Hello Plato, my old friend.

pb 001Although it doesn’t quite feel like it yet in Upper-East Tennessee, it is Autumn, the beginning of a new school year, and I have the good fortune of teaching a college class. Originally, the class was largely Plato and Aristotle, then was expanded into more of a general Ancient Philosophy class, and then became what it is now: How to Live Well: Ancient Philosophy and Enduring Questions.

We begin with Socrates—everything begins with Socrates.

Socrates may have been a brilliant original thinker, or might have been a pernicious troublemaker; he may have been one of the first great martyrs of free thought, or he may have been a dangerous cynic whose students attempted a totalitarian coup of Athens.

Maybe, all of the above.

We don’t entirely know—what we know of him is not a person Socrates, but a character within the dialogues written by a former student. The ideas expressed may be his, or may be Plato’s or may be a game.
We don’t know much of the person Plato—the writings he produced where he spoke for himself have been largely lost, and what we have are a series of dialogues from which we try to infer his ideas.

Yet, we begin with Socrates, because Socrates asked questions. He asked questions, he took answers, and then he said “but wait….that doesn’t seem right…” and he asked more questions.
That is how philosophy began.

I like that.

As I struggle through this life longer and longer, I also appreciate what he wanted to ask questions about. How do we live well?
He lived at the tail end of a great empire, a brilliant empire, a scientific, literary, poetic, artistic and beautiful empire.
He lived at the time it was all unraveling, and everybody was uncertain, and everybody was afraid of causing a stir, and nobody knew what was right or what was wrong anymore, or where to turn for answers, and instead everybody went through the motions and was ironic and clever and local and traditional and new at the same time, and the economy was shot, and nobody knew what would happen next.

If you do read any of the Platonic dialogues, bear one thing in mind: Everything is a question.

Everything is a question.Know Thyself

The key to reading is trying to keep track of what the question is.
What is the question? What does he mean by the question? Does he mean what we would mean, or does he mean something else? Does he change what the question means in the dialogue? What possible answers are advanced? How and why does Socrates shoot them down?
What are the questions? What are his answers?

Christopher Phillips, the foundr of the Socrates Café movement, characterizes Socrates as always being concerned with 6 Questions:
What is virtue?
What is moderation?
What is justice?
What is good?
What is courage?
What is piety?

That’s not a bad starting point. Those were all good questions to ask 25 centuries ago; those are all good questions to ask now.

The down-side to the class is this: I dislike Plato.
Plato on Library (1)A brilliant student I had in this class a few years back characterized him as seeming really cool at first, but by the end of The Republic, he seems more like a cross between Dr. James Dobson and V. I. Lenin. That’s a pretty bright characterization.

Mostly, though, I dislike his idealism. Plato saves the idea of absolute truth by locating it in a real of ideas or pure forms somewhere outside of the corruption of our day-to-day lives. The material world is secondary, a mere shadow of the real.

I have friends to whom this idealism appeals, and who like to quote Pierre Teilhard de Chardin “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”  I could not disagree more. I have fought long and hard to stay in this material world, and my scarred and chemically fluctuating body–permeated by my mind to the tips of my fingers, and in turn radiating my mind through cosmos upon cosmos of imagination. I will fight for it, and remain true to it, and have no desire, when it is done, to be cursed with drinking from the river Styx, forgetting all my body has taught me, and starting anew.

But that is another story for another day.Life is uncertain

Crockpot Apple Butter and/or Sauce

The Virginia Winesaps in my back yard are so full that the branchesApple Harvest are bending over. It’s time to harvest. The apples tend to be very firm, a bit grainy, and quite tart, and aren’t incredibly good for eating, but are great for pies and for apple sauce and apple butter.

Ingredients:

  • 6 cups of peeled and sliced apples
  • ½ cup sugar
  • 1 Tbsp cinnamon
  • 1 lemon

Apple Sauce 002 best  Step 1, the tedious part: Harvest (or buy) several pounds of apples. Find a comfortable place to sit or stand, and peel them, and then slice them into a bowl until you have 8 cups or a little more.

