Less than 2 weeks ago I shared our exciting weekend of land clearance, bonfires and box building! Happily, we've now got an update on the latter! Though in the long term we plan to open the Earth Heart land to community groups, artists and glampers in all manner of magical events, exhibitions and happenings, in the short term we're inviting local dog walkers and passing day trippers to pause and peruse the equally marvellous contents of our new 'honesty' box! It's taken a couple of full, creative weeks of construction, decoration, tweaking, painting, making, crafting, planting and growing; but as of today (and Welsh valley weather permitting!) we're open for business! So, if you're passing between Pen y Bont Fawr and Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, keep your eyes peeled for a selection of upcycled crafts, delightful decorations and various growing glories at the road side... You may even catch one of us for a natter and there's a free seed bomb with every purchase to spread that wild flower love! Do come and see us! Xx |
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Heat infusion is a little more involved; with your herbs and oil in a good heavy saucepan, you need to be giving the blend enough heat for the herbs to release their compounds but you're certainly not aiming for a fry-up! Low and slow is the best method. Some sources even recommend heating to less that 40°C for three days! That's not practical enough for me so I'll just pop it on as low as I can while I'm pottering in the kitchen, maybe a few hours if it's a busy morning. When it's cool, it can be strained into bottles and used. For either of these methods, it's good practice to make sure your glass vessel is sterilised with boiling water but do make sure its completely air dried before adding any oil. With the solar method, you also want to allow plenty of space in your jar, to give it a shake every so often and to make sure the herbs don't swell so much they come above the level of the oil. If that happens, you'll need to top up with a bit more oil. Yarrow, Lemon Balm and Calendula; Heat and Solar Infusion:
In our initial ‘mission statement’ we openly aspired for the Earth Heart project to be about placemaking, to offer a space to come to for connecting with a quieter, more natural environment, to spend time recovering and healing. Creating that place from our current circumstances is a big aspiration indeed, but it’s achievable. This weekend, we made some progress in that direction and we’re both feeling inspired, energised and motivated in having done so!
It took a few hours to really get going but by evening (and following a few cleansing sacrifices of old art work and bundles of herbs from last years harvest) most of the pile had been sent up to the heavens on a cloud of sparks! It was certainly a cosy fireside to sit by, gazing in to the flames and sharing our imaginings for the land.
As I bade a grateful goodnight, I was strongly in touch with a sense of each of the elements weaving their magic into support all we hope to achieve, lending their blessings and their energies to the vision of the Earth Hearth project.
Old door frames supported the front whilst various other found objects first jostled but eventually nestled between carefully placed stones and rocks from the pig hut. I rustled up a few make-shift candle holders and vases from jars and bottles then it was time for the finishing touches.
By this time, we were both getting close to the end of our energy for the day but we weren’t quite ready to go back under a roof so I knocked up some bowls of soup for us to enjoy by the last of the fire and the glowing candles of the new shrine. We chatted as we ate, soaking up the cleared space and sharing that we both feel we’ve made significant progress on the land this weekend. It might not seem like much; Earth Heart is never going to be a shiny new enterprise of business plans, bank loans and brand new kit. It’s going to burst from the grass roots of the land itself, crafted by what we find and what is given to us by circumstance and serendipity. But it’ll be real, it’ll be authentic, it’ll be stitched together with love and that’s what’ll make it special. It looks like the weather’s going to take a cold turn again in the coming days and I’ll be back at Taraloka next week for voluntary cooking on a retreat but if the weather picks up again in the last week of April (surely it’s got to!?) I don’t think it’ll be long before we’re giving our tent it’s first outing of the season. It won’t be the six meter bell tent we’re envisaging in the long run but it’ll be lovely to be back under canvas; and to take the next step in the dream of loving and living on the land at Earth Heart!
There's so much burgeoning growth in the hedgerows at the moment that I can't quite believe my luck and it seems like there's just one new plant after another unfurling itself and begging for a forage in recent weeks!
