An Extra Hour in Bed?

1,28 kg of 'Golden Hornet' crab apples. Our best tree this year.

We come to that weekend when we change all the clocks back and out comes that cliché that "we get an extra hour in bed". Indeed we held to that view when we had 'normal' jobs with fixed hours. This is always followed by a spate of Mums protesting, "Extra Hour? Not if you've a three year old child waking up" and now that we are out here doing the small holdering mallarkey, we have moved over to that view. We have no need of curtains in the windows here so the daylight comes streaming in 24 hours after it did yesterday and the westies don't know that it's now "only 7 o'clock" instead of 8 a.m. GMT.

The lovely golden pink of crab apple jelly.

They start bouncing around, wide awake so that you know they'll need a 'comfort stop' soon. The roosters are cock-a-doodling like billy-oh and the sheep start calling for their breakfasts. We are up and at 'em. In my case I was off 'buildering' in Sligo and Liz knew she had a load of crab apples to turn into crab apple jelly and we both knew that we'd have a normal length day with that odd jet-lag evening where all your senses are telling you that it is bed time but the clock says "No, not yet".

Too meaty for dogs? This chunk of beef spine/rib. 

If you are not familiar with UK or Irish TV you may not know of a recent successful advert for which the punchline has now gone into common usage in the same way as "Go to work on an egg" or "For Mash get Smash" did back in the day. That is the ad for the optician and spectacles shop, 'Specsavers' and the quip comes out when ever anyone has done something suggesting they are blind or poorly sighted, "He should have gone to Specsavers". The ad used amusing film of the sheepdog barely escaping the shearing shed where he'd been (badly) shorn along with the sheep.

Beef braised slowly in beer, to an adapted Nigel
Slater recipe. 

Where am I going with this? Nearby there is a butcher specialising in beef but who cuts the joints and ribs to suit the Irish customer. They love to see meat cut well clear of any connective tissue, cartilege, sinew etc and "well boned out" with the result that this butcher's scraps and "bones for the dogs" have so much meat wrapped around them that customers in the know joke delightedly with each other that the guy must have poor eyesight to have "missed" it and (inevitably) should've gone to Specsavers! To us he is now referred to as the 'Specsavers Butcher'.

I remember that my Mum (Pud Lady) had similar luck - she frequented a game shop near Hastings where the 'bones for the dog' were frequently casseroled into a very meaty venison casserole for us humans before the bones went anywhere near the dog. We recently came by a superbly meaty bit of spine/rib (Thank you generous benefactor - you know who you are!) which I converted into a superb braised stew taking a Nigel Slater recipe and swapping out his suggested Rioja (that must almost be a criminal act... Rioja indeed!) for beer and adding more veg. I reckoned that if I slow-cooked it long enough we'd be able to slap one of the big 2-vertebra chunks onto the plate and then forage the meat off that, with the veg and gravy doing a good job of mushing into the mashed potato (not too buttery, advises Nigel... keep it fluffy/floury to better take up the gravy). That was a very successful meal and the left overs, cooked up some more, may become a future pie filling.

Paired off? Belvedere now seems very attached to the widow
bird 'Min', here with inseperable buddy 'Squawk' the Marans

Way back when, our first Guinea Fowl were called Henry and Min after the daft Goon Show aul' folks, because they walked around stooped over like the old folks on the 'Old People Crossing' roadsign. Then, readers may recall, Henry met with an accident out on the road and Min has been driving us mad for 12 months calling her lonely mate-seeking 'Buckwheat Buckwheat' call. We acquired two young birds hoping that at least one would grow up a cock-bird and pair up with her.

Dylan tore his eartag out on a fence but we have found it
so we should be OK handing it in to the butcher with him
when the time comes. 

These 'guys' were named Apollo and Belvedere (it's a long story involving that 'Min' might actually be the Greek Goddess 'Minerva', so she'd need an Apollo for her mate and that there is a famous Renaissance statue called the Apollo Belvedere. We had two possible boys, so we needed 2 names. With me so far?). Well, it now seems that one young bird (Belvedere) has paired off with Min. He abandons his former gang (young turkeys and Guineas) for big chunks of most days and you can find him trotting along or mooching about closely paired off with Min and (inevitably) her inseperable buddy, the Marans hen 'Squawk'. Poor Squawk will be feeling like one of those less pretty  'best friends' who gets left behind when they grow up and her prettier friend starts to discover boys before she does.

