Limbo

I feel like we’re in limbo at the moment. We talk constantly about our plans to buy land and becoming more self sustainable – believe me, there may not be a lot happening with the blog, but we are full steam ahead with planning – but, until we get enough finances together, we can’t actually start gathering materials and mapping out a specific plan for our land. Oh, and we still have to buy the site, so that’s a pretty major part of the plan that’s still in “discussion” stage. We are so eager to get started, it can feel pretty frustrating sometimes not being able to just go and do. We are trying our best to prepare for our future (real) lives though and over the past few years, I've had a list of skills (that I add to on a weekly basis) that I am trying to get to grips with so when we do buy our land, it will (hopefully!) be a more organic transition from consumers to off gridders.

Site on the West Coast of Ireland that we're very interested in!

I've also acquired a range of books which covers everything to do with homesteading – i.e. bee keeping, preserving meat and fish, making candles, raising barns etc – to books on yurt building, permaculture practices, Lloyd Khan books Tiny Homes and Shelter – on a side note, what a pity (shame, travesty!) the UK and Ireland have different laws from the US on planning permission for tiny homes – in the UK/Ireland, no matter what size the building is, if you intend on using it to live in, you must have planning permission. In the US, you can build up to a certain size (depending on the State) without having to gain planning permission first, very handy! I have general books on preserving food, from fruit and vegetables, to meat and fish and anything else I could possibly get my sticky little fingers on. I have books on tree houses and simple shelters as well as self sufficiency and allotment gardening - which are fantastic for making month to month plans for seedlings and planting out. And a selection of books on traditional methods of cooking and preserving food. These books are my bibles, and I spend a lot of my spare time reading and trying to absorb as much information as possible...

Things I want/need to learn....this list is finite, so these are just the more immediate things I think I need to learn

Building skills

How to make a green roof

Straw bale building

How to can fruit and vegetables

Smoking meat and fish

Making sausages, preserving hams

How to make hard cheese

How to kill and butcher a chicken

How to butcher a sheep/pig/goat

Bee keeping

Things I/we've done over the past few years

Courses/workshops

Sourdough bread making

Mozzarella & Camembert cheese making

Fermented foods – preserving vegetables

Permaculture Design Course

Reiki One – this obviously isn't directly linked to becoming self sufficient, but I loved this course and occasionally practice on M and myself, I find it’s a good way of meditating while realigning and energising chakras

Things I’ve made at home

Strawberry jam

Fig, vanilla bean and ginger preserve

Blackberry & pinot noir jam – from foraged blackberries

Pumpkin (galeuse d’eysines) and orange marmalade – this is probably my favourite so far!

Green tomato chutney

Cherry tomato and ginger chutney

Sourdough bread – still a work in progress maintaining a good starter

Duck confit – very easy, just space consuming, but well worth the effort!

Traditional Irish Christmas pudding

Sloe gin –maturing until December 2014 - we have “sampled” this several times and it is divine, but absolute rocket fuel!

Sloe port – made from the gin soaked sloes, we gave bottles of this to our parents as part of their Christmas present and it went down very well. A small nip is plenty to warm your cockles...and everything else!

Gardening ...on-going but getting better each season! This year, we’re hoping to get a (decent) crop of onions, potatoes, carrots, peas, tomatoes, garlic as our basics, and all sorts of other squashes, pumpkin, sweet peppers and soft fruits to go with them – updates on the raised beds and new additions to the garden shortly!

We spend our weekends doing projects around the house and garden. Most recently, M has almost finished an extension which leads out of the kitchen into the garden; which he’s built from windows and timber we liberated from local skips.  We had a fantastic haul last weekend of old bricks from a skip down the street. It took three trips up and back to get all the bricks, but it was well worth it, and M used the bricks to create a beautiful paved area inside the back extension.

Extension - work in progress - we rescued the blue and yellow stained glass windows (bottom left) from a skip a few months ago, the owners told us we were welcome to help ourselves as they were getting new PVC windows fitted

Between work and travel to and from work, we spend roughly 50 hours out of the house a week; if we could find a way to instead, dedicate that time to building sustainable lives and running our eco/yurt/renewable living center, that would be the dream!

