What a Privilege it is to be a Tax Payer!

Posted on 17/06/2015 by hotnsticky

We are smack in the middle of our winter, wood firing program, we have done 9 weekends in a row and still have quite a few to go. I am spending a lot of time cutting, splitting and stacking wood for each firing. It takes about a tonne of wood to fire the kiln for the 20 or so hours for the kind of quick firing that we do here for these workshops.

I get out early and spend a few hours cutting the logs to length to suit the firebox length that I need for this kiln. I spend the next 4 or 5 hours splitting the logs that I have cut. I was busy in the morning with other jobs, so I am a bit late getting started into this job. Still, it has to be done, so I get stuck in. It’s a bit foggy and misty/rainy, but once I get into it and warm up. I don’t notice the rain at all.

Splitting wood is a bit mind numbingly repetitive and ever so dull, but what can you do?. After a few hours, I’m a bit over it. But there isn’t enough split yet, so on I go. It’s getting late and a bit dark now, but I push on when I shouldn’t, but I think that I need to do more. Its stupid, but on I go into the dark. The pile of logs is getting smaller on the fire-wood pile of split pieces is getting wider and taller.

Suddenly it happens. I’m way too tired and should have stopped an hour ago. I catch my finger under a piece of wood in the splitter.

Immediately, I stop the downward motion of the blade, but its too late. The pain explodes like a cracker in my mind. There is a flash-light like burst, but not towards me, it’s from the inside my head outward. My vision isn’t affected like it would be with a camera flash. There is no burnt-out hole in my vision. Instead, there is a ringing, although strangely silent sound, with a flashing stab of pain.

Somehow, a piece of wood, that I had in a tight grip in my hand, has somehow slipped, or been wrenched, from my grip. It flips around and over, twisting my wrist and then comes down hard on my other hand that was supposed to be holding the log secure!

How could this happen? I can’t even imagine that this is possible. The pain is blinding and a little nauseous. I can’t even understand what has happened, I’m stunned, but I know that it is serious. I am sufficiently aware to know that I should shut down the motor of the splitter before heading to the house to wash my hand and have a good look at my finger in the bright-light of the kitchen. Luckily, on this occasion, here is no broken skin, no blood, but my finger is still numb to this day. Some sort of damage that I hope will eventually repair itself and grow out.

I remember an earlier event of a few years ago, when I really did do myself some serious damage with the splitter. That time I caught my finger under the edge of the blade and it was dragged in and under by the protective glove. I try to pull back on my hand, but the machine is stronger and the glove is caught in the blade. The pain is so intense that I can’t describe it. I’m blank. There is no real memory of it at all. It’s all gone into the file marked ‘don’t go there’. I can remember that it all happened so slowly. I could see it all happening in slow-mo. It all took seconds to happen in replay, but over so quickly.

I’ve crushed my finger. There is no doubt. I gasp it in a vice-like grip with my other hand. I am suddenly in shock, but I can still remember that I had the presence of mind to stop the machine, kill the motor, and take the keys out of the tractor, before heading for the house. I usually wrap everything up in a tarp to keep it all dry in case of heavy dew or rain, but this is different and I just walk away. I know that it is too serious to be bothered with the trivialities.

I can’t get my glove off. It’s wet through and stuck to me. I can’t bear the thought of shaking it off or pulling it off. A piece of my finger might comer with it!. Is it wet with blood or sweat? I don’t remember it being wet beforehand. I’m gripping my hand so tightly, that I’m cauterising it. I don’t mean too. I can’t help myself. It’s instinctive. I head for the house. I walk in and Janine knows straight away. She grasps her mouth. “What have you done now”!

I often come up to the house with some sort of blood stained head or hand that isn’t any sort of real problem. When you are focussed, and want to get the job done, you just push on and get it finished and don’t let any little nick or scratch deter you.

I say “What blood?” and we go from there. It’s always so superficial. Boring even!

But this is different. I know, that she knows, that I know, that I’m hurt. I haven’t cried since I was a child, but this makes my eyes water a little. I’m far too quiet too. She knows. She goes to get the car keys. We’re off to the hospital.

“Are you OK?”

“Yes, but it’s a bad one this time. I thInk that I might need stitches”

I ease the glove off over the sink. It isn’t blood that is sticking it on, but sweat. It’s crushed out of shape a bit and the numbness is starting to wear off now and it’s hurting like hell.

She drives and I sit and shiver. I’m feeling quite cold now, while only a few minutes ago, I was hot and sweaty and very busy. I want a drink of water, I’m parched, but The Lovely say no!

“You’re in shock and it’s not good to drink anything, just in case you need surgery and anaesthetic. So I sit and shiver it out for the 25 minutes it takes to get us to Bowral Hospital Emergency.

The triage nurse see us coming through the outer doors and comes out from behind her desk to meet us. She ushers us straight through a side door and into some sort of cubicle. So much for all those poor people queued up in the rows of seats in the waiting room! She says to sit here and someone will come. They do. I must look bad, to get this Ryan-Air style priority seating. The nurse comes and asks me some questions that I don’t remember. Janine isn’t here now, she’s back outside. I’m cold and alone. Eventually the Doctor comes. He looks at it and asks how I did it. He flinches! He tells me that I’m stupid! I already know that.

