Big Block of Cheese Day

The eponymous Big Block of Cheese

Fans of the US TV political drama 'West Wing' (one of our favourites) will recall the episode(s) in my title as they were funny and often bizarre. They referred to a day in the White House year when the staff resurrected an old tradition of inviting any madcap pressure group to come and be heard by the Administration and the staff would set up a huge block of cheese in the foyer for the visitors to cut bits off if they were hungry. Last time Liz was over in the UK, our good friend Mazy advised her to buy from local deli and farm shop 'Macknades', a house-brick sized block of a gorgeous vintage cheddar - 1.36 kg at about £13 (UK). I mention this because, Mazy, it has taken us this long to get through it. Not enough lunatics with outlandish pressure group requests, we guess. Thank you very very much.

Fruit scones

Not all good news this time, I am afraid. Hot on the heels of our 'loss' of the cat Pirate, came a call from Sue and Rob to say that the lovely ram, 'Rambo', whom we borrowed to service our three ewes. had died in the night. They'd had no warning and he appeared perfectly healthy on Saturday except for one 'symptom' which they think with hindsight, might have been significant - the lad standing still in the middle of the feild in the rain, when he is usually first in the queue for shelter under the trees. With Rambo dead in the morning Rob could see a little dark blood around the boy's anus and in the poo but we are at a loss. I have contacted our vet to see what she thinks and she is asking whether we vaccinate (e.g. with Heptavac P). I must admit we haven't, though we have wormed and fluke-drenched, so it is obviously something we should think about.

Pirate's grave site and memorial rock (grey lump
bottom right) under the beeches. 

Then there was another good friend, near neighbour and fellow (beginner) bee keeper, T McC. Poor T had that thing happen to him that all beginner beekeepers (incuding ourselves of course) are worried about - that you'll have a dramatic reaction to a bee sting. T was snugging down his bees a week or so ago and got stung, not for the first time but suddenly had "sweating, redness, itching, light headed, flashing lights and a slight constricting of the throat.  Had to lie down on the ground outside. Lucky it was sunny". He had to phone the ambulance and felt a bit silly by the time they arrived as he had recovered except for the big bump on the back of his head (the sting site) tingling.

Beekeepers know that they can react differently to stings and the intensity can also change with time/stings; You can have no problem for a while and then suddenly react, or you can 'get over' your sensitivity and have no more bad reactions after that. Poor T is now going through the tests with his doctor to see where he is, whether he'd be safe to carry on or whether (God forbid) bee keeping is not for him and he'd have to give up the hobby. On the bright side all his hives are snugged down now so he won't have to go near them till Spring. The doctor has a few months to do the tests and come to a decision.

Hallowe'en fare, Champ with pork chops. Our own spuds, kale,
pork and onions, of course.

On happier topics, Hallowe'en went really well for us. We had set up the 'Jack o'Lantern' on the gate pier and made a long "chain" of candles in jamjars all up the new fence, one on each post. We also hung our two posh gift lanterns on trees, so that the drive up to the house was nicely inviting and we were publically 'up for it' to any random passing groups of witches, ghosties and vampires. We had the obligatory big bowl of sweeties and we sat back to enjoy our own Hallowe'en fare, of 'champ' with pork chops.

The turkeys try out the pumpkin seeds. Bit of a mixed reaction
but they did all disappear eventually.

You never know round here, how many kiddies will come. We are out in the sticks and there are no children in walking distance, so they come carted round likely places by Mums in huge people-carriers and farm cars. Well, we had none till quarter to 8 which was nice because it meant we could eat our own supper in peace, but then a veritable army showed up and annihilated the sweeties in short order. The bowl now contains a lonely refresher bar and half a dozen tubes of tiny Parma Violets which we'll never eat, so we need to find a post-Hallowe'en victim for those.

Traditional unmolested Irish Stew after Theodora Fitzgibbon 

I am partially Liz-less at the moment (she's shuttling between Silverwoods and house/Dad sitting for part of each week and back up here for work the other part so I am King of the Kitchen temporarily and continuing to expand my range. Today that meant that my favourite Irish Recipe book, Theodora Fitzgibbon's "A Taste or Ireland (in food and in pictures)" (pub Pan 1968) was dusted off and cracked open. Irish Stew! I had a chunk of our own delicious lamb, our spuds, onions, parsley and thyme. Theodora tells me that "the pure flavour is spoiled if carrots, turnips or pearl barley are added, or if it is too liquid. A good Irish stew should be thick and creamy, not swimming in juice like soup". Well, I'm happy to report that it was delicious, but I do not know where the 'thick and creamy' comes from. There were no thickening ingredients on the list and my gravy was definitely 'wet'. Perhaps she uses a different kind of spud which breaks down better and solidifies the gravy for you.

