AH SURE AZURE

Author: Kathy

  • Marmalading

    Marmalading

    It seems like an age since I bought a bag of bitter seville oranges and filled the kichen with the exciting tangy aroma of these citrus treats. What a way to warm your body and soul in January when the promise of sunshine and Spanish holidays arrives in the little mesh bag in our shops.

    Since then we have had snow storms and bitter winds. But my jar of home made marmalade has indeed brought a smile to my face in the mornings, lathered on top of brown soda bread and butter. My ultimate comfort food. Some thing about the bitterness of the soda bread combining with the texture of the orange rind.

    As a child I helped every year with the marmalade production. The Universal Marmalade Cutter was put to good use every year. I assumed everyone had one.

    IMG_4775But my friends were bemused when I produced it. It is actually on etsy as a cute antique.

    Using my mother’s recipe, which was sketchy at best, the first batch didn’t set. I implored her to make it set. She sadly passed away last September and I hoped she might still be able to help me in my predicament. But no, I am on my own with her cookbook from now on.

    As I cook, her phrases come to me and so much of my methods are learned from her. I get huge comfort from this connection. One of the wonderful things about cooking is this tremendous tradition that links us back generations.

    IMG_4535

    The top of the page is marked ‘Good. I always make this’. There are recipes in the book written by us as children. It is strange to recognise your sister’s childish writing or your brother’s bold capitals.

    A thousand moments are captured within its pages.

    IMG_4793 (more…)

  • Sands of Time

    Sands of Time

    The sun enticed me to the beach today.

    A privilege of country living is being able to capture moments like this. The rippling of the waves brings peace.

    I thought of Keats’ wonderful lines:

    Oh, ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired, 
        Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea; 
            Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude, 
        Or fed too much with cloying melody— 
            Sit ye near some old Cavern’s Mouth and brood, 
    Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired! 

    Nature has a powerful way of allowing you to connect with yourself and what is really going on inside.

    Now I didn’t come across any sea nymphs or anything but I thought of my sister who left us four years ago on this day. The sea still comes in and out and always will long after we are gone. It leaves marks on the sand that are gone the next time the tide comes in. I suppose this is what they mean by the sands of time. Always shifting but never disappearing. When someone you love is taken away, other things you love still remain such as the sea, sun and fresh air.

    I thought of Neptune the God of the Sea – even he cannot hold the tide back. Last night I went to see the Justice League, a movie featuring Superheroes where there was an awesome pale blue eyed Neptune, complete with Trident. He managed to hold back a few floods in order to ‘save the world’ but even he was pushed back eventually.

    I have a metaphor for my efforts to change my career. Its from Castaway with Tom Hanks. There is a coral reef about 200 metres out from the beach that he has to get past before he can paddle out into the wide ocean. The waves break on it continually and he has wounded himself on the sharp coral many times. He spends his days devising methods to get himself past the reef, designing rafts and failing time and again. Eventually he uses an old piece of corrugated plastic that washed up on the beach and puts a makeshift sail on it. The wind in the sail gives him enough momentum to get beyond the reef, allowing him to journey back to civilisation.

    The wind in my sails has been my friends offering me a country retreat while I paddle past the rocks of convention so I can start forging a new way of life.

    It has been exciting so far but I hope I don’t have to get picked up by a liner in order to make it wherever I am going. I am going ahead with a mind ‘open to everything and attached to nothing’ – thank you Wayne Dyer.

    DSC_0720

    Not  exactly a Coral Reef but what sun on a Winter’s day.

    DSC_0728

    Patterns left from the ebb and flow of the sea.

    DSC_0732

    Bright winter sunshine on the wet sand.

  • The Slimy Molluscs

    The Slimy Molluscs

    Sludge

    Molluscs are the second largest Phylum in the Animal Kingdom. How do I know that?

    Because I am studying Organic Horticulture and our last assignment was studying Slugs and Snails.slug sketch

     

    Why do I need to know about Slugs & Snails?

    So that I realise that they live in the dark and wet parts of the world, the shady cracks under stones and leaves, basically, in the Sludge.

    The hint is in the name. Onomatopoeia and assonance never worked so well. Words that begin with Sl and even better, SLu, bring to mind oozing wetness such as we have never felt since we were children experimenting in the garden, before our parents spotted us. The joy of mud cakes as a child. We need to learn textures when we are children because we sure as H–ll are not going to get down and dirty when we are grown up.

    So why does a horticulturalist need to know where a slug thrives? Apologies to all vegan out there, but it is so we can exterminate them. In a situation where we cannot use pesticides or anything that will harm other animals or birds, we have to use methods such as drowning them in beer, squishing them or poisoning them with iron phosphate.

    Knowing that they will multiply and come forth when it rains gives us the tipoff to bring out our arsenal of weaponry to the garden at the appropriate moment. It is the cabbages or them and quite often it is them who survive leaving the poor brassica looking like a skeleton.

    We also learn that their sense of smell is keen but their eyes, which are at the top of two revolving tentacles sticking up off their head, is poor. These tentacles are also used to smell. They like the smell of beer. How does a beer loving, cabbage eating, revolving tentacled animal end up living in sludge? Our is not to understand the ways of nature. Ours is to know that some slugs produce a calcium enriched mucus slime that forms a shell. they are called snails or escargots, the French delicacy. This occurs mostly in the city where slugs can eat more eggshells for calcium.

    So even a Gollum like creature can perform minor miracles in its nether kingdom of sludge!