With those qualities (and more!) I think this would be a great dish if you're bouncing back from one of those spring colds that seem to be rampaging about at the moment! It's got a distinctive flavour, slightly more like kale or cabbage* than spinach, a little bit lemony, quite sour and slightly bitter. There are, of course, hundreds of sorrel soup recipes out there but here's my version!
A while back I mentioned cleavers as a seasonal ingredient to my 'spring tonic tea' but I've been enjoying it as a refreshing, soothing medicine all on its own in the last couple of weeks, so I thought it was worth revisiting.
I once had a kombucha scoby (that's another kind of bacterial colony that likes to drink tea instead of water or milk), which looked like something from a sci fi film or the shelves of the Huntarian collection but was also an enjoyable way of introducing some healthy bacteria to the microbiome. It was pretty easy to care for but I know of no fermentation** easier than good old water kefir. There are a plethora of instructional videos and web pages online that will instruct you in the correct care of kefir, but I inherited my knowledge as I inherited my culture and with a little bit of trial and error, as well as the occasionally neglectful 'oh, great, I didn't kill it!', this is how I have learned to care for ours. If you don't know someone who can gift you some kefir 'babies', you can order them online, in which case I would suggest following the instructions that come suited for your particular culture. But here's what I do, to give you an idea if you're considering introducing kefir to your home brew options!
One of the reasons I find it easy to accidentally miss the intended date of bottling the kefir is that I do stick to the instructions I was given about only using boiled water. Of course, to use freshly boiled or even hot water would kill the bacteria, in fact, I guess the reason for boiling it is to ensure you've only got the 'friendly' stuff, so you need to plan ahead at least as far as the time it takes for boiling water to become tepid. Ideally, I do it the night before and leave the water in a covered jug until the morning but I'm just not always that organised! You can flavour your kefir by making an infusion at the point of boiling the water. Those dusty old fruit tea bags languishing at the back of the cupboard would work very well, as do ginger and subtle herbs like bay. I've experimented with various flavourings but recently I've decided I just like plain old kefir... You'll want to go through your own process of trial and error with that one! Once the water (or infusion) is cool, it's time to bottle the previous batch. As the kefir cultures all hang out at the bottom, it's quite easy to just pour most of the fermented liquid off the top but I find pouring it into a jug before approaching the bottles is by far the best technique for doing that, else I tend to spill a lot! I don't sterilise the bottles but of course you want to make sure they're good and clean. This is another opportunity to add flavouring by adding aromatic ingredients (such as rosemary sprigs or lavender flowers) to the bottle; but to be honest, I'm not sure how much of an effect that has on the shelf life of the drink and anyway, I like it plain! When I've (mostly) emptied the kefir jar it's simply a case of dumping six tablespoons of sugar on to the little gelatinous kefir babies in their remaining yeasty soup and then pouring the cooled water straight on top. The lid goes on, I date the jar with both today's date and the rough date I think it'll be ready on and then it goes back on the shelf to be forgotten about for another 3 weeks! I've not yet established how long the bottled kefir lasts once it's been filtered off the culture but that's because we're only really able to make about a litre and a half at the moment, which we've usually drunk before the next batch is ready! Going forward, I'm hoping the culture will grow enough that I'll be able to split it and get a second one on the go. Since we've got a cool kitchen it's not been growing very fast, but I gave it a little extra attention today and strained off more of the cloudy, yeasty goop at the bottom to establish that it has grown a bit over the months I've had it. I'm hoping with a little patience and a few more months we might well be able to stagger the bottlings and add even more probiotic tastiness to our lives! *If you're treating any yeast infection or have been sensitive to yeast in the past, best not take water kefir.
