Brer Fox Comes Back for a Goose

Not a clean death - she was covered in puncture bite marks
and badly bruised. We think the neck wound was inflicted
when the fox tried to pull the carcass through the sheep wire. 

Our fox left us 10 days after taking the duck, in which to relax, start thinking he was a one-off and maybe drop our guard a little. Then he sneaked back at 4 pm on a Saturday. Luckily for him (or her, of course, foxes are almost impossible to sex on a fleeting glimpse) he chose a time when I was off site and Elizabeth was hoovering, so that she did not hear the Guinea Fowl alarm-call cacophony until it was too late.

A good old fashion (goose) stew with
dumplings. 

I was out at a gentle, afternoon, drinkless, family and friends gathering for the 60th birthday of my archery coach, Con, and heading home at half past 4. At roughly the same time, Elizabeth finished the hoovering, killed the noise and heard the Guinea Fowl clamour. She raced outside and found one GF high up a tree, giving out all manner of dog's abuse, which is never a good sign. Casting around she could find no cause for the racket but we know and trust these birds, so we keep looking for as long as it takes, or they stop the screaming.

Goosey Gumbo? This lovely soup (over rice) made a fitting
end to the fox's abandoned prize. 

Then she saw the sad white shape right at the bottom of the orchard against the fence. It was straight away obvious what had happened - the fox had got into the orchard, killed the goose and then dragged her to the fence. Unluckily for the fox, this was a big, 5-6 kg bird he had chosen, so he could not jump back out of the orchard with his prize.

The day after losing her 'sister', one of the
survivors gives us the first goose egg of
2018. 

He'd put it down by the fence, jumped the fence unladen, then tried to pull the goose through the fence. It was too big a goose to fit through, so he'd presumably spotted Elizabeth bearing down on it and fled the scene. She never actually saw the fox. She'd just about time to carry the body back to the shed and hang it up to bleed out a bit, and shepherd the survivors to safety, when I pulled in to the drive way and heard the sorry tale. We didn't know at that point, whether the victim was one of those females I'd been waiting to start laying eggs, or our belovéd gander, Gorgeous George. It was the former.

Still spoiled rotten and sleeping indoors at this stage, Lily and
the month old lamb, Tigger. 

The plucking took place that evening, when the bird proved to be so full of puncture holes and bite marks, that Liz decided to skin the bird instead, half way through plucking. This goose was going down the 'stew' route. At the gutting stage it turned out that the bird also had half a dozen part-formed eggs up her 'pipework', the largest of which was almost laying-size and could only have been a day away from our long awaited "First Egg of 2018".

Outdoors now - breakfast with Mum and Aunts on
Monday morning.

Long story short, the goose became a superb stew and dumplings, the gribbly bits went in the wheelie bin and a great pile of white feathers went on the compost heap. The latter fact is the most significant because our furry, bushy-tailed friend came back for his lost prize the next day (Sunday) at about half past eleven. This time we were both up and about when the Guineas kicked off, we raced outside, each via a different route and caught the lad in the act of sniffing the pile of feathers on the compost heap, right up by our cattle race. He scarpered, of course, when our 2 heads appeared round either end of his covering wall, galloping off and clearing the 3-4' sheep wire into the pig-pen without breaking stride. He paused briefly to see how serious we were and then shot off down the pig-pen and cleared to bottom fence the same way, vanishing off down the bog field below us.

A 2018 first, the new kitchen windows are
thrown open to let some warm air through
as the sun shines brightly outside. Spring
is here. 

In a surprising parallel to Sue and Rob's garden-fox mentioned in a previous post (10th Feb), to get to the compost, the fox must have come in over the fences again but through the gangs of surviving geese and ducks, ignoring them. My guess is that he came first to the piece of fence where he'd left the goose in such a hurry, and once there, could either see or smell the "dead one" (he wouldn't have know it was only a pile of feathers) 40 yards away on the compost. I assume that had we not disturbed him, he'd have quickly worked out that he needed to kill another bird and done that (or more) on the way out.

