Another weekend squandered.. .. no wait. I rested, read, crocheted a bunch, baked a bit, sorted out all my yarn, watched several movies I should have seen as a child but didn't, went on some wikiventures, and even did a bit of work. That's probably not squandered.
I make 'West African style' peanut stew fairly regularly, so what else is there to this collection of hearty and rich cuisines? Babenda from Burkina Faso immediately jumped out at me as something I'd love to try. Funky smelling fermented locust beans? Sold. They're called soumbala, dawa dawa, or iru, and after failing to find them during a brief trip to London I ended up ordering some off ebay, dried. I looked through a few recipe variations, and most closely used this one. Of course, no anchovies for me, but locally foraged seaweed (dulse in this case) gives it that salty fishy edge. The first step is to blitz everything in the food processor: peanuts, iru, spices, and also the uncooked rice. I was using sushi rice, because that's all we ever have in, and it didn't break down much. Also probably because the tiny food processor was too full. Then I simmered everything until it seemed cooked, and stirred in some homegrown bitter greens. I think I added too much chilli, using both dried and fresh. I loved it. Everyone else who tried it agreed it was funky and weird, and didn't seem convinced. They did eat it all though.
Babenda, Burkina Faso: food I've never eaten
I read about the iron ore train in Mauritania and added that to my definitely-to-do list. But probably not any time soon. In lieu of that, I made what felt like either a hybrid of or transition between African and Middle Eastern food: cherchem. Recipes online were consistent more or less with the spices that go along with the millet (which, incidentally, I like way more than cous cous, but all my brother can connect it with is that my parrot used to eat it / scatter it everywhere) - mint, oregano, thyme, bay, coriander, garlic and paprika. Plus some tomato paste, and boiled up all together. I served it dolloped on top of salad for lunch.
Cherchem, Mauritania: food I've never eaten
I had a fabulous sunny time at Kirkcaldy Artisan Friday market today and am feeling so much appreciation for the local community here.
The local 'ooligans tipped a communal paper and card recycling bin over the bank onto the beach (again) last night, so cleaning all that up at 7am was how I started my day. Some critiques of my neighbours' paper recycling practices though.. good job to whomever flattens and packs everything inside everything else, including toilet roll tubes within toilet roll tubes... Zero points to the person putting mixed waste in a bin bag in there.
I love a good Star Trek time travel back to the present day episode as much as the next guy, but did Picard S2 run out of budget or something..? (I'm almost caught up but still one or two behind atm.)
I started making a hat but ran out of yarn and didn't have anything else to match, so I backed up and turned it into a tea cosy instead.
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Helped to make (well, mostly watched.. did some sanding..) a hefty chopping board from an irregular chunk of scavenged oak worktop. Why do I never remember to take before pics?
Finally getting up closer to sunrise again. Motivated this week by those planets that were supposedly aligning, but cloudy horizons meant I didn't manage to see the spectacle. Still, it's always worth rising early for coffee on the beach.
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Adventure day! the main goal was to scout fields for St George's mushrooms, or tufty grass ring evidence thereof, but there were none to be found. First walked around Balbirnie Park in Glenrothes. Then to Falkland. Cake and coffee and lunch at Pillars of Hercules, before a couple of hours walking around Falkland Estate. Saw friendly bluetits and robins, amazing shell-like bracket fungi, enormous hundreds-of-years-old fallen trees ravaged by honey fungus, tree art, the ruined Temple of Decision, the Bruce monument, the waterfall at Maspie Den.
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Curry-y bread; apple caramel pie and baked apples; gingerbread; buckwheat apple pancakes; urid dal with greens; sprouted chickpeas and brown lentils.
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Made some very tasty food this week, including: apricot and coconut scones; Burkinabe-style babenda; chu hou noodles with homemade seitan. The babenda is peanuts, iru (fermented locust beans, very stinky), chilli and rice blitzed together, then simmered until thick, with bitter greens (I used chard and mustard greens) stirred through. As promised by various blogs, taste was funky and unusual - a combination I love. Seitan was improv; veg stock, nut. yeast, soy sauce and spices with vital wheat gluten, boiled in miso, then sliced and fried with the veg. Chu hou sauce came in a jar.
Amy added 12 photos to https://i.amy.gy/madefood/
Mauritania-style cherchem: millet with tomato, herbs and mint.
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No-recipe sugar-free carob brownies. The secret ingredients are sweet potato, cooked and blended with a bit of coconut cream, as well as sunflower butter. Besides that, they have coconut sugar, carob, flour, apple cider vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. Chopped hazelnuts inside, and hemp and goji berries on top. They turned out well! Fudgy and chocolatey.
