How we welcomed the summer

We managed to get away from it all this prolonged weekend. This year Corpus Christi coincided with Saint John's Eve. I don't mention that cause I'm religious in any sense, Corpus Christi simply gave us Thursday off. Saint John's, on the other hand, has deeply rooted pagan tradition and I love the fact that we still celebrate it with fire and water here in Pomerania. It seems to me I can't open my summer without going wild on that particular night.

To stimulate good, festive mood we got ourselves some beer, this time we chose non-pasteurised Amber, a cheap, yet good quality beverage produced locally. We needed a lot of warm up, cause the weather suited the coming of spring more than June. Yet the beauty of the surrounding and the being surrounded by a bunch of my closest friends was so heart and body warming that I even has a swim in cold water of the lake, which didn't seem that cold at that time. In fact I needed a splash of cold water to sober up a bit and proceed with the evening celebrations. I guess everyone was a bit tired, the rain forced us to stay inside and enjoy ourselves by the fireplace.

For the first time I enjoyed collective cooking. I normally treat my kitchen as my sanctuary where I like to be left alone, but this time I experienced a sense of togetherness when preparing common meals. We lived like a commune of 8 for a few days. Our culinary experience started with English breakfast (with some ingredients replaced with their Polish counterparts i.e. sausage and bacon). This made a very good start for another cold, rainy day.

Then we remembered that we're a nation of  natural goods pickers so we went to the meadow to get some sorrel for the fantastic sorrel soup. This season this soup is an absolute hit in my kitchen, but so far I've been using plantation-grown sorrel. Wild sorrel soup was equally good and matched our communion-with-nature summer mood.

It cleared towards the evening and we finally could set out on a nice walk along the fields. Bitten almost to death by hungry mosquitoes we struggled through the greenness into the unknown. Found some more goodies of the earth like blueberries and wild strawberries. Yummy! I felt so free of worries, almost as free as before.

The walk was highly inspiring. The vagabonds returned to their lair to pick their instruments and give the first live performance (jam session) of their newly formed psychedelic jazz/funk/blues/ rock/folk/indie band called Lame Lime. They even did a cover version of The Neverhood sountrack hit "Klaymen's Theme". What a night! What a performance! 

And then, like artists after a good gig, we had an afterparty, namely 70's/80's and early 90's disco.  

Next day we had to fetch our kids, we had to rescue the grandmothers half dead with exhaustion. What's more our friend came to visit us with her two so we had a nice little pack of screeching, running, deatroying the house, moaning, chattering brats. Uhm.... it wasn't so bad I suppose. We survived, they survived and that's what matters.

Last night was definitely fire-centred. We got involved in a fiery discussion in front of a fire which we made of some maple branches and an old sofa. And then moved towards the fireplace , where we baked the most delicious tortillas ( bought earlier from Lidl heh) which we filled with ratatouille of my own spontaneous recipe. 

Sadly, we had to go back the next day. I must say this was too short for me to rest. We returned with heaps of dirty laundry to the flat with an empty fridge and wished we could go back to the greenness, the larks singing, the mosquitoes biting, friends playing the guitar and zither. Well, nothing lasts for ever. Good thing is that summer is not over yet!