Blackcurrant Day
With the blackcurrant bushes overflowing, we found ourselves thinking of delicious things to do with them. Having picked over 3 kilos in a few days (even if we did eat quite a few on the spot) it was obvious that we had to preserve them somehow. This turned into a blackcurrant feast with jam, Swedish-style blackcurrant cordial, bottled fruit and a yoghurt and blackcurrant cake – so good we had to make it again the next day.
We’re posting the recipes for all these things below, just in case anyone else is in the same situation…
Blackcurrant Jam
This jam is simple and delicious (we know because we already ate a whole jar!). Currants are a great fruit to make jam with because they’re high in pectin – especially when just under-ripe, though ours weren’t – so they set without adding any other fruits. This recipe is from the River Cottage Handbook of Preserves.
We used
1.5 kg of blackcurrants, without twigs or stalks (though the shrivelled bit left from the flower can stay)
2,250 kg of sugar
900 ml of water
Put the currants with the water in a pan and place over a low heat to bring to simmering point. Leave for 15-20 mins (the fruit should be soft but not totally disintegrated), then add the sugar and stir until it has dissolved. Then, bring to a full rolling boil and maintain it for 5 minutes while stirring.
Remove from the heat and continue stirring gently for a couple of minutes to cool. You’ll know if the jam is ready by testing for the setting point. When it is done decant into sterilised jars – from our currants we got (more or less) six:
Jam!
Bottled Blackcurrants
This is a great way to preserve the little delicious black balls themselves. This project was also a way to test out using the solar cooker and oven to sterilise jars, which was definitely the most work-intensive part! To sterilise jars we boiled water in the solar cooker (at about 88 degrees centigrade) and filled up the jars, which we then left in the solar oven for some twenty minutes.
Jam jars sterilising in the solar oven, with the screw tops in hot water
We needed:
1,750 kg blackcurrants
1,2 l water
450 g sugar
a few lemon verbena leaves from the garden
The actual bottling involved cleaning the blackcurrants and packing them into the jars, with a few verbena leaves layered in each. Then, we added the syrup we made from the sugar and water – it should be at 60 degrees. We closed the jars without tightening the lids much and put them in a deep pan with a tea towel at the bottom filled with warm (38 C) water up to the jar necks. The point of this step is to create a vacuum inside the jars by slowly heating the water to simmering point (88C again) and letting it boil for just a couple of minutes before removing the bottles and tightening the lids. After a day or so, they should be properly sealed and last for about a year… Fingers crossed.
Adding hot syrup to the jars
To be continued due to low solar power…
Hedvig & Sara
First-time wwoofing at Quinta des Abelhas
We were looking for a free holiday when we found out about Wwoofing. Sara and I live in East London, and being Portuguese Sara gets thoroughly sick of grey skies and rainy days by the end of a long English winter and starts to pine for her homeland. When we hit upon Wwoofing Portugal it seemed the perfect way to sate both her longing for 30 degree temperatures and ours for growing fresh vegetables, having had to give up my tomato and chili plants when moving house last year. I didn’t really know anything about growing organic food and permaculture, having largely ignored the movement considering vegetables in the UK to be expensive enough already, but we were attracted by the yurts, the bees, and the prospect of debating the collapse of civilisation.
Morning mist.The joy of arrival was only slightly tempered by our accomodation being moved from the then-uninhabitable yurt to a cosier (smaller!) caravan, and we soon realised that this was a symptom of life at the Quinta being more relaxed than we could possibly have hoped. It’s no picnic, we get up at hours I normally only see from the other end of the day to shovel horse-shit and do the heavier jobs that are unbearable once the mist clears and the temperature climbs, but when we have time free in the day I recall Sophie suggesting we take a picnic to the river, so sometimes it is.
There is certainly a lot of work that I would not describe as fun. Scrubbing yurts and weeding (especially in the heat of the day) is in no way my particular cup of herbal tea, but I was surprised to find that once done, and done well as part of a team, the satisfaction is considerably greater than that gained from, say, skiving off in the shade to ‘blog’, as I’m doing now and do a lot back home.
Flowering veg attacks predators. They eat the bugs, we eat the rest of the veg.
I wouldn’t say that wwoofing is for everyone, but the great thing about Quinta des Abelhas is the relaxed attitude to it: no-one has ever asked me if I’ve done my 6 hours of work on a particular day, and they haven’t needed to. With such a variety of tasks available to get on with in our own time, everyone seems very happy to spend a few hours making a mosaic, some time in the garden, a dip in the pool to cool off and then off to the kitchen to bake bread. There was no question that taking two days off in the first week to go wild in Porto at San Joao would be a problem, and likewise when Matt screeched to a halt in the 4×4 when I was on the way to watch the football, saying “Need a volounteer to put the yurt up, it’s gonna rain!”, it didn’t occur to me to point out that I’d already done 6 hours work that day. If my employer in London asked me to work an extra hour for free I’d be laughing all the way home. I even missed the Holland game yesterday to watch Andy’s Geoff Lawton film, “Creating a Food Forest”, which was a revelation. It’s great to realise that there’s a way to live off the land without stripping it bare and spraying it with pesticides. I would recommend coming here to wanting to learn about permaculture, as long as you don’t mind shovelling shit at 7am.
