The Joy of Ceps

Another day spend 'shrooming. I found some scary-looking, sulphur-yellow Boletes first in a wet & ferny little conifer wood and then, after having pedaled by accident into an enclave of the super-wealthy (lots of signs all more or less saying Achtung Minen!), I paused by the gate on the way out and boggled at a whopping great Fly Agaric.

Before leaving I turned round to cast an eye over the ground beneath a few nearby Birches - and what did I see?

Could that be the holy grail of the 'shroom hunter, the Penny Bun itself? It certainly looked like it - but the size of the thing! I had no idea that they were such giants!

I raced home and (after double-checking it against the 'shroom books) scoffed it tout de suite.

Now, the probably-Birch Bolete I ate the other day was perfectly nice, ditto the Horse Mushrooms and the Parasols, they were surprisingly good - but this! Well, I can see what all the fuss is about, I really can. Fried in butter it was seriously, seriously delicious.

Two Puffball Frying Pan Exit Strategies

1: Peel puffball.
2: Chop it up.

3: Fry it - with olive oil or butter - better yet, with olive oil and butter.
4: Season with salt n' pepper.

5(a): Add beaten eggs to make omelette (Obviously, garnish with chives only if it's your intention to photograph it for a blog) or:

5(b): Slap onto ketchup-loaded wholemeal doorstep.

6: Stuff into face.

Dirty job.

I was standing in front of the 'reduced items' fridge in the supermarket of the grim estate down the road earlier today, holding a knock-down plastic pack of pink and perfectly oblong 'sliced pork product' & thinking the sort of thoughts I always think when I'm on the verge of buying this sort of thing, i.e., gloom, gloom, gloom and more damn gloom.

In the end, I didn't. I bought fruit - like you do - and cycled home instead, still feeling low.

I'm off to London for the day tomorrow and buying anything to eat on the go there requires a small mortgage - so taking sandwiches is pretty much a necessity. But what could I put in my butties? Nada. Zip. There was nothing in the fridge (since I don't actually have a fridge) and the cupboard was bare.

So, go out and try to get a rabbit? Oh God, I'm not sure I can be arsed.

So I blobbed & played 'Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' while the sun started to go down outside.

No. Bugger this - go out. Try and get some grub for tomorrow.

I needed to change my jeans though, they were clean on this morning. Could I be bothered? No, no I couldn't - I'll just make sure I don't get them dirty...

So, obviously, when I drop to take a shot, I drop straight into a nice fresh pile of cow shit and then, before I've figured out what I'm lying in - before the smell and the damp start to make themselves felt - I roll around on the ground to get into a better shooting position.

Still, got something for my sandwiches.

Time for a shower.

Frugal lunch chez Hubert...

Tapping up my take on the Midland Game fair I'm disturbed by tum rumblings. There's no bread in the flat and I can't be arsed to walk to the shop. There is a rabbit I shot last night - but cooking that will take a couple of hours. Open the cupboards: 'Savoury Rice Cakes', a couple of months old - and ketchup. O.K. Fry the liver & kidneys in butter with a sliced tom, liberally coat rice cakes with ketchup, slap on the fried stuff & eat.

Marvellous. Lick the plate clean.

For pud, coat another rice cake with some home made damson & apple jelly I was given. Pretty damn good.

Back to writing...

Number One in Twenty-Ten

Since freezing my bum off yesterday had so sharply underlined for me the hazards of sitting motionless for hours in the midwinter snow I made an effort, today, to get to my favourite spot within a half hour of when I figured that dusk would start to fall. There's very little point showing up much before this in Winter I gather; if it's nearly too dark to see anything at all then it's just about the time that rabbits will venture outside.

Happily, the brief interval between 'I can clearly see that there are no rabbits' and 'I can't see a damn thing' yielded me the first bag of 2010.


Joy! I was - as they say - well chuffed.

My thanks again to Fred for the scope he was kind enough to bung me in the mail when my foolishness trashed the Hawke. Idiosyncratic the Rhino may be, but it's hugely more effective in low-light than iron sights and my old myopic peepers!