Step 2, mixing it up: Put the apples in a large crock-pot. Add the sugar (more if you like it sweeter, or if the apples are really sour, but I find this is enough), the cinnamon (again, to taste), and the juice of the lemon. If you want to be creative, you might consider adding a tablespoon of ginger, or a half cup of rum, or some cardamom; red-hots if you are that kind.  Mix thoroughly.

Step 3, cook it down: Turn it on to a medium heat, and let it sit for 6 hours if you want Apple Sauce 004apple sauce, 8 or more if you want apple butter. You will know when it is the thickness that you want. I cooked it down to about 3 cups, which makes it more like a spread.

Step 4, share and enjoy: They are great on toast, or with a scone, or on a sandwich with peanut-butter, or to sweeten tea, or in a Vinaigrette. You can store them in the fridge in cute little jars, or give them to friends. You can take it and some warm baked bread to a class you are teaching, or leave some in the break-room at work.

This Dismal Cairo

On a trip back to Kentucky last week I got to take a two day road trip with my aunt and uncle, primarily to visit Cairo, Illinois. People who know Cairo may find that last clause surprising. It’s not exactly a tourist Mecca. At least there’s no border crossing to get there. One time years ago I stayed with a friend in Duluth, Minnesota, and when he had to work for a couple of days I took a side trip up to Thunder Bay, Ontario for no better reason than its name: Thunder Bay! It sounds like such a fun place, but the name is a lie. As far as I could tell, the city was just a series of strip malls loosely stapled to a two block downtown whose most striking feature was “the world’s largest building designed by a Ukrainian architect.” (I’m relying on memory for that last detail, but if it’s wrong, I assure you that the real answer was comparably weird.) The place was so down and out that merely wanting to go there got me in trouble. Crossing over the border both ways I was asked why I was visiting Thunder Bay, and when I said, “Tourism” I received funny looks and had my car searched for drugs. The border patrol apparently had a policy that no one in their right mind would go to Thunder Bay without an ulterior and illicit motive.

They’d probably think the same thing about Cairo, but fortunately there were no guards on either bridge linking the bottom tip of Illinois to Kentucky over the Ohio River or to Missouri over the Mississippi. In fact, there were scarcely any people at all. I should have known this – I had read that Cairo’s population had dropped from a peak of just over 15,000 in the 1920s to under 3000 today, and I had seen the sad pictures of the decrepit buildings in the old downtown that looked like little more than habit was keeping them upright. What I didn’t realize was that for whole blocks the buildings that weren’t falling down were already fallen. The old avenues by the Ohio levee where saloons and mills bustled around the time of the Civil War hadn’t taken the ghost town turn I expected, but instead had just disintegrated. If you hadn’t known a city had been there, you wouldn’t have guessed it. Much of the scene more closely resembled a quarry than a downtown.

Cities come and cities go, like everything else. The visit saddened me, though, because Cairo was important once, and there’s scarcely any sign left to remember that. Later on the day we saw Cairo we stopped at the Jefferson Davis monument, a 351 foot phallic symbol rising out of the flat lands of southwestern Kentucky, and a stunning reminder of the vast effort the losing side in the Civil War put into memorializing the conflict’s landscape. I can’t help thinking of the quip that we should have put Aaron Burr on the $10 bill instead of Alexander Hamilton, since after all, Burr won the duel. Cairo was the first seat of Union success in the war and there’s virtually nothing there to make that known. The city has been thoroughly Burr-ed.

Check out a map. Cairo hangs there at the very bottom of Illinois, dangling like a stray piece of free soil that the mighty rivers swirling around it could break off at any moment and amalgamate with the slave-holding lands to the south, east, and west. The city is lower in latitude than the Confederate capitol in Richmond, Virginia, and the attitudes of its inhabitants when Fort Sumter was fired upon were scarcely more favorable to a Lincoln-led Union than that geography would suggest. But the Union arrived there in the form of Grant and his army, and from that base they and Admiral Porter’s gunboats made the Mississippi, Tennessee, and Cumberland rivers grand avenues of invasion for subduing the rebel states in the west. While the fighting in Virginia amounted to nearly four years of stalemate the Union steadily ran over the west, and no site was more important to that effort than Cairo. Yet even the park marking the point just south of the city where Grant’s Fort Defiance once stood hardly deserves the name, being little more than one good rain from counting as a swamp.

