A while back I made some passing reference to chocolate malt cake, and I may even have gone so far as to add that I’d post a recipe at some point. Foolish me. Those words sealed the fate of that recipe for at least a month, as I then promptly went away for a week or so, and had a general melt-down. Well, meltdown over, I now present said recipe, along with an apology for its being so long in coming. I know what chocolate and malt means, gentle reader, and I don’t mess with such power lightly.

Chocolate Malt Cake
Ingredients
Chocolate and malt. Ha. Had you there, didn’t I? But seriously…
2 mugs self-raising flour
2 large-ish eggs (in my case, three smallish blue ones, I think)
½ mug dark brown sugar
½ mug malt extract
¼ mug cocoa
¼ mug sunflower oil

Yes. I used mugs. Not cups. BECAUSE I AM GREEDY.

Then…
Sling the lot in a large bowl and beat the buggery out of it. Pour the resulting shiny happy mixtureness into an oiled loaf tin (or a smug-inducing silicone one which requires no such fiddling) and cook in YOUR NEW OVEN WHICH HEATS UP IN ONE NANOSECOND AND ISN’T COVERED IN A MYSTERIOUS FILM OF OIL for about forty-five minutes on 180°c.

All clear?

Right. It’s official. I have decided that the best way to rediscover my mojo, currently missing in inaction, is to just pretend it’s here. It’s not quite the same, but levering oneself off the sofa isn’t pleasurable even when one has got more energy than the average sloth, so I figure I’ve got little or nothing to lose, except a few extra minutes of lounging, and that seems to be contributing to the problem rather than alleviating it. So, today, I have ordered an external hard-drive (yay!, largely because taking action in this, er, active manner means that I no longer have to think about such deeply boring things, and can now return to filling my head with more fascinating and useful information, such as, um, recipes for Swedish apple cakes, and, er, knitting patterns), bought a ridiculously reduced pair of shoes on t’inter (that’s reduced in price, I hasten to add; I have not suddenly developed a passion for foot bondage) to solve the stupid lack of shoeage that I have recently developed, sorted two lots of laundry (so much less horrid since we have done away with the laundry airer and replaced it with the cunning hangy-from-ceiling thing – I am almost enjoying laundry, which just might constitute the eighth wonder of the world), and made two batches of biscuits with the tiny daughter. That’s ‘with’ as in ’she helped’, rather than ‘now available in new daughter flavour!’. It seems that the small girl may well have inherited my love of all things kitchen witchery: she spent an hour stirring the mixture, putting in individual pieces of mixed peel, and shaking in what can only be described as a veritable spronkle of cinnamon. End result: one very sticky daughter, one VERY sticky counter, and something like a metric ton of biscuits. Not bad, eh?

Tomorrow I shall make a bid for freedom by sticking the small girl in the velvet sling and going for a walk with her. At the moment, most of our walks involve her doing the walking, and one or other of her parents sort of idling along, although when she’s on top form, I reckon she’s managing about two miles an hour, which, on legs approximately a quarter the length of ours, is not bad going, by my reckoning. But… it’s not exactly strenuous for adult companions, shall we say, and, as previously mentioned, at this rate, I shall be hiring myself out for use as a traffic island. Unfortunately, I need exercise. Don’t get me wrong: mostly, I loathe the very thought of such a thing. But… in the quiet of my secret mind, I confess (to the entire inter) that I do love that feeling when you’ve walked five miles, and have another two or so to go, and you’re into your stride, and your legs feel as if they’re walking for themselves and you’re not really putting in any effort and you could go on forever.* And perhaps it’s the Sagittarian in me, but I often feel better for getting out, getting fresh air, a change of scene. So, that’s the plan tomorrow – go somewhere, preferably by the sea, and walk for at least forty minutes, at a good quick pace, while carrying about twenty-four pounds of baby. Good for the soul, and not so bad for the ol’ cardiac whatsit either, I hope.

On which note, I shall retire to my chaise-longue. It’s not good to rush one’s recover.

*Or until someone offers you a nice bun and a cup of tea. I’m only human, you know.

So, here we are in 2010 – how very nice it is to see you all, as it were. This evening, Quercus and I went out for a quick walk around the field behind the house – it has been very cold here in Devon, and the frost is thick enough on the ground that there are spikes of ice sticking out at outlandish angles from each blade of grass. We haven’t had snow, but the frost in the rising moonlight was crunchy underfoot, and the stars were bright overhead, and we are told that snow may even appear tomorrow or the day after.

Tomorrow is twelfth night, and this being one of the traditions that appears to have crept into our lives together, we will disband our Chrimbly tree, removing in the process the eighteen felted hearts and, er, one star that I managed to get stitched before giving up for this year; we went for the minimalist approach, using only the felty things, lights and some particularly attractive fircones as decorations. The good thing about losing the Christmas tree, which I am always sorry to see go, is that we will have serious floorspace available to us in the kitchen for the first time in aaaaages. Quercus has fitted oak worktops during the Christmas break, and we spent the days after New Year waxing them and polishing them with hard wax oil, a slightly confusing substance which behaves like neither wax nor oil, and which requires approximately half a decade to dry. Or go off. Or harden. Or whichever term implies best its ultimate, er, setting. Having worktops, together with cupboards underneath them, means the kitchen now resembles an Actual Proper Kitchen In Which Cooking Might Not Be Outlandish, particularly with a fitted oven! and a hob with wanky touch control thingies that neither of us really understands! to complement the cupboardage. Next up is a large oddly-spaced cupboard on the right-angled wall, but that’s sort of the next stage, so let us not get too ahead of ourselves, eh?

