An autumn warmer for World Vegetarian Day

October 1, 2017

An autumn warmer for World Vegetarian Day

Is there any better time than World Vegetarian Day to find a new, meat-free way to embrace the flavours of autumn? Check out my warm, easy-going family-pleaser: Comforting Bean Stew.

The season has now well and truly turned – it’s the time when my trusty cast-iron casserole comes out, along with the spice jars, rolling pin and my stockpile of hearty storecupboard ingredients. My sofa is piled high with cushions and throws, abandoned crochet projects get finished and I rediscover the pleasure of thick socks and my flowery DMs.

So, looking at a couple of abandoned cooking apples in the fruit bowl and cool rain running down the window one day last week, I thought it was a day for hot pot. With a whole day of writing ahead of me, and a full schedule of errands after the school run, the idea of something simmering on the stove all day felt like the best option.

The result was a warm, thick, beany stew which I served with a warm, fresh, crusty loaf (the breadmaker’s first outing of the season as well).

Comforting beany hot pot

Serves 4

1 tablespoon oil

1 onion, chopped

2 carrots, peeled and sliced

1 teaspoon each of ground turmeric, garam masala, corriander, cumin, paprika, ginger

1 cooking apple, peeled, cored and cut into chunks

1 mug of dried beans

1/2 mug pearl barley

300ml vegetable stock

Method

Put a large, lidded, heavy casserole pot on the stove to warm. Pop in the oil and let it warm too.

Meanwhile, rinse the beans and barley and rinse thoroughly. Place in a separate pan and cover with cold water, bring to the boil and simmer vigorously for 10 minutes.

Add the onion to the casserole pan and allow it to soften but not brown.

Add the carrots and apple, mix a little and then add the spices, along with a little salt and pepper to taste.

When warmed through, well coated and starting to cook, add the beans and barley, when they’ve finished bubbling.

Add the hot stock and mix well. Pop on the lid.

Leave for 8 hours (which will seem like eternity if like me, you work from home) but return now and again to check water levels. Bear in mind the barley and beans will thicken the stew as it cooks.

It’s ready when the beans are soft and the barley is plump.

Put the butter dish and bread in the middle of the table along with the casserole dish and call everyone for dinner. It’s also great with a little strong cheddar crumbled on the top – it melts in wonderfully.

*a note on beans*

I have jars of beans in my cupboard – red kidney, cannellini, flageolet, yellow split peas, green lentils – and a mix of these usually does the trick. You can choose to use as few or as many varieties as you like. Some supermarkets do a great line in mixed beans (the best is Waitrose’s ten-bean mix). Some people soak their beans overnight but I find this can ruin their texture. Simmering them for 8 hours or more should be more than enough to make them good to eat.

If you don’t have the time or you’d rather not buy dried beans, 2 tins of canned beans will do. Reduce the cooking time or the beans will reduce to goo. If you still use pearl barley (the comforting thickness it adds is well worth it), you’ll still need to cook the stew for a couple of hours.

Earthy smells and riotous colours – I love running in autumn. With darker mornings and evenings, there’s more reason to make sure I sharpen my schedule to make sure I keep moving. Check out my plus-size running posts if you need a little inspiration.

Please like & share:

September 6, 2016September 6, 2016

Why I never give up on new beginnings

Autumn. A time when nature starts to shut up shop for the winter and the humans turn their attention to retreating indoors for cooler, darker days. Odd that it’s also a time of new beginnings, but it is.

And it’s not just the new term that I’m talking about: although whether you’re a four-year-old starting school or a forty-eight-year-old beginning the final year of your Masters, there’s the potential for new books, new people and new ideas.

It’s the concept of the summer providing a fire gap. On one side, the wind up of the old term, work schedules geared towards taking time off for a holiday and a season of barbecue weekends and cold beer in the garden. Then the disruption to the normal routine – whether there’s kids at home or not – and eventually a return to what went before.

Or is it? Do we really go back to what went before?

I spent some time working as a childminder a few years ago and during August the phone would ring off the hook with new enquiries: usually women who, with the upcoming new term, were re-evaluating their employment status or taking on new studies.

