The best season to eat this vegetable runs from May to November, for the one produced next to your door, in small Britain.



To choose a beautiful artichoke, a Breton one, le camus de Bretagne (green globe for US)… You have to recognize it : it is not the same as the mediterranean one, it is bigger (2 to 3 heads for a kilo). Then for a good one, you need to check the stem : it has to be fresh (not dry).

To cook it : you need to use two different boiling water

The first one is to wash it (the acidity will go), boil for 5 minutes and don’t cover. The water will be green.
The second is to cook it. Depending on the size of the vegetable, cook betwenn 15 to 30 minutes in boiling water. To know if it is cooked, remove a leaf and if it is tender, you can strain and wait till it is cold.

Recipe for french dressing :
3 tablespoons oil
1 of vinegar
a large teaspoon of french mustard.

Eat the leaves one by one dipped in french dressing. Savour the heart once you removed the inedible “choke”. You can also peel the stem and eat the tender center.
Be careful you have once cooked to eat it during the day because the artichoke oxidizes quickly.

Read it in French : Recette de l'artichaut à la vinaigrette

Have you heard about the Copenhagen Summit... Of course... States and men have to act together to change the habbits we have for years...

One step can be simple : eat the right vegetable or fruit at the right time...
But as most of us don’t grow anymore vegies, we have forgotten when it is the right season to eat that kind of vegetables or this type of fruits…
And it is not just politically correct, it is also healthy (fresh vitamins) and wise (less expensive if you buy them when they're naturally mature.... cheaper...) to eat well and good (better taste)...
To help you through and to discover some of our regional products, I have done this calendar for the autumn production… October, November and December...

Some veggies can be kept through the year, if well preserved : beets, carrots, celery, potatoes and onions...
We often forget that exotic fruits are also related to the seasons.
Autumn is also the season to collect and enjoy fresh nuts (chestnuts,wallnuts...).

Enjoy the recipes and the local production clicking on links.



Vegetables
Artichokes, Beans, Beets, Horseradish, Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Cabbage, Carrots, Cauliflowers, Celery, Chicory, Cucumbers, Fennel, Leeks, Onions, Potatoes, Radish, Romanesco cauliflower, Roquette Salad, Spinach, , Turnips, Zucchini

Fruits
Apples, Dates, Figs, Grapes, Lemons, Oranges, Pears, Persimmons, Quinces
Almonds, Chestnuts, Hazelnuts, Walnuts
Exotics Pineapples

NOVEMBER

Vegetables
Beets, Broccoli, Carrots, Cabbage, Celery, Chicory, Fennel, Jerusalem artichokes, Leeks, Lentils, Onions, Potatoes, Pumpkins, Salad, Salsify, Spinach, Turnips Fruits
Apples, Grapes, Kiwis, Mandarins, Oranges, Pears
Chestnuts, Dates, Walnuts



Vegetables
Avocados, Beets, Horseradishes, Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, Cabbage, Carrots, Cauliflower, Celeriac, Leeks, Onions, Potatoes, Pumpkins, Salsify, Turnips

Fruits
Apples, Clementines, Mandarins, Oranges, Pears
Almonds, Dates, Hazelnuts, Walnuts
Exotics Bananas, Guavas, Lychees, Mangoes, Pineapples

Read it in French : Calendrier des fruits et légumes à consommer en saison d'automne

As I live near by a canal, I do often walk on the banks and in autumn it is time for harvesting chestnuts, the one edible. Make sure you’re not bringing home conkers, that won’t do for my nice chocolate chesnuts recipe (next post).



Even though they can be both called chestnuts, they are not the same.



1 - Conkers
The fruit of the conker tree (or horse-chestnut) is alone in its capsule, it is bigger, round and has a beige scar. The fruit of the conker tree is not edible, even for animals. It can be used for medicinal goals. or some other things...



2 - Chestnuts
The sweet chestnut is not alone in its capsule, they are two or three. The fruit has a pear shape and a small tuft The bur is very prickly. When green, it is not ripe enough. Wait till it’s brownish to eat them.



The Romans brought the chestnuts back in Europe from Asia Minor. It was nice for the empty stomachs during the hard winter time. It was then food for poor people. It was not considered as a good flour because it is no good to make bread as it does not rise.

Time have changed. Now in Ardeche it has an AOC (French Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée equivalent Protected Geographic Indication) and is quite nice for people who suffer from gluten allergy.

Once you picked them, read my next post to make my chocolate chestnut cake.



Read it in French : Chataignes ou marrons : quels fruits pour un gâteau ?

April is the month for harvesting dandelions. Take your knife and pick flowers, some buttons and young leaves. You’ll make the meal of the day. Try to avoid to places where dogs like to … or where foxes run (the disease they transmit is hard to heal) or where cars leave their gaz…



The jelly is so nice. It looks like honey (colour, smell and texture) and it is really good.
No wonder because the flower is melliferous (it attracts insects that make honey). Taste a flower. It is honey…

Well the recipe now

Quantity for a mug of flower well packed. Harvest as much mugs as you want and add the quantity necessary.
250 ml water
175 g sugar
A quarter of lemon in slices

Remove stems. Wash the flowers.
Pour into a saucepan with the water. Boil softly (5 minutes for a mug, 10 for 2…). Filter and strain the flowers to collect all ther liquid.
Add sugar.
Cook over low heat until the consistency of a syrup. Times varies on the number of mugs you used (for 2 mugs about 45 minutes). Transfer to pot and let cool upside down . Store also upside down.