Largely, the festive whatsit was quiet and delightful this year. Notable exceptions to this rule went as follows:

- Quercus’s mother told him he needed a haircut as her opening greeting, literally as she walked through the back door (to which she goes automatically, and which she opens without knocking unless we, Lucia-like, thwart her Mapp-inspired progress by locking the door, something we delight in managing), which was particularly irritating as we had actually had a cut booked for him but the hairdresser had cancelled because she wasn’t very well. Also irritatingly, she told him his glasses need changing because they’re scratched; he’d been to the opticians the weekend previously and is awaiting new lenses as we speak.

- One of the presents she very kindly gave us was funds for a wooden hanging airer affair, the sort you suspend with cunning ropes and pulleys, shimmying it up somewhere nice and warm and OUT OF THE WAY whenever clothes have the temerity to need washing. We bought the blighter, and blow me if we didn’t fit it the very same day it arrived, largely in a bid to avoid our usual ‘oh yes – must do that sometime’ procedure, a well-rehearsed number which usually includes a six-month lead-time. So, there we were, congratulating ourselves on a job disgustingly well-done and with more promptness than is perhaps decent, when up pipes Quercus’s dear mother with ‘but of course the washing won’t actually DRY there, will it?’. No, because clearly the effect we were hoping for was not one of drying, but of an INDOOR WATERFALL, carefully crafted with prayers to the gods of wet laundry.

- Eclipsing any irritations offered by my delightful mother-in-law, however, was my experience of van versus elbow, which took place on Boxing Day. We (we being me, Quercus, his mum and the tiny daughter) went for a walk in glorious December sunshine. We followed the Highway Code, walking on the right side for the conditions and taking general note of any traffic around (which was not considerable, it being Boxing Day, and the lanes being tiny and icy) and wearing suitably bright clothing (in my case, because I am naturally colourful; in Quercus’s mother’s case, because other people’s retinas are there to be attacked). Unfortunately, this did not prevent a van driver hitting not one, not two, but three of us, though astonishingly, and hugely thankfully, the tiny daughter was completely unharmed. Quercus had a big bruise and two large grazes to show for it, and I had a partially dislocated elbow and a bruise the size of Calcutta which has yet to disappear. Stiffness, general aches and pains and the continued purpleitude are the ongoing whatsits at this point; for the other party, apparently either a mandatory driving improvement course and accompanying fine or prosecution is likely. We have litigiously engaged a personal injury lawyer.

The delightfulness still outstripped the moments of homicidal mania, however, particularly where the tiny daughter’s recent acquisition (a red rocking moose) was concerned. Other splendid moments were created by the rapid consumption of far too many mince pies (though I still find that the mince pie drawer remains reasonably empty,* in my case, begging the question as to whether or not one might find any more about the place…) and two entire trays of homemade Rocky Road (for which I blame Nigella Lawson, of whose work I had remained blissfully unaware prior to a moment of weakness in the few days before Christmas, and an unfortunate availability of her back catalogue on the Beeb’s iPlayer dooberry).

Also, and I feel this warrants an entry of its own, really, I found myself the recipient of the very best present I could have wished for, but wouldn’t have, not wanting to tempt fate: the witchling’s sleep has improved. We haven’t done anything horrid, and we didn’t end up night-weaning, but for the last couple of weeks, things have been much better. Of course, now that I’ve written that down and made whichever part of the universe which had until now been looking the other way, busily destroying nations and whatnot, I expect the attention will snap back this way and sleep will once more become but a distant memory, but I just wanted to record for posterity that things have been particularly lovely for a little while. Long may it last.

And you?

* I tend to think my stomach has various drawers, departments and other organisational sectors; sometimes, for example, the savoury drawer can be stuffed to capacity, while the sweet drawer is happy to accept four servings of pudding, a bar of chocolate, and the promise of a ruptured something-or-other still to come. Is this just me? I think not.

A while back, I mentioned the chocolate ginger cake I made for Quercus’s birthday. Oh, the chocolateyness of it. Oh, the gingerification of it. Folks, it was, put simply, such stuff as dreams are made on. Anyway, in the absence of anything remotely interesting to say about anything else, I thought I’d offer it up here, on a virtual plate, for your cooking – and scarfing – enjoyment. Of course, anything ginger gets a get-out-of-accusations-of-piggery-free card, courtesy of it being the time of year when one catches all sorts of nasty cough-related bugs, and ginger being a most lovely way to attempt to ward such nasties off. Of course the second, it’s also a very good way to worm your way into your loved ones’ affections – providing cake is always a winner, no?

In other news, well, still coughing. Today I caved and started to take the antibiotics. I’ve been coughing for ten days; enough is enough, I suppose. It’s all very tedious. Never mind. There is tea; there is ginger; there is, then, hope.

Chocolate Ginger Loveliness

Get mits on:
200g dark chocolate;
200g brown sugar;
200g butter;
A tbsp self-raising wholemeal flour;
Three large eggs;
Four of those knobbly bits of ginger you get in a jar of preserved ginger, together with a good ol’ slurp of the liquid too.

