She Stoops to Conquer

 

Every year, we go to glean chestnuts in the local woods.  I use them in all sorts of vegetarian and vegan dishes over the winter.  We realised they were ripe now and if we didn’t go soon, we would miss out.

I’d committed to a teaching conference at the weekend (on Zoom), so we couldn’t get away to the woods until almost dusk on Saturday.  We would have to be quick or the car park would shut with our car inside. 

We headed for the best spot and began combing the ground for the green spiny cases.  They always remind me of the land-bound version of sea-urchins.  But the only land-urchins we found had already been split open.

Many people and even more deer had been there before us.  The deer always leave the case spread out with the silky lining showing, like a pale star, completely cleaned of chestnuts. People do a less thorough job and leave small nuts behind.

Empty-handed, we rushed back to the car before we got locked in.

The following day, the conference again stretched into the afternoon, but when I got out, I remembered a new spot.  I’d discovered it a couple of weeks earlier, by the usual expedient of spotting other foragers and asking them what they were collecting. 

However, it was a long walk to get there and would there still be chestnuts?

In the green gloom of the woods, it turned out that there were.  Plenty of them.

And it allowed Nigel to make the annual repetition of one of his favourite puns.  As I bent to pick up a chestnut, ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘She stoops to conker.’

NB Despite Nigel's terrible pun, conkers ( AKA) Horse chestnuts are not edible. It was the delicious sweet chestnuts that I was collecting. 

 

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Make your own milk!

I’m a great one for avoiding faff. 

But logic made me change my mind this week.

After approximately six weeks of trudging to the Co-op mainly in order to score some milk, I finally remembered that some of my acquaintances had mentioned making their own milk.

Before you recoil in horror, I mean oat milk.

Oat milk is way greener than dairy milk in terms of carbon footprint.  Even greener than soya milk. 

I had mentally filed it under ‘faff’, but right now, it looks like less faff than social distancing at the Co-op.

This, coupled with the fact that we now have about 2 kilos of porridge oats which Nigel has rejected as being ‘Not the kind I like’, means that the time has come to make oat milk.

The first recipe I looked at described the problem of milk turning out slimy.  This was a bit off-putting, especially as my first batch really was slimy and sank like a stone in my tea.  

However, I tried again with a different recipe and this time it still sank like a stone, but at least it wasn’t slimy.

Nigel’s not keen, but I’m going to keep going.  I like a challenge.  And if I succeed, even after Lockdown ends (someday), it means we’ll have fewer of those hard-to-recycle tetrapaks.