Fruits of our labours

As regular readers of this blog (not sure if I should go with a plural there, but what the hell) will know, last year we became landed gentry and purchased a house with a garden. Well, I say house, but I really mean crumbling-building-once-used-as-a-house. Anyway, the barn is in the process of being made into a liveable space and should be done by July, but the house is no less, and possibly more, decrepit than it was this time last year.

But, setting aside all that, last week just before I went to Prague I made a pesto almost entirely from ingredients that we ourselves had grown. I say we grew them, but it seems a little too easy. Dig up some ground, stick some seeds in and then just let them get on with it. Though it doesn't always work, of course, since we do have one patch which seems to resolutely resist producing anything worthwhile (even the weeds grow slowly there).

So, anyway, without further ado, Pesto alla Bankfalva.
You will need:

• Large handful or two of rocket/arugula/rucola (this was one of those words I learned in other languages before English, since when I was a lad we didn't have rocket and had to make do with lettuce)
• A couple of cloves of garlic
• Some walnuts (about 10 per handful of rocket). Shelled, of course.
• Olive oil
• Salt (these last two were the ones that didn't come from the garden)

Stick everything in a blender and errm, blend, until such time as it all has become a pesto like consistency. Add olive oil as required if more liquid is required. Cook pasta, and stick some of this delicious green gold on it and mix up a bit. Et voila! Or whatever Et voila is in Italian.

Now, there may be those who are at this moment boiling with rage about the un-pesto-ness of this pesto. Pesto purists, for example, will see the replacement of pine nuts with walnuts as an act of great treason (but pine nuts are unavailable here, and we have a walnut tree, so nerr). Also using rocket instead of basil will almost certainly set some peoples' teeth on edge (but our basil hasn't grown much yet, and the rocket is almost as prolific as the weeds, so double nerr, and anyway don't knock it until you try it - rocket pesto is the business). However, it also shouldn't be forgotten that pesto purists would insist that parmesan cheese ought to be in pesto, so I think we can safely conclude that pesto purists are mentalists who would rather make their primi smell of vomit, than eat something tasty and wonderful, so discounting their views is easy.

What the Mikulás brought

Friday was the day when the Mikulás came. The Mikulás, or St Nicholas as you may know him, shows up on December 5th with various small gifts and sweets and stuff for children. [I should note here that there is some confusion over this date. Here, he comes on the 5th, but apparently in Hungary he comes on the 6th. It seems that his Romanian counterpart, Mos Niculae, comes on the 5th, so perhaps that's why the Mikulás comes then here]

Anyway, he came, as usual, and brought various sweets and cakes and fruit and stuff, and also brought me safely home from Uzbekistan and - on that day - Turkey, which is apt, since that's where he (St Nicholas) is from. The other thing he brought though was of much greater interest and value. He brought our palinka. I mentioned some time ago about the abundance of plums that we have acquired as part of our new land-owning status, and that we would be making palinka from them. Well, on Friday, Erika (and a friend, since I was unavoidably unable to be there thanks to the Tashkent fog) carted our barrels of fermenting plum mash off to the village church for just this purpose. For reasons which are unclear to me, but perhaps related to the role of the church at the heart of the community and the priest as guide to the people, the distiller had set up his equipment in the priest's garage next door to the church. And so a few hours after dropping off our plums, we had a significant quantity of delicious 53% abv palinka to our name. On Saturday evening some friends came round and we sampled it (and continued to sample it for quite a long time, to really make sure it was as good as we thought).

Yesterday morning I woke up without the merest trace of a hangover, which I take to mean that thius is really top quality stuff, since these days, I do tend to get some fairly brutal hangovers if I drink too much, and for that reason do so less and less. The fact that this palinka was able to do the job without leaving me comatose for the day is testament to the skills of our distillers. I raise a glass in their general direction! (hic)

Brush strokes

Yesterday I did some gardening. It's very rare that I've ever been in a position to proclaim such a thing, so I'll just ponder it for a moment...

...Ok, that's done. Yes, me, gardening. This wasn't, however, the gentle and sedate clipping the heads off roses or picking tomatoes type of gardening that my mother does, but more your kind of slash-and-burn industrial strength gardening.

On Saturday I went out and purchased a tool that is described on the box as a "brushcutter", and I suspect that's as good a description as I could come up with - basically a lawnmower for people who don't have lawns, but have brush. Serious brush. We basically have a bit of land which is covered in fast growing vegetation ranging from what I suspect are young trees to clumps of thick grass to nettle plantations to some kind of creeping vine like thing and everything in between. It's not, shall we say, suitable for golf. Anyway the brushcutter is a machine in which a two stroke engine powers a rotating drum from which two lengths of plastic wire protrude, which as you might imagine whip through the vegetation with some force. It's quite fun, though also fairly noisy and somewhat physically strenuous - my muscles are complaining bitterly this morning, and it may be that soon my arms will seize up altogether curtailing all blogging until further notice. (Nettles, by the way, are great fun to slash to death, vanishing in a deeply satisfying blur of shredded greenery. The vine thingy and the grass are much trickier, being tough and unyielding and requiring repeated butchery to cut them down to size).

