September 2013

September 12th:
The perils of food growing: most of the nearly-ripe tomatoes, plus a couple of the still-green ones, have split because of this week's rain. C'est la vie.

September 11th:
Saw what we think is a hornet in our front garden.  Never seen anything like it before. It's quite large, about as wide as a honeybee and maybe three or more times as long, with a bright yellow end, and a burgundy colored thorax. The first time I saw it, about a week ago, it seemed to keep bumping against one of our rosemary plants, which are not in flower at the moment. Scary.

September 6th:
It seems that traditional French milk producers are just as beleaguered as their English counterparts.
Here is a link to a campaign to save traditional milk production, http://sauvonslelait.fr/ and an appeal set to music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guMYOFphto&feature=youtu.be
which I came across via a link from Clotilde's blog, Chocolate and Zucchini.

September 1st:
At last the tomatoes are starting to go yellow.  They are a yellow variety from the Heritage Seed Library, Scotland Yellow.
Hopefully they will ripen before blight sets in, otherwise I have a recipe for Green Tomato Curry from Floyd's India. Last year's attempts to grow tomatoes were a total disaster.

Found some fresh pistachio nuts in the shops. They have a thin leathery outer skin, pink to black in colour. When you peel that off you get the hard shell that we are used to seeing on pistachios. The texture of the fresh pistachio kernels is similar to that of fresh hazelnuts.

Bought some Turkish-style ice cream, dondurma. Ice cream is made in Linton, Cambridgeshire. Contains salep, and doesn't seem to contain cream, so maybe a low-fat type of ice cream. The color was very white, unusual for cow's milk ice cream, and more like some goat's milk ice cream that we had at a Food Festival in Hyde Park in the early '90's.