You’ve spent 10 years becoming a doctor. Tell me something that I don’t know!

He responds. “I’ve seem fingers come off in accidents like this. You are very lucky!”

I am lucky. I know it, and I am very stupid with it. I know that too! I should have stopped an hour earlier. But didn’t. I am so fortunate.

However, I’m also aware that if I had lived my life, stopping when I should, and not working extra time, doing over-time and more! Doing too much. working into the dark. Not stopping for beak times and working to rule, then I wouldn’t own my own home by now. You have to put your arse into gear and work hard if you want to get ahead in this Brave New World of part-time, unregulated, contract work and self employment.

The doctor starts to clean the wound and gives me a series of injections around the site. A local anaesthetic. But it doesn’t work very well and I can still feel the needle go in and out, and be pulled through, with each stitch. It hurts! I ask if this is normal and he answers that there are some places that are very hard to anaesthetise fully and this is one of them. He gives me a few more shots and it is a bit better, but still quite sensitive to the needle and thread. More of a sort of prickly sting, than a real pain. I’m not about to complain. I’ve seen the third world, I consider myself so lucky that this has happened here.

Eventually, it is all cobbled back together. X-rays reveal that no bones are broken, but a lot of damage has been done to the knuckle. He warns me that it will take a while to heal and that I should go and see my regular doctor on Monday. I get a script for antibiotics and pain-killers. It doesn’t look quite normal any more, but at least I still have it. It ends up taking over a year to loose sensitivity and another year to get back to normal function. To this day, if I bump it during the winter when it is cold. It stings and aches for ages.

I’m a very lucky man and I know it. But this is the price of independence in the Brave New Deregulated World.

At least the hospital is clean, the service is fast, excellent and sterile. I’m not in the third world now!. It’s also completely free. I’m amazed. I should pay something. If I went to a doctor, if one was available on a Saturday night. I’d have to pay him or her. I am so very grateful that such an amazing service is available. I want to pay someone for this incredible service. But No, I can’t, it’s totally free to citizens. This mind blowingly complex and efficient service is apparently covered by my meagre taxes.

What a privilege it is to be a Tax payer!

I am so grateful!

fond regards from ‘Lefty’ Harrison

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

Back from the Lip

Posted on 07/06/2015 by hotnsticky

We prepare to leave the realm of our Colonel Kurtz of Tenmoku. We kurtzy, as a kurtesy and take our leave. But before we leave the valley completely, we want to spend a day visiting the contemporary potteries that still practice the forgotten art here in this little remote valley. They are reviving the old style here and dragging the lost art back from the brink. Re-inventing it as they need to as they go.

There a still a few potteries here and there around the area, a few either side of the valley and another over the river, plus several in the nearest town. They are all making contemporary interpretations, if not replicas of the old wares. None of them have really worked out how to do the most difficult and rarest styles. Even though they have the exact same raw materials and clays right here on site. We keep on finding the same purple, shale-like material, piled up in great heaps.

The best pots were so very rare, that we couldn’t even identify any broken pieces of shards in among the millions that litter the various sites. Even though our very own Kurtz took us to the actual site that he says was the place identified in the old records. However, we have no way of cross referencing this piece of information and there is no real difference in the nature of the shards here that differentiates this site from some of the others.

We also visit the site of the ‘Royal Patronage Kiln’, The tenmokus made here were incised under the foot, with the mark of the emperor. Something to do with death or taxes! However, this site is also pretty much the same as some of the others. All traces of inscribed foot ring shards have been thoroughly worked over and removed for sale elsewhere long ago. However Kurtz finds and shows us a piece of wadding, that is impressed with the royal mark in the negative, from the foot ring that it supported. He immediately pockets it. Kurtz seems to be laying claim to this site too. Perhaps his family own it? Or have some connection with it. I really can’t determine any detailed information from our ‘charades’.

What there is here is an amazing little piece of information that is quite unexpected. Leo will have to present a paper on this and publish it to get some cred for it in the academic world. ‘Kurtz’ seems to be indicating that we can keep the shard from here, as he seems to own it??? Not too sure about this. Still, we take loads of photographs and record what we can of what we have found. This is a blog and not a peer-reviewed paper. So I’ll leave it there. Conrad would have had more to say on the matter I’m sure. But I’m not Conrad. Our Colonel Kurtz seems to rule in this remote valley, all the way ‘up-river’. And how appropriate it is that he should dress in a US Army camouflage uniform? But instead of finding Conrad’s ivory trader, we find that he’s a blackware trader. It’s not quite the same. In fact the difference is black and white!

All the contemporary potteries that we visit are making tea wares, mostly small tea cup bowls. We are given one, at each of the potteries that we visit. These are small, low value, items around here. But we are very appreciative of the gift and also for the ability to be able to walk around the pottery and ‘take it all in’!

