Please Do Something with this Cake!

Nugget

Liz is, as we all know, a lady of many talents, one of them being baking, cake making and all things kitchen. But that is at home - it does not normally impact on working life. This week, though, she was amazed to arrive at work one day for her 11:00 start to be be met by work colleague and boss flapping around  a very ordinary (but perfectly good) Victoria sponge (cream, strawberry jam, caster sugar 'frosting' etc) armed with a tub of whipped cream and a punnet of fresh strawberries.

If it wasn't so tragic, we'd be hooting with laughter - our
broadband locally has recently struggled to top
half a 'meg'. i-player TV is a total 'no-no'.

The story went that the indomitable ladies and gents of the local "Active Age" group were having one of their regular meetings and, as it was one of their birthdays they were going to serve Black Forest Gateaux as they ALWAYS do. A runner had been sent off to town, to the bakers they ALWAYS use to buy the gateaux but the bakery were running late and did not have one ready yet. Disaster. The runner bought the Victoria sponge instead and phoned 'base' whereupon another shopper was despatched to buy the cream and strawberries with which to enhance the cake to make it a bit more gateaux-like, all be it devoid of black cherries and kirsch. It was at that point Liz showed up and both shoppers were expressing concern about their inability to make cakes or decorate them, so a rather flustered Lizzie was pressed into service. Toughen the sinews, Summon up the blood.

A 'downside' of fully free range chickens?
Eggies all over the gaff

She carefully separated the two cake layers and sneaked a new rim of crescents of strawberries all around the edge. Then she created a lovely 'scree' of strawberry chunks at one end of the plate and scalloped the cream all around to create a vison of strawberry and cream loveliness. The staff were delighted but still had to present this gateaux to the Birthday Girl rather trepidatiously, fingers crossed that she'd not be disappointed by the lack of Black Forest. Well, history tells that it all went brilliantly and BG was delighted at the choice ("It makes such a nice change from Black Forest Gateaux"). More brownie-points too for our 'chef' when the left over cream was hustled into an option on the usual plain 'hot drop' (hot whiskeys) at these events, Irish Coffees. I think we'll call that snatching glorious victory from the jaws of possible defeat. Well done Lizzie. No pressure for the next Birthday Party, then.

First fruits from the Dylan carcass. This rack of chops
got roasted wrapped in a lovely bread-crumb and herb cover

I can claim no such heroics for myself. In fact, if you don't do Twitter, I have probably been more than usually silent, unavailable, un-engaged and hidden. If you do Twitter and you have been anywhere the SmallholdersIRL account you will know that we have been having a blast. I have fired off dozens of 'tweets' and pictures and we have shared stuff, discussed, bantered and made some good friends. I have spent more time at the PC (and glued to Liz's i-phone 5) than is healthy for me and I am tired out but I have enjoyed it immensely. I am not sure I would want to do it again too soon and I may be quite happy to hand it over to the next 'curator' on Sunday evening, but I'd not have missed it for anything.

George gets himself noticed for the
Twitter account.

Apart from that, a fairly normal week. I was out at the buildering the last couple of days, mainly 'labouring' while the main man and a builder-mate from Dublin clambered over the roof or up ladders installing new window frames upstairs. The house is coming on a storm. The roof is completely battened out ready for the (trad) slates, the guys have done all the stonework they are able to do on the north gable (we need the Electricty Company (ESB) to come and do their stuff dismantling the old supply which looped across to the chimney) and have created a natty stone arch indoors at the entrance to what will be #1 daughter's bedroom, plus created the wooden 'bridge' which runs between the two mezzanine floors. My jobs were passing concrete blocks to the "brickie" making the porch and 14 foot 2x2 battens up to the guy on the roof, plus clearing the (deliberately) fallen chimney rubble from the bedroom and the old soft-board ceiling and tar felt from what will be the kitchen. My ankles ache from all the heavy barrowing across rough ground and up hill.