Naturally we are back on high alert, Fox-Watch for all the hours that the birds are out of their sheds and free ranging. We have also abandoned all our optimistic foolish ideas that this might be a one-off, fox, a 2017 youngster turfed out of the home earth and roaming around looking for a territory to call his own. He came on the 2nd Jan, took the duck on 8th Feb, and has now come back on the 17th and 18th. He is now a local and regular visitor, though he didn't come back on Monday or today. While he is all unpredictable and careful, there is little we can do about this except keep watch and listen to what those Guinea Fowl tell us. However, if he starts to get regular, predictable and a bit complacent, then we have some options. Wish us luck.

Briefly chaotic Living Room scene, books
everywhere. 

It is never ALL bad news though. The next day, one of the other geese laid her first egg of 2018 so we are back in that 'game' and the waiting is over. The ewe Lily refused to come 'home' that evening to her indoor pen in the Tígín as we've done happily for 4 weeks now and seemed to want to go, instead, into the East Field where her 'sisters' have been all along. I let her in and closed the gate on her happy re-union. It was a warm evening, so I decided that she was all done on the 'Intensive Care', indoor housed thing. Tigger is a big, bouncing, plump, chunky lad at this stage and no more likely to die of his sister's hypothermia that is his fully-fleeced Mum. They have slept out ever since (all be it they actually sleep in the shelter with the other girls) and I have been able to muck out the pen ready for the next mum+lamb. This looks like it might be first-timer Rosie, from the 'bagging up' evidence, or Polly, from the 'I want to be alone' sleeping behaviour.

One of the book walls!

Finally, Elizabeth finally made it to IKEA in Dublin to buy 2 more of their excellent, full height, 80 cm wide, flat packed "Billy" book cases. There are, obviously, a gazillion books here and the cases we have have been double stacked and overflowing for too many months. Liz finally cracked, girded her loins and went to do battle with IKEA. The boxes, although almost 7 feet long, fit neatly into our little Fiat Panda with all the doors shut; you just post them in the back hatch and slide them down into the passenger side foot-well. Brilliant. Well, now they are assembled (by the Flat-pack Queen) and full of books after a massive, day-long sort-out. We are so tidy, we won't know ourselves.

"Gribbly Bits"

Chinese belly pork (Johnny Diamond)

Gribbly Bits. That is our in-family jokey name for any non-standard bits of the pig, cheap cuts, offal, ears, tails, trotters and trimmings. That all started with a chum of ours named Andy while we were on a 2CV convoy across Northern France, off to show off our 1961 reg, fully restored car at La Chapelle d'Armentieres. There is almost certainly a post on this if you go back far enough

(try http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2011/05/three-2cvs-in-big-parade.html)

Andy had brought along his Hungarian then-fiancée who's spoken English, I should add, was probably better than ours. We'd stopped in a restaurant along the way and she (who went under the superb name of Zsa zsa) is one of those people who take huge amounts of time choosing off a menu; to the point where waiters give up and promise to come back later having 'given you a bit more time to choose'. Liz and I have no such problems and had spotted and quickly ordered a chicken gizzard salad. This is a firm favourite here but would definitely be in most peoples' list of 'gribbly bits'. We had a good laugh 'teaching' Zsa zsa that 'gribbly bits' was a genuine English expression and was widely accepted by French waiters as 'les pièces gribloises'. No, don't worry, we weren't being mean, we were kidding enough that she was definitely unsure and we let her off the hook before she could embarrass herself!

