Food Made Slowly: Pickled Ash Keys

I love food. Probably too much.

I also like trying new foods. Living in Los Angeles, I had access to just about every cuisine imaginable available to me within 5-10 miles. One of the most difficult things about moving from West Los Angeles to rural Fife was getting used to the fact that if I wanted halfway decent Mexican or Chinese food (or any other ethnicity that wasn't a part of the British empire), I needed to learn to cook it myself. When I left the Scottish countryside for the outskirts of metropolitan Cardiff, the greatest consolation was the availability of Continental, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, African/Caribbean, Indian, and Halal markets. When looking for housing, one of our biggest problems was finding a house with a kitchen big enough to accommodate our accumulation of herbs, spices, and sauces from different cuisines (not to mention my homemade pickles, preserves, brews, and infusions).

As much as I love eating a variety of world foods though, I recognize that living in the UK and eating a diet heavy in exotic produce isn't particularly sustainable. So, alongside my attempts to up my game in Thai, Mexican, Ethiopian, and Korean cooking, I'm also trying to learn about foraging for local wild foods, herbs and spices, and plant-based medicine.

In Los Angeles, I was never close enough to wild spaces to even think about foraging, but when our nearest neighbor was about a mile away, it was easy to look at all the green (and yellow, and red, and purple) growing things around me and wonder which of them might be useful. I still consider myself a very novice forager, but I'm learning to identify and use new plants all the time, most of them just by keeping my eyes open during my daily 1-mile walk to the train station. It's amazing the variety of useful and/or edible living things I've encountered just within the village: hawthorn, brambles, nettles, plantain, cow parsley, common hogweed, ground ivy, elder, red valerian, garlic mustard, herb Robert, and ivy-leaved toadflax. (To my great disappointment, I haven't yet found any local ground elder, sweet cicely, or wild garlic).

Ash keys in situ

I subscribe to a number of mailing lists and Facebook groups about identifying and using wild plants, and a while ago, I got an email containing a recipe for pickled ash keys. At the time, I didn't even know what an ash key was, let alone whether or not I'd like them pickled, but a couple of weeks ago, I noticed several clusters of the seed pods hanging from a row of ash trees about 50 yards from my front doorstep, so I looked up the recipe again. I still have no idea whether I'll like them, but I've been in a pickling mood recently, and for the cost of two cups of vinegar, a few spices, and an hour of my time, I figured they were worth a try.

Crochet project: Jute Basket

The Viking/Victorian shirt has been hibernating recently, partly due to indecision over a minor construction detail, and partly because all of my limited supply of energy has been devoted to my application for Indefinite Leave to Remain (aka permanent residency) in the UK. I've continued to make some things, but they tend to be either brainless chipping away at slow, tedious projects (like stitching over the anachronistic metal eyelets on my wedding cotehardie, or knocking out a few more embroidery motifs on my early 19th century shift), or quick, instant-gratification type things like baking, making lemon curd, or gathering elderflowers for cordial.

Today's post is about one such instant-gratification project: a basket/bag crocheted from jute garden twine.

Sewing Project: Viking-Victorian Shirt, part 1

I hate shopping for clothes.

I'm 5'11" and 205 pounds, not terribly curvy, and I have an abnormally long abdomen. This means I'm too big for "normal" sizes, but don't really fill out most plus-size clothes. Store-bought clothes are invariably too short in the legs, sleeves, and waist and too tight in the thighs.

Mmmm, stripes.

In the US, after years of trial and error, I found a few shops that carry basic items that don't look horrible on me, but in the UK, I'm at a loss. Up to now, my solution has mostly been to not buy new clothes, but after nearly five years, my work wardrobe is now looking a bit shabby.

In an attempt to remedy the situation, I looked through my fabric stash to see whether I had anything that could be turned into business casual attire. After a bit of rummaging, I turned up five yards of cotton shirting with a subtle woven stripe. I originally bought it thinking I would make a Regency gown, but I've carried it for something like 8 years across two continents, and I don't really have any 19th century costumed events to attend here, so I might as well use it for something a bit more practical.

Spring Thaw

Oh my, it has been a while, hasn't it?

Since I last posted here, rather a lot has happened, while at the same time, not very much has happened at all.

Pickles and Pottery

Today's post falls at the intersection of two seemingly unrelated hobbies: pottery and fermentation.

The fermentation started innocently enough in college with just the odd batch of mead. Then, sometime in 2006/7, one of my coworkers heard that I make mead, and mentioned that she'd just made some T'ej (Ethiopian honey wine) from a recipe that called for no yeast (or rather, wild yeast that occurs naturally in the air of your kitchen). Intrigued, I asked to see the recipe, and she loaned me her copy of Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz.

I'd been taught that, to make mead successfully, everything that came in contact with the must (mead before it's fermented) had to be carefully sanitized and controlled or else the mead would be spoiled--or worse, make you violently ill. The T'ej recipe, however, said that it was perfectly possible to get a good fermentation by just leaving your must covered with just a cloth to keep out bugs and dust for a few days before putting an airlock on it. My coworker who'd made the T'ej insisted that it came out great, and that she'd suffered no ill effects from drinking it, apart from a slight hangover.

I flipped through the rest of the book, finding recipes for all sorts of interesting stuff like kombucha, yogurt, and kimchi. I'd tried making pickles before, using a recipe in The Joy of Cooking that involved putting cucumbers in spiced vinegar, but I found the results extremely sour and unappetizing. After the recipe, there was a cryptic warning that while it's possible to make pickles in brine instead of vinegar, but it's far too complex and requires too much specialized equipment to be attempted in a domestic kitchen. Yet here was this book, telling me that brined pickles are easy and don't require anything that isn't already in most kitchens or easily acquired from a thrift shop.

Interlude: Bead Jewelry

I had originally intended to follow the previous post on my herringbone linen tunic with a bit of a rant about historical accuracy and what we label "accurate" vs. "fantasy" and the social signals we send when doing so, but since the discussion thread that inspired the rant is now a couple of months distant, I've decided to let it lie for the time being. Instead, I'm going to show you some shiny things that I made.

I don't often wear jewelry (apart from a few pieces that rarely get changed out, like piercing jewelry and my wedding-ish ring), but I enjoy making it.  I don't consider myself a particularly skilled jewelry-maker since I don't know the first thing about soldering, casting, wire-wrapping, or any number of other techniques, but I can tie knots in a string and I'm pretty handy with a pair of needle-nose pliers.  Recently, I got a hankering for some new bead necklaces and had a rummage though my supplies.  These are the results:

First finished object of 2015: the Black Herringbone Linen Tunic

Right, so, this post was supposed to go up at the end of January, except that a combination of insufficient natural light to photograph a black garment, other priorities besides blogging that took up most of my creative energy, and some good old-fashioned procrastination got in the way.  Better late than never though, right?

This week (i.e. the last week of January), I am very pleased to report about my first finished project of 2015: the black herringbone linen tunic. This was a (relatively) quick project, begun over the Christmas holiday using a remnant of some fabric that I bought for my husband's wedding clothes. (I confess I might have bought a *teeny* bit more than I strictly needed.) My aim was to create something that would work equally well as either modern or Medieval(ish) clothing, and that would be comfortable and go together quickly but still incorporate some decorative details.