**The fermentation process does produce a small amount of alcohol so if you need to avoid it, this isn't for you! Xx
I played bass guitar for many years before taking up the sitar, for which maintenance is as simple as changing the strings. Maintaining the sitar is as much a practice as playing the instrument. Even the great masters would take their sitars back to their maker because servicing done well is as skilled a task as making the instrument in the first place! After servicing my sitar to the best of my abilities, I feel much happier with the sound, which inspires my practice! Having said that, I can’t wait to get back out to India at some point soon!
We can thank (or maybe blame!) the Romans for introducing this cousin of the carrot to our shores apparently, as they were fond of using it for culinary as well as medicinal purposes. One of it's therapeutic uses is as a poultice for arthritic conditions, in fact it's also earned itself the name 'gout weed'. To eat, I think it tastes a bit like a cross between parsley and celery. You definitely need to select the new leaves not the mature ones though, they're a bit too tough and develop a more pungent flavour that would, shall we say, be an acquired taste!
Fresh ground elder pesto pasta two days in a row and 'weeding' very temporarily crossed off my list of chores! Perfect! Wishing you an equally satisfying foraging-come-gardening adventure this weekend! May your tummy be full and your herb beds clear! With love until next time. Xx
I once gave a talk called "Why I Meditate." I'm tempted to title this "Why I don't Meditate". But it's not as straightforward as that.
First, maybe I'll catch you up on a bit of historical context. I learnt to meditate a tickle over nine years ago, in March 2015, when I was signed off sick from and about to leave arts teaching. I was anxious, unhappy and unwell. I actually went to a drop in class intending to prove to a friend that meditation wouldn't help me without looking too closed minded to try. Well, that kinda backfired and just a few weeks later, not only had I learned meditation could indeed help me, I'd found it could completely transform my life and subsequently realised I was a Buddhist. Being an 'all or nothing' kind of person with a taste for intensity, I promptly spent six months in India living in a Buddhist community and teaching some very oppressed and abused young people before returning to the UK, requesting ordination and deciding to live in the middle of nowhere (rural Shropshire) to be on a team of women running a retreat centre. Oh yeah. That's why I decided it was time for a rest. (Did the kettle boil yet!?) So, you may well wonder, how did all that happen? How did all that unfold from the simple act of walking into a drop in meditation class one grey Wednesday lunchtime in Manchester? Did I have a third-eye opening experience of transcendent bliss on the spot? Hell, no. The only thing I honestly remember about that first session is that I spent most of my time alternating between wondering why I was there and what I was going to do when the class finished. Also that my legs were aching from too much running. Actually that was almost certainly the longest I'd sat down all week. If you want a more detailed back story, I gave this aforementioned talk (Why I Meditate) a little while back but basically I realised I really needed to stop. I wasn't sure what it was exactly that I needed to stop but I knew I had to stop it and I knew I had to do something different. Slowly but surely, regular, short meditation helped me create a small but significant window of time between one thought and the next where I could notice the constant inner monologue of anxiety but choose not to be defined by it. I learned that from these spaces I could choose to open more to others. I started to feel more connected to the world around me, less fearful and less alienated. I even began to heal my very fractured relationship with my own body by finally consenting to investigate what it really felt like to have one. For the first time in my adult life I bothered to explore what it feels like to have toes.
