The Extraordinary in the Ordinary - A Foraged Midwinter Feast

 It all started a few months ago with a conversation over dinner one night. We were at our friends Nikki and Corrie''s place. Nikki and Corrie are the kinds of excellent friends with whom one can scheme up fabulous adventures, mostly involving foraging and preserving and almost always involving a good party.

"We're thinking about doing a bulk foraged apple pressing for cider," I said, " wanna get in on it?"

"I don't really like cider, but I'd be interested in making apple jack," said Corrie. 

"Okay, if we make cider we can use some for apple jack." I said.

"Our friends down the road have 3 big pear trees full of pears, they don't know what to do with them all, we could use those." This is almost exactly how every scheme with Corrie and Nikki goes, it starts as a kind of offhand comment, and fast becomes something slightly unwieldy that we pull off simply because we want to.

We jokingly suggested that if the perry turned out well we'd have to hold a big mid-winter party. Like I said, adventures happen fast with Nikki and Corrie, great, fabulous, fun adventures.

And that's how we found ourselves up ladders, filling laundry baskets and bins with pears on Saturday morning a few weeks later. Then it was onto the pressing. pressing kilos and kilos of pears with a borrowed basket press over a couple of Fridays in a row. We fermented the perry (pear cider) in demijohns. Nikki and Corrie heard them bubbling away day after day as they sat under Nikki's desk, while she studied for her exams and attended online classes. 

\And then, somewhere right before Nikki's exams we managed to find time to bottle the suckers. It was a morning of complete hilarity, mainly because the perry was pretty strong and we obviously had to try it. Siphoning perry out of a demijohn while trying not to laugh because your mates are cracking jokes is actually way harder than first anticipated. That was it though, we knew the perry was delicious. And so of course we realised that we had to share this perry with other people. And so, with slightly giddy heads we laid out plans, something on a spit, foraged pickles.... wait what if almost everything was foraged? And so, the date was set. 

And so Corrie magically pulled a feral deer from a contact he had, I ran the perry that wasn't as awesome as the other stuff through our still (it was turned out so well) and our mate Loki made a collection of foraged fermented deliciousness. There was something really fun about trying hard to only use foraged or free stuff to throw a crazy party. The kind of crazy party where people don't quite know what they're showing up for, but they have an inkling that it's going to be amazing.

In case you're wondering, it was a fucking brilliant party. It's exactly the kind of thing I really believe in, creating abundance and joy while having fun with friends and community. You get so many yields that way, you spend time with mates, you get to share something you're proud of creating with people. You don't have to spend much money. Joy can be found everywhere. It can be created out of some foraged pear and a free Saturday morning, it can be schemed up over a demijohn you're siphoning perry out of, it can be uncovered on a mid-week walk, or a coffee in the sunshine, or a crochet session with your friend. The possibility for joy is already there in ordinary things, getting creative with frugality has so much joy in it. Adventures are there for the taking, and they are always the best when they feed back into the people, places and ecosystems that support you.