Ireland - The Burren

The Burren, a barren area of Western Ireland, is absolutely beautiful and home to a really great perfumery that uses many native plants/flowers to create really localised products. You can see their products here. Otherwise, just scroll through the photos. :)

Some of the local colourful bits

A killer porter cake, and I mean that literally it had walnuts in it and they didn't tell me! Cue me wanting to vomit and being covered in hives!

savoury scone

The Burren

Local mayor

At the meadow

A stroll from the farm to the family meadow on a lovely summers day. It was nice until a marchfly decided to bite me three times. Ow!

Even in the middle of nowhere you get the quintessential shirtless Polish man.

The Beauty of the Winter and the North East

I think sometimes human words are irrelevant, especially when it comes to the beauty of nature. Marty and I often talk about life and what it will hold for us in the future. Being people who speak multiple languages, albeit mine aren't great, we think and dream about what to do as we have a great thing called choice now.

We love that the world is so "easy" to travel around, and that there are so many options open to us. But, there is always a but, we never know what to do, we are, as the saying goes "spoilt for choice".

Almost all of my students and most everyone I meet in Poland will ask "Why are you here? You could be in Australia in the sun!", I laugh and tell them, "I actually like Poland! Its seasons, its people, and its food." They all think I am "A crazy Australian!" and shake their collective heads. When my family came here for my recent wedding my father repeated ad nauseum that "Poland is nice, but how can you live in such cold conditions, the weather is horrid", he would remind me every time I saw him. His other favourite saying was "I feel like a Christmas turkey in all these layers of clothes".

However, if we are ever to leave Poland, I think one of the things I would miss most of all is indeed the weather. It would be very hard to leave the snow behind. I know it is cold, wet, numbing, almost painful and hence horrid when you are waiting for a tram, or walking somewhere before the paths have been cleaned. That is something Polish people (and me at times) forget, that the paths are labouriously cleaned by the amazing people of the city of Warsaw. I still wonder how they survive out there for hours at a time cleaning snow from footpaths, roads, and transport stops. Sometimes feeling, like it is as my father-in-law said to me at Christmas, after I had done my shovelling duty for an hour and a half, "impossible to beat the weather. Winter always wins".

That said to me, the winter is gorgeous, the air is crystalline, it is almost tasty because it is so clean. I love it when you get a little whiff of someone's wood fire burning as you stroll about town or in Sokolka when I am out with the camera. I am still a huge kiddy at heart and get great pleasure out of seeing my own breath emanate from my mouth, I make snow balls while I wait for the tram. I love the cracking of ice underneath a layer of snow when we have had a little thaw. I also love not having a car so I can look at the ice formations on windscreens, as I trot through the snow to work, with a sense of wonder and enjoyment rather than thinking about having to scrape it off myself as in England, when I would curse frost for putting me a whole massive 5 minutes behind schedule. Something that really, in the grand scheme of things, is irrelevant, but at the time when you have numb fingers and 6 windows to clear seems like some sort of world-stopping event.

So this post is a tribute to Winter, my frigid cold mistress. She loves me in her own way, she loves to envelop me in her tentacle-like arms when I am up early in the morning going to the far side of the city. She loves to tickle me under the chin, if I forget to do my scarf up high enough and she will hold my hand till it turns blue, if I forget my gloves. But, I know why. She does this so that I don't forget her and take her for granted. So that I appreciate her for what she is. Lady Winter, my mistress of the start and end of each year, is the one that prepares me for the explosion of Lady Spring who makes my eyes water with her pollens. She gives me a contrasting comparison for the sweaty Miss Summer who will make me sweat and laugh at me for having to wear jeans or long pants (trousers for you UK based people) to work. She is also the result of Granny Autumn who teases my eyes with colour and her bountiful natural foods.

The sky in Winter when clear is freezing, but stunning. I'll trade numb fingers for this easily!
I love how we many people leave the apples on the tree through winter, some say it is because they are a great fertilizer when they fall in spring others know it is just about being lazy.
Mistletoe, the predator of the North East.
Mistletoe up close.
Without electricity, many would be in dire trouble come winter.
Contrasts are what winter is all about.
I am "hooked" on winter. Sorry, horrible pun.

