Enda on the Exit Slope

Poor Enda. When a hen looks this rough there is usually
only one outcome. 

Enda on the Exit slope? No, no, no, not beleaguered politician Mr. Kenny currently battling to stay in charge of the country. This Enda is Enda 'Vaneera' our now longest serving chicken. We fear she may be on the exit slip-road of hen life. We've had her 5 years now and for the most recent 2 of these she has strutted around in charge of all hens, a real alpha female. She has also batted away any male attention - we are sure she has been barren for 2 years - and has been the keenest garden-helper when ever she saw a human weeding or disturbing soil.

Parrot tulips

Recently she amazed us by coming back into lay, giving us about a fortnight's worth of good eggs but this, sadly, seemed to be a reproductive swan song (at risk of mangling my metaphorage here!). A few days back she woke up suddenly unable to cope with the attentions of our rooster. He jumped her and rolled her onto her side, then finished and she just lay there instead of the usual huffy get to your feet and shake out those feathers. Seeing her still there, apparently submissive he did it again and again till I had to shoo him off and rescue the poor girl.

Pear blossom

I could see that all was not well and gave her some days in the sick bay and isolation to let her regroup. Bad news, I'm afraid, she is not recovering and is going downhill. Friends of the Blog will know that in our experience, chickens don't do "sick". They go from perfect health to dead with nothing in between, so it is amazing that she has lasted these few days. I think she will shuffle off the mortal coil today. I'll let you know.

'Our' pigs with their Mum (Iris) on their first day out of the
sty.  17th April here so 6 weeks old. 

Happily, there are winners as well as losers for every post. Our pig breeder (Hi Adrian) sent us the latest pictures of our soon-to-be piglets who are (we hear) bounding with health and full of mischief. He has also told us when we can collect them, any time from 7th May. We are so excited. We are getting 2 of these, probably a (castrated) male and a female, and our friends Sue and Rob another 2. I presume Adrian has also sold the 5th.

'Parma' Ham, Roscommon stylee. The "Parma" word has
protected geographic status dictating permitted breed, diet
and 'terroir' but we do our best with our local beasts. 

While we are on pigs, with our latest visitor, Mum in Law (Steak Lady to this blog) on site we wanted to crack open this season's first Parma-style ham so that we could taste some and declare it ready. Mum is often in the part of Spain which does the 'Serrano' equivalent and has even brought us back an official, wickedly sharp, designed-for-the-job, "Cuchillo Jamonero" carving knife, with its 9" long by slender 5/8" 'deep' blade which lets you slice off almost transparent slices of ham. The ham was a great success and we have been slicing bits off ever since for starters and tasters.

Our other local fan of this meat is Charlotte, normally now a Dublin resident but, by coincidence (or did she smell the ham?) down here for a few days to look after little H (5) while Mum and Dad were at a wedding. Obviously we had to have her over for a taster and packed her off with a size-able "doggie bag".

The ladies try out the new ham.

This whole leg will do us about 4 kg of ham, we think - the muscle loses 30% of its weight, ideally, during the air-drying process. The 2nd leg is being saved for similar treatment at Christmas. Any friends of the blog reading this and fancying a taster, get in touch while we still have some. We'll be good for about a month but it won't go much longer than that even as 'back up stores' in the freezer assuming there is any left for that.

We love the way Mum does these roasties. Liz calls them
"hedgehog" potatoes but I am told they are officially called
Hasselback. That could just be a foreign word for hedgehog.

Mum's visit, meanwhile, went off really well and was enjoyed by both guest and host. At one stage she even took over the kitchen and cooked for us - she know the way to our hearts! She had bought with her a lovely beef roasting joint knowing that we do our own lamb, pork, chicken and duck. She did this with a stir-fry of veg plus some superb special potatoes. These are cooked whole but see no water or par-boil prior to roasting. They are sliced almost through into very thin slices and the whole then wiped in oil including trying to get some oil down into the cuts. It is great to eat them in these slices. It is like having all the best bits of a roastie in your mouth at once!

Mutt and Jeff. NZ White cross bunnies.

I also took Mum across to see Rob (Sue was in UK) - she loves their place and is quite taken with Rob as he is with her. I think it is the nearly OVER-stocked air of chaos. "How many chickens have you got?" We had a lovely welcome from Rob and the enthusiastic, small and huge dogs ("Woool-ufs" says Mum) - they have terriers plus a St Bernard and a mad maybe-Newfoundland pup which is even bigger than the St B.

Get that grass cut you bunnies!

We came away with a couple of half grown bunnies. These lads (named Mutt and Jeff by Mum) are NZ White crosses, quite a big breed. They are surplus to Rob's breeding programme so, if they can avoid Mr Fox, they can spend the summer doing lawn-mower in our apiary. Bees, famously, hate the vibration of a petrol lawnmower, so rabbits are the perfect solution - the bees ignore them and they ignore the bees. The grass stays short so the bees will always recognise 'home' by sight.

