of frosted and dead late-autumn stragglers, like chillies and capsicums. Kate strips off all the freeze dried chillies. We thread some of them and hang them in the kitchen. These will keep us going till next summer, when the next crop will be ready.

We’re ready for an early lunch. I cook stir-fried, green, leafy vegetables from the garden, 10th pick micro broccoli and firm tofu, fresh ginger and coarsely crushed and chopped, end of season garlic that has been hanging in the kitchen ceiling since Oct/Nov. It’s a little dry, so I add a slosh of white cooking wine from the fridge and a spoonful of garlic/chilli/tomato puree. It’s fresh, crisp and warming. While I am busy doing this, the girls are de-stemming very large mustard leaves and rubbing them with a little oil to make green leafy crisps that they bake quickly in the oven. They are fresh and crispy, but with a little bit of salt to spark them up a bit. They just melt in your mouth, they are so fine and delicate. Totally ephemeral, but delicious as an amuse before a meal.

After lunch, we clean out a few garden beds ready for mulching. We start with the herb row. The thyme has grown out into the path and abandoned growing in the garden bed altogether. It has decided to migrate over a number of years. Progressing by layering itself bit by bit, metre by metre. We got our first rooted pieces of thyme from our neighbour, the famous Australian writer, musicologist and historian, John Meredith. He kept s superb herb garden, vegetable garden stone fruit orchard and apothecaries garden. Everything that he did, he did well. John was a fantastic mentor. He took us under his wing and educated us in ‘country’ ways and hospitality, folk lore, gardening, self-sufficiency, and bush music.

We were so lucky to find out that he was our neighbour. So our first sprigs of thyme came from him. I try explaining this to anyone who will listen. But no-one is, when the lovely comes over and explains to Kate that, “Steve’s hawking his brief history of thyme”. I know my place and I go back to work shovelling s%#t and spreading compost. I divide the thyme into a dozen small rooted pieces and replant them back into the herb bed. They’ll continue to grow there for while, at least until they start to migrate again.

After lunch we make yeasted dough in the marmalade making machine. In the later afternoon we come in from our labours and I make 3 disks of dough and let them continue to rise in the oven while the girls come in. Kate is shredding the tiny leaves from the pruned and cropped thyme, collecting them in a small colander. It’s a labour of love, as the leaves are very tiny and it takes her some time. We appreciate it, as she is about to use it all to teach us how to make manakish ‘Zataar’ , fragrant middle Eastern herbed flat bread.

Kate stripping the thyme leaves, sitting in the sun on the verandah.

Kate starts with the fresh thyme leaves that she has just stripped from the stalks, then fresh oregano,These are all finely chopped up together, then freshly pan roasted sesame seeds, sumac. These are all mixed together with olive oil to make a fragrant paste. This is spread over the flat bread dough, with a little extra drizzle of olive oil over the top and placed in a hot oven at 220 oC for 10 mins. When it comes out we grind a little salt over it and sprinkle a few shredded olives on top. We try 3 different variations using dried tomatos and even yoghurt on top . They are all delicious and it takes no time at all to finish most of them off. It’s a fabulously fragrant and energy rich carbohydrate hit to end off a day of working in the garden.

We send Kate home with 1/3rd of each one for her own family to try.

I love this exchange. We give and we receive. It’s all good and everything is as it sound be. We consider ourselves so fortunate to have such great friends, mentors and associates to help us along on our way.

I am grateful!

More of the days pick, potatoes, beetroot, carrots, parsnips, coriander. Abundance!

Best wishes from the Low GI, un-leavened Lovely and her dough-boy!

The completeness of it all

Posted on 28/07/2014 by hotnsticky

I love the completeness of it all.

We have had all our firing partners back again for the unpacking of last weeks woodfiring. A lot of nice pots come from the kiln and everyone makes a line of human-chain to pass them all the way to the top of the kiln shed. It’s a slow process, as each and every pot is examined and discussed all along the way.

These potters have helped pack the kiln with all of their own work. They have stacked the wood and stoked the fire. Shared meals together and stayed up all of the night in shifts to see the firing successfully reach the bright white heat of stoneware temperature, then fired down to a safe state, where the kiln could be left to cool un-attended.

Now we are all back together again to experience the un-bricking of the door. Cleaning and carefully stacking all our home-made, hand-made, fire bricks, then carefully sorting, cleaning and re-stacking our kiln shelves and home-made props. Together, we share the delights and disappointments of the results. Fortunately, nearly everything comes out really well. There are so many beautiful pots here. We have experienced the completeness of the firing cycle together.