It’s not as if the victors in the Civil War set up no monuments. Lincoln’s on the capitol mall certainly counts. But still it seems that winning produced less of a desire for memorials than losing did. Perhaps the Union side’s comparative lack of enthusiasm for the war after it was over helps explain why Cairo slowly faded away. Or maybe what we saw last week is just Cairo’s natural state. I don’t wish that to be so, but there’s historical evidence to support the claim. From the earliest European exploration in the area, settlers took it for granted that some great city should rise at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, but repeated failures kept destroying that assumption. Only the Civil War finally produced the investment in infrastructure that made Cairo reasonably large and prosperous, and as the decades wore on and that infrastructure wore out, nobody renewed it, and the prosperity and population departed. Much as Wagner’s music is better than it sounds, Cairo seems a better site for a city than it actually is. Charles Dickens wasn’t fooled. Here’s his description from 1842:

 A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away: cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo.

That’s not going on the brochures. But that’s just as well. We couldn’t find any brochures anyway.

 

 

 

 

Ireland

Europe 2013 055It is hard to believe that only a month ago, we were flying out of Charlotte and into Ireland.
Ireland was beautiful and very, very green. It really is called the Emerald Isle for a good reason.

If you have a low tolerance level for quaintness, I would advise you never to visit.

We flew into Shannon, because we decided that we wanted to force ourselves to see the Irish countryside, and were afraid that otherwise we might get stuck just seeing Dublin—lovely in its own right, but a city.Europe 2013 071
We knew we would be arriving at 6:30 am local time, and that it would feel like 2:30 am to us, so we didn’t have anything specific planned. We managed to find our way to the bus, and climbed up to the second story. Apparently, all Irish (and most Scottish and English) bus drivers are expected to drive like the night bus from Harry Potter—lurching back and forth, taking turns at frightening speeds, etc.—but we were also driving across green rolling hills, past stone cottages & castles, all under a brilliantly stormy sky. We unfolded ourselves at the train station in Limerick, and found the Railway Hotel.
Europe 2013 105The check-in time was 2:00 in the afternoon, and the clerk frowned as we walked in. She suggested we eat breakfast, and I realized she was frowning because she was trying to think of a way to allow us to check into our rooms early. That first breakfast in Limerick was one of the best meals we had—Irish brown bread toast and jam, strong Irish breakfast tea, scones, a full Irish breakfast (rashers? black pudding? white pudding?), porridge—it was so good, I have tried to duplicate the bread.
After a nap into the afternoon, we wandered about Limerick, and found a local farmer’s market that was just shutting down. The very Irish and very sturdy Europe 2013 031looking lady behind the counter at the cheese mongers frowned at us, then gave us samples of several cheeses, discussing where each had come from, and how long each was aged, and we left with supplies for a plowman’s lunch down by the wharf.

Again and again, we encountered Irish natives who were friendly and kind—the bartender at the Bram Stocker hotel warning that the people in Cork “spoke funny and are hard to understand,” cab driver who refused to take us as customers—“Oh, I’d be embarrassed; it’s only t’ree blocks, now. Just cross the bridge and through those tall buildings” (I knew how far it was—6 blocks—and I had a 20 pound pack)—although often, the kindness was about fixing something that had gone wrong.
Things going wrong is apparently common in Ireland, and they all seem to have developed what I think of as “a bemused complacency towards the fecked-up-ness of it all” (“Oh, I can’t sell you a ticket on the bus; you can only get those from a machine, and that one there, it is broken. Marvelous!”)

Another odd observation, though: any given block in Ireland seems to have two pubs, a bookie shop, a homeless person or two and their dogs, and a pro-life billboard. It seems to me that there are vices that might be more important to fight than allowing a woman the right to choose, but, then again, Ireland only reluctantly legalized birth control.

It did surprise me that I had trouble getting used to both the stern face and the b.c.t.f., since those are both things with which I face the world. That and the heavy lidded Irish eyes that are part of my genetic heritage.

I did love Ireland.
Irish HarpistIt was one marvel after another–a beautiful countryside here, a harpist there, music in a pub, the stormy skies at sunset, the voices–Irish is not so much an accent as a cadence, a lilt, a language sung softly. Kind people, great ale, and wonderful food–yes! the French were polite and the British Isles had good food; re-examine your prejudices!

