Year in the Valley

by Jackie French

  1 or 2 firm-fleshed peaches, thinly sliced

  chopped macadamias or walnuts

  3 egg yolks

  1 cup cream

  2 tablespoons caster sugar

  1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence or 2 tablespoons of vanilla-flavoured sugar (see note)

  Preheat the oven to 200°C.

  Line a dish with the shortcrust pastry. Place it in the hot oven for 10 minutes, just to cook it slightly. It should still be mostly raw.

  Fill the tart with the sliced apple and peach, scattering some chopped macadamias between the layers.

  Beat the egg yolks into the cream and sugar. Add the vanilla essence unless your using vanilla-flavoured sugar.

  Pour the egg-cream over the fruit. It should come up nearly to the top of the pastry (if it’s too low the pastry will be overcooked and hard; if it comes right to the top it’ll bubble over).

  Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, or till the custard has set.

  Note: Vanilla-flavoured sugar can be made by sticking a vanilla bean into the sugar container; the flavour is infinitely more pungent, subtle and superior to vanilla essence.

  March 9

  Sometime in the past week (lugging yet another bucket of apples up the hill or plastic bags of Golden Queen peaches or currawong-pecked avocados in my sweatshirt) I realised that the poem lauding the ‘Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ could only have been written by a man. A nineteenth-century man at that. E’s school holidays were spent lugging cardboard boxes that invariably broke halfway down the hill, spilling apples into wombat holes and bouncing down the cliff into the creek. Bryan’s fingers are (maybe) irrevocably purple – his contribution to the blackberry and apple jelly sitting on the kitchen table.

  Only a nineteenth-century man would have had time to mutter poetry during harvest season. I can see John Keats languishing by the fire with a glass of fresh-pressed cider at his side while the women of his household scurried round with jam-stained aprons and strings of drying crabs (apples that is, I don’t mean the crustaceans).

  What we really need of course is a siege. A nice long one – long enough for us to have to eat the remnants of last year’s plum jam, the seven bottles of pickled lemons that only a siege will force us to get round to, the apricots in rum from three years ago (potent enough probably to win a siege by themselves), the bags of slightly moth-infested red maize cobs that are too pretty to throw to the chooks…

  I have sieges in my blood. I love the thought of sieges. Every time I fill a supermarket trolley or pick tomatoes I dream of sieges. Not of course that I actually want a siege – not one that would really deplete the larder shelves. I just like to dream of them.

  The problem with self-sufficiency is that you’re stuck with it. Ten years and forty-four varieties of apple trees later, there are boxes of apples in the hallway, laundry, kitchen (not up the stairs however – the pumpkins reign along the stairway). The wombats are munching windfalls, the foxes climbing the more sprawling trees and the birds too fat to fly…and still we’ve got too many apples.

  Not nice ordinary Jonnies or Golden Delicious either (both of which I believe are the queens of apples), but Lord Roberts and Prince Edwards and King Alfreds and French Crabs (planted mostly for their names – one for each member of the family…though I couldn’t find a Bryan), and now we have to eat them. And eat them. And eat them.

  Old-fashioned apples sound better in the catalogue. Most need a colder climate to be truly rich and crisp. I remember my first Cox’s Orange Pippin in Tasmania as a revelation – sweet and pungent at the same time and incredibly crisp (only apples and mornings and freshly ironed damask are really crisp).

  Here they are sort of firmish, sort of sweetish, nondescript apples, not even a memory of what they might have been.

  But back to the apple glut. I now realise why last century’s recipe books are so hot on adding fruit and veg to cakes and puds. Not because they were starving, poor things, or grudged a little flour, but because they had too much…too much…too much…

  Desperation Cake

  1/2 cup butter

  1/2 cup brown sugar

  2 eggs

  2 cups self-raising flour

  1 cup mashed pumpkin

  a little milk

  1 teaspoon cinnamon

  1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

  at least 7 large apples, peeled and thinly sliced

  Preheat the oven to 200°C.

  Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, add the other ingredients except the apple – the amount of milk you’ll need depends on the squishiness of the pumpkin. Pour into a greased cake tin then press the apple slices deep and thick into the cake.

  Bake in the oven for 35 minutes, or till a skewer comes out dry.

  Feed to family, guests and friends (makes good chook food when you can’t persuade anyone to eat another slice).

  March 10

  More rain, just as the creek stopped flowing again – so heavy that as we drove home there was a sheet of white in front of us. We never actually drove into the rain, only where it had been. Runnels of milky water down the side of the road, erosion gullies down the mountain and collapsing edges on the mountainside. The creek ran – well, not a flood, but more than a freshing – cloudy with silt from the logging upstream. (Few city dwellers understand that a good fall of rain doesn’t break a drought. You need lots of rain, for weeks…)

  The rain has gone, but the clouds have stayed above us, fat and stationary as though they’ve settled in for winter, a true taste of the grey days to come.

  I’ve started to pick the medicinal herbs for winter – hop flowers and chamomile flowers and the last of the English lavender (higher in oil, so better medicinally), all to be covered in brandy with lemon verbena leaves and a little peppermint for a relaxing brew: two teaspoons before bed, with honey in a glass of milk.

  There are elderflowers too, for traditional cold and flu remedies – also supposed to be good for sinus problems, but I’ve never taken it long enough to tell. They get soaked in syrup; and rosehips to be picked and threaded and hung next to the chillies, and peppermint to be dried for tea before it dies down for winter and the last of the garlic to dig up, though we still have plenty of Giles’s so it doesn’t matter if I don’t get round to it, it’ll grow again.

  It’ll be time to dig the roots in a few weeks’ time, when the leaves have died down and the first of the frost has tenderised the bulbs – echinacea root, which is an immuno-stimulant and especially good for the bronchitis I’ll probably get later in winter (an asthmatic remnant of a city childhood), valerian root for even more potent relaxation (if you want it for a sleep inducer, it’s best fresh, or dried to help long-term stress; but be warned – it can leave you as dopey as any commercial product), dandelion root ‘for the liver’, to be roasted and ground for coffee (which is disgusting, but some odd people like it), marshmallow roots for a cough remedy, and horseradish root so there’ll be sauce to eat with the giant zucchini next season.

  Lotions

  (Written with pleasantly stinky fingers and the odd splodge of lavender oil.)

  Sometime about now every year I start making potions. I know I should make them earlier, when the petals are at their best, but somehow I never do.

  Maybe it’s the sound of the bees. Bees are louder in autumn – a sudden frenzy to store stuff before winter maybe – or perhaps you just don’t hear them in summer under the noise of the cicadas.

  Buzzing bees make some people feel drowsy. I get envious, imagining them slipping from flower to flower. Maybe I’m just naturally competitive and want some of the nectar too.

  The potion mood comes suddenly. One minute I’m tapping calmly at the computer, the next I’m out in the garden with stainless-steel bowls, picking, picking, picking. (No, I don’t pick my flowers by the full moon – it’s a nice poetic idea but you tend to pick the odd caterpillar as well, which isn’t much fun for the caterpillar and is no good at all for the potions.)

  R
osebuds, lavender flowers, echinacea petals, calendulas, lemon verbena leaves – which is why I’m writing this with stinky fingers and the odd splodge of wax and lemon grass oil on my shirt. The jars have been filled up, the larder’s fragrant and I can crane my head out my study door occasionally and admire the produce lined up along the bench.

  Most of the jars are handcream. There are…I need to crane my head again for this…eight jars, two of which I’ll give away, and the rest I’ll hoard. It’s enough handcream for the next decade, if not more. (Perhaps I’d better leave an annotation to my will too: and to my stepdaughters Elizabeth and Catherine I leave my accumulation of lavender handcream, jasmine massage oil, poppy face wash, chamomile shampoo…)

  Six jars may not seem like much handcream for a decade, and we do go through a lot of handcream. But they’re large jars and you only need the tiniest smear of homemade handcream to do the job of several large splodges of the commercial stuff. This is because the cream you buy is mostly water – customers need to feel they’re getting something for their money – whereas the jars you fill yourself are crammed with concentrated essence of flowers and bees.