The other young Guinea we think is almost certainly a hen but may be a bit confused as to her species. You see her doing a very flirty dance with the young male turkeys, where she runs in circles with her wings splayed, then squats down on the ground in front of the chosen boy. The chosen male turkey gets all excited and also start running in circles calling, but never quite works out (mercifully!) what he is meant to be doing, so the Guinea Hen runs round some more and squats again in front of him. Maybe he looks, to her, like a big Guinea cock-bird. Should've gone to Specsavers?

A Taste of Honey

Now, there's taste in Birthday presents,
a straw skep.  

With Liz having been away on the actual date of my Birthday, she proposed that I should have a second "Official" birthday on the next available day so that I could catch up on the missing presents and coffee in bed and the special meal. We decided on Saturday (25th) and I had a lovely day being spoiled. The presents had a decidedly bee-keeping flavour and included the lovely straw 'skep' in the pic. Every home should have one, don't you agree? These were the actual hives back in the days before modern wooden hives were designed but had the disadvantage that you could not remove the honey on portable frames like we can now, so the colony had to be destroyed at harvest time to get the honey out.

Nowadays, we do not willingly destroy our bee colonies,and the skeps are used as swarm-catching baskets; they are much better than cardboard boxes or other containers because the bees can cling to the inside and hang on in there while you move them about. I also think they are beautiful artifacts so I have wanted one since we had bees, even though I am not at all sure I will ever get the chance to use it in anger.

Beef Wellington. Happy Birthday to me!

The meal was a treat, which we served on our best table linen ( a gift from Montenegro via 'Steak Lady'; thanks SL). Liz did a starter of langoustines and the main course was a Beef Wellington of rare scrumptiousness; the 'duxelle' mix round the meat was mushroom, onions and bacon. Dessert was a splendid blackberry Pavlova. For most of my life I have not been a fan of meringue because, as far as I knew, merignue was always impossibly sweet and like spooning crunchy sugar into your mouth. I do not have that kind of a 'sweet tooth'. If we were served lemon meringue pie I would try to sneak the meringue layer across to Liz.

Blackberry Pavlova

I am now converted. Meringue from Liz here is made with our real eggs as well as way less sugar, and is slightly soft and yielding rather than brittle. The fruit, too, is always done nice and naturally, with hardly any sugar added. In this case these were blackberries picked by us from John Deere Bob's field hedgerows and the mild un-enhanced flavour was beautifully evocative of the summer sun on picking day and the taste of the blackberries you always sneak as you walk round with the bucket, picking them. One for the bucket, one for me? No, not quite. We picked 5 kg each that day - we'd have been sick of them.

Fillet steak.

We lubricated the starter and dessert with chilled rosé and had a more meaty Rioja for the main course - a lovely 'Gran Reserva' grade Batturica (Tarragona) 2007 bottle from the amazingly good vintner, Lidl's supermarket (!) yours for just €7.99. The steak, too had been a good find - from our local favourite butcher (who is also our lamb slaughterman/butcher), Ignatius G Victualler. He had cut it out especially for us and kept it for us. Very reasonable in price, too.

Liz slices the cappings off a frame of
honey comb. 

Before I give the 'rescue package' bee hive back to our benefactor in Longford, I have to clean it and re-populate it with new frames and foundation, so we needed to 'dispose' of the used frames and sort out what to keep. You will know from earlier posts that some of these frames were full of honey, so we decided to have a go at extracting this. Bee keepers normally do this during mid/late summer after each 'honey flow' (i.e. at the end of the oilseed rape flowering season, or after the clover, or fruit blossom or heather), and do it with a gentle 'centrifuge' machine. The frames fit into the rotor of the machine and you spin the honey off them after slicing off the crinkly white wax cappings.

The mess of honey and wax sits in the muslin. The potential
for creating sticky mess is awesome. 

We have no such machine so we had to try letting the honey run out down through a muslin sheet, helped by gentle warmth from a double-boiler arrangement sitting on our range. Some of the honey comb was liquid enough (what they call "run honey"), presumably from blackberry blossom or other flowers. Some though was hard crystallized (granulated) so was probably ivy honey and was only going to drip through if it was warmed up. You have to do this very gently (roughly blood heat and a bit). Do not go anywhere near 60ºC or the wax will also start to melt and the honey will lose a lot of its flavour. Much of honey flavour is from bases, salts, amino acids, proteins and volatiles in it, as well as pollen so the more you mess it about, the more the quality goes down. You must also not use steam or damp-heat as honey is hygroscopic and takes up water easily from the surroundings. If it can stay at only 17% moisture it will keep for ever, but if the moisture content rises to 20% it can start to ferment, trying to turn itself into mead and developing bad 'off flavours'.