Then…
Melt the chocolate with the butter in a manner which doesn’t involve the woodburner, a lot of spitting butter, and the too-late realisation that washing is within spitting range. Stick the ginger into a small bowl and – assuming you’ve got one – blitz the hell out of it with one of those natty little hand-held blitzy things which are probably officially meant only for blending soup. Warning: ginger really travels in this situation. Sling the resulting goop in with the sugar, then stick in in the melted chocolate and butter mixture, before beating in the eggs and the flour. Select a tin of your choice – ours was a slightly battered square number – about eight inches across, and stick it in t’oven for about, well, the timing is probably highly oven-specific, to be honest; our oven being the shite pile of crapness that it is, it took about forty minutes, but a decent version might manage to cook this to perfection in half that. The idea is that the top looks slightly cracked, but the inside remains a sticky gooey loveliness. You get the idea. Anyway. Retrieve from oven. Poke suspiciously with soon-to-be-burnt finger, and indulge in any loose bits (purely for research, you understand), before scoffing as much as you think you can remove without being detected in your gluttony.

So, where were we? Ah yes – I was having a whinge about teeth, wasn’t I? Yes, well. That. And sore throats, and sniffly noses, and nasty coughs. Oh, and dust. Lots of dust, as Quercus is working on building the kitchen – cue lots of head-scratching, noise-making, saw-using chaos creation, and, hopefully, before Christmas, a bespoke oak kitchen, complete with deeply smug-making Belfast sink and integrated oven/hob whatsit which looks as if a Physics PhD might come in handy for doing anything other than taking the packaging off.

This week we have been pottering about with Los Que Saben and their delightful mother, who we don’t see half enough of, given that she continues (rather selfishly, in my view) to live in Ireland for some dubious, half-arsed reason having to do with, oh, I don’t know, schools, and children’s fathers, and such clearly unimportant things like that. Honestly. And in that time, we went to the sea, and we ambled around gardens, and we talked about the important things in life (mortgages, children, houses, why the Twilight film sucked so badly), and we caught up on some much-needed tea-drinking, and I enjoyed being with the tiny daughter, despite her having a horrid cough which meant far more wailing than is normally encountered, and I appreciated yet again the delights of having a brown velvet sling in which to potter her about the place. (It is just so strokey, and so brown, and so velvetty.)

And of course all of this provided ample excuses for the tiny daughter to wear her new hat, which she takes off so quickly when in the house that catching a decent picture has proved near-impossible. I like it so much, though, that I am probably going to make another, and quite possibly one in my size; the yarn, ‘Silk Garden’ from Noro, is just so delectable. I have it in mind to knit another hat, a cardigan, some wristwarmers and a hat of grown-up size before Chrimbly; the sane part of me realises this may not happen, but the magpie-like idiot who takes over whenever pretty wool is in sight will not be denied.

Other things of note hereabouts this week: parsnip soup with coconut and coriander is the stuff of life, as was the chocolate ginger cake which I made for Quercus’s birthday on the twenty-third. In fact, that cake was so luscious as to warrant an appearance recipe-wise shortly; fortunately, only small quantities of it could be consumed in one sitting, so it lasted more than the thirty seconds I thought it would take to eat all of it when I first gobbled the tiny oddments stuck to the bottom of the tin post-cooking. I drool just thinking about it.

So that’s life here, only with more sniffing, moaning and hacking than the above might suggest. And you?

(I thought I’d already explained: the cakes in the pictures are Unintentional All Hallows’ Cakes, so named because they were intended to be a birthday nibble for L-Q-S during her visit, but the fates (and three children under ten) conspired against this, and they got overlooked in the general bedlam of the week. So, Quercus, the witchling and I are quietly chomping our way through them, and sending virtual crumbs to L-Q-S.)

I jest, of course. Teeth, in the context of a tiny mouth capable of surprising volume when desired, have never been a particular friend to me, and just lately they have been more than normally hostile. The tiny daughter is teething. Well, to be honest, I don’t think there is ever really a time when I can say that that isn’t the state of affairs; teeth – they loomed on to the horizon when she was about three months old, and mostly, they’ve stayed around since then. Which is a good thing, obviously. I mean, we don’t want them falling out, now, do we? Not when they’ve only just arrived.

Ahem.

Rambling.

Anyway, the point is that the tiny daughter has now got her first big back tooth (top left), and is currently working on its right-side counterpart. This means that sleep is at a bit of a premium in our household; last night I was up four times with her, and as a result I am a bit of a zombie today. This also goes some way to explaining why, despite clearly being hungry, she’s been rejecting lots of otherwise tantalising offers of food – sausages went the way of all things (i.e. down Wixon’s neck), as did sardines on toast and various versions of stews and casseroles. Stewed apple, however, is enjoying a renewed popularity, as are sweet potato and apple, butternut squash, carrot, apple and prune, and apple, sweet potato and blueberry. (Yes – I read the combinations of various posh baby foods in the supermarket, and then I go home and rip them off. And you know what? I am entirely unashamed. Mostly, the tiny daughter eats what we eat (the notable exceptions being the acres of chocolate that I consume in times of tiredness, and the odd pint of rosehip wine which has been known to cross my lips [and yes, I do drink occasionally now - literally not a drop of booze passed my lips while I was pregnant, and it stayed that way until the tiny daughter was about, oooh, nine or ten months, at which point I was getting long enough gaps in her feeds that I felt it was time to fall off the wagon in grand, ginger-wine-flavoured style], but she does like stewed fruit, so stewed fruit is what she gets as afters, normally.)

Anyway, this is largely to say that thank you for the recent comments which I have rudely ignored (except I haven’t, but, oh, you get the idea), and thank you to Mel for the lovely award thingy which I have also consigned to the depths of oblivion (except… etc.), and I will attempt to fill this space with something more interesting than ‘yaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn’ as soon as time and teeth permit. Still to come: cakeage, quince cheese, cob porn pictures and why? oh why? did we decide to build our own kitchen?

