Long Slow September Feeling

 On Sunday we visited Tapeley Park near Bideford in North Devon. It's billed as "The sustainable  stately home in the making".  It's run by a passionate farmer and activist, Hector Christie, emulating his grandmother Lady Rosamund, a close friend of William Morris...

We walked around the walled kitchen garden and the permaculture garden - all chemical free....visited the chickens and the turkey, the small black pigs and the shaggy horned cows - from a distance -  and ate our picnic on a bench in the sun on one of the Italian terraces below the house which has been in the family since the early 1700s. Signs of autumn everywhere... virginia creeper a blaze of red and gold, sunflowers bending their faces to the ground and pumpkins and squashes ready for picking.

This afternoon I conjured autumn in the kitchen....peeled and quartered the heap of fallen apples which I've been collecting every morning from the wet grass - roasted them with honey and orange zest....boiled  up last year's borlotti beans from the freezer and when they were soft, almost breaking up and still hot, tossed them in a pool of olive oil, crushed garlic lemon juice and masses of chopped flat leaved parsley  - a salad for tomorrow.

I stirred the remainder of the borlottis into my spicy Coconut Tomato and Pumpkin Laska, (loosely based on Nigel Slater's recipe in The Kitchen Diaries ) thickened with sweet potatoes and carrots and another squash. We had it for supper piled onto nutty brown rice laced with rainbow bright chard leaves.... shutting out the night and turning the heating on for the first time....wrapping myself in that long slow September feeling...