A Sloppy Mess

Marzipanning the cake. 

After the excitement of our snow and the beautiful pictures that were possible, the thaw was always going to be a come down. The snow is all gone now and the melt water is sitting on the surface, waiting to drain away, turning our grass and any soft paths into a sloppy mess. The ducks don't help, of course, with their keenness to dibble about in any puddle with their bills, sifting for grubs and worms in the slop. Areas that should be green are brown. We need it all to drain, which does not usually take too long, and then for a short, sharp rain shower to wash the grass blades clean.

This loaf had me worried this morning, but seems to have come
 good. When I first went to knead it after the overnight "sponge"
stage, it seemed cold, dead and dense. It then rose sluggishly, but
I had no need to fret. Looks and feels OK now.

This may well be the shortest post ever as we are literally just getting ready for the start of Christmas visitors. Coming this weekend we have old Friends of the Blog, formerly "Dan and Dan". Dan and Dan(ielle) are now famously wed on a cruise ship off Italy earlier in the year, so maybe we should call them Mr and Mrs Dan. They arrive tomorrow for a quick break but we will get them involved in decorating the Christmas Tree and sharing in our glühwein, so it should start to feel like Christmas for all of us.

That half-deer still giving us some useful joints - this a half leg
of venison, up for roasting tomorrow for the guests. 

With Liz away and the snow coming and then thawing, the dogs, cats and I have inevitably walked a fair amount of wet into the house. We can train humans to wipe their feet on the rugs and to take off their boots at the door (well, most of the humans, anyway!), but cats come and go through the cat flap at will and the dogs are so pleased to be back indoors and have eyes only for their dog-treat ('sweeties' here), so if you can get them to put each paw down on the rug even once in passing, you are doing well. It's a never ending battle.

A new way with belly pork. Mini 'porchetta'

A quick sorry update on those duck eggs we have (had) in Sue's incubator. They were keeping us waiting - a week ago we could see little feet kicking about in the 'candling' light beam but then day 28 rolled round to 35, 36 and now 37. Sadly they have now failed to hatch and are dead in their shells. It happens. They would be VERY late season, laid in November, so probably the drake and ducks are not doing their 'mating season' with the required amount of spring in their step. Their various contributions were not in peak of health and these babies were never going to be. Thanks for trying, Sue. We will give it another go in Spring. We have another string to our bow, of course - there are 5 duck eggs under very late broody 'Connie', which come to Day 28 on Christmas Day. Perhaps a real bird might fare better than the incubator. Watch this space.

A 'Swiss roll' of belly meat with inter-leaved herbs, all rolled
up in the skin. 

Meanwhile, we have found a new use for those big squares of belly pork. Bacon rashers and fried strips of belly are all well and good, and Black Spring's Nan's recipe is Divine, but we saw on the Internet, some people making a mini 'porchetta'. Our go-to You-Tube butcher, the 'Scott Rea Project', shows how to take a foot-square chunk of the belly, lay it flat on the chopping board and slice through it horizontally so that you can open two 'pages' like a book.

Nom nommetty nom!

Don't cut all the way through - leave yourself a 'hinge' at one end. You now have a sheet of 'meat' 24" by 12". Smear all over this sheet a mix of as many herbs and flavours as you fancy - we used salt, garlic, rosemary, thyme, sage, fennel seed and lemon zest. We strip all the stems out of the herbs and use just the softer leaves. Now roll the whole thing up leaving the skin outside and facing out, and do your best butchers' knots to make it keep shape. Score the skin all over to help the crackling. Sprinkle with salt or oil according to preference.

We served our porchetta with steamed kale (2 varieties), carrots
and white rice. 

Pre-heat oven to 230ºC (very hot!). Put the roll on a rack sitting out of the roasting dish. Have a mug's worth of water in the dish to stop the worst smoking and spitting. Cook for 20 minutes on hot, then turn oven down to 150ºC and cook for another 3 hours or so. Take joint from oven, cover with foil and a tea towel and rest for a good 20 mins to relax, while you do the veg. Ours was lovely and...oh!... the crackling. Thank you Scott Rea and the rest of the Internet pork-chefs. Good eating.