  There are two sorts of handcream sitting on the bench. The first is heart’s-ease handcream – made especially for a friend with bad eczema. Heart’s-ease is excellent for eczema and this cream both protects against irritation and helps heal.

  The other stuff is more your generic handcream: good for what ails you, whether it is chapped fingers, scratches (my hands are always scratched), swollen cuticles or just the creeping signs of age. It’s excellent stuff if you’re planning to service the car, dig the garden or scrub the bathroom – it really does protect your hands.

  You only need the tiniest smidgen on your hands – literally a matchhead-sized blob. Any more and your hands will be greasy.

  I discovered today that Bryan doesn’t know how to rub on handcream, so if you or your near ones don’t (cross-examine your nearest male): place a little in the middle of your palm, rub well, now rub the palm of your right hand over the back of your left, then the palm of your leftover the back of your right – and keep on going till it’s all sunk in.

  So this is the recipe. It’s not set in stone – if you don’t have most of the ingredients there’s no excuse for not making it – just use what you do have. As long as you have oil and beeswax it’ll still be good.

  Heart’s-Ease Handcream

  1 cup olive oil

  3 cups heart’s-ease flowers

  a third of a beeswax candle (not paraffin)

  Blend the olive oil with the heart’s-ease flowers till smooth. Melt a third of the beeswax candle in a saucepan, pull out the wick and pour in the oil. Mix with a knife (it’s easier to get the scent off a knife than off a wooden spoon) till blended. Pour into small wide-necked jars (make sure you can get your fingers to the bottom easily or you’ll either waste half the cream or dislocate a knuckle trying to get at it).

  I’ll probably mix 1 part of this with 1 part of the cream below.

  Good-Beeswax-and-Various-Stuff-from-the-Garden Handcream

  This smells incredible. Apart from the flowers, you’ll need olive oil and some beeswax candles. (Make sure the candles are beeswax, not paraffin.)

  Choose a day when the bees are sipping and the flowers are singing. Take a stainless-steel bowl (if you pick lavender into a plastic bowl your cakes will be lavender scented for the next two weeks; of course you may not mind this…). Strip off a collection of flowers:

  lavender flowers (antibacterial, soothing for eczema, antiseptic, mildly analgesic, smell good)

  calendula flowers (antifungal including for thrush, antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, help heal scratches and scar tissue)

  chamomile flowers (anti-inflammatory, soothe itching, good for eczema but can cause dermatitis in some people – test first)

  lemon verbena or lemon balm leaves (soothing, antibacterial)

  echinacea flowers

  mint leaves (soothing, antibacterial, reduce swelling)

  rose petals (smell divine, can be antibacterial, soothing and anti-inflammatory depending on type of rose and season)

  Note:‘antibacterial’ doesn’t mean it will kill all or even many bacteria.

  Take them inside and just cover with 3 parts olive oil to 1 part flowers. Heat slowly in a saucepan for 5 minutes with the lid on – otherwise you’ll lose a lot of the volatile oils. (Don’t worry. Even with the saucepan lid on, the house will still smell of lavender and roses.) Leave to cool.

  Strain. For every 2 cups of oil add a melted beeswax candle (those rolled-up ones from health food or craft shops are great). Stir well. Pour into jars.

  Note: If you don’t have a garden or aren’t herbally inclined, empty out some chamomile tea bags, rosehip tea bags, mint…well, you get the idea. The cream won’t be as fragrant, but as I said – you have no excuse for not making your own.

  March 11

  Grey light and wet grass. We walked across the ridges between showers: soft rain intercepted by the gum trees, till the moisture ran in silver trickles down our backs.