In between colouring myself nearly entirely yellow courtesy of the yellow ochre which we’re using to colour the limewash (remind me to tell you about – wait for it: annual – and singular – scientific  term usage coming up – exothermic reactions sometime, by the way), I have also been revisiting the list of things I wanted to achieve in October. So far, so good, frankly! Here we are, midway through the month which marks properly the arrival of autumn, and today is the first time we’ve lit the stove this autumn. It’s been quite cold, but we are embracing once more the put-another-jumper-on approach, largely because, having run the stove for three years on free wood we’d collected from various people who didn’t want their spare trees and whatnot, we now find ourselves with a rather depleted woodpile. Of course, by most standards, it’s still a Pile Of Shame, but we can tell already that there isn’t enough wood there to get us through the entire winter unless we get back to scavenging on a reasonably regular footing. The thing with all this building work is that it knocks a lot of the things we have to do regularly to the back of the queue. Living in a house like this is not really a sit-back-and-do-nowt existence; the house needs a lot of work, and just to keep things from getting too damp in the changing months between true summer and genuine autumn, bearing in mind that the stove being our only source of heating – and an almightily ample one, at that - we have wood to source, and chop, and store. This means trolling around with the trailer and the chainsaw, and generally going where angels fear to tread in terms of where sane people would drive cars…  (Gratuitous fireplace picture, largely because I managed to hang those lanterns up today, having had the idea festering away at the back of the ol’ noggin for some weeks now; we used the lanterns, plus about fifteen of their friends and family, as table decorations for our wedding bash, nearly four years ago. Each time I light them, I hear a vague strain of chaotic folk music, and I smell the acrid smoke of outdoor fireworks, and I taste the sweetness of icing made by our cake-making helper, and I remember the brightness of Quercus’s smile as we danced in circles with a huge throng of our friends and family.)

We are also embarking on a little time-filler; you know, just the sort of thing to knock off in an afternoon when you’ve nothing else to do. Ahem. Yes. So. We’re building a barn. You know, as you do. And we’re attempting to make it from free timber. That whole project I described blithely as a woodshed.  So far, it’s not going too badly: we’ve got planning permission for it, Quercus having drawn up scale plans and whatnot, and we’ve specified a wooden frame with shingles (wooden tiles, effectively) on the outside, so the most important thing is that hopefully it’ll look like a giant fircone when it’s done. Um. Did I just type that out loud? I was trying to keep at least a thin veneer of serious adult concern over this one. We’ve been collecting pallets as a start – the idea is that Quercus will process them with one or other of the frankly disturbing quantity of giant saws he has accumulated during the extension build, leaving us with planks ready to be cut to shingle-like length, and off-cuts which, provided the wood is untreated, will feed the stove for a while. The only slight shadow on this particular horizon is that we worked out the other day that we probably need to find not one hundred, but probably three hundred pallets in order to get this barn off the ground. Current total? About thirty. (Maybe I should start Pallet Watch 2009, in a desperate bid to keep us motivated.)

I have finished the hat I was knitting for the tiny daughter (it matches the legwarmers I made her for Christmas last year; I can’t stop squeaking when I see her in them together, which those of you who know me personally will know is a distinctly unlikely reaction to one whose favourite word is probably ‘gruntfuttock’). (Picture of said hat to follow as soon as I work out how to distract the tiny daughter long enough to allow both the presence of said hat on the head, and the camera to be within [my] [exclusive] grabbing distance.) I’ve also gained another excuse to take the tiny daughter out for a walk around the lanes – someone might see her hat! and find it as charming as I do! Tiny legs sticking out of brown velvet sling on my back, tiny head whipping around as she peers over my shoulder, both swaddled in knitted confections. Happiness is not hard to come by with such things around the place. Mostly, we’re walking a couple of miles more afternoons than not, helped by the knowledge that when I’m really tired (did I mention the molar-cutting which has been going on at night chez nous? No? Well, that’ll be lack of sleep!) the best thing is normally to Go Out And DO SOMETHING, rather than sit here, flatly, attempting to remember which way is up.

Also, we have now got three coats of limewash on the outside of the house; the render is now protected from frost, and we’ll be happy if we go through the winter without adding any more washes. The colour is just divine – the sort of yellow which speaks – no, sings of golden sunshine, of warm autumn afternoons, and of the glorious and unexpected burst of colour to be found at the very tops of our seven-foot Jerusalem artichokes.

Next up, rosehip jam. We’ve just made our first batch of quince cheese, and it is every bit as lovely as the sample we were given by our friends the other week; I am freezing it in silicone moulds and then storing small whole cheeses for later in the year. Provided I can stop myself raiding the freezer in the quiet anonymity of the night.

So, that’s what’s going on around here. And you?

1. Has anyone out there got any experience of quinces? We find ourselves with a goodly quantity of them, courtesy of some lovely people across t’other side of the village from us (the same folks who have previously donated crab apples, grapes, rosehips, blackberries and mulberries), and having just sampled the quince cheese made by said chaps, I am tempted to make some myself, but am also pondering the concept of quince wine.

2. Am I ever going to get over my adoration of baby legs in stripy tights?

3. How much jam or jelly is too much? This weekend, I appear to have concocted six pounds of crab apple jelly, and about four of bramble, apple and rose. Should I start on a ‘for sale’ sign now, bearing in mind that I still have about three pounds of rosehips waiting to be made into jam, I wonder?

