Alex Hallatt 4/5/19 Alex Hallatt 4/5/19

Reasons to Be Cheerful - Saving Seeds From a Borlotti Bean Harvest and a Recipe for Pochas

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When we were living in the Basque Country, we discovered the bean dish, pochas. It was a kind of bean soup, made with semi-dried beans, from that year’s harvest. I have looked up the recipe for this and it varies widely. Most recipes use a sofrito of finely chopped vegetables, often onion, carrots, peppers and garlic. A quartered tomato is added to this fried reduction and sometimes all of these vegetables are then either strained all pureed . I couldn't be bothered with that and I also wanted to use my borlotti bean and courgette harvest and some home-made chicken stock I had, so this is my interpretation of pochas.

Ingredients For Pochas (for 2 people)

A cup or two of beans harvested from dried pods
1 carrot
1 onion
One small courgette for the sofrito (or use a green pepper) and one to add at the end (or a chopped red pepper)
2 garlic cloves
1 tomato
250 ml chicken stock (or use vegetable, or water)
paprika, salt and pepper

Method

Dice the carrot, onion, courgette and garlic cloves and fry in olive oil on a low heat until soft. Quarter the tomato, add to the sofrito and cook until it begins to break apart. Stir well, or puree if you can be bothered. Add the beans and stock and top up with water until the beans are just covered. Simmer for 45 minutes, or stick in the oven at 180°C degrees centigrade for the same amount of time. Add the other finely-chopped courgette and a teaspoon of paprika (picante or dulce, hot or not) and cook for a further 15 minutes. Add salt and pepper to season before serving with bread and guindillas (mild spicy green peppers). If you have a meat tooth (like the boyf), you can add a few slices of chorizo that have been warmed in a pan.

It wasn’t exactly as I remembered it in the restaurants in Spain, but it was good!

Alex Hallatt 4/4/19 Alex Hallatt 4/4/19

Reasons to Be Cheerful - Seventhwave Wetsuits Are Made-to-Measure

I tested it out at Taylor’s Mistake (not great surf, but it is always good to go in).

Taylor's Mistake is often a good place to bodyboard and I'd love to have a bach here

The Seventhwave factory-shop in Ferrymead, Christchurch, NZ

See more of what Seventhwave do here.

Alex Hallatt 4/1/19 Alex Hallatt 4/1/19

Reasons to Be Cheerful - Dog Borrowing

We are still missing Billie and we aren't ready to get another dog. But we are able to borrow a dog from up the road when the owners go away. He is a proper Jack Russell and chases everything. One time he stayed with us he escaped at 4 o'clock in the morning and we had to give up trying to get him back. He was chasing possums and the boyf was out on the street calling him back, wearing only a T-shirt, underpants and a pair of Blundstone boots. He saw Jack going in and out of people’s yards on the chase but felt he couldn't really follow him into our neighbours’ properties, in the middle of the night, dressed like that. I was up the road seeing if Jack would return to his home. He didn't.

We left the front door open and it was over an hour later that we heard the tic tic tic of his nails on the floorboards as he slunk back in.

Now he is ALWAYS on the lead with us.

Or on a very long rope.

Alex Hallatt 3/29/19 Alex Hallatt 3/29/19

Reasons to Be Cheerful - Visiting a Cheese Factory in Barry's Bay, Banks Peninsula

Barry’s Bay cheese is made with local milk and you can go to the factory and taste it. It’s a lot nicer than most of the mainstream cheese in New Zealand. That’s damning it with faint praise, I know, but for some reason (DESPITE ALL THE BLOODY COWS AND SHEEP), New Zealand doesn’t make cheese nearly as well as Britain or France. Or even Spain.