Multiple Pork Products

Apple shredder designed and built by woodwork
genius, K-Dub. Photo by Carolyn. 

In the last post, I described a hand-made cider apple shredding device but had no photo with which to 'paint a thousand words'. Here to put that right is the said weapon. The drum is spinning at a fair rate here so the exposed screw heads are a blur and the wooden rolling pin used to hold the more uncooperative apples down on it is also moving. I hope you can work it out.

A car load of carcasses.

We also left the 'late' pigs down at the butcher's cooling and 'setting', hanging in his cold store. This post will show that we have been very busy ever since and not stopped with the pork products thing, till now.

AB looking the part with his ADL "Cooking
up a Storm" apron and a tea-towel over his
shoulder.

AB and I collected the meat on Thursday morning while Liz stayed home to prepare the work surfaces, for which read Dining Table and chopping boards, and to get ready the pile of plastic bags and the labelling 'Sharpie'. We use an excellent You Tube self-videoing butcher from Warwickshire for our 'how to' information. Scott Rea of the @ScottReaProject is worth a look see if you are contemplating doing any butchery or making of pork products like 'brawn' (a.k.a. 'head-cheese' ).

This is very early stages, Whipping
out the "caul fat" which lines the
abdomen and is superb for suet crusts.

Amusingly at one stage Liz was in the kitchen watching the Scott Rea on brawn while I was ensconced in the Dining Room watching the 'whole pig' one. Scott would be proud of us! 

Coo. Mind your fingers there cutting out that sheet of ribs. 

So AB and I set to with the cutting with me letting him have a go on a 'monkey see, monkey do' basis. He was quickly whipping out tenderloin fillets and sheet ribs like a pro, sawing through the spine to separate out racks of chops and generally enjoying breaking those halves down into 'primal' cuts and then freeze-able portions (quarter shoulders etc). 

Slicing up some bellies.

Finished joints were landing on the table only to be rapidly bagged and labelled for the freezer. Occasionally we called Liz in to choose cuts (chops separate or in racks? shoulder in 4 quarters? ribs in sheets or separated? etc) It was a real team effort. It took around 30 to 45 minutes per half which reassured me that we were right to not spend the €50 per pig on having them cut up at the shop. We are also able to cut the chops nice and thick (basically one chop per spinal vertebra and rib), which the shop lads, with their band saws, do not do. They zip through the 'rack' every couple of cm and the saw goes diagonally through several ribs, so you get more, thinner chops but lots of sharp, diamond-shape bones in them.

First fruits. Liz sorted out some small
 cutlets of the new pork to go with our
lunch of left over pie and eggs. Delicious!

By lunchtime we were done on 'our' three halves, though Liz had another full afternoon and some of the next day onwardly processing the other bits. There was liver to make into paté. She was also doing a 'rillette' ('pulled' pork preserved in soft pig fat, lovely to spread on bread!) and, with those 2 split heads, 4 lovely big tubs of brawn. AB and I had a chance for a breather before heading down to a friend's house to deliver their half carcass and to butcher it up for them at their place.

Clockwise from top left. First of 4 tubs of brawn, rillette,
paté and more paté. The green in the brawn is fresh parsley.

The late afternoon saw me mixing up 2 strengths of flavoured brine. These recipes are from the Strawbridge books and are flavoured with a lovely 'Christmassy' mix of cloves, garlic, onion, star anise, bay, mustard seed, chilli flakes, allspice and peppercorns. The big whole ham gets 3 days in the less salty/sugary brew before being frozen till December. The belly pork rectangles for bacon rashers get the stronger brew but only for 24 hours.

The fridge in the Utility Room is rather
over-full, at least in the short term! Here
the two 'Parma' legs stand in dry salt mix
and the other buckets hold cuts in brine(s).

