Who Do You Think You Are, David Bailey?

I'm getting increasingly frustrated with my photos. I was out this morning, in the damp early morning mildness, and saw the kingfisher. Joy! I took a photo. Here it is:

I know there is a kingfisher in this photo but even opening it in Photoshop and enlarging it made it difficult to tell the difference between bird and bulrush.
I have partially solved the problem, the frugal way by buying a second hand digital camera off ebay. It is a fixed lens camera only suitable for snaps but at 16 megapixels it will be a big improvement on the phone. It cost £40, my dream digital SLR costs nearer £1000 and there were ones I couldn't even dream about costing over £2000.
The other solution of course is to dig out the old Canon AE1 35mm SLR with its 300mm telephoto lens. This does have its drawbacks 1) It will seem like forever waiting to get the film back from processing 2) they would then have to be scanned into the computer 3) I would have to learn how to use it again. Shutter speed? focal length? remind me someone.

Deadlines no more

For the last nine years whilst working at the university, January 31st has been the deadline for filing the Transparency Review Return for which I was responsible. January went by in a blur of long hours, stressful meetings, last minute adjustments. Prior to that, I ran my own chutney business, so January 31st was also a stressful day, as it was filing day for self assessment tax forms. Many a time have I hand delivered the form to the tax office at 5.30pm. So there is a strange feeling of lightness in the air,  coupled with a nagging worry that I have missed something important, as for the first time in seventeen years, the last week in January is just another step on the way to spring.
This morning on the valley, it was mild and springlike, I saw two rabbits in the wood as I hurried on my way to the pond. Like a teenage girl hoping to see her crush hanging out on a street corner, my walks these days all head in the same direction as I hope that today the kingfisher will come out and display himself. Yesterday he flitted several times across the pond before settling on a branch overhanging the pond, as though posing for an illustration in a bird book. I couldn't get a photo, my camera is only on a mobile phone and not good enough for anything further than a few feet away, also by the time I have taken off the security code that I put on in a fleeting attack of  responsibility, any self respecting bird has flown off long since. Here is a picture of the overflow area of the pond though, looking very full since all the snow has melted.

Hoping that my coat was long enough to keep my bottom dry, I sat down gingerly on the grass and  for ten minutes waited for anything that might show itself. Although the kingfisher is my star attraction, the supporting players in the guise of little brown birds that flit in and out of the bulrushes were all out. If they would stay still long enough to get the binoculars to focus on them it would be a help. Out too were a pair of mallards, the duck I saw earlier in the month now being joined by a drake. I do hope there will be ducklings in spring.

 At this point another star player came into view as a red kite soared across the sky. By leaning back so I was lying back against the hillside I could watch its graceful trajectory. It was at this point that I realised how much my life had changed. Never in the last seventeen years, had I thought I would spend any time in this last week of January, lying on my back on the grass watching birds.

The Importance of Work?

I switched on breakfast television this morning at six whilst making my morning tea, and was in time to catch an item live from a gym, about High Intensity Training, the theory that to get fit you don't need to work out for hours just 3 minutes at full intensity.It struck me that these people were having to pay to go to a gym because they didn't have time to exercise naturally, as part of their daily lives (walking, cycling, gardening whatever). So they had got themselves into a situation, where they were earning money, for them to spend compensating themselves, for the time they had lost through earning money. In addition, they were having to go to the gym at 6 in order to fit it into their day. This madness is not for me. I know most people have to work for an employer but can't we find a way to offer more jobs at shorter hours for less pay?
One person who is happy to be going into work is my neighbour Kevin. I met him this morning on the way into his second day back at work following a devastating stroke two and a half years ago when he was in his mid fifties. Work is important to him as a way of showing that he is just  a normal person who has mobility problems and needs to use a wheelchair. Wishing him the best of luck.

