Olives and Cat-and-mouse-astrophes.

Well we've been busy little self-suffiency-ites today. 34 bottles of Olives now bottled and ready for putting away. We picked a little later and cut all the way around this year, and the results are excellent. The olives just did their 3 weeks in strong brine and are little salty but edible already. They'll only get better.

For the record here is the method we used: cut a slit all the way around the olive, and then soak changing the water at least daily, in fresh water weighted down with a plate to keep them below the surface for 20 days. I was cautious and started adding a half a handful of salt every day afer the first week, just to muck the pH around for any bacteria. At 20 days I made a strong brine (1 cup of salt 4 liters of water, and this got changed weekly. They did 3 weeks in strong brine. At this point I bottled them, put a little wreath of herbs on top (to keep the Olives down) and filled each bottle with weak brine. The olives are eatable now, and ought to be fantastic in a few months. Before we eat them, I rinse the salt off, put them into Olive oil and rosemary and lemon juice to steep for at least a day. 34 bottles may sound a lot, but I use olives in an array of things (and you thought that was a sour cherry in your black forest cake?), and they're also very popular trading produce items.

We also did the first pine-nuts from the garden. We have 34 shelled nuts, or about 15 grammes! And it only took about an hour, one crushed finger and a blood-blister on my palm. These are NOT trading items. Don't even suggest it! Some things may be not really worth self sufficiency. I will never look on pesto lightly again. There has to be a better way of doing this... like a supermarket.

We also finally had the right tide for squid not intersecting with a howling gale. We got 34... only minus the thirty. Still 4 was a good haul and Barbs and I each got a big one, and I lost one through trying to be be clever, and got bitten by one for the same reason. I don't know why I keep doing that... The same experiment and hoping for a different result.

Of course the morning did see its own little bit cleverness. Robin cat in wee-small hours, with a mouse. MEEEEEAOW! Meeeow! (out of the side of the meowth, the front being kinda mouse occupied.) "Lookit Me! I got a mouse. I am the cleverestest! I am the bestestest!"

Whereupon Barbs opens on eye, and tells her to shut up and eat it. Of course, cat, being a cat pays no attention and lets mouse go. Squeak-squeak meeeow squeak squeak meeow, snore (the snore is from me, happily in the land of Nod during this saga.) The noise stops before I am prodded from this happy country, and Barbs returns to sleep, until I bring her her coffee, blissfully unaware that there is a mouse (a live trapped mouse) behind the door screen.

Barbs gets up and realises Robin is staring intently at this piece of wood. So she moves it. The cat, not your real-life athlete, misses her pounce, and mouse on a serious shrink dives into the hinge corner of door and part way through. Barbs yells for me (in the throes of ye culinary task of making porrige) and armed only with a stirring spoon I arrive, panting. "There's a mouse stuck under the door."

I contemplate suggesting offering it some porrige. Decide the suggestion not worth the risk of being force-fed the spoon sideways down an orifice not designed for spoons, and grab some Loo-paper instead (on account of having been bitten by mice before) Try to sieze mouse. Mouse makes herculean effort on seeing hairy man with loo-paper, lifts door on its hinges and darts past my foot, into the gap under Paddy's room door - in theory stuffed with cloth to stop this very thing as Pads is allergic to cats and thus his door is always closed, and the cats excluded. Only the cats have taken to catching mice and letting them go in the passage... and they run under the door.

So we block it up. Especially seeing as B has been vaccuuming it and airing curtains and changing linen on account of the Pads and Clare coming on Monday...

Except the smart alec cats have clawed it out, because they're quizzy. So we had three cats and moi crawling around mouse hunting in the new cleaned room.

Fiction is so relaxing after this!

Doggy blue (means 'fight'?)

Well, doggy updates -- they are in Sydney. And Wednesday and Puggles had a 'blue' and both needed to be checked out by a vet. Ah well. They're all fine. Expensive but fine.

We've had a couple of sets of visitors today. The 'drop in' is something we miss a bit, but maybe we're starting to get there. We had young Jeremy and his son Harry this evening(who is the sort of toddler that could encourage childless couples to have 6. Good natured, friendly, easy going and bright.) B and I are fond of kids anyway, so we did the pre-grandparent turn-to-goo.

The olives are all bottled and labelled and put in the back dark corner. They're in strong herbed brine, and should spend at least a couple of weeks in that before we possibly re-brine (less concentrated salt) or transfer into olive oil and vinegar/lemon and/or various aromatics. Now is the hardest part of the process - waiting to see if it all worked out. We have to wait at least a week before trying them.

We did a big freezer clean-out/ sort with the two secondhand wire baskets we bought - the freezer is full. We're doing our best not to overstep any of the fisheries regs with forgotten stuff in corners. Of course some like squid is just damned awkward. We divide squid into tentacles, tubes and wings. Wings are mostly for bait, and the others are cut into serving amounts. So Barbs's battle mother is in 7 bags. (3 tube, 2 tentacle, 2 wing). They're all dated, but not all together. We're supposed to have a personal possession limit of 15. So... 15 what? At the moment we're using bait slowly, because we have our near our quota of wrasse, and we haven't been after flathead for a while. I'm sure we have less than 15 tubes(I'm not even sure that's 15 each -which makes sense or 15 total - which doesn't, but we try and abide by). I'm still a Fisheries Scientist at heart and try and keep to the rules. They're not really designed around (or for) people like us. Gee. What a surprise. We don't fit again.

I've started drying some bunches of herbs against the cold killing off our stock. I need to take Quilly's advice and move some indoors or at least into shelter next to the house... but well, writing, visitors. There is a finite amount of time - speaking of which, back to work. Vet bills to pay :-(

Tim Tam goo...

Hmm well B got to write about catching her battlemother squid last night, but she left out the glorious scene where she got down onto the big truck tyre (a fender, I guess) to net one of mine. It squirted black, gukky ink as she lifted it, in a beautiful arc... over her head to splash my boots. Talk about a lucky night - that and a 1.85kg squid.

Today the predawn was saw me getting up to the sound of drumming rain. I did not dance to the beat, as I'd hoped for a few Trevally this morning. Time and tide are
right once every 2 weeks... and really this morning would have been the best. Oh well. The Island skies were flashing their winter petticoats, with lacy flounces of white edges against the rainful dark clouds. It rained. And now it is cold. So the fire/heater is at work, warming us and incidentally drying mushrooms. Maybe the rain will bring more out.


I've bottled in herbed brine the first two bottles of 'green' olives, complete with a little wreath of fennel to keep them under. I am not terribly enthusiastic about the taste of the rest! Still very bitter.

I pulled up my tiny bait-trap in the dark last night, when we finished squidding, and fished the token shrimp out of it - and left it on the veranda to wash, with the zips open... and lo and behold today the little suberb fairy wrens (AKA Tinks) were cheerfully climbing into it and eating the little amphipods off it. Quite happy... I guess a trap is only trap when you can't walk out at will.

And finally we had a new taste experience today - someone brought us some Tim Tams (a very Australian layered chocolate coated buiscuit) and explained that you needed to bite off catercorners (diagonal) and then suck coffee through it like a sort of buscuit straw. Then, very hastily you need to put whole beastie in your face, because it is melting from the inside. A sort of hot chocolate mouth-bomb... try it :-)

Mushrooms, olives progress

I am feeling a bit like death warmed over, however, unless mushrooms now cause a streaming snotty nose and sneezing, I don't think that eating some of these was the cause. There are rather a lot of them out there - the huge kind that are fleshy and bruise pink down near the creek (which the locals pointed us at, and all the bugs seem to adore), and the ones I tasted the day before yesterday, and we both had some of last night (that's 48 hours since I ate the first, so reasonable to assume they're OK). They are brown gilled, with gills not attached to the stem, with brown spore prints, do not have volvas and they grow in open grassland a long way from any tree so they're not destroying Angels, Death Caps or any Amanita.



