Preparations

With the Dans out of the way, we are now on the run-in to 'proper' Christmas, killing our own turkey, doing the big food-shop and any other acquisitive missions which become necessary, doing any food prep that can be done before the day, and generally getting the place ready for our Seasonal visitors. It is an exciting one, this one, as we are happily welcoming into our home at this important time, 3 people only one of whom we have ever met before. How brave is that? What could possibly go wrong? :-)

A very generous gift of this yule log table
centre decoration comes from a good
village friend, along with a bag of red beet
which he knows we love.

Yep. These people are our French Help-X volunteer from September, Augustin (a.k.a. 'AB') and his mother and younger sister. When AB was here helping, it was just a month out of his 5-month tour of Ireland and we worked out that he'd therefore be still in Ireland over Christmas. We wondered whether he'd be a bit lost in a strange city or might be going home to family for the holiday.

The car gets a jet-wash at the local valet place. It's not been so
clean since we've had it. 

We ended up inviting him back here for the 24th-26th and then, when he found that his Mum and Sister would be coming over to see him, we asked him to bring them too. Liz loves doing this 'hospitality' as you know and will love the chance to practise her French and reminisce about Paris and it will be great fun to see AB again. We will both thoroughly enjoy showing these French folk how Christmas is done in Ireland. Not sure what they'll make of it. We know that they are all really looking forward to it. I will tell you all how it went in the next post. Joyeux Noël!

Bringing the big turkey in for Liz to 'process'.
One dog, at least, is interested. 

Because of all this, we are in a frantic 'prep' mode but as the guests do not arrive until a Christmas Eve afternoon train from Dublin, we can do it all in safety and privacy - no-one to see our frantic chasing about. I dinged the 2nd turkey-stag (the one for here) on the 20th. I like to do all my 'killing' prior to the Solstice. It might just be a silly foible, but prior to the shortest day we are on a down-slope and it is OK to finish a few birds, but after 21st, when we are climbing back up out, it feels wrong to be ending anyone's time on earth.

Fast handiwork in the de-feathering dept. 

This fella looked nearly as big as the one Liz took down to the In-Laws last week. He continued to look that big as he was plucked out and 'dressed' (euphemism for disemboweling and removing extraneous lower legs, head and "giblets" (another euphemism)).

The trussed, short-fuselage version. 

Because they get a night dead, hanging up, head down, by their feet, they come into the kitchen with their legs straight out behind them. This guy, oven ready, gave us quite a scare, being "too big for the oven". We had visions of having to joint him up and cook him in bits - the 'crown' (bone-in both breasts), wings and legs.

Resting in the afternoon

I knew I could do better with a bit of amateur trussing, so I brought him back in from the fridge and heaved his legs into a squat-bend. He is a muscly chap but I prevailed. I lashed his ankle joints together and down to his 'parson's nose' and then ran my twine round under his armpits, shortening his profile by a good 6 inches. Liz always cooks these whole turkeys 'empty' with the 'stuffing' in a separate tray, to let the heat straight into the body cavity, so we can also push the front opening closed without any stuffing bulge. Even shorter. He now fits on the roasting tray, and therefore in the oven. He weighs 8.7 kg and we are very proud of him. He is survived by our hen bird who is only about 4 kg and will now be a keeper till spring. She may give us some eggs.

More left-overs. This one a burger risotto. 

What else have we done? The big 6 kg Christmas ham we brined and froze back in the Autumn had to come out of the freezer to thaw for 24 hours. That big joint gets boiled briefly and then simmered for 6 hours in (cheap, fake) coca-cola. It is the only time we buy 'coke' all year, not being fans of fizzy pop at all. The big lump of meat then gets cooled down and, before the Big Day, has its skin removed and then that fancy diamond design cut into into the sub-cutaneous fat. We stick a clove into each diamond and glaze with some combination of the coke-liquor and mustard to give the lovely golden colour to the baked ham.

Extracting venison marrow using a corkscrew for the dogs,
We did clean the corkscrew afterwards!

Liz has also been whizzing up stuffing mixes, soaking chick-peas for hummus and worrying about other Christmas specials like fancy custard, mince pies, red cabbage, cocktail sausages, pomegranates and so on. Liz went present-shopping to Sligo today, so she's now all over me for having 'finished hers' when I still have a mini-mission to do tomorrow. All good clean fun.

