Slindon Pumpkin Festival

The village of Slindon in West Sussex is famous for its annual Pumpkin Festival, a tradition which was started almost accidentally by the late Ralph Upton when he laid his pumpkin crop out on the roof of his barn to cure the skins. The pumpkins attracted attention, so Ralph started making pictures on the roof using different sized, shaped, and coloured pumpkins - while the rest of the world measures pictures in dots-per-inch, this is a display is more inches per dot!

The 2011 display - a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins!

A few of the 20+ different varieties of pumpkins and squashes.

As well as the pumpkin artwork to look at, the produce is also available for sale. There were at least 20 different varieties of pumpkins and squashes from the tiny We Be Little to the somewhat larger Atlantic Giant.

The pumpkin-sellers are very knowledgable about what to do with your pumpkins once you've bought them, and can advise which are best for carving, curries, pies,  soups or roasting.

Pumpkins also last a long time, which is just as well, given the number we came home with!

Stork and Orca

Mint Choc Chip Ice-Cream Cookie Sandwiches

The chef has been off base on his second winter training trip this week, so Geek-Boy and I volunteered for a day of canned, dried and frozen food fun. 

Our canned carrots are generally quite mushy and tasteless, so we strained them for several hours, before adding them to a caramelised orange sauce. The frozen sausages are fairly reasonable and the liberal application of butter and dijon mustard turned the Smash into mustard mash. To finish I made choc chip cookies using a recipe sent to me by a friend from home; Geek-Boy loves mint chocolate, so I sandwiched two cookies around mint choc chip ice-cream.

Skiing down Middle Stork Col

Wednesday was dingle, so I took the afternoon off, in lieu of several weekends worked recently, and one of the GAs kindly took me out on a ski mountaineering adventure.

As far as I can tell, ski mountaineering involves about 80% uphill skiing ('skinning'), 10% ice climbing, and 10% of the fun stuff - downhill skiing. One spends a lot of time dripping with sweat either from exertion or fear, and very little time flying gracefully downhill with the sun on your face and the wind beneath your wings. We took skidoos out to Middle Stork and skinned as high up the col as we could. When it became too steep to skin, we took our skis off, strapped them to our rucksacks and climbed the rest of the way up. As we sat on the col eating chocolate, we took our skins off the bottom of our skins and admired the view of Orca Mount and the untracked snow that lay between it and us. For a few short and glorious minutes we skied down the slope, picking lines which avoided the dips and bumps that the wind had formed. At the bottom we put the skins back on our skis, roped ourselves together as we would be travelling over crevassed terrain for the rest of the trip, and spent the next couple of hours making our way uphill around Orca Mount, past North Stork and back to the skidoos.

Orca Mount from Middle Stork Col

Wibbly Wobbly 3

At Lancaster University there is a burger bar called Wibbly Wobbly 2 (originally there was a WW1 in town, but it moved to campus), affectionately known as WibWobs. Wibwobs do the best ever spicy bean burgers, with lots of salad, in lovely soft rolls. You can pile it high with chillies, spread it with a multitude of sauces and enjoy a LiteBites on the side (chips, onion rings and mushrooms). Geek-Boy loves the chicken fillet with mushrooms, others go for the pork chops, or beef burgers or bacon. Or several of those together - there is a WibWobs for everyone. There is even a WibWobs Appreciation Society on Facebook

In Antarctica however, there is no WibWobs. Until now. The chef is doing night-watch this week, so we're fending for ourselves, and Monday was our turn in the kitchen. We made beef burgers, turkey fillets (we're running low on chicken) and pork chops. Geek-boy made bread rolls, but there weren't quite the success that last week's were (in fact, they were like yeast-flavoured rocks), so we had to put out bread instead, and we are somewhat lacking in lettuce and tomatoes at the moment, but I mixed up garlic mayo and made some beer batter for the mushrooms and it all went down rather well.

We'd decided on roast lamb for dinner, so once we'd cleared away after lunch we started scrubbing potatoes, opening cans of carrots (well, soggy orange disks, which might have seen a carrot once, from a distance) and brushing the 3 lamb legs with butter and rosemary. It was a bit stressful as I've never done a roast for that many people, but everything came out fine.

Cooking continued on Wednesday when I rustled up some dark chocolate covered ginger and vanilla ice cream sandwiches. Trying to dunk frozen ice cream into hot molten chocolate was, to say the least, rather messy; subsequently trying to photograph them, when the only decent light was the heat lamp on the food service area, was also not without complications - hence not being the best photograph in the world - but you should get the general idea.