Tonight My Fingers Smell of Garlic – Again

Posted on 09/11/2015 by hotnsticky

The first of our open studio weekends is over and we were quite busy all day, each day, with only one 10 minute gap between visitors all day each day. Not quite enough time to be able to make and eat a sandwich. We had to take it in turns to eat and go to the loo.

Now that the pressure is off. It is time to lift the garlic crop for this year. As I got them in early, they were ready to be lifted and dried a couple of weeks ago. Now is the first clear space I have had to be able to get into the garden and spend a couple of hours digging over the plot, weeding and sorting them all out.

Janine had managed to get into the main garden last week and dig up the small plot that I planted out up there. I planted about 100 cloves from our larger knobs in the kitchen. A mix of all the different types that we have collected over the years. Red, white and pink varieties in both hard and soft stem types. She managed to find the time to preen them and spread them out to dry, before plaiting the largest of them and hanging them up on the kitchen wall by the wood stove chimney to finish drying. We have 3 plaits of about 15 knobs each. With another 50 smaller knobs all cleaned and dried and placed in a large colander on the kitchen bench top for immediate use over the next month or so.

While I dig the garlic, The Lovely gets stuck in at the other end of the plot, up by the patch of English cottage garden flowers that I planted for her as a surprise 2 or 3 years ago. They take a while to get established, but are flowering well now. It bit past their best, but still lovely. A very nice back-drop to our work today. At some point in the future, I am going to reverse these two garden beds and lift all the cottage garden flowering plants and move them to the vegetable end, and vice versa. This will refresh the soil and the vegetables and flowers will both benefit from the change. Janine starts to harvest the last of the broad beans. Pulling out the spent plants as she finishes stripping the last of the beans off each one. It’s nice to be able to spend this time, working together in the garden.

I bought half a dozen ‘new’, named varieties of organically grown garlic and planted them out in serried rows, down here in the Pantry Field garden. They had grown quite well, with some being obviously much stronger growers than others. I bought 3 knobs of each and planted out the individual cloves. These have now grown up into about 150 knobs of differing sizes. It would have been best if we had managed to find the time to harvest them a week or two ago. They had started to dry out and the tops had begun to lean over. Then we got so busy and it started to rain. We had 3 inches or 75 millimetres of rain last week and this was enough to reduce the dried tops to a liquid mush. The earliest varieties had lost their ‘paper’ coating and are starting to ‘burst’ or spread out. They’ll be fine for eating, but without any substantial stem. we won’t be able to plait them and hang them up. So more individual knobs for use directly from the bowl kitchen bench top.

I’m not too sure how this will affect their ‘keeping’ capacity? We’ll find out during the coming year as this hasn’t happened before. I’m glad that we have had this fine, sunny day today, combined with a day ‘off’, so that we could get the crop in and start it drying out. There is a certain sense of achievement, satisfaction and security knowing that we have to years supply of garlic safely in hand.

Some people have asked me what we do with so much garlic. Well, we eat it. We seem to get through the 200 to 300 small knobs pretty easily during the year. What we grow isn’t the largest or most presentable garlic. Not like what you might see for sale in the green grocers. But it is our own, organically home-grown produce, clean and free from any sprays, pesticides or preservatives. That is the kind of self-reliance that our enterprise here is all about, and a day ‘off’, spent in the garden is a good day indeed. This is fun for us. It doesn’t involve going out, driving anywhere, or spending any money. What more could you want?

Our friend Annabelle Sloujetté has turned up from the south coast, bearing gifts of oysters and a couple of beautiful blackfish. I steam them with some of our fresh little garlic cloves, a little olive oil, a couple of sliced large dark field mushrooms, two sliced zucchinis, some pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice. A splash of white wine finishes it off.

These fish are a really good size for blackfish, so I choose to cook them in the big rectangular copper baking pan, but it doesn’t have a lid. In the past I have used a sheet of al-foil to cover the pan on occasions, but I really don’t like to use aluminium cooking foil. It’s an environmental disaster, so we rarely use it. I decide to run down to the kiln shed and quickly make up a folded stainless steel, custom-made, lid for the pan. I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time now. So now is the time.

I choose a small piece of stainless off-cut, that is almost the right size. I measure it exactly and use the guillotine to slice off a few centimetres, I use the pan break to fold a slight return on two sides to help keep it flat when it is heated, then hand-file and smooth the edges. I measure it so that it will fit exactly between the two handles and sit snuggly on the flat rim.

It takes me 7 1/2 minutes to get it done and I’m back in the kitchen before the others have finished cleaning the new potatoes that we harvested today along with the garlic and broad beans.

I lift my hand to my face to wipe my brow after I have run back up from the workshop. Ah, Yes! I remember that smell. I have been digging and cleaning garlic all day, so tonight my fingers smell of garlic – again!

Spring and The Man for All Seasons

Posted on 06/11/2015 by hotnsticky

The broad beans that I planted before leaving for Japan have come to fruiting. They have been slow arriving, but now they are in full fruit. We have had 3 picks from them so far and there will be more, but with the increase in heat and day length, there are no more flowers, so as we pick the last beans from each plant we pull it out and add it to the compost pile.

There haven’t been quite enough of them to get tired of them yet, we have managed them quite well. I don’t think that there will be many left at the end of the season to dry for later use. only just enough to save for next years seed.

The garlic that I planted in March is wilting now and drying off, so it is time to harvest it and lay it out for drying. This will have to wait for next week, as we are flat-out busy cleaning up the pottery and setting out our pots for the Open Studio Weekends coming up. We are pretty much ready now with only minor adjustments left to do today. I did all the lighting and most of the pricing yesterday.

