Hampers, Scottish life and adventures with Scottish food.
To make our range of hampers, we travelled all over Scotland seeking out the best Scottish food, the best people who produce it, and the best knowledge about it. Our blog charts our adventures with Scottish food.
When not creating gorgeous hampers, we also climb rocks, take photographs, write and enjoy the highland life. You can read about all of this on the Velvet Antlers Blog...
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Chocolate chip fougasse
I jumped out of bed a little more eagerly than usual this morning to go and see if Mandy had been yet to deliver this mornings bread. It wasn't a tasty wheatgerm baton this morning, oh no, it was a chocolate chip fougasse which I was looking forward to today. Fougasse is like the French version of a focaccia, which apparently was traditionally baked in the embers of the fire to check the temperature of wood-fired ovens.
Warmed in my regular oven and shared with a glass of cold milk, this made checking this mornings inbox a little more decadent than usual.
Our first film, Echo Wall, premiered at the Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival last night and I discovered a new-found respect for Dave for doing his lectures. I figured I would be nervous getting up to introduce the film but not that nervous! I can't believe Dave gets up on stage regularly and talks for an hour or so without notes. If any of you saw me just before the evening started with a crazed look on my face and you could see the whites of my eyes, it was because I was so flustered I managed to drop and lose my notes - thank you Pete for finding them! It was only a couple of paragraphs but I could just not remember them for love nor money. This was, by far, more nerve-wracking than watch Dave crank his way through the crux on Echo Wall. Kudos to Dave and any public-speakers out there.
To say I was blown away when it was announced later that we'd won the Alien Rockaward for Best Climbing Film would be an understatement. But when Sir Chris Bonington presented the Tiso Best Film award to Echo Wall, well that was just unbelievable and I was left literally speechless, as anyone in the audience who seen me stare blankly at it in disbelief would probably agree. It's very hard to get your head round, especially when we were not expecting it; for heavens sake, I only turned a camera on for the first time last March! Needless to say, we're both dead chuffed and thanks to EMFF and everyone who came along to make an amazing evening.
Here is another all time favourite of ours, made frequently through the winter months in our massive pot which Dave got for christmas a couple of years back. This soup, like most homemade soup of course, can’t really be beaten for being gorgeous to eat, very healthy and being cheap and really easy to make.
Ingredients:
350 grams red split lentils 3 tablespoons vegetable oil 5 slices of bacon medallions 2 medium onions 3 carrots 3 sticks of celery 1.6 litres of water Salt and black pepper
Wash the lentils in a sieve and then leave to soak in warm water for 30 minutes. In the meantime, chop the bacon and vegetables. Heat the oil then fry the bacon and add the vegetables, frying until soft.
Drain the lentils and add these and the water to the vegetables. Add the salt and pepper. Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove any scum and for best results leave to cool for a while and blend the soup.
Enjoy. And thanks for all the messages letting me know how much you enjoyed my gingerbread!
With all the manic work of Echo Wall I’ve not had time to upload these pictures of a lovely day out with Peter and Cat last month on their boat on Loch Sunart, Ardnamurchan. Being in the driving seat of that thing was well cool! We aren’t used to boats and we thought it was really cool that you could jump in a wee inflatable boat not far from the house and be out at sea near Mull in no time.
Now we’ve finished our wee film about Echo Wall and it’s about to be released, we’re starting to step back and finally come out of the bubble of working pretty much night and day on it. It was a very steep learning curve for us, or rather a series of vertical learning curves at each stage.
Although this is the story of one big climb, we’ve tried to pack the film full of as much climbing footage as we can. So there is plenty of bouldering, sport climbing, trad and winter routes, which were all part of the preparation for climbing Echo Wall in one way or another. Our aim was to make a pretty full climbing DVD with quite a lot of different types of climbing going on.
We also wanted to make a really honest film. It would have been pretty easy to for us to really play on the fact that Dave might have died trying to climb Echo Wall. And it’s true, he might have. I didn’t really see it at the time because he was slapping through the moves so quickly, but when you see him doing the final crux you can see his arms wobble. To someone not used to seeing hard climbing that might look like nothing, but Dave never does that. If he wobbles it means he’s about to fall off. Thank god he didn’t. But although for that moment at the crux of the route he was near his limit, he’s not a crazy risk taker. In fact the story of the film is of Dave first really battling with himself to decide if the risk really was the right thing to do, and then doing everything he could to climb the route really well.
There’s no wild falls or shaking or scrabbling for holds, because on Echo Wall it can’t be like that. As Dave said, falling off Echo Wall would be a once in a lifetime experience. All there is, is someone making the best performance of their life, in a very amazing place, captured on film. Everyone thats seen it so far has also said how lovely the landscape around Ben Nevis is. That was something we realised more and more as we were shooting it and tried to develop it as much as we could. Our favourite part of the film for this is the part of Dave running over Tower Ridge and Carn Mor Dearg. He was so tired after shooting all that having to run back and forth all day to collect the camera.
A huge difficulty for us was the combination of making the film on one camera, the desperate nature of getting any conditions just to get days climbing on Echo Wall itself, and the fact that there are no good bits on the whole route apart from the easy bit at the end. We wanted to go back and get more shots of Dave dropping the ropes near the top and soloing the rest of it but the route was wet every day since he did it (and now it’s already covered in snow!
It’s really lucky Dave decided to do it on the day he did back in July, otherwise we would still be here making this film next July. What a thought.
Here is a wee clip from our interview with the legendary ice climber Jimmy Marshall from the DVD extras.
