(Not up for the chitchat? Completely get it. Click the email title to go to a web-based version then jump straight to the recipe or Cultural Fun.
Apologies for my absence last week. I had my first cold of the season - a real doozy - and wasn’t good for much except taking baths and falling asleep to podcasts. I haven’t felt that washed out since the first time I had Covid. I don’t like feeling feeble - it messes with my self image which is of someone relatively robust who can just KBO.
Anyway. I am more-or-less fully recovered. All that’s wrong with me now are a few residual sniffles and some standard-issue autumn melancholy.
I generally like autumn but I always feel a bit sad at the start of it. Conkers don’t help. Did you play conkers as a kid? My brother and I did, but more out of curiosity at this old-timey game than genuine playground competitiveness. I loved collecting them though. So perfectly shiny - as if they had been polished. And yet within hours that gloss would dull and the seeds begin to shrivel leaving you with nothing but dusty disappointment. An early lesson in the fleetingness of life and the impossibility of holding on to any moment in time? Something like that. A lesson reinforced every autumn when all the leaves fall on the floor…
The other thing that always comes to mind at this time of year is a song we sang at my primary school. I went to a tiny CofE place with quite a happy-clappy headmaster. Assemblies featured various modern hymns accompanied by the strum of his acoustic guitar.
Wikipedia informs me that the one I am thinking of, Autumn Days, is by someone called Estelle White. The first verse goes:
Autumn days, when the grass is jewelled And the silk inside a chestnut shell Jet planes meeting in the air to be refuelled All these things I love so well
I think about it pretty much every time I go for a walk on an autumn day. Which is often. It has a very catchy tune so becomes a near constant autumnal earworm. And it irritates the hell out of me. I have never in my life seen jet planes meeting in the air to be refuelled*. They are not a thing I love so well. What is Estelle White on about? Have you ever seen jetplanes meeting in the air to be refuelled? Even if you have, surely it’s a thing that happens all year round and isn’t especially autumnal?
*Except in the classic Harrison Ford/Gary Oldman action thriller Air Force One. Which is great but was made in 1997, long after Estelle penned Autumn Days.
Upcoming Events: workshops and supper clubs
I’m really looking forward to running more workshops at Home Farm House in Oxfordshire. It’s a beautiful, grade II*-listed farmhouse with a gorgeous kitchen and an adjoining field used as a a no-dig, regenerative market garden by Worthy Earth.
We’ll pick vegetables fresh from the ground and turn them into delicious seasonal ferments. It won’t be sunny like it was in this picture from June but it will still be totally delightful.
There are two dates currently on sale: Friday November 22nd and Friday January 24th.
We’ll make kraut, kimchi and pickles with our freshly-picked veg, enjoy a tasty home-cooked lunch made by Home Farm House’s owner Anita and then investigate vinegar, kombucha and kefir before you go home with jars full of goodness and detailed instructions on how to look after them.
Tickets are £150 but book before October 12th for an early bird discount. Use the code GARDENBIRD for 30% off.
I’ve also got a supper club coming up that I’m super excited about. I’ll be at the Lacy Nook in Walthamstow on November 20th and 27th. The Lacy Nook is a lovely Balkan restaurant just next to the Forest Flora Path community garden where I recently taught a workshop. They’re only open Thursday - Sunday so are giving various chefs the opportunity to use the space on Wednesdays. It’s lovely space too: woody and cosy and fairylit.
You can see the place in this picture of the workshop I did. Obviously there won’t be plastic bowls all over the place during dinner.
I loved the events I did at Lizzy’s but its cafe-in-a-park nature means I couldn’t continue working with the team there outside the summer months. The Lacy Nook has a roof and walls and heating and blankets and everything. So prepare for an autumnal feast.
Menu announcement and ticket link coming next week but for now please save the date!
Lastly, there are some more Dusty Knuckle dates for November, December and January (both fermentation and pasta). These always sell fast so get in there if you want to come.
Dare I say that a ticket for the January class would make good Christmas gift? I think I do and you don’t even have to take my word for it: the 2023 Vittle’s Christmas Gift Guide said as much. Which (apart from the fact they spelt my name wrong) delighted me no end:
Recipe: Sweet Chilli Sauce
I’m old enough to remember the explosion of Thai food in the UK in the early 2000s: the result of the Thai government’s highly successful gastrodiplomacy policy. I was newly resident in London, working in my first job in journalism and enjoying life as an adult (or something that looked like one). Suddenly it seemed as if every other pub had a Thai kitchen and there were also loads of good, inexpensive restaurants where my friends and I could spend our minimal early paychecks on green curry and Pad Thai.