Likewise, it would seem that some women re-evaluate every aspect of their lives as they edge towards autumn, including their bodies. Social media has been wall-to-wall this morning with introspective comments, some positive, most negative, about how lazy and unfit people feel. Is this really the case? Could it be that with children back at school and/or the distractions of summer out of the way, there’s some time and space for these women to think about who they are and where they are heading?

The new term brings new beginnings for everyone, I guess.

So, I started running again this morning. I walked around the supermarket afterwards, remembering the buzz and how strong my legs feel. And despite missing the lazy, warm days of summer with my children, how exhilarating it is to be out alone under the trees, with this new beginning stretching out in front of me.

I love the chance to start again, no matter how many times I’ve done it before.

Thinking of new beginnings yourself? If you’re looking for inspiration, check out my Top Ten Tips for Plus Size Running and for a little motivation, why we should ignore the doubters and just get out there for the sake of our heart health. If you want a giggle, there’s my retort to Nicole Arbour’s fattist outburst and if you’re looking for a re-stabilising moment of calm, what the body obsessed modern world can learn from an ancient Tibetan proverb.

Please like & share:

October 22, 2015

Do You Fallow? Why We All Need The Season Of Rest

The pumpkin season is upon us – they’ve been in the shops for weeks and these plump orange friends, along with the ghoulish outfits and chocolate eyeballs also on the market shelves, herald the fact that the commercially busy time of Halloween is not far away.

Whether you intend to hunker behind tightly closed curtains to escape the trick or treaters, or you’re likely to embrace the evening with a glass of something warm and alcoholic around the barbeque after taking the kids around the neighbourhood, I think it’s way too easy to miss the real value of the season.

Let me explain.

I’ve always disliked autumn.

Or rather I’ve tried to dislike autumn but despite myself, I’ve always found too much to enjoy: iridescent red/brown trees; leaves falling like snowflakes; hidden fungi and bright shiny conkers like gifts in the grass – all pleasures I have reluctantly and even guiltily fallen in love with.

Conkers — Little shiny gifts in the grass

Now, I really do love summer and I am very open and up front about this. Where do I start? Is it the rosé left to lose its chill on a patio table, or warm sand in between your toes while catching the drips coming down a cornet or the disorientating but quietly pleasing first afternoon of the school holidays? For me, the pleasures of summer are deep seated and long awaited.

And then the year turns and autumn slips in while you’re not looking. New shoes are polished, shirts buttoned and hair pig-tailed for the new term, the warm sunshine always seeming to last a little longer than expected. The green lawn you battled with over the summer has become brown with leaves, the blades of grass stumpy as their growth slows.

Before you know it, October happens, leaves drop in the strengthening winds and one morning you wake to suspect that someone might have tampered with your alarm because suddenly your feet are hitting the floor while it’s pitch black outside.

For me, this is where the wait starts. With every leaf that falls is the latent desire, almost an impatience, for the buds of spring.

That is, until now.

For now I feel I understand a little more of what it’s about and it all started with a conversation about the festival of Samhain.

I will explain at this point that I am not a witch or a Wiccan. I’m pretty happy for most people to go about whatever route to spiritual satisfaction they wish but I’m not one for being persuaded to any particular faith: I’m more of a spiritual tourist, you might say.

A friend of mine mentioned she was having a fire feast for Samhain – which, through many permutations has become what most know as Halloween. I’m no expert, so I’ll offer no comprehensive definitions here (although it is well worth a look up on the web) but what I did glean from our conversation was the notion of fallow: the fire feast being the last of the harvest festivals, the start of a new year and the beginning of a season of rest.

The fire would have served to not only dispose of the by-products of harvest but also to light, celebrate and appease – an opportunity to clear out and hang out after a long period of intense activity and hard work.

This led me to think that we have no sensible concept of rest in our modern 24/7 365 world. Even our sleep has to be discussed, prodded, analysed. Are we getting enough? Is our bed suitable? An article I read the other day asked ‘Have you scheduled down time?’ (Scheduling ‘down time’? Surely a more obvious oxymoron has never existed.)

But fallow season? This denotes a stoppage. The trees will drop their leaves until their branches are bare. The bracken will die back to the earth. Some mammals retreat to their burrows and sleep until spring.