Using the only Rabbit Stew Approved Recipe ('use what's in the cupboard'), I stewed the meat in a stock made from the butchered carcass (which I later removed) added rosemary, thyme and parsley, a spot of Agave nectar that was lying around to sweeten slightly, some dried Shiitake mushrooms that Santa brought me, plus carrots, cabbage, broccoli and rice.

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Tags: food, cooking, cookery, hunting, rabbit stew, air rifles

Out Hunting: Bees, the Catechism and the Oral Object

I found the papery remnants of a beehive when I was out wandering over the fields the other day. After I found it - and rather unwisely perhaps - I looked around for the place it had come from; spotting it, I stuck my head into the hedge where the rest of the hive was hidden. Perhaps I thought that there would be a few bee-free combs full of golden, glistening honey in there that I could pluck out with my bare hands? I'm sure that I had something like that in mind; I love honey, love sweet things, love anything, in fact, that I can cram into my mouth and, when it comes to getting hold of stuff with which to fill my cake-hole, I rarely let anything as trivial as moderation or common sense stand in my way.

What I found, though, when I stuck my head in the hedge was a hole in the ground filled up with more of these old comb fragments and a few disconsolate bees ambling around on top of them. Perhaps, it occurred to me at this point, there might well be a more lively hive beneath the remains of this older one? Perhaps, if there was, the inhabitants might not take kindly to my great ugly mush hovering over them? With this thought, I pulled my head out of the hedge and made off.

Then I sat under a tree for an hour waiting for pigeons and thinking - with little enthusiasm - of the vegetarian meal which awaited me at home if I didn't bag any birds. I'd taken a little book out with me so as to have something to read during these times when I'm staking out a tree in the hope of harvesting wood -pigeons. Opening it, I found myself reading these words by the Dominican friar Herbert McCabe:

We exercise the virtue of temperance in the matter of eating and drinking by, characteristically, taking and enjoying what is sufficient for our health and for the entertainment of our friends.

We may fail (in the exercise of temperateness in this area) by indifference to the enjoyments of the table; by eating and drinking that is totally divorced from either friendship or the requirements of health; by eating what is merely superficially attractive at the expense of a reasonable diet, by drug abuse and by all forms of gluttony.

After about three-quarters of an hour and two missed shots I gave up on the pigeons and went to sit under another tree in the hope of rabbits. The light was fading now and, as it did, so grew my dissatisfaction at the idea of a meatless meal. I must have meat! I thought, I must!

After another half-an-hour, and in near-full darkness by then, a rabbit hopped out from a burrow about five feet away from me and sat there with its back to me. With the scope on the rifle I had no chance of getting a shot at a target that close and so all I could do was sit there and watch it. After a few moments, still not having noticed me, it ran away up the field and kept on running until it was too far away for a shot.

In complete darkness, then, I went home and - with much satisfaction since fruitless hours in search of meat had left me with a great appetite - ate my, in truth, perfectly pleasant vegetarian supper.

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Tags: food, hunting, air rifles, shooting, catholic, Christian

Hubert's Cookery Tips: Cooking Rabbit with Olive Oil?

I'm no gourmet; I don't haunt delicatessens in search of edible exotica or loiter in puddles of my own drool beside the doorways of fancy restaurants. I don't really do posh nosh.

I do, however, regularly buy olive oil and, when I can afford it, I'll spend extra to get a bottle of oil that has a bit of taste to it. The furthest down the 'extra' road I ever got was a bottle of Nunez De Prado.

I came across it because I'd spent most of a day walking around the giant halls of the Tate Modern gallery in London and I was knackered, blitzed with high culture and very hungry. Wildly against my better judgement and heedless of the real state of my bank account, I decided - the hell with frugality! - to have a snack in the Tate's own swish restaurant.

I ordered the cheapest thing I could find and a devastatingly stylish waiter appeared bearing a tiny plate which was artfully adorned with one pink, glassy rectangular block (which turned out to be pressed hock of ham), one purple blob (a beetroot puree of some kind), a hand-hewn chunk of bread, a small pile of sea-salt flakes - and a circular pool of pale green oil.

