Santa and the Bunny Rabbit

One little girl in the village is going to receive a nice surprise on the 25th; this little daughter of either Ginny or Padfoot. Money has changed hands to secure the deal but 'Santy' (as they call him in these parts) is hanging on to the little bunny for the moment and she will be collected on Christmas Eve once a hutch, a bag of food, some hay, a drinker and a book on how to keep rabbits has also been secured. I sense that these people intend to look after the rabbit properly. A pet is for life, not just for Christmas, as they say. I did not, however, manage to persuade Santa to take the other female bunny on a "Buy Two for the Price of One and a Half" deal even though I pleaded the case for not leaving the poor sister-doe all alone, but maybe Santa will relent on Christmas Eve.

Multi tasking. Plucking while
chatting to Diamond on the phone

Meanwhile there is one job that we will NOT be including in the portfolio of Enjoyable Tasks, Living the Dream and all that. That is Plucking Geese. We have got quite good and fast at the chickens by now - we can pluck and dress a chook in 45 minutes without breaking sweat. Geese turn out to be a whole different species (as you'd expect, I guess!). They have a gazillion feathers, many of which are very well glued in AND under that they have a complete layer of fluffy down which puffs chokingly into the air at every twitch of your feather collecting bag.

Oven ready at 3.8 and 4.0 kg respectively.

Now I can see Mentor Anne leaping for the keyboard at this stage to give out to us for our incompetence and we KNOW there are options around dipping the bird in hot water to loosen the feathers, and even using melted wax in the manner of a ladies' beauty treatment to de-fluff the carcass but we'd gone with cold straight plucking and it took AGES. We were easily into 2 and a half hours per bird including the gutting, our hands were raw and Liz at one stage resorted to gloves and a pair of pliers. If people can do a goose in less time then they are 'better men than us' and we are quite happy with that. So annoyed were we by the job that we both decided that it is not anything we want to get involved in long term, or to any great degree, into the future. If we do breed geese in the future (as opposed to just collecting the eggs) then we will be trying to sell them 'live' for finishing by someone else and most of what we keep will probably be skinned and cooked wrapped in bacon or some such. I went into this thinking the actual killing would be the worst part. We survived that but never dreamed the plucking could actually be worse!

We got through the plucking task in the end and the singe-ing and the gutting out and produced 2 nice looking, oven ready birds which weighed in at (we think) 3.8 and 4.0 kg respectively. The cat managed to knock our nice digital kitchen scales off the worktop and kill them, so I was weighing these by jumping on and off the bathroom scales with and without birds. Good weighty birds anyway, more than enough for our Christmas table, one staying here, the other being delivered to Steak Lady in Portmarnock (Co. Dublin) tomorrow. Other seasonal catering includes a huge batch of braised spicy red cabbage. Liz likes to do these kind of foods in big batches and freeze 4/5 of the product. Today's task is the first batch of mince pies.

Rolo (l) and Blue (r) looking handsome at 18 months

We love a good Olde Fashioned cook book in this house, and Liz finds good ones on the internet, recently also downloading them from 'Project Gutenburg' down to her Kindle e-book. One is old enough to include instructions like "Smite thee the lamb into gobbets" (I love that!) but today's is by one Elizabeth Moxon who in 1764 wrote the snappily titled  "English Housewifery exemplified (in above 450 receipts giving directions for most part of cookery)". From this tome comes the rather breathlessly punctuated "To Make Apricock Pudding:" as follows "Take ten apricocks, pare, stone, and cut them in two, put them into a pan with a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar, boil them pretty quick whilst they look clear, so let them stand whilst they are cold; then take six eggs, (leave out half of the whites) beat them very well, add to them a pint of cream, mix the cream and eggs well together with a spoon full of rose water, then put in your apricocks, and beat them very well together, with four ounces of clarified butter, then put it into your dish with a thin paste under it; half an hour will bake it". From reading these in the context we know that 'whilst' would be written 'until' nowadays, and the 'paste' is a 'pastry case'.

Big wild mountainy trout. 

In a previous post, I spoke of a high quality fine porcelain table cruet in sheepy form, generously given to us by the Silverwoods. We actually came away well laden with gifts for which we are very grateful. As well as the cruet sheep, we were handed a 2CV badge for my collection of 2CV bits and pieces, two orange tear-drop shaped squashes which we need to identify and find a "receipt" for (Perhaps E Moxon can help?), and three very fine, big wild river trout caught by one of the Silverwoods' neighbours in the nearby mountains. One of these has been used up already and was so big when cooked that we managed only 3/4 of the 'meat' between 2 of us at Dinner.

Henry and Min Re-United

In a recent post I might have worried you by finishing with a story that one of Henry or Min had gone AWOL at 'bed time' and we'd been out hunting with torches. Well, next morning  the pair were happily and noisily reunited. The missing bird had run for cover into the collection of bikes, cement mixer and other junk in the goose end of that building and kept his/her head down and kept quiet. That explains why the other bird was so contented to be up on the perch alone and also stayed quiet - he/she was presumably well aware of where the hidden bird was keeping quiet. In the morning they just had to each find their separate way to the yard and give each other a load of telling off. Not so silly after all.

Haggis mixture

In the kitchen we wind steadily on towards Christmas and even beyond. Liz converts a huge quantity of lamb "trimmings" (bits like the breast meat which the butcher would normally cut away and discard) and offal (including this year the lung which we specifically asked Ignatius to keep for us for this purpose), into home made haggis mixture. We love our haggis in this family and last year Liz found a recipe where you bake the mix in a baking tray instead of stuffing it into a piece of gut or sheep's stomach, or some kind of plastic 'cover' and it was easily the best haggis we had ever eaten. This probably because it was made with real ingredients instead of 'commercial' heaven knows what, so it is bagless haggis for us in 2014 too.

Hubbard hen at 19 weeks

Our two remaining 'Hubbard' chickens have amazed us over the last month by filling out from the rangey, gangly, big-legged adolescent shaped birds of October, to squared off, filled out, solid chicken-shaped birds now. They are 19 weeks old at this stage so they are approaching the standard 'Point of Lay' age where you'd normally buy them if you wanted them as laying birds, but these ladies are of a fast growing meat breed which the commercial boys would normally be 'finishing' at 100 days or so. Mentor Anne is keeping 2 of hers round to a fully mature age and is going to try a bit of breeding with a La Bresse rooster.

White Hubbard hen

Ours are still here for looser and more "happy chance" reasons. We had gone through a phase of 'harvesting' them, especially the roosters which were getting troublesome, and were finding them dead easy to catch because of their habit of gathering round my feet as I scooped feed from the feed bins, especially if it was raining outside. With just 2 to go, I wanted to 'do' these on the same day so that neither would be left lonely. I never got that chance and then the weather dried up and they stopped doing the under-foot thing. Also, we now had 4 birds in the freezer and needed the space for the lambs, so these two got a stay of execution and are still with us. A living larder, maybe, or perhaps we will see how they do as egg laying birds.

We've now done the run down to Silverwoods, so the lamb is all distributed to its final users. The Silverwoods have pronounced it excellent and, being as loopy as we are, found this lovely piece of lamb based 'tat' during their recent holiday in Bulgaria and thought of us. Fine, elegant tableware, I think you will agree, fit to grace the most elegant Christmas table. We have no idea why the lambs depicted are cuddling tiny teddy bears. Our lambs never had them. Perhaps it is an animal welfare thing?

Castlerea prize draw sign

We finally came to the point here where there was no longer any escaping a job which I'd been putting off and rather dreading, that of slaughtering the young geese for the Christmas table. These geese are now 6 months old and full adult size. Well, we girded our loins and got on with the job this morning with Liz, for her first time, actually getting involved and in (watching) at the kill. It went well, better than I had feared, and the boys (we are sure both these are ganders) met their end quickly, cleanly and with as much respect and as little distress as we like to ensure and they are now hanging in the Tígín awaiting the plucking and dressing job tomorrow. The relief is immense - we are now pretty much through the autumn slaughtering 'campaign' which we appreciate we have to do but cannot claim to enjoy.

There is just the one more goose to 'go', but this is our current parent bird 'Gander', he of the genetic wry-tail abnormality which he is sadly too able to pass on to his sons and daughters, so the plan is to swap him out with an unrelated gander called George who currently lives down the lane with Carolyn of the mini-horses. We get George and we deliver Gander to them but we are currently not sure whether we need to deliver him alive or whether he will be collected and despatched by K-Dub.

Finally today, we loved this Prize Draw sign seen in Castlerea (picture above) where 1st Prize is a Charolais heifer. She looks a lovely big girl from the pictures we have seen and is worth about €1000. You have the option of taking her home if you win, or immediately selling her at the Mart and going home with your money. We were laughing about what we'd do if suddenly presented with a strapping young female beef-cow. We'd have to give it to John Deere Bob to look after. We are not set up for cows' we don't even have a cattle herd number.

Of Birds; Listed, 'Late' and Laying

When we lived in the UK we took part every year in the British RSPB "Big Garden Bird-Watch" which is a survey of garden birds by members of the public which takes place on a single weekend in January. Tens of thousands of people take part, spending an hour on one of the days bird watching in their garden and then recording what is the highest number of any species seen at any one time during the hour. They either post off their results recorded on a form, or can go on line and enter their data into the web survey. It has been running for many years now and is starting to show some interesting trends up or down in bird populations.


We had a good wildlife garden and used to feed the birds a variety of food all through the year so our scores were generally in ones and twos of all the 'usual suspects' - blue and great tits, blackbirds, greenfinches, dunnocks, a robin or wren if you were lucky and, very reliably, between 30 and 77 house sparrows of which we had a huge mob all the time in our holly bushes, beech hedge and trees and shrubs. If we were lucky our resident female sparrow hawk would nip through while we were on watch. Either way we had a pretty good idea of what our garden population was like.