Curator (The Voice)

Possibly our new species for 2016 - ducks. To be more
precise, Muscovy ducks.

This week I am wired up to the internet like some teenager, thumbs glued to the touch screen and eyes taking in the feed of 'tweets' racing up the screen, oblivious to any real life going by, neglecting my duties, grumbling when interupted and asked to do chores....... Well, OK, not really; you can imagine I'd not actually last 5 minutes like that. I am, though, as predicted, this week's 'curator' of the Irish smallholders' Twitter account (@smallholdersIRL), the (Twitter) voice of Irish smallholdering, which I took over on Sunday night from the first ever 'curator', our friend Margaret from the Old Farm pig-management training courses in Tipperary.

The Goat Herd Registration docs finally arrive.

She'd done a good job and attracted 160-odd new followers and there was some excellent lively discussion and sharing, so I was a bit nervous of this responsibility and anxious that I might not do as well. In for a penny, though. I am, after all a fairly waffly and garrulous old sod and, after 4 years, a little bit knowledgable as to the ins and outs of smallholdering. We have worked through a lot of the common problems and we are still here. We knew that we could dish out advice with the best of them so I cracked on and seem to be well received and reasonably popular curator. Well... I was. At present Twitter is having a sneezing fit globally and users the world over are in and out like a fiddler's elbow suffering "internal server errors".

We decided to vac-pak that haggis to see could we simulate
the boil it would normally get in the chunk of sheep gut.

I am trying to be a little bit organised and 'themed' about my posts. Day 1 was an introduction and showing the readers ('followers') around the place, getting to know a few of them and letting them know a bit about me and our set up here. Today, when I can get it working, is a day for advising newbies and wannabes, people who might only be planning to make the leap into smallholdering and are still researching, dreaming and budgeting, of things they might want to think about and include in a realistic budget. If we knew then what we now now.... that kind of thing. Things like the usefulness of out-buildings and a cattle-race, the likely cost of getting connected to mains water and electricity, septic tanks, a trailer and tow hitch for the car and so on.

Breakfast of Champions - home made (pork) rillette

You are, of course welcome to go take a peek into Twitter and watch all this go through but if you are doing that go sooner rather than later. As I've already said, Twitter is a fast moving blizzard of short comments. Leave it an hour and the 'tweet' you are looking for is pages and pages of scrolling down the screen. Ephemeral is the word. More on this when I've done my week (and when Twitter is actually working, of course!) and I have a clearer idea of how good a curator I proved to be. Margaret loved her week and is quite missing it now; lots of time suddenly on her hands, she tells me.

Billy nose dives into the ivy branches.

A bit of a catch up then while Twitter is having its hissy-fit. Here the 2 guest-goats have settled in well. Nanny Óg does well out in her big field and happily follows me home to the shed of an evening. There have been no problems between her and the ewes. Billy has eaten himself out of house and home - there is not a leaf of browse (ivy, hawthorn or herbs) left in the pig run which he can get at. I had to phone his 'Mum' today to see if he was allowed ivy - I have whole forests of that on the other side of the patch which I could bring him but I needed to make sure it was not toxic. I remember our first sheep used to love it but I was advised not to let them have too many flowers or berries. Well, it turns out Billy can work away, so I have started cutting down great boughs of the stuff and dragging them across to hang them on his fence and he is in there, nose first with a huge smile on his face. At last! Someone who knows what a goat likes to eat! Sheep 'crunch' and slices of bread? I ask you!

Nanny Óg creating a Savannah browse-line
under our spruce trees.

I was saying a few posts back that we are quite good at the food date-rotation, using up the left-overs and minimising kitchen waste. This week we had a classic example. I had slow-cooked a chunk of pork loin (like 5 thick chops still welded together) in cider with apple to great success. We could not eat it all so a lot of the sauce and some of the meat and fat were left over. Liz took the sauce, enhanced with garlic and more apple, cream and mustard and turned some Hubbard chicken thighs into the kind of meal that had me proposing all over again. The remaining meat, shredded and combined with some of the apple-y fat became a rather gorgeous 'rillette' which I am using up as breakfasts on toast. Anything else went into a stock for a risotto and some soup. Waste not want not.

