Good dreamers

Rustat Road, Tuesday 29 March 2005

Blue tit, great tit, green finch

It's a small triumph, but a triumph nonetheless: within a day of putting up our new bird feeders (actually, they were given to us at Christmas), they've been visited by all of the above.  And I saw a chaffinch just biding his time too.  Interestingly, the fat balls are currently untouched, as is the grain, but the peanuts are clearly hot favourites with our local birdlife.  Just wait until we put in an actual bird table or something similar so we don't have to hang them on the neighbours' tree.  I'm hoping to get a full house of the top 20 birds according to this year's RSPB survey before long - I think I've seen all but rooks, coal tits and goldfinches before anyway.  I'm intending to put a 'what's about' board up in our kitchen and monitor what we see, month to month.

I'm slightly hesitant about using feeders in the Spring because I know that accepted wisdom used to be that this was bad for young birds, but I've been reassured more recently that actually adult birds eat what's good for them, and only take the stuff that's good for them to their chicks.  The RSPB says to avoid peanuts in Spring and Summer, though, and  the BTO seems to say the same thing - avoid peanuts unless they're only accessible through a wire mesh, so birds aren't tempted to take them whole to their young.  We're probably early enough now to get away with the peanuts, but I might have to change soon.

Though I've not seen or heard any yet, I also know (thanks to BirdGuides) that the migrants have started appearing: black redstarts, willow warblers, chiffchaffs, swallows and sand martins all mentioned over the last week or two.

PS A chaffinch landed on the seed feeder this morning - until a blue tit chased him off.

Stanpit Marsh, Saturday 12 March 2005

Curlew, redshank, greenshank, dunlin, oystercatcher, little egret, lapwing, coot, shelduck, mallard, teal, wigeon, mute swan, brent goose, canada goose, cormorant, black-headed gull, herring gull, great black-backed gull, meadow pipit, pied wagtail, crow

And we probably saw whimbrel, possibly sanderling, and maybe godwits of some description too, but I'm not sure.  The greenshank I wasn't sure about until I looked back on it with the benefit of a book or two.

There was a fair old wind and it was chilly when it blew, but otherwise it was one of the first really spring-like days of the year.  I'd never been to Christchurch before, but Catherine and I visited her brother Simon and his wife Ildi at the weekend, and they took us for a walk around Stanpit Marsh nature reserve.  It was great as a pre-rugby-post-drive treat to wander by the coast and watch the groups of ducks and waders with the benefit of a bright springtime light.  Simon also pointed out the Isle of Wight and ferry in the distance.

It still seems fairly amazing how little egrets have become so common in such a short space of time.  I remember seeing one in the early nineties and it was an exciting moment; this year, I've seen up to six at a time on several different occasions.  This report doesn't surprise me, given my own experiences.  Though I suppose this should be a cause for optimism - at least some birds are on the rise - it somehow makes me feel a little uneasy; the little egrets must be a sign of change, whether climatic or otherwise, and the same change is seeing the likes of the lapwing get sparser and sparser.

Cauliflower cheese soup

1 organic cauliflower, 1 organic onion, 20g butter, 900ml Swiss Marigold vegetable stock, a pinch of saffron, maybe 80g of strong cheddar, 50ml double cream, cayenne pepper, sea salt

Nigel Slater wrote on Sunday 'how to be good', observing that he likes to think:

I can put a meal on the table that is not only delicious but is made from ingredients with a certain integrity to them.

Knowing something about the provenance of a meal undoubtedly adds to the savour of eating it.  I'm sure the biggest buzz must come from eating something you've nurtured through the year in your own back garden, but I'll be honest that I'm not sure I can be bothered with all that.  Still, knowing that what you're eating is good is actually part of what makes it tasty.  Or at least part of what makes it enjoyable.

When I visited Robb recently, he cooked me fantastic bangers and mash.  The bangers were free range Duchy Originals and absolutely delicious - they looked like the sausages Rick Stein cooked recently on Food Heroes - full of meat and proper pork fat.  Robb also cooked the potatoes in their skins, and they were beautifully fluffy and not at all gloopy or gluey as they are sometimes when I make them.  Anyway, I'm sure the knowledge that those pigs had lived a little before finding their way to our plates made a difference.

I also watched Jamie Oliver's school dinners programme for the first time last night, and though I suspect that the lines of chicken thighs and drumsticks weren't free range, at least he's fighting the same fight for good quality food.  If we get over the idea that food has to be cheap and consider value for money and (as Nige would say) integrity too, then that must be a Good Thing.