If you are ever in Dublin, drop by the Murphy Brother’s Ice Cream Shop. They are always smiling.

Of course, who wouldn’t, spending the day around ice cream hand-made in Dingle.
(“hand-made in Dingle” that makes me giggle.)ending321

Wheaten Bread (Irish Brown Bread)

Irish Wheaten Bread 007On our first day in Ireland, for our very first meal in Europe, we had breakfast at the Railway Hotel. Besides some marvelous tea and incredible service, we also had some toast, which included a brown bread.
My foodie daughter was in love.
“Wouldn’t it be ironic,” she asked, “if after going through Germany and France, my favorite bread ended up being Irish Brown Bread, and my favorite cheese really was a sharp Irish Cheddar?”

Ne Gustibus Disputatem Est.

Ingredients:

  • 3 cups extra-course whole wheat flour
  • ½ cup bread flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 cup oat bran
  • 1 cup wheat germ
  • ¼ cup brewer’s yeast (optional)
  • ¼ cup melted butter
  • 2 cups buttermilk or milk
  • 1 Tbsp dark corn syrup or honey
  • 1 egg

Step 1, Prepare Ye the way: Preheat the oven to 400°, assemble all the ingredients, run to the store because you are out of butter, and grease & flour a baking sheet or cake pan.

Step 2, sifting the dry ingredients: In one bowl sift (mix if you don’t have a sifter) the flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add in the oat bran, wheat germ, and brewer’s yeast.  Mix thoroughly.

Step 3, pastry cutting: Mix in the butter, much as you would cut in cold butter or shortening.

Step 4, mixing the wet ingredients: In another bowl, beat the egg, then mix in the buttermilk and the corn syrup.

Step 4, combining the big mess: Add the wet ingredients to the dry ones and mix well. The results might be a bit gloppy. No, I take that back: they result will be very gloppy. Flour your hands and try to fashion this into a ball, and if you cannot, add a bit more flour until this is manageable.

Step 5, baking: Set the round loaf (or round loaves, if you are making little ones)Irish Wheaten Bread 001 onto the pan. Score the top with a cross. Bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes. Rotate them to make sure they brown evenly, reduce the oven temperature to 375, and bake for 30 minutes more. The result should be a crumbly brown loaf.

Final Step, share and enjoy They break along the score, so you can each munch a quarter. You can have them with a mug of strong Irish tea, and some cold butter, and some current jam. They are perfect as a toast for breakfast, or to accompany a hearty plowman’s lunch.
Irish Wheaten Bread 010As always, they are perfect for giving to somebody you love.

A few words about politeness

4 Cavaillon to Gordes (12)On our recent trip to Europe, we were surprised again and again by how helpful most of the people we encountered were. Yes, since you asked, even the French. In fact, some folks at the information desk in Cavaillon went about of their way to help us get the bicycles we needed to travel to Gordes (as was the artist in Gordes whose floor I woke up on after a black-out, but that is another story).

A notable quality of European politeness, however, is that they don’t seem to feel it is necessary to smile at you constantly. At first, many of the people I encountered seemed to be scowling, but they were merely concentrating on what I was saying and trying to figure out if they could be of help. It is ironic that it took me a while to figure this out, since I tend to look a bit dark if I am concentrating, perhaps even hostile. But even total strangers who had no obvious reason to do so were friendly and helpful–even people in Paris were kind and patient with us.

But not cheerful in the way we are expected to be here in the States.

I recently discovered a very obscure 18th Century English thinker named Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671 – 1713). I knew his Grandfather, also named Anthony Ashley-Cooper, who was a brilliant man, a lively conversationalist, a marvelous political player–although it almost cost him his head to James II–and who kept a very good table. He was also the patron of the philosopher John Locke, whom he also engaged as a tutor to his grandson.

The 2nd Earl, son of the 1st and father of the 2nd, was a git of the highest order.