A nearly full house for Friday night. Wednesday
and Saturday were quickly sold out. 

Last but not least among our "Winners" in this post, THE PLAY. This village event, having had a good but slightly wobbly dress rehearsal, played a real 'blinder' on the First Night. It went really well with no hitches and delighted the audience into gales of laughter and frequent enthusiastic applause. Everyone is over the moon. I have written a good review which is now up on the website (  http://lisaculinfo.ie/first-night-review-cupid-wore-skirts/ ) and Facebook and Twitter have been a-buzz with nice pictures and favourable comment. As I write this (Saturday morning) we have also had a brilliant 2nd night and we have high hopes for Last Night which is tonight.

Watch this space.

Going Once....Going Twice...

Crack! The (nominal) gavel comes down on our long running local drama, "The Sale of the Land". Back in early September I posted that the 28 acres of land around us had gone up for sale and that we were considering buying one of the fields. ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/09/field-of-dreams.html ). Back when we bought this place we took a small (2.5 acres) chunk out of what had been a 30 acre farm, in our case the house and buildings and the fields immediately surrounding. In the process we became good friends with one of the three sisters selling the place, 'Vendor Anna' on this blog.

No relevance to this story - just a '365'
pic I snatched of a water-well drilling rig
which parked in the village.

The three sisters held on to the remaining 28 acres for 4 years but have now put the land up for auction. They very generously created an option for us to buy the 1.5 acre field opposite in which we had registered an interest. We had to have a good old poke around in the dusty corners of the cupboard labelled "Our Financial Life" but alas, no such lump of 'wedge' presented itself and we had to pass on the option. Well, this sale has now gone through without us and we have a new neighbour. You don't win them all. Never say 'Never', though. The field is likely to remain right there and just maybe, in a couple of years when the cupboard might be a bit more yielding.......

Dry cured hams awaiting their 8 months (or so) of air drying.

Meanwhile, back in the bit we did manage to buy, plenty of stories are still chugging along happily. The big, complete pig legs we saved at butchery time for our version of Parma/Serrano ham have now completed their 21 day stay in the dry cure mix (3 parts salt, 1 part sugar, various spices, refrigerator) and come ready to be scrubbed clean of the encrusted cure (using cider vinegar properly but I used white vinegar), bagged in their muslin sleeves and hung up in a well ventilated, cool, dry place for (the recipe says) 4-18 months. Our plan is to try the first one next summer (so about 10 months) and save one for Christmas 2017 (14 months). The air drying is to get the lovely sweet Serrano flavours. The salt cure is to give us a head start in the not-very-Spanish local climate. If you hang up uncured meat in the West of Ireland in October, I think you'd just generate a maggot-sanctuary in a bit of a hurry.

The hams hang in their muslin sleeves.
We will hide them up when guests are
using the room!

The first print-run on the village calendar has sold out and we know that many have already left the country en route to their delighted recipients. We have had delighted feedback from the UK  and I have also posted them to Germany and Canada. Liz is already taking orders for a 2nd print run. The village website is widely seen as a great success and gets plenty of 'traffic' both locally and from people who have connections back to the area but now live abroad, the 'Diaspora'. It is to the website that many people are going to register their interest and place their order(s).

Liz has given up trying to knit here and is reduced to playing
a game on the laptop as long as the 'kattens' do not try to
eclipse her view. The laptop is up on the cookbook 'lectern'
to stop tiny feet walking on the keyboard. 

Our other main  'project' if you can call it that, is to try to integrate the "kattens" (they are too big to be called kittens any more but not yet big enough to be called 'cats'). They are almost 6 months old now and not too vulnerable to doggie molestation. They can jump up onto safe high places and make themselves quite big by arching their backs, bog-brushing their tails and hissing and spitting. The dogs tend to stop and think about it now.

Lovely colour from the beech trees in the
(now empty) pig-run

Most evenings and sometimes during the day when we are around to supervise, we open the door through to their Sitting Room and let them come through to explore and enjoy the family, fire-warmed company of the Dining Table. They love it and we are starting to believe that we may actually get these cats through from kittenhood without either of them suffering death (or injury) by dog. We do not yet trust them all together unsupervised, however, so they can not yet have the "access all areas" freedom enjoyed by our adult cats, the fearless 'Soldier' and the big-enough-to-damage-the-dogs, alpha-male 'Blue'.

Borrowed ram-lamb Silas has still not, to our knowledge, succeeded in mounting any of the ewes (no give-away blue painted rumps at the breakfast bar) but he has settled down with the ladies and is now very much inside the flock. I frequently see him in close company with the big ewe 'Myfanwy' and the youngster, 'Rosie'. The experts tell me that this is all OK and that ewes, even when they are in season, only come receptive to the ram on a 13-18 day cycle (average 17). We don't know where they were before Silas arrived, so we have no idea how many days we need to wait. If they weren't on at all, then the presence of a ram should bring them round. Happily, Sue says we can keep Silas for as long as we like or need, even through Christmas, so the lad has plenty of time to grow into the big boots left behind by the mighty 'Rambo', our 2015 tup.

