Back In The Kitchen

K-Dub on the big Kango

This week saw K-Dub and myself swinging back into action after our respective Christmas breaks and in his case a call up to the big smoke to do some 'proper' work (as in 'paid' work). "What's the story, Bud?" (or just the Dublin slang "Story, Bud?") is how he announces himself on the phone and we are straight into discussing what, when, how on any jobs. This week it was the decision to finally go for the break through, smashing out the wall at the end of the existing kitchen so that the two spaces become one room with a little 'waist' in the middle where we will leave stub-walls to form a 5' wide 'arch'.

The hole is started but K-Dub has to make running repairs to
 the big Kango.  

You can imagine that our announcement that we were going to smash a huge hole in the end of the kitchen, caused a certain amount of anxiety within the 'main stake-holder'. Visions of rubble, dust and plaster fragments everywhere. What she hadn't realised but was also concerning K-Dub, is that the rumble set up by the massive Kango-hammer sets anything on shelves vibrating and moving gently towards the front of the shelves before leaping to its doom like a gang of lemmings.

Mad hour, then, clearing all the kitchen vulnerables into multiple shopping bags which are now stacked all around the corners of the Dining Room. Liz need not have worried, though. We are good, house-trained builders and we do not create mess inside your house. This kitchen has the internal walls lined with stud walling insulated with foam blocks and plastered over that. The Feb 1012 blog at  http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2012/02/bathroom-floor.html gives you some idea - in one pic you are looking up at the bathroom floor / kitchen ceiling. We knew that we could chop out all the external wall (concrete, rocks, masonry)  and the window frame without actually breaking into the kitchen. We just had to screw a board a cross the window inside, so as not to leave a huge 2'+ square hole.

A board covers the hole where the window
was. This is the only change you see from
'indoors' for now.

Six or seven hours later after lots of noise, rubble, dust and shovelling, we have our hole, roughly 5' wide. We have thereby created a weakness in the upstairs (bathroom) wall which we need to fix by slotting in a couple of 6' x 4" concrete lintels at the top of our hole, and we have exposed the wooden joists of the bathroom floor, so those guys need a 'stringer' of 6 x 2 and a joist-hanger from this to each old joist-end. We reinstate the shower pipes which are mainly just 'push-in' hand-tight connections and we can safely leave the job for the few days over the weekend. Nothing will fall down and we can still use the shower. We are now also ready to get the 'Sparks' in for some electrical first fix.

Liz's tray-bake version of haggis using our own lamb bits. 

The main other event affecting the week was Burns Night which regular readers will know we like to celebrate. We think we are in a minority here; we know of no other people locally who do a Burns Night and our comments on social media meet with blank incomprehension and dead silence. I have never seen haggis for sale locally. That does not worry us as Liz makes her own haggis using bits from our own lambs (breast-meat etc. plus we keep a lung back from one of the carcasses specifically for this purpose.)

This year we could not do the meal on the correct date (25th) as we had a meeting in the village, so we moved it to tonight (Fri 27th). It was, as ever, delicious and the haggis, 'neeps' and tatties with onion gravy was nicely rounded off by a gooseberry cranachan (whipped cream, oats etc) and accompanied by a wee dram of whiskey. It should have been Scottish, of course but the nearest I could get in the local supermarket was Bushmills, which is from County Antrim. Close enough.

Our village's indoor handball court. 

Finally, there is the '365' thing now only 4 days away from finishing. My nipping around everywhere has made me something of an unofficial photographer for the village, certainly among Liz's circle. This brings me an occasional 'commission' - the most recent was to be sent down to the local hand-ball court. Coming from Sussex, hand-ball would be a sport I had had absolutely nothing to do with and first 'met' as a series of strange abandoned outdoor courts  in Irish villages.

Looking down onto the court, through the
perspex wall from the top of the 'stand'. 

These sit in their respective villages as just 3 walls around a rectangle which is roughly 20' by 40' and the walls are roughly 20 feet high. We have never seen an outdoor one still in use. But in the local village we are rather special in having a modern, fully indoor one and an active thriving club. Ours has a perspex wall at the top end which protects spectators but allows them to watch the action from a ramp of stairs and at the top of this 'stand' is a kitchen and bar area.

That's all I know and those are the photo's I have fired into the Village Development Co. I have never seen anyone playing the game, have little idea what this involves and am completely ignorant of the rules. I guess it is a little like squash but with a bigger ball and no  racquets.

Towser at speed.

