Too Many Cooks?

These yellow pokers are flowering away despite the weather
and despite sitting in a 'rescue' bucket awaiting a new
proper position. 

I am just back indoors from dropping our current Help-X couple, Sonja and Asbjörn, to the bus-stop in Ballaghaderreen, for their bus to Sligo. They have earned a weekend off and there is some flavour of "Celtic" music/arts festival on where they will meet up with fellow Help-X-ers who they know from New Zealand and Iceland. They get about, these volunteers! They are away just the one night, then back with us for next week, but off to Dublin ready for Tuesday flights home to, variously, Frankfurt and Berlin.

Bramley tree temporarily propped back
upright after it was lent over by the wind.

They have proved to be brilliant and helpful hard workers, and worked way over the hours we would expect. Every day they have gone back out after lunch and carried on because they "just want to finish this last....." This even with the skirts of Storm Ali blustering slowly through so that on some days they were restricted to under-cover jobs, mucking out bird houses, clearing the poly-tunnel and splitting up kindling in the car port.

Pigs' ears and tails become dog treats.

They have achieved so much and we are delighted with them - it has quite restored our faith in Help-X after that French lad upsettingly blew us out for the whole of August. We have that mountain of kindling sacks, a clear poly-tunnel and 2 full buckets of (volunteer) spuds out of it. The geese and chickens do not know themselves for the pristine state of their houses and the new bedding. The five railway sleeper beds are either cleared or weeded and one has been top dressed with the goose muck.

Starting to prune the living willow tunnel.

Asbjörn helped Elizabeth on a mission to buy feed sacks. When Storm Ali bent a couple of trees over and knocked down all our apples and pears (fruit, not trees!), the volunteers were on hand to stand the trees back up and prop them with old fence posts, pending me being able to buy proper tree stakes and ties.

We were not quite so successful on the rescue of windfall apples, especially of the soft-ish 'James Grieves' which we had intended for frozen purée. By the time we got out there the orchard was full of rather smug looking hens and the ground was clean of all apples! We were reduced to picking what was left off the trees. Most recently we have had S+A pruning and tidying up the living willow tunnel which now puts on metres of growth each year as it tries to achieve 'willow trees' status.

Bread and carrot cake by Sonja.

When not working in the garden, they have shown as very keen to take over the kitchen and cook stuff. Sonja started this off with 2 loaves of bread and 2 carrot cakes. Asbjörn wanted to cook our Thursday supper of a very rich beef in Guinness with a topping of "scones" (not quite the same as a British dumpling or 'cobbler'; a German variant, I guess.

2 left over quarters of that beef in ale topped with scones

The beef-in-ale was made with one of the new 'retro' Guinness types, called "Foreign Extra Stout". At 6.5% this would be stronger than anything I'd choose in a pub, but gave the stew a beautifully rich flavour. The scones were actually made by Sonja, they cook in the steam rising from the stew. There was a lovely Waldorf on the side.

Just for a laugh, and because Asbjörn's most distinctive feature is his magnificent ginger beard, the shoppers had to buy a bottle of an alcoholic ginger beer by an English brewer (Wychwood, of 'Hobgoblin' fame).This beer is called Ginger Beard and the label features, as you'd expect, a man with a ginger beard. It was a good laugh but perhaps not the ideal accompaniment to the beef in ale. It was rather sweet and very gingery, more like a kiddie's 'alco-pop' and the ginger flavour conflicted with the stew's deliciousness. The real 'Hobgoblin' would have been a better choice but hey....

German style carrot-cake. 

Our kitchen is rather small, even though now extended to twice the bought size so by the time we had Asbjörn in there stewing, Sonja scone-ing and the Woman of the House still trying to nail that days lunch and that night's (stir fry) supper, it was getting very busy and there was a fine dance going on for space, movement and available time slots on the oven. Luckily not a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth. Everything worked and was cooked to perfection and at the correct times.

Dry cure salt/sugar mix for pork legs. This mix included cloves,
chillies, garlic, thyme, star anise, coriander seeds and cumin
seeds, cloves and black peppercorns.

