Mushrooms Borough Market

And tonight Mellors is making mushroom dumplings, woo hoo!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/usrkepolishdumplings_9692

Ingredients

½ sweet potato, peeled, chopped

300ml hot chicken or vegetable stock

salt and freshly ground black pepper

pinch dried chilli flakes

2 tbsp double cream

1 tbsp chopped fresh chives

olive oil, to garnish

Method

Place the sweet potato, stock, salt and freshly ground black pepper and dried chilli flakes into a saucepan. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10-15 minutes, or until the sweet potato is tender. Blend using a stick blender. Pour into a warm serving bowl and top with the double cream. Garnish with the chives and a drizzle of olive oil.

Pear chutney

Ingredients

60ml olive oil

1 tsp fresh rosemary, finely chopped

300g sultanas or raisins

100g demerara sugar

400ml cider vinegar

100g crystallised ginger, finely sliced

800g pears cored and cut into wedges

½ tsp salt

½ tsp nutmeg

2 tsp ground allspice

1 good pinch of saffron

Method

Heat a large saucepan with the oil, add the rosemary, sultanas, raisins and sugar and fry them until the fruit begins to caramelise.

Pour in the vinegar and boil on a high heat for three minutes. Then add the rest of the ingredients, bring to the boil, then turn to a simmer and cook until most of the liquid has evaporated. Because of the fruit, this chutney has a tendency to stick to the bottom of the pan, so stir it well and keep an eye on it. Don’t let the pears cook too much; they should keep their shape.

Spoon it into clean hot jars, filling them as full as you can, and seal while hot. Store in the fridge.

Crunching leaves

The clocks have gone back in Britain and it is properly dark! On Monday I took the one year old (hereafter Bumblebee for she is fat, happy & busy) to the park to run around, pick up leaves, oggle at squirrels and burn off some energy. The change in timings caught me somewhat off guard. By the time we got there after her nap, it was practically sunset!

Park in the mornings from now on. Afternoons in the library.
<gavel>

PS Parks with kids are enchanting places. Bumblebee collects the world in tiny handfuls, carefully bringing me leaves, crushed petals and sticks to admire. She clutches a yellow leaf with one fist, the other cold in my hand and crunches through piles of brown leaves with squeaks of joy.

Here are some autumnal scenes for your viewing pleasure.

This stunning ivy is in a league of its own

Pumpkin on 31 October

Alexandra Palace park in Muswell Hill, North London

52% of the total population

contribute 75% of the agricultural work

produce 60 – 80% of the food.

BUT

earn earn 10% of African incomes

and own 1% of the continent’s assets.

The tragedy is that women are often better economic stewards of capital than men. For example, crop yields in Kenya could rise up to 22% if women farmers had the same education and inputs (such as fertilizer, credit, investment) as men farmers*.  A report called Economic Empowerment of Women by Almaz Negash shows that women are more likely to reinvest profits back into human capital than are men.

When women have economic power – defined as control of income and capital (land, livestock, etc.) -they gain more equality and control over their own lives, while contributing directly to their children’s development (nutrition, health and education) and thereby indirectly to their nation’s income growth. Increased income controlled by women gives them self confidence, which helps them obtain a voice and vote in land use and conservation decisions: rural women tend to favour sustainable environmental practices since they are usually the ones that collect the families’ natural resources such as water and firewood.

Women’s economic empowerment could ease corruption and violence in Africa, promote greater environmental sustainability, and through education, contraception, and lower fertility rates, help lower HIV/AIDS rates. If this kind of process is accepted by society, then it should be apparent that women’s education and economic empowerment is not only a matter of human rights but also human security.

A very simple solution to some of the challenges outlined above? GardenAfrica empowers women in Africa, giving them the training and the resources they need to grow food for themselves and their families, while selling their excess produce to pay for their children’s school fees. Please dig deep. www.gardenafrica.org.uk.

*UNFPA, UN Population Fund, State of World Population 2005: The Promise of Equality, UNFPA, New York, 2005, p. 47

Cherry tomatoes from the greenhouse

Artichoke

Sloe berries

Tomato plant growing in olive oil tin

Homegrown apples

Bumblebee in the herbs

Little greenthumb

Something fantastical is happening
to our weekly vegetables.
A deep organic mystery.
Take this peculiar Buddha root,
these conjoined tubers,
apostolic, luminous.

At first it was our ignorance
that had us both agape
at sprouting aliens, but Google,
Wikipedia, my fat Larousse,
enlightened us. See, here,
celeriac, kumquat, jackfruit,

chard, tamarillo, salsify –
we learned to welcome strangers
to our house. The whole green world
was subject to my knife,
till more burgeoned from the box
than I could chop.

This wasn’t what we signed up for:
our direct debit, like the widow’s jar
of oil, a source of never-ending
anti-oxidants. I waited,
but could never catch the van.
Piled offerings at our door –

neighbours complained – we took them in.
I’ve called the helpline
and the chap from – Delhi?
Mumbai? – answers me,
then puts me through to silence,
growing quiet down the phone.

I sit among the congregated squash,
the jungled cress, the mute
appeal of finger-shaped shallots.
Wish that the zinging in my ears would shush,
ponder the way of xylem and of phloem,
pray for the peace of photosynthesis.

A one year old sniffing the sweetpeas with exaggerated “Hmmmmm….aaaaah”s of pleasure is adorable. A one year old hell bent on chewing bees and trampling on dried holly leaves is not.

Features such as our raised beds made of empty wine bottles and barrel pond no longer seem viable.

Raised beds made from bottles

The plus side is that I am seeing nature through her unjaded eyes. Every speck of dirt is worth grave consideration. Each tiny ladybird is regarded with awe. Birds – well – they’re greeted with shrieks of delight, obviously. And the wind moving through the apple tree is spellbinding.

Yes, she picks a lot of lovingly planted daisies. But like the poem* goes, if I had my life over, I would pick more daisies. She is just getting a head start.

Picking daisies

*When the late Nadine Stair of Louisville, Kentucky, was 85 years old, she was asked what she would do if she had her life to live over again.

“I’d make more mistakes next time,” she said. “I’d relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been on this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones. If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds and I would pick more daisies.”

And once you’ve heard it you will want to see photos of the indomitable Lizzie and her gorgeous grandchildren and the fertile Eden she has carved out of a scrap of semi- desert in Swaziland (puts my borders to shame). So get thee over to our Swazi photo story here.

And if you feel moved to help (donations, surplus vegetables, telling your friend, retweeting for us or any other way you feel you can contribute, its Open Mike over on the Radio 4 Appeal FaceBook page.

The usual palace attractions are diverting enough (Ice rink! Skater Boiz! Giant boats shaped like swans! Actual deer in a pen!) but today there was an exhibition forwards slash performance art thingy on – sculptures and assorted whimsy placed in the palace grounds which made a walk super-exciting as we looked at everything with new eyes. Is that just a boring normal café table or is it an INSTALLATION?

Swan boats at Alexandra Palace, London

In between such everyday sights as dog walkers, yummy North London mummies with Bugaboos plus a cheerful 9 month old eating stale bread feeding the ducks for the first time ever, were random picture frames.

Loved this sign on a tree which, if you were in a hurry, looks like a dull sign and not a funny one.

Silly tree sign

Tree sign

Amongst the common or garden roses were bright and mismatched fakes, reminding me of the minion in Alice in Wonderland , hastily painting white roses red in a bid to save his neck.

Best of all there is nothing about this exhibition on the Alexandra Palace website, so either there is acid in the teacups at the boating pond café or this really is the best kept secret in North London.