If you have access to one or more plum trees, then in an average year you’ll easily be able to pick more plums than you can possibly eat. A plum tree in July, its branches sagging under the weight of ripe fruit, is an image of the fecund abundance of nature. What to do with your superabundance of plums? Well, plum jam, plum crumble and dried prunes are all nice enough, but for my money,… Read More »Bottling summer: an easy recipe for plum liqueur
Eat like the ancestors: reclaiming your birthright For many thousands of years, wherever oaks grew, acorns (‘oak-corns’) were a staple food for people. Balanophagy, the eating of acorns, can be seen across a wide range of cultures since earliest prehistory. Across northern Spain, where Abrazo House is based, large quantities of acorns have been found hoarded in Celtic hill-forts. Anyone who’s read an Asterix book knows that the Celts venerated the oak, but who knows… Read More »Forgotten food: Two recipes for acorn bread
Morning meditation is part of our daily routine at Abrazo House. The beautiful, resonant sound of a bell being struck (or “invited”) with a wooden striker calls us back to the present moment and reminds us that, despite all our projects and worries, were are always living precisely in the here and now: the only place and time we have. We made this meditation bell from the bottom of a propane gas cylinder, as a simple… Read More »Meditation bell from a propane gas cylinder
The stone retaining wall on the driveway leading up to Abrazo House was overgrown with tough matted grass and other weeds. With this quick, easy and almost free project we turned it into an edible “wall of strawberries”: Put down a layer of cardboard, hanging down from the top of the wall, as a mulch to kill the matted grass. (In time, the cardboard hanging down will be removed once it’s done its job of… Read More »Quick and easy wall of strawberries