Archive for the ‘General Gubbins’ Category
Potatoes and Elderpples
Posted by: Dav in Food, General Gubbins on August 15th, 2010
“If only we had some potatoes for tea tonight”
Thus heralded the results of my vaguely scientific trial, does one really need to earth up potato crops to maximise your dinner?
My crop of potatoes were carefully grown in a couple of surplus buckets and started off as a couple of supermarket potatoes that I’d left for too long and had started chitting on their own. They’re one of my favourite varieties, Charlotte, coping well with any use in the kitchen and still being reasonably early in the year.
I’m not the only one enjoying home grown potatoes at this time of year, but I do think it’s one of the more interesting crops to harvest. All you can see during the growing season is an increasingly straggly stem, the mystery of how successful you were isn’t dispelled until you start rooting around for the, err, roots.
Bucket o spuds
The bucket that I earthed up probably won the contest by two medium sized tubers. The lazy version had quite a few roots near the edges of the bucket but nothing in the middle, whereas the second layer of compost in the earthed up bucket had extras in the middle. It had none in the upper layers of compost, despite the stem and leaves growing on to match.
Potato trial results
The results. The top row was from a potato left in some compost and forgotten about, the bottom row was earthed up 4 or 5 times over the growing season.
Apples packed with Elderflowers
My holiday was well timed to help with another experiment. When we were at the NEC in June, Alys Folwer mentioned that apples packed in Elderflowers for a month came out tasting like pineapples. Well, going away for three weeks seemed an ideal space of time to try it. We caught the tail end of the local elderflower crop, but there were plenty of creamy clusters of flowers in the hedgerows, some were even without bugs.
Apple and Elderflower Crumble
The answer? Perhaps I didn’t use sufficient flowers. They scented the house gloriously for a week, but the apples just tasted like both apples and elderflowers. I probably should have packed the apples in something too, they were somewhat bruised at the end despite not having been moved about. They still tasted good, so we combined them with a few spoons of last year’s Elderflower Cordial and turned them into an extremely summery Apple and Elderflower Crumble. Served with a generous helping of Yorkshire Vanilla Ice cream.
Day 3 – Champex to Verbier
Posted by: Dav in General Gubbins on July 8th, 2010
After another good night’s kip, roused only by somebody making with a petrol strimmer at 7am, we headed away from Champex-Lac and onwards to Verbier.
Last night was enjoyable tho, a swift stroll by the lake after a positively riotous evening meal sharing a table with 2 British couples. A doctor was singing Nellie the Elephant to illustrate proper CPR technique, that song is forever tainted now..
Our modes varied slightly because I’m on holiday, rather than a mission, so I took the bus, train and cable car along the valley instead. 
I got chatting to a couple of guys from North Carolina, they were roughly following Kev’s C-Z route, but with a couple of approximations made by the company they contracted with to handle all the arrangements. I thought 31 C was 10 degrees too hot to do anything, they thought it was pleasantly cool. Different idea of normal I guess.
It was more than a bit novel to be the expert French speaker in the group! Their idea of the cable car up from La Chable was a pleasant finish, only a couple of Francs more than the bus. Then i promptly got us lost leaving the telecabane station.
My mission for the day was finding us somewhere reasonable to stay, it’s still quiet – medium season in Verbier so I had the pick of 2 or 3 places within budget. So I’m typing this from my private balcony over looking le place centrale over the third ice tea of the day. Holiday much?
much of the town is under construction, lots of big lorries and cement mixers feeding the many hungry big cranes.
Found a family pharmacy for a throat spray and joy of joys, they stocked Fisherman’s Friends and the kindly man spoke great English, tho I amused what I’m guessing was their daughter with my broken french and glee at finding yeehar strength mint tablets.
I perplexed half the town’s sports and shoe shops looking for size 50 insoles, mostly not available until ski season, tho I did fine a pair of size 50 boots on sale. “Le Cinqante?!” *surprise and bafflement*
I also finished devouring the novel I brought along for the ride, so that’ll get posted home in a bit, dead weight ftl.
tomorrow is the start of the real mountain leg of the holiday, the point of the exercise as it were. Up to 2600m at Col Terman and sleeping at 2200m at Lac de Louvie. Up close and personal with the mountains. Could be interesting or it could be seriously annoying if the promised thunderstorm hits.
I can’t promise much phone signal until Grimentz in a week’s time, but I’ve ceased being surprised where Swisscom put cells..
Day -1 : York to Vallorcine
Posted by: Dav in General Gubbins on July 4th, 2010
‘Meep’ went the 4 legged alarm clock. 5am.. Wait, what? So began what I’m hoping will be a 3 week epic holiday in the Swiss Alps.
LBA’s baggage belts were broken, so there was more than no pandemonium as Jet2 tried to get three 7am flights sent off at once.
Still, we got to Geneva 10mins early and wandered off to stock up on noms from the Migros. The nice people running ChamExpress(.com) managed to fit us in a minibus an hour early, I can thoroughly recommend their service.
Paused in Chamonix for an hour to take the obligatory photos and an ice cream before letting the train take the strain up to our home for the next two nights, Belle Vue Alpine Lodge.
The sun was scorchio down in the valley, but there’s a gorgeous cooling breeze here, probably about 20ish degrees, which perfectly matched a cool bottle of wheat beer from Brasserie Du Mont Blanc ‘La Blanche’.
oh, and Mountains!