All of these peculiar components turned out to be individually delicious but the star was - to my surprise - the oil: it was just unbelievably rich, complex and delicious. I was astounded; I had no idea that a simple thing like olive oil could get so good. I consulted the menu again: "...Nunez De Prado Oil". O.K, then.

When I got home I tracked down a supplier on the net, bought a bottle straight away and, for a few months after it arrived, every salad I ate was a feast and every dull boiled bit of veg - when garnished with a few drops of this stuff - positively shone on the palate! It was wonderful stuff.

It ran out, of course, and, because it's about twelve quid a bottle (about a fifth of my weekly income right now) I didn't buy another one. I did carry on using olive oil for almost everything I cooked, though - only I'd use Tesco 'Extra Virgin' at about a tenth of the cost.

This brings me - finally - to rabbit.

For months now I've been cooking rabbit with olive oil and I realised - yesterday - that I have finally developed an opinion regarding the merits of this which I am in a position to share with the readers of this blog. It's this:

Don't cook rabbit with olive oil.

Why not?

Well, even basic olive oil, I've decided, is just way too strong for rabbit. Rabbit - I've finally understood - is a delicately flavoured meat and a feisty, noticable oil like this just gets in the way, interferes with, clashes with the flavour of the meat - and then hangs around afterwards.

It's just not good.

I'd been suspecting this for a while but, since I'm a bit slow on the uptake - in this as in most things - it's taken a while for it to percolate through my bonce that something might be amiss in the kitchen. The last rabbit I got, by way of experiment, I cooked with sunflower oil only - and it was a huge improvement: there seemed to be space, this time, for the flavour of the meat to sit with the thyme and the rosemary; it was altogether fresher and less cloying than when cooked with olive oil.

Well, yes - that's quite enough Fanny Cradock impersonations for now, I think. Back to shooting stuff.
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Tags: Cookery, Rabbit, Olive oil, food cookery, game, food

How Do We Enjoy a Fish?

I caught this Pike last year. It wasn't the first Pike I ever caught, but it was the first Pike I ever landed, took home, cooked and ate.

The first Pike I ever caught I was just too astounded by the sheer enormity of having caught an animal so fierce and so beautiful that I just stood there on the riverbank, transfixed, gaping at it like a fool as it tugged on the line in the water at my feet. A few seconds passed like this as I wrestled with the shock of its beauty and the seeming sacrilege of my plans for it - and then it spat out the spinner and surged away to disappear into the waving green weeds downstream.

The first Pike that I landed - the fish in the photograph above - was, if anything, even more striking than the first. I'd gone out late in the day at the end of Autumn - dusk was becoming darkness and dense mists were rising from the floodplain fields behind me. The first cast of a red 'Flying C' lure produced an explosion at the bend of the river before me and this tremendous fish leapt out of the water and started to thrash at the line. Despite my shock, I landed it quickly and, as I say, killed it, took it home, cooked it and ate it.

Now I'm aware that I'm nervous writing this because in England at the moment, we don't really have a fishing culture that supports pulling fish out of rivers and then eating them. In England, by far the dominant notion of what you should do if you catch a Pike, say, is to lay it carefully on a mat, unhook the lure or deadbait that you used to catch it with, weight it, pose with it while an accomplice takes a photograph of you holding it - and then return it safely to the water.

This is the procedure for fishing understood as a 'sport' and there is, at the moment - and Izaak Walton would doubtless be amazed, but it's true nonetheless - almost no popular way in England of understanding what the word 'fishing' might refer to if it doesn't mean this. Catch and release: that's fishing . Coarse fish - Perch, Carp, Pike, Chub and the like - are almost universally caught, admired, weighed, photographed - and then put back in the water. That's what 'fishing' means here.

So there's been a very heated argument over the last few years - in on-line fishing forums and the sport-fishing press - that's been sparked almost entirely due to the influx into the country, temporarily or otherwise, of fishing folk from the rest of Europe. In most parts of mainland Europe, English 'sport' fishers have discovered to their dismay, the popular culture certainly does support the idea that 'trying to get some food' is one of the obvious, commonplace reasons why a person might take to the riverbank with a fishing pole.