It’s shut down time: the earth has pressed the restart button.

I have decided this is what has always bothered me the most about autumn: the return indoors until spring. During the summer, as long as it is light, I am outside washing the car, the windows or pottering in the garden. I pop out for some shopping or hang washing at four o’clock in the afternoon, safe in the knowledge that it will be dry by ten. I run by the river, ride my bike over to the park with my daughter for a go on the swings before bed or laugh with my friends over wine, while the bees work the flowers in the pub garden.

But up until now I have not understood that the fallow season a necessary rest, not just a reluctant temporary stoppage. That this is not a death: only a sleep and a vital one at that.

It is not a time of inactivity, just a different form of activity.

It is a time to regroup, to learn new skills, to deepen and develop relationships.

Just as, below the ground, the trees will store their nutrients, ready for leaves and fruit the following year, we as human beings need to do the same. I feel like we have lost our concept of rest – light bulbs and televisions illuminating the spaces we used to sleep in during the winter. And as air freight has made it possible to purchase strawberries long beyond autumn, I believe we have lost the concept of harvest and how grateful those who have gone before have been for it.

I’m not suggesting that we go back to the dark ages before electricity and ample food but what I am suggesting is that some of the anxieties we have today (mine being the waste of time retreating indoors presents) arise from our lack of connection with the turning seasons, the cycles of life and the inevitability of death.

We need to remember that we are merely earthly observers and although we have learned to tinker (quite effectively, in some cases) with the outcomes of these turnings, there has to be more than a going with the flow – when it comes to the inevitable changes the year (and indeed life) throws at us, there has to be an active engagement.

So, in a break from what has gone before, I’m going to enjoy the fallow season this year. I’m going to dust off the board games, find my crochet needles scattered around the house and browse awhile my collection of dog-eared food magazines for well-loved recipes.

We’ll pull on walking boots and sweaters to catch the odd, brief, bright day and enjoy the sun’s ingress through the leafless branches.

We’ll laugh as we wipe marmalade muffin crumbs off our hibernation blankets on a Sunday afternoon.

And we’ll talk, reconnect, read, learn and enjoy the fallow season, all rested and ready to re-emerge in spring, ready for a new year.

Please like & share:

September 15, 2015

A Cornishwoman on retreat – or how to fit Eat Pray Love into five days

Having read the book Eat Pray Love twice and seen the Julia Roberts film too many times to mention, I guess you could say that Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoire about discovery and fulfilment across Italy, India and Indonesia has always struck a resonant chord with me.
And never more so than now. Having left my son in his bed and my daughter on a railway platform with her father, I waved goodbye to my life for five days yesterday, in favour of sitting in an attic room in the Dordogne in front of an open window to finish my novel.

In the week leading up to my departure, while I was busy preparing myself for my trip and the household for its abandonment, something caught my attention: the number of family and friends who approached me and told me, quite independently, how this writers’ retreat would be about far more than finishing my novel. Quite flippantly, I’d smile and ask if they’d like another cup of tea/biscuit/roast potato.

But these words were not entirely lost on me. After the unreality of yesterday’s flight (my first ever) and sitting quietly watching the yellow evening light of the Dordogne basting the turning leaves and bracken before dinner, my old friend insomnia crept into my room in the night to remind me that these days are real and this is my life.

So, sitting in my bed watching the sun come up I’ve decided that what links Gilbert’s introspective tale of eating, meditating and falling in love to my own journey are the themes of trust, amnesia and a space for total immersion.

I don’t have a year and an ashram to explore these things but I did have the most delightful spaghetti dish for dinner last night and draw some comfort from the fact that every other writer here has left their children in the hands of someone they love in order to find the space they need to write.

Will I be able to sum up my trip in three simple words? Will five days be enough to find myself? Will I like what I find?

Who knows. For now, it’s time to find my running shoes and get some Dordogne morning air before settling down at my desk in front of the window.

Please like & share:

March 22, 2015March 22, 2015

Spring Apples

Sunday morning and a tale of an apple lost and some memories found.

