redcurrants and rosemary awaiting sugar

What a bumper year it’s been for the currants – were having berried up green smoothies daily, there are lots in freezer which will extend the berry smoothie season and it’s looking to be a very abundant bramble year too. Last year we gathered quite a lot for the freezer as well as smoothie-ing them fresh. At least I thought we’d gathered a lot until I met a man in the woods with 3 huge bucket loads of them. He must have spent all day picking. Maybe for jam? I really want to try preserving in different ways this year so we can eat the home grown stuff in winter too. So we made strawberry jam as mentioned, and then moved onto:

redcurrant and rosemary jelly for savoury things

 This was inspired by the home baked blog, that mixing of flavours is beautiful! I used Delia’s redcurrant jelly recipe with quite a few rosemary sprigs thrown in and then used the same basic technique to make:

blackcurrant jelly

which is wonderful – what a sensational taste blackcurrants do have!

Cooking on the stove this morning is Apple and Ginger Chutney from the Cranks recipe book with the apples from the bike ride heavily supplemented with ones from our trees and our own onions in there too Adapted recipe on the sauces page.

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pea

It’s wonderfully warm here just now. In between all the cycling, walking, climbing and meeting badgers in the woods were loving the cool of the pool and reading in the sun

Fiction being perused: Mariana, a gentle tale of reincarnation and time slipping and the latest Sophie Hannah, A Room Swept White – very impressed with this author’s progression. Non fiction-wise: The Moneyless Man, a guy who lived without money for a year (and continues to do so – see his blog), quite mind blowing, lots of info about the financial system as he was an economist and The Age of Absurdity, a great antidote to, well, total nonsense and status quo worship and it’s very funny too!

Jodie Picoult’s House Rules is also well worth a mention, though I read it a while back, as the main character has aspergers syndrome. He may have been given almost every trait going but he does come over as an authentic aspergian person and Picoult makes so many good points and references much current research, I feel it’s a valuable title to have in the mainstream.

borage

grapes

toms

red peppers, just watered

parsley, getting ready to self seed

melon

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other Scottish recipes on site include cranachan (traditional pud at Burns suppers), Balmoral pie, skirlie, bradies and mince with dumplings and here’s a previous Burns night posting from 2008 complete with haggis, poetry and music.

*note: do not serve the macaroons with neeps and tatties

update: toasted coconut and it stuck fairly well – they were just not right without it!

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Reading a book lent by my mum. She found it while scouring her shelves during the snow time (unable to get to a library) and thought it might actually be mine… can’t imagine why

Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society is full of wonderful radical thoughts on education, reminds me a lot of Holt and Gatto. The previous owner has hardly left a page untouched, with highlighting and notes everywhere, which somehow makes reading it more interesting, an extra dimension, what someone else finds of import. I think he went a bit too far in sometimes underlining whole pages of text, but there we are

Enjoying Scotch Broth, not the most photogenic of soups but it tastes good:

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In our kitchen:

detail:

standing on a beautiful bit of the Earth :

 currently reading:

Very peaceful and wise….

Buy UK or Buy US

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Written the little home ed page for vegan family – crammed quite a few photos in there

 …blog goes back to sleep…  or at least presses that snooze button for a while

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Adventures of the Homeschoolers: The Genie in the Teapot by Liz Pilley :) For children aged four years and up. Freya and Heath embark on the ultimate home ed family history project with magic, genies and pirates. I love their mum with her educational slant on the situation and her fear of inspectors :) Nice to see a book without the assumption that all kids go to school and that’s how it should be… authors site (includes a blog).

…and a school related one that I’m reading is Joanne Harris’s Gentlemen and Players – wow, descriptions of both state and private schools are refreshingly stark, honest and lacking in denial. Plot is enjoyably gripping too

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Heard a bit of Tony Robinson’s friendly guide to music on Saturday and knew the kids would like the style of it, so we ‘listened again’ to the Baroque programme with lunch – very good.

