Final photograph

This is the final photograph from the series, of a priest at Rengenin Temple working.

Seventh photograph

This is the work of one of the priests at Rengenin, image to follow.

Sixth photograph

This is the sixth photograph, from the series today.

Fifth photograph

These images have been the best I have ever produced using

Fourth photograph

This is the fourth image from Friday.

Third photograph

This is the third image, shadow and colour.

Second photo

Here is the second photo. Enjoy or whatever you may...

Photographs

My wife, Aya bought a small digital camera a number of years ago now, and used it often. This is a Nikon camera, a coolpix, which looks rather nice all in, all and is easily slipped into the pocket. I have never liked using this, but am unable to use my main camera currently, as I lack darkroom facilities and the time to process and print images. Project after project has taken precedence, at the moment setting up the garden as an organic food source for the summer is the main weekend task at the moment.
So, last Friday I was involved in a school outing, and took the Nikon Coolpix camera with me. I am posting some of the results here, this is the first.

Soda Bread Recipe

500 gms Flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
250 ml Buttermilk / Whey / Yoghurt

Pre-heat the oven to 220 centigrade.

Mix together the dry ingredients Very quickly mix in the liquid by hand. (The quicker these are combined the lighter the bread will be.) Put the dough onto a well floured surface and shape it into a round. Put onto a greased baking sheet and bake for 40 minutes.
The bread will not rise as far as yeast risen bread and will be more cake-like in texture, but it will taste delicious and can made in a wink of an eye, unlike yeast risen breads.
You can make this bread with white flour or with wholemeal flour, or some combination of both. It is also possible to substitute oats for part of the recipe, and add raisins or currents to make a fruit bread, or nuts or seeds. This bread can be eaten with cheese, or butter, or jam or whatevers.
Also, to perfect your bread making. Buy a terracotta tile 30cm square. Wash it and put this into the bottom of the oven to bake your bread on. Buy a terracotta plant pot to the maximum diameter that your oven will hold. Place the tile in the oven, invert the plant pot on top, and heat the oven to the the required temperature. Leave the oven for 10 minutes after the temperature has been reached. Remove the flour pot, then place the bread directly onto the tile, cover the bread with the inverted pot and bake for 40 minutes. The tile and pot act as heat sinks. The tile bakes the bread from below up, and the pot retains the evaporating moisture, mimicking more closely a traditional wood oven for baking.

Compagnion Gardening Savoy Cabbage, etc.

Here is a picture of one of our savoy cabbages growing in a companion plot, which still is mostly of brassicas as this was one of first steps towards companion gardening. There are savoys in stages of development, this is one of the bigger ones, there are far less mature ones further along the row. But as you can see there is a good sized cabbage, not great, and there are companions growing alongside. Will harvest and cook some of these this weekend; it is quite a pleasure to pick and eat vegetable so fresh, and also to see Hannah and Aya enjoy eating what we have produced together.

Ricotta and Whey

To satisfy a request for my Ricotta recipe, which is very simple, you will find it below. It is possible to make this with the barest of equipment and ingredients, but it is useful to have a thermometre to measure the temperature of the milk. It is necessary to heat the milk to just below boiling, and as we know when milk boils it tends to emigrate from the pot with dramatic effects. In Japan, ricotta is expensive, and buttermilk or whey literally unavailable most where; so for the price of two litres of milk, lemons and energy use it is possible to get 500 grams of ricotta and whey for baking.

4 litres of pasteurised, not UHT, milk
Juice of 2 lemons

Heat the milk till it reaches about 90 - 93 degrees centigrade. Then add the lemon juice and return the temperature to 93 degrees. Switch off the heat, and let the milk curdle for a little while, it should have done that already.
Scald a cloth (linen, or an old white towel - they must be clean as can be) a small sieve, and a large sieve and a large bowl. invert the small siive inside the bowl, rest the larger sieve on the top. Line the large sieve with the cloth, then pour the curdled milk into the cloth. Leave this to drip for about two hours, in a coolish place. Scrape the cheese into a container, and pour the whey into the milk cartons from where the milk came. (The whey can be frozen, and it can be used as buttermilk for baking cakes, muffins, etc.)

The whey can also be sprayed onto aphids, to eradicate them from your plants as they do not like the lactic acid content. Repeating the spraying every 3 days or so for a couple of weeks to eliminate the aphids emerging from eggs laid on the plants; they have a 10 day cycle from laying to hatching.)