All of which is by of introduction to the fact that I was excited to have my first delivery of a box of organic vegetables on Friday.  Now I'll confess that there were some blemishes - some of the apples were a little soft and wrinkly, the satsumas are a little too tart, I threw away a couple of black and mouldy-looking potatoes.  But I'm still delighted with what I've got left.  We had cauliflower, carrots, parsnips, leeks, onions, potatoes, apples, satsumas - and all this in the month about which Nige says:

the low point of the cook's year, and I could almost scream at the mundaneness of it all.

Well, I suppose that all our veg were fairly 'ordinary' - and I'll confess that I don't know the provenance of it all (I just trusted to the organic box man).  But there was something reassuring about having to wash the potatoes thoroughly of real mud, and it's going to be fun seeing what turns up over the next few weeks.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed for some good quality purple sprouting broccoli (I could order it specifically, but that would be a bit like going fishing with a 1lb roach ordered in advance).

So my first box veg meal was on Saturday lunchtime, when Lulu and Sheila came to visit.  I fancied the look of the cauliflower, and vaguely remembered seeing a spicy cauliflower soup recipe on TV recently, so I dug around and found this.

My version went like this: roughly chop the onion, heat the butter in a big fat saucepan until it's fizzing, add the onion and fry on a medium heat until it's soft and just turning golden but not yet brown.  Add a few saffron strands while it's cooking.  Meanwhile, chop the cauliflower into chunks.  Add these to the onion, give it a good stir, then add the hot stock, bring to the boil, and simmer with a lid half-on.  After about 20 minutes, the cauliflower should be soft.  Grate the cheese in, let it melt, then stick the whole lot in a blender.  Add the cream (shockingly, I used Elmlea because it was all the local shop stocked and Catherine had been kind enough to get it for me), maybe a quarter of a teaspoon of cayenne and a spot of salt.  Whizz until smooth and creamy.

Serve with ...

Parsley, olive oil

This is straight out of Nick Nairn's recipe - I just fancied the splash of colour.  Briefly boil the parsley, dry it on kitchen towel, and whizz it with olive oil (I added pepper too).  Put the oil in a pretty pattern on the top of the soup.

Fowlmere, Sunday 6 March 2005

Somehow this was something straight out of my childhood, only I was more enthusiastic now: balanced half in and half out of the car, grappling with my boots and getting the laces soggy in the muddy puddles, wishing I'd brought my scarf with me because my neck was already too cold.  I suppose the difference was that it was my choice, I knew that I could hop back into the car at any point, and I had a better idea of why I was there.

That was the beginning of my first visit to Fowlmere, the RSPB's reserve between Cambridge and Royston.  If I'm honest, we picked the wrong time of year; the reedbeds were silent, when I'm sure that in a couple of months they'll be filled with the sounds of reed, sedge and perhaps grasshopper warblers.  The 'recent sightings' list taunted me with a peregrine and two merlins in February (I've still never seen a merlin in the wild) - I was surprised at these, because I didn't think they'd be along for another month.  But we fancied a walk, and I wanted to see what it was all about, so it was worth the trip.

Fowlmere has a crystal-clear chalk stream running through it, which was almost the highlight of the day.  After a predictably fruitless hour or thereabouts, though, the biggest treat was a willow tit singing its heart out at the top of a spindly tree.  I'm normally hopeless at telling the difference between willow and marsh tits, but this one gave a beautiful performance and, by all accounts, the songs are unconfusable.  The Bird Guide describes the song as 'a series of pensive, melancholy, Wood Warbler-like notes'.  Though I didn't think it at the time, and the species was wrong, the vulnerability of the tiny bird singing loudly on such a grey and cold day has since reminded my of Hardy's The Darkling Thrush:

At once a voice outburst among
   The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
   Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
   In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
   Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carollings
   Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
   Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
   His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
   And I was unaware.

Our willow tit wasn't carolling ecstatically - his was an endlessly repeated, yearning 'tiu' - but there is the same principle of nature's suddenly throwing up a moment of determined self-expression in the midst of a dreary winter's day.  In fact, our tit was soon joined by another singing nearby.  Read into that what tale of hope (Hope?) you will.

In another update, I've found out where those waxwings were thanks to this site.  If only it were up to date on the day in question, I might have known where to go.  Perhaps this'll teach me to pay the subscription on Birdguides.

PS the description of the call on the BTO site has thrown me into doubt - perhaps they were marsh tits after all.

Spanish omelette

Six Woodland organic eggs, one Woodland non-organic egg, three onions (one big, one medium, one small), three Maris Piper potatoes (one big, one medium, one small), olive oil, butter, black pepper, celery salt

I say Spanish omelette, but I'm really not sure how authentic this is at all.  In fact, Nigel Slater calls it a frittata (minus the potato with the addition of some parmesan):

A frittata is an Italian omelette.  Unlike its soft and creamy French cousin, a frittata is cooked slowly over a very low heat.