some of these are now drying, others were cooked and frozen. They're all from the field next door. The house was so mushroomy as I fried successive small batches in butter - and it was absolutely lovely, earthy, nutty, with hits of aniseed... just overwhelming mushroomy - that we had to open a window. It actually took very little time (and they cook to next to nothing) as they're very light compared to bought mushrooms (the pink-bruising ones are the opposite - huge and dense and meaty.) I think they're both species of Agaricus (the same as the bought mushroom - which also bruises pink but doesn't get quite as big!)

Olives - in theory they should be due to stop the water-change sequence on Monday and be brined. In practice, the green ones (which should be more bitter) are nearly ready and will be fine by Monday. The black -- eugh. Still very bitter. I conclude that the porcupine was less than effective, as all the greens got a slit cut in them instead. So I cut a slit in the contents one large bowl of blacks (about 1/4 of the total) and we'll have to taste. The woodash lye still have 10 days of water change to go and are still vile. The very ripe in salt... mixed bag - some wrinkled and quite edible, some plump, juicy and... vile. Not salted, not leached bitterness. I pricked them all and put them back in salt. It may not work, but the alternative was a bit like playing olive roulette.

And now I must contrive something for supper. Not containing Olives (we don't have any) or mushrooms (tested pink bruising ones. One slice only, despite being told they were fine by both David and Inge. Advice from mushroom guide - don't mix mushrooms.)

More on Olives.

I thought I'd add some more to the olive story after B's post yesterday. I don't know about the South African rainbow nation, but I'm doing a fine imitation of a rainbow human. The wind was cold, biting and strong when we were picking, looking up, my eyes screwed up so those symbols of peace, the olive branches, didn't whip back and poke me in the eye. And, because I had wanted to do some writing first, it was mid-day. Didn't realise how strong the sun was. My face is the colour of over-ripe tomato today, between the wind and the sun. My fingernails are black. Not all the scrubbing in world will stop me looking like I just hauled my hands out of the innards of an elderly Ford. The scars and cuts (this is me. My hands would not have healing cuts if I were in a coma. I am eternally grateful for anti-tetanus shots.) are purple. As it's not warm enough to consider swimming without a wetsuit a lot of me is a charming shade of dead-fish white. And my forearms are brown (from the hard sunny work of weilding a computer).

Anyway, we ended up with I think 9 kilos of usable olives which had to be either salt-layered (about a half kg of the ripest) or put into wood-ash lye (about 300 grammes of the greenest) and pricked and put to soak for the other 8 kilos or so. To prick olives... you cut a slice of cork and push pins through it to make a little hegdgehog. You then sit on the hedgehog, because that's whole lot more sensible than the alternative that you are supposed to do. Less painful too. However, if you have determined that you really are going to process olives, you then use the hedgehog to pick up olives (which are now in container without water, and thus prick them and drop them into the next bowl with water in it. You need to make sure you have a plate or second bowl which you can can put on top to keep the olives submerged. Otherwise you find them climbing out of the bowl, towelling themselves off and trotting off to the pub (where you can find olives someone has mechanically processed, also at the bar, in a bowl).

If you live in New Zealand (where they also grow olives and have lots of introduced English creatures) you can do this with a real live hedgehog, which will add a whole new dimension, and the RSPCA, to your life. On the whole I think you are probably better off with the pins, but if it's adventure you are after... well as an alternative you could try Barbara's new Olive oil experiment with the rejects... Not only did this involve danger to life and limb, but it was a great shaping up weightloss process. She started on the middle of the kitchen floor with her new patent olive squisher - A five litre cast iron pot and the lid off a three liter one. And her. Standing on it in her nice clean bunditoes and rocking... evil black goo began to squirt and splart out of the sides of the pot-lid onto those little feet... Oh for a movie camera. Her face! At this point I decided to intervene before the entire kitchen got covered in what I already suspected was a very permanent purple black dye. You may have gathered we're possibly not your most usual couple, but I carried my wife over the thresh-hold - out. Like a sack of meal - terribly romatic, with her laughing helplessly, and - when she had breath - begging to be put down. It got really interesting at the door - where I had to bend down so I could open it.

