Head Cheese

Brawn - the red is carrot, the green is fresh parsley.

The brawn is made. This is Liz's first time making it and she'd never eaten it before but not letting those minor problems get in the way of a good cookery experiment, in she went, internet recipe to hand and just me at the end to tell her how genuine it looked and, Wow! the gorgeous flavour and texture. Tick that one up to the 'keep' repertoir along with others like Yorkshire Puds (again, she had no experience of them; they didn't really do them in Ireland) and pretty much from the get-go, became the best Yorkshire cook any of us know.

We were amused to learn that brawn is called 'Head Cheese' in France but also, dredged up from Liz's folk memories of books she read long ago, also in some famous literature. She could recall a fairly detailed description of the killing, cutting up and processing of a pig in "Little House in the Big Woods" (with its better known stable-mate, "Little House on the Prairie")

"As soon as the hog was dead Pa and Uncle Henry lifted it up and down in the boiling water till it was well scalded. Then they laid it on a board and scraped it with their knives, and all the bristles came off. After that they hung the hog in a tree, took out the insides and left it hanging to cool. When it was cool they took it down and cut it up. There were hams and shoulders, side-meat and spare ribs and belly. There was the heart and liver and the tongue, and the head to be made into headcheese, and the dish pan full of bits to be made into sausage" and later "Ma scraped and cleaned the head carefully and then she boiled it till all the meat fell off the bones. She chopped the meat fine with her chopping knife in the wooden bowl, she seasoned it with pepper and salt and spices. Then she mixed the pot liquor with it and let it stay in the pan to cool. When it was cool it would cut into slices, and that was headcheese". See? Nice children's literature!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas round here. We got a superb result on the tree buying. We like a 'real' tree and need one about 6 feet tall. As well as being hard to find round here - with local traders telling you "we stopped doing them" and not knowing where you might get one - they can be pricey. Last year we had to go all the way over to Ardcarne Garden Centre, half an hour away and choose from trees which were up in the €50, €60, even €70 range. We were even contemplating lashing out the €250 on a decent artificial one because it'd see several Christmases out and pay for itself in the end. Then we were walking round Balla-D and one of Liz's knitting ladies tipped us off that our local supermarket, SuperValu were doing them for €20 or €25 if you spent just €30 on groceries. So here we are, erected and dressed today, our 6 foot 'cheapie'. Very nice it looks too both from inside the house and also you can see the top through the window from down in the lane.

Beginning to Look

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. We are behind the curve a bit locally, as the McG's down the road already have their tree displayed in the front bay of their house, all twinkly multi coloured lights and tinsel, clearly visible from the road. Our problem is that we can't find any for sale. Unlike Kent where very garden centre, every farm entrance and everything even vaguely like a craft market or boot sale had trees by the dozen from late November and the verges seemed to be littered with roughly made cardboard notices saying "XMAS TREE'S!" (or some such apostrophe'd up grocer-speak) we had seen not a whisper. Even the guy running the Christmas wreaths, yule logs and table centre-pieces stand in Balla-D market "didn't bother with them any more" and didn't know where you could get one. I asked in a variety of shops. No joy.

Fortunately we subscribe to the news-feed in Facebook from ace local (half hour away) garden centre Ardcarne and they were suddenly advertising them "From €29!"). That was our Saturday morning sorted. Admittedly we were a bit horrified by the prices - needless to say the €29 ones were all the threadbare, thin, short and damaged ones. These were all the newer, more fashionable 'Noble Fir' which apparently sheds its needles less, rather than the Norway Spruce we always bought in UK and seemed to be around €55 for a 6 footer.

We baulked and went to look at artificial ones thinking they might be cheaper in the long run. Indeed they might in the VERY long run. Anything at all realistic and large was €169 up, and often €299 up. Yoiks. We bit the bullet and got us a real one. We needed a decent tree to go in our Living Room bay and be tall enough to be visible from the rather high-silled window from outside.

Trees round here are subject to 'style police' rules. Amusingly, given that Christmas tends to be about overstatement, garish, tat-ness and lairy colour, the Style Police here dictate that the tree must be mainly silver with a bit of red and only tiny amounts of other colours. Tinsel is silver, the lights are clear rather than multi-coloured and baubles are 99% silver. A few red ones are allowed if they were gifts. Toys of course can be any colour but end up mainly red.

We do have stuff of other colours but this gets used up in other rooms, so gold tinsel, for example, goes round pictures in the Dining Room or the stairs balustrade. The small strand of old multi-coloured lights, which pre-date the style police, get draped round book shelves. We also work a system where we try to each buy a Christmas Tree decoration for each other each year and welcome any gifts there-of, so we love this year's heart shaped 'stuffed toy' decs from Mazy Lou. Thank you Mazy!

We think it looks nice. We were worried that the pups and kittens would wreak havoc, pulling over the tree and so on but so far the only damage sustained was to the feather boa you can see at the base of the tree in the pics (shredded by pups), the tinsel round the picture pulled down by a kitten (and this is above the hot range!), and a dangly bauble-on-string-of-gold-pearls disentangled from the stairs and chucked on ground. The kittens do not seem to be able to resist the slithery, pearl-over-pearl rattly movements of this as they attempt to grab it and can't quite grip it. Hours of fun. Luckily it is a cheap old thing with the plastic 'pearls' welded to the string, so there's no danger of a string-breaks, pearls rolling around like marbles style accident.

Merry Christmas.