We have had the most unbelievable weather recently. Our fruit trees are completely covered in blossom and remind me that it won't be long before I'll be fruit picking. I've set myself a challenge to make sure we don't waste any crop from our land this year and we have a number of apple trees as well as pear, plum, cherry, quince, sloe, raspberries and blackberries - so I have quite a lot of work on my hands with jams, pies, drinks - perhaps some gin!
I'm still preparing my veg patch, which I really need to get finished now. I dug in a few tractor loads of old horse manure a few weeks ago and have quite a bit more digging to do! So I will have veg from the garden this summer to add to the fridge.
It's not only fruit and veg though, as I'm sure you know we bought our first pigs in January, which was very exciting. We decided to buy Rare Breed Berkshires - seemed the right thing to do seeing as we used to live in Berkshire! We bought a male pig who was a few weeks off slaughter and two girls with a view to breeding. Our male had already been named Robin and after spending some time with the girls, we named them Pepper and Olive. The pigs have been so much fun, they are really friendly - we scratch them and they drop on to their sides so we'll tickle their tummies. They are also very muddy and very good and turning up any grass, roots, rock, walls around them!
At the end of March the time had come to send Robin to slaughter. We investigated our options of driving him to our local abattoir or having a home kill and eventually decided on a home kill, which was done by a french retired butcher called Christian. We checked that it was going to be done humanely and he confirmed that a quick shot to the head and he wouldn't know anything that went on afterwards. We began to get really nervous as the day approached, I decided to have a couple of glasses of wine at lunch to calm the nerves. He arrived at 3pm on the dot on a friday afternoon, Stu and I had already separated Robin from the girls and put him in one of our barns, we were brushing him and giving him love when Christian arrived. Suddenly before I knew what was going on Christian had walked into the barn with his stun gun, I heard one squeal and they were dragging Robin out - that was it. They had to hang him in a tree to slit his throat and let the blood drain, I was in charge of pulling the tractor forward acting as a winch to pull Robin into the tree. I watched as they worked on him and it wasn't as bad as I thought, once he was truly gone they set about cleaning his insides and taking the hair off. They worked quickly, speaking all the time, most of which passed me by; in 45 minutes they were waving as they pulled off our driveway and we had a pig hanging in our barn. Robin had gone.
He arrived at 6.45am the next morning and we really didn't know what to expect other than he'd asked us to buy garlic, onions, white wine, salt, pepper and parsely - so he was going to cook! He set up in Stu's workshop with lots of vats bubbling away on gas rings, we had crawled out of bed, pulled on some old clothes and were sipping coffee as he took the saw to the first of Robin's legs....he worked fast as the morning went on he was throwing meat at me left right and centre, I was bagging it up as quickly as i could. All the extra bits were being thrown in various vats to be cooked - we still didn't really know what was going on. He handed me a pot of terrine (pate) and told me to go and put it straight in the oven for 3 hours and when he started on the black pudding or Boudin in french he asked me to taste the fresh blood after he's salted it! After 5 hours of cutting and cooking, we had 40 pork chops, 5 huge joints, 2 filet mignons, 80 black pudding, bags of terrine, a pot of 'pate de tete' - for those of you that don't know, that's EVERYTHING from the head - Stu saw an eyeball go in!, bacon, liver....I think that was it. The experience was absolutely amazing and the freezer as planned was full of meat.
It's not just the pigs, we also had 11 hens, 2 cockerels and 4 ducks until last week when we sold 2 hens and a cockerel. We get so many eggs each week, I can't cook them quick enough and we're now ready to eat some chickens. Our beautiful chicks from last summer are still here and laying us stunning blue eggs, we don't really want to eat them just yet- but I think we will eventually. We rescued 6 hens from a lady earlier in the year and we think we're going to start by eating those, although Stu has already killed one, we're going to take them to a local abattoir who do all the horrible work for just a couple of euros - it's a no brainer.
One of our ducks 'Em', is now sitting on lots of eggs and on the 20th April we should have some ducklings, which is very exciting. So, we will also be able to eat some of our own duck later in the year. Needless to say, we also picked up a new freezer on the weekend!
Bring on the house cow and little lambs I say!
Sunday, 10 April 2011
I have a Kitchen! Yay!