Next to the garlic I planted a long row of peas which The Lovely enjoyed while I was away in Japan. They are all over now, so I planted potatoes in that spot a few weeks ago. They are all starting to show their first leaves now. They went in a month late, but I was so busy when I got back that I just couldn’t do everything at once. Pot making, kiln building, wood splitting, kiln firings, studio cleaning, weeding, mowing, planting and harvesting.

I have been back a while now and just about caught up. The garden is pretty much fully planted out with the summer vegetables and we have already picked our first cucumber, zucchinis, picked our first sprigs of basil and had a couple of meals of artichokes. Janine lifted some of the earliest garlic that had self-sown on the edge of the path, a few knobs that we missed last year, that had grown into splendid plants. They are all dried, plaited and hung up next to the stove in the kitchen. It’s so nice to have fresh garlic again. I forget just how juicy and oily it is when it is this fresh. This is the first year that we have had our own garlic last the full year. We had just 2 little dried out knobs left in the colander on the kitchen bench when Janine picked that first plant.

I have managed to make progress on the big new gas kiln for Sturt Workshops. It is all panelled and bricked up now. I had my very good friend and right hand man Warren down for a few days to give me a hand, as there is just too much to do at this time of year and I’m only one man.

Warren is an amazingly creative person. So skilful at so many things. He was apprentice of the year in his trade course. For two years in a row! Then he worked as a stonemason in Canada for a while, then as a fencer on his return, a panel beater, and a potter/sculptor, this was when I first met him. He worked in the sculpture department of the National Arts School for some years and then studied horticulture and set up his own business. An amazingly creative, restless spirit.

I taught Warren in the ceramics course at The National Arts School, back in the 90’s. On the first day of the year, I started my class by getting the students to make some good, basic, pottery tools. I took them all over to the sculpture workshop, where there were woodworking and metal working tools and vices. They were encouraged to get to know how to use these simple tools, so that they could make and sharpen their own tools. A little bit of self-reliance, that I had decided to inject into the course syllabus.

I handed out some small pieces of thin stainless steel sheet and a pair of tin snips to each of the students, so that they could cut out a small kidney-shaped profile tool. By the time I had turned around, Warren had cut out a perfect kidney shape. He held it up to me and said,

“Do you mean like this”?

I said “Yes! Exactly like that. Do you want a job”!

He replied, “Maybe, it depends what it is”

We have worked together on a casual basis ever since. When I have too much work on, it’s great to get Warren down here to give me hand. Apart from being amazingly skilful, he is great fun and we laugh a lot. Working with Warren puts a spring in my step.

Having been a panel beater, Warren is excellent with sheet metal and with the State Medal in MIG welding under his belt, he is a very useful man to have in a kiln factory. He has a great eye for detail and is very careful and accurate with his hand-work skills. This in conjunction with a few years as a mason, makes him ideal at the very fine and precise type of brick laying that I do in my kilns. It’s great to have The Man for All Seasons here in the Spring.

Time For Some Fun

Posted on 25/10/2015 by hotnsticky

Last week I attended my friend Alan Parkes funeral. Alan was a good mentor, a stonemason and sculptor. He taught me how to cut and dress stone, so that I could create all the sandstone features for my home, when I built it way back in the early seventies. I still have those stone masons tools that I forged all those years ago. I have Allano’s pitching tool, that he gave to me, I am forever grateful for his kindness and support. All the other tools I have forged myself.

I have been slowly building stone retaining walls for the new pottery workshop Pavillion building. It’s been a slow process, because I have had to dig nearly all the stones out of the ground myself over the years that we have been living and gardening here. When even I make a new garden bed or make a new orchard area, I have to dig some enormous sandstone floaters out of the ground. I pile them up down at the bottom of our land, until the time is right for some more stone work.

That time is now. It’s time to have some fun and in memory of Alano I get out my skutch, point and bucket of gads. I originally made myself 10 gads, back in the seventies, but when I get my bucket of stone working tools out from the workshop, I find that I only have 5 left, I’ve lost one at a time over the intervening period, so now I only have a bare minimum of them left. The first thing that I do is make another set of 10 more. That should see me out for another 40 years of quarrying and masonry work! Just like the last lot.

I set about breaking up the big floater that I cut in half a while ago, so that I could put the citrus grove fence right through the middle of that space. The rock just happened to be smack-bang in the way, so I cut it in half and cut up the piece that was now in the way and used it to make the lower part of the stone retaining wall that I plan to finish off this weekend. Using just my small 4 lb hammer and a dozen gads, I cut it up into 4 large blocks and another half-dozen, smaller blocks. They are really enormous lumps of stone and I need to use the tractor to move them to the site. The largest is about 200 kilos. It’s longer than the 1200 mm bucket on my tractor. I have to secure it with heavy snigging chains, to make sure that it doesn’t fall out of the bucket during the bumpy ride over to the building site on the other side of the kiln shed and pottery.

It is amazing what one man can achieve with just a 2kg hammer, a dozen small gads – and a few hours!

Using crow bars, levers, rollers, the tractor and the help of my good friend and faithful retainer, Warren, we build the retaining wall. In two days, we cut and lay 20 metres of stone wall and two sets of stone stairs. It’s great fun and ever so rewarding. We get so much done working together and we manage to laugh a lot while we are at it, even though the work is physically very demanding. The Lovely Janine is here too, supporting, passing, carrying, sorting stones, getting gravel and lime in the ute, raking up, finishing the details and finally sparging and cleaning our messy lime mortar work in the afternoons, once the mortar has started to set a little. The weekend goes so fast. It’s been really tiring but also energizing to be so productive in a free and creative way. We don’t really know what we are doing, but we enjoy doing it all the same. It all goes so well. Mostly because I spent the last two days before-hand splitting up the stones and cutting and dressing those blocks, then carting then onto the site in preparation. The largest stone is 450 mm high x 300 mm deep and 1500mm. long. It takes a bit of maneuvering to get it into place, but it can’t resist the hydraulics of the tractor and two crow bars.

