The Six-Day Week

More often, but not for so long at a time. That's the key to this blogging lark.* Slap me on the wrists, I'd be useless at Twitter. And in any case, who wants to know 'Oh good, the Everbearing Strawberries have arrived - now I need to plant them'?

As I mentioned some time ago in the Growing Audit, setting out to be self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables has had an unexpectedly potent influence on our diet. We have a weekly delivery of milk and fruit (although we're increasingly viewing the fruit as an age-of-carbon indulgence), and other than that we only shop once a month. We make most of our own bread and yogurt, and buy cheese from a shop near WP's work. This means that our meals are now largely driven by 'what can I do with these seasonal vegetables?' rather than 'what's in the freezer?', which means we're eating less and less meat.**

Writing up the menu board for the rest of this week (which helps with planning) it occurred to me that I've only cooked meat once in six days; I haven't planned Saturday yet, but Friday is really the leftovers from Sunday, when I slow-roasted a shoulder of local pork, an economical and hugely tasty cut of meat that has been largely ignored by the supermarkets.***

It cost £11, but we were floored by how much meat there was on it - there was still a great hunk of top-notch meat left when we were full, two meals at least. I froze half, and the other half went in the freezer. So thus far it's been;

Sunday - slow-roasted pork shoulder with roast potatoes, green beans and rich gravy (thickened with roasted and seived onion, parsnip and celeriac) & a forced rhubarb tart

Monday - tomato soup (featuring onion, carrot and celeriac) beefed up with half a tin of tomato paste) and onion bread (featuring dried onion)

Tuesday - nut cutlets (featuring onion and carrot), celeriac mash and steamed spinach (with excellent leftover gravy)

Wednesday - curried parsnip soup with sage bread

Thursday - spaghetti with tomato, onion and garlic (using the rest of the tomato paste)

Friday - stir-fried honey pork (leftover from Sunday) and peppers with noodles

You'll have noticed, no doubt, that the winter storage vegetables (onion, celeriac, carrot, parsnip, potato) feature quite prominently in there, but are mostly disguised because otherwise we start to get tired of them. The peppers, beans and tomatoes are frozen. This is an age-of-carbon solution and one which we'll need to move away from soon, so I foresee a move towards more dried and bottled (canned) produce before too long; as always, watch this space. But don't hold your breath.

And now, if you'll pardon me, the Day-neutral Strawberries have arrived. I need to go and plant them.




*Ah, it's true for so many things in life.

**There's a wider argument here, but I'll save it for another day. For now let's just say I'm ambivalent.

***Tastewise far superior to the more visually-appealing leg and chops. The public supermarket-driven appetite for these rather limited cuts has driven the UK pork industry to the edge of annihilation - we now export them to Europe and import more of the 'choice' cuts - and there are welfare issues too. But don't take my word for it - give it a try. There are easy recipes here, and in the UK pork shoulder sells for about £4.50 per kg. Make sure you buy British!

Of Backs and Badness

I've been quiet for a few days, I know, which has prompted a concerned comment or two in case I had managed to poison the whole clan with roadkill venison; not the case, let me assure you. No, what's been keeping me quiet is one simple thing. You call it spring. I have a few other names for it, largely due to the sudden increase in garden work that it requires.

One year soon I'm going to be on top of all my winter jobs before Ole Man Spring comes knocking. The strangler vine will be clipped and tied; the strawberries will all be snug in their beds; there will be no new beds to dig; no fences to make; no last-minute mulching to do.

S'yeah, right.

At any rate, the last couple of days have been taken up with a most impressive bout of backache, brought on by the hazardous task of putting a teabag in the compost caddy. It's funny how it's often the little things that catch you - a friend of mine dislocated his kneecap closing some curtains (Dislocated! Kneecap! I mean, Jesus!) . Of course the real problem wasn't the teabag at all, it was the hours I spent handweeding the asparagus bed on a cold and windy Tuesday, because I carelessly let it get away. Big mistake. So teabag? Ouchie. Still, at least I get a warm glow from knowing that the asparagus bed is now snug under four inches of compost. Or maybe it's the wintergreen, who knows.

It's going to get warmer this week, according to my home-made thaumaturgic weather station, so it's seeds a-gogo tomorrow. No doubt something will come along to keep me from them. Over the last few weeks there have been family emergencies, maladies, Publisher Panics and dead animals. I wonder what's coming next?

Venison, anyone?

"Allow about three hours," George said, explaining why he wouldn't be coming, "and use a five-gallon bucket to catch the guts."

That was the sum total of the good advice I'd been given when I went to work on my roadkill deer. Sadly, I'd also been given a couple of pieces of bad advice (not from George), including 'don't bleed it', 'don't gut it yet' and 'cross the hind legs to hang it, like a rabbit'. As it turns out deer are best bled and gutted as soon as possible to stop the flavours getting too strong, and crossing the legs is a poor idea because then you can't get good access to the belly.