Most of the workshops are quite small and very modest. Everyone of them except one, is using either an automated jigger/jolly machine or a rotor head. We only got to see one place with wheels and throwers. Perhaps this is because the product is sold quite cheaply?

Only two workshops had wood fired kilns and both were the long, inclined single chamber dragon kiln style with multiple doors along the tunnel for ease of stacking. In the valley, there is one site that has been protected from vandals and looters by enclosing it in a fence with an impressive gate.. This kiln appears to have been a tunnel kiln of a similar kind. There are half a dozen sites around the valleys edge, so there must have been a number of kilns here, but they appear to have all been erased by the looters over the centuries.

They were packing the kiln at one pottery. Still using saggars for everything and they were getting very nice results too. There is an enormous quantity of thinly split wood stacked along the kiln. It is very impressive. I wish that I owned it! Not that I wish that I had cut, split and stacked it all. I don’t. I’m finding it hard to keep up the wood supply to our own, kitchen slow combustion cooker, lounge room fire, pottery pot belly stove and wood fired kiln. It’s enough.

The real problem here is me. I attempt to do everything myself. Nobody else is so silly. They are all specialists. There is diversification of labour and skill sets. You don’t attempt to learn how to do it, you just play your own small part in the system and buy the rest! Just give in and buy everything, whatever you need. This is the age of consumerism and conspicuous consumption. It’s not what I aspire to, so I have to deal with my own problems that I create for myself in choosing this engaged life.

I have managed to cope with this issue of wearing myself out over the last couple of decades, as I’ve aged, by finding and restoring old bits of machinery that would make the hard work a little bit easier. Machines like rock crushers and hydraulic wood splitters, but now, even using them to do the really tough work. I’m still finding it a bit tiring.

We rejoice in our good fortune and the good will of all those around us who have helped us along on this journey ‘up-river’ into the Heart of Tenmoku Darkness, to stalk the wild tenmoku in its native state and natural surroundings. We have drunk our last cup of green tea from the lip of the tenmoku bowl in its rightful place. Separating lip from lip, I return the bowl to the table. This journey is almost over.

We decide to celebrate with a smack-up meal in one of the little food-sellers shops along the road.

You guessed it, more jowls and bowels – with chilli, Yum!

Best wishes from Marlow and Willard returning from the lip of the Heart of Darkness

Growing Old Together

Posted on 07/05/2015 by hotnsticky

Potting, throwing, making clay, kiln packing, kiln firing, kiln unpacking, more wood cutting splitting and stacking, gardening, weeding, pruning, composting. It’s been a busy couple of weeks.

Recently we have been doing something different everyday. There is always the garden and the pottery, then the house and land maintenance, but we are also doing weekend workshops over the winter months. We have just completed the 4th weekend in a row, only nine more to go, with a possible tenth.

We started off the week in the pottery making pots. It’s always fun to get in there and let a few days slip by un-noticed in the joy of making. Clay is such a tactile and responsive medium. I’ve started to make some white tenmoku bowls out of my native bai-tunze porcelain stone. I also make a pot-board full of stoneware bowls and another of blended kaolin/stone based porcelain body. I finish up by making a board of Black ware tenmoku bowls. I plan to fire these unglazed in the wood kiln so that they will come out jet black. I think that this contrast of matt black and glossy white will work out well together. It’s just an idea. I’ll have to see how it goes. It’s starting out looking OK.

The kiln that I welded up last week is back from the galvanisers already. A 7 day turn around! unheard off!. What has gone wrong? It usually takes these buggers at least 2 weeks and more, usually 3 or 4. I’ve even waited 6 weeks for one of my jobs to get through their process. Still, it’s back here now and I’m very pleased, it takes the pressure off. I drove up to Sydney on Monday morning to collect it – to make sure that it was done. I have spent an hour or two each morning this past week grinding, etching, sanding, filing, priming, undercoating, and finally two coats of top coat will go on the inside to make sure that it is really well rust proofed inside for years into the future.

The customer has no idea what has gone on inside this kiln frame. It’s all covered over in Stainless steel, but I know that it is the best way to insure that this kiln will last a working life time and more. I don’t have to do it. I decide to do it, because it’s the right thing to do. No one will ever know, but I know. I build them as if I was going to own it myself. I want it to last for 20, 30 or maybe 40 trouble-free years.

I know that this effort will be rewarded. I have some kilns out there in Universities and TAFE colleges that are fired on a regular basis, every week and have been now for almost 30 years. I know their history and I also know that they have had only minimal maintenance issues over that time. I’m proud of that. If I buy something, I want it to last, all my life if necessary, with no built-in obsolescence. I want it to work perfectly, for as long as possible, and then to only need minimal attention. Something like the replacement of the thermocouple or temperature meter. This is my aim, and I’m all-in to go for it as best I can. It’s the product that I want to own!

Another little wood fired raku/midfire portable wood kiln rolls of the production line. This one fitted with all-terrain 200 mm. tyres, for wheeling over wet lawn and/or soft gravel.