Salad with buttons of dandelions, leaves, potatoes, soft-boiled eggs and bacon

Like bitter salad. You’ll love it… Pick some young leaves and buttons.



Ingredients
Dandelions
Lardons
Eggs (2 per person)
Potatoes (2 to 3 per person)
Dressing (with french mustard)

Wash them. Cook the potatoes in slices, the eggs (6 minutes). Fry in a sauce pan the lardons.
In the bowl, put the salad, add the potatoes, the lardons and the eggs cut in half. Finally the buttons of dandelions.
Delicious, is n’t it ????

Read it in french : Miel de pissenlit et salade aux boutons et fleurs de pissenlit

My regular readers may have noticed that my last posts have no picture ...
And yes that's the mystery of the computer system, my PC has some shortcomings, a failure ... A screen full of colored stripes... Horror, all my photos are in, in my computer (and many other things too). How to fix my computer? Calls here and there, tips but no solutions that work for now ... I dare not even imagine if I must take it to repair ....
So, I use my little one.... And I make notes without pictures!

For these two activities watch the weather forecast and be a little prepared in advance, waiting for the winter and rain in Small Britain.
You need some material ... straight branches, rather thick (1.5 cm diameter) and nuts you did harvest in September.

For the rest, wait for a good winter weather forecast and a nice rainy weekend ... Wait for THE sunday until you hear "what we do, it's raining ..." .

So what do we start with : recipe or branches?

Free activity for kids with branches of hazel : dwarfs and other colored snowmen

This DIY needs :
Secateurs
A long branch of hazel
A knife without tooth
Markers
Cotton

Cut your branch into pieces. Cut the heads and hats. Paint and draw faces.
You can also make another craft such as a family, a small dwarf with a beard, a dress ...


Hazel can also be used to make a bow, it is flexible ... but I do not know yet how to make the arrows ...



In Germany for the Christmas period, very different cakes, biscuits and shortbread cookies are made. It is a recipe from my girlfriend living in Freiburg.

This recipe has a nice taste of chocolate and are similar to gingerbread cakes topped with chocolate... The good ones for this Christmas period.



Ingredients
60 grams of dark chocolate
60 g butter
3 eggs
80 g sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
60 g flour
60g hazelnuts coarsely crushed

For the frosting
80 g chocolate
Icing sugar to sprinkle
Baking time : 30 minutes
Preheat oven to 180 ° (6).
Coarsely grind nuts.
Melt butter and chocolate.
Meanwhile, mix sugar and eggs. Add flour, cinnamon and nuts. Then the chocolate-butter mixture. Mix well.
Cover your dish (square or rectangle) of a baking sheet.
Pour your dough and spread on a regular basis (thin layer). Bake for 30 minutes.
Once baked, melt chocolate and pour over the square cake and spread. Sprinkle with icing sugar. Wait to cool and cut into small pieces.
Read this article in French : Activités pour les jours de pluie

Do you know that dandelion is a french name… dent de lion which means lion teeth… because of the shape of its leaves.

In April, land is covered with dandelion flowers. Yes indeed, this plant is useful and the wonders of the dandelion are to be discovered…

First of all it is an easy plant to find…It grows almost everywhere, even in weird places like walls or concrete…



But be careful not to confuse them with other plants : more than hundred species are alike and have also yellow flowers. But they are not as tasty or even they can be toxic.

How to recognize a dandelion ?

The flower smells honey and if you eat its heart, it slightly sweet and taste like honey.
The stem is hollow and oozes a white liquid.
There is only one flower per stem.
Once it’s faded, the plant has fine hairs… that’s the best way to recognize them.



Its leaves are dentated : that’s the origin of its name, remember…
In French we call it pissenlit (piss in bed) because of its diuretic properties.
What to do with it ?

In France, the classical salad with potatoes, bacon and eggs.
The leaves can also be eaten cooked as spinach.
The roots were used during the second world war as a substitute to coffee.
The flowers, melliferous (plants that bees used to make honey), are used to make a wonderful jelly.



Read it in French : Vertus des plantes sauvages : le pissenlit

Buckwheat is not what it’s name suggests : it’s not wheat neither a cereal or a grain. It is a Polygonaceae, a sister of rheum, docks or sorrels.

In French and even in Breton, its name is blé noir (black wheat, the flour is dark) and it is used to make the famous galettes de blé noir (sarrasin).

Archeologists found it in Brittany in prehistorical pollen. But it is a common plant in Britain since the 15 th C, probably because it was reintroduced at that time in the region. And soon it became the basis of the food of the breton farmers.