Ah yes. Stored trauma. Body work (I'm talking yoga, Tai Chi, other somatic practices) have also played an essential part of the story to the extent that I can't easily separate my formal sitting meditation experiences from those I often meet during yoga practice anymore. And that these apparently physical practices have a therapeutic effect on the mind is no longer the sole assertion of the new age hippy or the martial artist, it's backed up by medical doctors and trauma specialist psychologists who are extremely well respected in their fields. (Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk and Pete Walker are some of my favourites) But before we lose ourselves in the secular and psychological, let's come back to basics... What really is Meditation and have I been doing it? Simple questions often belie complex answers but I'll have a bash at the first bit. Meditation can be thought of as: A.) A tool for cultivating awareness, B.) An exercise for developing compassion, C.) A method for becoming fully embodied (hmm, that might actually just be A. Or is it B? Maybe it's both, never mind…) D.) And, because I'm a Buddhist, I do believe it's an essential factor on the path to awakening. (Oh wait, that sounds like A as well. Or B? Hmm... This tangent might have to be explored in a separate, future post...) The second bit is less complex; have I been doing it? Er, no. Not really... Hang on. It's just not as straightforward as that. OK, well, let's unpick this and look at the first bit again. What is Meditation? Sometimes I have found it helpful to think of meditation as a kind of gym for the mind. I train my mind in meditation to focus and become aware; I get a more user friendly mind the rest of the time. And that's fine, as far as it goes in a secular, psychological kind of way. But it doesn't for a second do justice to the rich subtlety of consciousness that you can begin to access in meditative states and you may have gathered that my relationship to the gym hasn't always been healthy or helpful. Neither has it often been mindful or kindly. So, some of my work of late has been in cultivating awareness of the all those same old subconscious yet unhelpful behaviour patterns trying to crystallise around my reasons to meditate and turn it into a bargaining chip in a transactional equation. If I carry out (X) behaviour then (Y) = I'm an acceptable human being. Y is pretty constant. X has variously manifested as academic success, fulfilment of socially normal activities, demonstration of creative skill, physical fitness, a particular sort of body shape, etc. The list is practically endless. To break that loop, I'm back to making the space to notice (awareness) that story telling itself somewhere in the depths of my mind but refusing to fuel it (I think that's the compassion bit kicking in). To me, meditation is about being creative, experimenting, doing something differently. It's about taking responsibility for myself, looking at the actual effect certain acts of body, speech and mind have on myself and those around me and making choices. What habits am I reinforcing? Are those habits helping me awaken? Are they even helping me live a happy, healthy life? And if the answer is 'no', then what? We all know old habits run deep and stubborn.
When I was in the process of leaving Taraloka, I could feel that my relationship with meditation had become pretty routine, that I was often sitting because 'I should', because I didn't want to appear to have checked out of community life too soon. But I was, and still am determined to allow a new, dynamic, potentially unstructured, living, breathing relationship to evolve. It's often been my experience that one must totally let go of one thing before a new one can arise. Of course, I'm still hugely benefitting from my years of formal practice and I have no intention of allowing myself to lose that or to back-slide but I've learned that meditation is cyclical and just like I know in my bones I'm a poet without having had to write a poem before breakfast, I am beginning to believe that I can trust my meditation practice to my intuition. I can work with my mind. It doesn't have to look a certain way.
If working with my mind doesn't currently look like meditation, what does it look like? I'm not sure that any meditative experience can be easily described, defined or pinned down but it's certainly not transactional and my sense of being an acceptable human being definitely doesn't depend on it. It's much more subtle than that. It's free, it's wild, it's remembering to notice my experience in any moment, not 'doing my 45 minutes' then checking out. It's dropping into my body, my raw, current, felt what-is-actually-going-on-ness, in mundane moments. It's an honesty, an authenticity, a live news reel of paying attention in both painful and in pleasurable moments of daily life and holding myself responsible for some of that. It's requesting a conversation with the fullest breadth of this human experience I can manage and choosing to listen more than I speak. It's weaving with aspects of disciplined practice such as breath and compassion but not being limited by count-to-ten structure. It's suddenly realising at three o'clock in the afternoon that I really, really want to light the candles on my shrine now and rushing off to do so. Sometimes it's yoga and often it's chanting and maybe it's just sitting with my shrine, being slightly more in relationship with the OK-ness of not knowing. Content to simply be in this vast mystery of the universe. Years ago in the ‘Why I Meditate’ talk, I stated and still believe that it's a radical thing to sit and do nothing (no, not even meditate) in our current social context of constant productivity and exponential economic growth. It's quite a thing to say 'I'm not doing', to sit (or stand, or lie, or walk, or dance, etc.) and just be. So, whatever my current meditation practice is, or isn't, it's not regular, formal or disciplined. It would hugely undermine nearly a decade (eek!) of meditation experience to say despite saying all that I think I'm the closest I've ever got to actually meditating, but if I stop listening to all the little voices that like to tell me 'I'm not doing it right' I know full well it's a very significant and powerful development in my relationship with a consciousness that doesn't start with, end in or limit itself to what we normally call meditation. And I'm pretty happy with that. So, if you've read any of my previous posts, you'll know I said I'd be posting seasonal recipes... And then promptly decided the term 'recipe' was a bit overwhelming. I've now also decided the term 'seasonal' is probably a bit limiting! Anyway, I've done pretty well on the obviously seasonal front in my last few posts but I'd like to share one of my favourite kitchen 'go to' recip(ish)es which I regularly fall back on at any time of year, come rain or shine!