I started weeding the last of the tomatoes from the summer garden and made a huge couple of heaps of compost of all the weeds and old tomato and spinach plants. At this time of year, the Worrigal greens (tetragonis) seem to spread everywhere. It’s a native plant that is something like spinach, but growing prostrate, and spreading wildly. It seeds prolifically at this time of year and there will be numerous seedlings appearing in the spring.

The garlic that I planted in March is all up now, early, mid-season and late varieties. All seem to be doing well. I also planted bush peas and broad beans on either side to accompany them and to fix a little nitrogen as well, while they are at it. We’ll see how the rest of the year pans out, and if the rainfall continues.

One plant that has thrived in all this rain has been the avocado tree. We have a bumper crop this year, hundreds! We’ll eat what the hail, birds and possum don’t ruin.

We had such a sustained hail storm last Saturday week. During one of our wood firings. The hail on the tin roof was so loud that I went and put on my industrial ear muffs! One of the potters measured the decibels with her phone app at 89 decibels. That’s as loud as my chain saw, according to the warning sticker! The hail continued and lapsed, then returned 3 times in all during the afternoon and evening. It will have made a mess of the avocados. However the vegetable garden is entirely under cover of both chook wire and small mesh plastic netting now, so I was able to look out of the kiln shed window and watch the hail bounce off the fine plastic netting. After the storm, I wandered out for a quick look, there was no noticeable damage to any of the vegetables. That netting was such an exertion of time, money and effort, but it was worth it in every way. This is part of the pay-back now. All those vegetables saved from a shredding from the hail.

In the evenings, early mornings, or whenever I can fit it in throughout the day, I manage to find a little time to play my cello. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s changing over time as the wood ages and settles in.

We are growing older together, Nina, me and this cello, the difference between us being that it’s the cello that is getting better with age !

Fond regards

Pau Harrison

A world tour of our garden, in 3 meals.

Posted on 03/05/2015 by hotnsticky

Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner, a world tour of our garden, in 3 meals.

Gardening is a very enjoyable activity. It gets us out into the fresh air, it’s good exercise and It provides most of all we eat each day. As the autumn progresses towards winter, the cooler weather encourages us to seek out more warming cooked meals. We indulge ourselves in reflecting on the people and places that inhabit our collective memories. Our conversations trigger memories of these people and places. Fond recollections of some past events and friends remembered through pots and food. We don’t attempt to make Italian, Spanish, Japanese or any other type of national cuisine. We make Australian food. Real food, home-grown, eaten fresh where possible, but when preserved, we do it without any added chemicals or preservatives. Preserved in glass jars, not plastic. and all home cooked. We just take the influences that we recall and weave them into our dietary choices, them combine our thoughts with what we actually have available to us from the garden.

This is what happened yesterday, in between, potting, gardening, wood cutting, kiln building and building maintenence. There is time for everything, in its own time.

For breakfast I cooked eggs in passata with a few cloves of garlic warmed in good olive oil first. The passata I used on this occasion was made from little yellow, pear-shaped tomatoes that I preserved a couple of months ago, at the height of summer. The passata is heated up and the eggs cracked in and covered to gently simmer until the whites are firm. I served it up on a piece of rye sour dough toast.

I must say that it was just right for a cool, misty, foggy, morning breakfast. A little cracked pepper makes it perfect.

We don’t quite lick the plates, but there is certainly nothing left.

For lunch I made and hotch potch from the left over baked vegetables that Nona Nina made for last nights dinner. Brussel sprouts, parsnip, leeks, carrots, pumpkin, onions, zucchini and beetroot. We had that garnished with preserved spicy plum sauce from our summer orchard fruit.

These left-overs were added to some chorizo sausage, our garlic, olives and home-made dried tomatoes from the summer excess. A lovely way to use up everything that we have in different and interesting combinations. We haven’t bought any meat since Xmas as far as I can recall. We aren’t vegetarians, but we don’t eat a lot of meat. So this is our little indulgence, veggie hot-pot with chorizo. Hot, spicy and nicely warming.

For dinner we decided to have Gyoza. I had previously bought 500g of lean pork and asked the butcher to mince it for me. I divided it into 4 parts and froze 3 of them for later. The 125g of pork mince is just the right amount to make gyoza for two. We fry the pork with lots of garlic in olive oil and some finely diced garden veggies. Then Ninako fills the small parcels with the mixture and I simmer and steam them in a sauce made from the last of the small red and yellow tomatoes from the garden, a few beans and some chillies. When this is reduced down, it makes a delicious simmer sauce.

It all mellows out very nicely. 7 each is just the right number of gyoza dumplings for one hungry potter. This sauce, although not culturally authentic, is very well matched to what we are enjoying, and most importantly it is entirely ours, from our garden. This is our Australian ‘gyoza’ influenced local dumpling experience. I’ll have another go at it some time in the future, and I’m sure to enjoy that too. Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts. This meal certainly didn’t!

It’s such an indulgence to tour the world of our recollections with such wholesome and tasty food, and almost entirely from our own produce.