By the time I talk to you again, it will all be over.

The Un-Planned Harvest

The remainder of the honey extraction went well as we settled on a workable and non-messy technique. We worked our way through the four, two-sided frames at a couple or three of sides a day and ended up with a very satisfying 22 of our small jars, at 150 g (net). 3.3 kg total. These little jars come from Lidl containing their very reasonable 6-pack paté variety pack and are superbly useful for things like this. We have a lot of people eye-ing up our honey keenly and by potting it up in these 'taster' quantities, we can make plenty of them happy. Oh, and K-Dub... we did try out your method but could not get the honey to leave the honeycomb. K-Dub had suggested that if we un-capped a frame and put this into our tall fermentation bucket at an angle, then whirled it round my head, I might generate enough centrifugal force (I might mean centripetal) to throw the honey out of the comb. Well, I whirled and whirled till my shoulder was nearly dislocated and got no more than a thimble full, hence our change to the warm-gravity method described in my previous post.

Honey on ciabatta for breakfast.

In celebration of our new largesse, Liz decided to knock up a ciabatta bread to eat it on. Neither of us appreciated how sloppy is ciabatta dough and how it spreads out sideways during the rise. The 'knock down' phase prior to the 2nd proving was more a case of trying to pull it all back into one lump but in the end it went into the oven like that and came out as easily the biggest ciabatta either of us had seen. Perhaps we will divide the dough into three or even four 'loaves' next time.

This ciabatta was easily 14 inches square.
That is the oven-tray it is cosily resting in.

No matter, it just got quartered and the 4 portions will get used up via fridges or freezer as appropriate. It was delicious, especially with the honey for breakfast. It has that lovely 'big air-holes' mouth feel, a bit like crumpets.

With the honey all extracted, Liz has rounded up all the 'cakes' of spent wax with a view to washing them clean, melting and re-cooling the whole into an 'ingot' and then trying out some warm jam-jar alchemy involving coconut oil (4 parts to one part of beeswax, we are advised) to make furniture polish. I will let you know how we get on.

Brine cured pork leg joint

Our attempt to brine-cure some bacon did not go quite as well according to plan. Liz cooked it with an old favourite (Delia, I think) recipe in which the joint is slow boiled in Coca-Cola. Sounds horrific but works surprisingly well. Normally, that is. This time, though, it was superbly tender and was very edible but was possibly a tad salty, probably at our salty limit. We think that this is because although the brine cure worked well, I did not have any specific instructions for "3 inch thick round of leg" so I went with ten days in the brine, but then we got all distracted by Liz coming home, then not, then yes, and it did not get rescued till it had been soaking 14 days. Liz soaked it overnight in water but then did not do the boil, water change, boil, water change again thing as she was using the Coca Cola.

A late frost on Saturday night tries
 to catch us out

All is not lost, though. That joint will be converted into bacon'n'bean soup/stew (with no need to add salt!) and the other two joints will be soaked when they come to be used and get cooked through several changes of water. You live and learn. Any future joints will be brined for fewer days, possibly as few as 3-5. We do not need the salt as preservative, after all, as these 'bacon' joints go into the freezer. The brining is more to give us a change to 'bacon/gammon' from straight pork.

Rather white for the end of April.

A rather brutal change in the weather tries to catch us out as we get frosts, cold winds and lashing rain with gritty bits in it; proper wintry showers. It was all forecast accurately by the superb Met Éireann team, of course, which gave us a chance to go and cover up the sensitive stuff, mainly asparagus shoots, and it is too early to hit much in the way of 'set' fruit blossom (only the plum and damson seems to have got that far yet). It did hit some new emerging leaves on my poor 'baby trees' though, some sweet chestnut which has barely topped grass height yet looks badly 'scorched'. I hope it has the reserves to put out some replacement leaves.

This gap will be Goldie and Nugget's new run.