Sheep hurdles assembled into a pen.

I have also been out spending the hard earned loot (I did clear this with the Chancellor of the Exchequer first), investing in some sheep bits, namely hurdles and dagging shears. The hurdles assemble into a 6 by 4 foot pen for containing sheep while you work on them, but I bought them for their handiness singly as temporary gates. I have posted before of the plan to install some new runs of fence to give the sheep a new bit to graze and tidy, but I need to leave 'holes' through which to push the trailer when moving pigs or just to move geese about. Rather than invest in 4 permanent gates, this was a cheaper (and more flexible) solution.

Dagging shears. 

While at the farm supplies 'co-op' I spotted a rather nifty pair of old-style (springy scissors) "dagging shears". One of our ewes (Myfanwy) came with full length tail (some mix up at her own birth) so she is prone to great chains of 'klingons' adhering to the underneath of her tail and around the bum, where the output cannot fall freely to the ground. These will sort that out and be good for any other small trim ups for example where I have missed bits on the shearing.

Definitely getting a bit TOO cheeky now!

Finally, I leave you with a brilliant local expression I picked up recently. This where the old boy involved had come into the building with me but nipped off for a quick wee while I made the tea for us. "Ah, you're as good as a bad woman" he said. Made me smile, anyway.

Sausage Stuffing Failure.

The impressive looking sausage meat grinder /
sausage stuffer. This is it doing the first (coarse)
pass on our cubed belly pork. 

The expression "You don't win them all" was ringing in our ears today when we failed rather disastrously to make any more than 4 sausages. The short version of this story would read 'failed to slide any casings onto the stuffer horn' which, if you have played this game, you may already be problem-solving me.

We had been loaned the use of an almost-new and very shiny, impressive looking sausage meat grinding machine cum sausage stuffer to have a play with some of our belly pork. These machines are like an electric version of aul' Granny's hand grinder -  a funnel drops the diced meat down a tube, a worm-drive pushing meat through a perforated plate via a spinning blade but they convert, by swapping the blade and plate for a plastic spacer and a tapered plastic tube over which you slide the concertina'd tube of "sausage skins" (casings). You run the twice-ground meat, rusk and flavourings mix back through and allow the casings to be gently pulled off the horn by the mix extruding through the exit hole. Every 3 inches or so you give the filled casing a deft twist and then you expertly knit three strands of sausage into those professional links of 'sossies' that festoon butchers shops. What could possibly go wrong?

On the right 'plain' sausage meat; on the left with apple and sage

We were grand to start with, going great guns, "away on a hack" as they say. The meat all went through the grinder, got mixed with our expertly prepared seasoned and wetted rusk mixture, got split into two and run back through the grinder on the smaller 'screen' - 5 mm holes - in two halves, one as was, the other with apple and sage added. We broke for coffee and the man-made casings which came with the machine got to soak in warm water, still in their concertinas as per the instructions.

4 sausages was our lot. Not our finest hour. 

That is when the wheels came off the operation. Right there where it is all supposed to get funny, with endless potential for schoolboy toilet humour and good old British smutty innuendo and 'double-entendre'. The casings, once wet and pliable are meant to slide easily onto the horn using wet slithery hands to (yeah... I know... stop tittering at the back!) slide yards of it up there, hand over hand so that you can subsequently pump as may yards of sausage meat down the horn carefully releasing folds of casing concertina as you go. You try to avoid air bubbles and take care not to split the casing as you deftly twist the  filled skin every 3-4 inches or so. We have since seen YouTube videos showing demonstrators whizzing yards of casing up their horns, barely pausing to untwist the empty casing lest it become entangled at the end.

The chickens celebrate Liz's Birthday

Our problem was trying to get ANY of the casing over our 'horn' end without splitting it. It was a stretch to get it over and even when we managed to get a start, it was very tight to try to slide it up the tapered shape of the horn tube. The casing inevitably burst after a few inches, and the split would then run the full length of the loaded bit and you had to start over with a cut off, unsplit empty end. We took turns, both trying to help.

Bergamot, a gift from Anne last year. We thought we had
killed it all, but we have 2 surviving clumps.

