Pea Tip

Sowing peas is always a silly game here - the mice come and dig them up overnight and I have to resow. Sometimes it's a wonder I manage to grow any at all!

But this spring I remembered that mice are supposed to hate the smell of mint, and since I hadn't cut back the dead stems of last year's mint yet I did so, and scattered the cut-up stems and dried leaves over the soil after I'd sown my peas.

The peas are all up now, with not a single gap in the rows. Hurrah!

There's a tip I'll remember in future!

The Foragers

You may have noticed there was no Wild Food Night post in February - the evening was unfortunately cancelled due to the illness of the chef. So it seemed the perfect opportunity to check out a more local 'wild food' restaurant which has popped up right here in St Albans - The Foragers @ The Verulam Arms. Unlike the Country Bumpkin's once-a-month set-menu event, The Foragers serves a full menu featuring wild foods every day.

The Verulam Arms is a familiar pub to us - we were quite fond of it a couple of years ago when we used to live just around the corner. It first opened in 1853, so it's been part of St Albans for a long time! But it's outside the centre of town, in a quiet area, and increasing competition and changing culture have caused it to struggle time and time again over the last few years. During the five years we lived nearby it closed down and opened again more than a couple of times! And it had just closed down again when 'the Foragers', George and Gerald, met the landlord and told him they were looking for a place to set up a wild food business... The Verulam Arms is still a pub (now with their own beer on tap, and occasional homemade wines and flavoured spirits) but offers a restaurant-style foodservice as well. And I can't believe it's taken me this long to get round to trying it!

Eddie and I started with home-smoked whiskey-cured trout with nettle salsa verde and crispy lardons of homemade chorizo, garnished with crispy fried fish skin and beautiful trout eggs (how's that for making the most of a catch?), and a sprig of goosegrass!

This was a wonderful combination, very rich and flavourful - in fact I would have liked a little more of the lovely nettle salsa verde to temper the richness.

Dave had this pig’s head and rabbit white pudding terrine with tomato chutney, pickled baby carrots and toasted sourdough. He said it was really good, and he particularly enjoyed the pickled carrots!

For Eddie's main course, he chose braised ox cheek with a stilton, wild garlic, roasted shallot and mushroom ragout, and toasted spaetzle pasta. The slow-cooked ox cheek was amazingly soft and tender, and really tasty.

Dave chose battered skate wing with pea purée, goose grass, parmentier potatoes and crispy capers. It looked lovely!

I read once that goosegrass should be cooked to get rid of the hairiness, but actually, served raw like this, the hairiness doesn't really matter, and of course it disappears as soon as you chew anyway. Goosegrass tastes pretty good, and I have added it to my 'to forage' list...

I had venison wellington (the last piece - sorry guys!) - venison wrapped in mushroom duxelle and flaky puff pastry, served with nettle sauce, pommes dauphine and home-grown blackcurrant game jus.

Wow.

Again, this was wonderfully rich and full of flavour. The blackcurrants complemented the rich wellington really well, the mushroom duxelle was delicious, and the meat was just perfect. I'm always a bit nervous about rare meat, as it can be chewy and I'm not a fan of that, but this was incredibly tender and lovely.

For dessert, we picked chocolate fondants with a white chocolate and hazelnut sauce. There's not a lot you can say about a chocolate fondant, is there...? (Except maybe 'more please'!) But yes, it was just right, and the hazelnuts were a very nice complement.

All in all, a really great meal and a great evening. You can see how much love and care goes into both the sourcing of the ingredients and the preparation of the dishes, and flavours are brought together perfectly on every plate. The atmosphere was pretty busy (and I'm so glad they're busy!) but service was quick and very friendly, and the barman even recognised my name and answered in person a question I had asked on facebook - how's that for service?! Unfortunately it's a bit pricey for us to go regularly, so it won't be replacing wild food night, but I do hope we can go again. And while at our regular wild food nights there's a sense of 'this is what's available this month', seeing the full menu at the Foragers brings home what a huge variety of wild and local seasonal foods (including, of course, stored and preserved foods) are, in fact, available at any time of the year!

Thank you, Foragers!

Winter Heather to Feed the Bees

I've been feeling a bit bad for the bees in our garden - they've been out and about for a while now due to the mild winter but, except for the odd primrose and a few short-lived crocuses, there are hardly any flowers round here for them. And we've just cut down several years' worth of overgrown honeysuckle, which they'll miss. And I can't expect them to pollinate my tomato plants all summer long if I don't look after them in the winter, can I?!

Reading up on the subject tells me all the usual spring flowers are good for bees - crocuses, primroses, daffodils, rosemary, dead-nettles, forget-me-nots and fruit blossom - but when bees come out super-early like they did this year (I saw several in January) these may not have bloomed yet. Early in the spring, pussy willow and hazel catkins can provide nectar, and winter-flowering plants are a great help too - heather, hebe and lungwort are particularly recommended (though I don't see our lungwort flowering yet...)

So when I spotted these little winter heather plants for sale yesterday, I had to get a couple - it's well known that bees love heather, and winter varieties flower extremely early and for a long time. I picked plants with lots of buds, so I knew they still had plenty of flowering-time left in them.

I planted them out today, forking some compost into our heavy soil first, planting them level with the surface, and treading them in lightly. It may be too little too late this year really, but they'll be much bigger and much earlier next year, to feed our precious pollinators.

Charity for the Facebook Generation

In this age of information, I am regularly appalled by the amount of misinformation out there, and the number of people who repeat what they've heard without verifying their facts. Sharing links is one thing - you're just pointing people to an author's opinion. Taking on that opinion yourself and spreading it without even a cursory look at the evidence is inexcusable, and foolish.