This isn’t ‘virtual’. It’s real, gritty, up all night, bags under the eyes and soot on the sleeves reality. It’s just one part of our attempt at a sustainable process here. The wood for most of this firing was cut just 20 metres away from the kiln site, where we are now growing potatoes, down below the pottery.

Janine, The King of Glaze Testing has her own special moment, when her ‘StONeS of beaches’, glaze test tile emerges. The Princess of Pumice, she has tested the new pale ‘wild’ beach pumice with limestone in known and reliable recipes as a control against the same pumice fluxed with cuttlefish ‘bone’ from the same beach and mixed to the same recipes.

There is no discernible difference between the mineral ‘Whiting,’ calcium carbonate powder and the ground up cuttlefish bone powder. They have behaved identically, if anything the cuttlefish is purer and whiter than the limestone.

We are satisfied that cuttlefish bone is composed of calcium carbonate. We are also very pleased to see that the glaze is quite stable and a lovely mid to dark bottle green celadon. We will call it our Sealadon glaze. The third test on the tile is straight pumice and it looks like it will be quite good just by itself. So further testing is in order. I love the completeness of the idea that we can make a total stoneware glaze from the sea, just picked up off the beach in front of our friends house, like so much flotsam. I suppose that if the glaze needed some extra quartz, we could use the sand and fire the kiln with drift wood? I like it.

Just to make it a complete series, the Queen of Quadaxials has mixed all seven test samples together and glazed one of my small coffee cups with it. It has turned out terrific, so now we have a new cup with added meaning in the kitchen. ‘StONeS of beaches’ glazed short black.

The beautiful potter is already back in the pottery making some pots to try this new glaze on.

Although we only have glaze tests in this firing, I am feeling quite good about it. Isn’t it amazing how something so small can have such an effect? We rarely get out of the kiln what we packed in. We pack our pots in there to be sure, but we also pack in all our hopes and dreams, but all we get out are cups and bowls. So when there is something else that has that ill-defined promise of potential, then that is a real reward. I was interested to see what the effect of cuttlefish fluxed pumice would be and now I know. It has a completeness about it that is very sustaining and intellectually rewarding, not to mention frugal.

Meanwhile, in the orchard, the almonds have just burst into blossom. Spring is almost here.

The over-winter trial of potatoes down in the ‘Pantry Field’ garden are doing well and have managed to avoid the frost so far. I’m hoping that we will be able to get away with it. Not that it matters. If they don’t thrive or even survive, then that is just the way that it is. They would have died anyway if we hadn’t planted them out. We’ll plant more in spring.

We are forecast to have more frosts this weekend, during our next overnight wood firing, brrrrr!

Where we have situated this garden, seems to be quite well protected in amongst the tall trees. There are also some remnants of the cottage garden flowers still lingering on down there.

A big surprise yesterday, was to find a few really nice, big plump mushrooms growing in with the potatoes. It isn’t all that surprising, as we used a ute load of spent mushroom compost to fertilise this patch of garden when we planted these potatoes in late autumn. There are more mushrooms emerging as well, with some other larger ones coming along as well. We picked four of them and had a mushroom risotto for dinner.

Fond regards from the complete Mr cephalopod fluxed ignimbrite and his Regal sealadon glaze tester, who compliment and complete each other.

Bitter and twisted

Posted on 27/07/2014 by hotnsticky

Making marmalade on a sunny winters morning.

I’ve found the time to make some more marmalade. The citrus trees have fruit to be picked, so I make the time and manage 4 batches throughout the day. I use mainly Seville oranges, but I also like to experiment, we have tangelos, lemons, ruby grapefruit, nagami cumquats and Italian bitter chinotto.

The Sweet One has already made the tangelo/seville mix. She does everything so properly, measuring out the ingredients to a recipe. Her marmalade always works. She is so sweet, she even adds the correct amount of sugar. I tend to make mine with a little bit less sugar, as I find some marmalade far too sweet for my taste. I have reduced the sugar to 300 grams to 1kg of whole fruit. I juice the fruit and add it into the pan, and that is the only licquid that I use. Then I scrape out all the pith from inside and discard it to the compost. i havent weighed this pulp, so Im not too sure what the final balance of sugar to peel ends up being, but it works. Next I slice the peel finely, add it to the pan and lastly weight out 300g of sugar and toss it on top. I bake it in the bread maker, set to ‘jam’ setting. I know that it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that I’d normally do. I’m usually so hans-on. But it works so well. I don’t use the pips, nor do I soak the peel overnight. The machine does a perfect job of it in one hour, while I get on with other things.