We are also having another go at the dry-cure and air dried "Parma" style hams. 2 whole legs again with one planning to be ready in August 2018 and the other for Christmas 2018. These are rather risky investments - each leg is about €60 gone up the Swannee River if you don't get the salt cure right and the flies and maggots get a hold, but this is our 3rd year at this and we are quietly confident that our salt, sugar and spices (not to mention 16 days in the fridge!) will win the day.

Out in the 'honesty box' we are struggling to keep up with
demand for eggs. The girls are on a 'Go Slow'.

The Utility Room fridge is feeling a bit over stuffed just now. The whole legs are long, so they go in standing on end and we have to take out the shelves.

If you are pinned down by the rain, you can
always break up some pallets for kindling.

The bucket for the bellies just about slides in beside the dry-cure bucket and the big-ham brine container perches rather precariously on top of that. It is only for the 24 hours, though, then the bellies are done and on day 3 the big ham is also cured, so then the legs get some space. They get patted down with more dry salt mix each day and the brine which is drawn out of the meat by the salt is drained off, lest the water dissolve and dilute the dry cure. It's all good fun and technical stuff and, even better, it works!

Meanwhile, Stumpy the hen reaches Day 21 of her 2nd go at doing 'broody' today and, right on time, she has a hatch. I have seen at least 1 baby chick peeping out from under her skirts. Following the new system of naming chicks after your current Help-X volunteers (as in Manu1, Manu2 etc) we guess these guys should become AB1, AB2 and so on. Wish them luck.

Ouch!

One of the three turkey poults - they are doing well.

Today sees us roughly in the middle of that Liz "Dentist Hell" of which I spoke in the last post - easily the most painful day but also the 'bottom' of this particular helter skelter ride. From now on, in theory, it is all mend, repair, getting better, recovery and the like. Just to add salt to the wound, this would have been the day she should have flown to Spain, off on a lovely sunny, relaxing, food-rich, sociable (long) weekend with a group of Internet chums including our good friends Mazy-Lou and Airy Fox.

Dustbin Lady and Crate Lady out on the front drive with the
babies.

Yes. As we were driving to the dentist, Liz should have been on the bus from Ballaghaderreen to Dublin Airport, checking in for Bilbao. Then this dental thing loomed up with rubbish timing and Liz decided that exploring the foods of Spain was not really practical for now, so she dropped out.

A lovely gift of acorns from Tara. Genuine Irish Oaks.

So, off we toddled to Balla-D and Liz's date with Destiny and as we turned out of our lane at the crossroads in the village I spotted, sitting on the kerb, a lady runner in jogging shorts and a bright pink top. Thinking she was just resting, I recognised her and said to Liz, "Hey, isn't that your friend from The Play?" It was and Liz had already spotted that both her knees were bleeding from nasty grazes.

All quiet in the pig pen - just a million footprints

Obviously we stopped, did a quick U-Turn and scooped her up. She was feeling very foolish as she had just fallen for no reason she could see, but was also in a lot of pain and shock. Ouch! We drove her home (she'd already run about 2.5 km outbound so was a way off, especially on bleeding knees) and all agreed that now that we are 'grown ups', to fall and graze knees takes you right back to school days where the teacher would gather you up and pass you to the School Nurse who would wipe your cuts down with horribly stinging antiseptic stuff. The days of stretchy pink cloth sticky plasters.

A good vet could get them back on their feet? These ladies went
down to Castlerea in a trailer but came home in the car. 

That, though, is surely enough pain and hurt for one blog. Mine is only the mental 'anguish' of finishing my lovely Oxford Sandy 'n' Black piggies, Somerville and Ross. It hardly compares and especially now that we are through it and able to enjoy the 'product' end of the process - getting our meat back and butchering it up into joints and cuts. The whole job has gone seamlessly. I always worry that something will go awry - we'll fail to load the pigs or we'll have a break down or puncture. So far it has gone well with us (pre-dentistry!) working well as a team, loading, hauling, talking to the butcher, then collecting the split carcasses (he even split the heads for the brawn), butchering them up and finally stowing them in the freezer(s).