Old Wives Tales

On Friday night, the snow in Leeds came down good and heavy, we had been predicted rain for Saturday so not wanting to miss the best snow we had had in years, my friend and I both of us about to hit our fifties, decided to go midnight sledging. All the time I was waiting for someone to stop me, I could hear the voices of my mother and other grown ups, in my head saying 'You get to bed now! This is ridiculous, you'll catch your death of cold' After half an hour of sledging on perfect snow, my own inner grown up began to return, I had to admit I was cold, wet and tired and the snow was coming down so hard it coated our heads and faces. We went home.
Saturday morning I woke at 7.30 to find the rain hadn't come, the snow was still there looking absolutely beautiful in the sunshine. Despite tiredness and aching legs from the night before, I felt obliged to go out again  to give Rosie and Oliver the chance to experience the sort of snow that only comes to Leeds, once every five years or so. Surprisingly the youth of Leeds are not early risers, even when there is snow to be played in and once again we had the hill to ourselves until at least half past ten.
Wanting to share it with you, I have recorded this video clip on my phone. If it looks bumpy that is because it  was.

Sunday however was when all the Old Wives in my head reared up and said 'I told you so.' I felt awful, sore throat, headache, fever, tiredness. I know you can't catch a cold from being out in the cold and wet but it was very suspicious. Possibly the cold and wet and unusually amounts of exercise (all that walking up hill) had lowered my immune system letting the cold virus flood in. It meant that yesterday I was good for little apart from watching Andy Murray lose at tennis and trying to read a book I couldn't get into.

You will be pleased to know that I am feeling much livelier today and that this morning's walk on the valley resulted in the retrieval of two missing gloves. I was especially pleased to find Rosie's as I had borrowed it without asking last week, believing correctly that it was warmer than mine, only to drop the blessed thing in the garden.

Stocking up - Part two

So after making a stash of carrot cake, malt loaf and oat cakes to see us through the week, I thought I would have a go at making cheese.

 Making a soft cheese is really very simple, you just take milk (I used 4 pints), heat it to 32 degrees and then add rennet according to the instructions on the packet and leave it to set. After several hours it will look like this :

Chop it into cubes and heat again to 32 degrees. This will encourage the whey to drain from the curds. It can then be turned into a muslin lined sieve to drain.

Once it has drained to the desired consistency turn it into a bowl and add salt and any herbs to taste. A little milk or cream may be added now as well.
So I had my cottage cheese, but what to do with it? One answer was to use it as a filling for ravioli so naturally I had to make pasta then. I made it by mixing 6 eggs into 600g of white bread flour and attempting to form it into a dough. My mixture however was incredibly dry and didn't want to stick together so I instead of adding more egg, I cheated by adding a little water. This seemed to do the trick although compared with bread making the dough still seemed very hard to knead. Eventually I had a lump which looked like this:

  Taking approximately a quarter of this dough I rolled it out until it was thin enough to force it through the rollers of the pasta maker, like so:

Then I kept on passing it through the rollers, moving them closer together each time until the above lump of dough had been rolled so thin, I had been forced to cut it in half and turn it into two pieces like so:

I then did the same with the remainder of the dough. Although I was going to make ravioli, I had far more dough than I needed so I used one third to make spaghetti and another to make tagliatelle:

These have both gone in the freezer for another day. Cost for all the pasta about 54p.
The ravioli I wanted to make was this recipe by the Hairy Bikers http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/ricotta_ravioli_with_a_25270 for Ricotta Ravioli with Soft Egg Yolk, Brown Butter and Pan Grattata. Obviously I was using my own home made cheese instead of ricotta. Translated the recipe called for large ravioli parcels to be filled with a ricotta and parmesan mixture and then have an egg yolk placed gently on top of the cheese like so

 and covered with the top sheet of pasta. This is then poached in simmering water for two minutes to give you a lightly poached egg inside ravioli.It is finished off by being  topped with garlic breadcrumbs and melted butter poured over. Here is the finished article after I cut into the egg to show off the glorious golden yolk of our eggs.