Trick or Treaters. Liz has bobbed down to
kiddy-height to offer the sweets so we can only see the
top of her head., 

You can use every part of the pig, so they say, except its squeal. We have been playing around with some of the gribbly bits. You'll know I made the 'head cheese' (brawn) a week or so back, and the dogs got the ears roasted. We have the hearts and livers, of course. We did not get the tails or trotters back this time but that was because we have trotters still in the freezer from last year, when we bought half a carcass of Gloucester Old Spots cross. Liz had boiled up the trotters, following a recipe in our Phil Vickery and Simon Boddy book ('Pork') but had not followed up with the oven-roast/glaze half. The trotters had been portioned up and frozen. Well, now all inspired by our own pigs, Liz completed the job and  rescued them from the 'archive'; glooping them up well with a whizzed up mix of mango chutney (ours), tomato purée, cider vinegar, red chilli, garlic and olive oil and then roasting, uncovered, for 15-20 minutes in a hot oven.

Under this 'abuse' the trotters pretty much fall apart and flex into impossible shapes as the tendons contract, so it is compulsory to pick them up in your sticky fingers and get all Medieval on their glutinous, sticky, sweet, delicious gribbliness. If you, the reader, are finding this a bit too gribbly, then remember that this is just the skin, tiny muscles and cartilege of the lower calf, wrist or heel joint and the feet, cooked to melt-in-the-mouth tenderness. The actual bones and the hoof 'toe-nails' are left for the delighted dogs to deal with. The mango chutney glaze is definitely a success; we will be claiming our trotters back from now on. We have some more half-done in the freezer to be going on with. No pics of the finished product, I'm afraid, not for any reason. I just didn't take any.

We've also been exploring some Chinese style recipes for the pork bellies. Here, Liz followed a recipe from our other excellent pork book, Johnny Mountain's "Cooking with a Passion for Pig", which involves, like the trotters, 2 cooking stages, a 6 hour gentle boil in stock, followed by a fry-then-roast. We make one adaptation from the Mountain recipe, in that we use a family favourite stock known as "Blackspring's Nan's pork hock stock". Blackspring was the pen name of one of Liz's internet buddies, and his Chinese Nan used to do the hocks this way; the stock was the perfect choice for the belly-boil. It's on

http://gapyearforeating.blogspot.ie/2009/10/blacksprings-nans-pork-hock.html

...should you want to follow that one up, but it's basically a goodly mix of ginger, chili bean sauce, brown sugar, dark soy sauce, light soy sauce, star anise and spring onions plus, if you fancy, rice wine and 5-spice powder. After the boil you cool the meat, ideally overnight (you will have spotted that this dish can therefore be pretty much pre-prepared the day before), then carefully cut into portion 'blocks', which if you're as posh as Mr Diamond you can present rather nattily on a bed of rice etc (as per the photo at the top of this post). Very yummy and more-ish. Neither of us stopped at just the one 'portion block'.

Nice meaty bellies wait for their curing mix.

Other than that, in the pork dept, Liz has started some dry-curing, bellies for bacon rashers and a couple of boned-out leg joints to have a go at air dried hams. We are looking to rig up a cold smoker too, so at least one of these may get smoked. There are some exciting recipes for this kind of thing in both books and there is a thriving group on Facebook called "Sausage Debauchery" where dozens of curers all around the world are creating ham, salami and no end of types of cured sausages. We will be in good company, but I won't go into any detail here; Liz is covering all that on her blog.

By tonight, then, we were feeling a bit like we might have had enough forms of pork for the moment, so we re-visited the old faithful supply of Hubbard chicken parts which is still going strong in the freezer. Just breast meat (skin on), roasted nice and simply and served with broad beans and cous-cous. Guaranteed no "pièces gribloises".

Hummus, Neeps and Tatties?

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great Chieftan o’ the Puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang’s my arm

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill, and on and on

You will, I hope, recognise the above as Robbie Burns's famous "Ode to a Haggis" beloved of carving-knife wielding head-of-the-table blokes on Burns Night, 25th January. We love our Burns Nights in this family and we love the haggis, neeps and tatties that come with, the onion gravy, the whisky and the Scotland-related desserts. This started for me back in the 70's when the College used to do them as a formal dinner, black tie, academic gowns, Top Table and all that. Ever since then we have managed to find haggis available in shops and supermarkets, always leading up to the Night itself and often all the year round. 

