nettle & potato soup

A couple of weeks ago I made the Friday Soup at Haarlem Artspace where I have a studio. We take turns providing a nourishing lunch for one another in our communal kitchen. I've long held the ambition to cook with the seasons, or at least understand what food the hedgerow can provide throughout the year. So in early March, with the nettles beginning to show their faces I made this soup.

Today, I gathered nettles in an altogether different world. I walked past a couple wearing face masks and felt wary, a heightened need for distance and also to smile, to reassure. It felt good to stride out above the town and quietly sing to the nettles, wild garlic and cleavers as I picked them. The wind cold, the sun warm, an abundance of young plants doing their thing, COVID-19 forgotten for a moment.

Nettle and Potato Soup

Two handfuls of nettle tops, rinsed

One large onion, chopped

Two medium potatoes, peeled and diced

One garlic clove, crushed. I also added wild garlic.

1.5 pints veg stock

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

Fry onion and garlic in olive oil until soft. Add nettles, potato and stock, simmer until potatoes are cooked, blend and season.

Cleaver Tea

Pick a generous handful of cleavers, rinse, place in a teapot, pour over boiling water and allow to infuse for five minutes. A friend who drank this said it reminded her of childhood.

Cleavers

Wild garlic

Nettle tops

  Nettles, cleavers & wild garlic

middleport

Inspired by The Great Pottery Throw Down and Keith's tears my sister and I drove to Middleport Pottery for my birthday earlier this month.

The pottery was built in 1888 and is remarkable in being the first to use a production line system, with clay delivered by barge at one end of the factory and ceramics shipped out by barge at the other. 

Middleport pottery has been the Home of Burleigh since 1889, Burleigh is the only remaining UK pottery continuing to use traditional methods from the Victorian era. The factory tour was fascinating - viewing the whole production line, the specialist skills of the craftspeople and how each stage of the process fitted together - a very well oiled 'machine'. Got a birthday kiss from a kind woman who was cleaning up saucers! Have deep respect for the ingenuity that goes into creating the ceramics. 

 Ware boards

 Ready for first firing

Discarded clay

first walk of the year

The new year is long gone and I'm only just posting this image from my first walk of 2020. 

Walking with my sister (the day after her birthday in early January) we were rewarded with this view towards Chatsworth. A sheet of light beams lit the winter fields and revealed the kind of green that makes a heart soar. 

solstice walk

This Saturday I took myself off on a solo solstice walk. The town was busy with Christmas shoppers and I was glad to leave the tinsel bustle and walk into the hills surrounding Matlock. There was much to wonder at on the trails, complex fungi, new shoots, crystal flowing water, furry moss, bright berry jewels as I followed rich deep paths. At this darkest point of the year I was amazed by the grounded stirring within these woods, a surety and faith contained within all life forms. The cycle never still, turning of the earth, rolling of the seasons... 

Our ancestors would have measured their lives by these cycles and being aware of this connects in a small way to the people who came before. It also brings close an un-knowing, my reading of the woods dulled in comparison to past inhabitants of this place. In 2020 I hope to learn about and deepen my connection with this landscape and it's flora. Can I belong here? Can I find surety and faith?

after the floods

Last months terrible flooding in Matlock is receding into memory. On Thursday 7th November I was traveling from London, arriving into Derby Station at 9.30pm and the weather came as a shock. East Midlands Trains provided taxis for stranded travellers, as the track beyond Ambergate was flooded. We took the high road to Matlock, driving through deepening puddles and it was a relief to see the lights of the town in the distance. We arrived and a fellow traveler and I walked to the bridge to see the river, it thundered below us, almost reaching the top of the arches that span the Derwent.

I struggled up the hill home, almost midnight, rivulets of water soaking my feet. Friday and Saturday were very bad in the town. We learned that a woman had died in the flood and this was devastating.

On Remembrance Sunday the sun shone for the first time in days. I went for a walk and photographed the swollen river and saturated fields overlooking Matlock. At 11am, stopping by a drystone wall for two minutes silence, I gazed over the town beneath an immense blue sky and felt terribly sad. The Last Post sounded from a nearby war memorial, marking the end of our silence and alone with my thoughts I felt connected to others nearby. 

my friend, the tree

I'm very fond of this tree. When I stopped to give her a friendly pat on a walk last Sunday, I was amazed to see she was speckled with tiny white mushrooms. They nestled in the moss, and reached far up into her strong branches. They reminded me of constellations of stars, catching the October sunlight as it streamed momentarily through the wood. How magical they are.   

Trees are life support systems.

charming graffiti

Late last month I visited Haddon Hall on a drizzly Sunday. After a week of heavy rain the Derwent River was mud toned and high, surging under the footbridge to the hall. Nearby, rain sodden fields reflected the sky in silver mirrored surfaces, blades of grass piercing clouds. 

Haddon Hall is a fascinating site with parts of the building dating to the 12th Century. For a period of two hundred years the hall was empty and left to ruin, so visitors scratched charming graffiti into glass panel and wooden interior. We have much in common with our ancestors. 

I get excited when rediscovering these marks, wondering about the people, their conversations, the day, the journey to the hall, what awaited them when they returned home. The halls windows are like no other I've seen, angled like cleverly folded origami paper to allow as much light as possible to enter the building. These illuminated diamonds hold whispers from the past in unfamiliar script and dates jump out - 1779, 1828. I try to imagine what the world was like then, pondering literacy rates and who had the agency to leave their mark, who didn't?