The bad weather rather pins us down for outdoor work but this week I do not mind. I am creating a new run for our giant rabbits, Goldie and Nugget in the 'gap' behind the yard wall and the sheep fence. This needs a 'bedroom' so I am back in carpenter mode building a sleeping house for the ladies which I can do in the (now) turkey house out of the wind. The chosen patch of ground is a nice lumpy-bumpy piece of rough grass into which a variety of mud, old cow poo and stone was tossed 3 years ago when the mini digger cleared our yard. We are hoping that the banks and dips will give Nugget enough to aim her well developed digging instinct at without her needing to tunnel out. She can build a nice safe warren under there away from Mr Fox if she needs to with a 'Mummy annex' for Goldie in her autumn years. There is also a wealth of good grass in there and taller stuff which will benefit from a bit of lagomorphic management. Finally one little minor hiccup in the Hubbard dept, as one of the 12 dies while we are out shopping. We have no idea why, you normally don't. Little birds go from quite happy and healthy looking one minute, to dead and cold next time you look without pausing at 'ill'. The remaining 11 all seem happy enough and are eating plenty and putting on lots of weight. More pics of them soon.

Down the Rushy Glen

Keen to stop all this lovely rain water going to waste, we decided that it would be a good idea to invest in a couple of the huge (1010 litre) water 'butts' that everyone uses round here. These could be a reservoir for refilling the pond and also for irrigating the poly tunnel but also to supply drinking water to a drinker on our East Field for the horses and soon the sheep. These come from Coca Cola in Dublin originally and are for sale at anything from about €45 to €75 but have lately been in short supply. We have clubbed together with Mentor(s) Anne and Simon who can possible get them, delivered, at the €45 end of the scale, but their supply has dried up, so we nipped out and got a pricier one locally, collecting it with the trailer. We want to start accumulating water now so that we have a full tank by the time we finish the pond.

We have rigged up a bit of 2nd hand guttering (also, partly, from Anne and Simon) to collect the water from the car port roof. These tanks are only made from plastic and aluminium, so are nice and light when empty, so that Liz and I could easily lift it between us and wrangle it into position. After a bit of rain over night it is already 5-6 inches deep in water. We find that we are now ahead of the curve. Keeping your rain water separate from the sewers is the LATEST THING in eco-warrior terms and is called "Blue-Greening". Get us!

Look at any picture of the East Field we have printed up to now and you will see a mess of rushes tall enough to tickle the bellies of sheep and horses, tall enough to hide them if they lie down. These grow easily here-abouts as soon as the land is allowed to get wet and neglected. The cattle will not eat them, so they just get worse and eventually take over the fields, rendering them useless as pasture unless the farmers bother to spray them and mow the fields; not many do unless pushed, as in this year, by serious shortage of fodder, or forced contractually by their landlords.

We do not want to be negligent managers of our grassland, and the sight of all those rushes was preying on our minds. I was going to have to hire a brush cutter for a day and have at them. I was talking about this to our fencing guy, Paul M and, generous guy that he is, he offered me the lend of his meaty, 'professional' strimmer to try out. This turned out to work like a dream, scything through the clumps like a knife through hot butter. The field is one and a half acres, so it took a few hours (about 4), some replacement "string" (tough nylon cord in the strimmer head) and 4 tanks of petrol but it looks very good now.

The rushes were sprayed last year by Mike the Cows when he was using the field for his cattle, so they are possibly weakened, and some have grass growing among the rush root-plate, but the theory is that the soft rush regrowth can be eaten by horses and sheep which should finish the tufts off and grass will win the grazing war in the end. Our pasture will be like a rush-free garden lawn (!). Liz fancied a go at this strimming game so we kitted her out with her best pink wellies, and my Husqvarna chain-saw gloves, helmet, mesh visor and ear defenders and she was away. It is not on record who she was thinking of as the whirling string zipped through the tufts sending a spray of mashed rush fibre flying in all directions and the decapitated stalks whipping away in the wind.

Meanwhile we have sought (and gained) permission from John Deere Bob to go newt surveying on the little pond at the bottom of his bank field. We explained that we might have to go look during daylight but also at night with a torch. Looking a bit twinkly eyed at Liz as if calculating how much he might get away with as a tease he warned us to be wary of the faeries in the dark down there as there were known faerie-forts (raths) near that water. I am remembering Pud Lady's little rhyme from when we were all small

Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men.......