Big shock then, when we realised we have moved to a place where nobody celebrates Burns Night and nobody has seen or eaten haggis, though a few have heard of it and 'seen something about it on the telly'. We looked in three different supermarkets (Tesco, Aldi and Lidl) and some butcher's shops on the day we went down to buy the geese, to no avail. We have since heard that these shops might have been selling it around Dublin (Mrs Sparks even helpfully told us that Tesco in Newry had it - that is 3 and a half hours drive away!) and Aldi might have had some on Thursday 24th but that was no good to us. 

Our last hope on Goose Day was SuperValu in Castlerea where Liz had a brief surge of hope when keen young butchery counter man leapt to her aid. "Of Course!" he said and led her to a nice full chill cabinet stuffed with .....Hummus! He was crestfallen when she explained that, No, she meant 'Haggis - the stuff Scots people eat?' We don't have many Scots here, he told us. Amazingly he was more hopeful at Liz's half-joke that he might be able to sell her a sheep's stomach. "Over the road!", he said - in 'that' butcher, but you'll have to go on Monday; That's the day he does his slaughtering. 'That' butcher is, of course, our old chum Ignatius G Victualler, slaughterer of our own three sheep. 

Never mind, we thought, we'll just have to make our own. How hard can it be? Surely it's just rough old bits of lamb (of which we have plenty), oatmeal and a few spices and pepper. Liz quickly surfed up a recipe from the BBC website. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/haggis_66072

This looked very manageable and had the option of baking it in a casserole dish rather than trying to source a sheep stomach or "ox bung" (Don't ask - it's a bit of lower gut). We have an amusing family expression for the non-lean-meat bits of lamb, offal etc, the "gribbly bits". Now, there's an excuse for a 2CV picture, the expression was invented during a trip across Northern France in our then-freshly restored old 1961 car where it quickly translated in to 'les pièces gribbloises' because we were teasing an endlessly-indecisive friend who didn't want anything 'gribbly' off the restaurant menu. 

Gribbly bits we have, of course, having recently had our lambs slaughtered. Not the 'lights' (lungs) listed in the recipe maybe but we have heart, liver and plenty of the really cheap cut 'breast' and other off cuts which the butchers would normally discard but which we asked him to bag up. For the next set of lambs we will see if we can save the lungs and stomach too, with Burns Night in mind. Oatmeal and the other ingredients are easily available, so Liz was on, in creative mode on the Thursday, and also decided we needed whisky (no 'E' in Whisky  for this - Scotch for Burns Night) and a dessert called 'cranachan'; a mixture of whipped double cream, honey, whisky, raspberries and toasted flaked oats. The raspberries led us way away from our normal principles of locally-sourced and 'sustainable' eating - they were from Morocco and cost the equivalent of €16 per kg. Oops.

Well, we got there. The BBC method, adapted by Liz, worked superbly and the haggis was, we both agree, the nicest we have ever tasted. Being non-commercial it had way less pepper and being home made by us using known gribbly bits it was ten times more meaty than any tartan-packed, mass produced version. Of course we do mashed spuds to suit our own taste (skins on, plenty of butter, pepper and full-cream milk) and also neeps (steam and mash, nothing added) plus a lovely onion gravy. We were stuffed to the gills but still managed some rather generously proportioned cranachan and a wee dram to wash it down. 

It made for a very enjoyable and pleasant Burns Night and, for an added 'sharing' socially, we had set up a silly 'On Line Burns Night' on social networking website 'Facebook' which had gathered up lots of like-minded relatives, friends and former colleagues who were comparing recipes and planning detail leading up to the evening and then comparing successes afterwards. We 'shared' all the fun with oldest cousin Win, Challock Forest living friend Rona D, Kent-based Diamond and Mazy, ex-colleagues Cath and Shane, Sparks and Mrs Sparks and many more. It was quite an occasion.

I hope you had a good one.