Here isn't the best place to go into the actual process (and I'm not going to make Fergus Drennan's mistake of posting grisly images of half-skinned animals). Suffice it to say that eviscerating a deer (technically gralloching, not paunching as I mistakenly said this morning) turns out to be a bit easier than doing a chicken; more room to see what you're doing - a boon to a sausage-fingered dolt like me. And George was right about the bucket.

So most of the beast is bound for the freezer, wrapped in butcher's paper and bagged (ah you see, not so terribly post-carbon really, am I?). I cut some medallions off one of the loins for tonight's meal though - and the fish chowder I had planned can wait for another day. The medallions were cut just under an inch thick and pan-fried in butter, and when they were done I threw in a glass of red wine, a couple of spoonfuls of sloe gin jelly and a shot of Crème de Cacao Brown, and reduced it until it resembled gravy. This was served with steamed carrots, fresh from the polytunnel, and celeriac mash (which uses about one-third celeriac and two-thirds potato, so that you get the celeriac's aromatic note while keeping the creaminess of the spuds). And the venison, by the way, was excellent.

So to my beloved wife, who was waiting for me to bottle out - 'Told you so!'

Roadkill 101

Hmm. A little while ago I ventured that I was intending to experiment with the eating of roadkill. This turns the stomach of most people, but I'm pretty sure that it's all down to our very visceral experiences encountering dead animals that have been there for a while, and got a bit lively. A fresh kill, on the other hand, where there's a very obvious cause of death and a known time window (in this case between midnight and 6am) is another matter.

There's a common misconception here in England that if you kill something in your own vehicle, you're not allowed to take it home. Not true, I discover - if you hit it you have a duty to leave the carriageway clear, as with anything else. The theoretical owner of the carcass is the Highways Authority, but this is very rarely enforced. In other words, trough away!

I thought I might start gently, say with a bunny or two, and put a small plastic sheet in the car in case I should pass one*. But yesterday my beloved WP rang me at 9.30 to tell me there was a deer on the driveway. A bloody deer, and too heavy to carry up the hill without my wheelbarrow - and of course once I had the carcass in there everyone had to come out to take a look, including the vegetarian Miss Giggle who was surprisingly cool with it given that the crows had been there just previously to remove the eyes.

She peered. "What's that you've got there?"

"No eye dear."

Well, you have to don't you? Opportunities for crap jokes like that one don't come along often.

So. Said deer has been hanging in the garage overnight while I tried - unsuccessfully - to engage the interest of anyone who has butchered one before. Now it will be me and my kitchen knives, and may the gods have mercy. But first... I have to paunch it. This should be interesting.



*Recollections of my late friend Vaguenbeardy, who screeched to a halt on his way to work to collect a pheasant struck by the car in front. Leaving the carcass in the trunk all day, after work he went to put his briefcase back in and the bird, who had only been stunned, shot out like a jack-in-the-box leaving the car full of shit and feathers, and V close to a heart attack from the shock. Ah, memories.

Things you find yourself saying

Thanks for the eggbox blurb efforts on the previous posts, chaps. Keep them coming!

No time to stop today - again - as I've missed the deadline for an article and really should know better. As a peace offering, have a clip from an e-mail I can't quite believe I just sent...

"...as a member of the public, if I was given the choice of attending the (insert worthy cause here) AGM or watching a duck die in the river, I'd probably have to think about it.
At least the river is handy for the chip shop."

Blurb

(clears throat)

Blingle Farm
Large barn eggs
Blingle Farm hens live in spacious barns where they are free to roam, perch and dust bathe as part of their natural behaviour. They are fed a cereal based diet enriched with corn and wheat.

That's the blurb off the top of an egg box which a neighbour gave me to put his eggs in, and that's exactly how it reads except that I've changed the farm name. Without wishing to go into the ins and outs of egg production, I'm interested in the blurb (that's the flavour text used to describe the contents of the box). You have to be honest in the text otherwise the Advertising Standards Authority comes and tells you you're a very naughty boy, but that still leaves a lot of room for a wily copy editor to play.

For instance, the use of the word 'barn'. This has no precise technical meaning but manages to convey, to the naïve, an image of a moderately-sized red-painted structure with a hayloft, from which bare-footed urchins swing on a rope to land in a haycart, squealing with delight. The barn is open at the front and the farmyard chickens wander in and out, chasing the occasional butterfly. One suspects this is not the case. Furthermore the barn can be as spacious as it likes, even in bold text, and still look a bit cramped once you bung four thousand chickens into it. I could go on – even to point of asking how a diet could be based on cereals if you left out the corn and wheat, without actually becoming porridge – but I won't.