These things swiftly went from exotic to mainstream and on their coattails rode sweet chilli sauce.
There was a time in the late aughts when sweet chilli sauce was completely ubiquitous. The default dip. It came with everything. Pubs served it with chips instead of ketchup. Salads were drizzled in it. It got included in pasta recipes, mixed with cream cheese and used as a topping for hummus.
It was all a bit Too Much. Not least because the stuff on offer was sweet and gloopy and not very nice. Like hearing a song so many times you’re sick of it, I went off sweet chilli sauce for a while.
Fortunately I rekindled my love but it didn’t occur to me until recently to make my own and give it a fermented twist. I make no pretence of authenticity but it makes sense if you think about it. Lots of Thai flavours are fermented: most famously the many varieties of funky, umami-filled fish and seafood pastes and sauces. But fruit, vegetables, grains and meat too.
Like my fermented hot sauce this starts with a brine pickle of chillies, garlic and coriander stalks. If you don’t want to use all the fermented chillies in this sauce (see note about spice levels) then hold some back and I’ll bring you a recipe next week to use them up.
For the ferment
100g red chillis, stalks removed
20g red birds eye chillies, stalks removed
1 bunch coriander (stems only)
1 bulb garlic, cloves separated and peeled
sea salt
For the sauce
200ml brine from the fermented chillies
100ml water
100ml white vinegar
300g sugar
1 tbsp fish sauce
2 lemongrass stalks
1 lime, juiced (peel reserved)
Method
Prepare the ferment. Put the chillies, garlic and coriander stalks in a scrupulously clean jar (something roughly 500ml will do for this quantity). Make a 5% brine (300ml should be enough - eg. 15g salt dissolved in 300ml water). Pour the brine over the chillies and add a pickle weight or something else to keep them submerged (I used half an onion). If you dissolve your salt by heating the water remember to let it return to room temperature before adding it to the chillies or you’ll kill all the microbes. Seal the jar.
Ferment until soft and flavourful. Leave the jar at room temperature, burping occasionally, until the chillies are soft and have developed some “funky” flavours. Probably a couple of weeks.
Strain and blitz the chillies. Remove your pickle weight and drain the chillies, garlic etc. reserving the brine. Blitz them them in a food processor until they form a rough paste. Not too smooth - you want visible bits.
Start the sauce. Measure 200ml of your reserved brine into a pan and add 100ml each of water and white vinegar. Heat gently until the sugar has dissolved then add the fish sauce.
Add the flavour. Add the chilli paste, lime skins (keep the juice to one side for now). Give the lemongrass stalks a bash with a rolling pin or similar heavy object, just to bruise them a bit and add those to the pan too.
Boil until syrupy. Cook on a high heat until the bubbles begin to slow down and the mixture is syrupy.
Finish the sauce. Let the mixture cool down and remove the lemongrass stalk and lime skins. Add the lime juice and mix thoroughly. Taste and adjust with more fish sauce, salt or lime juice if necessary. Store in a clean bottle or jar. It’ll keep in the fridge for at least a month.
Notes (If Ifs And Ands Were Pots And Pans…)
This is pretty spicy. The acid and sugar balance out the heat but it still packs a punch. If you don’t have a high tolerance for chilli heat or want something more like the warmth of supermarket chilli sauces then just add a spoonful of the blitzed paste at a time, tasting the mixture as you go. I’m going to have a recipe for you next week that will use some of the excess fermented chilli paste. Keep it in a jar in the fridge in the meantime.
If you want to make a veggie/vegan version, swap the fish sauce for light soy.
Recipe: Fermented potato wedges
One question I get asked a lot in my classes is whether there’s a vegetable I would never ferment. I tell people that there isn’t but that lacto-fermenting alone sometimes isn’t enough. Potatoes are the main example of this. You can ferment them but they’re not going to be nice to eat straight out of the jar. I wouldn’t make a potato kraut or pickle.