Even though I have used, the tractor, chain blocks, crow bars. levers, wedges and rollers and a mate to help me. My back is still telling me that I have done too much. But if I don’t do too much, then I don’t get enough done.

We finish the job and are all cleaned up, well before dark. The Lovely had picked the 2nd picking of the early pink cherries. Yum! We need to be vigilant, as the birds soon realise that they are ripening and will clean out the lot if we don’t net them. But netting will have to wait for another day. Today we are being masons, not orchardists! The Gorgeous One manages to find time during the days hectic work, to bag a good deal of the crop, so as to allow it to ripen in its own good time and mature, before the pesky birds get them all.

As it is getting dark, we come inside for hot showers, a change of clothes and a well earned beer. For dinner we have a simple light meal of cubed silken tofu with todays fresh picked, early season garlic, some finely diced spring onion fresh from the garden, finely diced fresh ginger and a drizzle of light soy sauce. This has to be one of my favourite light meals.

I am someone who benefitted greatly from the generosity and good will of Allano Parkes. He left his mark on me, and inadvertently on this small piece of land of ours. I am really quite taken by the concept of self-reliance. So being taught to be able to dig up stones and turn them into a visually pleasing and environmentally sensitive, carbon-neatral, building material is a real thrill. Apart from the occasional use of the tractor to do the heavy lifting, there were no power tools used on this job. All the cutting was done using the small 2kg hammer and gads, while all the fine dressing was done using the bitch-pick and pups as well as the skutch hammer. We ache all over from the exertion and the use of muscles that don’t get used like this very often, but when we take the time to stand back and admire our achievement at the end of the day, they are all good aches!

fond regards from the part-time mason and his masonette

The Harvest

Posted on 27/09/2015 by hotnsticky

I started here a month ago. Empty pot boards, clean wheel head, heaps of storage racks all waiting for pots. 100 kgs of clay waiting in its plastic packs. I’m here in a fertile frame of mind and ready to experience and learn. I’m here to harvest what I can from this fertile environment.

Now after weeks of intensive work I’ve made about 115 kgs of premium Arita porcelain clay into about 100 pots. I’ve ruined 3 of them by accident and turned all the others into fine, thin, beautiful bowls. I’ve gone through them over and over as the turning, re-turning then finishing and polishing has progressed. I’ve narrowed them down to just a dozen nice ones to be fired and glazed.

It doesn’t seem like much for a months work, but I’m quite happy with what I’ve learnt. Ideas and experiences are mingling and germinating. It’s what I’m taking away in my head that counts. The work that I’ve done here is the best way of getting it in there. I haven’t come here to take pots home. I’ve come to learn some skills. I think that I’ve done that, and of course I didn’t spend every day at the wheel. I managed to get out to visit people and places of interest on a lot of days, and that was very good. It was great to get some insight into this place and the people that make it all happen.

I’ve also eaten a lot of wonderfully flavoursome food. Most of it I cooked myself, in my little kitchen, often for me alone, but also for others who dropped by at times. I quite enjoy cooking , and Japanese food is a favourite influence on what I cook at home.

I cook a bastardised version of Japanese food at home using the ingredients that I grow in my garden and what I can get hold of locally and substituting the closest things that I can find to make an approximation of what I have in mind. I’m not very good at it, but I enjoy doing it and everybody eats it politely and compliments me on what I cook for them. Japanese people are so polite!

I don’t cook for myself every night. sometimes I get to go out. I’ve had a coupe of meals out. Sushi, sashimi, tempura, shiso and kelp salad, It’s all so lovely. But it costs money. So I get better value by staying in and cooking for myself. It’s no problem. I love cooking and very good sashimi and fresh vegetables are readily available in the local supermarket. You can’t beat it, fresh, delicious and cheap! What more could you want?

I did manage to find some good salads finally. I took a while, but I got there eventually. Mostly I just bought the salad greens from the supermarket and made them myself, but occasionally , when I saw what looked like a good salad, I’d lash out. Hang the expense! A ten dollar treat every now and then didn’t break the bank.

Mizumi salad, with tofu skin and roasted seaweed, Yum!

Not only is the salad delicious, but the plate is a joy to examine after I’ve eaten its contents. Beautifully warped, with a thick application of white slip, over a dark iron body, under the clear glaze. Beautiful. Sugoi!

Before I finish up at Tatsuyas workshop. I decide to spend my last day making glaze tests. I have collected a few pieces of Izumiyama stone from the access ramp at the quarry site on a previous visit there last week. I crush it in Tatsuyas huge stone mortar. I ask him if he has a mortar and pestle. He nods and shows me a 100mm dia one that he has made himself for grinding pigments. He has several of them. But they are just too small and light for crushing rock. Then we go outside and there in the garden is the mother of all mortars. It’s huge. It has to be about 50 kgs and carved out of a solid block of volcanic rock. I’ve seen little versions of these in Asian markets in Sydney and other countries around the world. I have used them for my lectures/demos in Singapore and Taiwan recently. This has the be the biggest one that I have ever seen, let alone used.

I set to work and make some tests out of the powdered stone with limestone and wood ash added in various proportions. I’m keen to see how it melts. It isn’t any use to me. I won’t be using the glazes, but I’m inquisitive to see how it melts from an intellectual point of view.

Finally its time to leave. My time is up. When I arrived here 5 weeks ago, the rice crop was green and lush, and starting to bolt upwards. Now it is all yellowing and has set its heads of golden grain. As I set out to leave on the train, I see that the first of the harvesters is starting their work.