We are very lucky people and I am grateful.

I have arranged to donate one of my recent bowls from my Watters Gallery exhibition to the fund-raiser appeal for the Nepalese victims of the recent earthquake. The pot will be auctioned soon. Please see below;

I believe you will have heard about the recent devastating earthquake in Nepal.

With the help of Vicki Grima, The Journal of Australian Ceramics editor, I am organising a fundraising project called CLAY FOR NEPAL (#clayfornepal15) to raise funds for the Nepalese people affected.

The first part of the project is an AUCTION of ceramics from around the world.

In conjunction with the AUCTION, Adriana Christianson, has offered to help me organise a BUY NOW STORE offering more affordable items for immediate purchase.

Both events will be happening from Friday 15 to Sunday 17 May 2015.

AUCTION: www.stores.ebay.com.au/clayfornepal

BUY NOW STORE: www.clayfornepal.bigcartel.com

PREVIEW of available works for both events here

Thank you for your support,

Vipoo Srivilasa

contact :

AUCTION: vipoo@vipoo.com

BUY NOW STORE: mail@adrianachristianson.com

All funds collected, less any event expenses (eBay and Paypal fees), will be donated to Oxfam, Nepal Earthquake Relief Appeal.

Vipoo Srivilasa is authorised by Oxfam Australia to collect funds for the benefit of Oxfam.

Vipoo is a very nice and thoughtful bloke who has taken on this endeavour of his own volition. It’s a credit to him and I am proud to be associated with the enterprise. Janine and I have donated cash through the Red Cross, but this is a way that we can do more, by doing what we do best. Which is making beautiful, thoughtful, meaningful objects.

Best wishes

from

Stevbu and Ninako, gardeners of local produce and international flavours.

Home Made Chainsaw Saw Mill

Posted on 30/04/2015 by hotnsticky

Over the past few weeks I have had over 500 hits on my article on self reliance including a little bit about milling my own timber. So I thought that seeing there is so much interest in building a home made saw mill attachment for a chain saw, I ought to put up a post with some more detailed explanation, including a few dimensions and some images to help explain what I did.

It’s pretty basic unit made out of scrap steel sections that I just happened to have laying about on the day, but it works really well for what I need it to do and that is to turn logs that are too good to burn, into usable milled planks. I haven’t studied this kind of gadget at all. This is my first attempt at building one. It seems to work OK, so i haven’t got around to making another one or changing it. If I was to, I would perhaps add a bit of rubber tube over the upright centre handle, just for comfort.

Since I moved here, I have built my own house and pottery building. We made all our own floor boards and made all the windows and french doors. I also made all of the kitchen furniture to go into it, chairs, tables stools etc.

All you seem to need is a few basic tools, an inquisitive mind, some perseverance and a bit of spare time to figure things out. The saw is an old (15 years) Husqvarna 371 60 cc. and the milling bar is about 900 mm. long. The effective cut is about 600 mm.

So here are a few pictures with measurements chalked onto the bench.

It’s The Season For Wild Passata

Posted on 28/03/2015 by hotnsticky

Another on-going job besides kiln maintenance at this time of year, is keeping up with the tomato crop as it slowly sprawls and proliferates all across the garden beds and over the lawn and down the pathways. They keep on flowering and producing loads of ever-smaller compact, flavoursome, little zingers. full of intense tomato flavour, but very small. These little beauties take a long, back-bending, time to pick. There is no easy way. I’ve tried kneeling and I’ve tried bending, but the problem is that there are so few places to put your feet, when the plants spread all over the place. I’m always aware of not crushing the fruit or the plant stems, which set down adventitious roots all along the way to feed and nourish the ever-expanding crop. It takes a long time, as there are so many of them, but it’s worth it. It doesn’t take too long to fill the first box.

I don’t get all of them, there are just too many, but I fill the basket. it’s enough. We can do this every few days at this time of year, and do. Batch after batch, we slowly fill the pantry cupboard shelves. After cleaning and washing the tomatoes, I simmer them down in the evenings when we light the stove. I make them into tomato passata, some times just straight tomatoes if I’m pressed for time, but on other evenings, when I can make the extra time. I brown our own onions in good EV olive oil and then add garlic, capsicums and basil with the tomatoes. It makes a richer flavour, but the extra fibre takes a lot longer to pass through the mouli sieve. Sometimes it’s just a batch of the prolific little yellow tomatoes, they don’t have the same level of acidity in them, so the piquancy is somewhat less, but they are still worth the effort. A more usual batch is a mix of all of the above. It just depends on what there is the most of on the day. Every batch is slightly different and makes for a natural variety throughout the coming year.

After sieving out the skins and seeds, the sauce is placed back on the stove to be reduced and concentrated a bit more, by about a third. This intensifies the flavour considerably. I try to make enough passata to last the whole year, so that we don’t have to buy any later on. This has been the case for a long time now. I haven’t needed to buy any pasta sauce for some years. This is one of the few things that we have been completely successful at achieving during our long experiment here. Self-reliance in passata!