A Life in Food

My mother was given the above recipe book as a wedding present. On the flyleaf she has inscribed her wedding date and her name, possibly the first time she had written her new name after signing the register in church. It was October 1949, food rationing was coming to an end and there must have been hope that the a recipe book was now appropriate as a present, that the ingredients would be available and the family members would be there  to eat the special meals. So it became part of our family life, she would write in recipes that she had been given, like the malt loaf recipe or stick in ones cut from newspapers or magazines like the Christmas cake recipe. I don't know when she acquired that recipe but it was the one we went to every year, the picture of the chef in the newspaper acquiring a blue pen beard and moustache as we girls waited to be allocated jobs, chopping almonds or cherries for the three Christmas cakes made every year in September to mature for Christmas. Naturally when I needed to make a special cake for Oliver's christening it was that recipe I went to.

When I left home to go to university, I started my own book and this too became a record of my life. My mother's recipe for home made bread being the first entry. It charted all the fads and fancies, the diets and the health kicks, the frugal recipes and the splurges for special occasions. Amongst them were recipes that became standards in the family, the sticky chocolate cake and the cookie recipes. It was useful too, when I went on self catering holidays, I took it with me as having all the key recipes I would want to make. This was my undoing though, I took it camping to France with me in 2011 and somehow, incredibly, it got lost. I mourn that book as a part of my life, lost.

It was too useful not to be recreated but now I am going digital, I am slowly typing my recipes onto the computer from where I can transfer them on to my kindle and carry them around with me that way. It will mean that I will always have them on back up and ready to be sent to student daughters at the call of a telephone. It won't be the same though, I will never be able to tell favourite recipes by the way the book falls open or remember cooking disasters by the stains on a page. It can never look like this:

I will never have that recall of exactly how I felt when I wrote a recipe down. There was a recipe in my book, Haddock Monte Carlo I believe, made with haddock and tinned tomato soup and rice which I never made after my first year at university, but reading it recalls the excitement of being independent and having to cook for myself and make choices as to what to eat. Remembering Haddock Monte Carlo they weren't necessarily good choices. This is what nostalgia means, a fond recall of things that weren't always that good.

The Valley looking Alpine

A quick picture from Tuesday when the sun came out, the sky was blue and the valley looked like an Alpine ski resort (almost).

Stocking up- Part One

So, three quarters of the way through the Super Frugal January, I have spent £49.35 on food which is good but I realize the cupboard is looking a little bare. Time to stock up. First off, I set some bread going in the breadmaker, an experimental mix of white,wholemeal and rye flour, some porridge oats and a handful of mixed seeds, with ingredients like these it will probably need a long rising time but no worries it can take all day.
Next it was off to the supermarket:

 A very satisfactory total of £8.14. The margarine and oats I will not use today , they were just needed to keep the stocks up, the mince was an impulse buy reduced to £1.04 it will go in the freezer but there are so many ways to use mince there is no danger of it languishing there.
Now to the baking, firstly  I made a batch of oatcakes. but knowing I was making a carrot cake I didn't cook them immediately but left them until the carrot cake mixture was ready so that they could share an oven. The carrot cake recipe was from here;http://www.cheap-family-recipes.org.uk/recipe-carrotcake.html?opt=rsnack and very satisfactory it was too:

 

Next, I wanted to make maltbread. At least we have always called it maltbread but it is made from a wartime recipe which contains no eggs or fat or indeed malt. It was given to my mother by Mrs Sunman of Ivydene, Collingham and here is the recipe written in my mother's recipe book. As you can tell it has been well used.

The maltbread turned out a bit lopsided but who's to care? I'm sure it won't affect the taste.
A satisfactory refilling of the cake tins for a morning's work:

 I will of course be freezing most of the carrot cake and two of the malt loaves, creating my own store of convenience food. Now for a cup of tea and a quick snack, but what to choose?

I love snow but ice, oh no!

