Le Rond.
I was just thinking that there was something familiar about the description of backberry picking and endless geese flying over head that I was about to jot down when I was moved to look at my first ever post - and there it all was. I actually started writing on 10th September last year. And how little has changed ... but not NOTHING, so it isn't totally embarrassing.

I am finally alone today after weeks and weeks of a constant trickle of family and even the odd friend. The cats didn't know what to think and began starting nervously whenever I put on the TV and walking towards normally empty rooms with bent knees for maximum camouflage in case there was (horrors) 'someone' in there. But now, as before, the chestnut tree opposite this window has already started to 'turn' and the garden is full (ish) of Autumn flowers like Japanese anemones, golden rod and asters. There is also ... low moaning noise ... a 'bumper' crop of apples in the orchard. My husband regularly gets up very, very early and it is depressingly normal to come down to make coffee and find a large wheelbarrow in the middle of the kitchen heaped with a hundred or so prime cooking apples. 'This is still only scratching the surface', he says, beaming heartily, 'Drink that up and we can get in some more loads before it rains'. 'But ... what are we going to DO with them?'. 'What do you mean? Just turn them into apple puree and put it in the deep freeze. There's enough here for the whole Winter'.

Hello .... the deep freeze is already full right up to the top with god knows what; as no one ever digs any deeper than the first foot or so. (I emptied it once pre-Christmas and found bags of prawns from a company that went out of business years before and a sinister huge plastic packet of 'meat' which turned out to be part of a stag once handed to me by a huntsman as a treat.) Even if it was totally empty, making apple puree is a huge chore .. and bore. Peeling literally hundreds of apples leaves your hands sore and aching and if you make apple juice it also has to be frozen and takes up vast amounts of room. I do have the exciting birthday present fruit boiling equipment (Finnish) but the instruction booklet shows that the enticing product description was faulty. You do not, in fact, throw whole unwashed apples into a bucket thing at the top and then wait, humming placidly, for sterilised juice to pour out of the bottom into a handy recepticle. As if. You have to 'prepare' the fruit .. or peel, core and f-ck around just as normal. If I wasn't so lazy the stupid thing would be on its way back to Hels1nki as we speak.

The trouble is that after so many years of 'seasons', I am all countryed out. When I was younger I had an earth mother, home-making phase which lasted for quite a long time but I think it is tied in with having small children, who really appreciate skipping around with blackberrying baskets etc. Going blackberrying on your own is fun for about ten minutes and then turns sweaty and prickly. The last fruity thing I made was a vast batch of marmalade about two years ago when my husband approached me in the supermarket carrying some Seville oranges and said sadly that he supposed there was 'no point' buying any as I had 'given up' all that sort of thing. I fell for it, naturally.

I decided to make the marmalade perfectly and follow an ancient, anal recipe to the letter. This included cutting the strips of peel in different thicknesses 'for interest' while they were still red hot and washing the jars and polishing them to a blinding brightness. I even dug out the jam thermometer from a dusty drawer back and watched obsessively as it climbed to the exact temperature which combined cookedness with no chance of the dread 'bitter after taste'. The whole enterprise took many, many hours but the table full of orange charm made it all worth while - and there was enough there for an entire year of breakfast delight.

I had left half a jar for my own first breakfast and was taking some out with a knife when I realised that a spoon would be more useful. The stuff was like water - it hadn't set at all. I covered the table with a cloth and silently left the building but by nightfall a ruthless madness descended. I ripped off the perfectly sealed covers and tipped the f-cking stuff back into the pan; re-washed and polished every jar and waited over the stove with the thermometer. 'Boil for about ten minutes at most or the marmalade will become bitter and inedible'. Bitter but at least SET, you stupid assh0le woman. 'Test a small spoonful on a saucer and it should wrinkle when ready'. I may have tested a thousand times and was sobbing hysterically with tiredness and fury when eventually the 'wrinkling' appeared. I had boiled the marmalade briskly for an hour and a half and was beyond caring. The next day it was cooled to a gumminess of scientific precision and my husband said it was some of the nicest he had ever tasted. But my confidence was shattered and the pleasure of jam creation gone for ever.

- posted by Iris @ 9/06/2004 07:58:00 AM comment