Our Frugal Summer in Charente by Sarah Jane Butfield

Author:Sarah Jane Butfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublishDrive
Published: 2015-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

My first garlic plait of 2013

Onions

Now when it came to storing the onions after harvest, that was a whole different ball game. Although you can plait them like the garlic, our onions were so big and heavy I doubted if I had string or a nail strong enough to hang them from afterwards. Therefore, we went for the box method. So, just as we did with the garlic, the first stage was to harvest with a fork and then dry and brush them. This time when they have been drying for three weeks you brush off or trim the roots and cut the stalks about 1 inch from the bulb. The skins will have started to go tight and over the coming weeks they will darken and go shiny. I placed my curing onions in wooden fruit pallets from the supermarket lined with newspaper. A tip I learnt after the first week of curing, check all the onions carefully for signs of damage or rotting because if you get a rotten bulb it will disintegrate and become a liquid producing ball. If this happened, you would need to remove it and the fluid it produced without changing the whole box as the onions do not like being disturbed during the curing process. I think I would like to be an onion undisturbed over winter.

Now curing the onions needs to be done in the dark so initially I laid newspapers above and below and placed a coat over them. The advantage of using the wooden fruit pallets was also that they were made to be stacked which is good because we had five boxes of onions. At week six, after checking the onions each week and discarding, or using, any that still had green stems or looked to be going soft, the next task was to individually wrap each one in newspaper ready to store. A daunting task to start with but one which became quite therapeutic when you sit there thinking of all the food you are squirrelling away for the winter.

As usual due to the temperature and ventilation requirements, these boxes also ended up in the bedroom, another good reason for not wanting any rotten ones in the pallets.

Elderflowers

By the 16th June, the elderflowers were now hanging heavy with white flowers. The unmistakable scent, strong and to some people off-putting, in no way resembles the flavour of anything made from the flowers. The elderflowers that had until now been just small buds were now white flowers and as instructed by André ready for eating! I have never eaten an elderflower, although I have eaten flowers before as Sheila, Nigel’s mum, used to add nasturtiums to salads. However, elderflower heads always looked too much like a weed for my liking, and I wasn’t keen on the scent either. Despite this, the flowers were collected as we walked the boys, and we researched and began our first attempt at making a cordial from elderflowers.

Elderflower Cordial

Ingredients:

30-40 large Elderflower heads,

1kg sugar

1.5 litres boiling

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