It might have been because Jess spent the night howling and I got very little sleep that I was late for my appointment with Donna the business mentor, at Shine, the business and conference centre in the splendidly revamped premises of what was originally the Gipton Board School in 1897 and then the Harehills County Secondary School

What this photo doesn't show is that  the roads to each side of the premises are very steep and this morning were totally ungritted and very icy. As I was late and tired, I turned up one of them without thinking. I managed to park and go in for my meeting but trying to depart, I found I was going nowhere. Or worse I was inching backwards down the icy slope towards the red Fiesta parked behind me. I tried putting cardboard down under the wheels but all this did was attract the attention of an idle youth who threw a snowball at me. I was forced to go, cap in hand, back into the Shine building to beg for some of their grit. Better than grit they sent me an angel, who seemed to be disguised as Badly Drawn Boy, in any case he had a shovel and was prepared to come and chip out the ice from beneath my wheels. After some effort on his part I managed to get the car moving forwards but only for 6 inches before it became stuck on the next patch of ice. The Badly Drawn Angel didn't seem to relish the prospect of digging out the entire road so suggested that if I could get the car away from the Fiesta then it might be best to let it slide bac`1kwards down the hill and then he would keep an eye out for me whilst I reversed into the main road. I didn't fancy this plan as there were parked cars on either side of the road but there didn't seem to be any other option. So that is what I did, slowly, gripping the wheel with utmost concentration, until the blessed relief of a flat gritted road was reached. We take normal, safe roads far too much for granted, you know.

So to this morning's angel/good samaritan/ caretaker at Shine: thank you.

The Sayings of Parents

This is a small update to a post I'd made a few weeks ago, I'd mentioned that my sisters and I are unable to go outside in cold weather without declaiming 'Cold, cold, it blows across the moor' which is a saying inherited from my grandfather without us ever hearing the original Victorian melodrama it came from. However Rosie pointed out to me that I have done the same thing to her, that she is prone on occasions to start singing the theme song from a 1960's television programme that she has never seen:
The Flashing Blade
Ah indeed 'For life and love and happiness are well worth fighting for'. A cracking theme song, much better than the dubbed low budget, European historical action story that it introduced.
Do any of you remember the Flashing Blade? Or any of the other poor quality programmes, we children were  forced to watch in the early seventies?

Sledging

No talk about wildlife today, we joined the rest of the human race and went sledging. Although as we did it at 8 o'clock before taking Oliver to nursery, most of the human race were still at home.

 As you can see we had our hill and the other family (those specks in the distance on the photo) had theirs.
It felt great, the snow was deep and crisp and even, as they say, and despite age and weight (both numbers higher than I'd like), I felt like an 8 year old again. The photo is pretty blue because as well as it being still quite early, it was snowing steadily at the time.

Here is a rare photo of me for the blog taken by Rosie.
I like snow, it seems a necessary part of the seasons, that it should be cold in January and having a week or so of snow disruption breaks the monotony of winter. People like the drama of stocking up on soups and hot drinks and discussing whether they will be able to make it into work tomorrow. It takes our minds of the fact that Christmas is over, we ate too much and spent too much and it is still a long time until spring. It brings the children out to play that would otherwise be huddled in front of televisions and computers and brings an outbreak of neighbourliness in offers to clear drives or fetch shopping.
By the time this cold spell is over, January will almost be over too and then we can start looking for the early signs of spring with a clear conscience knowing that we have had a proper winter and that we are safe from all the things that a mild winter brings -growth in rat population, unchecked slugs and snails and mosquitoes and anything else the doom merchants want to revel in.

Tasty Treats for Frugal Families

No-one can be healthy all the time, everybody needs a small indulgence now and then. Also I find if you are trying to steer your family into frugal eating, it is much easier to keep them on board if you make them something sweet, tasty and unhealthy . For these times I recommend Toffee Popcorn.

Ingredients
40g popping corn
2 tbsps oil
40g demerara sugar
40g butter
2 tbsps golden syrup.

Heat the oil in a large pan with a lid (if you can't find the lid, a baking tray placed on top of the pan will do instead). Cover the bottom of the pan with the popping corn. Allow to pop, shaking the pan from time to time to prevent burning.Turn the popped corn into a large bowl. Meanwhile put the sugar, butter and syrup into a bowl and heat together in the microwave for several minutes. Drizzle over the popcorn, tossing the popcorn to try to distribute the  toffee sauce evenly. Remember that the toffee will be very hot and the coated popcorn should be left a couple of minutes to cool down before tasting. I didn't.
This will make a large bowl of popcorn at a cost of 38p, comparing favourable with the £1.50 or so it costs to buy it in the supermarkets. It also tastes delicious.

