Of slimming, beer and mushrooms

The perfect slimming plan! Guaranteed to work.
Step 1: Base your diet mostly around potatoes. You can do with them what you like, boil them, fry them, eat them as mash or gnocchi or whatever else.
Step 2: Grow your own potatoes. Choose a plot some 25 km away from your home, preferably up a hill. Only ever cycle to this plot. Turn an uncultivated stretch of this land over with a spade prior to planting your potatoes, then plant them.
Step 3: After a few months come back and dig over the plot again to retrieve your potatoes. The calories you have expended on growing the potatoes are roughly equal to the calories you take in from consuming them.
Step 3 ½: If you are feeling particularly energetic, you can come a few times in between to weed, water (carrying the water up a few terraces from a nearby river) and earth up around the plants. This will increase your crop, but of course also involve further expenditure of calories. As you can see here we were out potato digging in Villa today, cycling back with over 10 kg of spuds on the back of my bike, which is particular fun coming back up our hill… Mushroom season has also started in earnest. Around us it’s still to dry, but in Villa we found a good crop of chanterelles last week. Today we found a good handful of little brown button-like mushrooms, which I haven’t actually identified, but I had thrown a couple in last time with the chanterelles and we’re still alive. We also found two beautiful porcini. So we’ll have a lovely mushroom dinner.
This evening we also decided to test my home-made maize beer. As you can see it’s a bit cloudy, but it has a distinct hoppy aroma from the wild hops we picked and a nice dry finish. It actually tastes of beer despite the fact that it hasn’t seen any barley. Alcohol content is about 5% AbV. I only made an experimental 3 litre batch, but shall try a larger amount next time.

Finally the festa on Sunday got pretty much rained off. There was a poetry reading in the small community centre in the village, but the concert was called off. They had actually lugged up this huge concert piano up to outside our house. Anybody who has ever visited us knows how many steps this involves. They just covered it up against the rain and collected it again the next day. We did have a little private festa in our kitchen though. The pianist and two lost Swedish tourists came down for a glass of wine. We had the Swedish couple over for dinner even. They weren’t actually lost. Elin and Martin were on their holiday and, looking on the internet, found themselves a little B&B just outside our village. It turned out a jolly evening.

There's autumn in the air

Yesterday autumn arrived. This is not to say it has turned chilly and cold, but the last two nights we’ve had heavy rain, the first serious rain in 3 months really. There were odd showers before, it’s been threatening occasionally, but nothing that left proper puddles behind until yesterday. During the day yesterday there were a few showers too and drizzle on and off and there is now even a slight chill in the air, which is actually quite refreshing after weeks of constant heat.
Nevertheless we walked over to Arcola yesterday to pick as many ripe tomatoes as possible, before they would be attacked by rot. Made a few more jars of tomato sauce today with it. Above you can see the dark clouds threatening above our village on our way back home.

Today was a beautifully bright and fresh day again and after the rains I thought this should be the ideal mushroom hunting weather, but no luck. We went into the woods and came back with virtually nothing, just one tiny mushroom of unknown provenance. We found some blackberries though as you can see. Soon it’ll be time to collect chestnuts.

I have, lacking any further advice, started making beer from maize and hops. I tried malting it (soaked the maize in water for 3 days, then spreading it out for another 3 days, until it started to sprout) and it worked to an extent, but there was not sufficiently enough sugar produced to turn into beer. So I added a bit of sugar to come to a potential strength of 5% AbV. It’s bubbling away merrily now. The colour of the brew is an odd yellow and it does not smell as good as the real thing in a brewery, but it’s only a small experimental batch, so we’ll just see.