This next batch, I decide to make a straight seville orange batch, then another one with seville orange, ruby grapefruit and lemon. Lastly I add some of the bitter Chinotto

The ruby grapefruits are on at the moment so we are having one each morning before breakfast to cleanse our pallets and freshen us up to start the day, beautiful glowing colour and sharp astringent sour/sweet pulp.

After we have had our ruby grapefruit for breakfast, which The Sweet One has peeled in one long twisted strip of peel. I see that it looks so great. I don’t want to waste it, so I decide to add it to the next batch of marmalade. I will mix it with Seville orange and Myer lemon, with the addition of the finely sliced up twisted grapefruit skin from breakfast and a bitter Italian chinotto.

In this way I can call this batch of marmalade ‘bitter and twisted’.

I like it.

With best wishes from The Sweet One and her bitter and twisted marmalade maker

A special moment

Posted on 25/07/2014 by hotnsticky

A precious friend drops by quite unexpectedly.
We get a call. “just passing by on route to help an ailing relative, will be there shortly.”
It’s a big surprise and a wonderful one. We offer coffee, tea? What about green tea? “Yes. Lets have green tea”.
Whisked in beautiful bowls.
We don’t often get out our really beautiful tea bowls very often. It’s a special occasion. So lets celebrate.
We share tea and a few sweets. It’s good!
We are both stimulated, enriched and enlivened by the shared experience.
We examine, share, appreciate and discuss the bowls, the process, the taste and the experience. We are uplifted by each others company.
It’s a special moment and I am grateful.
Life goes on.

Defying Entropy

Posted on 21/07/2014 by hotnsticky

I’ve been out all day way down south, doing a repair job on a kiln. Not one of mine. Fortunately most of the kilns that I have built have not needed repairing — so far. They seem to last a very long time. I’ve made it my business to build out any chance of obsolescence. Everything is so over specified that it is my intension that they out-last me. This was a repair job as a favour for a friend. I don’t do repair work generally. I prefer to custom build from scratch. However, I’m also committed to the concept of reducing waste and not throwing anything out until it is really worn out and not able to be repaired any more. There is so much embedded energy in all our modern ‘stuff’ It is a crime against society to throw ‘stuff’ away.

Our parents generation had an excuse, in their time there was a place called ‘Away’ and things could be thrown there. But now that we have taken an interest and gone out looking. We have found — or not found, that place called away. It isn’t anywhere to be found. Everywhere is some where and what’s more, it’s someone else’s backyard, and they are not too happy to have everyone else’s junk dumped there. We don’t have our parents excuse. We’ve been told. We know. So we can’t go on doing it. Pretending that we can just throw things ‘away.’

This is why I will do some repair work on other manufacturers kilns. To forestal waste and preserve the embedded energy a little bit longer. But everything has a time, and that time has to come to an end at some point. Life is terminal and all flesh is grass. I’ve spent my life so far trying to defeat entropy. I know that ultimately I will fail, but like King Cnut (Canute) I’ll give it a good try.

So as a special favour to my friend, I spend the day re-furbishing this old kiln. I’ve taken along a lot of new furbishes to replace all the old furbishes. So now it’s totally re-furbished. Actually it’s still an old piece of worn out junk, but it will keep on going and working for a few more years now. I can’t make a silk purse out of it, at least not for a few hundred dollars, I can’t. Still, everyone is happy with this outcome it seems.

When I return home. I find that that my very own lovely Mrs Beaton of garden, kitchen and household management has our friend and garden helper Kate here to do some work in the garden and pottery, but the weather is so windy and unpleasant outside, that they have spent the day in the kitchen, making marmalade, candied peel and other culinary delights, like spinach and ricotta cheese pies. She has also been baking Ethiopian cabbage and mustard greens, rubbed with a little olive oil, so that turn crispy and delicious, add a little salt and they are just like crisps. This works well with all sorts of other firm green leaves as well, especially the brassicas like kale.