For dinner this night, I bake some carrots, zucchini and aubergines, fresh from the garden and serve it with a helping of tuna steamed with fresh Thai basil leaves, wasabi and a squeeze of lemon. While the oven is hot I use the heat to dry some of the small tomatoes. After an evening when we have guests and make a dozen pizzas. I use the remaining heat to dry a few trays of tomatoes. Dried tomatoes are great, full of concentrated sweet acid flavour. They keep really well without any extra energy needing to be applied. We use them in stews and soups and where-ever we need that little extra hit of added flavour.

Indulging myself in this kind of self-produced and preserved, essential larder-filling activity is one of the reasons that I came here, to a place like this, miles away from services, where there was clean air and a lot of space to live out an imagined ideal. It takes a few hours a day of extra work and then occupies our evenings after dinner at the stove, but what could be better and more rewarding? I could of course be sitting, watching some brain-dead and fake commercial television show about how the cook?

It seems to have worked out OK for us. We have managed to earn a living from various and diverse means, all more or less associated with pottery making. We have tried making and selling pots, ceramic tiles, making and selling clay to other potters, building kilns, writing books, doing weekend workshops and part-time teaching. None have proved to be sufficient in their own right, but all combined together, has provided us with a self-reliant, if unreliable income through most of the years. This combined with gardening and orcharding, as well as eliminating most tradesmen from our budget by doing all our own building and maintenance, means we have been able to continue to live out this self-reliant, utopian, creative adventure for the past 40 years together.

I beats working for a living.

Best wishes from Dr. Do-Little and his Ms Abundance

The Luxury of Frugal Simplicity

Posted on 24/02/2015 by hotnsticky

We’ve been making wine, making clay, making kilns, making pots, making preserves and in general making a living, in all the various and diverse ways that we have grown into during this big long experiment called life.

As the last few weeks of summer are slipping away, the days get shorter and the plants are adjusting accordingly. This last week, we have been harvesting the red grapes and the yellow quinces.

In the past we have tried making wine from our Isabella/fragolino grapes, but it was never very good, due to the fact that we are not at all skilled at making wine, but also because these grapes are not really suited to wine making, so we have taken to bottling the dark red grape juice. This is the very best way to appreciate these grapes. We have also grown both Cabinet Sauvignon and shiraz, which are much better for making wine, but they need a lot of work to protect them from mildew. I refuse to use anything poisonous, restricting myself to only organic treatments. So this meant regular applications of Bordeaux spray, which is copper carbonate and lime mixed together. This works, but has to be applied after every rain, as it is water based and washes off. Long term use can lead to a build-up in the soil, so I decided to let them find there own way to survive without spraying. They didn’t! So no shiraz grapes this wet year.

However, the Isabella/fragolino hybrid is totally immune to Phytophthora root rot and leafy mildew. So no sprays are needed, perfect! These grapes are only good for juice, but the juice is of excellent flavour and the way that we have developed to extract the juice brings out exceptional depth of colour and flavour. We have tried the more traditional crushing and pressing, but this only results in a clear/pale pink juice. Partial fermentation to make ‘summer wine’. A semi fermented blend of partially fermented sweet juice and a little alcohol from the fermentation, results in a pale pink, cloudy, rose style. This is very nicely spritzig and tangy on the tongue but we have developed a better way of improving it to what we believe is an outstanding level of density of flavour and colour.

The red colour of wine comes from the skins which contains, amongst other things, anthrocyanins. These complex chemicals are thought to be quite beneficial to your health. But simply pressing the juice out of their skins only results in a white juice or wine. Have you ever thought how clear champagne is made from pinot noir red grapes? The clear juice is quickly squeezed out of the red grapes and separated from their skins so that no contact colouration can occur. If the grape juice is left in contact with the skins, the alcohol that develops in the wine ‘must’ as it ferments starts to dissolve the red colour. Partial contact results in a ‘rose’ light red colour, but full fermentation on the skins produces a red wine. Wine makers have developed a technique called ‘plunging the cap’ which involves pushing the red skins down into the fermenting ‘must’ to encourage the contact and colour extraction. This is done several times a day, for a week or two, as long as the fermentation lasts.

As we are not making wine, but only juice. Miss Penfold Grange King decided to try heating the juice to sterilize it for bottling, but along the way found by accident that the colour improved as well. So now we don’t really crush the grapes in the normal way. We carefully pick all the ‘berries’ off the grape bunches and separate the stems and any unripe grapes, as these can give a sour acidic flavour to the juice. We also separate any living protein from the bunches as well. In industry this is called “MOG” material other than grapes, and a lot of it, slaters, spiders, caterpillars and especially snails, can pass through the system and separators, just like grapes, if they are the same size. However, It doesn’t seem to affect the finished wine from industrial scaled production wineries.

