A busy weekend with foraged and bargain food. First of all I bought two polybags of apricots for €1 each in SuperU and cooked them with sugar and powdered ginger. I just love the colour of the finished product - and the taste - it's absolutely scrumptious and I'm having trouble not just spooning it out of the jar every time I go past the fridge.
My absent neighbour's garden now resembles that of Sleeping Beauty. Most of the overgrown plants are blackberries and the fruits are much larger than the usual hedgerow type so I wonder if there is a cultivated blackberry in there somewhere. I have picked them every three days for a couple of weeks now and the ones I picked on Saturday I turned into a blackberry sauce - done in the same way as the apricotes above but without the ginger. I have tried it spooned over vanilla icecream and it is very moorish.
Here are some I just cooked through with sugar and poured over some icecream, but I think I prefer the sauce to the whole fruits.
I've also been out picking green hazlenuts in the lane to my field. Previous years I have left them to ripen to a nut brown and they have been stolen by little creatures, mice or squirrels perhaps, before I could lay my picking fingers on them. I read something about Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall eating green hazlenuts and having cracked a whole large flowerpotful of them,which took forever, I can vouch for how delicious they are and that they have a fresh pea taste to them. I shall definitely pick them green in future.
This is a huge paella at the market in Mur de Bretagne on Friday evening - I was very tempted to buy a portion but restrained myself.
I seem to have taken several photos of sunlight and its effects in various places during August too.
This was a rainbow, in fact a double rainbow, but the second higher arc isn't showing in this photograph over my neighbour's house.
Two dragonflies taken in a park we visited in August - they seemed to be everywhere we looked.
Two of the windchimes which hang on the pergola in my garden.
Plants in my garden
These are some of the veggies I'm growing this year.
Three things I like:
1. Having three batteries for my camera so I always have a charged spare.
2. Seeing a sign this morning for free wood - loads of kindling for the winter months.
3. Remembering how to use the pressure cooker and cooking Chinese sweet and sour spare ribs for lunch in 15 minutes.