  It was the first time since summer that I’ve walked along the ridge. I’ve been clinging to the greenness of the garden and the shelter of the house. The grass is almost brilliant green now, fertilised with months of debris and wombat droppings gradually dissolving with the moisture. The hill is covered with wattle trees with dead tops and pale green shoots halfway up their trunks.

  We sat on the old log halfway up (or I sat, getting a wet bum, while Bryan stood and kept dry). You could see the pattern of soil on the mountain opposite – wherever it is thin, along ridgetops or backs of rock, the trees have died; but most trees seemed to be coming back. It is still a piebald mountain though – gullies of green and stripes and almost squares of brown.

  Then further up into the hills – me puffing, Bryan loping – the native raspberries are nearly finished. There’s been so little native fruit this year (one reason we’ve lost so much down here) that there is only the odd berry to be found where the birds and wallabies and bush rats haven’t found it. But the puff balls are fat and the wombat berries bright orange, and their roots would be swollen now, with all the rain. Wombat berry roots are a bit like a sweet potato. It would be a good season to dig for roots now: soft soil and lots of new root growth as the trees wriggle into it. Many of the trees here produce sweet roots – not to mention the bulrush roots, and the orchids – but I can rarely bring myself to dig any.

  The last of the thorn-bush seeds (good to grind and bake), the last of the grass seeds – at least a dozen that are good to eat, probably many more if I only knew them – new green tips on many of the vines, very sweet. And if we wanted meat, the roos are fat.

  About a dozen years ago I lived hand to mouth here – fed the occasional houseful of guests with food that got more and more traditional – great hunks of sheep roasted at nearly every meal (leg or shoulder or rib roast), with masses of veg from the garden (potatoes and pumpkins, peas, silverbeet, beetroot, zucchini and tomato), and stewed fruit for after, with maybe pastry from home-grown eggs and nut flour – everything home grown; incredible and easily achieved abundance, the living very cheap, and similar to what my great-great-grandparents probably ate. It would be easy to substitute roast roo for the sheep…

  Sometimes, walking in the hills, I never want to stop. I want to keep going to that ridge and the next, though I know that eventually the hills would end, the roads begin and besides, I am a fair-weather walker, a nomad only in the gentle times, winter/autumn and spring. And then the heat arrives, or the cold, and I huddle back in the shelter of the stone walls and the protective greenness of the garden.

  Grass-Seed Cakes

  Take a cup of grass seeds – the oily ones on top of the blady grass (Lomandra spp.) that rips through your fingers if you’re unwary enough to try to pull it out. Bash the seeds with a rock or in a blender till they’re oily and mushy. Then bake on a hot rock by the fire or in a non-stick pan, just a thin
scrape of mixture that slowly turns flaky and curls up at the edges, then sets into a solid crisp pancake which you eat hot and savour because there is really no taste like it – like flour used to taste maybe before we bred out the taste so we could marry it with other things.

  Almond-Flour Biscuits

  Another recipe for when the aliens invade or the meteor falls or the social fabric collapses and you don’t have wheat flour.

  These are excellent with a dish of cold peaches stewed in half water, half white wine.

  2 egg whites

  2 tablespoons caster sugar or honey

  ground almonds or walnuts or hazelnuts or grass seeds or wattle flour (at least 1/2 cup – it depends on the size of the egg whites)

  Preheat the oven to 220°C.

  Beat the egg whites until stiff. Stir in the caster sugar (or honey – different taste and texture but still good), then as much ground almonds (or walnuts, or hazelnuts or grass seeds or wattle flour) as you can, which will be quite a lot. Place small dabs on a greased baking tray, then bake in the oven for about 10 minutes, or till they puff up and just turn brown.

  Eat them hot or cold. They are delicate and lovely and you can pretend they’re almost good for you.

  March 12

  The soil feels cool for the first time (probably won’t last – we usually get a warm spell in April). I planted broccoli seedlings today. They won’t mature till late spring. They’ll be welcome then, after months of hauling the last of the silverbeet off the stalks and eating only the broccoli offshoots from autumn’s plants.