Eventually I reckoned I had very slowly got about a foot on, so Liz started pumping (Stop it!) and we created 3 sausages before the casing then split once more and we had to start again. I then got another short length to work, one more sausage, but we were by then so fed up and frustrated that we decided to freeze the remaining meat for pies, scotch eggs or a 2nd attempt when we knew what we were doing wrong or what was wrong with the method or kit. Our total output for all that effort, then, 4 bangers and a 1.1 kg lump of frozen sausage meat. I put pictures of what we had up on Facebook to see would anyone suggest anything or spot any howlers.

The hollyhocks are looking good out front.

The concensus seems to be that we have a wrong size of casings for the spout/horn. This could well be right. The outside diameter of the smaller, exit end of the horn is 21 mm. The concertinas of casing in their raw dry state are about 16 mm internal diameter. We may well be trying to slide chipolata or Irish breakfast sausage casings up the horn designed for standard British bangers. To be fair, the lenders of the machine had not tried out these particular casings and are now in search of bigger ones and possibly natural 'gut' casings. We are all beginners fumbling around in the dark. They will probably be the next people to try this so they are as interested as we are in getting it right. None of us knew that you could get different size casings unless you were trying to make big salamis and chorizos etc and the butcher would not have known the machine size when he generously handed the pack over. Finally, to add insult to injury, I tried 2 of the sausages we HAD made and they split badly as soon as they hit the fat of the frying pan, so I squished them flat with the spatula - I might as well have just lumped in a couple of uncased patties of the meat! Delicious though!

Brawn with loads of fresh parsley in it.

Well, we may not (yet) be any good at the sausages but we are pretty good at other foodstuffs. Liz claimed the brawn job this year so she had all the fun of boiling up those heads for hours with a few trotters thrown in for added jellification. She has produced a classic among brawns having adding late on in the process, fistfuls of the fresh parsley which now thrives in our polytunnel and has also produced as a sideline 5 good litres of an epic pork stock which sets as a jelly when it cools. To freeze it in foil portion-tubs I was more slicing blocks off than ladling it out.

Salmon baked in cream with cucumber and lemon juice.

My chance to shine came over Liz's Birthday weekend. The family tradition is that the Birthday girl/boy can choose the menu but the spouse cooks it and Liz, having sneaked the chance to cook 'first chops from new pigs' from under my nose (delicious, fried with crushed juniper berries and lemon juice), let me do family favourite, Theodora Fitzgibbon's old Irish recipe of salmon baked in cream with cucumber and lemon juice. We both love this recipe while always being delighted that the lemon juice does not curdle the cream.

Split pig skulls as art materials?

Lastly we may have taken the "everything but the squeal" and recycling thing a bit further than was wise this week. We have a friend in Wales who is a successful professional artist. No names at present because we have not checked with her that she doesn't mind me posting a link from these less hallowed halls; this lady holds exhibitions of her latest work and installations. We know she is good and does well and we admire the quality of her work but she will not mind me saying that the product is not to everyone's taste; you would maybe call it 'thought provoking' if you were being ambivalent, perhaps 'unusual' or 'weird'; if you were being less polite. Liz finds some of it rather too unsettling to want any in the house on our walls.

By the admission of her own website "Her themes are magical, often found in folklore, fairytales or the manifestations of the strange around us, but just as magical is her transubstantiation of thoughts into haunting visual images – her translation of woven baskets into a drawn language as intricate and ordered as the baskets themselves, her conjuring of pieces of lace or coral as reliquaries of past life, or her invention of a scene so impossibly familiar that one wonders if it has rekindled a spark of lost memory." In practise she paints raggedy crows and magpies perching on babies cradles, pictures featuring skulls and mythical runes and folkloric stuff.

Tidy sized mushrooms coming off the front lawn now.

When she is creating 3D stuff, models and the like, the work can include real teeth and other parts. For this reason, it occurred to Liz that the lady might like our pig skulls from the brawn-boil, teeth and all and when Liz suggested it, our artist was delighted. Naturally, Liz wanted to clean them up a bit before posting them off so they got more boiling and a good scrub and pick over with an old toothbrush and assorted sharp 'picks'. They are packed and ready to go - we just need to decide what desription to put on the customs docket! We will be fascinated to see what the lady makes of them and with them. That may be years away. She apparently finds or sees things and they can then be a long time rattling round in her head before she thinks of something to make with them.

An Innocent Abroad?

Sugar bowl and milk jug set.