I say good bye to Tatsuya san and Miyuri san. My place here is going to be taken by another Australia, Keiko Matsui. She arrives and I leave. It’s an all Australian event here this month with a brief visit by Nicky Coady and her friend Erica during my time here.

This image by Keiko Matsui

I must say that I’m quite sad to be leaving but I have achieved everything that I set out to, and then some more on top of that which I just couldn’t have imagined before arriving here. Thanks to my friends, Tatsuya and Miyuri san.

I am very grateful. Thank you!

The Soba Noodle Potter

Posted on 13/09/2015 by hotnsticky

I decide that today is my only chance to go and visit Mr Norito, or Noritou, or Noritow. I’ve seen it written in different ways. In Romanji it’s written as Norito, His web site is , but on his card, the hiragana ends in a ‘u’. So I think that Noritou is the best approximation that I can make.

I first met Noritou san when I was taken to his workshop for a brief mid-week visit. He is in his late 80’s I think, although he doesn’t look it. He’d pass for 60’s any time, but I’m told that he was selected as a very young kamikaze pilot at the end of the war. Not unlike my former teacher Shiga Shigeo, they only survived, because the military ran out of planes.

Noritou san is a very gentle character. I can tell from his manner and tone of voice.

He is also a very interesting potter. He is the only person that I have been introduced to so far that makes his own single stone porcelain body for his pots here in Arita. Regrettably I can’t speak Japanese well enough to understand any of the technical information that he is offering directly from him. However, I have Miyuri san with me on my first visit and she is a very competent translator. It was she who brought me here and told me that I really ought to meet this guy. “He’s a bit like you. he makes his own clay from stone”. So of course I had to come. He has no machinery, it’s all very hands on and time-consuming, as all clay making is, but he selects the softest, kaolin/sericite material that he can still find – I didn’t ask where, directly, but I got the impression from Miyuri san that it is from the old Izumiyama quarry. Even though it is now a preserved Historical site, apparently, there is a group of potters who want to preserve the old traditional ways, and Noritou san is one of them. They appear to have privileged access to collect small quantities of porcelain stone from the site. The archaeologist at the Historical Museum on site, maintains that there is still plenty of material in the quarry. This fits with my understanding of the nature of hydro-thermal weathering. it creates an inverted cone shape of ore body. So it should go down a long way, like an inverted image of the mountain that was formally there, now all mined away

Noritou san simply slakes his collected material in water and ashes for a year. Yes, that’s right ashes! He is telling me through Miyuri san that the ash-water, lye perhaps? is necessary to break down the clayey particles and remove the iron staining from the various contaminants? It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – but!

That is what I was told, or what I think that I heard, but there could be some loss in translation, Ne! He shows me his slaking tubs. I dip my hand into the water. It is certainly slippery, just like lye. This is exactly the opposite of my understanding of clay making. I know from my own experiments, that when I grind the porcelain stone down to powder, it breaks some the chemical bonds of the alkali in the felspars, releasing some soluble alkali. This makes the resulting clay rather ‘floppy’ to use. Sort of thixotropic in nature, becoming softer and more fluid as it is worked, making it difficult to hold its form on the potters wheel. The counter to this is to add some acidic material into the mix to counter the release of alkalis and neutralise them. I choose to use the roof water from my water tank connected to the pottery roof, which has loads of eucalyptus leaves in the gutters, and makes the water naturally acidic. I also add vinegar. As I understand it, clay develops its plasticity better under slightly acid conditions as it ages. The low pH encourages the growth of beneficial bacteria that increases the workability of the mix. Maybe Noritou san knows this too, but is talking about something else entirely. And all this through an interpreter. Imagine what is happening now that I’m here alone this time?

Actually, I don’t always need a lot of words. I’ve spent close to 50 years as a potter, so I have a fair understanding of what is happening in the pottery just through observation. It’s mostly all I need. My limited Japanese is only just greetings and platitudes, in-depth, technical discussion is beyond me, but I manage.

The other very interesting thing about Noritou san, is that he does many things, just like me. We don’t just share a love of fossicking and clay making. He also teaches pottery to visitors on one or two days during the week to bolster his income, because you can imagine, his income from making ceramics by his chosen, slow, hands-on method is very low. That part of the conversation we both agree on! So, a little bit of teaching from home, just like me. The really interesting bit is that he opens his home on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for lunch and early dinner, something like 11am to 7 pm. He operates a hand-made soba noodle shop and is very famous locally. I’m warned to go early as he is usually booked out, so I do. Naughtily, I arrive 15 mins before he is due to open. I’m first in.

He and his wife make all the buckwheat noodles themselves by hand in the old-fashioned traditional manner, allowing them to sit over-night before cooking them, in the time-honoured way. This ageing maximises the buckwheat flavour. I can’t wait to get back there again. It’s Sunday today, so you can guess where I’m going. It’s my last chance, as I’m leaving next Sunday and am booked with other things planned on the other two days.

The meal comes in 3 servings, an amuse of tea and room temperature, crisp, fried buckwheat noodles, with just a hint of salt. Then the main course of cold, handmade noodles with an adjunct of warm soup to follow. There are some condiments of grated daikon radish, finely chopped green onions and wasabi, with a small separate dish of pink salt. Finally, there is a desert of sweetened buckwheat paste. It’s all terribly yummy. All this for Y800. That’s less than $10.

We exchange gifts, I have brought him a jar of Australian honey and he gives me one of his pots.

