Author: Lesley

Reader, baker, crafter, grower, crofter living on the Isle of Skye
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The Truffle Diaries- bring back the sparklies

4. Day Five of my incarceration.

The escape tunnel under the bed is progressing well and the fools do not notice the excavations going on right beneath their feet.

My planning look

I scatter the diggings gradually around the caravan. Ha! Another few days and I will be free, either via my superior speed at dashing out of the door unnoticed, or else via the tunnel. I cannot fail.

I have been googling power tools and sadly I do not think that the arrival in the post of a plunge saw will go unnoticed. Claws it shall have to be.

The male captor spoils all my fun. He removed the fairy lights from the windows after discovering me dangling from them. I wasn’t going to electrocute myself at all. Fool.

Bring back the sparklies.

Day six of my captivity. They have not returned. I am beginning to forget who they were – I have vague recollections of them, but these are fading. The were probably not worthy anyway with their shameful abandonment. I am considering scratching them into my Retribution Journal but I can hardly bring myself to write their names.

I have made a nest for myself on a pile of folded clothes in the bedroom which, as these captors are clearly slatterns, never get put away. From here I will one day make it to the top of the wardrobe, but for now I am content to shed over their jumpers. From this vantage point I survey my reduced new kingdom.

It is somewhat of a comedown from the last one. I do not think that my floofmeisters are ever returning so I am clearly going to have to make the best of it. The oaf hound seems to have resigned himself happily to these shabby new circumstances but I sigh wearily with the realisation that I am going to have to begin over with a whole new training plan to mold these incompetents into suitable subjects.

My work is never done.

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The Truffle Diaries – escape plan

Day four of my imprisonment. They still have not returned.

My captors are now becoming aware of my superior escape skills and have become canny, shutting me in the bedroom whenever the caravan door is opened.

Fools. Do they not realise that it is just a matter of time before they make a mistake and I slip out to freedom! The Grey Ninja cannot be contained for long.

As a master strategist I also have been working on Plan B for my great escape should my door dashing prove unsuccessful. I have started an escape tunnel under their bed, drowning out my digging with fake, affectionate purring. I am careful to wash my snowy white paws after excavation so that they do not suspect a thing.

I have still not sat on any of the shelves that have been prepared for me, although I have begun to think that it might work well as an alternative diversionary tactic. This may work to my benefit.

Otherwise, of course, I would not consider it.

Purely strategic
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The Truffle Diaries – incarceration

Dear Diary,

This is day two of my incarceration in this place. My people have left the hapless hound and I in the care of these people for two weeks.

Us in the Time Before

This place that I am imprisoned in lacks basic comforts, despite us being used to caravan space whilst our people build their own home, and I am sorely tried by the lack of high roosting places from which to pounce.

All available high shelf space seems to be full of books, scrabble boards and other such fripperies, all of which are in my way.

The female moved her teapot and seed box reluctantly yesterday to free up a degree of shelf space for me, and I shall of course now never use it.

I have gone through my stand-offish phase and I am pleased to report that the temporary carers are starting to soften up nicely. A few days of lurking under the bed and perching on the edge of the duvet ready to take flight at the slightest movement from them have them nicely under control.

I am not asleep but perched, ready to pounce

Phase two of my plan is now underway. The female seemed helplessly pleased to see me join them for breakfast today, and let me lick a smear of butter off her toast plate, so it will be but days until I have them exactly where I want them.

Not on the bed with Mr Crabby

The hapless hound just frolics with them and offers them his love and his disgusting Mr Crabby toy without thought. The fool. He does not make them work for it.

I shall post when I can. I hope that they will not find these scratchings for some time.

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Gneiss things

Those of you that have been reading for some time may remember that the croft is built on an outcrop of Lewisian gneiss. This is an extremely hard rock, Precambrian metamorphic, and at 3,000 million years old is one of the oldest rocks on the planet.

The gneiss outcrop by the house

Which makes it all the more interesting that anyone would try to carve it. Even denting it seems impossible. I can only imagine the huge amount of work that went into smoothing and scooping out a grinding bowl from a rock this hard.

There is a small maker over on the Isle of Lewis who does just that. A couple who cut and carve this amazing rock into bowls, earrings and key fobs. The same outcrop of gneiss as the house is built on, but in the outer isles. http://www.gneiss-things.com

I’ve always had a thing for pestle and mortars. I love them. Such an ancient implement, used since the earliest days to grind and crush grain or spices. I’ve got a few already, but when I saw that there was one made out of lewisian gneiss, I was intrigued.

Pestle and mortar

I’ve hankered after one of these for years, and I figured that it would make a fitting moving-in present to the house. A sort of homage to the bedrock that we’re built on as well as something lovely to own and use.

It arrived a few days ago in the post. It’s immensely heavy (useful when you’re grinding spices) and incredibly tactile.