One of the things I love about kedgeree, however you choose to spell it, is that it can be almost infinitely varied according to your tastes and what you have on hand. I regularly swap rice for quinoa, lentils for chickpeas and you can use any sort of nut or vegetable you like, seasoned as you choose. Of course if you want it to be a dish of Ayurvedic benefit, you'd need to do a bit of research and check your dosha (Ayurvedic type) and meal plan accordingly... But if you just want a sime, nutritious and tasty meal you can't particularly go wrong! This is how I make a version that's a bit more elaborate than the one I was served when I was barely even able to eat, but should also be fairly 'Tridoshic', or pretty suitable whatever your type. Feel free to improvise! So, here's a version I often resort to, and happily Nik also enjoys this almost indefinitely it seems. I normally cook a big batch and we'll have it for lunch as well as dinner, or dinner and then lunch, maybe even dinner again, especially if we've got a busy day coming up. Technically that's not ideal, as Ayurvedic practice teaches that the prana, or life force, in foods diminishes pretty quickly but it seems to work for us and it’s still got to be better than processed food or convenience store snacking!
You could easily dispense with the fresh stuff to be honest, I just like using it, even if it does turn my fingers sunshine yellow! Chuck the coriander stalks, carrots and celery in before anything starts burning and turn the heat down. If you’re cooking with any other veg, add it here too. I tend to think of the carrot and celery as basic staples but I’ll also add butternut squash quite regularly. Okra, green peas, broccoli and spinach are all regular favourites but you could use pretty much anything you like. Once it’s all stirred in, I like to pop the lid on and let it sweat a bit. Incidentally, in my latest batch, I also chucked in a few fenugreek seeds. Not strictly tridoshic but it gives it a tasty boost and this feast was for flavour, I wasn't particularly trying to cleanse or balance! Once you’re happy that it’s all looking nicely on the way, chuck in the lentils, add enough freshly boiled water (and then some) to cover the lot, and add the rice. Give it a good stir, replace the lid and let it simmer gently. I’ll check it every now and then, to be sure it’s not sticking but it’s pretty self sufficient from there!
That’s the job pretty much done. When you’re satisfied that the lentils are cooked and the rice is fluffy (another reason I like to use brown rice is that it’s less likely to turn to mush, in my experience) turn off the heat. Let it cool for just a moment or two then stir in the lime juice. It really does make such a big difference to flavour if you stir it in at the end, when it’s just that little bit less hot, so the cooling is definitely not a step to rush past.
Serve with generous amounts of coriander and cashew-coconut sprinkle! We also like to have it with poppadoms and a bit of lime pickle, though I’ve also served it with chapati and sometimes I make a coconut or sesame chutney to have with it too! So there you have kedgeree; probably my favourite go to dish, for sickness and for health, for cleansing and for a comforting feed. A versatile and delicious friend, whatever the season or weather and no matter you choose to translate it as 'mixture' or 'mess' it's still a most delicious example of either! Enjoy! xx |
We're Nik and Annabeth. This is Earth Heart...Read about the Earth Heart Project here... Reaching Out?
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