Anthony_Ashley_Cooper,_3__Earl_of_ShaftesburyThe Third Earl, however, was an influential and, in  his day, well thought of thinker. Most of the thinkers we associate with what we call Moral Sentiments were influenced by him. Among his claims was the observation that we–human beings, that is–seem to have an innate (sorry, Mr. Locke) tendency towards being kind to others. Contrary to thinkers such as Hobbes or Calvin who tend to take a rather dim view of human nature, Shaftesbury observed that we do have a tendency to help others–much as that wide variety of friends and strangers helped me on my recent trip.
His idea–and this seems insightful–was that it quite simply makes us happy to make other people happy. He coined a term–borrowing it from a jewelers term for the brightness or polish of a gem, and called this politeness. For him, politeness was about structured acts of kindness towards others, not about the snobbish pretensions of court etiquette or the dull, rote, empty obligations of church virtue, but a joyful giving of oneself, and of caring.

This seems true.
This seems to be a really important insight into human nature. We take pleasure in making a baby laugh, or a kitten purr, or a dog happy. We enjoy giving presents to others, and watching their faces light up when we give them something we know they will like. When we help somebody jump-start a dead battery or change a tire, we often feel good for the rest of the day.

Unfortunately, like all pleasures, it is not enough; we grow tired of it, and look for other pleasures.315signature

Chocolate Macaroon Cookies

Chocolate Macaroon Cookies 010Now, I know it is lovely to have a rich, dark chocolate cookie with some cold milk.

 

 

…and, in the same way, it is lovely to have a coconutChocolate Macaroon Cookies 019 macaroon with a cup of tea.

 

 

 

 

So, why not the best of both worlds? Why not have a coconut macaroon on top of a chocolate cookie?Chocolate Macaroon Cookies 017

 

 

 

Of course, we could take this to its natural

Chocolate Macaroon Cookies 007

conclusion, wrap the warm cookies around a broken pretzel, cover it with red food coloring, leave it in a pool of red jam, and tell small children you have chopped off Elmo’s fingers.

Chocolate Macaroon Cookies 014

Chocolate Macaroon Cookies 016Chocolate Macaroon Cookies 002

Chocolate Macaroon Cookies 024

 

Chocolate Macaroon Cookies 003

 

Why I write

The Writers Museum, EdinburghAn audio version of tonight’s Entrée is available at this link.

My dear Kirsten–

You once suggested that I write a blog explaining why I write a blog; I recall you suggested it as my first blog, but I think I have run out of other questions at the moment, and I want to avoid writing too much about Europe, so I think I will come back to it now.

I cannot remember a time that I did not want to be writing. As a child, I was always imagining, so imagining first games and then increasingly complex stories came naturally to me. For the past 40 years, I have generally fallen asleep to some story or other I am telling myself. When I did write as a teenager, the bad poetry and the stories became shorter and shorter—compressed. By the time I was in college, I was always thinking of short stories, and occasionally showed somebody else one.
Eventually, marriage, work, and academia came to exhaust my time, and I simply stopped writing.

The blog was a last ditch effort to try to start again.

I wish I could be content training horses, as you do, or working a little farm up in the mountains, or even gardening, but for me, these are just chores. I wish I could be happy only working in a bookstore, or a restaurant, or teaching, or baking bread; I love doing all these things, but they are just pleasant occupations. I enjoy spending my time with them, they relax me and refresh me, and I enjoy the company of others they offer, but my mind is drawn again and again to the world of words and ideas.

I love the way words feel as they flow off the tongue, and the way they look flowing writing2across the page. I love the way words fit together, finding their way into a seamless weave in a well-crafted sentence. I love the welcome pain of beauty that clicks into the mind and the heart upon having completed a sentence or paragraph or phrase or story or lecture and just knowing it is right. I love feeling ideas explode when I read, and explode when I write, as if I am discovering new universes within a book or within myself. More than anything else, I love the moment of the gentle bond with some other soul as a phrase or idea connects, and for just one moment we are in the same place, together.

However, as far as writing goes, here is the problem, this has always been my problem as a writer: I can’t just write.
I am a conversationalist. I need someone to write at. I am happiest in conversation.

Not a single person who knows me will find this in the least surprising, but I really am happiest in conversation. I love the banter and give and take, the flow of ideas and stories and wit. I love telling my weird stories, and listening to the fascinating experiences others have to offer. Even in Philosophy, I see the whole enterprise as a long conversation going back to Socrates and even before; I love the banter of Philosophy and the ongoing shared examination of this big ol’ goofy world. I love the stories of the people in it—I love to tell them, and I love to hear them.

