Spring Arrives in Books

 In January I wrote a post about Winter Books  and   I've got library books reserved about winter that I'll not get to read until spring but this was a book about Spring that I read last week - while we are still surviving winter.

Simon Barnes - Spring is the Only Season: How it Works, What it Does and Why it Matters.

This book covers every aspect of spring - From birds and butterflies to agriculture and literature , mythology, religion and art.

The library website says..........

Spring is the time of renewal and rebirth, a celebration of the resilience of life. As the year turns, animals and plants that have struggled to survive the winter find new hope and create the next generation. The season has inspired some of humanity's greatest art and many of its most significant religious festivals. Simon Barnes provides a fresh and compelling look at this period of the year. He explains the science of the seasons, which are caused by the planet's 23.5 degree tilt; he also highlights the music, the paintings and the poetry that have tried to capture it.

This took several days to read, there was so much of interest in it  but it comes with a warning...........

However, while the Earth will continue to spin on its tilting axis, he reveals how our impact on the planet is beginning to destroy the natural course of the seasons, and that elements of the beloved spring - from migrating birds to emerging butterflies - are endangered by climate change. But it's not too late. Not yet. We can still make a difference and so continue to enjoy the pleasures of spring. 

One tiny patch of celandines for spring down the road from home

The  other spring book here that I needed to read before spring arrives as it's due back at the library is 'Spring - The Story of a Season' by Michael Morpurgo. (Second of four books commissioned from authors who usually write fiction, the post about the Winter book is HERE )

This book is a look at the arrival of Spring on the farm and land around where Michael and his wife Clare have lived for many years in a remote area between Dartmoor and Exmoor. Here they are now retired to a small cottage but live next to the farms that are part of the charity started by them 'Farms for City Children'. 

Review from Waterstones website

As the weeks pass, we accompany Michael as he watches the lambing on the farm, walks through the bluebell woods, and feeds the birds in his garden in his wellies and dressing gown. He describes dramatic encounters with sparrowhawks, hares and otters, while sharing other magical discoveries, new poems and reminiscences about childhood and springs gone by.

This is an uplifting burst of springtime joy from one of the nation's best loved authors.

Another Spring book 'The Nature of Spring' by Jim Crumley will go back to the library unread - for the second time. It's just too wordy!

A couple of the Winter themed books I have reserved still have long waiting lists, so I might cancel them and make a note to re-reserve next Autumn ready for next Winter. 

Final Food Shop Of February

 This was probably (except for eggs and salad ) my last food shop of February, photographed again for food-shopping-photo fans!

 

Mostly from Aldi but as I needed to go into town I had to spend £5+ at Asda to get my £1 car park cost back.

Frozen sweet potato fries went straight into the freezer. On the work top is a lovely big British savoy cabbage, strong bread flour (this is Aldi's own brand which I mix with Allinsons more expensive flour for a cheaper loaf in the machine). Cheese and onion rolls, self raising flour, spaghetti,  butter, extra mature cheese, coffee, cocoa, castor sugar (Silver Spoon from Asda as it's made from British sugar beet rather than foreign cane and can be very local ). 4 pints milk, fine egg noodles, hidden at the end are six British apples and 5 British pears. And because I went into QD for some cheap beetroot seed to give to BiL there was  a 'junk food' purchase of a packet of Dunkables - which are broken or mis-shaped chocolate biscuits - somehow they  leapt into my hand!

Total spend £27.51.

There is a post in drafts almost finished ready for Friday which will have all the February shopping photos and the % of UPFs and total food spend.......so much to look forward to!!

That Rye Flour

 

The rye flour bought for £2.40 from the Farmers Market to make a medieval/Tudor maslin* loaf - just out of curiosity, then needed the purchase of a different blade for the bread-machine, which I'd not realised.

So I bought a spare ordinary blade at the same as they came in a pack of  one of each for £5.99.  AND THEN ........even sillier, when I came to set the menu for the loaf on the bread-machine I found my model didn't have that setting, which of course is the very reason it didn't come with a rye flour blade....Duh!

 I let the machine do the dough making and then bunged it in a loaf tin and cooked in the oven.....curiosity can be more complicated than it was meant to be!

It's taste? Deliciously nutty and different. 

Below is info I found from a blog called Breadclub20. (My loaf didn't include floor sweepings!, just rye and wholewheat flours)

*Meanwhile, down at the other end of the social ladder.....and, really, you couldn't get much lower, the peasants and the lower orders ate Maslin, a bread originally made using barley and pea flours and a fair bit of millstone grit. Not necessary for roughage, but probably accounted for all manner of dental problems as people moved into adulthood. Add to that, chaff, straw and the sweepings-up from the bakehouse floor, and you had a bread fit for only the very poor. 

By the time we reach Tudor times, the 'best' Maslin was made from a blended flour of wheat and rye often grown together.