It joins my French deep-bowl ceramic pestle and mortar from the pottery in SW France where I once lived, and the grey stone one gifted to me by my best friend many years ago. Almost a collection.

Hoping for many years of happy spice grindage in our new home!

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Chutnification

Last year a local friend made and gave us a jar of something called tomato kasundi. I’d never heard of it before. It’s a spicy, hot tomato chutney, rich with tumeric, mustard, ginger, nigella seeds, and chillies. I thought it was absolutely delicious and I badgered her for the recipe.

Assembling my weapons

I had been hoping to wait for the house kitchen to be operational before I tried anything like making chutney again. It’s a messy business with lots of mincing, grinding spices and chopping, and the caravan doesn’t really lend itself easily to anything needing cooking space.

But we had tomatoes, onions and chillies to use, and I was keen not to waste them.

Underway

Off I went. An hour into the process and I’d peeled, cored and chopped apples, onions, tomatoes, garlic and ginger and was almost ready to start cooking.

The cooking process is simplicity itself – just throw into a pan and simmer for an hour. The caravan very quickly smelled like a vinegar factory and I hurriedly opened as many windows as possible before I choked us both to death.

Sterilising the jars in the tiny oven was fun, but just possible.

Eight jars filled

The chutney’s now ladled into jars, and once fully cooled I’ll label them up and put them away for a few weeks for the flavours to mellow. If they make it through the taste test at that point some may become Christmas presents to local friends who I know are up for a bit of spice in their lives.

The recipe is here for anyone who would like to try making it https://tastecooking.com/recipes/tomato-kasundi/

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Small, disorganised and evil

We have reached peak storage capacity here in the caravan after two years of occupation. We are officially full.

The tiny kitchen has very limited cupboardage and what there is is highly inaccessible. Things get stuffed into every available crevice, causing carnage whilst cooking and frustration in searching for ingredients that I’m sure that I have, but can’t find.

The tiny kitchen in the caravan

As the day started with torrential rain and it was definitely one for indoor entertainment I took a deep breath and decided to make a start on sorting out the cupboards.

It won’t be long until we move things into the kitchen and pantry in the house and I figured that a bit of work now wouldn’t be time wasted.

It’s the small cupboard that holds what I call “miscellaneous cooking stuff”. Basically an overspill of everything else. Tubs of spices, bags of sea salt, containers of currants, pine nuts and ground almonds. That sort of miscellaneous. It’s small, disorganised and evil. Impossible to extract anything without a landslide.

Over the last two years things have got buried, packets opened and not properly resealed, and I had no idea what lurked beneath the first two rows of stuff.

In I went.

There were mysteries in there, dear reader.

Three tubs of custard powder, all opened and about a third empty. The remnants of winter trifles, I could only imagine.

Several bags of sea salt. I vaguely remember buying lots for pickling and clearly not using as much as I thought I’d need.

More pink peppercorns than I could feasibly use in a lifetime.

A tub of smoked paprika that I’d lost a year ago.

A bag of currants so old that it had shrivelled into something that looked like mice droppings. Hmm.

Tidiness!

I’m feeling triumphant, even if it is only one small cupboard. A good use of an hour of my time.

I need a labelling machine.

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Heritage tomatoes

My first tomatoes grew prolifically this year in the polycrub, but almost without fail the several varieties that I grew had very little flavour.

I don’t know whether it was lack of sun, as we had a pretty awful summer, or some other factor. But that acid-sweet bite that I’d been looking for that’s so lacking in supermarket tomatoes just didn’t develop.

This was true for both the small cherry tomatoes that I grew as well as the larger tomatoes, vine and bush types. Lots of fruit, but slow to ripen and not that sweet.

Except one variety that had some hope.

Every now and then in a handful of harvested fruit I’d get that hint of acid-sweet, intense flavour, and rummaging in the grow tub to find the plant label I eventually found it. They’d all got a bit tangled up together. A heritage Russian variety called Grushovka. One of several Russian bush varieties that I tried this year.

It’s one that I bought from Real Seeds with medium sized heart-shaped fruits that are more pink than brick red. It had good flavour, although the tomatoes were slow to ripen, despite advertising that they were earlies.

I’ve decided to try and save some of the seeds. Not only will this save a bit of money (a pack of ten tomato seeds from Real Seeds is about £3 plus postage, and I grew dozens of plants this year so it mounts up) but hopefully it will mean more success with plants that cope well in our conditions next year.

I’m discovering that our short seasons really restrict the success of ripening up here.

Fermenting tomato seeds

I’m fermenting the seeds from a couple of these tomatoes now for a few days. Then it’s rinsing, drying thoroughly and storing in paper bags until use next spring.

It may take me years but I’m determined to crop excellent, super-tasty tomatoes here. I know it can be done.