"Book Learning"

Book Learning. Grand as far as it goes. We are madly trying to absorb as much information as we can on the 2014 projects - bees and pigs - and have read our little socks off on books, magazines, websites and leaflets. We have talked to as many people as we could persuade to give us advice and we have, as you know, joined a 'club' and been to one bee-based meeting. We probably 'know' way more than it is healthy to know for 2 people neither of whom has ever opened a beehive and lifted out a bee frame to examine the contents, or been closer to bees than idly spotting them on the garden flowers ("Oooh! I think THAT one is a honey bee!") or had anything to do with pigs other than helping to run 2 porkers down the ramp from trailer to slaughterhouse (about 5 seconds!).

You can't beat a turf fire for visual effect.

No. We are now hungry for hands-on, practical experience and 'monkey-do' learning. We want the bee training sessions to start, and especially the apiary based practical ones. I want to try myself out in the middle of a wary, loud-humming, cloud of potential stinging insects to know that I can be as cool, calm, relaxed, gentle and slow moving as I am with rabbits, sheep, geese and chickens. I want to know that I can be sufficiently careful that I do not risk 'rolling' bees between the close spaced bee frames (which annoys them) or squashing any between hive sections when reassembling the boxes. I want to know that I can move among pigs and bond with them, come to understand them without being nervous of them - they are big, strong and heavy, potentially dangerous animals when full grown, which need treating with respect. I expect I will be OK on both counts; I generally am. We are currently looking out for a pig rearing/keeping course aimed at small holders. Tipperary in April looks favourite so far.

Meanwhile, one of our favourite annual celebrations came around, Burns Night, our chance to eat haggis with a clear conscience and, this time, to have some guests to supper, Carolyn and Charlotte of the mini-horses, plus K-Dub and little Henry (2 in February). Being lamb-rearers, of course, this is not some kind of commercial, mass produced haggis boiled in a plastic (or gut if you're lucky) sleeve. It is the home made version constructed by Liz from our own lamb products; this year some breast meat, heart, liver and 'lights', plus, of course, oatmeal, onion and spices. 'Lights' for the uninitiated, is lung tissue; we managed to persuade butcher Ignatius G that we really did want a lung (just one) to try out just this recipe. Liz bakes the whole in a casserole dish.

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face..... haggis.

For a starter we diverged a bit away from Scottish fare with a favourite salad - leaves, pomegranate bits, goats cheese, pickled sweet red peppers and toasted pinenuts. The haggis came, of course, with neeps and tatties and an onion gravy. Dessert was a bit 'fusion food'. Liz crossed cranachan with pavlova (why not?) and came up with a pavlova with a meringue base, a good layer of cream, then blackberry coulis and berries, topped with toasted rolled oats.

Cranachan x Pavlova

We have, inevitably, a mountain of this food left over even though everybody bar Henry piled in with gusto and did it justice. H was a little excited at his first evening visit to 'Matt and Dizzy's' house and was not in the mood for settling down to eat this unfamiliar food but he was still a pleasure to entertain and he enjoyed himself. "Dizzy" (sorry, I mean Liz) has since been on the internet talking to chums who also have left over haggis and mashed spuds, and someone has come up with the very promising idea of haggis and potato 'pasties' which have GOT to be worth a try. We have very little 'neep' left so some of our lovely fresh sprouts may get thinly sliced and added to the pastie filling.

We had lit the fires at both ends of the house, so we had a lovely turf fire going in the living room as well as the range in the dining room. We do not usually have real turf in the house as we'd only use it on the open fire, which we don't light very often; it does not go very well in the range. However, I had taken some eggs round to neighbour Una and she was trying to pay me money for them. I asked instead if I might have some of the lovely long dry turfs she has in her shed; they look very picturesque in the log basket and would burn nicely on our fire for our guests when we adjourned through to the comfortable chairs. We didn't go very late. The visitors were mindful of the need to get little Henry to bed by 9:30-ish but, more importantly, K-Dub was due a very early (04:30) start as he's off to the Bavaria mountains on a motor bike, to be part of the annual "Elephant Rally", camping.

http://www.bvdm.de/index.php?id=47&lang=3

Rooster 'Mr Buff' shelters in the goose house. 

We take our hats off to you, buddy, rather you than me. The weather is not looking particularly promising, it is snowy and windy in Bavaria at present, but he has a good ex-military tent and a sleeping bag which is good to minus 30 degrees C and, anyway, hey! He's a ruffty tuffty biker. I used to enjoy my 2CV camps but they were generally in the summer and I had the car around me when I was driving to and from. K-Dub is on a bike in just his leathers and helmet through the night to Dublin, then all across Wales and England to the Channel Tunnel, then all across mainland Europe to his snowy forest 'home' and all his biker mates. Safe journey, K-Dub. Look after yourself.