4. Are our chickens in league against us? Having spent the entire summer in intensive relay broody races wherein the Buff Sussex chooks tagged each other, apparently as they left the laying box, for broodiness, one of our Black Rocks is now broody to the extent that she appears to be putting the others off even approaching the empty box. We’ve booted her out for a few days running, and she’s persisting. Egg-count today? Nil. Grumpiness as a result? Plenty. Six hens and no eggs = not fair, particularly as it’s not even daylight-related yet, I don’t think. They are moulting, though, so I am trying not to hold it against them too much.

5. What do you do when your iBook is approaching meltdown in terms of hard-drive space, and you can’t upgrade your hard-drive because there isn’t room, physically? I am contemplating backing up important stuff like pictures and whatnot, and then just wiping the whole thing and starting again. I have about 2Gb of space left out of a forty gig hard-drive; not ideal.

6. Anyone ever installed their own hot-air ducting heating system? We are thinking of doing this; have stove – will burn, sort of thing. Apparently it’s more popular as a concept in North America than here in the UK; the basic concept seems good in that it would let us move excess heat from the sitting room, where the stove lives, to the extension, along the building in a direction which heat doesn’t really move naturally, or at least not to the extent it would with a small fan attached.

7. Ever noticed how ‘tidying’ the remnants of a jam-making session into one’s stomach makes for furry-feeling teeth in next-to-no time at all? Oh. That’s just me, then, is it?

I have no idea how an entire week has passed since I sat down to whinge about the internal thought process I’m working through about the whole procreation idea. (As an aside, how would one go about having an external thought process? Ah yes – a whingeing blog post.) Yet somehow it has, and here it is, Wednesday again, and me all good intentions about posting a bit more regularly too – I don’t know if it’s just me, but discussions with one or two other bloggers tend to suggest that to call oneself a blogger, one must lever oneself off one’s proverbial at least twice a week, and ideally more frequently, and bloody well write something. This works well with me because when I write frequently, I tend to think of more things to say, and I even remember to plug in the bloody camera and go through the iPhoto-related angst (I have about 8000 photos in my iPhoto library, which means it takes roughly the power needed to light Liverpool for a week to open the app, and once it’s open, it needs another kick, this time of a nuclear-like level, to actually bring the pictures up and let me sort through them, and that’s before we even begin challenges like uploading the blighters to Photobucket) of adding pictures! pictures! to my otherwise blocky text.

Anyway. Where was I? Ah yes.

So, this past week has seen Quercus finish cleaning up the old window frames in the front of the house, cutting in bits of chestnut wood where the rot had got too bad to make the original recoverable. I’ve glazed most of three windows, leaving only the tiny daughter’s to do; we left that one until last so that we’d hopefully have perfected the technique, insofar as we were ever going to do so. This morning, furthermore, will see the arrival of the replacement window catches – the old ones were rusted to the point where their continued existence was just not on the cards, frankly – which may even mean closing windows! with glass instead of board! glass! which you can see through, and everything! this very day. After two or three weeks of living with boarded-up windows in the original house, I’m quite looking forward to the restoration of light.

We’ve also been scavenging about in various hedges, procuring nine pounds of sloes (rough translation: fifteen – eighteen bottles of wine, in about six months), four pounds of rosehips (thirty bottles), shedloads of apples (mostly cooked and frozen for the tiny daughter’s afters), shedloads of blackberries (ditto) and some plums, which are nearing the end of fermentation as I write.

It’s that time of year where you can smell autumn just around the corner; this morning there was a slight mist coming across the fields and a cool breeze coming in from the west, and (annoyingly, for those of us with a scavenger’s eye) the hedges were cut last week, meaning there is a newly-spartan look to the borders around Earthenhouse. How did it get to be autumn again already? It seems only yesterday that we were taking down the wreath over the stove in January, and here we are, contemplating cleaning out the woodstove prior to lighting it for the winter (because in a house where it’s our only source of heat, it basically stays lit until spring).

And oh – we’ve got so much to do on the house before the weather gets colder. The render, for a start. The cob is still bare at the moment because the preparatory work has taken ages (sorting out the windows, the door-frame, the top of the cob walls just beneath the thatch, the fact that someone is now living in the cob wall at about bed-height in our room…), so this coming week, Quercus’s mother (who obviously drew a short straw sometime in a previous life, given that she’s a sixty-odd- year-old woman, and clearly shouldn’t have to spend her visiting time hoiking lime render into a mixer; on balance, though, she is also incredibly, astonishingly, bewilderingly irritating at times, so perhaps it’s a fair trade-off) is coming to help Quercus; hopefully, this will be the time when we actually begin to get the cob covered up again. If we manage to get the render sorted and the windows done, and the guttering on the extension, and the lead on the join between extension roof and cob wall, I shall be a very happy bunny indeed. That only leaves the woodshed to sort out – we’ve now got planning permission to build a large wooden shed which we’ll use for storing the wood we burn in the stove, so all we need to do is, er, build it. Oh, and source the wood – possibly pallets – to do so. So, yes, um, a few bits and pieces to be getting on with.

However: coming soon – crumble topping to beat off feelings of overwhelming chaos, hotly followed by a detailed – yet not depressingly-so – list of works-in-progress I’m going to allow myself to contemplate over the coming few months. Repeat after me: I will not – repeat NOT! – keep accepting copy-editing work which turns out to be written by someone for whom the English language exists only by reputation; rather, I will develop extensive x-ray writing-standards vision which will detect the looming presence of such bedlam, allowing me to decline, politely and in words of one syllable which are not open to misinterpretation, such projects.*  And, of course, stopping taking on work which ends up being rather longer-winded than once anticipated, I will reclaim my evenings, and thus, some crafty creativey whatsit time (hereinafter known as CCWT).