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Back at the Community Kitchen after a month! I made experimental (no-recipe) cookies with gluten free flours.. A risk on several counts.. but it worked out well. They had lots of ground almonds in. I also made chocolate cake with secret cranberry sauce inside (not pictured). I started on some vegan haggis spring rolls, too, so I could nab some before I left. Also pictured: soba in miso with tofu and foraged seaweed.
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Chia puddings with coconut milk, topped with fruit cocktail, for something different at the Community Kitchen. Grilled peppers stuffed with delicious teriyaki-adjacent lentil mush (three kinds of lentils plus mung beans) and topped with tempeh, for K&M.
Finally able to work in the garden. Planted tomato seedlings, radishes, dwarf purple french beans in the polytunnel; romanesco, more dwarf french beans, aubergine, celery, runner beans, in trays; beetroot and chard in the garden; and overhauled the footpath garden with fresh mushroom compost; pulled out the chicory (to eat) and dead plants and got it all ready for seedlings in a few weeks. Remember last year's rhubarb that definitely died completely and rotted into a ball of mush? I threw it in the weeds across the road. It... has come back to life. Whilst lying on top of weeds and grass, over the winter. Retrieved it and potted it back up. Who knew.
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Romanesco sprouted. A new raised bed erected, new home to a squash and a cucumber. Planted onions, soy beans, mange touts seeds; and pepper plants into the polytunnel. Kale in the footpath garden is flowering; I should probably eat it.
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A week of astonishingly beautiful days. Walked into town a couple of times, and mornings on the beach of course. Enjoyed a quiet cove off Ravenscraig Park for a while, before heading back to Dysart beach for a dunk in the sea.
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Made krompirusa again: premade puff pastry rolled thinner, potatoes, onions, vegeta. Mmmm.
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At the last minute, Lowenna was deposited on my doorstep on Thursday evening. She was full of bounce and beans and buzz as usual, and has decided that nonstop barking at Dave is now a thing. I was still in covid isolation on Friday, so we snuck down to the beach at sunrise, then she spent the day alternately lounging around and barking at nothing (until Dave got home, then she barked at Dave). She also thoroughly systematically dismantled Max's colourful string ball, and set to on his fancy olive stick thing so there is woodchip everywhere.
Lowenna and Max frolicked on the beach for a lot of Saturday. Then they snoozled inside. Once Max had got past his most primal urges, he started trying to romance her properly. They would gaze into each others eyes, or delicately lick each others paws and faces, sweet little puppy kisses.
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On Sunday Lowenna was knackered from all the walks on Saturday. We worked in the garden, and the doggos chased the ball and frolicked. Lowenna is faster than Max, but less precise, so they're evenly matched in ball chasing competition. Lowenna is definitely learning good behaviour from Max, and Max is learning how to be socially normal from her.. In the evening, Max took over 2/3 of the sofa as usual, and Lowenna discovered the best way for her to fit on was to lie directly on top of Max. On Monday Lowenna was scared to go outside because there was an Alsatian very far away in the distance who she is for some reason terrified of. She wasn't really okay until Max came over and demonstrated that outside is safe. K&M came for her in the evening, and after about an hour of sitting around and talking with Dave, ignoring Wenna's barking, she suddenly realised Dave is not actually a threat, and brought him a toy to play tug with. Hurrah! Then she went home.
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Hung out with and fed Maud and Jess over the long weekend. Mostly Maud. Jess put in a couple of token appearances, but soon realised I wasn't going to let her outside while her human was away and resumed her usual state of sulking in the airing cupboard. Maud, on the other hand, is a tiny zooming blur of affection and excitement. Though she forgot how to eat, and only managed it if I hand-squeezed food from the pouch directly into her mouth, or handed her one tiny biscuit at a time.
Amy added 33 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2022-fife/
Amy added 17 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2022-fife/
Market day! First trip into town in at least three weeks. Pizza from Roastie Toastiez on Pathhead beach. Max kicked sand into it but it was still good. Later: Max tried on my new tea cosy for size. Last night was an enormous blood moon.
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The oxalis is flowering! I didn't know it flowered when I bought it, I just liked the foliage, then I saw one in flower at Inverness Botannical Gardens some months later. So I've been excited for it, but not hopeful, because it has seemed to be struggling. Nonetheless, tiny delicate pale purple flowers have emerged! The tradescantia that I got at the same time has had ups and downs too, but is thriving on the mantel piece at the moment. My chillis are all bearing fruit or flowers now, and my ridiculous inside cherry tomato has three more tomatoes on.. French beans, runner beans, aubergine, onions, romanesco planted last week are all sprouting in the polytunnel.
Amy added 6 photos to https://i.amy.gy/growstuff/
Planted a ton of chilli seeds of various different kinds. Most of them were out of date. We'll see what comes up. Also potted up a thousand romanesco cauliflowers... not sure where they're all going to live when they're bigger.. Oxalis flowers are lovely!