Still continuing on with Celestine – it generates a lot of discussion. Synchronistically, I was looking through a blog, found on a local forum, and came across some fab holiday pics of Peru. We looked all through them and then that day the book reached Machu Picchu

Filmwise weve been doing E.M. Forster with Howard’s End and Room with a View… also some more Jane Austen with Persuasion. Rewatched The Two Towers – never realised but Fanghorn Forest is our woods… knew we’d seen them before somewhere

Mathswise were doing money in various ways – these little games are quite good from the beeb.

French continuing with Asterix and some worksheets.

From the synopsis this looks a promising programme on teachers TV next week – We Don’t Go To School

Random pic from today that I love

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 They are getting so good at doing (I can now hear sawing sounds – only slightly worried) stuff like hoovering their own rooms, making beds, dealing with pool heaters, saving small frogs from perilous places, growing veg, cleaning bathrooms, making meals, general looking after themselves stuff… am even thinking of getting them to start learning to drive up and down the track as it’s our own private road (not by themselves I hasten to add!).

Harry Potter anticipation growing… read all through the wikipedia page on the 7th book but think weve heard most of it already or spotted the clues ourselves. Charlotte sat up until 1am one night finishing the third book and is now on the first. I’ve finished 5 but am having a break from them now as have started having weird dreams. Last night I was dying my hair purple with a wand and using magical water from the swimming pool to rinse… all felt quite normal too…

Spent an hour or so this morning picking blackcurrants for the freezer – there are just so many, it’s wonderful. Such abundance. Think we’ll use these to extend the season for having them in smoothies… maybe save some for a pie in winter.

bagged up for freezer in front of the tile with redcurrants on… these tiles have grown on me now but they will soon be no more – but that’s actually quite exciting so no sadness

Apparantly the kitchen is now covered in small packaging materials – have given out the information that the job is obviously not finished and a frenzied gathering seems to be occurring. Daniel has offered to make me a hot drink (this may have been inspired by a lecture about considering the impact of our words and actions on others I dispensed earlier). Then it’s on to some Shakespeare this afternoon in preparation for an upcoming play

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Then Cherryann sent me a quote from New Horizons for Learning: “The brain is truly a phenomenal structure, and keeping it healthy for our entire existence on this earth is a goal we can and should all aspire to. I am going to touch upon just five basic factors. And you are going to say there’s nothing new about them. Perhaps so, but we now have important scientific validation we did not always have.*Number one, and in my mind the most important, is DIET. What we feed this brain is a significant factor in its well-being.
*Two, is daily EXERCISE, and that applies to the brain as well as the body. Exercising the total body serves to maintain a healthy brain.
*Three, we must CHALLENGE the brain. It gets bored; we know that well.
*Four, we need NEWNESS, new pursuits, new ideas, new activities in our life.
*And five, last but definitely not least, we must nurture ourselves and each other: call it sharing basic HUMAN LOVE.”

We reached a decision about what to read together and Sunday evening saw us starting on Wuthering Heights. Started reading the introduction about Emily Bronte and the uniqueness of the book in English fiction but then it got all too plot revealing. Will go back to it after. The same goes for the rather wonderful pages on wikipedia and the like… also have high hopes for the Ralph Fiennes film being a good follow up. Were well ensconsed in the book now. Charlotte especially loves this reading together we do and is constantly asking to get back to it and read some more. I too love this way of learning. Well written novels throw up so many new words and phrases, symbolism, situations, relationships (what word describes Heathcliff’s family set up at the start – dysfunctional, completely and utterly!) etc. to discuss. I am impressed with the understanding the children have – it has really developed since leaving school. Do you understand this bit? type questions are answered in detail and the affirmative far more often now. For a bit of related fun weve looked at a couple of versions of the song on youtube – how dated does that look? (still love it though) Went and printed out the lyrics too as the sound quality is not just spot on.

Sky Learning - if you have Sky, this lists upcoming educational programmes by subject. The BBC does a similar thing here with their schools programmes (thank you again Cherryann!).

Right, it’s an early lunch today, then the piano tuner is coming – should be interesting -  and then were headed for the library

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