His advertising says that you can eat your handmade soba noodle lunch from his hand-made porcelain-stone, soba cup/bowl and them buy the cup. I do just that. It’s a warm autumn day and just right for cold soba.

from Steve in Arita, enjoying the food, porcelain-stone cold soba

Enjoying the Now

Posted on 17/08/2015 by hotnsticky

We have our pottery back to ourselves again now, so it’s back to the wheel for us. We work at our kick wheels, set either side of the old pot belly stove which has been generating a steady gentle heat to keep us warm on the coldest of days for the best part of 40 years now. I’m amazed at how it has kept on going for so long with only minor repairs.

Throwing pots out of these ground rock ceramic pastes is a slow process. We have to plan ahead so that everything must be thrown thicker than you might like and then there is a lot of turning to be done. Some times we rough the forms out on one day, then let them dry overnight until they are almost completely dry, before finishing them off to the thinner desired cross-section. They can’t be bone dry, or they might break under the pressure of the turning tool, but they can’t be damp either, as then they will chip and tear. Milled rock paste isn’t like ordinary clay. It’s just not very plastic. It needs to be turned just before bone dry. Grinding away at what is essentially sand and water mix really takes the edge off my home made metal strip turning tools. I have to resharpen then after every 2nd pot, just to keep the edge keen.

The garden is starting to respond to the increasing day length and the hint of warmth in the air. I can see a poppy bud starting to show some red colour and there are swelling buds on the blueberries. We have just picked our first asparagus spears as an aperitif before our other vegetable dinner. These are all good signs of the warmer spring weather to come.

The Japanese Wasabi plants have grown well through the cool wet of the winter and are looking good right now. It’s that hot dry summer heat that knocks them around. I planted onion seeds 2 months ago. A lot of it came up on time, but for some reason, one packet of seed, just sat there and did nothing until now. This variety must need warmer weather to germinate. all the other plants are now 100 mm or more high. I hope that these plants can get enough growing season before it gets too hot and dry for them in the summer? Just down the row a little we have a nice crop of Pak Choi, lovely for stir fry, or just steamed with a little garlic, ginger and soy. 2 mins and melt in your mouth, with still some nice fresh crunch in the warm but fresh and crunchy stems.

I have made what is probably the last batch of marmalade for this year. As the citrus season has all but come to an end. I make a batch of cumquat. blood orange, and lemon marmalade. I finish it off with a dash of whisky before bottling. It’s unusual, it looks great and tastes better.

thumb_DSC01224_1024 tonight’s dinner is spinach with ricotta, Brussel sprouts, initially lightly steamed, then finished in a pan-fried with garlic and chilli, served with steamed potato and pumpkin.

Another recent meal was pork medallions pan-fried in olive oil and garlic, he deglazed with a splash of a nice chardonnay, served with lentils simmered in home-made marrow bone and veggie stock, then plated up with mushrooms in white sauce.

We have plenty of cauliflower, broccoli and Brussels sprouts at the moment, as the winter chill weather draws to a close. I have been enjoying lightly steamed Brussel Sprouts, which are then pan-fried in some home-made stock. In this case chicken stock, and finished with a little sesame oil and pan-fried and tossed for a few minutes. They get a few caramelised spots on them as they roll around, a slight grind of fresh pepper and some vegetable salt. Delicious.

No better way to enjoy the crisp cold of winter.

There was an article in a recent issue of ‘New Scientist’ magazine. (No. 3032, 1/8/15) That told of the health benefits of eating bitter foods like Brussels sprouts.

The Brassicas have several bitter phytonutrients that are produced by the plant to make them unappetising to predators – like us, as well as caterpillars. Sulforaphane is one such protective phytonutrient that gives them the particular sulphur smell. It has anti-cancer functions and is an antioxidant. I usually have a small nibble on what there is in the garden, snapping it off and eating it raw while I wander around, weeding and watering, crunching and chewing as I go. They must be good for me?

I really like the idea of going to the garden each day/evening and picking what needs eating on that day, because it is absolutely ready to be picked, organically grown and totally fresh. This is self-reliance, living with the seasons.

Enjoying the now!

Best wishes from Steve and Janine, who are vegging out in the late winter.

Lime Pickle

Posted on 07/07/2015 by hotnsticky

In these cooler, shorter, winter days. The evenings are long and there is plenty to do. Winter is the season for citrus. I have made 20 jars of marmalade so far, so now its time to make lime pickle. A good lime pickle is a great accompaniment with curry, it needs to be salty, sweet, sour and chilli hot.

We have plenty of limes on the tree, so I slice them up length ways into 1/8 segments, salt then and then leave them covered for a day or two to soften.

A few days later, when I find the time. I’m fasting today, so there will be no dinner, that leaves a bit of time to make up the pickles. The wood fired stove is cranking away in the kitchen, even though we aren’t planning on cooking anything tonight. We light it because it’s frosty outside and going to get a lot colder overnight and we want the room warmed up and the hot water heated as a by-product.

I start by dry roasting some fenugreek seeds which smell so exotic, but taste of ordinary dried green garden peas unless they are roasted. Roasting brings out a lot of that wonderful aroma and changes the taste to something that is so much more interesting. It also makes them very easy to grind up in the mortar and pestle.

Next I heat a little olive oil in the frypan and add various spices and seeds, like black cumin seeds, mustard seeds and coriander seeds. Once they start to pop, I keep the seeds moving by flipping the pan and add black pepper corns. Once I feel that they are sufficiently heated and softened, without having them popping out of the pan and all over the floor. Not too much heat and keep them moving. I add all the other ingredients. The salted lime segments (de-seeded), some of our roughly chopped chillis, two sprays of our own home-grown curry leaves. Thank you Toni Warburton for the gift of the curry leaf plant some years ago!