A little sun and we get some thaw.
A little thaw can quickly turn into a river.
Crisp and clean snow melt.
Birch and the lichen that are common here.
The home grove.
Country cats love climbing trees, they only need firemen to save them in the city.
It is hard to see, but the tree is actually sweating!
Clear skies and cat tracks.
Little house on the praire, or at least in the snow.
The crispness of sun and snow is fabulous, but can be a challenge to photograph with so much brighness.
After running around outside for so long I had to come in for a coffee and to sit by the fire. I just admired it from the window for the rest of the day, I might love the colour, the crisp, the clairity, the pristine nature of snow and ice. But, at the end of it all, I still like being warm.

Nettle Beer awwwwway we go.

As I mentioned last blog post, I am always sitting at home thinking about the things I have done in recent times, the things I would like to do in the upcoming times and the things that I would like to do right at that moment. I think I am slowly driving Marta insane with my ideas for goats cheese, ginger beer, fruit wines, anything! If you can name it and make at home I have talked about it.

So, due to me aforementioned affliction, I like to flick through numerous websites. Including, but not exclusively limited to, the really inspiring guys at Blagger (Nik runs a great concept there), Channel 4 Food, I miss watching Landline in Australia, and then there was the TV show the River Cottage from the UK with Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. The latter is where I got the recipe for the nettle beer after trying some in Prague at the beginning of the month last month and being excited. So here it is:

Nettle Beer

Hugh:

"We love nettles at River Cottage, turning them into everything from soup to gnocchi and tagliatelle and, yes, beer."

Ingredients

• 6l water
• A small carrier bag of nettle tops, washed
• Juice of 1 lemon, strained
• Juice of 1 orange, strained
• 750g caster sugar
• 30g cream of tartar
• 5g yeast

Method: How to make nettle ale

1. Bring the water to the boil in a large pan.

2. Add nettles, stir, then remove the pan from the heat and leave to infuse for at least an hour until it is at blood temperature.

3. Carefully - you might want to enlist a helper at this point - strain the nettle liquid through a colander lined with a large piece of unbleached muslin into a large brewing bucket or pan. Once the liquid has filtered through, squeeze the muslin to get the maximum amount of liquid into the bucket.

4. Gradually add the sugar, stirring constantly to ensure it is thoroughly dissolved, then add the cream of tartar, and lemon and orange juice.

5. Finally, once the mixture is tepid, stir in the yeast. Cover and leave for 2-3 days in a warm place, until it’s obviously fermenting.

6. Remove any scum which has risen to the top in fermentation and siphon the beer into sterilised bottles and seal with corks.

7. Leave for at least a couple more days or up to a month before drinking.

What I did:

Picked Large bag of nettles tips (in photographic display)

This guy certainly doesn't look trustworthy, with a face like that and gloved hands and scissors....

Here are the nettle tips

Now they are gone! Where are they?

I think we have found the cause here a major force in weed destruction.

He certainly looks happy with his find, something ready to consume, no doubt!

The proud nettle hunter!

Supporting Sokolka's finest fresh produce.

Then there was a few hours delay between picking them and getting them home. Once home at about 10 at night I started to work. Boiled nettles up in two pots, with 5L of water (4 in one 1 in the other) Then tipped the smaller into the larger pot to sit overnight to get some flavour out of the nettles.

Reboiled the next day to allow the death of any bugs and removed the foamy scum at top

Added juice of 4 lemons (one as per recipe and 3 as I had no crème of Tartar available)

Juice of one large Orange

750g of Caster sugar (certainly seemed a lot!)

Added a little extra water (about 1L to cool down hot mixture)

Then added yeast and allowed to start a little.

Poured all into Demijohn and waited about a week.

So then I was getting excited and started to make preparations. I wanted to bottle it, so sterilised as many as possible, and also brewed up some priming sugar liquid (to make it fizzy), I needed to rack the good part of the beer off so as to separate it from the dead yeast. This was relatively easy as I have 2 demijohns. So I could sterilise one and putthe good clear beer into the other.

The beer smelled more like wine, and quite a lot like Champagne. The taste is a little tart but still not horrible.
I had just about finished bottling, when I realised something, I went back to my calculations and realised I had made double the priming solution!

Some people would think this to be a good thing, but to me exploding bottles and lots of fizz in my beer isn't really what I am looking forward to. So it went all back into the demijohn to ferment a little more to reduce the available sugar. I did keep one bottle out though, it is one in a soft drink container, I have since been slightly letting out the extra CO2 each day. I will probably try it after a week or so.
Then along came a beautiful Saturday, and I thought it was about time to bottle. So we now have 13 bottles of Nettle beer, sitting in the pantry aging and hopefully not exploding.
I did add a small amount of sugar, about a quarter of a teaspoon, to the bottles to give it a little fizz. Fingers crossed now!