When we moved here we were delighted by some of the differences in what we could describe as 'usual suspects'. The house sparrows are replaced here by a mob of around 17 chaffinches who gather up any poultry food left by the hens. We have never seen a house sparrow yet. Robins and wrens are ten a penny. Our 'crows' are the grey bodied Hooded Crow; UK-style black Carrion Crows being almost entirely absent from Ireland. We also do well for field fares and jackdaws. Coal tits seem to be more common than blue or great tits.

Also different is the 'peoples' survey'. Not for us the easy life of one hour on one day of a fixed weekend. The Irish version, run by Bird Watch Ireland involves keeping your eyes open for 13 weeks from early December through to the end of February and scoring the biggest number of each species you see at any point during that week. This is good for we out-door types, as I can 'watch' while I'm allotmenting or out round the ground with dogs. Liz and I have conversations where we are basically 'auctioning' the results in a series of bids. Liz saw 17 field fares today, for example, which meant I had to go into the website and up my previous record (4). It has a few minor frustrations mind - we wish we could have recorded the hen harrier who flaps lazily up the valley but never came into our 'airspace', or the kingfisher zipping up the River Lung from Feigh Bridge (again - not actually IN the garden). We get regular mobs of long-tailed tits through, too, but they have stayed away while I have been 'surveying'.

A quick warning for those readers who do not want to know about the 'meat-preparation' side of small holdings; Look Away Now (3 paragraphs). The 'Late' birds? That will be the young roosters hatched 17 weeks ago today by Broody Betty. It's been great to see it all happen and to nurture them up through babyhood and into adolescence but they turned out to be male and were starting to square up to each other, tried their hand at crowing and even tried to mount the hens. William the Conqueror was getting fed up with them and it was all getting a bit feisty. The hens would shrug them off but then turn round and attack them quite viciously. Someone was going to get badly hurt or even, if William got them cornered, killed. William is twice their size. I had offered them to anyone on the poultry forums but those guys are mainly breeders of pure fancy-fowl and a hybrid x hybrid of dubious parentage is of no use to them. The boys' times had come.

Dispatching them is my job, and Liz has volunteered for the role of plucker. I managed to grab one yesterday when it foolishly preceded me into the confined space of the goose house but the other one was having nothing to do with that. The advice in that case is to set the alarm for 'while it's still dark' and pay the hen house a visit while nobody can see to fly off and escape. Rooster 2 was therefore waiting his turn in the pluckery by the time Liz got up. Liz has tried 2 methods now and prefers the 2nd - the first was just to dry-pluck holding the bird half inside a dustbin liner - the 2nd involved dipping the bird in hot water for 5 seconds and then wet-plucking. The feathers come away easier but the wet feathers stick to your hands and to the bird so "at times it was a bit difficult to see where I'd been" said Liz.

Anyway, the two brothers are plucked, cleaned and in the freezer now, awaiting their turn to be made into coq-au-vin. Interestingly for 2 brothers, clutch mates and equal age young "roos", they were hugely different in carcass weights - one was 1193 g cleaned weight, the other 1833 g. They may, of course, have had different mothers - no end of hens were happily contributing to BB's clutch! Their livers, hearts and gizzards, sliced up and briefly fried off have featured in tonight's tapas style supper. Delicious.

And finally, we have found another secret egg stash left by Wandering Wendy when she doesn't feel like laying in the official nest boxes. We had seen her nipping into the goose house looking a bit guilty. The rabbit 'Maternity Unit' is in there, though currently empty and she had discovered that she could sneak in (yellow arrow) through a hole at the right hand end and nip along 5 feet or so, well out of sight (yellow cross). I only found these (7) eggs by squeezing my head round the gap and using a torch. I had to prise off one of the planks to extract the eggs. That was yesterday. Today I blocked up the hole and two (it turned out) hens were very loud in their complaints and hung around the hutches, even jumping up into them through the open doors and marching around inside as if looking for the nest site.

The picture here shows the hutches not yet complete, with no mesh. They now do have proper fronts with a hinged mesh panel. I decided that if I left the mesh door open and put some hay in the 'bedroom' they might use that. At least I'd know where the eggs would be instead of having to hunt under hedges, track WW across the fields or find an egg at random in the yard, outside the front door, on the drive or what ever. To my surprise two hens laid in the hutch (and nobody laid in the nest boxes) today. There is time, I think, for one final bit of egg-laying related tomfoolery. Yesterday Liz and I paused outside the back door to watch the hens pecking at some wheat I had thrown down in the yard, amused, as ever by their antics. Suddenly we both heard a "tick!" and, as the forest of legs parted we could see an egg on the ground right where they were pecking. As far as either of us could see no hen had actually stopped pecking at the seed, so they must be able to multi-task, pecking with one end while the other end pumps out an egg. They come out (we did not know) pointy-end first and we know this because the 'tick' noise we had heard was the shell getting broken slightly at that end where it hit the gravel and concrete of the yard. So now you know.