Therein lay my problem, of which more later.  Delia's recipe is Spanish tortilla, though here she includes chorizo and green pepper, which sounds a little too fussy to me; her more recent online recipe is more familiar:

I sometimes marvel how it is that three basic, very inexpensive ingredients – eggs, onions and potatoes – can be transformed into something so utterly sublime.

By the way, someone still loves you, Delia, despite the contorted face and horrible mockney accent you put on the other night.

I think my favourite version was in the Moro cookbook, but I don't have a copy, so I don't remember what they said.  Whatever it's called, despite a few hiccups, it made a very enjoyable dinner tonight, and I'm looking forward to having the rest, chilled, for lunch tomorrow.

So here's what we did: heat a few glugs of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan (4 out of 6 on our crap hob), peel and cut the potatoes into half-centimetre slices, and fry them until lightly golden on each side (Delia says they shouldn't colour, but ours tasted pretty good like this).  I think the key is not to make them crisp in any way.  I reckon each batch takes about five minutes, all in.  Drain on kitchen paper.

Peel and cut the onions in half, top to bottom, then slice them as thin as you have patience into half-moons.  When the last potato leaves the pan, add the onions, lower the heat marginally (3 out of 6).  Panic slightly when you realise that they're going to burn because there ain't enough oil left, and add a big knob of butter.  Cook 'em for maybe fifteen minutes, stirring very occasionally, until they're soft.  Turn the heat up (5 out of 6) and, stirring more, get them gold and brown.  Break the eggs, whisk them with a fork, add seven or eight scrunches of black pepper and maybe a teaspoon of celery salt (it says you can use it in omelette, and otherwise I only have it in a bloody mary).  Frantically throw the potato back into the pan, take it off the heat, mix potatoes and onion together and add the egg.  Move the whole thing to a cooler hob space (1 or 2 out of 6).  Leave for maybe fifteen minutes, until almost cooked, then pop under a grill on low (or, in our case, on 5 out of 6 - crap grill).  When it's cooked, slide onto a plate and cut into wedges.  In our case, slide onto a plate, realise it's not cooked underneath, slide back into pan, and stick back on hob again.  Still seems to work.  To accompany ...

Three small and slightly old cloves of garlic, two dry bay leaves from Nanna's garden, a pinch of chilli flakes, olive oil, a tin of Italian chopped tomatoes, a pinch of ground cinnamon, a pinch of oregano, a squidge of Heinz tomato ketchup, sea salt, black pepper

I was planning on having leeks with it - salad would have been ideal - but we'd run out of stuff, and this was good.  Slice the garlic, fry it in the oil in a little pan with the chilli flakes and bay leaves until just soft, add the tomatoes and everything else, and cook for twenty or thirty minutes on a low heat.

To serve - a couple of wedges of omelette with a dollop of tomato sauce.

A waxwing in Cambridge

Apparently, there are waxwings in Cambridge today, and they have been here since at least 27 February.  It's so tantalising: I know they're here somewhere, but don't know where to look.  I tried rather optimistically scanning the shrubs around our garden, but unsurprisingly, there was no waxwing in sight.

As you'll see from the link, they're remarkably exotic-looking birds that turn up here in dribs and drabs for the duration of the winter, generally when it's too chilly where they come from (Scandinavia and Siberia).  I suppose they're a little like puffed up bullfinches with heavy eyeshadow and a punky haircut.  I'm told that they favour rowan, whitebeam and hawthorn berries; perhaps I should try the Botanic Gardens.  I've only ever seen waxwings once before, when I arrived at Minsmere to find a small flock sitting tamely in a tree next to the (old) car park.

There are a few reasons why I'd like to see the ones that have turned up here, but not least is the fact that they won't be around for much longer - the warmer weather and longer days will see them head North and East again.  Migrant birds provide a reassuring reminder of the patterns and cycles of passing time, and each species is synonymous with its own season, weather, environment.  Although I had a great weekend in Norfolk watching the huge flocks of white fronted geese and wigeon near Holkham, all my efforts to see the great grey shrike at Wimpole Hall came to nothing, so it would be lovely to round off the winter with a comparative rarity.  I'm excited about the return of the hobbies next month - a trip to Wicken Fen is in order - but would really like to see a few juicy wintertime birds first.

Birds are like vegetables, in some ways.  What's around is dictated by the seasons; yes, you can buy purple sprouting broccoli all year round from Sainsbury's, or see a hobby at a bird of prey centre whenever you like, but they don't mean the same thing unless they've arrived of their own accord thanks to the ancient twists and turns of our seasons.  Which reminds me - we get our first delivery from the organic fruit and veg man tomorrow ... hooray!

As a footnote, I have become addicted to checking what birds are around on the brilliant Birdguides birdmap.  I thoroughly recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in birds and seasons.