Helen and Peter in Portugal

When we moved to the hills of Portugal we thought we'd be growing all our own vegetables, picking grapes, harvesting olives and being just a little more self-sufficient.  But over the last 8 years we've not really embraced this way of life.  The veg patch is more of a place where veg goes to die, we've never picked the grapes and up until this month we've never bothered with the olives. We have about 13 olive trees in our garden.  Each year we watch the olives grow, fall on the ground and rot.   I hack back the grapevines so hard the neighbours come out to laugh at my poor pruning skills.  They tell me each year 'you'll never get grapes if you do that' I reply 'I don't want grapes, I just want leaves'....they shrug and laugh to themselves as the walk away. And as for that poor veg patch...well aphids, rot, bad soil and a whole host of problems mean we only plant peas (which we often forget to harvest until they've gone hard), tomatoes (...

Portugal has a long history of preserving fish, it seems to have started in Peniche with two main ways of preservation recorded.  Either drying on racks in the sun or as Roman remains have shown, they were salting fish and putting it into clay pots. The first modern commercial preservation factory was started in 1853 and put locally caught sardines in olive oil. In fact this company are still doing it today with a wider variety of fish canned -  http://ramirez.pt/.   Tuna from Ramierz As time went on canning factories used new canning technology to preserve the fish for longer, opening up the international market and by the 1980s there were over 150 canning factories in Portugal.   However, c anned fish went out of fashion and as processing costs grew many factories closed down. In fact in the year 2000 there were just 20 factories still canning fish in Portugal.   In recent years canned fish has made a come back in Portugal, it's become a fashion cho...