Passports, Newport, berries, booze

[bunn]

 Bit of a frantic week - lots of work, lots of volunteering, plus I suddenly realised that my dratted passport was about to run out and had to spend a day going all the way to Newport to get a new one. Now my passport is half in Welsh!  

Newport was a surprisingly pleasant place to spend 4 hours mooching about.  Remembering South Wales from my childhood in the 1970s I was expecting it to be pretty grim, but in fact it has a rather nice covered market with a reasonable second hand bookshop, a Waterstones, and at least one really nice cafe (Coffee 1, in case anyone else is stranded in Newport for 4 hours)...

Feeling that I may have slightly overdone the jelly thing, I've made some blackberry liqueur - though I'm not sure that any of the jellies are as nice as blackberry, so I may have to expand my Jelly Empire even further.  It's *such* a good blackberry year, and also I have found some more crabapple trees. 

Today I went out looking for my daily fig and there wasn't a ripe one! Have got used to the tree ripening one a day.  There are lots of largish green ones though, so am hoping that there are still more to come. 

The pheasantberry (Leycesteria Formosa) is starting to fruit.  It's a very generously fruiting plant, and PFAF reckons that the fruit is not toxic, thought it's considered only dubiously edible as some of the fruits are not terribly palatable.  So I tried it, and I'm in luck: my plant is one of the ones that produces tasty fruits.   They are very sweet with a sort of smoky caramel flavour (you do need to wait for the berries to turn dark brown for sweetness).  

I think we probably have enough jam for now, so I think I'll try them in a pie with some apples.   Am also thinking that a cake might be interesting with pheasantberries in it.... hmmm! 

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

LOL! Actually, the last troupe of belly dancers that are I really should have been called jellydancers. They were very very wobbly. But not lime green.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Are I ? LOL, the cider was obviously good stuff!

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Oops. Actually, I didn't have that much cider, since I was Drinking Alone, and had to be at work by 8.30 this morning.* I just went back and edited the sentence before posting, to remove a reference to where I'd seen them, since that could have identified the troupe.** It looks as if I ended up leaving in stray words from about three different aborted forms of the sentence.

* Which is why I am, of course, hanging around on LJ at 9.

* Yup, I know that the chances of the troupe finding my reference to their wobbly flesh via your blog is so minimal as to be non-existent, but I'm paranoid about things like this.