The point here is the skill of blurb writing. Ever had a go? I once revamped the menu of a gastropub run by a fierce Irish friend of mine, after finding her sitting on a bar stool chewing the end of a pencil and looking greatly troubled. When asked what was wrong, she said 'No-one's eating the mussels. I've had to throw most of them away again. Perhaps we should stop doing them...'

I took a look at the menu. It said, in an unappealing impact font, 'a pint of mussels'. I thought that perhaps I wouldn't have ordered that.

'Hmm,' says I, 'I think I can see your problem. What do you serve them with?'

'Lettuce, a bit of wheaten bread, and some sauce,' says Mrs Fierce.

'What sort of sauce?'

'Don't know. It's Liam's, but he won't tell anyone what he puts in it. It's not bad, but it's a bit... orange.'

'And where do you get the mussels from?'

'Ardglass.'

'Wasn't there a rumour that Van Morrison was sitting in here when he wrote Coney Island?'

'Was there?' Mrs Fierce asks, all excited. I shrug. There is now, Mrs F will see to it. Ten minutes later the menu is reworked, and a marginal note warns Liam to use a different font so that his menu won't actually alarm the diners. It now reads; 'Coney Island Mussels - A good pint of Ardglass mussels, served with Liam's secret sauce on a bed of crisp lettuce and fresh wheaten bread.'

It's important not to overdo these things, otherwise you end up with things like 'Subtly crisp medallions of rare-breed pork loin with red onion and five-spice marmalade, accented with a bruised raspberry and cinnamon jus' (can't remember where I ate this, but I remember how disappointing it was after the droolsome intro).

Sales did much better after that, Mrs Fierce told me; you get the idea now. To give me something to chortle at, if you keep chickens why not write the blurb for your own eggs? Here's mine.

Hedgewizard's Hollow Eggs*
All-sized funny-little-house-on-legs eggs
Hollow hens live in high-rise accommodation where they are free to scratch about, dig to China, peck the arse off each other and occasionally escape to eat the contents of the polytunnel as part of their natural behaviour. They are theoretically fed on organic chicken feed, but in practice eat all sorts of things including weeds from the veg patch, low-hanging pears, bumblebees and even the odd mouse.



*The eggs aren't actually hollow, and neither is Hedgewizard – the place is in a bit of dip, is all. I could easily have called it something else, all right? God, you people.

Routines, Strawberries and the Reinstatement of Yon

I still have nothing even remotely resembling a routine, unless you can call being horrified each morning by the time it takes me to answer e-mails. Yesterday was eaten by a succession of minor but important tasks, such as getting the drains unblocked, drinking a vital pint at an excellent local pub in support of the food co-operative, reorganising my sock drawer and taking lots of photographs in the polytunnel before I plundered it for the ingredients of a rich vegetable soup. With loads of barley in.

Much of the morning, however, was spent talking to a local journalist about the Transition movement. This was too good an opportunity to miss, not least because of the free coffee but mostly because Ruth, bless her heart, is using Transition Town Dorchester as the lead for a colour supplement later in the year. This is a fairly steep learning curve for her, however, as she had no idea what the whole thing was about and had never heard of Peak Oil; so taking things from first principles we were there for... oh, quite a while.

One of Ruth's questions, though, made me pause for a minute. 'Do you ever think you might merge Transition Dorchester with Transition Weymouth?' she asked. 'I mean, they're only a spit down the road from each other.' Well, yes and no, I told her. Dorchester and Weymouth are quite close together - separated only by a few miles of fields and a geographical feature known as the Ridgeway. However the Transition movement is all about planning for a future where we won't have so much fossil fuel to make such trips. In a car, the Ridgeway is a fair-sized hill; on a bike it's more like a cardiovasular workout. On a bike with some heavy shopping in the panniers, it'd practically be a death sentence.

The point is that in the post-carbon economy the world is going to start un-shrinking. What's a spit down the road today is going to be a fair old trek in a decade or two. We may have to reinstate the word yon into our speech. Yon and yonder have fallen out of use over the last couple of hundred years, unless you live in Scotland and some other places about which no doubt you're all about to tell me. I think it's kind of a pity.

For anyone not familiar with it, yon is like an extension of there but a bit further away. The cat who just stole your warm pork chop* may be here (unwisely choosing to eat it right in front of you), there (chewing it up in the hall) or yon (scarfing it down in the relative safety of next door's garden). It's not just there, it's over there, just out of slipper-throwing range. Itinerant cats are nearly always yon, and Weymouth... Weymouth is definitely yon.

But back to today, and the planting of a second row of strawberries in patch B. Sure, I know it's late but that's OK - being as patch A is still in production I can afford to pull the flowers off the plants in patch B this summer, and let them concentrate on forming a good root network. Out goes Sophie the late strawberry, which had an indifferent taste, and in comes a day-neutral variety yet to be chosen. Here we go.



*In memoriam, Magellan the warm pork chop thief. Sorely missed, but not by Colin's next door neighbour whose aim improved considerably over the years.