The big pond has fallen gin-clear in the cold weather

Amusingly we currently have the freezers so successfully loaded with portions of left overs that we were worried we'd not fit the lamb meat from Dylan into them and Liz has issued one of her periodic embargoes on eating 'stage 1' food - raw meat, raw veg, raw offal, shop bought stuff like frozen pizzas and so on. We must use up these portion pots and the cold-roast meat packs. Last year I was able to keep up with this as I would deliberately target them when ever Liz was away. It was nicer to eat a 'ready' meal, than to try roasting a great big joint and only use up one portion of it. Lately, though, Liz has not been on any of her away-missions, so we've been eating (and cooking) together.

Poppea in Jack Russel mode. No skirt. No feathering on the feet

We got fed up with the dogs always being muddy and wet and bringing the farm indoors, taking ages to dry out even when they lay in front of the fire. In Kent we had always clipped the westies in September and then let them go shaggy right round to my Birthday in April, so they'd be warm on their winter walks. I always cut them, too, in my (sorry) imitation of the Westie show-dog cut, big heads, skirts under the belly and great feathery feet like a cart horse. It is the skirts and feet, in particular, which pick up and then retain the mud like an old scrap of soggy carpet strapped to the dog's belly.

Pussy willow starting

This winter we reckon it has been mild enough that they could well do without, so at the weekend we ganged up on the little skanks. I took each dog in turn out to the Utility Room where I battled through the matted mess with the dog clippers, whipping off belly skirts and paring away all footy excesses. We are calling this the 'Jack Russell Cut'. As I brought each dog back indoors in turn Liz was there in swimming cozzie to grapple them upstairs for the multi-shampoo shower of their lives. Poppea, who was foolish enough to go out after this and roll in something, came back in as Liz was still in her dressing gown and about to take her own shower - she got it all again, much to her disgust. 2 showers in one day, Pops! In fact that day was one of those rare ones where all the planets align - the dogs were clean and dry, we had had showers too, Liz had blitzed the bedroom with hoover and broom AND we had changed all the bed linen. 2 people went clean and dry to bed with 3 clean dogs into a clean bed in a clean room - LUXURY. That does not happen that often on a smallholding in Roscommon in a wet winter. It was warm, dry, mudless, gritless, dog footprintless, damp dog-smell-less bliss.

Of Social Media

The new group on Facebook

"Ah!", say those who know me well, "Now THERE's a subject on which this lad is ill equipped to write!" An astute observation, especially regarding the 2nd of these, but my post today concerns the networks "Facebook" and "Twitter", the only two on which I stand a chance of making sense.

The new Twitter account which only started today. I am
'in charge' next week. 

Facebook is probably my 'thing' and I have been on it for all of our time in Ireland. It is a place where you can write entries of a decent length, sharing stories, anecdotes and advice, plus pictures and (short) videos with friends, relations and like minded interested parties. I have found it a real boon on leaving work and moving to this 'foreign' land where I'd not know anybody and was planning to start in a lifestyle where I knew precious little.

Our favourite 'Brown Trout' brand (sheep) calendar and two
nice (sheep) books from Santa. 

When you leave a job you always go round muttering "Ah well, good luck in the future.. we must stay in touch" and you probably mean it with about 5% of your colleagues but it is always easier to write that letter or pick up the phone tomorrow and you inevitably lose touch. 15 years ago (or so) a good friend left work to go and take on a smallholding in the Welsh valleys (Hi John and Paula) and we stayed in touch for a couple of years (even went down there once) but that, too, faded. There was no Facebook then, so they might as well have vanished into thin air. In 2011, when we moved, we were able to 'befriend' no end of former colleagues and I am still in touch with dozens on a daily or weekly basis. It feels nicely 'connected' and we do not feel as if we have 'vanished' in any way. We flash up a picture of a new lamb or note a Birthday and we get 50+ "likes" and dozens of positive comments.

