Planting garlic

Posted on November 5, 2016 by Ralph Bullivant

Today I got round to planting the garlic I had bought from Bantry Market more than two months ago.

I got to the stall on the last Friday of the holiday. I was grey and wet and I came away with a brown paper bag with about ten bulbs of garlic in it. When we got home it went into the basement and I almost forgot about it.

A few weeks ago I started to prepare for the planting by spreading a some bucketfuls of sludge from the bottom of the compost bin over part of the veg plot.

This morning I went down into the basement and spent time trying to find the brown paper bag. It had been moved as part of the general clear up for a party that took place last weekend.

Once the bag had been found the bulbs were split until I had a small bowl full of white and purple skinned cloves.

I planted them this afternoon six inches down for each of them fearful of squirrels that will no doubt be digging them up tomorrow.

Having done with the planting I went into the greenhouse and found a dozen chillies that has grown since last time I was in there despite the minimal care and attention they had received.

In the meantime we have been eating fish. Lunch was a soup made with white beans and smoked haddock and this evening we have had a fish curry.

We have spent most of the day listening to weird folk music and the snap crackle and darg of fireworks.

72 hours in Prague

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Ralph Bullivant

You could have been reading this and come away thinking that the highlight of a long weekend spent in Prague was any given time I was sat in a smokey bar with a small rotund glass of beer in front of me.

Whilst that might be close to the truth it is not quite the whole story.

Mid-morning on Sunday I found myself standing in front of the Memorial to the victims of communism. There was a gaggle of tourists taking pictures but they soon went and I was left alone for a while to look up at the fractured faces in metal.

I had been intending to go walking up amongst the streets under the castle and to test out the warning in the guidebook about taking photos outside the US Embassy. But as I walked I could see green paths leading up the Petrin Hill.

It was difficult to resist the temptation and so I turned left and headed up walking through apple trees. There were not many people up there although there was the occasional runner – probably just allowed out from the US Embassy.

As I walked up I would turn back every so often and more of the city was laid out in front of me.

There was still a morning light in the air and there was some chill left over from the night before, the chill had caught with the warm flow of the river and there was a faint mist that rose above the city and its buildings. If you were going to have to look back over Prague it was difficult to think it might be more beautiful.

As I got to the top end of the path on which was walking there was a graffitied covered bench that offered a good place to stop. I sat down and looked out over the city.

In the distance I could see in grey the church around which I had walked the previous morning and amongst the red rooftops the streets I had stomped looking for beer and good pork products. There was a stillness about it all and around me on the hill crows and the dirty pink flash of a jackdaw flitted through the apple trees.

I could feel myself settling into the bench and the view. There wasn’t much to disturb me for twenty minutes or so save to watch how the mist dispersed in the light.

Then another runner came past and I took myself off to walk under a limp American flag.

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Later that evening I was able to find another good rotund glass of beer. It was in a half hidden bar across from the hotel. I was clearly an aberration stood at the bat but tolerated all the same. Some of the walls in the bar had been covered in old egg cartons presumably to absorb the thick fog of tobacco and the noise from the four men of indeterminate age sat by the door who seemed to be the recipients of a never ending stream of full glasses.

Quince

Posted on October 30, 2016 by Ralph Bullivant

It is quince season again and there was a tray of them in the greengrocers yesterday.

I bought three with the intention of using them in a stew of some sort.

Back at home I went through the books to see if I could find some inspiration.

Pleasingly I found three books that gave me almost the exact same recipe; Jane Grigson’s Good Things, Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food and then more recently Sabrina Ghayour’s Sirocco.

All of them required lamb and onion to be cooked in oil, then seasoned (this evening – cinnamon, saffron and turmeric), covered in water and cooked slowly for an hour or so.

In the meantime quince, peeled, cored and quartered, was fried in butter until it took on some colour. It was then added to the lamb for the final half hour.

We ate it with rice.

It was good food to be had with the darkening late afternoon after I had reconstructed a pond and done my bit for global warming with a fire of dried leaves.

72 hours in Prague

Posted on October 30, 2016 by Ralph Bullivant

Sadly I could not spend the rest of the afternoon in my new favourite bar as I had a destination with lunch.

We had gone to U Medvidku a couple of years ago and I was determined to go back. Last time we were there we had made the mistake of sitting down in the vast beer hall downstairs only to be pointed towards the back and up some stairs in order to find where the beer was made.

This time I was able to stride through the bar hall without the need of direction. Most of the tables seemed to be full of people eating a hearty lunch but I had other things on my mind.

In the small room upstairs I was able to find a seat directly opposite one of the wooden barrels where beer was being made. A man in an apron asked me what I wanted and so I asked for a glass of Oldgott. He marked a piece of paper with a pencil stroke and put it on the table and walked five yards to the end of the room from where he poured the beer from one of the small copper taps poking out of a wooden counter. He brought it over and put it in front of me together with a menu.

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The food was mostly meat of one sort or other with dumplings or cabbage. I had deer in a rosehip sauce with red cabbage. Every so often I looked up at the man as he walked past and he would walk back with another glass and make another pencil mark on the piece of paper on my table.

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An hour or so later and replete with Oldgott I walked out into the light. It had been raining as I ate my lunch and the tourists were wrapped in bright plastic. I glided past them and through the crowds around the Old Clock Tower and the incessant taking of pictures with selfie sticks across the Charles Bridge.