Stirring It Up

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people etc etc. Yes, a whole year has rolled around since I posted the post at

http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2012/11/stir-up-sunday.html

and we are back to "Stir Up Sunday" again. For my Irish readers this is a rather nice little British (and probably Protestant) Calendar Custom when it came time for the cooks of the parish to mix up their ingredients for Christmas Pud and Christmas Cake to give them time to 'meld' (for flavours to merge) and the Vicar would select the above 'collect' from the Book of Common Prayer which would remind the cooks. I have no idea how traditional this really is but it's a nice story and it happens in The Archers, so it MUST be true.

We do it in this house, anyway, and Liz was there today with a table covered in the different packets and tubs of suet, dried fruit, glace cherries, bowls of eggs, the bottle of brandy and the rest. We use an old family recipe which comes to us from Pud Lady and which I believe comes from our family's ancient and venerable, much thumbed and well used recipe book which we know as 'Flo' (It's Florence somebody or other). Pud Lady may correct me if I am wrong. Last year we almost had a two-fold disaster when firstly Pud Lady, relating the recipe over the phone, omitted bread crumbs and also, we were so short of eggs that we were anxiously waiting on one of the hens to lay that day's egg before we could proceed. Luckily the bread crumbs did not seem to matter and the hen laid her egg - the result was a delicious success after all. This year we have a glut of eggs and we have added the bread crumbs to our saved version of the recipe.

Goldie Rabbit gets two visitors.

In their own attempt to stir things up, the Irish Rugby team almost beat the All Blacks, being beaten by only 2 points just 4 minutes from the final whistle. It would have been the first win over the New Zealanders for a hundred years or so. We deny ourselves the permission to follow these matches lest we jinx the team as I used to do to England when ever I watched them but my absence today was not enough. I understand it was a gripping match.

4 trees as delivered.

For me, a very enjoyable job today and another milestone in the November sunshine, once the mist had been burned off. I receive through the mail via Anne and Simon, my fruit trees ordered from "Future Forests". These are my last four for the orchard, filling the final four slots in my 6 by 4 array, a 2nd "Braeburn" apple, a "Sunburst" dark dessert cherry, a crab apple named "Golden Hornet" and a black mulberry.

Each has a small story and a reason to be included. The Braeburn is a potential substitute for my existing tree which is suffering a bit from a canker like lesion which has nearly gone right round the main trunk from a side bud. The cherry is the closest we could get to the Black Wonder we grew in Kent. We'd heard about it from a Bob Flowerdew answer on Gardeners' Question Time and had to have it specially grafted by Brogdale, the famous Fruit Research Station (which was in our town) as a one-off order. The Sunburst looks quite dark in the catalogue picture (though not on the pictorial label) so we will have to wait and see whether we have a "dark dessert cherry" at all.

The Black Mulberry harks back to my University days when the college with which I was associated while doing my research, Wolfson College, Cambridge, had a huge black mulberry tree growing in front of the main doors which used to literally drip the black sweet juicy fruit all over the flagstones but which we students used to happily 'scrump' every time we walked past. The crab apple harks back to our family home in Hastings, where Pud Lady and my Brother, Tom, still live. There is a magnificent crab apple in the front garden which gave us boys no end of pleasure in the climbing and in the harvesting of the crabs for making crab apple jelly and wine.

Well, those four trees are now in place and the orchard, nicely grazed short by the geese, is complete. We hope for great things over the coming years as the trees establish and grow. We have a vision of looking down the rows between the blossom and of picking plenty of fruit as it comes ripe. This year the trees were all very young (the first trees were planted in August 2012) so we got some blossom this year but the only fruit which set was on a plum, which gave us 2 dozen lovely fruit. Next year, who knows? Apples, pears? Quince and greengage?  Plums and dessert or sour cherries? Damsons and Mulberries? Hazelnuts and crab apples? We'll have to wait and see.

Anniversary Tourists

By the beach at Louisburgh, Croagh Patrick behind us.

The 3rd of November saw us hitting a major milestone and a happy event, our 20th Wedding Anniversary. We had decided a while back to celebrate this with a nice breakfast, a scenic drive, a picnic and a candle lit steak supper. We knew we were taking a chance with the weather but we just amused ourselves with the possibility of having to that British thing, a picnic in the car by the side of the road with the wipers going occasionally to clear the rain off the windscreen. When the 2nd of November presented us with a vicious Westerly, a gale of wind and driving rain squalls we wondered whether the joke was about to become reality but no, the 3rd dawned bright, blue skies, warm sunshine and not a breath of wind. We were on!

The beach at Old Head

Breakfast was that family favourite, boiled eggs and toast soldiers, always improved by having your own, deep yellow yolked free range eggs. Then we were showering and preparing the picnic, again, family favourite "Hang Sangwidges" and various salads plus some chocolate cake for 'pud'. With the car loaded, dogs an' all, we headed off west to find some scenery. Castlebar we have been to dozens of times, especially while building the house, but we'd never been past Castlebar and on towards Westport and all the lovely mountains and coast of North Mayo.

The shore of Doo Lough. 

As you approach Westport you can soon see the famous, cone-shaped 'Holy Mountain', Croagh Patrick, scene of many a pilgrim hike in the Summer, with an option to do it in bare feet if you are feeling particularly martyr-like. We are determined to do the climb soon, but not in bare feet. It is reckoned to take about 2 and a half hours to the summit, none of these Irish peaks are 'that tall' and "The Reek" is only 764 m. It is a tourist magnet, though, so we will try to avoid the known pilgrimage days.

From Westport we headed on West into ever smaller lanes, determined to reach 'Roonagh', the small port from which you catch the ferry out to Clare Island, famed in one of our favourite 'Sawdoctors' songs. We needed to let the dogs out for a comfort stop, so Liz found Old Head on the map, a small headland with a beach just east of Louisburgh. After Roonagh, we headed back to Louisburgh and then southwards into the mountains aiming for the gorgeous Doo Lough Pass and Doo Lough itself for our picnic.

Not everybody faced with a Lough in November in North County Mayo gets the urge to paddle, but I did and Liz grabbed the camera and took these pictures. The bed of the lough here is a lovely smooth scree of rounded, flat stones, perfect for skimming across the surface of the mirror-smooth water, so I could have gone barefoot, but I had my 'crocks' with me, so I kept those on. The dogs seemed to like the belly-deep (for them) wading, It wasn't that cold.

We swapped drivers at this point and I took over the maps to guide Liz down past the lough and on down to Killary Harbour (a 15 km inlet of the Atlantic), round the head of that to Leenaun and then south some more climbing over the minor road between the 'Devil's Mother' (mountain) and Ben Beg, grinding up the incline and dropping down a beautiful hairpin bend road and over a lovely bridge to Lough Nafooey. On to Lough Mask by which time we were a bit touristed out, so we were happy when Liz got onto some bigger roads, for the drive back eastwards through Ballinrobe, Claremorris picking up the N17 to near Knock airport and the lanes home. It had been a beautiful drive and a lovely, enjoyable day.

With all the livestock sorted we were able to crack the wine open and get our steak supper organised, whereupon the power died on us, so we would have had to eat by candle light even if we'd not planned to. Luckily we have a gas hob, so cooking was not a problem. We had a lovely evening chatting and reminiscing in the romantic ambience and, in fact, when the power was restored at 8 pm we chose to turn all the lights off anyway and carried on with just the candles. Cheers and here's to the next 20 years.