* As an aside, working as a proofreader/copy-editor has really pushed my moral boundaries, and I make no apology for the pompous nature of that statement. I keep getting approached by international students who are blatantly failing their assessments, sometimes at PhD level, because their English is simply not good enough. Surely the universities must have known/know what their language ability is? Or is not, more to the point? How can it be right that they are accepted on to programmes they have little hope of completing successfully? Or, worse, how can it be right that they’ll complete, having paid someone to sort their work out for them, or that they’ll complete because these universities give them a free pass in order to keep getting the fees? And where does that leave the qualifications I got myself from these bloody institutions, having spent a decade working, from time to time quite hard, in order to do so? De-valued, surely. On the other hand, I know that if I don’t do this work, someone else will; that’s not a justification for contributing to this system, and it pisses me off to be doing it. And one the other other hand (and yes – we now have three hands), we need the money. And it’s easy work for me. And round we go again, and again, and again… I still haven’t answered this one, in other words.

Good god, someone appears to have flipped the summer switch. Today, glorious sunshine pours in through the window, and, what’s more, not for the first time this week. At this rate, the south-west will be populated once more by people who think it’s acceptable to go into shops without the presence of a t-shirt (she said, her protestant savagery gene coming to the fore after years in abeyance). (Abeyance. Isn’t that a fantastic word?)

Anyway, yes – it’s been about twenty-eight degrees here today, and really quite pleasant. A light breeze to stop it getting too sultry, and not a cloud to be seen.

Unless, that is, you count the metaphorical cloud of teething, which is an ever-present enemy at the moment. The witchling, who, until the last few days, has been motoring steadily towards sleeping an entire night without wanting either milk or cuddles (which, of course, I then proceed to miss, predictably), and who slept a ten-hour stretch solid several times in recent memory, is having a hard time of it with what appears to be her first molar. There is a white bump in her bottom gum, and thus, she is waking quite a bit more frequently, and wailing inconsolably, which is horrid for all concerned. She is also having trouble dropping off in the day, and staying asleep for more than forty minutes at a time is also presenting considerable difficulties for the poor infant. The result is that she’s tired pretty much all day at the moment, and her natural rhythm appears to have been completely submerged in teething tears. She’d been moving towards dropping her morning snooze for a little while, and now it appears that if she sleeps in the morning AT ALL, even for half an hour, that rules out any more sustained snoozing in the afternoon, which makes for the clichéd tears before bedtime (sometimes all round; we have just arrived at ‘going batshit’ as the best definition for maternal exhaustion that we can come up with).

So, we’re attempting to claw back some sense of a pattern to our days; the tiny daughter seems to thrive on knowing, roughly, what happens when, and I think the teething woes, together with this difference in her daily snoozing (which is probably all rolled up in with the teething, of course), is combining to leave her spread pretty thin. Today, she slept for about forty minutes in the day before her teeth woke her up (she has a particular cry which really wrings my heart; you can tell she’s in pain, and deeply indignant about finding herself awake), so rather than spending ages attempting to get her to sleep again, I grabbed a sling and took her for a walk in the broadleaf forest up the road from Earthenhouse. (Indeed, I say ‘the’; there are actually several within easy reach, I am lucky enough to be able to say – the witchling, and indeed both Quercus and I, love nothing so much as a walk through a beech wood, and there are hill forts a-plenty in this area which feed our appetite for such things amply.) There was much tickling around the edges of the sling (a mei tai, which leaves handy poking holes for parental torture of tiny people), much pointing at leaves and shrieking with laughter, and considerable quantities of amusement on both parts.

And then, just as we were getting quite warm and about ready for a nice sit-down and a cup of tea, there was sticky date loaf. And it went thusly:

Sticky Date Loaf

Get mits on:

2 cups of self-raising wholemeal flour

1 cup of brown sugar

A good sprinkle of crushed walnuts (I’ve also used sunflower seeds when the walnuts had run dry, or is that a mixed metaphor too far?)

About two cups of dates, boiled in about a cup of water until they’re soft

A large pinch of cinnamon, and, if you fancy it, a good handful of lemon zest

2 eggs

Then…

Stick the lot in a mixing bowl and stir it all up; you can either wait until the softened dates have cooled, or, if, like me you are far too impatient for such things, make sure you put the eggs in last in order to avoid sticky date loaf à la scrambled egg. Shove the resulting sticky goo into a loaf tin, pop it in the oven on about 180°c for about forty minutes, et voila – sticky loveliness which goes rather well with a spot of chai.

It’s been a busy week, somehow – one night thinking the witchling might have caught swine ‘flu, and one thinking it was chickenpox (it’s neither – don’t know what, but there’s something not quite right; at the moment I’m assuming teeth…), work work work, sticking copious quantities of stewed fruit in the freezer for easy whip-outs for the witchling, and making wine courtesy of the vast quantities of honeysuckle blossoms out in the hedge behind the house. I think I already mentioned the fact that honeysuckle is poisonous if you get any part other than the in-full-bloom flowers; we were pretty thorough, but I still have a feeling that we may be brewing the Drink of Death, or something similar. It was a ridiculously bucolic occupation, though, and the flowers smell just divine (as do your fingers, once you’re covered in the sticky nectar that, I presume, gives honeysuckle its rather appealing name).