I had steered clear during the busy times (4 cooks in there might have been pushing it!) and my main 'cooking' job, applying the dry cure mix to the 'Parma ham' style legs of pork, could be done out in the Utility room where sits the fridge which will protect the legs during the 21 days of dry cure.

All you need for a game of Ten Thousand. 

We have also been enjoying the company of Asbjörn and Sonja during the evenings, when we have been invited to sit down with them for a few games of the dice-rolling, bidding game I described in the last post, "Ten Thousand". We have now got quite used to the intricate rules and scoring system and I can report that last night, with Elizabeth off at her evening class on furniture restoration, I won all three games handsomely. I was on fire for some reason, and neither of the visitors could make any points score 'stick'. All good clean fun.

Hey ho. Well, as I said, the pair are now off to Sligo for some R+R and, as I type this, I am just waiting for the boss to return from her 'Hard Landscaping' course, so that I can go have a lie down. It's bushed, I am.

Smallholder Buys Shop Eggs! Shock!

The shame of it! Shop bought eggs. 

Yes, all the girls seem to be in moult or sulking through the short length days and misty mornings and we are currently down to one or zero eggs from the 9 hens (plus guinea fowl) each day. We are just about supplying John Deere Bob with his half dozen but today, when Liz needed 5 for an extra gloopy chocolate fudge cake for some visitors we had to submit to the inevitable and buy half a dozen like 'normal' people do, in an actual shop. We have not bought eggs since our first batch of Sussex Ponte hens came into lay yonks ago.

The solid clean chap formerly known as skanky emaciated
stray with bits missing, Pirate the cat.  

We are not alone it seems. Anne, I know is also a bit quiet at the moment and friend Dawn was telling me this week that she had also had to buy half a dozen for the first time in years. Ah well. Don't get too excited, though, Lidl. You do not have a new income stream. Your free range eggs were OK but not a patch on our own for freshness or for the rich full yellow colour of the yolks. We will be going back to ours as soon as the girls decide that spring is round the corner.

Sorting the lamb meat out. Roughly 104 kg from the 4 lambs

Monday 17th saw us down at lamb butcher, Ignatius G (Victualler) of Castlerea Main Street, to collect our lambs and watch them being butchered up. They have been hanging in his cold store 'relaxing' for 7 days. We love Ig-G; he is an absolute joy to do business with. A well padded (but huge and strong) traditional looking butcher with a happy, smiley face, he is definitely a 'front of house' type bloke, bantering with the customers in his butcher's apron. His No.2, Joe, is maybe a bit quieter and seems to have his days for the banter but sometimes seems to prefer the quiet of the back room and his vicious-looking band saw.

Bagged for the freezer

That day was an out-front day and we had a great laugh with the two of them as they prepared our order to Liz's specification; we needed one of the lambs split between Mrs Silverwood and Steak Lady but also some parts of the order done as a million chops, while others needed to be in racks of ribs, some big joints but some half-leg or half shoulder. The guys don't mind, you can have it as simple or as complicated as you like. They have even bagged each individual portion for us before now, as they went along, printing labels on the 'till/weigher' for us describing the cuts (lamb chops, gigot chops, half shoulder etc). We get the distinct impression that they appreciate anyone who knows about meat and respects their work and their business.

Local grown!

While we are on meat, we have been delighted to find that sometimes now we can do a Sunday roast or a main meal and see that everything on the plate has come from this holding. On Sunday we had the first leg joint from the pigs and spotted that the meat, potatoes, sprouts, turnip and even the apple sauce was from here. Our apple harvest was a bit of a flop but the few we got we guarded jealously. Liz made the (single) Bramley and one of the James Grieves into apple sauce back in September, freezing it to be kept for the occasion of our first pork Sunday roast. Our only 'oops' of that meal was that Liz, without thinking, 'nicked' one of the rabbits' cheap carrots; we have carrots in the ground but I'd not brought any in that day. All delicious and succulent, laced with that added pride of having grown it ourselves.

Leg roast. Excellent.

We are very pleased, in particular, with the flavour of the Tamworth pigs and this leg cut was even a bit less fatty than the shoulder. Liz was able to make very good crackling with the skin still on the joint; for the shoulder she had stripped the skin off and blasted that separately.