You probably already know that a campaign video made by charity Invisible Children has taken the world by storm. The campaign's aim is to raise awareness about Joseph Kony, the leader of a guerrilla army in central Africa responsible for the abductions of up to 66,000 children and the deaths and displacement of many thousands more, and to put pressure on governments (who apparently think the matter is irrelevant) to do something about it. If you haven't seen the video, you can find it here. You'll need half an hour, and tissues.

Not long after the video started trending on the internet, the backlash began - a couple of bloggers pointed out what they felt were flaws in Invisible Children's methods, and an apparent lack of transparency surrounding their finances. You can read all that here, here and here, if you want. Accusations have spread about as fast as the video itself did, and include spending too much on awareness and media and not enough on actually helping people, oversimplifying a complex issue, exaggeration and manipulation of facts, foolish tactics, funding Ugandan militia who are known for their own humanitarian crimes, perpetuating the 'white man's burden' and saviour complex, promoting 'slacktivism' (the belief you might be able to change things by sharing stuff on the internet), over-sentimentality, propagandism, and being 'a scam' - an accusation made without any indication how so. Invisible Children posted this this morning to rebut all the claims made about them - a must-read for anyone who is not sure what to think. (This brief interview with the man behind the film is worth a read too.) For the record, they absolutely deny that they fund the Ugandan military, and their financial records are online for all to see.

But I'm afraid the damage has already been done. Most people see too much in black and white, and will have dismissed the campaign. It makes me furious how some cynics will condemn something when they find it isn't perfect, without recognising the value it has even in its flawed state.

Sure, if you don't want Invisible Children to have your money, don't donate. But don't dismiss the campaign to make people more aware, or to pressurise governments to act. Those are the key things here and they're entirely valid.

So called 'slacktivism' is better than ignorance. Simplification is unavoidable in a short campaign video, and in any focused campaign. No-one's claiming this guy is the only evil in the world or that getting rid of him will solve all of the region's problems - again, he's just the focus of one little campaign, and it's a step in the right direction. The white saviour thing is something we should think about but not a valid criticism. Anyone accusing the filmmakers of making an uncomfortably moving and provocative piece of propaganda has failed to realise that's just the way the world rolls these days. And on some rare occasions, sadly, military intervention is a necessary evil.

Invisible Children, as well as building schools and managing welfare and economic projects, puts more importance on producing media and spreading awareness than most charities. So what? Who says there's only one way to run a charity? I give monthly to a major global charity, but I don't keep up with what campaigns they're working on or where my money's going. Isn't that wrong? Aren't I just giving to satisfy myself, sitting comfortably at my computer, rather than because I see an injustice or feel a burden for someone? If the charity I support, or any other, made moving and rousing films about everything they got up to, less money would go to their causes - but I might be prompted to give more, and more might be prompted to give. It's different, but it's not wrong. Kony 2012 is charity for the facebook generation - it's visible, it's colourful, it's focused, it's exciting, it's dramatic. It's waking whole generations of kids up to the fact that Justin Bieber/being thin/Twilight/Louis Vuitton is not the only thing that matters. I never saw Christian Aid, Oxfam, Greenpeace or Cancer Research do that.

Awareness is so important. I know how it is - everyone's so busy worrying about money and school and work and chores and family that there's no time to think about stuff that doesn't affect them. And there's so much stuff going on in the world we'd never catch up with all of it, anyway. But it's dangerous to assume that foreign issues will never affect us. There's a hell of a lot going on out there - I've been blown away by some of the things that have shown up on my radar since I've had enough spare time and energy to start paying attention. My whole world view has changed (it's amazing how narrow the lens of the mainstream media is, when you look outside it). We must always strive to be more aware of what is happening in the world.

This guy has to be stopped. However much research you do into the situation in central Africa, however complex things are over there, you won't find a reason to justify what he's doing nor to allow it. And if we don't act, that's exactly what we're doing - permitting it. Yes, you and I are extremely limited in what we can do, but I'm not letting the government who represents me - who can do something - turn a blind eye just because it doesn't affect our country. If enough of us put the pressure on, maybe we can change things. Maybe we can't. But shouldn't we try?

You can find more info on Kony 2012 and what you can do here, and a UK e-petition here. There are also many, many more charities supporting human rights, peace and development in Africa.

Overwintered Peppers

As temperatures dropped last autumn, I brought my favourite pepper plant and my only chilli plant indoors to see how they'd last. A friend of mine kept peppers all winter in a south-facing attic under a velux window and they did great - I only have an ordinary south-eastish-facing windowsill, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try.

The chilli did fine for about six weeks and produced a new flush of flowers, then suffered some ailment and dropped lots of its leaves as Christmas approached - but it has pulled through, put on some new growth, and given me occasional fruits throughout the winter, which has been really nice. (I had to hand-pollinate the flowers, of course - as easy as dusting the centres with a soft paintbrush.) As you can see, it's looking a bit spindly (and one-sided) from less-than-ideal light levels and the dropping of its leaves, but it's doing fine now and producing more and more flowers. If you look closely, you'll see three little chillies on its branches. Let's see how long I can keep it going...

The pepper, however - the 'Dedo de Mocha' sweet Aji type which was wonderful when it finally fruited early autumn - has not enjoyed being indoors one bit. The fruits remaining on it ripened to red in the warmth of the house, which was nice as they'd showed no sign of it outdoors, but when the days got shorter, the plant got taller and taller, reaching for light that I just couldn't provide, and the thing ended up crawling over my curtain rail, producing long spindly branches which it couldn't support, and finally getting very unhappy indeed.

Ah well; you win some, you lose some. If I had a heated greenhouse or conservatory I'm sure I'd have got much better results. I think it's certainly worth overwintering more chillies in future. But the pepper plant has gone in the compost bin now, to make way for this year's new subjects!