Crochet tea cosy, using alpine stitch. It started out as a hat but I didn't have enough yarn, so I backed up and tea-cosied it instead.
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Made ugali / sima from maize flour, for something different. Ate it with a spicy root veg and bean stew. This week's bread came out fluffier than usual. Possibly I put fewer seeds in.
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I have tried sadza in Zimbabwe, made from sorghum flour. The Tanzanian variation on a similar side dish is ugali, made from maize. Every 'recipe' I found seems to be different, but I felt the most coherent instructions on WikiHow. I already had maize flour from when Grain & Sustain had run out of gram flour and offered me that as an alternative. I used one part maize flour to four parts water and mixed them slowly together. The texture was smooth, and it held together without being sticky once it had cooled enough to touch. Dave said he would have believed me if I told him it was mashed potato, but he isn't very discerning. I served it with a vegetable and bean stew.
As of this week, previously 'public' facebook pages seem to be behind a login wall. I can't check the menu for my local Indian takeaway, see which stalls are on the market this week, or get a clue about things happening in the community around me. I can't find anyone talking about this online, and the only thing anyone - even local biz owners - seem to be able to say to me is *shrug*. What the fuck.
Finished Ender's Shadow, started Shadow of the Hegemon. Lowenna went home, then Max came back By mid-week when my flat was no longer full of doggos it was quite strange. There is still fur and grime everywhere though. Made scones, babenda, seitan. Continued to work on scrapers for Woodland Trust, though we really should be wrapping this up. And did some final translation workflow wrangling ready for the BODS 0.3.0 release. Sorted out slides and stuff for my spot on a panel about sustainability at the W3C AC meeting. Went to the market! It's been so long. Made up for 3 weeks of missing out by buying loads of stuff. Caught up on all the local Kirkcaldy news from Real Humans instead of Online. Made loads of garden progress. Helped to sand a chopping board. Caught up with Picard and finally finished Uncanny Counters. Hung out with Maud (mostly) and Jess (token appearance).
Finished Shadow of the Hegemon, started Shadow Puppets. Wrapped up the Woodland Trust 'LaboraTree' project, for now. Did some stuff with DeepNote dashboards for the first time, which was interesting. Made Mauritanian-style cherchem, carob brownies, and finally got back to the Community Kitchen. Planted a load of things in the footpath garden on Friday afternoon, but was so foggy from lack of sleep that I forgot immediately what I put where. Sunflowers, nasturtiums, wildflowers, carrots and chard... I'll just have to wait and see what pops up. My oxalis is flowering, tradescantia are taking off, inside cherry tomato has more fruit, and all four remaining chilli plants are bearing fruit or starting to flower now, despite the aphid infestation. Seeds planted in the polytunnel last week are sprouting.. french beans, romanesco, aubergine, onions. Got up to watch planets aligning, but didn't see them. Saw sunrises instead. Watched Y Tu Mama Tambien and The Lady in the Van. Made a website for The Tiffin so I don't have to depend on facebook to check their menu. This was the first time I've made a simple website in years and ohemgee the state of the ecosystem. It's amazing. The CSS Grid? The browser dev tools? Lightyears ahead of what I remember. Started another crochet project.. writing the pattern for this one. Went on an adventure to Glenrothes and Falkland and around.
Finished The Lefthanded Booksellers of London. Resumed and finished The Overstory; it's a hard read. Started Five Ideas to Fight For but so far that's just making me as mad as twitter does. Purple sprouting broccoli was ready to harvest when I got back. Two new inside tomatoes have appeared on the scraggly monstrosity I should have kicked out ages ago but didn't. Covid finally arrived in my life. Presumably from London. Sealed myself in my flat and ordered groceries for delivery like it's 2020. Worked on planning application document scrapers for Woodland Trust and i18n stuff for BODS. Crochet slippers are not going well, so sidetracked on a tea cosy and a scarf. Very sensible episode of the DID Rubric podcast aired. Cooked and baked some things. Watched Raya and the Last Dragon, both disney Atlantis movies, and Treasure Planet. Share offer extended for the co-operatively owned wind farm being built on the West Coast of Scotland. If you're in the UK you should really check it out.
Still in covid isolation most of the week; mornings okay, but fatigue hitting like a ton of bricks in the afternoons. Tested negative on Saturday. Crocheted a tea cosy. Worked on BODS and Woodland Trust and logistics for May CoGM though. Seem to be more productive with covid than not. Made ugali, or some approximation thereof, from maize flour. Had Max for a day. Then Lowenna for the weekend. Max came to play as well and they are too cute together. Did loads of work in the gardens, including giving my footpath garden an overhaul with mushroom compost. Almost caught up with season 2 of Picard and watched a couple more Uncanny Counters. Read a lot of Ender's Shadow.