We have sneaked through our little hiatus of freezer space. Sparks was down today to collect his lamb, he took away a bit of pork too and tomorrow Liz is off down to the Silverwoods' with theirs and Steak Lady's plus the pork for those 'customers'. By that time we should be able to freeze the 'overflow' which we have put into the 'fridge' parts of those fridge-freezers for safe keeping and we will not have needed to buy either the 5th freezer or to borrow the generously offered freezer space at Dawn's. A narrow squeak but we got away with it. Next year, as I said, we will be sure to de-synchronise the lamb and pork harvests a bit better.

Pirate.

Finally just a quick update on the stray cat, Pirate. You can see from my top picture that he is now quite a solid (OK fat!) chap but his body is now beautifully cleaned up and cleared of all the scar tissue, scabby stuff between the fur and places where he had been gnawing on itchy skin. Also nicks and cuts inflicted by, we presume, barbed wire, brambles or dogs and cats chasing him off. Only his face is still a bit 'mashed', his nose always seems to be a bit red and scuffed, or dried up and scabby and his eye(s) are generally a bit weepy looking. He is a very affectionate young boy and loves to be picked up and fussed (though not carried about, curiously, he gets very fidgety if he thinks you are "taking him somewhere"). He has pretty much taken over the Utility Room and owns it to the exclusion of our other cat Blue. He has the freezers in there pushing out heat and a radiator. He has an old cat bed lined with one of my old fleecy jackets and he is brought regular food - at least a tin a day plus the odd sliver of ice cream when I go out there to help myself. We see him come out to pee or poo somewhere in the yard before nipping back 'indoors'. He seems as happy as Larry and is definitely improved in health out of all recognition from the poor emaciated, cut about, battered and bruised little mite who first showed up driven to steal our cats' food by hunger, bravely coming in through the open kitchen window braving the wrath of our dogs, cats and, for all he knew, us. Fallen on his feet, has Pirate.

Rules is Rules

We dogs are creatures of habit - we like rules to follow, we must know our place in the world. We need a structure to our day, rythms and predictability. We get concerned when anyone, particularly the humans in our pack start doing unexpected things.

One of the best rules and structures , we think, are those surrounding when "sweeties" are dished out. If we're in the garden and we get called in, when we (eventually) come in, we are rewarded with a treat. This can sometimes be stretched to "one of us has just come in so we should all get a sweetie" but when it gets pushed to "OK we didn't actually go out because it's raining, but we looked out from the threshold and now we're back in" it usually falls over. Treats also apply if the humans are going out and leaving us.

Another is the sweetie at bedtime. This is so strict a rule it is now a "tradition". At bedtime we are chased to the back door, the door is opened with a cry of "Last Out!" and we all speed off down the garden to do our last patrols, checks and um... ablutions. The we all head up to bed and when all are assembled, sweeties are dished out, 2 each in the following order - Meg, H, Deefer and Mississippi. Felix is not part of this and not interested in dog sweeties.

My photo is of 3 very attentive westies, left to right, myself, Meg and the H-man. Missi is here somewhere but not in shot. We are attantive because it is just before our bedtime "sweetie"

Sweeties are, incidentally, only those of the dried-meat type, like Winalot rewards. The packet says "meat and animal derivatives, at least 55%" but only "at least 4% beef". Not sure if that makes them technically "dried meat" but they work for us. The other acceptable type are square "polo" mint ones which were made by hartz, but seem to be now made by someone else and come in a grey bag on the rare occasions when the local Co-op has them on stock.

All other retailed treats are looked upon with derision, especially if they contain "plant". H feels especially strongly about this, and will outright refuse any "biscuit" type treats, much to the consternation of well- meaning sweet dog walkers and little old ladies, to whom we must appear quite ungrateful. Meg will sometimes save the day by deigning to eat such offerings, and I (natch) will eat anything if I see Meg or H trying it.

May have been forgiven for the robin thing. Another robin was singing away in the beech hedge this morning, which put paid to Dad's little digs when we went out into the garden along the lines of "Hark! Silence! Listen to the sounds of small red breasted song birds NOT singing!"

My other 2 pics, as befits the Garden of England - the large pink single flower is Quince blossom, and the other is apple blossom, specifically James Grieves

Have a good weekend

Deefs