It’s one of my favourite parts of wine-making – the smells you get throughout the process. Particularly when you’re making flower wines: the initial light wafts of blossom are just delectable, and when you get on to the first musty yeastiness of the fermentation, that smell takes me right back to my early childhood, when my mother whacked out some fairly blinding plum and elder wines. Let’s face it – anything involving a bowl full of flowers and an end result which includes free alcohol is going to get my vote. Even if it does take me rather a long time to get around to drinking what we make.

And of course some things are probably better left undrunk… it seems you don’t need toxic ingredients to produce something pretty unholy – yesterday’s trip to the top shed, in which we store most of our alcoholic output (and, I discover, some bottles of this and that that we bought during a trip to France in preparation for our wedding in 2005 – I either need to drink more, or we need to buy less, or something) resulted in the fetching of a most unpleasant concoction housed in a demijohn. The label has pretty much disintegrated so I can’t be 100% certain, but I feel fairly sure that the woeful contents are either our first stab at a straight red wine, courtesy of some friends with about thirty pounds of grapes they didn’t want, or the rather unusual-sounding mulberry wine we managed to make from the single picking that said friends’ tree yielded while we were round there relieving them of the grapes. Either way, it ain’t clever, and it certainly ain’t funny; at this stage, I’m contemplating whacking in some more yeast and, say, half a bottle of blackberry cordial to see if we can improve upon what tastes at present fairly like lighter fuel (only perhaps marginally less pleasant).

Fortunately, I have rather more certainty when it comes to elderflower wine; the photo shows half of this year’s batch, which now totals eight demijohns, or forty bottles. I’m also hoping to have another go at a combination of elderberry and blackberry; I managed, quite accidentally, to create a brew of heavenly taste a few years back, just by using up a few leftover berries and slinging them in a vat together. I didn’t write the quantities down. Oh no. Not for the likes of me, that whole planning or recording malarky. Ahem. It’s always the way, though, isn’t it? The things you write down taste of washing-up liquid, and the things you don’t turn out like manna from above. Of course, now that I’ve said that, the whole bloody lot will turn out vile, but hey – I like to live life on the edge. Note the elegant interior decoration combination of demijohn window dressing and kitchen table (saw). That pretty much sums up our house at the moment, come to think of it.

So, cake:

Impromptu Ginger Cake

Ingredients
1 cup dark brown sugar

2 cups wholemeal self-raising flour

2 eggs

A good sprinkle of ginger; probably about a tablespoon 

About a mug of sultanas

A splosh of soya milk as needed

 
Then…
Entire lot in bowl; stir about with suitably nice-feeling wooden spoon, and whack it all in a loaf tin. Took about forty minutes on something like 200°c.

Still laying siege to house; render largely off the south wall now, but a bit of an evil job, all told, and we learn, not really to our surprise, that most of that wall has been reinforced (we assume) with bits and bobs of concrete blocks and old bricks, probably to effect a sort-of cob repair at some point. Of course, let us not speak of the fact that concrete eats away at the cob because it’s so bloody hard while cob is a soft material… We have decided that taking the render off is probably sufficient unto the day; it seems likely that replacing the bricks et al would necessitate major cob repairs (and probably exciting things like acro props, which, while fine in a let’s-be-really-paranoid-even-though-we-don’t-need-them way, are less fun when there’s a real chance that one’s house might collapse without their presence), and we’re not here forever… So, it’s lime rendering still, and patching-up of cob as necessary.

Quercus has a small scaffolding tower put up against one wall of the house, and armed with an intense frown and an SDS drill, he’s chiselling the render off, bit by bit. So far, we have most of the south wall clear, and some of the west, but we’ve also found that most of the west wall is covered with chicken wire underneath the render; not quite sure if that’s to give a key for the render on an otherwise very dusty surface, or because the cob was thought to be utterly buggered, but either way, preserving its presence seems a good idea. We’ll get more lime delivered next week, ironically just as our lane is closed for thirty-five days, which might make for some interesting manouevres on the part of the various drivers involved, and, possibly, on the part of any hedges foolish enough to put themselves in the way. (The lane closure is because the surface of the road has become, well, insubstantial, shall we say. There are potholes large enough to eat buses, and odd bumps which regularly cause cars to ground in the middle.)

Other than that, the Steiner School thing was thought-provoking, though I’m still not quite sure what I think (Steiner Schools: an interesting and informative alternative to mainstream education, or a bunch of smug lentil-eating tossers – discuss); the toddler group is over until next September, so we’ll figure out whether or not it’s something we want for the witchling over the summer, I suppose. In between trundling shitloads of rubble from one end of the garden to the other. Oh, and demolishing various sheds. And sorting the windows. And the buggered plasterwork. 

And buying another set of little lighties.

Because every house needs at least twelve sets of little lighties. 

Right?

… Right?

- The visit from the paternal relative (+ wife) went well; they both loved the witchling, and this resulted in lots of laughter, tickling, and general adoration, which the witchling lapped up. She was incredibly good-natured with her visitors, even managing a forty-minute car-drive home when she was really ready to sleep (she finds cars a bit too stimulating to sleep, generally, although she did nod off about five minutes from home, of course…) without a hint of displeasure, despite yawning her head off and clearly wanting some peace and quiet. We had a very nice time out in Totnes on Saturday; new dungarees were purchased for her from one of my very favourite clothes shops courtesy of the aged parent, and we had a gorgeous lunch in my favourite Totnesian eatery, Willow.  I am, however, cursing myself for not having bought a chest of drawers I saw at the market there – it was really quite good, and would have done for the space we have earmarked for drawers in the kitchen, but I sort of havered until we had to leave, and now I kick myself. However, a rootle in the shed later that day produced a forgotten demijohn of sloe wine; silver linings and all that. 