I owe him an apology, though. In my previous post, I suggested that he was named for the biblical Silas who spent time with St Paul; Sue had said something about the diagonal white cross he had on his face as a young one. Apparently not. He is named after 'My Uncle Silas' in the HE Bates books because he is a country boy and Sue hopes he will be a disreputable, fun-loving, philandering rogue. Especially the philandering, I would think. I had not heard of these books, but Sue and Rob loved a TV series from 2001 starring Albert Finney as Silas and gave him the name in memory of it. Go Silas.

Calming Down

After a run of calm and frosty days we are back into (yellow) Weather Warnings over here, from tonight round to Thursday morning, mainly for the wind strength  as a 'dacent' Atlantic depression comes a-howling through. All the poultry is firmly shut away and there are rocks on the roofs of rabbit hutches (plus I may also do this to the bee hive, but it is quite sheltered over there). We are all safely gathered in tonight and enjoying the warmth of the range, which seems to like these SW winds and gets that extra bit of brightness going which self-cleans the mica-glass 'window'. The blog, I notice, is also creeping up on a milestone, that of 100,000 page-views; I don't think I can claim to be JK Rowling just yet, but my faithful 20-30 visits per post, mainly from friends and family, have kept me chugging along across the 8 years I have been posting. Thank you for that.

The range going well.

We are calming down here on the run in to Christmas which, for us, keeps changing shape. We were going to be going it alone, then we were to have a visitor, then we weren't and now we are again. with a different person. We are a good way through the gift buying and picked up a couple more bits at the local craft fair in Lisacul, our nearest village. We will be off down to the Silverwoods' a few days after Christmas but this will be a flying visit timed around our livestock needs.

Blue and Towser help their 'Dad' to a post-prandial
glass of red wine. Towser is on my knees. 

Really, though, I can never get too excited about all this 25th December malarkey which is now really just a spending spree and a short break for over-eating. When I was working this was especially true, as the supermarkets (who paid my salary) went completely ga-ga busy at Christmas and 'up-steam' on the supply chain we found ourselves working right up to mid afternoon on Christmas Eve and then back in at 06:00 on Boxing Day to get lorries ready with re-stock commodities (often, Cadbury's creme eggs; a cause of much hollow laughter and gallows humour to the exhausted crews). I used to hear of people who got the fortnight off or a long break by only having to take a few days out of their annual holiday (this sometimes included Liz if the dates fell right) and thought I might be in the wrong industry. I appreciated, of course, that there were plenty 'worse off' than me - the Emergency Services, Nurses and the like who had to work right through including the night shifts. It definitely knocked all the pre-Christmas excitement out of a bloke, anyway.

Those modeling paints, little 14 ml tins.  

In my head, I am more excited about 2 other dates in December. First comes the 13th, this Saturday, being the first date I can collect our sheep. The 14th is the date for the Ministry sheep census, so we may be able to report some ewes. 2nd, comes the 21st, the Winter Solstice. Don't worry - I am not going all Druidic and 'weird' on you, but the 21st is the shortest day, so by the 22nd  I am mentally into increasing day length and signs of Spring. I feel like I have got the worst part of winter over by then and even if it snows and blows a gale, in my head it will soon be over, it 'can't last' and we can look forward to daffodils, crocuses, blossom and so on.

Testing the cured pork leg.

On this, a conversation with neighbouring farmer, Michael McG stopped me in my tracks just by striking me with a different point of view, which I wasn't expecting, but which I quite liked and may adopt. We were chatting about the weather and the possible wind and rain to come when he said "....ah but it can only now be a short winter". He was saying that we had already done September, October, November and some of December with only mild and calm weather, effectively putting half the possible months to bed with no damage. Impressively philosophical.

Sniffing the crochet hook you just stabbed into the meat.

On an unrelated subject, our pork curing efforts seem to be progressing OK. The thick chunks of leg meat came through their 28 days of being rubbed and sprinkled with the salt, sugar, herbs and spices mix and are now air-drying in the coolest, driest place we can find - hanging from the loft hatch in the spare room with the radiator turned off in that room. Our instructions are to wait a week and then to test the meat by stabbing it with a needle, which you then withdraw and sniff. If you can smell any off smells then you have a problem. You should only be able to smell salt, sugar and a 'ham' smell reminiscent of Parma, Serrano or Pancetta type meat which is the area we are aiming for. We were fine and the meat now goes back up to hang and dry some more - you want it firm and 'stiff' but not rock-hard (we read) so this is likely to mean 8-10 weeks drying. That brings us to the start of February. I am looking forward to it.