The other day I lost an apple – it was a russet, my favourite. At the supermarket, I’d spent some time picking the most russeted but slightly soft ones in the box, all the while checking for bruising and placed them carefully in a plastic bag. But when I got home and unpacked my shopping, I was most distraught to find that I was one short.

Retracing my steps, I examined every nook and cranny from the car to my kitchen worksurface but it was clear that the apple had gone. It was lost. There were only two remaining and they would have to do.

Russets are really important to me. I grew up exploring my granddad’s rambling garden and one side of it was devoted entirely to fruit trees: apples, raspberries, gooseberries and pears. His apple trees were no usual apple trees though. He had little seen varieties such as American Mother but my favourite were always the Russets. Each tree had been carefully grafted onto the rootstock of a different tree to maximise durability and yield, so below the branches, the patch looked not unlike a collection of disjointed knees.

I’d spend days of spring treading carefully over the mulch on the floor as the white petals of the blossom fell like snow on to the dark, carefully laid bark. And then came the buds of fruit that would grow as the days grew and then continued as the days started to die away. Each weekend I’d check them for ripeness and make do with picking the wild strawberries on the hedge for my free sweetness hit.

The well drained lawn alongside would become like straw in the hot summer sun and then green again as rainy days became more numerous with the turning year but still the fruit would be too hard, the tree too unyielding.

Then one day I would turn up at my Granddad’s house and the apple boxes would be out. These were the boxes that lived some of the year stacked in the outhouse. There was an unmistakable musty smell in the outhouse. Granddad had an old butler’s sink that always smelled of surgical spirit and soap (he would wash out there in the summer) and amongst the dusty mud on the floor there would be wood shavings from some project or other he was finishing. The smell of oil mixed with that of stored potatoes and freshly chopped onions (he often prepared food out there too). At the window, obscured by years of dust, sat old cobwebs over the puckered linseed paint solution Granddad would use on the wooden frames.

A secularist by voice but a sentimentalist by nature, my Russian-born Granddad could find ceremony in anything. He would carry the boxes up the steps and I would know that now was the time for the laying down of the apples.

And this is where Russets come into their own. Eaten straight from the tree, Russets are sharp and crisp (not unlike other apples) but their skins are tough which puts many eaters off. I never ate fresh Russets, however. They were wrapped and rested, their flesh allowed to mature under the rough skin until when they were taken out they were as puckered as the window frame paint and darker brown in colour.

Inside, the fruit was soft on the teeth and buttery in colour – the sharp crispness had almost fermented into a flavour not unlike sweet wine. Using age old methods from the long lost farming family that had raised him, my Granddad could store apples and potatoes from one growing season right round until the next. Under the floor, in the cellar amongst the bottles of cooking oil, old Christmas cards and treasured stored timbers sat the boxes of carefully stored produce, waiting their turn. Apples were rarely eaten fresh.

You’ll be pleased to hear that I eventually found my Russet. It had escaped through a hole in one of my carrier bags and rolled across the floor, ending up underneath one of my kitchen cupboards. On the tiles, below the wooden cupboard doors I thought of cardboard boxes, the wood dust, the oily smell and the puckered paint and thought how lucky I was to have been taught to rest Russets in order to enjoy them at their best. Their sweet, yellowing flesh evading the supermarket shoppers who don’t know that the addition of time turns this hard, inaccessible fruit into a soft, sweet delight that seems to evoke autumn, even in the hard days of winter and the brighter light of spring, when the closing days of the previous year are a memory way out on the other side of Christmas.

Apple under the cupboard — An apple lost, some memories found.

Apples oranges and parsley — There’s something satisfying with placing a wood-coloured apple into a wooden bowl.

This is why each apple is carefully placed into the wooden fruit bowl and allowed to rest until the skin tells me it’s ready to eat. The kind of skills my Granddad had for storing food have been lost with the eternal harvest that is the supermarket but at least I can keep the spirit of it alive with each rested, puckered apple.

And there they sit, a symbol of autumn ready to eat on a spring day and my mind tumbles back to the closing months of my Granddad’s life. His wish was that he would see the blossom of another spring and I believe in honour of his beloved apples, he managed to make it through to autumn too.

Please like & share: