In a way, it’s a sad day – I’ve harvested the last of the beetroot for this year. We’ve never grown them before, but they’ll definitely be here every year from now on. They’re really easy, very tasty and you get loads. As well as eating the root part (roasted is good) you can eat the leaves, which are great as salad leaves but even better cooked like spinach.

The second picture is an earlier harvest in July, probably some of the first, so it’s a long harvesting season as well. One root has had a small hole burrowed in it by some creepy crawly kind of thing, but all the
rest have been completely pest free, above and below ground. I don’t want to spoil things for next year by saying this, but it seems like you can’t go wrong with beetroot.

Finally, from the beginning of July, here’s a picture of them happily growing away. They were all planted in early April, so only about three months before they’re ready to eat and five before you get your patch of vegetable patch back, although I planted spring onions in the gaps between the beetroot rows a couple of months ago anyway. Next year I’ll probably just put the beetroot closer together.

I used this River Cottage recipe as a guide, but here is what I did:

Saturday 3rd May

I started by boiling 6 litres of water in a pan, which takes an awfully long time if you forget to put the lid on. Then I took it off the heat, added a load of nettles, stirred it, and left it to infuse and cool. After a couple of hours, I strained it through a muslin bag, squeezing all the liquid out of the nettles. Then I added 750g of white granulated sugar, 30g of cream of tartar and the juice of an orange and a lemon.

Then I let it cool further, almost to room temperature, before pouring in a 7g sachet of ‘easy-bake yeast’ – the kind you use in bread machines, for example. This was chosen not because it’s necessarily a good idea, but because we always have plenty of it lying around the house.

At this point, I got out the trusty hydrometer to measure the original gravity, which was 1.050. Then I stuck the pan in the airing cupboard and left it.

Wednesday 6th May

I measured the specific gravity again – 1.031. The point of all this gravity measuring business is a) so you know how much alcohol you’ve made, and b) so you know when it’s ready. Brewing (or rather, fermentation) in a nutshell – you start with sugar, and the yeast gradually eats it, spitting out ethanol (better known as booze) and carbon dioxide. The ‘specific gravity’ is just a measure of the density of the liquid, which is a rough way of figuring out how much sugar is dissolved in it. So, if you know how much sugar there was when you started, and how much is left when you finish, you know how much alcohol was made. Also, if you bottle the beer when the yeast is still producing loads of carbon dioxide, the bottles are likely to explode.

Saturday 9th May

I measured it again – 1.015. Still not ready. I’d expected it to be quicker than this, but our airing cupboard isn’t very warm.

Thursday 13th May

This time, the specific gravity was 1.001, meaning it had pretty much finished fermenting and was more than ready to bottle, so I syphoned the beer into the things in the picture. They’re 2 litre cider bottles that previously contained cheap but very good scrumpy. I’ve got lots of these because a) I’ve drunk a lot of it, b) they seem too good to throw away, and c) they don’t fit through the holes in the bottle bank anyway.

As a result of all the measuring, my rough calculations tell me the end product was around 6.4% ABV (alcohol by volume). I managed to restrain myself and left it in the bottles for a few days before tasting it. It tasted very good, almost too good in fact, which is why there isn’t any left now. Fortunately, a second batch is already brewing.

I wasn’t expecting these to be as nice as they were, but seeing as there are millions of them about the place getting on my nerves I thought it was better to make friends with them than be constantly annoyed. Most of them have gone to make wine (more on that another day) but these ones became a friendly lunch, in the following way:

• Harvest some dandelion flowers, when they’re fully open in the sun. Remove the stalks, just keeping the heads.
• Make some batter by mixing up some egg, some milk, some flour and some golden syrup.
• Heat some oil in a frying pan.
• Hold the flower heads by the green bit, dip the flower heads in the batter and spin them around so they’re coated.
• Drop them yellow-side down in the pan and fry them until they’re golden brown.
• Turn them over and fry the other side, but probably not for as long as I did.
• Eat them.

There is such a thing as a free lunch after all.

Of course, all reasonable people are used to this backwards and forwards nonsense with every kind of food and drink under the sun and routinely laugh it off with a good dose of “all things in moderation” common sense. Only the media seem to suck it up like a sponge, with this latest egg story apparently being headline news everywhere.

I was blissfully unaware until it was given a prime slot on the BBC evening news, the highlight being the way they managed to wheel out the amusingly named Lucy Egerton from the British Egg Information Service without cracking so much as a childish grin.

The cynical side of me though, as always, responded with a weary “who paid for this ‘research’ then?” No surprises in the answer, or the fact that you have to dig a bit deeper than the news stories (a.k.a. press releases) to find out. It was of course the egg industry, which also seems to double up as the acronym industry, what with the BEIS (British Egg Information Service), the BEIC (British Egg Industry Council), BEPA (British Egg Products Association), the BEA (British Egg Association) and many more.

None of this though, should detract from the fact that you should eat eggs. Because they’re nice. Poached, boiled, scrambled, fried or omeletted – you can’t go wrong with an egg. Ok, you could – there is eggnog, for example. But in general, my advice, which I say is just as valuable as some ‘scientific’ research paid for by a vested interest, is to eat plenty of eggs. I wouldn’t advise eating eggs produced by an industry though – instead, eat eggs produced by a free* and happy chicken, preferably your own.

*As with free software, the “free” is as in freedom, although of course if they’re your own chickens you don’t pay for the eggs)

The above won’t work if you’re using Internet Explorer (stop doing that), and possibly not if you’re one of those Apple types either, though I’m not sure.

Update: I’m told this actually crashes Aurora, Midori and Kazehakase. I can’t help but wonder if that’s exploitable.

Secondly, a more serious use (it’s all relative) of the same setup, namely providing a guided tour of the grapevine:

The camera shoots the video in MPEG format, so I used Riva FLV Encoder to convert them to the more web-friendly FLV format, and also to reduce the resolution and bitrate a bit. This Wordpress plugin made it easy to embed the videos into the post. Although it was a bit more effort, I much prefer this approach to relying on an external service to encode and host the video as I did here.

Brimham Rocks has been on my list of favourite places for a long time, so it came as a bit of a surprise when I realised we’d never taken Mia there. We’ve put that right more than once recently.

It was also another opportunity to dabble with some more HDR photography. I’m loathe to use the word photography when I just point the camera and press the button, but anyway, the results are on the left. I think this (arguably overprocessed) stuff looks both nice and fake at the same time, but on the other hand, fake or not, I think it captures a much better idea of what it was like to be there. The main downside is that having to take three images at different exposures means that you don’t want things to move. Fine for rocks, but if you click the image and look at the top-left corner you’ll see that trees sometimes refuse to oblige.

If you’re in the area and hungry or thirsty, I’d recommend The Wellington in nearby Darley. As well as good food and ale, it’s child-friendly, which was just as well as our party on one occasion consisted of 7 children to 6 adults. Mia took advantage of the friendliness by filling all the candle holders with salt, something I’ll take this opportunity to apologise for, since I didn’t at the time.

It looked like compressed dust and tasted of cardboard (or was it the other way round, I can’t remember), but it can’t have been that bad because I’d wolfed it down before I got out of the car park. It contained 5000mg (sounds very scientific and medicinal when you use inappropriate units doesn’t it) of her “Energy Powder”, so I expected at least some effect for my 189000 millipence.

Imagine my surprise when driving back up the hill out of town I lost sight of the road and appeared to be driving through 3 inches of dry ice. This energy bar is good stuff after all, I thought, expecting to find Dave’s Mobile Disco set up on the tarmac at any moment. Then I realised that despite the brilliant sunshine the heavens had emptied themselves while I was pounding the aisles and it was just steam rising off the road. Not energy powder induced then, but quite a spectacular sight nonetheless.

I must admit I felt rather odd when I got home, but I think it was more to do with the heat, humidity and lugging half a tonne (sorry, half a billion milligrams) of shopping in from the car single handed than any magical properties of the powder.

Anyway, it seems this doctor of energy bars is quite well known, no doubt from that idiot’s lantern I try to avoid. I realised with horror that I’d inadvertantly got sucked into some kind of TV spin-off merchandising hell, rather than the good old-fashioned quackery I’d expected. She’s the presenter of something called You Are What You Eat apparently. That makes me an overpriced lump of compressed dust. Oh well.

Well done for reading this far – it’s a more pointless topic than ever, so much so I’d completely forgotten about it myself. Thanks to Alastair for reminding me.

I’ll leave you with this quote I’ve just found at the online dust shop, it cracked me up – “Dr Gillian’s own bars are the only bars that she recommends and endorses.”

This may sound odd, even relative to some of the other stuff here, but I have found myself on many occasions to be embroiled in a discussion with people who don’t know the difference between a swede and a turnip. The reasons include apathy, ignorance, and differences in the way the terms are used both regionally in the UK and also internationally. Anyway, if you’re one of these people in future, this is one of the pictures I’ll be directing you towards. It’s a picture of some turnips.

Observe, (a) there is some purple to the skin, but also some white – more commonly they can be white only, or white with green, and (b) the flesh is as white as a goth on a ghost train, (c) the size, which you can’t really observe from the picture, but take it from me that they’re a bit smaller than tennis balls.

These turnips are actually quite swede-like in appearance, I have to admit, but turnips they are.

These particular turnips went into what I call a ‘vegetable pot’, which involves throwing loads of different root vegetables into a giant casserole dish with a little bit of stock and cooking slowly in the oven.