Cook those fermented potatoes however and things can get exciting - it’s like they’ve been seasoned from the inside out. Chips that have already been lightly salted and vinegared!
For the ferment
skin on potatoes, scrubbed
optional flavourings: rosemary and thyme sprigs, skinned garlic cloves, black peppercorns
4% brine
For the wedges
fermented potatoes
olive oil
Method
Prepare the ferment. Put the whole potatoes and any flavourings you fancy in a scrupulously clean jar. The size will depend on how many potatoes you want to ferment. I would go with one large per person for wedges but you might want to make more and experiment! Make a 4% brine and pour it over (if you dissolved your salt by heating the water remember to let it return to room temperature). Add something to make sure everything stays submerged. I used a cabbage leaf but a sandwich bag of brine would work too or a layer of baking parchment. Seal the jar.
Ferment for a couple of weeks. Leave the jar at room temperature, burping occasionally, until the brine is tangy (see note).
Slice and cook. Heat your oven to 180°C. Slice the potatoes into wedges and pat dry with a paper towel. Place the wedges on a baking tray (I usually use a sheet of baking paper or silicone mat under any roast veg, just to prevent sticking and make washing up easier), drizzle over some olive oil and toss to coat. Cook until golden brown, tossing once or twice. This will probably take about 25-30 minutes.
Serve immediately. I wanted to taste the subtle flavours that came from fermentation so just went with plain mayo but you can obviously serve with whatever you like.
Notes (If Ifs And Ands Were Pots And Pans…)
The fermentation takes a long time because it takes a while for the brine to penetrate the potato skin. You can speed things up by cutting the potatoes into wedges before fermenting them - then they only need 2/3 days. But you don’t have much leeway. After that you’ve got a fully pickled potato. Keeping them whole gives you a bit more control. I also found that, after coming out of the brine, the wedges darkened in colour.
Try peeling, parboiling and roasting too!
Cultural Fun
Michel Craig-Martin’s art is instantly recognisable but I’ve never felt like I “got” it. Everyday objects, outlined in black and presented in bright, uniform colours. Lightbulbs, Nokia phones, safety pins and so on. Sometimes alone, more often in groups but at non-lifelike scale. They present to me as somewhere between cartoonishly cheery and blankly eerie.
So I trundled along to the retrospective of his work at the Royal Academy hoping I would understand it all a bit more and I feel like I did. There are early conceptual works which I hadn’t known about at all - a famous 1973 work claims to have transformed a glass of water into a oak tree - but mainly it’s the colourful objects.
These objects, things so familiar we barely notice them in life, are presented in ways that are apparently an attempt to “reconcile certain aspects of abstraction and representation that are usually considered irreconcilable”. (Yes, I read all the captions.)
I wouldn’t say I liked the work exactly but I think that’s slightly unfair. Apparently Craig-Martin is insistent in not giving interpretations of his work, allowing it to be found by the viewer and I liked that. The here is strangeness and sadness to be found in some of the combinations.
This chair and pill bottle combo for example. Or the empty redness between this bucket and clipboard. And the colours really do pop, especially against the turquoise walls of the large central room.
Craig-Martin’s work isn’t something I’d choose to put on my own walls. though. Even if they were turquoise. I ever find myself in the unlikely situation where I’m allowed to choose a work of art to own but it has to be by an artist whose style is characterised by simple black outlines and flat areas of colour then it’s Patrick Caulfield every time. But I was pleased to have had a look and come away with a greater understanding.
I just found out that Netflix isn’t renewing Kaos for a second season which is a huge bummer as I am one episode from the end of the first season and really enjoying it. A modern take on Greek myths, with Jeff Goldblum as an insecure Zeus, it is the perfect show for someone who read and re-read Roger Lancelyn Green as a child.
It’s funny and clever, has great performances and I love the visual look of it. Boo Netfix, boo.
Another TV recommendation (although not a very current one ) is Dark. Also on Netflix it’s a German time travel drama, set over three separate periods of history. Yes, it’s confusing and requires constant revision to remember who is who in 1953, 1986 2019 but the plot bowls along. There are three series and we’ve only watched one so I can’t promise that it doesn’t go downhill. But at least it didn’t get cancelled. If you like a bit of sci-fi/thriller-y stuff then this might be a hidden gem to seek out.
Bye! See you next week!
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Oh wow, love the idea of fermented potato wedges!