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Polycrub – winter vegetables

I’ve slowly been clearing the polycrub of pots of spent summer produce, the tomatoes, beans and squash plants all now cropped and done. The remaining green tomatoes are coming indoors to be made into chutney any day soon.

Winter crops in tubs

The winter sowings are largely in and have been growing like weeds. I planted winter lettuce and pak choi – too closely together, it seems, as I was short of tubs – expecting slow growth and plenty of time to pot them on once everything else was cleared.

But their rapid growth has taken me aback and we’ve been cropping lettuce and rocket for weeks now trying to thin it all out. They’re just about under control again.

The late August sowings of carrots have done really well. I tried growing a few tubs of Real Seeds French heritage carrots to see what would thrive. They’ve all grown well, but our favourite is a variety called d’Esigny which is a small, blunt tipped carrot with an incredible sweetness of flavour.

Yesterdays harvest with D’Esigny carrots

I shall fill tubs with this variety next year so that we have plenty, and succession-sow so that they ripen every few weeks for staggered consumption. I don’t think they’re a storing carrot, but that’s fine by us as they’re so delicious that they wouldn’t last anyway.

Carrots in tubs, dill, kale

The winter vegetables that have been planted up in the polycrub are purple sprouting broccoli, kale, winter lettuce, pak choi, tatsoi, rocket, carrots, beetroot, parsley, coriander and dill (not sure that dill will make it through winter). Let’s see what survives!

The nights are drawing in now, with a nip in the air and the fire in the caravan going on most evenings to keep the temperature comfortable. I wrap up in a blanket to watch films in the evening as the temperature drops. The electric blanket has gone back onto the bed.

The nights are properly dark again – which seems so strange after a summer of light. It’s awe-inspiring to look up and see the stars once again in clear, inky black skies. The clarity here with no light pollution is remarkable.

Autumn is my favourite season.

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Autumn fare

This will be our third autumn in the caravan, although we should be in the house at last before winter sets in and so it will be our last.

The tiny caravan kitchen space and mini oven have certainly been a challenge, but it’s amazing what you can do with a bit of ingenuity and a single cake and roasting tin. If I’d thought we’d be here so long I would have packed more.

As the season turns and the evenings get colder, my thoughts for food turn to more autumnal fare. Sausages, roasted squash, chestnuts, warming soups.. and wherever possible recipes adapted to work in a small space with the minimum of fuss and need for utensils.

One of my favourite ways to cook at this time of the year is a tray bake. Last nights supper was sausage, butternut squash and apple roasted up with onions and garlic and finished with honey and mustard for the last ten minutes in the oven.

If I’d picked blackberries I would have added those in too. Next time.

A supper like this is a meal in itself, both warming and filling, not expensive to produce, and most importantly, leaving very little washing up.

Birthday cake for a friend

September is also the month in which many local friends have their birthdays (as well as my own), so for the last year my one square cake tin will get pressed into action.

Next year my baking tins will be unpacked and I will have a proper oven, and I’ll hardly know myself! But for now my offerings are slightly lopsided, as the caravan is not entirely level, and always the same shape.

I hope that they’re well received regardless, baked as they are with love.

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Burnished with righteousness

There’s been a distinct drop in temperature over the last few days. Enough for a sharp intake of breath whilst slipping legs between bedsheets at night. I think we may have to put the electric blanket back on. That alone saved us last winter, I’m sure of it.

Autumn blackberries

The hedgerows are full of blackberries which we must find time to get out and plunder. Autumn isn’t worth having without homemade apple and blackberry pies.

Perched atop our windy hill croft

The shed is now built and it’s so startlingly big that I did warn husband that if we weren’t in the house soon we’d be moving the bed into it. It’s better insulated than the caravan and you could seriously house entire families in there.

One of the bays inside

I know better than to get used to its exquisite emptiness, though. It’ll be full of boxes and building material in no time, and glimpses of the floor will soon become a rarity.

The house build continues after a few weeks hiatus with husbands back problems. We will clear the building materials out over the next week and hopefully continue the electrics, kitchens and bathrooms.

Stuff everywhere

We’ve been testing Osmo oil wood treatments on slips of spare wood for the cladding in the bathrooms. The second coat is drying at the moment then we’ll head in and compare. Everything looks so different in situ. The light makes a huge difference.

Osmo oil

We also made a second visit to Skye Sawmills yesterday to try and source oak planks for our sills.

The challenge is those enormous windows in the living area, which will need 4m long pieces, something that it’s proving almost impossible to find. If possible I didn’t want joins.

Brendan didn’t have oak that long, however he did have something interesting – old church pew planks from a dismantled church in Broadford. They’re at least 150 years old, burnished to a patina with the feverish righteousness of all those worshippers bottoms.

I love the idea of reusing old wood from a local church, and having a bit of history in our sparingly new home, so if the price is right we’d love to take them.

The holiest sills on the island!