We take the time to carefully separate all of this by hand about 20 kilos at a time and then put the grapes in big boilers and heat them . initially to sterilize the juice for preservation, but we have found that a few minutes of simmering and some squashing using a potato masher, produces a very rich, red, dense grape juice of immense flavour and colour. It seems that anthrocyanins are also extracted by heat just as with alcohol. After the colour has been extracted by this heating, we drain off the skins and pips through a large kitchen sieve, pressing it a little by placing a stack of plates on top, then filling glass jars taken straight from the oven with ‘pop top’ lids simmered in hot water. As the bottles cool. the lids are sucked down and sealed making a loud ‘pop’ noise as they vacuum seal.

This juice keeps for up to a year in these sealed bottles. Miss Penfold Grange King has found lots of ways to cook with this preserved juice over the years. She makes jelly, by re-heating with some gelatine and a little lemon juice and even some zest occasionally. This year we have also made some summer wine from this improved and concentrated rich red grape juice. it’s absolutely fantastic. If you haven’t ever tried some of this stuff. it is an amazing way to preserve grape juice. Except, as summer wine it isn’t preserved at all, just drunk. we make a batch every few days to replace the last batch, keeping the ferment going, restarting the new batch off the lees of the last one. We make it in 4 litre glass fermenting jars. It’s an ongoing process that lasts as long as the grape crop.

Every year we try something a little different, some other way of dealing with what we have, always trying to find a better way to get the most out of our home grown produce. This year, amongst other things, we have experimented with preserving our quince crop by cooking them in this wonderfully rich, dense and colourful red grape juice which is brim full of flavour.

Quinces need to be cooked with a little bit of sugar. In the past I have used pure white and deadly as well as local honey, but this year we have decided to use the sweetness of our grape juice to provide the fructose to bring out the luscious red colour of the cooked quinces.

I bring the quartered and peeled quinces to the boil and then switch them off. Because they are so fresh, they don’t need to be cooked for too long, otherwise they will go all mushy. While the quinces are coming up to the boil. I bring all the quince peelings and cores and pips up to boil for a few minutes, and simmer for a while. The skins and pips are full of pectin, so boiling them dissolves this pectin. I drain off the pectin liquor into a smaller sauce pan and continue to reduce tha pectin sauce further.

I place the quinces in a baking tray with a few cloves, a 5 star anise, a cinnamon stick and the zest and juice of a lemon. I cut the spent lemon in the baking tray as well and pour the hot grape juice over them and place them in the oven on low to cook a little more. As soon as the pectin liquor is reduced to half, I pour it over the baking quinces and bake them for another half hour. It reduces to a jelly-like, rich, red, fragrant syrup.

Perfect with a little cream or icecream, or both.

Yum. You don’t know what you are missing if you haven’t tasted something like this.

We may not have much cash flow, but by gosh we eat well. We just couldn’t afford to pay to eat this quality and range of gourmet foods if we were working for money.

Best wishes from Miss Penfold Grange and her Maximillion dollar value Schubert

The luscious excess of the summer garden

Posted on 13/02/2015 by hotnsticky

The luscious excess of the summer garden

Breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus desert.

We have been experimenting with a few new ways of dealing with our excesses from the garden. We have our favourites that we love to cook every season with all the usual suspects as they front up in quantity. It’s just amazing how much I look forward to that first tomato of the season to get ripe enough to pick and eat, right there in the garden. It truly explodes in the mouth with sweet, acidity. Such a flavour. Then all those vitamins that I am obviously in need of, because I crave that first tomato so much. Just brushing the leaves of the tomato plants while weeding is nostalgic and gives me the Pablov’s Dog reaction. i can’t wait. I’m craving a fresh tomato after 6 months without having any. However, after a month of tomatoes with everything, I seem to have enough of the vitamins and minerals that tomatoes offer, and they lose some of their charm. They are still fantastically delicious, but there is no longer any urgency to eat them. They just become part of the menu landscape. In fact, so much so, that while I’m weeding and watering the plants, I try to avoid brushing the leaves, as the smell is no longer appetising, but slightly off-putting even. What is this reaction? How does it work? My body is telling me what I need to eat and when I’ve had enough. Time to move on, try something different.

The same can be said for zucchinis, capsicum and aubergines as well I suppose, but not with the same urgency.

After we have cooked and eaten all the usual favourite dishes a few times, we start to consider other ways of thinking about what we have and how we can be creative with it.

Breakfast of stewed fruit and yoghurt. Today its blood plums or fresh prunes.

It’s always interesting to see what other people have found to do with summer vegetables. The following recipe is from Andrew McConnel, from his page in the recently launched “The Saturday Paper” This is a new Australian newspaper launched by Morry Schwartz this time last year. We were foundation subscribers, as I have been to ’The Quatertly Essay’ and the ‘The Monthly’. I think that it’s important to support creative ventures, and anything that may help to subvert the dominant paradigm can’t be a bad thing. The recipe for Zucchini salad is from the 7th of Feb issue.

Zucchini Salad and ricotta

The lovely made some fresh ricotta and served it with a few thinly sliced zucchinis. This is a lovely fresh salad of thinly sliced raw zucchinis. Slice the zuchs and season with pepper (plus salt if you use it), then dress with some torn basil leaves and lemon zest, + its juice and some olive oil. Evenly spread the fresh warm ricotta over the top in little lumps and a few lightly roasted pine nuts.