Because it was so easy to grow it in Brittany : first of all, buckwheat is a crop that loves acidic or low fertility soils, it needs lots of water too. And Brittany was the place… we have “bad” soils and lots of rain.



As it grows quickly, farmers used to cultivate it beetween the winter crop and the summer one. It was also used to cover the fields and then as fertilizer.
Farmers could use hand mills to obtain flour, they did not have to use the mill which one must pay for!!!
During the 19th C, Brittany was producing 50% of the French buckwheat.

At the end of the 19th C, buckwheat was abandoned for new cereals and potatoes. And its cultivation began to decrease. During the 80's, 90's, crêperies had to import the flour from Russia or China as it was no more cultivated in France. And with the green movement, hardy plants have a new life : farmers in Center Brittany began to produce it again. Now you find organic buckwheat produced here, in the region.

Today buckwheat has other nice advantages : gluten free, it is also a good provider of vitamins, proteins, minerals such as iron… it is nice for food allergy.

Beer is also done with buckwheat in Brittany.



And all over the world, buckwheat has its specialities. Specially in its original region South East Asia : in Japan, people eat it as pasta. Or the grains are used to make special pillows to relax…

Read it in French : Blé noir ou sarrasin en bretagne : une farine miracle

Want to eat unusual pancakes… with a spring flavour…

The elderberry flower will give a very light sweetness to the crêpes. And hurry… the season of flowers elderberry flies (a good month of May and June).

You need two to three large clusters of flowers to put in the dough.

Ingredients
250 g flour
250 ml of beer (the same amount of flour)
500 ml of milk (the double )
4 eggs
Salt
Some alcohol of your choice
Mix everything and let it rest a bit.
Add the flowers in batter. Heat the pan. With some oil on a tissue, grease the pan each time you make a crêpe. Pour a ladle of batter. When the edges turm brown, turn it. Let cook a minute.

Place on a plate, sprinkle with sugar (which will melt with heat) and add so on your pancakes. Eat them when they are cold (the flavour of flower is light, when eaten warm, it does not taste as much !).

Brittany and specially the North coast is known for its high concentration in algae. They are famous abroad, above all in Japan, big algae consumers.




Roscoff, a small city on the littoral is pretty well endowed : 800 species out of 1500 compiled in Brittany in 2000. Probably others must have been discovered.

The location of Roscoff explains why it has such a wide variety of algaes : the Gulf Stream allows a water temperature that doesn’t change a lot. The Stream gives a good waterquality.

Now, look at the shore and at the algae lying on the sand. You’ll see 3 colors : green, red and brown.



Each color is on a specific place on the shore. The brown ones are under the sea, then you have the red ones and the green algae are the closest to the earth.

Here in Brittany we have had lots of problems with the green ones. Thanks or because of fertilizers and nitrates from our pigs breeding, they were too many. It used to be a real annoyance. It's getting better but before on some beaches you could not walk or swim because they were doing a really too thick cover on the littoral.

For a really long time, seaweeds were used as fertilizers by farmers.



If Japanese eat them for a long, long time, we are just starting to be interested in them.
We do use it as gelling agents : when you buy an applepie in a shop and you are amazed by the nice shaped apple segments, well don’t think too much : the compote has been mixed with algae to make those nice perfect pieces of fruits.

Algae are also used as dietary supplements. They are full of vitamins, minerals, calcium, proteins… Sprinkle them on your salad.

In thalassotherapy centers they are used to help your body to recover… Your wrinkles will dicrease, your orange peel disappear, your hair will be beautiful … Used in cosmetics, we make lots of products with algae extracts : from anti-aging creams to oil to fight cellulite, skin care products or algae shampoo… They are everywhere. And to use them, you need to mix them as algae can’t be dissolved in water !!!

Read it in French : Algues en Bretagne : de l'engrais de nos grands pères aux complémetns alimentaires et produits cosmétiques

Prunus spinosa (also called sloe or Black thorn) is a small tree you can find in lots of Breton hedges. And it has its specific uses here in Brittany…

The tree is quite an old one : during the New Stone Age, stones were found in the houses of our ancestors…
It has other specifities : birds and insects like to rest or even more... in the bushes as it is full of spines.



Its bark was used to dye wool or flax in red. Its flowers are helpful when one suffer from digestive disorders or constipation.



In Brittany, its more common use is to make an alcoholic beverage…with its fruits.

Read it in French : Le prunellier : un arbuste aux qualités multiples

You can make this soup with pumpkin or butternut squash.

Ingredients :
1 kg of butternut squash
250g chesnuts
Salt and pepper
One clove garlic
Ginger
10 minutes in a pressure cooker



Cook garlic in a pressure cooker while you cut the butternut squash in large sized cubes. Pour your cubes into a pressure cooker and add water to almost cover. Add ginger powder or slices of ginger. Simmer for 10-12 minutes until the squash is very tender. Flavor with salt and pepper. Mix the soup and add the chestnuts. Mash them just a bit and enjoy the soup with some pieces of chestnuts.

Read it in French : Recette de soupe à la courge musquée et aux châtaignes