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.

A Simple Fencing Job

The 5 geese are allowed on the front lawn now. 

More fencing for us. We decide to run a length of sheep wire along the inside of the new post and rail fence up the drive and around the front lawn. You may recall that this lawn was fenced in with post and rail because neither of us wanted to sit on the 'terrace' out front looking at green high tensile barbed wire, sheep wire and standard de-barked farm-field style fence posts. The post and rail, though, is good for adult sheep which are tall, large-bodied beasties, but would not stop the geese or the baby lambs, who can just dip down on their hunkers and shimmy under the bottom rail.

Rather too much pork belly for we two, but it does lovely
cold left overs. Cous cous salad accompanies.

The answer, in these parts at least is to staple a run of non-high-tensile (i.e. cheaper!) sheep wire along the inside. Not being green (it's just 'galvanised' colour) it dulls down and fades from view but it has the 6 inch square mesh format which can stop lambs, geese and even Westies. The smaller chickens seem to be able to slip through with a bit of a wriggle and a wrestle of the wings. They could also fly over if they only thought about it but one thing we've found with chickens is that if they can see through a fence and then butt up against it and feel it at ground level, then a 3-4 foot fence will stop them. Give them an opaque barrier like a wall or a wooden fence, and they will try the flying thing and find that they can 'hop' over a 6 feet tall barrier with ease. Our Sussex Ponte hens are regularly to be seen on the 6 foot wall of the cattle race and we have pictures of one up on the roof ridge of the goose-house (ten feet up?)

Liz's new baby.

With the post and rail shored up we have been able to mix and match the grazing arrangements a bit. The poor old geese have nearly exhausted the grass in the orchard. "There's not a pick left", as Bob would say, so we have been able to shepherd them round to the lawn for some good, longer stuff to fill their bellies, all be it watching them closely in case they decided to annihilate my precious crocusses. They didn't. The next day we had them in the East Field and the ewes and lamb were let loose into the lawn 'paddock'. The lamb, in particular, seemed to enjoy this.

Bramble-bashing by the veg patch.

Regular readers will know that I have recently savaged the hedge along the east side of this, the hedge which grows from the top of a long-buried stone wall. We now have a steep-sided, 2 foot tall bank with some 2 feet tall, 2 inch diameter, gnarly hawthorn (etc) trunks sticking out of the top. The lamb thinks this is adventure playground stuff - he goes spronging up and over, or weaves along the top like a small boy balancing along the top of a brick wall, while his Mum and Aunt fill their bellies on the lawn grass. We have also seen him challenging his Aunt, 'Little John' style stopping her from coming over the bank by hopping into the way to block her progress. We feel a bit sorry for him as he has no playmates (yet) but his Aunt seems to indulge him and play a bit, limited though she is by her own pregnant bulk. Next year we are determined to get all the lambing, should the lambing gods smile upon us, synchronised, so that the babies can grow up with little chums to play with, and give the Mums a break.

Other than that, we have been trying out the new toy, our brush cutter. We are delighted. It is light enough for Liz to manage it. but powerful enough to do the necessary amount of damage to the brambles, plantains, rushes and nettles (even the young ash and elder suckers). We 'learned it' a bit tentatively in the 'woods' by the drive but got well stuck in by the time we were thrashing along the bramble thicket next to the vegetable patch, tackling the former nettle patch by the muck heap and whacking the rushes at the bottom of the yard leading on to the rain water gulley.

A rooster given to us by a friend to kill
(she can't cope with necking them) gets it.
His name was 'Pineapple'. Are we allowed
to call the curry "Pineapple Chunks"?

We are confident that we will have a much tidier small holding this year and we are looking forward to attacking some new green nettles and Queen Anne's Lace (Cow Parsley) in the woods when they start, docks and rushes and ground elder. I used to enjoy swooping down upon them with the 'Old Father Time' scythe but you could only really use that on tall stuff, patches which were already shouting 'neglect' at any visitors.

We already know that in the bits of woodland where we can get the mower, grass starts to grow, and we love that rather 'Capability Brown' look of the grass and the trees, so we are wondering whether a strimmer used often enough under the trees would lead to a tidy, grassed look (with some planned sweet woodruff, Lady's Mantle, snowdrops, foxgloves, Pulmonaria and cyclamen) rather than the current nettles, ground elder and elder suckers. It might be less 'green' but it should, surely, look more 'deliberate'.