I also add half a dozen roughly chopped cloves of our ageing garlic. A couple of teaspoons full of cumin, coriander, and ginger. I keep this moving for about 10 minutes on a low heat until the lime skins are a little bit softened and can be chopped in half easily by pushing down on them with a wooded spatula. Not such an accurate measure of cooking time, but it works for me. I want them slightly softened and not too leathery. This also give a bit of time for the flavours to meld in together.

It seems to work. If it is still a little dry, I add a little bit more oil, or the juice of a lemon or two, or lemonades, or limes, or both. If it is still a bit too sour, I add a little bit of the white death sugar. If you add the juice of the lemonade lemons, you don’t need as much sugar. I try and use a little salt as possible, but a small amount is necessary to get it to taste right, otherwise it is just too bland. I’m not very good at making lime pickle yet, as I only get to do it once or twice a year, during this winter season when the citrus is in such profusion. If I were to do it more often, I’d get better at it, but I don’t need so much lime pickle. Two or three jars are enough for a year.

So many of the things that we attempt here are just like this. We never get to be any good at most of the things that we do because we do so much, there just isn’t time. However, the point is not to be the best at doing something, or ever particularly good. The point of our endeavour here is to be as independent and self-reliant as we can be. Getting better at doing something only comes with repeated practice. This just isn’t possible here with most things – apart from weeding!. So I am resigned to being a bumbling amateur at most of the things that I do. Sometimes I daydream of being competent at one or two particular things, but on reflection, I realise that it is more important to keep the big picture in focus and stay horizontally diversified across all my interests. The more things that I do for myself, the less I need to spend. The less that I spend, the less I need to work. The less time I spend working for money, the more time I have to do things for myself. This cash-minimising self-reliance is a vicious circle.

All this thinking is making me hungry! Actually, these cold nights are just right for a warming curry. if only we had some lime pickle!

Cooking something that you don’t know anything about is always a great big experiment. A bit like life really.

Best wishes

Miss curryleaf Murraya King and her curry-wallah

Fruits of the Solstice

Posted on 19/06/2015 by hotnsticky

We have been keeping up the citrus experiments. Each evening we try something new. The Lovely has been trying out some more ideas with citrus jelly. She uses oranges, limes, lemon, lemonade and tangelos. Whatever is ripe and plentiful on the day.

Citrus Jelly

recipe;

375 mls. of Juice

125g of sugar

1 1/2 tablespoons of gelatine.

method;

Squeeze 375 mls. of Juice from the above fruit. Use whatever mix of citrus fruit that you have.

Take 125g of sugar and dissolve it in 100 g of hot water. Stir to dissolve.

Zest some of the skins into the sugar/water mix.

Dissolve 1 1/2 tablespoons of gelatine powder in 8 tablespoons of cold water. Sit the small bowl of gelatine and cold water in a bigger bowl of hot water to encourage the gelatine to dissolve.

Once the gelatine is dissolved, mix it into the sugar water and both into the fruit juice.

Stir well as it cools down. Once cooled, place in fridge to set into jelly. It may need to be stirred a few more times during the time in the fridge to stop the gelatine settling out.

It’s very easy to make and to eat. It goes very well with either ice cream for desert or yoghurt for breakfast.

Candy for grown-ups

I was recently given a bag of old fashioned citrons by a lovely friend. She tells me that her husband makes marmalade from them. I try them for marmalade, but I think that the flavour is rather too strong. So I decided to try my hand at making candied, citron peel from them. I use candied peel for adding in with other dried fruits when baking some cakes. particularly for panforte or sometimes in muesli.

Candying fruit is an easy thing to do in the background while you do other things in the kitchen at night.

This is a pretty standard recipe and technique. You can use any thick skinned citrus.

Candied Citron Peel

Method

Cut the citron fruit lengthways into quarters and again in half into eighths, cut out the centre of the fruit to leave the white pith and peel.

Place in a saucepan and cover with water, then bring to the boil for a few minutes, maybe 10 or so. Discard the water and refresh. this removes a lot of the bitterness. Bring back to the boil and simmer for half an hour or so, or until softened.

Drain off the water and weigh it. Add 1kg of sugar for every litre of water or part thereof proportionally. Return to the stove and bring back to the boil and let it simmer for another half hour or so. Leave to cool in the liquid over night.

In the morning drain and leave on a drying rack to dry, or place in stove on rack and dry for an hour or so on very low, with the fan on, if you have one?

The strips should be dry enough now to ‘keep’ in a jar in the fridge without going off.

You can roll them in caster sugar if you want to. I don’t.

Don’t dry them too much or they will become rock hard.

Winter is not just the time time for citrus. The avocados are in full crop just now too.

They don’t really ripen on the tree. It’s best if you pick them a week or so before you need them. So The Lovely picks a few each week, so that there is an ongoing supply available.

It’s an easy and quick lunch to slice over toast with a squeeze of lemon and some freshly ground pepper. Our good friend Toni Warburton comes for the weekend firing workshop and leaves us some smoked trout to put on top.

Yum! Thank you Toni.

Best wishes

from The Candy Man and his Sweetie

Marmalade for Busy People

Posted on 17/06/2015 by hotnsticky

The solstice draws near, the days are cool and short. The mornings cold and misty. Mrs Grey Thrush is out and about celebrating this cold, cloudy, misty, drizzling morning. She flys down and serenades The Lovely with her beautiful haunting melodic song. she swoops down and continues from the verandah guttering, then up into the pine tree with her mate. They continue together for some time all around the garden with what might be some sort of call and response? It’s a shear delight on a dull morning.

During this cool, damp time It’s great to celebrate this colder weather and make the most of it while it lasts. We have had a few frosts, but only mild. Hopefully just enough to spur the older varieties of stone-fruit into fertile flower buds. I noticed the other day as I walked through the orchard, that one of the early peaches has its first blossom out! How amazing. So early.