Kate makes the pastry from the recipe that we got off Marta Armarda from Spain when she was visiting here. It’s so quick and works a treat. I don’t know how we got through life to this point without knowing about this simple recipe. I suppose that it was because we were always so head-down and butt-up everyday, that we just didn’t get out enough. It’s so simple. Just 1 tablespoon of oil, and another two of water and wine each, then firm it out with enough flour to bring it to consistency. It couldn’t be easier or quicker. We don’t chill it or leave it to settle, just roll it out and cook it.

We dine on hot pie from the oven for dinner.

A full tummy and a glass of wine makes entropy all that much easier to defy.

Kate and Janine crush pumice (ignimbrite) that we collected on our mid-week, weekend down at the coast recently. Pumice is such an amazing rock. It’s an aerated volcanic glass composed mostly of felspathic minerals. These minerals (magma) are very viscous when hot and when forcefully ejected from a volcanic explosion, the trapped gasses in the rock, created under the intense pressure of the volcanic process are suddenly released. They can’t escape from the viscous magma quickly enough and so expand rapidly exfoliating the rock as it cools. Fluffing it up, like aero chocolate, Not unlike the way that grains of rice are ‘exfoliated’ into rice bubbles in a similar synthetic process.

My very own Mrs Beaton of household and pottery management grew up at the beach on the far North coast. Back in the early seventies, she collected beach pumice from the wild beaches up there to make her own local celadon. This recently collected ‘weekend’ pumice is rather paler than that which we are familiar. We hope that it will make a paler glaze.

We also found cuttle fish on the beach, so I have this crazy idea that cuttlefish ‘bone’ is possibly made of calcium? It’s possible. Many sea creatures utilise calcium from sea water to create their shells and carapaces. It occurred to me that it might be possible to make a sea-blue celadon glaze from the products of the sea? Sealadon?

Janine Beaton has just the recipe in her cornucopia of “The Woman Potters Big Book of Useful Recipes and Techniques for Every Glaze Situation,” No doubt soon to be serialised in 24 convenient monthly instalments. She fills a grid-tile of possible recipes and ‘control’ reference tests.

I’m keen to try her drift-wood, salt glaze, wood ash recipe!

Thanks to her stirling efforts, the ‘StONeS of beaches’ glaze tests are all made up and ready for the current firing.

I feel compelled to play something by Elgar to celebrate!

The pumice is quite damp from its journey across the sea. We have been told that this current appearance of pumice has come from a massive underwater volcanic eruption somewhere in the Pacific near Samoa or Tonga, and has spent the last few years floating it’s way here, driven by wind and sea currents.

It passes through the big ‘jaw’ crusher OK, but needs some encouragement, as it tends to stick to the jaws because it is so fresh and still damp. We try it through the other crushers, it won’t grind well, it jams up the small jaw crusher and will only passes through the Cornish rolls with some persuasion, as it packs into a damp ‘clag’ and binds up the milling process. It really needs drying well first. It packs to the wall of the ball mill and I have to switch it off and break up the mass, then add water and do a wet milling. This works OK but, no butts, it’s a pain in the butt. It mills down well, however, now it will need to be settled, dewatered and finally thoroughly dried out before we can use it for weighing out the glaze tests that we need to do to find the best recipe for this particular batch of unknown mineral. Mrs Janine Beaton, manages this one evening on the side of the wood stove after dinner.

To get things going we put the remaining rough crushed granules from the primary crushing into the electric kiln, packed in bisque-fired bowls and fired up to 400 oC to thoroughly dry it out, prior to dry milling. Pumice is a very soft rock and is very easy to dry mill, but only when it’s quite dry. In the past, my lovely Mrs Beaton of sea-side glaze management, would dry it in the sun and wind for a few weeks or months before milling, as there was no real rush, it was just a constant flow of material that was well understood. A job that needed doing to keep ahead of her usage. This time it’s something new and we want to see the results of this new material and what it will do. So Mrs Beat-on gets the heat-on.

We have just had a weekend wood firing workshop with another 10 potters working with us to make it a great success. All very enjoyable, but hectic. Everyone enjoyed roasting marshmallows for breakfast over the firebox towards the end of the firing. Janine has Beaten the rush, worked so very hard to get everything ready for this latest workshop. There is so much prep to do, but Mrs Beaton can’t be beaten when it comes to workshop management.

We have our sea glaze sealadon/celadon tests in this firing now thanks to her, so we are keen to see the outcome next weekend and just like everyone else, it will be like Xmas for us too.

With love from Mrs Capability Beaton and her workshop assistant, Mr Furbisher, The Kiln Whisperer, who are attempting to be so well organised — defying Entropy.

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