As I cut, I uncovered vast troves of ripe plums. The trees which are all over the garden are heavy with fruit, and as we've been away (coupled with the whole nettle thing) , harvesting has been neglected, and so we have a garden full of plums buried in the vegetation. One branch on one tree has actually broken under its own weight which seems a bit excessive - that tree must be feeling very foolish for having miscalculated so spectacularly.

In a bit of fortuitous synchronicity, though, we had discovered on Saturday what we could do with all these plums (other than making enough jam to flood the market and bring the price of plum jam plummeting to its lowest levels since records began). It seems that in Csíkszentgyörgy (the next village, which is effectively the same village - Ciucsângeorgiu in Romanian), there is a palinka distillery. We haven't fully worked out the system yet, but it seems that it works like this. You pick your plums and stick them in barrels and mash them up a fair bit. You then leave them like that to ferment until sometime around Christmas at which point you take them to the distiller and he converts the fermented plum mush into palinka for you. (Not free I presume - I guess we either have to pay him in palinka like farmers used to pay the miller in sacks of flour, or, as this is the capitalist 21st century, possibly in cold hard cash). So, at some point in the not too distant future we will have our own palinka, which is a very exciting prospect. (Lest I get too carried away with how exciting this all is, apparently a 100 litre barrel of plums produces about 10 litres of palinka, so we're not talking about massive amounts of the stuff, but I reckon we'll be able to fill 2-3 such barrels, so it's not nothing - as people round here are fond of saying)

Our neighbour, from whose well we are at present getting water (until such time as we have our own), is 95. Yesterday she and her young (probably around 80) friend engaged me in what might be described charitably as conversation talking about Csikszereda (a full 16 km away) like it was the other side of the world. Telling me about people they knew who had been to Csikszereda and even someone they knew that lived there nowadays. It occured to me that when she was born, Bankfalva wasn't even in Romania, and I would love to sit down and talk to her and ask her loads of questions about her life and how stuff has changed, but the fact that (a) she's pretty deaf; and (b) while my Hungarian can stand up in predictable situations like in restaurants and shops, it's not even close to being adequate for the task at hand; means that the communication difficulties will probably be insurmountable. I'll have to stick to brush clearance.

Going for a song

Who among us has not pondered listlessly on what a traditional Szekely peasant house looks like? Who can honestly say that they haven't lain awake at night wondering if there would ever be someone, anyone, who might assuage their thirst for this gap in their knowledge? Well, fear not because help is at hand. No longer will you need to feel that emptiness in your soul, no longer will you contemplate the days stretching unending before you without knowing what the Szekely paraszthaz resembles. Because, here, with only a mere paragraph of bush-beating to precede its unveiling, is one:The roof is shingles, and there are basically two rooms. As with all old houses round these parts there is no bathroom (as there is rarely running water).

Why, you may now be asking (having slaked your thirst for knowledge re images) is he showing us this house at this juncture? Well, it's because it's ours. We bought it this week. It's ace. I mean it's utterly knackered and would be politely described as a "fixer upper" by a British estate agent, but we fully intend to fix it up (slowly and surely bit by bit as we have the money to do so). It's in the small village of Csikbankfalva (Bancu in Romanian) which is about 15 kms from here (but on good roads). It is surrounded by 11 ares of land. I had never actually heard the term "are" before I came here, but it's always used for describing the area of properties here (and I have discovered that we do have the term in English, we just don't use it - one are is 100 square metres if you can't be bothered to click on that link).

Anyway, this week, in between apocalyptic rain storms we started cleaning out the barn - didn't I mention the barn? It has a barn. We intend to make the barn something we can live in on weekends while we use the garden, and next year work on the house. It's in better shape than the house and looks like this:As we cleaned it out, we happened upon loads of bizarre antiques which would go well in a museum (somebody suggested we should sell them on ebay). Things like old milk pails, knife grinders, various kit for weaving stuff, and a few things that I had no idea what they were. One of them was made from a hollowed out horn and had a hook on it - this turned out to be something you fill with water and hang on your belt, then you put your sharpening stone in it and when you are out in the fields with your scythe, you can sharpen it without going home. Fascinating stuff, hey? (He says, trying to wake everyone up). What would Arthur Negus make of that? (I expect Arthur Negus is dead these days, so he probably wouldn't make much of it, but what would he have made of it when he was alive? Huh? HUH?)

Oh, and it has an outdoor bread oven too. It's mint.

Anyway, our new house. I'm in Barcelona now, but I'd much rather be in Bankfalva. I'm guessing that is the first time in the history of human thought that that particular sentence has ever seen the light of day.