Mid winter is the time for warm lingering breakfasts of coffee and toast with marmalade. I have been trying to keep up with the citrus fruit this year by making a batch of marmalade each day. Of course I’m not successful at this. It just can’t be done, but I hold it in my mind as an objective to aim for. There is so much to be done. Something has to give. Sometimes it’s cello practice, other times its preserving the garden excess. But the winter firing workshops must be prepared for and made to work smoothly.

This mornings breakfast involved preserved blood plums from the summer with yoghurt. These are so good. Full of flavour, sweetness and the fruity acidic tang of a good blood plum. The colour is exceptional, dark and rich, with a complex texture that is both fibrous and smooth. We have been enjoying them on and off through the year and are now down to our last three jars. It’s a wonderful thing to have a pantry full of preserved food that you have grown and bottled yourself. A great sense of reward and satisfaction just to look in there and see all the colours ,and then to imagine all the concentrated flavours, that you know and are so familiar with. What is really good, is to know that non of it came from a supermarket or chemical factory and non of it is stored in plastic. All recycled glass. our oldest bottles date back to the mid seventies, and they were bought 2nd hand even then.

This week I have been developing the recipe for my marmalade a little bit further. I use more or less the same recipe every year. the only difference being the fruit that i use. Two years ago i was given some honey mercott Mandarins. these turned out to be so sweet that the marmalade was not nice. Too sickly sweet. I like my marmalade to be a bit tangy and slightly bitter, and definitely not too sweet. it has to taste of citrus and the tangy bitterness of the peel. I aim for a nice creamy smooth texture, not too runny, but definitely not stiff and rubbery.

So to this end I did a few experiments. I have always weighed the fruit. 1 kg of whole fruit to 300g of sugar and I use only the juice of the fruit as the cooking liquid. However, the juiciness of the individual fruits varies so much. Especially in regard to when the fruit was picked. I have noticed that the fruit is easier to juice if it has been picked for a week or so beforehand. fresh picked citrus is a lot harder to juice.

I have come to the following recipe, developed from the original one above, but reduced to separate weights of each of the components. recipes That I have read that say take 4 oranges and add ‘X’ sugar and ‘Y’ water aren’t reliable, because the size and the age of the fruit varies so much. I decided that achieve the best result, it would be necessary to weight the separate ingredients; the cleaned peel, the squeezed juice and the sugar individually.

Yesterdays batch of mixed citrus fruits from the grove turned out quite well following this line of thought. I used;

1 ruby grapefruit

1 myer lemon

1 Tahitian lime

1 seville orange

1 Washington navel orange

1 tangelo and

1 Italian bitter chinnoto

I have come to the following recipe and method.

Recipe.

Cleaned citrus Peel = 100% = 550g

Juice 83% of the weight of the peel = 455g

Sugar 79% of the weight of the peel = 435g

Method.

1. Squeeze the juice out of the fruit and set aside

2. Strip the peel of all the spent fibrous core, to reveal the peel with a clean layer of white pith.

3. Thinly slice the peel into strips and weight it. What ever the weight of this peel, say 550g. call this amount 100%

4. Calculate 83% of 550g = 456g. Weigh the juice and make sure that it is 456g, or close to it. If the fruit is a bit dry and there isn’t enough juice, then juice another piece of fruit to make up the difference. If you have too much, drink the excess.

5. Calculate 79% of 550g. = 434g. Weight out 434g of sugar.

Place all ingredients in the bread-maker machine pan and set for ‘Jam’ setting. come back in and hour and decant into sterilised jars while still hot from the oven and seal with sterilised lids. They will make a loud ‘POP’ noise as they cool down and vacuum seal.

I am inclined to add a dash of whiskey into the hot marmalade as it comes out of the machine. Stir it through evenly, just before pouring into the jars.

Technically, sealed in this way, the marmalade should last for a few years, but never seems to last us till next season 🙂

You should end up with a creamy, smooth marmalade that isn’t too runny or stiff, and you don’t have to soak overnight or spend an hour at the stove stirring, or boil the pips in a calico bag. Marmalade for busy people!

Best wishes

Steve and Janine, a busy couple of people

To Get Rich Is Glorious

Posted on 10/06/2015 by hotnsticky

To get rich might be glorious – but, to be content has its merits too.

We are packed and ready to leave this special place with so much history and future potential. The old and the new worlds are co-mingled here. We breakfast in the street on food cooked on the back of a bicycle and then go looking for a driver. He’ll be here some where along this little bit of road. As we walk along, we are reminded again of how we are seen as being quite exotic here in this remote part of China. There can’t be too many foreigners like us around these parts. This is made obvious to us by a giggle of teenage girls who point and talk about us as we pass. Suddenly, a couple of them run along after us and then past us for a few metres. Once out in front, they quickly turn and take our photo on their phones. Then look nonchalantly straight past us, into the distance, back down the street, as if they are just looking back along the street as if there is nothing unusual going on, just as you do every day! Then, as we get level with them, they turn sideways and snap our image again, but this time in profile, from side on. They run back giggling to their friends to look at the images and chatter and laugh. I turn and wave at them and they wave back, then burst into chatter and laughter once again. We have made their morning more interesting!

We are looking for our amazingly honest driver from the other day. The one who returned Leo’s wallet full of money. We want him to drive us on this last leg of our journey. He was so honest. We find him in a cafe on the corner. A few days ago we paid him Y80 for 4 hours. Today he wants Y200 for 2 hours. I don’t hesitate in agreeing. He was honest enough to return the wallet, which he could easily have ‘forgotten’ to do. After-all, “to get rich is glorious” in China! Or so he has been told. And that windfall wallet, would have been an easy start for him towards glory. But he didn’t and in so doing restored my faith in the goodness of people. So I thank him and think that the Y200 is like a reward for goodness. He’s a nice guy, and I like him. Even though I can’t tell him.