All you need to cut up a pig - Scott Rea's excellent videos on
YouTube.... oh and maybe his 25 years experience!

This year we discovered a series of videos on YouTube by a butcher from the UK, Scott Rea. Scott videos himself with a camera over the shoulder as he does master classes in the various aspects of butchery. They include making salt beef, making brawn (or "head cheese") and so on but most importantly today, in how to cut up a pig.

With the ribs removed, these lovely sheets of front "belly"
will become string tied, rolled rib roasts. 

He has 25 years experience and shows and explains the process really well, so I found myself watching a chunk of video, then pausing the tape while I did THAT to my carcasses, then looking at more. Respect, Scott. You are now my go-to butchery mentor! I learned some new cuts this year which I had not seen or done before this year; a (string-tied) rolled rib roast, for example, steaks from one of the big muscle blocks in the leg and boned out loin-chops. Also a new way of doing rib-chops.

The Dining Room Table gets a bit of abuse.

All that lovely meat is now cut up, bagged, labelled and (amazingly) squeezed into the freezer. We had been going a bit mad using up thawed portions of frozen left overs; the shopping list dry-wipe board says "BUY NO MEAT OR FISH" in big letters at the top. We had also been turfing out stuff that had a lower priority than our new 'harvest' and might survive long enough in the fridge to get used up safely.

All bagged and labelled ready for onward shipment to the
Utility Room freezers

I can also tell you that the pork is GORGEOUS. Tonight (fairly late after all the butchery and other normal jobs) I cooked a couple of the boneless loin chops, deliberately very simply so that I could get the full flavour; just veg oil and heat. I served these with mash and broccoli. It pains me to say that Liz missed out on this too, restricted as she is to soup today. She said it smelled and looked lovely. Finally on pork, we have salted down 2 of the whole legs to try our version of 'Parma' or 'Serrano' ham. These lads get a dry cure of mixed salt, sugar, star anise, bay, peppercorns, coriander seed and dried chillies (Thank you the Strawbridge father and son team) patted and massaged into them daily for 21 days (and the brine which gets sucked out of the meat by the salt layer, drained off). They then get air dried for about 8 months hanging in our spare room. Last year it worked a treat, hence we have gone for 2 legs this year. It's an expensive cut if it goes all smelly and maggotty but so far we have not had that happen.

K-Dub rollers down the first layer of mix and the matting on
our newly buit roof sheeting. 

Meanwhile, the kitchen project moves on another stage. K-Dub spots a dry day and zooms over here so that we can sheet over the roof frame and apply the fibre-glass weather proofing. I am told that "no-one uses torch-down bitumen felt" any more; the stuff we used so dramatically on our Utility Room roof (flames, smoke, coughing, worries that the whole place would go up in flames). There is now a good product spawned out of the boat industry, a modern (non itchy!) version of fibre-glass which comes in rolls that you can just tear to shape. overlap, squidge round corners and mouldings and then cover with a 2nd, pigmented layer of the same mix (softener and catalyst) as a top coat (or 2).

The pigmented topcoat

It is quite new still so no-one really knows what the life will be on roofs but all indications are that it will go longer than bitumen felt and is certainly less easy to damage by walking around on it. The building industry has adopted it whole-heartedly and the fire-regs boys also prefer it. K-Dub (and colleagues in Dublin) have done some huge roofs in the city with it and they love it. It is also a nice, trustworthy, solid GREY. It LOOKS like it will last. Inevitably it is more costly than torch-down felt but hey, you have the added bonus of getting high on the fumes! I was talking about falling over whisking you right back to school days; well those fumes had me right back to building fibreglass canoes at school, too.

Well, I suspect that this is enough for this post. I hope that by the time I write again, I will be able to report Liz well on the mend and with at least one pork supper to her name (and the fallen lady jogger fully recovered). Good luck now.