Autumn days

Smoked trout, fig leaf salt and a beer vinegar

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There are two techniques at the end of todays piece that I hope will bolster your confidence in the kitchen, simply because they are strange and it’s probably only chefs who turn their hands to these types of thing.

Onwards.

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West Berkshire , October 2024

I’d never seen a white feathered pheasant until today. Scuttling out suddenly in front of me from behind the twisted, hazel lined hedgerows that border the lower part of the drive near the tall gate posts where a pair of carved stone eagles sit watching us quietly from above. His back and tail feathers completely white as he popped out over the little bridge that crosses the stream that flows along the edge of the woods, the electric blue feathers of his crop flashing, as his bright scarlet wattle and beady amber eye nod away as he hopped off along the drive to look for his companions with what sounded like a cluck and a honk all at the same time.

Most peculiar birds.

October has arrived, and with it the shooting season has begun. Perhaps his feathers have turned white with fright.

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Fig leaves

The large fig tree with its unruly limbs, tall, thick and twisting, clambering up the back of the house, high up past the gabled roof where the cats like to sit to catch butterflies, has few ripe fruits this year. This is most likely caused by my harvesting baskets of its small hard green fruits last year for preserving in honey, not realising that it’s this previous year’s growth that should ripen this year, so the few decent ones that have swelled over the summer are unreachable without a very tall ladder and so have been left to the wasps, finally dropping to the floor with a magnificent splat onto the stone slabs beneath, a pulverised red puddle of bright red fig flesh, a slippery trap for the shoes of the unaware. The wide green sweet leaves that have been placed alongside tails of monkfish in the wood oven, steeped into syrup for cordial and pickled with the fruits for vinegar are beginning to fall now that summer has past. I have collected handfuls this week, washing them and snipping away their tails before placing them neatly on racks to dehydrate at a very low temperature for a couple of days, filling the vast new kitchen with that heady green scent of fig leaves. A smell that will turn my head wherever I find it.

The dry crisp fig leaves ground to a fine green dust and crushed into sea salt.