Well, Liz's Birthday is now done and dusted and has been pronounced a success even though this weekend in Ireland is NOT a Bank Holiday, so that she does not get the '3 day break' around the big day as she did in UK. We managed to stretch it out to 2 days by having the special meal (we each cook that day for the other, the meal of their choice) on the 2nd day. Now that the presents are opened and revealed, I can shamefully admit to a serious outbreak of being a numpty, blundering around in the internet like an innocent abroad, like a country bumpkin in the big city!

A bit of fun - these napkins.

I will happily admit to being just no good at that sort of thing and would normally have Liz do it, like I plead with her to do all the actual ordering and talking to the waiter when we are in France. These though, were gifts to her, so I was on my own. I was grand as long as I was in familiar territory; I started off with a few bits (music, books) from Amazon, paying in Euros and knowing that the stuff was coming from within the EEC. It was after that it all started to fall apart - we 'needed' a certain body lotion from Van Cleef and Arpels ("First") and we'd failed to get it in town; the lady had advised that Galway City might have it. Pah! (says I) The internet surely, what could possibly go wrong?

That is how I ended up with our friendly postman, Ger' , strolling up our drive and demanding €17.69 in unpaid import duty one day and another €17 a few days later. I had managed to knowingly buy the body lotion from Florida (!) and some 'stocking fillers' with knitting pics on, un-knowingly also from the USA. I had no idea these costs would occur - I thought I'd paid my whack including the rather punitive shipping costs. Lesson learned, I guess - either don't let me loose on the internet with a debit card, or at least make sure I keep to the EEC. To add insult to shameful injury, the top had also come off the lotion in transit and some of the gloop had leaked out into the manufacturers posh packaging, but Liz has most of it and thinks she can rescue the situation.

On a happier note, one of the boxes which I thought might be a Liz present, turned out to be our 'MAQS' anti-varroa mite hive medication, so we can use that on Monday AND a gift from Mazy which we thought had gone astray, turned out to have been left for us by the courier in one of the pharmacist shops in Balla-D. We assume the courier was going there for his next drop and had failed to find us.

River Trout in creamy sauce with lemon and cucumber

For the Birthday meal itself we went with a salmon recipe out of our much-loved Irish Cookery book by Theodora Fitzgibbon. We had been given two big superb mountainy river trout by Anne and Simon along with three plump cucumbers in part payment for our pig-wrangling. We do not know a lot about Theodora F but she is a well known food writer and, from this book, more a collector of recipes, than a chef per se, and given to name-dropping her contributors. The book is nothing like a modern 'celebrity chef' book; there are no glossy colour pics, no shots of lady chef looking alluring as she licks chocolate sauce off her fingers, and no snappy "Naked Chef" style title. It is a soft back with a 3-colour cover and the pictures within are old monochrome period scenes of Ireland; St Stephen's Green in 1860, Cork Market c 1900 and so on. But the recipes we have tried out of it have always been excellent and this salmon recipe (used on one of these big trout) was a triumph which will go into our own 'repertoire' collection, simple but delicious. The trout's body cavity was filled with parsley, the outside rubbed with butter and cream poured over. It was baked for 10 minutes per pound, then diced cucumber flesh (minus seeds and skin) and lemon juice were added. It was well basted and returned, lidless, to the oven for another 15 minutes. Liz was worried that the lemon juice would curdle the cream, but no, it created a lovely, tangy, lemony sauce which was pure delight to mop up with the steamed, floury potatoes and the ruby chard. Excellent.

The Ramones on the front lawn

Meanwhile, we now have the lambs fully bucket-trained so that we can get them into the routine of being led out of the East Field onto the front lawn in the morning and then home again in the evening. We are keeping them in the wire-fenced field overnight and while we're not around for now; we are still not 100% sure they couldn't squeeze between the rails of the post and rail if they had a mind to do it. When you sit on the terrace table and watch them through the gaps between the rails, they sometimes seem scarily small and the gaps very wide. We may suffer a confidence failure and add strands of 'bull wire' half way up each gap on their side of the fence. It will not spoil the look of the thing, but might make us feel more secure.

The lambs are enjoying the new space - there will be grass there untouched by sheepy mouths for almost 2 years and there is good browse to be had from the big trees (ivy) and the hedge and bank. They also seem to enjoy gazing at the rabbits  in their runs and to wander into the currently disused keet run for a lie down when their bellies are full. They also come and look curiously at any human activity near their fence, such as when I was planting a load of daffodil bulbs this morning. They are lovely gentle things and I find them charming.