Double boiler set up on the range. 

Anyway, to cut a long story short this all worked and when we were satisfied that it would bimble gently through the night at not much more than blood heat, we left it to dribble and by morning we had a nice load of honey in the pan under the collander  which we were able to decant into a couple of jars in the morning. The 'dip a finger in' test told us that it was a bit special and certainly tasted a whole lot better than the commercial honey on our kitchen shelf. Liz promptly cooked up some toast and we had toast and honey for breakfast. We don't generally eat a lot of honey here (maybe 3 jars a year?) but we may do now that we have some proper stuff. Anne and Simon, who turned up later in the day also tried it and were impressed.

Generally speaking we are not about a huge production of honey. We like the bees for the 'wildlife gardening' reasons and to help with pollination locally. We never anticipated extracting much crop, preferring to leave the bees with it to help them through the winter. That is why, after all, the bees make and store honey - their survival through winter is at stake. We were going to ensure that the bees had enough (30 to 40 lbs per hive) and only steal a frame or two if these were excess to that. Only our hive failure led us to this happy coincidence and this lovely stash. Every cloud, we suppose, has a silver lining.

There are a few bubbles in it but our first honey is a lovely
pale colour and truly delicious. 

With all the honey extracted from the honey/wax mess, we now have the option of trying to recover the beeswax which Liz fancies turning into furniture polish or 'lotions and potions'. After however many seasons in the hive being trampled over by thousands of dirty, outdoor, bee feet, the wax can come off the 'extractor' dark brown or almost black but now we are not so worried about heat, so the wax is melted in the company of hot water so that it washes as well as going liquid and then you leave the whole to settle and cool. In theory you get a disc of clean. re-solidified wax 'floating' on your cooled down water, which you can then use in the alchemy to follow. I will let you know how this bit goes when we have processed a few more frames. Honey comb is so fine and delicately built that you do not get much wax out for each pound of honey; typically 1/8 as much.

We are having fun and learning all the time. The jars you see in these pics are from our first frame of honey. Since then we have started a bigger batch using 2 more frames. I don't think there is any chance of us going into commercial production but it will be nice to give a few jars away to friends. I was always amused by thoughts of what we would call the brand - honey is famously good to buy locally because there is a firm belief that eating local honey helps guard against allergies to local pollen, hay fever and so on. I wondered if we'd get away with using "Bees@Feigh", Feigh being the local 'townland'. However, the rhyme with 'bee' only works if you are an ignorant Brit, like me, and think it is pronounced 'fee'. It is not. It is another one of those 'Anglicised' Irish words (for deer), translittorated by the British military and map makers when they were 'in charge'. It is actually pronounced  'Fi' like the word 'fit' without the 't'; it is a very difficult word for Brits to say as we expect either a long vowel or a consonant. Bees@Feigh would just confuse everyone and might even put off the locals who you'd be hoping were your customers.

Rhubarb pie with a polenta crust.

The other mildly amusing aspect of this job is the HUGE potential for making a sticky mess. The honey can drip and then get on everything and the wax will happily re-solidify out of your washing up water as soon as it leaves the kitchen and cools down in the waste pipes en route to the sewer. We end up being oh so careful with the honey and keeping a pan JUST for the wax which will never get used for anything else. Well, we do if we want to see another Birthday, anyway!

Let sleeping dogs........

After lots of years of trying, Dad and his allotments gang have finally obtained grants to fence in the public foot path. The work will be done by proper contractors, but the ground works and clearing up of old fencing will be done by Dad and his merry men. When we say "old fencing", this is, of course an allotment site where the spirit of recycling and "make-do-and-mend" is ingrained in the culture. Old fencing is pallets, bed frames, brambles, sheets of corrugated iron and so on.

So it is that we have been up there today with loppers, pruning saws and forks but also wire cutters and crow-bars.

With Mum away with Diamond in Glasgow, Dad's been seeing to it that we don't feel hard done by, so a treat today of raw pork ribs saw us OK, and Dad has been coming out in solidarity with Glasgow, with a supper of haggis, neeps and tatties. At one point a glass of Glenmorangie was calling loudly to him, but he's pleased to say he resisted, and stuck to traditional Scots Rioja (!)

Now, as you can see, we are all watching West Wing. Glued to it we are. That's "H" on the leather sofa, me up on the back of the sofa against the wall, and Meggie on the dark blue arm chair. You can tell it's a gripping political drama, and just up a westie's alley.

Deefski