Importing this approach into England, however, where the popular culture is very different as regards conventions on the riverbank, has proved far from simple and has sparked a furious series of arguments.

Certainly, a part of the heat has been generated by a number of Central European people who've been caught fishing in England without a Rod Licence. Scores of English nationals go fishing without a rod license (they're 25 quid a year and that's certainly been enough to prevent me getting one in the recent weeks since the season opened) and this is a matter for official censure and public disapproval - but a special fury seems to have been reserved for immigrants who have the temerity to behave as many UK citizens ordinarily do. People have been very cross about this - but it still hasn't been the big issue.

The big issue has been, I'd say, the question of the clash of cultures as regards the proper aim of a fishing expedition: do you go fishing in order to get photographs - or do you go to get food?

It's been very interesting to read the forums on this matter. Those whose fishing pleasure is organised around the 'sport' fishing model seem to be genuinely astonished and outraged with those whose enjoyment is organised a different way - and, interestingly, vice-versa. I read a fine post by a Scot who was treating the dominant English mode of fishing-enjoyment, sport fishing, with absolute contempt, "pulling them out of the water just to have a wee look at them!" - he was disgusted with the idea.

It seems to be that if you're a member of a group who are organised under one mode of enjoyment - 'fish are for food' or 'fish are for photos' - then it's baffling and infuriating to meet members of a group whose enjoyment is organised differently. If your group, say, enjoys a caught fish only with the eye, then meeting members of a group who enjoy them with the mouth as well seems to inspire a furiously disgusted revulsion.

So, I'm nervous admitting that I'm personally a member of the 'mouth clan': I enjoy eating fish that I've caught in the river.

It seems to be very difficult for different modes of enjoyment to exist together happily. It looks as though 'enjoyment' is a way that we define ourselves on a shared level that's set very deep. It's tricky enough getting along with people who think differently about things, who have opinions that we don't share - but living alongside people who enjoy things differently is a far greater challenge.
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Tags: enjoyment, ethics, fishing, politics, culture clash, food, psychology

On the way to Tesco: Food for Free?

I was on the way to Tesco's a couple of weeks ago, walking through the town park and over the river to get there. There's a fairly unattractive concrete bridge over the river and underneath the unattractive bridge are a collection of ducks, doing their ducky thing.

Half way over the bridge I noticed that, tucked in beside the river in among some reeds, was a pile of about half-a-dozen, bright blue, freshly laid duck eggs. In my pocket was a small piece of paper with "loo roll, tea bags, veg, eggs" written on it. I was fantastically skint at the time and I thought to myself, Well, why don't I just climb down there and take those eggs?

I looked at the eggs and I pondered it. I looked at the people walking back and forth over the bridge - on their way to Tesco's, coming back from Tesco's - and I thought about how it would look, me clambering down to the riverbank to take these duck eggs. Nah, I thought, too scary.

I went to Tesco's and I stood in front of the egg shelves: Duck eggs, Free Range eggs, Organic Free Range eggs, Omega Blah-Blah Enhanced eggs - eggs, eggs and more eggs.

I bought the anonymous, cheap and shameful Eggs from Caged Hens. I did this because I was, as I say, terrifically skint and also, I confess, because a part of me thought, Oh bugger off with your ****** Organic, ******* Free Range, ****** eggs - I can't be doing with two quid for six ******* eggs!

I am fully aware that purchasing said eggs, even in times of financial hardship, makes me an ethical criminal, not fit to show my face amidst my Guardian reading, hen-cruelty-abhoring, liberal peers. But there you go; I like nuked eggs on ketchupy toast; I couldn't - at the time - handle paying two quid for a box of eggs; so I bought them. So - as they say - sue me.

The next day I walked across the bridge again - back to Tesco's, no doubt - and the duck eggs had disappeared! Someone, I guess, must have looked at those eggs, looked at Tesco's over the road, and then thought, Well yes, I'll have those free eggs, thank you very much.

I pondered the vanished eggs and tried to reach a conclusion on the matter of what I'd done and hadn't done.

No conclusion offered itself; I went to Tesco's.
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Tags: ethics, free food, supermarkets