Mosaic by the kitchen caravan. Wavy step by your correspondents.
Sao Joao. Never have plastic hammers been so much fun.
Porto at sunset.
Roasting sardines for Sao Joao.
View from the hammock.
Chooks for the coop
Went to the market in Tabua (translation: “plank”) on Sunday to pick up more chickens for the coop. Despite Andy naming them after the date he intends to eat them, it felt like a rescue mission, packed 20 to a cage as they were, sqawking in fear as we approached. They didn’t really enjoy the trip to the supermarket, but once we got them into their own little coop they seemed a lot happier, and shook of their bedraggled look almost instantly.
Giles.
In the box
Getting out
Solar cooker swings into action
We set up the solar cooker today. 200 euros worth of lean, green, carbon-free cooking. Matt estimated that a couple of years of cooking will see it pay for itself, versus the gas cooker, and when Russia cuts the gas supply off we won’t have to worry.
First we had to clear the ground of tiles and weeds, and more weeds, and all the weed roots, and then all the roots we didn’t see the first time. 6 wheelbarrows of gravel smoothed the surface off and then we just had to prise the kittens away from their reflections and put it into place.
The first kettle boiled in twenty minutes and there’s another one on as I write, which seems to be going quicker as we get better at angling the beam. Cooking does take a bit longer, and although a sheet of metal laid in the beam began to buckle and melt, when it’s warming a large pot the whole thing won’t get quite as hot as it would on a hob, but it’s great as a slow cooker. Things take a little longer, maybe you have to plan ahead a bit more, but a free replacement for your gas cooker sounds like the future to me.
Tabua chain-saw massacre
Just cutting down an olive tree.
Who the hell is that?
Putting on the first kettle.
The angle is adjusted to hit the spot.
Free cooking for life.
Cooking with the Sun!
Sara & Giles prepare the ground for the parabolic solar cooker:
Cooker’s set up and the kettle’s on …
Waiting for the kettle to boil, it took 18 minutes!
Potato slices
A typical Austrian dish is very easily made: Potato slices. Especially when you have from last dinner some cooked potatoes left.
Here the recipie (for 5 people):
500g potatoes
1 egg
170g flour
30g butter
oliveoil to fry the slices
How you do it:
Cook the potatoes, peel and mash them. Let the mash cool down, put the melted butter, the egg and the flour in. Knead it to a smooth pastry.
Form small balls and flatten them to small slices (you may need some more flour to not stick the slices to the ground).
Heat a pan up, put in pleanty of oliveoil and put the slices in. Fry them on both sides until they look lovely brown.
Potato slices are traditional served with jam. They taste also good with cheese and salat.
Enjoy your meal! Or as it is said in Austria “Guten Appetit!”
Inga Marén
Summer Bounty (almost)
We are just on the edge of summer abundance, with a basket of veg coming out of the garden every day, but not yet enough to start preserving for the winter.
Tomatoes are starting to reach full size, but not yet ripening. When they do, it looks like we will be awash with them (hopefully).
We have been eating courgettes for a couple of weeks, although most plants are only just fruiting now. On sunday we hope to get an old window from the scrap yard to build a solar drier for the July and August bounty.
Cucumbers will be a while yet, as temperatures have only just reached the heights that they like. It still feels moderate to us, while visitors think it is very hot in the day.
Nasturtium flowers are adding a sweet spiciness to our salads.
Young runner beans are crispy but not stringy – wonderful.
We do not have so many strawberries this year, but still we are eating some every day.
Peppers and aubergines have some way to go. They like it HOT. The plants are growing quickly, and will fruit when temperatures go over 30 degrees consistently. We have 160 pepper plants in the gardens!
The wild leeks are flowering, attracting some weird and wonderful insects.
Several of my pumpkins are larger than footballs now – I hope to show them off in the village if they get big enough.
And the 3 sisters bed, with Trail of Tears beans, Hopi blue corn, and a few butternut squashes are looking really good.
Pixie Yurt New Beds (for plants!)
Inga has made some new beds for herbs outside the pixie yurt which are looking lovely. Plus there is a new hammock on the terrace which makes it a perfect spot for a person who wants to get away from it all (and there are 11 of us on the quinta at that moment!)
Inga outside the Pixie Yurt with its new beds
A perfect spot
Shower area next to swimming pool
Matt and Andy have been busy with this today, making sure that the water will drain into the new beds dug by Hedvig and Andrea. Our eco-friendly ionising capsules have arrived to help keep the pool clean. So it’s had a good clean and we should be back in it splashing around very soon.
New Shower Area