She's a very determined lass, so I got to carry the feindish device out after her, so the crushing jive could continue. Up she went again. Squish-splart. "Aren't you sorry I lost those kilos for our medical?"
I looked back at the door... "No."
Now... the pot lid is rounded. And olives do contain oil even if mixed with black splarty goo. Oily slippery oil. And of course a bed of olives is not terribly stable...



I love her dearly even though she was a fallen woman. (wearing her glasses to do this, I ask you). Fortunately, no need to call the ambulance - I have this mental image of their faces.

The goo... well It's been stirred and squeezed. It's oily, but oil hasn't really seperated out. I think B would need a lot more kilos. I am about to go and put some in a milk bottle, and walk out into the field (a long way from the house) and spin it around my head on a rope (nearest I can think of to a centifuge.) Hmm. odds on going into town and being asked just what I was doing twirling? :-).

Olives

They look like black cherries - the olives are ripe (and some are passed it). The Orchard up at the school has been left to its own devices, it was planted ages back by someone who is no longer at the school - they did as student excercise preserve some olives last year, but this year some other project has taken that slot - so there are I would guess 50 trees - many barely waist high and oliveless and shaped by the bitter wind (This IS Flinders). About 20 of them have anything from 10 to a hundred olives on them. Two or three have many more. I think Olive oil may be beyond me at this stage (unless done by hand-squeezing?) but I hope we'll get some olives brined and in Olive oil and vingegar and olive oil and lemon juice. Until you've eaten home made olives... you might think olives in a bottle were good. Yes, I adore olives.
The school is about a km away, and so very convenient. I just wish I knew what the varieties were! (the pictures are of fruit on different trees).



And yes I am squeaking with excitement! I've been dying to do my own olives again for 20 years.

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Blogger is being truly erratic. Giving me error messages half the time. If you do get here - please let me know.
My glasses - you know the ones that B says make look truly extinguished - decided that screw Dave - or at least screw loose and dropped the lens onto my lap were the order of the day. Then I took John-boy to airport and drove his truck back here - rain and misery weather sweeping in. Horrible weather for a small plane but the island air-service has a good record (at that price they should have). Rex or Dennis was telling me about one of the old islanders who'd never left the island by plane being flown out on the Flying Doctor service in some dodgy weather. "Oh will you be able to land it?" she asks. Pilot smiles reassuringly - "Don't worry, I've never left plane up here yet!"
On the exciting news - we have been given permission to pick olives in the school grove. Pay what we think is fair. Difficult question - what is fair for raw olives?

Planting time

For the last eight years spring has always been planting time, with seedlings being planted indoors in early August, and then hardened off and planted as things warm up. September through December I am alway battling to keep ahead on writing and the planting (and weeding and netting the fruit trees). This year, of course we're packing rather than planting. I find planting time good for the writing, packing bad. I've netted the cherries, but alas I was too late for the apricots and peaches. The monkeys and mousebirds had wreaked havoc. The fieldmice got most of asparagus too :-( I am sure that wallabies, possums and doubtless some of the local birds will be just as destructive on cultivated crops. I reckon I have quintupled the carrying capacity of wild beasts around here, drat them. But I am itching already to plant again. I am not sure what I'll be able to get, what'll grow and what I can afford... Olive trees, I hope. Plant an olive, plant a piece of your heart. A bay tree I hope. I have kept one alive here against the odds for about 6 years. Lemons... can't have fish and no lemon! We'll just have to see. Why someone of my undeniable gifted horticultural talent (I can make one plant grow badly and then die where four flourished before) would want to do this is something of a mystery. Put it down to obstinacy ;-)