I smile. He knows.

So now I’m finally back home again.

It’s good to see The Lovely again and be back in my own familiar life. My own home, my family, my bed. I’ve only been away a few weeks, but there is so much that needs to be done. I was busy before I left. Now that I’m back, the work load seems to have multiplied. First, I need to help The Lovely catch up with house work, then, the weeding of the garden and we have several weekend workshops booked over the next few weeks of winter. She has done one while I was away, with the help of our good friend Val, and the next one starts today. So it’s up early to get the portable wood-fired kilns out onto the site. I have built 3 new portable wood fired kilns since we last did these workshops, this time, a year ago. They are a great improvement in speed, ease, size and effort.

The day goes well and the new larger kilns perform really well, being the most productive and popular kilns on the day, turning over the work, faster than the older kilns.

Fortunately, I am home just in time to see the last few tomatoes ripen in the window sill. I cook them with a few of the last capsicums and some garlic, broccoli, pumpkin and lentils cooked in marrow bone stock.

This evening, I set about making a new batch of stock to replenish the skerrick that is left in the fridge. There is something very positive about messing about in the kitchen in the evening, fussing over the wood-fired stove, roasting, simmering, reducing a vegetable and marrow bone stock. There is something so essential and wholesome about it. It warms me! In every possible meaning of the word. In some ways, It defines my existence here, living this, positive, practical, hands-on life. Making something out of (almost) nothing. Creating capital, forestalling waste, making do and in so doing, avoiding buying some inferior mass produced product that is probably bad for you, as all the packaged stocks that I’ve seen are made up with artificial everything and loaded with a lifetimes allowance of salt to boot. What I make is a concentration of leggy vegetables that are on their way to seed, a few marrow bones and some garden herbs, reduced down with a bottle of good, local, red wine, into a firm jelly-like essence of flavour. Using a spoonful of this home-made delight beats using a stock cube of unknown origin and content.

There is a massive frost in the morning. Everything is pure white and crunchy under-foot. This is bad. It will kill off a lot of sensitive plants that were struggling on in the near absolute cold, but it is also very good! It will help kill off all the over-wintering fruit flies and while it is at it, it will ensure that we will get a better crop of apples and pears. Old stone-fruit species, especially apples, need to have a few frosts over the winter to ‘chill’ and stimulate the flower buds and make them fertile, come the spring.

It’s winter and the citrus harvest is now reaching maturity on the trees. There are lemons, Myer and Eureka, plus ’lemonade’ lemons. Then there are ruby-red grape fruit and oranges. Plus tangelos and bitter Italian chinottos. Lastly, there are Tahitian and kaffir limes. They all go in together in a radical seasonal mix of flavour and colour.

I try some new ideas about making marmalade. I make marmalade every year and I always like to try a new variation on the theme. You never know what you might learn. The recipe that I have evolved over the past 4 decades has changed so much that I don’t know what it was when I first started out. I use about 1kg of mixed fruit and use only the juice squeezed from that fruit as any liquid in the mix. I like to peel out all the fibrous pith from the fruit after juicing, so that I mostly use the coloured peel with just a bit of white on the inside. This is mixed with 300g of sugar and boiled and stirred for an hour. It’s pretty easy and quick, so i can get 4 or 5 batches done during a session. This makes about a dozen small jars. Up until today, I didn’t really know what the recipe was, so this time I separated out all the parts of the fruit and weighed them before cooking. So now I know.

1 kg of mixed citrus breaks down into;

200g of peel

460g of juice

275g of white fibrous pith into the compost

65g of pips and other discards

Put the peel, juice and 300g of sugar into the pan and boil while stirring for an hour.

That’s it, pour into hot sterilised jars straight from the oven, 10 mins at 120oC. cap with lids that have been simmered for 10 mins at a low rolling simmer. They will ‘pop’ after 15 mins to let you know that they are now vacuum sealed and good for storage for the coming year.

Confession!

I don’t boil and stir for an hour. I just don’t have the time for it. For the past decade I’ve been using the ‘jam’ setting in the bread maker machine. We have a bread maker machine and have had one for the past 20 odd years. It’s one of the few kitchen gadgets that we own. We have even worn the first one out! But we never make bread in it! We use it for making dough, which we then roll out into bread rolls or a plaited loaf, which we bake in the wood stove, or in this case to make marmalade. It works a treat. The best part is that it leaves you free to get other things done, while it ‘minds’ the jam and it never forgets to stir, or lets it burn or stick. It even rings a bell to let you know that it’s time to bottle.

Winter is the time for marmalade on toast for breakfast with a warm bowl of milky coffee. So french! We talk and plan the days jobs ahead. Wood splitting for the up coming stoneware wood firing is high on the list.

Working hard to make money, takes so much time, that there isn’t anytime left to enjoy the life that I want to live. So I decided a long time ago that it was best to try to live with an absolute minimum of money and have a lot more time for having fun and being more in control of my everyday life. When you get used to doing most things for yourself and making do, you find that you need less money. I guess that one reason is that I’m so tired by night time that I just don’t feel like going out.

This mentally focussed but physically demanding existence has it’s contentments, but non of them are money.

Best wishes

Steve

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Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic

Steve Harrison and Janine King's other Hot and Sticky web site

Category Archives: cooking

Tonight My Fingers Smell of Garlic – Again

Spring and The Man for All Seasons

Time For Some Fun

The Harvest

The Soba Noodle Potter

Enjoying the Now

Lime Pickle

Fruits of the Solstice

Marmalade for Busy People

To Get Rich Is Glorious