Soda Scone Recipe

This is for Vicky and her family who are allergic to yeast. Soda scones are quick and easy to make. Combining the ingredients while the griddle is heating is the best and quickest way to make them. The faster the ingredients are combined the lighter and tastier the scone is at the end of the day. Here is the recipe, sorry I cannot stand working with cup measures, and instinctively work in metric:

Soda Scone

250 grms Flour
1/2 tsp Sea salt
1 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
125 ml natural yoghurt or buttermilk

Heat a gridddle or heavy bottom frying pan for about 10 minutes, on a lowish heat.
Meantime, combine the flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda in a bowl. About 2 minutes before the pan is ready to use, mix in the yoghurt or buttermilk quickly by hand. The more quickly you can do this the better, the mix should be sticky but not too wet
On a well floured work surface, roll out or pat out with floured hands the dough to a round about 2.5 cm thick. Quickly place it on the griddle or the pan, and cook for about 10 minutes. (I usually cover this with a lid, but be sure it allows enough space for the scone to rise without hitting the lid.) Turn the scone and cook for a further 10 minutes. The scone will come away freely when fully cooked, and is not burned.
Allow the scone to cool and serve with butter, or cheese, or your favourite jam.

Because it is cooked with soda and is small the scone will be better eaten within the same day of making it, as it will deteriorate very quickly, eventually becoming dry and hard.

You can make your own buttermilk, actually buttermilk equivalent very easily by making Ricotta. I can post a very effective recipe for making Ricotta Cheese. This cheese is expensive to buy in Japan, but is cheap to make with ordinary milk and some lemon juice, and an old shirt or towel to drain the cheese from the whey.

Mange Tout Flower and Pods

Here is a photo of the mange tout growing in the garden. They were sown directly into the ground at the recommended distance in autumn, now they are a dense growing foliage covered in blossoms and swelling pods, also sporting leaf minor. The pods taste deliciously sweet without being overly sweet and crunchy, easy to snap off and munch in the garden as you pass. This is the first time I have grown mange tout, previously having grown sugar snap peas, but mange tout taste better to my mind.

What is this plant/flower, please?

Today, the rain has dispelled and the sun is seeking its way through the remaining clouds; thus I am preparing to plant out some of the seedlings, beginning with making a small, rough sketch of the vegetable patch and the raised beds. Along the side of the drainage gutter there is a plant growing which reappears every spring and spreads voraciously throughout the summer. I am sure this is a perennial planted there by the previous owner of the house, but what is it; can anyone identify it from this picture? Please comment with suggestions, then maybe I can track it down. Every summer I have tended to cut this down as a weed, but now that flowers are featuring in the midst of the vegetable sector design as well as vegetables, it seems like a good idea to keep it growing, if it is not a weed. Then again a weed is simply a plant and a flower by another name with the conferred status of cast-off or unwanted pariah.

Rainy Saturday

Well, today it is raining hard, off and on lightly. I woke a bit before 6am, and was called by my daughter Hannah. After putting her back to sleep, it was time to relight the wood fired oven. Last night it was burning, we had pizza for dinner. So it did not take much or long to get the temperatures back up to around 250 degree centigrade. On the left is a photograph of the oven re-firing to restore the the temperatures adequate to baking bread. The small pile of wood, perhaps 6 or 7 logs is burning in the middle of the oven, a little to the back, and it is easy to see the flames roaring up, following the curve of the oven to the front to send the fumes up the chimney. While this was occurring I started the next batch of bread and pizza doughs - recipes available on request - as well as a fresh polish starter. Also made yoghurt, and muffins for breakfast. meantime Hannah got up, ate yoghurt and strawberries while watching the 1950 version of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much, not the earlier 1930s B&W one; she said this was scary at one point. The muffins were baking at the entrance of the oven, as the centre was way too hot at 250 for baking muffins, chocolate for Hannah, her favourites, and blueberry muffins for us. Bowls of beans are soaking in preparation for their long slow cooking in the reducing oven temperatures.

Yesterday arrived a new, hardback copy of Elizabeth David's incredible book, English Bread and Yeast Cookery, bought second hand through internet shopping. I original purchased this book around 1982, and used it to study how to make bread. My first fully successful bread used the overnight, slow rise recipe from that book, and many others followed. There is a superb recipe there for making a blue cheese quiche using a yeast risen pastry, that I used to bake regularly for a café in Glasgow, a while ago... But, the original book has begun to disintegrate, the pages are falling out and it is difficult to maintain them in proper order. So now with this new copy, I again reread the earlier chapters. The book is a mine of information on bread baking through the centuries from earliest times. There are chapters dealing with each element of bread making, flour, yeast, salt, water, milks, sugars, fruits, spices, and so on, with an excellent section on bread ovens, starting from the baking stone, the inverted clay pots and onto today with a great deal of information on the construction and use of wood fired ovens, which I am now studying with relish, to discover what a 'watch and tell' pebble is, used to determine ideal oven temperatures for bread baking. (For that an infra-red thermometre measures more precisely.) If you do not have this book, and wish to bake breads, it is something that should sit proudly on the kitchen bookshelf; also it is a history and a literary entertainment in itself, with frequent quotations from cookbooks of lore and literature on breads, yeast cakes, and all sorts of yeast cooking. (We watched a couple of TV biographies of Elizabeth David, which were both informative of here cooking life and skills and also of her private sexuality. She was a more colourful character than imagined.)