After making the ricotta, there is a lot of whey still left over. This is good to feed to the chickens or a pig – if you happen to be fattening one up at the time, or to make a batch of scones?. Ms ‘one brick’ Einstein has a brilliant idea and decides to make a whey pudding by adding a little bit of vanilla bean paste, some sugar and a little gelatine to the warm whey. It sets in the fridge to a jelly that is surprisingly good as a breakfast or dessert option.

Lightly steamed capsicums and garlic served warm and topped with fresh ricotta

Sliced, fresh warm tomatoes picked straight from the garden 5 minutes earlier and served on a bed of oak leaf lettuce.

Mixed small tomatoes, finely sliced fresh red onion and grated zucchini salad, served with crispy toasted seeds,(sunflower and pumpkin) dressed with lemon juice. This salad will be going on our list of ‘must do more often’. Really nice mix of flavours and textures.

Served with cold potatoes cheese, fresh basil pesto and green leaves.

Zucchini fritters. Grate a few small young zucchinis and mix with a little flour and an egg, season with salt and pepper, some coriander leaves, parsley, a hint of chilli and finely chopped shallots. Fry in a little olive oil till golden on both sides.

Mixed summer veggie fritters. Grate zucchinis with mashed, steamed and cooled, waxy potatoes, sweet corn nibblets, sliced, steamed French beans, finely chopped capsicum, parsley and Thai basil. Mix with egg and flour and fry in a shallow pan with some extra virgin olive oil. Season to taste.

Baked capsicums stuffed with ricotta mixed with olive, garlic and dried tomato tepinade. roasted beetroot dip, grated zucchinis with lemon juice and pepper, sweet corn on the cob, fresh capsicum and cold potato with tomatoes and olives.

Lightly steamed french beans served with home-made spicy tomato passata. We also have beans like this served in yoghurt with garlic.

Baked, marinated ocean trout fragments with udon noodles and seasonal veggies. Marinate the fish in some soy, ginger, olive oil and lemon juice for a few hours. Steam, bake or Pan fry the fish in it’s marinade. Meanwhile, boil the udon buckwheat noodles and steam the fresh veggies, beans, broccoli, colli, zucchini chunks, whatever is at hand on the day. Toss the veggies through the drained noodles and serve with a few torn-up fresh Shiso leaves on the side and dress with a mix of mirin, sesame seed oil and meso.

Baked mediterranean vegetables with cumin, Roughly chop up what ever is in the garden by way of Mediterranean vegetables. Zucchinis, tomatoes, beans, aubergines, onion etc. pour a little olive oil into the baking dish and rub it through all the vegetables with your hands. sprinkle some cumin over it and bake in a moderate oven till tender. This is a Nigel Slater recipe that The Lovely has transposed to suit what we have. The cumin isn’t something that I would have thought of, but it works and is really nice. It’s no longer a ratatouille sort of dish, and is suddenly transported to another continent.

Ratatouille variations. Slice egg-plant, tomatoes, capsicums and onions liberally sprinkled with mashed garlic and plenty of torn basil leaves. Pour over a jar of home-made passata, sugo sauce and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour or so. Crush a few more cloves of fresh garlic and sprinkle over the top before serving. It’s tangy and gorgeous.

Serve with some chopped parsley and a little grated parmigiano.

Summer vegetable frittata. Brown some onions and garlic in olive oil, add in chopped tomato, aubergine, capsicum, french beans, zucchini and cold steamed potato slices. Pour over the whisked eggs and grate cheese on top. cook for a few minutes on the stove top and then transfer to the grill. Best to use a flat flan pan or very shallow fry pan for this dish. One with a metal handle that can go under the grill. Grill till the cheese turns golden.

Serve with chunky zucchini steamed with fresh mint leaves. It’s just another way of using up more of the buggers.

Serve with a grating of fresh pepper.

Almond friand cake embedded with slices of fresh pear and topped with local pecans

Poached pears with amaretto and served with greek yoghurt

Quinces poached in fresh pressed red grape juice.

Peel and core the quinces, place in a large baking pan cover with fresh pressed red grape juice and slow cook for at least 4 hours in a slow oven, untill they soften and turn red.

We are not fooling ourselves. There isn’t anything new here. This isn’t fancy food. It’s just simple honest Post Modern Peasant food picked from our garden and cooked within hours, if not minutes of harvest. A good percentage of it is even eaten raw in the garden while we are harvesting. Nothing could be fresher or more wholesome. Nearly everything on these plates is home-grown and home-made – even the plates.

Best wishes from two well-fed potters

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Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic

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

Category Archives: self-reliance

What a Privilege it is to be a Tax Payer!

Marmalade for Busy People

To Get Rich Is Glorious

Back from the Lip

Growing Old Together

A world tour of our garden, in 3 meals.

Home Made Chainsaw Saw Mill

It’s The Season For Wild Passata

The Luxury of Frugal Simplicity

The luscious excess of the summer garden