I have been listening to the BBC news and finding it impossible to believe what I am hearing.
I find that this happens sometimes with the BBC.
Today I looked out at my washing flapping in the warm autumn sunshine and could not believe that much of the rest of the country is busily loading two of everything into arks.
It has been a truly beautiful day. The dogs and I trekked up the fellside after Mark went to work this morning. I had not been listening to the radio then, and had not heard the news. When we got to the top and I gazed out across the mountains out to the sea I thought that it was probably the clearest day we have seen for ages. Everything was etched in the most vivid greens and golds of autumn, and in the far distance the sea glittered silver.
The sun was warm on the back of my neck as we picked our way down.
I am very sympathetic if you live in Doncaster, perhaps you should consider coming here for a little holiday for a few days. You might have to bail your kitchen out when you get home, but at least you will have dry socks to start with.
It is not very often that there is anywhere in the UK that is wetter than it is here. If it carries on I expect we will have a hosepipe ban soon.
Of course the tiresome part of the rest of the country slowly glugging its way under water is that nobody has felt that they want to leave their house to drown by itself, and come for a weekend break here. The Lake District, gloriously sunny as it might be, is utterly deserted. I am on the taxi rank looking out at a silent wilderness, and actually it is not gloriously sunny any more because it is dark.
I do not mind it being quiet because I have got a flask of tea and some home made strawberry fudge and Stephen Fry’s book about Greek legends, which is splendid. Margaret Pole died in the end of the last book, but of course you knew that so it is not a spoiler.
I have spent the day engaged in my latest Project.
This is to have an Appealing Fridge.
Obviously our fridge is fairly appealing already. As regular readers will recall, it is coloured in shades of gold and green and is large and friendly and solid.
Despite these obvious assets I do not feel that it is doing its job.
I notice, from my infrequent but much appreciated visits to a better class of eating establishment, that the most important part of middle-class dining seems to be the appearance of the food.
You might be being served a plate of sausages and lettuce, but if it is beautifully arranged with some artful salad dressing drizzled over it and some strategically placed tomatoes, you will like admire it very much. You may even believe that you are eating something nice and not mind that you are being charged £16.95.
The human mind is a marvellous thing.
As you are aware, I do not have £16.95 going spare at the moment, and so I have decided to take my own steps to make our diet more enticing without the inconvenience of any extra expenditure.
Hence I have recently been engaged in a reappraisal of our fridge.
I have made some changes.
The first of these is that I have cleaned it. You can have the most beautifully arranged sausages in the world, but if there are brown sticky smears on the shelf beneath them, and fingers of black mould above, you might think twice about eating them.
I have been through the fridge and removed any such hazards.
I have washed all of the shelves and restored them to pristine beauty.
After that I looked at the contents.
I threw away a bit of long-dead Parmesan cheese that had become petrified, and half a jar of mango chutney that exhorted me to eat it before Dec 2014. It still smelled all right but better safe than sorry.
After some recent contemplation of the topic, I have reviewed my storage arrangements. I am no longer using Tupperware boxes or wrapping things in cling film.
They weren’t even Tupperware boxes really. They were plastic boxes left over from Chinese takeaways.
I have stopped storing things in these because they do not look appealing. There is a reason that Mitchelin starred restaurants do not serve food in slightly mis-shapen plastic tubs with all the scratches coloured orange.
They do not even look appealing when you get them from the Chinese filled with Sweet And Sour Pork. They look a lot less appealing a year later when they are sitting on a smeary fridge shelf containing two leftover potatoes and half of a wrinkly onion.
I have stopped doing this.
I have started putting things in dishes and Kilner jars. The chocolate and cherry biscuits are in a tin with a pretty picture and the strawberry fudge is in a tall glass jar. The sausages are on a plate wrapped in my home-made beeswax muslin, and today’s potatoes cooked in lemon and mint are in a blue and red patterned dish from Istanbul.
I have started wrapping things in beeswax muslin instead of cling film. I like this, I think. It is yellow, and feels cool to the touch, and somehow manages both to look and smell welcoming. I have discovered that cheese wrapped in waxy muslin no longer sweats the way it does when wrapped in cling film. It is drier and stronger, and is quite different. The muslin has to be washed in cool water afterwards, because hot water makes the wax melt.
I was very pleased with the results when I had finished.
We will be eating with a new enthusiasm.
NOTE: You can see from the picture that not everything is wrapped in beeswax muslin yet. That is because I haven’t yet made enough pieces of it. Some more manufacturing is about to happen.
