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| The Tarot Brothers and friends playing jazz in a boat |
What’s been happening, have
I fallen off the blog? So much to
do … sometimes too much to do. The
new issue of Permaculture Magazine
is out today carrying a five-page article on our compost toilet, with our web
link at the end. So, it’s high
time I reconnected with the blogosphere and published our latest news.
We’ve been
‘permacultured’! A few weeks ago,
friends Flo Snook, husband
Andy and twins Sol and Jacob came to visit us, all the way from Brighton in
their venerable van. Flo has just
completed her permaculture diploma with Brighton Permaculture Trust
(congratulations!) and took time out to wander around our Brittany permaculture
smallholding, pen and notebook in hand.
She talked to both of us and her leaving present to us was a notebook
full of her permaculture analysis and suggestions. It's an exercise I thoroughly recommend: we found it really useful to have a fresh
set of trained eyes take a long hard look. She picked up on ‘overwhelm’ as a limiting factor to our
many projects.
Which is one of the reasons
that we’ve made special efforts to have some quality downtime recently,
including a picnic on the beach and watching a jazz quartet in a narrow
boat.
For picnic fayre, we turned
to Elizabeth David
for inspiration and an idea that I’ve wanted to try for some time:
Shooter’s Sandwich
Take a large, thick, excellent rump steak. Do not season it, for that would cause
the juice to run out, and in grilling it keep it markedly underdone. Have ready a sandwich loaf one end of
which has been cut off and an adequate portion of the contents of which has
been removed. Put the steak, hot
from the grill, and—but only then—somewhat highly seasoned, into the loaf; add
a few grilled mushrooms; replace the deleted end of the loaf; wrap the loaf in
a double sheet of clean white blotting-paper, tie with twine both ways,
superimpose a sheet of grease-proof paper, and more twine. Place a moderate weight on top, and
after a while add other weights.
Let the thing endure pressure for at least six hours. Do not carve it until and as each slice
is required.Instead of the weights, I used a pair of building clamps and a couple of wooden boards, which worked a treat. It makes a damn fine picnic sandwich.
Normal blogging to be
resumed very soon, with updates on the barn conversion and other eco-building
stuff; how to (almost) make hot compost the Geoff Lawton way and how to efficiently collect acorns to feed to pigs.
