Life since Italy

Since being back from Italy, so not to feel sad, I’ve kept myself busy with the following activities.

1. Lunching on salad to detox from the Italian carb onslaught

2. Buying trees for the patio. I wanted an olive tree and a fig tree so I could pretend I was still in Italy but apparently neither get good fruit in England. We got a plum tree…

…and one of our neighbours gave us something but we haven’t worked out what it is yet.

Any ideas anyone?

3. Seeing friends for dinner and getting lovely presents.

4. Planning to pull down the garden shed and put a vegetable patch there.

5. Feeding my worms my vegetable peelings and sprinkling cinnamon around the compost bin to stop the ants invading (it works!)

6. Volunteering at Ham House again. I was there yesterday and it was my first day by myself baking in the kitchen there and it went really well. People liked my biscuits, no-one vomited and lots of people said “Mmm.” I’m taking that as a good sign.

7. Hanging the washing out in the garden and acting all Disneyfied because it’s sunny (it later poured and the washing is still wet on the line but whatever).

M is for…

MY FIRST DAY AT HAM HOUSE!

Yesterday was a big day. If you read ‘B is for…‘ you’ll know that I had signed up to volunteer at Ham House and was yet to have my first day. Well, that day was yesterday. And it went fabulously.

I was scheduled to be shadowing another volunteer baker in the kitchen for the day but when I got there, unfortunately the lady I was due to be shadowing had been unable to make it so another plan was put in place for me.

As I was keen to get involved in any way, I agreed to the other plan and just kind of threw myself into it. I spent the morning with a room guide in the kitchen, learning about the history of the kitchen and chatting to visitors, getting used to the type of things they ask, etc.

The kitchen has a distinctly different feel to the rest of the house. Instead of looking at beautiful lacquered cabinets from afar or admiring wall hangings, the kitchen is about touching and feeling and getting involved. There are dishes all around the room holding herbs and spices. There are even a few rudimentary pestle and mortars where visitors can grind up some spices and smell the aromas which are released. The signs around the room say ‘please touch me’ and visitors are encouraged to pick up the food and smell. There was a ball of dough and a rolling pin for children to roll out and pretend to make bread.

Down the huge elmwood table which has been there since the 1600s, there are bowls of fresh vegetables and herbs which have been brought over from the garden. There was rhubarb and kale and Jerusalem artichokes and something called, I think, school’s honora. That’s what it sounded like anyway. I haven’t the foggiest idea where the name comes from.

My first half was spent in the kitchen talking about all this stuff to visitors. Then, on a quick tea break, I swotted up on 17th century herbology (that’s a word, right) and the second half of my day was spent making nosegays.

Now, before you burst into hysterical laughter, it is just a little posy. They had various names, at one point even being called ‘tussie-mussies’. The term nosegay comes from the idea that it makes a gay smell for one’s nose.

The gardens have recently had a trim so there was a glut of lavender and santolina…

… so I brought handfuls of it down from the Still House, which smells AMAZING, by the way…

… and worked away in the kitchen making my nosegays and giving them to the visitors.

As washing wasn’t so popular in those days, a lot of people were quite stinky. There also wasn’t the sewerage systems we have now. So lots of things smelled bad. The nosegay would be tied to one’s lapel and when encountering a stinky situation, one could turn their head and bury their nose in their nosegay.

Different herbs and plants had different meanings so when someone gave you a little nosegay as a gift, the specific herbs they used meant something about their relationship with you. For example, lavender was for love, rosemary for rememberance, fennel for flattery, roses were to ‘rule me’, whatever that meant.

One of the others I remember was that marigolds were for marriage because I was talking to a lady who said she is getting married at Ham House next weekend and I joked that I would give her a nosegay with marigolds in for the occasion.

It was brilliant fun as people were constantly interested in what I was doing, asking me questions and taking the nosegays and smelling them. I felt like a fountain of knowledge, when in fact my knowledge had been gained over a fifteen minute tea break.

Anyway, my next day is Tuesday, when I will be shadowing a baker so will have more stories then too. Keep an eye out!

B is for….

BAKING!

I’ve done a little adjustment on my daily instruction from Karen M. Jones in The Difference A Day Makes. She asked me to find a common cause to contribute towards. She gives examples such as cleaning up the park or repainting a wall or something as things the community can mobilise and spend a day doing.

As I’ve been meaning to join the National Trust for ages, I figured I’d scale this up a little. Stately homes and gardens are one of the many things the National Trust looks after and membership with them recognises, in a way, a dedication to a common cause to preserve history. It also gets you free entry to tons of cool places. I figured it sort of fitted in with my instruction for the day.

So I went along to Ham House yesterday to join up…

…and while I was there, I asked about volunteering as it suddenly struck me that they have a kitchen garden and a cafe where they produce food made with the vegetables growing outside. Omygoodness, I’d be a bit like a farmer if I volunteered to work in the gardens here, I thought, while enquiring about it.

The lady who looks after the volunteers took me to the office to chat and talked about all the different things volunteers help with and in amongst it all, I heard this….

“…and we have some volunteers who work in the big old 17th century kitchen and do baking demonstrations for the visitors….”

O. To the M. To the G. This is so me! Baking! In a big beautiful old kitchen! Talking to people about baking and then feeding them!

“Oo, that one! Can I do that one?” I exclaimed. The lady seemed equally as excited for me to get involved.

“Would you be willing to be in costume as well, when we get round to doing a fitting?”

“Would I?! Of course I would!”

So the scene has been set. I am to be added to something called Google Calendar and to just add myself onto a day when I’m free. I shall wear a 17th century outfit and hang out in a kitchen all day baking cakes and biscuits and talking to people and feeding them. I don’t know how I could be more excited.

The lady who talked to me actually also lives in Ham House and I reckon, if I play my cards right, I could get in there too. It could be mine and Danda’s holiday home. Our Ham House holiday home.

If you don’t know anything about Ham House, go and watch Never Let Me Go or the new Anna Karenina – they were both filmed there. Then think of me dressed in my 17th century outfit, baking biscuits.