Guest-Goat (Nanny Óg) and ram lamb (Dylan) play King
of the Castle on our grassy knoll in the East Field.

One area in which I retained a great interest is the veg growing and allotments. Somewhere in Facebook you will find an interest group to cover any subject you can name and I quickly got involved with the 'Allotments' group. I posted regularly and sensibly and soon got invited to take it over from the couple of guys who had set it up along with 5 other 'newbies' so we became the 'Admin Team' for that group choosing who could join and keeping an eye on the posters to make sure they behaved. We keep a friendly and relaxed ship and have quickly grown the group to over 4500 members, we must be doing something right!

The kitchen gets a coat of paint.

This year/change, a good friend Alayne, actually she who bought the piglets from our other friends Sue and Rob, decided to start a group for the smallholders out here in the 'Wesht'. So was born the "West of Ireland Smallholders Group" and Alayne asked me to dive in and help her to 'admin' it. This is doing well, all be it still fewer than a hundred members and has had some good pictures and nice friendly, lively discussion as well as members starting to help one another to find good books, training courses, to source pigs or deal with problem wasps nests. I hope this one will 'work' but my suspicion is that the type of people who decide to do smallholdering are sometimes doing it to get away from it all and live a quiet life. The last thing they want is to stay "connected" and play on computers to invite into their day the clamour of on line 'experts', keyboard warriors, nerds and (sometimes unwelcome) advice. We'll see.

Hubbard chicken wings glazed with honey and sweet-chilli

For those same reasons I am probably even less convinced by Twitter which I see (maybe wrongly) as the territory of those smartly dressed, young, business and social types who walk the streets of cities with their thumbs glued to the touch screen of their i-Pad* or smart phone** and their eyes fixed on the flow of 'tweets' from celebs, politicos and journalists as well as their own gossip groups.

(* and ** I have no idea what these machines are or how they differ from one another. I have never owned one and could not even turn one on if it was passed to me. I just know the words and think they work in this context.)

Liz battles to use her i-phone from buried under a pile of
blankets, dogs and cats.

I have a Twitter account which I run from my old fashioned PC under the stairs, so I can only get to it when I come back indoors and wash my hands. I miss a good 99% of all the 'traffic' from people who I nominally 'follow'. These posts are limited to 140 characters which is enough for a quick comment, a thought or a link to an article or item the person has found interesting. You cannot really get into a conversation with anyone or discuss things and as quickly as they appear, they are gone, shoved off screen by the next 'tweet'. When I go in after a few hours on the plot (or whatever) a statement says 273 "new" tweets and there is no way (and no point) I am going to trawl through that lot. You can just click on the recent ones; the rest are ephemera. They may have been worth reading 2 hours ago, but I doubt it.

As clear as gin? Well, possibly poitín.

None the less, there is a small community of smallholders who use Twitter and they make use of the facility on there as 'guest accounts'. Here the interest group sets up an account (in this case it is called @SmallholdersIRL ) and then gets a different user to use the account (and do the tweeting) each week. You can apply to be that person, or you can get invited by the owner. The smallholder one on Twitter is very new and was set up in the new year by a friend (Margaret G) and first "curated" by another friend (Margaret whose Pig-Management Course I attended a few years back down in Tipperary). She is doing the first week (this week) but other smallholders have been invited to take the weeks that follow and so, by this means, I am to be the voice of Irish Smallholding for week commencing 18th Jan. Yes, I know. Get me, slagging off Twitter one minute and then up to my oxters the next! I hope I can do it justice.

Please do wish me luck in both. Thanks.