We have the will, now we just need to find a way...

Early Autumn walks... Blackberry and Sloe picking

Even though it's only late August, we've noticed lots of blackberry brambles around Dulwich starting to turn a lovely juicy purple. Of course, the most appealing brambles, absolutely laden with ripe blackberries, seem to be just out of reach, fenced off by East Dulwich station. So we decided to go for a walk to Belair park yesterday evening and see if we could forage any ripe berries there.

We struck lucky within a few minutes of arriving in the park and spent a happy hour or so, wandering from bramble patch to bramble patch and by the time we'd finished, we had about a kilo of ripe blackberries. From all the footprints and trampled grass around the brambles, we obviously weren't the first people to visit the park, but there were plenty of berries in various stages of ripeness scattered around and between the sports fields.

Just as we decided to leave the park and make our way home, I spotted a sloe berry bush, then another....and we ended up staying for another half hour picking sloes. I couldn't believe they were ripe so early, but the temptation to make sloe gin was too much and so we picked some of the ripest sloes that had a nice powdery appearance and left the rest to continue ripening.

Ripe blackberries Belair Park - Dulwich

There were clouds of these pretty seeds close to one of the bramble patches

Early Sloe berries

Acorns with Knopper Galls - these are growths caused by chemical reaction to the Gall wasp, which lays its eggs in the developing acorns...and more information about that can be found here
  

Evening sky in the park

Harvest!

As it was so early for sloes - usually they are picked after the first frost - I popped them into the freezer overnight so their skins would split.

And I decided to turn the blackberries into Blackberry and Pinot Noir jam. I found the recipe in my Salt, Sugar, Smoke book*, which looked delicious and was surprisingly easy!

                         Blackberry and Pinot Noir Jam

Pop a small plate into the freezer before you start, I use this to do a wrinkle test to see if the jam has reached settling point

Ingredients

1 small cooking apple - peeled, cored and chopped into small pieces

1 kg blackberries - washed and picked through for stalks and bugs

700g granulated sugar, with pectin (jam sugar)

350ml pinot noir wine

Put the apple into a saucepan with about 4 tbsp water and cook until it is almost completely soft

Put this into a preserving pan (I split the mix between my two largest saucepans as I don't have a preserving pan) with the rest of the ingredients, hold back about 30 mls of wine and slowly bring to the boil, stirring to help the sugar dissolve. 

 Boil hard until the setting point is reached. I tested for setting point using my thermometer (the jam has to reach 104° C) and doing the wrinkle test on a plate just out of the freezer - when the jam has reached 104°C, put a small blob onto the plate and put into the fridge for a few minutes,  if the jam wrinkles when you push it with your finger, it's done and if it's still runny, boil for another two minutes and test again. 

I skimmed a small amount of scum off the surface and stirred in the rest of the wine, then potted in warm, dry jars (thank you Lloyd Grossman) and sealed.

Sticky blackberry jam

The end result!

                                                Sloe gin

After freezing the sloes overnight, I made the sloe gin today...it won't be ready to drink until December 2014, so I'll just have to admire it until then.

Ingredients

450g sloes

450g sugar

600 ml gin

I put the frozen sloes into a bag and bashed them with the meat tenderiser to break the skin, I then dropped them into a large Pimms bottle I'd cleaned out earlier. 

I poured the sugar into the bottle, followed by the gin, sealed well and gave it a really good shake.

The bottle will need to be shaken daily for the next week to prevent the sugar from settling on the bottom and to help release the sloe juice. Then it will need to be shaken once a week for the next eight to ten weeks.

After ten weeks, the mixture should be distilled through a fine sieve, then poured into bottles and left in a cool, dry place for about eighteen months.

The gin soaked sloes can be used in desserts (the stones must be removed first) or folded into melted chocolate and made into petit fours...I think that sounds delicious and I'm definitely going to try that when the sloes have finished steeping in the gin

Photos of the maturing sloe gin to follow

28 September 2013