- An impromptu ginger cake I baked on Friday turned out particularly well; recipe to follow shortly.

- Quercus’s mother is here (the witchling is in danger of over-excitement at this rate, but we are off out together tomorrow on our own, just to give her some [I think much-needed] mama+babe time) and will stay until Thursday; on the plans – render preparation, garden organisation, door-finishing.

- Tomorrow the witchling and I are going to a Steiner School toddler group; I think it’s fairly safe to say that I am a thousand times more excited about it than she is!

Yesterday Quercus, the witchling and I went out to pick yet more elderflower. On Sunday, the solstice, we started off four gallons of elderflower wine. I took the witchling out for a walk while Quercus had a lie-in (it being father’s day), only to return with enough honeysuckle for another gallon – this is an experiment, as we’ve not done honeysuckle before, and there are dire warnings about all but the very ripest flowers (if flowers can be ripe) being poisonous, so if this blog stops being updated in about six months, you’ll know why…

Our second picking trip brought home a big bag of elderflower, gorgeously pollen-dusted and blissfully fragrant, which we then proceeded to ignore in the evening, having said we’d sort it as soon as we got home, in favour of sitting on the sofa and watching Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (we started out saying ‘ooh – we should so watch this more often! It’s a lovely film!’, then reached the bit where everyone gets blown up and remembered why we don’t watch it more often…).

Guess what we’re going to be doing tonight, then? Yup – another four gallons of de-stalking flowers and whatnot. The smell makes it more than worthwhile, particularly as it gives us chance to sit in the kitchen, gawping at our newly-painted-red wall, and remembering the months we spent without plaster on the wall, and with cob dust collecting all over the place as a result. Cob dust. So very… dusty. And so very… red, in our case (Devon has very, very red earth). And, of course, as we pick, we listen to music. I suggested the idea of a music swap in the post below, and a few people have asked for a theme for playlists; on balance, I think the best plan I can come up with is to say how about music that just works for you? Here is a rough idea of what we’ve been listening to lately:

Joni Mitchell – we listen to a LOT of la Mitchell chez nous. Oh yes. From ‘My Old Man’ to ‘Free Man in Paris’, it’s all good.

Thievery Corporation – every. single. album. Even the slightly dubious mix ones.

Bach – particularly the Goldberg Variations, played by Glenn Gould.

Steve Reich – ‘Electric Counterpoint’ is one of my favourite pieces of music.

Gotan Project – ‘Queremos Paz’ always makes me think of driving across southern France and marvelling at fields of sunflowers.

Debussy – particularly the String Quartet.

Horace Silver – the first CD I ever bought Quercus was ‘Pieces of Silver’.

Cali – ‘Je m’en vais’ is an utterly fab song, and one which I can listen to for hours.

So, there you go. Illustrative of this week, at least.  If you don’t fancy the idea of the CD swap, then how about some listening suggestions in the comments box? Go on – be a devil.

(Quick update: just to clarify, what I’d like best is to do the actual CDs you think are worth a go – I burn you something, you burn me something, we all make tracks to the post office et voila!)

This weekend I have A Plan. It involves large glass bottles, lengths of tubing, indecent quantities of sugar, and some hot water. It also involves tramping through a few fields with Quercus, armed with a long stick of some sort for hoooking purposes. (At times like these, I’m glad I’m beginning to get the hang of carrying the witchling on my back; we recently acquired a mei tai carrier in brown velvet, and it’s quite good for popping on and off, though I hate to say it, but I think perhaps, despite the time and faff of on and off, I am perhaps more comfortable in the woven wrap. Is that a woman i.e. ‘I have breasts; please do not attempt to flatten them with fabric’ thing, I wonder?)

Where was I? Ah yes. Alchohol.

We’ve realised lately that it’s been a bloody long time since we last made some wine. Last year, I got some sloes on the go when I was first pregnant, but then nothing else really made it after that; I s’pose knowing that one isn’t going to take part in the fruits of one’s labours (an oddly appropriate saying, bearing in mind my pregnancy) meant that I sort of forgot about it. And now, after a year of construction and general builderyness, our supplies are quite depleted – somehow, three demijohns of plum, three of sloe, one of ginger, one of lemonbalm, one of elderflower, one of crabapple and one of coffee wine have disappeared, leaving us scratching about with a few dodgy-looking bottles of vintage who-knows and some cobweb-covered I-wouldn’t-if-I-were-you.

So this weekend it’s time to rectify this situation. The field behind Earthenhouse is covered with elderflower, and there are more trees to be found in the lanes hereabouts, so that’s the first port of call. Then I’m considering a bottle of the ridicoulsly idyllic-sounding honeysuckle champagne, as the hedges are full of flowers at the moment, and – if I can avoid the poisonous foliage and berries – imagine what a thing to make.

Sadly, the first bit is always the worst. No, not the picking. No, not the taking of the flowers from the stems. Worse yet: the cleaning-out of last year’s demijohns. I’m not a complete slattern, so I do normally give them a perfunctory sluice when we empty the last few drops down our necks, but still somehow the intervening time seems to bring forth a plethora of mouldy whatsits and disgusting so-and-sos, and I’m sure that the strangely-shaped demijohn brush will be pressed into service once more, despite my attempts to avoid it… Oh joy. But I’m sure it’ll be worth it, right? When, in a few months’ time, I’m sitting and swigging the odd half-glass down?