So, I'll start from the beginning with the plans for our Kitchen. When we bought the house we were lucky enough to have a large amount of old oak left in our hangar. We had always planned to use as much of the resources we already had on the land as possible and so it was obvious to have a real oak floor in our country kitchen. When it came to the crunch and we really looked at the oak, we realised that some of the beams were so huge that we would need to get them to a mill to have them cut down, Stu has some pretty major table saws and stuff but nothing as big as we needed! Also, even if we had got it cut down, Stu would have spent weeks sanding all the wood down and trying to prepare it. It turned out that one of the french people that lives in the next village is a carpenter and so we decided to get a quote. He came and looked at the wood and calculated how much useable stuff we had, it was a perfect amount to do the kitchen area. He said he'd cut all the knots out for us and we were saying 'no!' 'we love the knots', he thought we were weird but agreed to keep them in. The quote was much less than we expected and we had the wood back at our house within a week, it was sanded, tongue & grooved and stunning!
We had spent some time planning the type of adhesive we were going to use, which wasn't simple as we have laid underfloor heating - but we got there in the end and bought it from the uk as we could get better advice and, as always, it was cheaper. So finally by mid February we had everything we needed, Stu's younger brother flew over to us and they laid the floor in a couple of days. The room was transformed! We sanded and treated it overnight for two nights in a row and finally it was done.
Our Kitchen had been sat in our main barn since summer last year, which had been a real stress as we had no idea how the wood was holding up through the winter and really didn't know what we would find when we unwrapped it. So, heart's in our mouth and a little prayer said, we were ready to bring the kitchen in. We were lucky, it was seemingly unharmed by the change in temperature and humidity from summer to autumn to winter and it was definitely as beautiful as I remembered it in the shop. We bought it in unit by unit and started to try and make it fit, I say try because it didn't really fit! I don't know where we got our measurements wrong but let's just say we had to make some adjustments, I don't think you'd know - but we do! It took us a few days to get it really right, levelling it and fitting the cornice etc. all take time but we got there.
The worktop was the final piece of the puzzle but Stu was too scared to cut it, we had two huge lengths of real oak and he said that if he did it wrong there would be no going back! Luckily we have an english friend here who is also a carpenter and he came over for the day and did a fantastic job. By early March we were there, I had not only a lovely kitchen, but my big oven, a beautiful butler sink and a dishwasher! Cooking is a joy again.
We had a few visitors in March, which was great but as always it did mean that the work on the house slowed down a bit, the bathroom upstairs has been finished and looks beautiful and work has started on my larder room, which is where I intend to store all our meat, jams, juices etc.
We had spent some time planning the type of adhesive we were going to use, which wasn't simple as we have laid underfloor heating - but we got there in the end and bought it from the uk as we could get better advice and, as always, it was cheaper. So finally by mid February we had everything we needed, Stu's younger brother flew over to us and they laid the floor in a couple of days. The room was transformed! We sanded and treated it overnight for two nights in a row and finally it was done.
Our Kitchen had been sat in our main barn since summer last year, which had been a real stress as we had no idea how the wood was holding up through the winter and really didn't know what we would find when we unwrapped it. So, heart's in our mouth and a little prayer said, we were ready to bring the kitchen in. We were lucky, it was seemingly unharmed by the change in temperature and humidity from summer to autumn to winter and it was definitely as beautiful as I remembered it in the shop. We bought it in unit by unit and started to try and make it fit, I say try because it didn't really fit! I don't know where we got our measurements wrong but let's just say we had to make some adjustments, I don't think you'd know - but we do! It took us a few days to get it really right, levelling it and fitting the cornice etc. all take time but we got there.
The worktop was the final piece of the puzzle but Stu was too scared to cut it, we had two huge lengths of real oak and he said that if he did it wrong there would be no going back! Luckily we have an english friend here who is also a carpenter and he came over for the day and did a fantastic job. By early March we were there, I had not only a lovely kitchen, but my big oven, a beautiful butler sink and a dishwasher! Cooking is a joy again.
We had a few visitors in March, which was great but as always it did mean that the work on the house slowed down a bit, the bathroom upstairs has been finished and looks beautiful and work has started on my larder room, which is where I intend to store all our meat, jams, juices etc.
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