I both love and am pained by writing this blog: it gives me a chance to throw a just little bit of that conversation out there, but it is all terribly one-sided. A conversation without another voice is, “alas, like an ale without a wench, or an egg without salt.” It relieves the urge, but is still sadly unfulfilling.

You know I love you, gentle readers, but I do dislike the loneliness of writing.
Would it kill you to write back?
315signature

Allotment Gardens

For those of you who do not know, I’ve just returned from 4 weeks of riding the rails through Europe.
Lake District- Hunting for Angus (edit)I am certain that I will have a lot to write about in the coming week, and I will try not to madden you with jealousy, or bore you to tears.

Along the railroad tracks in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, and the British Isles, one can spot small gardens. Imagine the grassy area, like a median, between a county road and the railroad track–maybe 12 or so feet before the gravelly slope of the railroad embankment. Now, imagine that area subdivided into little parcels, maybe 20 feet wide. Now, imagine those areas enclosed, en-fenced, and planted with well-tended gardens, and maybe even with an outbuilding. This is an allotment garden.

Allotment gardensAs Europe became increasingly industrialized, this little gardens began springing up. Many Europeans live in large cities with little garden space, or even in apartments with no garden space, sometimes without even lawns that they can actually walk on. Although there are parks, and even wonderful forests and fells to hike in, there are many people who still feel a need to have land of their own. I don’t think it is as much about owning the land (they often do not), as it is about having a little corner that they can tend, that they can grow something upon. You often see them on the weekends, working and then sitting or staying over in the little sheds. Sometimes, they will even invite friends out to their little domains to share wine and eat al fresco.
The part that struck me over and over again was the pride with which this tiny little parcels were cared for and decorated–yes, Virginia, there were garden gnomes. Since I really do not enjoy gardening–it is like housework, but dirtier and hotter, and I am really uncomfortable at the idea of permanent ownership, especially of land–this feeling is alien to me, but perhaps those of you who could imagine the desire for a tiny little farm (or even tending tiny little sheep) could try to explain it to me. However, I do believe that there is something about being human that makes us want to have our little piece of nature and of life to tend and to take care of. I don’t know if this is in spite of or as a result of our increasingly artificial and detached relationship with the natural world and with our food sources.

Either way, it seems like a lovely idea.801signature

Savory Sides

Hi, Folks; I’m back.

Excited about the food, but still wish I was on the road.

Chutney & PiccalliI have not made it back into the laboratory for a new recipe yet (although I have great ideas to try), but I wanted to say a word about Chutneys.

That word is “wow.”

Chutneys come into our food world from the Indian subcontinent, and were adapted and adopted by the British. British food has traditionally been rather bland, but Plum Chutneythey have a fine appreciation for condiments of every kind, and borrowed heavily from this spicier tradition when they occupied India as a colony. Chutney can be a variety of things, but is generally made of fruits, vinegar, sugar, salt, and spices that are boiled down to a thick sauce–about the consistency of jam. The combination of the pungent tartness of the vinegar with the sweetness and the flavor of the fruit, along with the saltiness and the spices is amazing, and allows for an infinite number of possible combinations.
Edinburgh 1It is great to accompany simple things like a ploughman’s lunch or eggs, but can be served on the side of just about anything. I had an amazing sandwich picked up at a Spencer & Marks store of a caramelized onion, wensleydale cheese & chutney.  A somewhat similar thing would be certain British forms of pickle–like Branston Pickle or Piccalilli. They can be used for many of the things we would use salsa.

I had sort of been preparing for chutney thanks to my friends from “Eat Local Or Die!” at beet bruschetta 2the Johnson City Farmer’s Market, who make some incredible savory jams, or which my favorites are the Caramelized Onion Jam and the Caramelized Onion and Ghost Pepper Jam. I made a really interesting bruschetta by stacking a slice of raw beet, a slice of sheep ricotta salata, a dollop of Ghost Pepper Jam and some roasted salted pecans on a piece of French bread toast.

Anyway, instead of a recipe, I will encourage you to go out and experiment on your Edinburgh 2own, either boiling down that fresh fruit you have with some vinegar and making your own chutney, or by finding some and seeing what you can come up with.

Enjoy.
Share.
Love.