Tracks in the Snow

Aha! Oho! A trail in the snow, whose is this trail and where does it go?

 Those words will be instantly recognisable to those with children or grandchildren under five but for those people who only have civilised conversations with other adults they are from the Gruffalo's Child by Julia Donaldson and I have been saying them to myself constantly on my walk round the valley. It wasn't so much the tracks that caught my attention this morning, however as much as the bright orange rabbit pee:

 Keeping my eyes open in the wood, I spotted some branches that had had the bark stripped off revealing a bright orange underside. I'm guessing that as the grass is getting more difficult to access, the rabbits have resorted to eating bark, and it is having the same effect on their digestive system as eating too much beetroot has on humans.

 Walking on through the woods I hoped to see the jays again, without any luck, but approaching the pond from the other side than usual, from the top of a steep slope, I was thrilled to see the kingfisher perching on a bulrush. Obligingly it sat there long enough for me to focus on it with my binoculars and marvel at its beauty but when I risked life and limb slipping down the snowy slope, trying to get close enough to take a photograph, it flew off. I need a photograph to prove its existence to my birdwatching friend, who has claimed  I am hallucinating. The two of us walked to the pond yesterday and saw nothing of interest save a kestrel swooping overhead.
There was a different atmosphere on the valley this morning, as it has of course been invaded by children with sledges. This is as it should be, if there is snow on the ground and an accessible hill, it is a strange child that doesn't want to go sledging. I was also amused to come across on my walk,  the handiwork of some children from yesterday.

It is good to know, that the age old impulse of children to make a den, has not diminished.

Frugal Food

I went for a walk this afternoon with the friend I got Jess from and Jess's sibling Inca. Like most siblings they started bickering as soon as the saw each other and kept up the jockeying for superiority most of the afternoon. They were literally fighting to be top dog.
As is normal at this time of year, the conversation turned to money and the need to economise on food and I was able to boast a bit here, by telling my friend that I had only spent £40 so far this month on food. She immediately wanted to know how I'd done it and what I had bought. The answer is that we had made sure there was nothing thrown away from Christmas ( in fact the last of the turkey is being brought out of the freezer and cooked in the slow cooker overnight ready for tomorrow's dinner as turkey casserole), we have eaten out of the freezer and store cupboard and I have baked a lot of biscuits, cakes and bread.
My friend asked me to recommend recipes and I have actually referred her to two websites, the first is http://www.cheap-family-recipes.org.uk/ which is a great website for families who are really up against it as it provides a meal plan that will feed a family of four for £100 a month. I met the person who set it up on the Money Saving Expert forum http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/ and did a bit of testing of recipes for her and can vouch for the immense amount of selfless work she put in, making sure that the recipes were not only cheap and tasty but also met nutritional needs. I still use her recipe for carrot cake and also the risi e bisi recipe.
The second website I recommended http://mortgagefreeinthree.com/  is more than just food (although it has a fabulous recipe for oatcakes on it), it is more inspirational than that. Please don't let that put you off looking at it though, in the belief that it is run by some dreadful self help guru. Elaine Colliar who runs the site seems to be a whirlwind of determination, making much out of nothing and bringing not spending to a fine art. As the title said, she has pledged to pay off her mortgage of £125,000 in three years. I don't know how she will do it, as she is a single parent of two boys, currently on an income of around £10,000 but I have faith that she will.

The Valley

As I said in my opening post, I don't live in the country, much as I'd like to.I live in Leeds, alongside half a million other people. However that doesn't mean I am surrounded by concrete, in one direction I am a stone's throw away from Temple Newsam Country Park and in the other, a slightly longer stone's throw is Roundhay Park.
This is not where I walk Jess though, I walk her by taking a walk down the garden and opening a gate in the fence at the bottom which leads onto the valley.

 The valley is part park, part wasteland, part nature reserve. It was once something less pretty, a map of the 1890's shows 3 quarries, Halton Sewage works and a disused colliery. Later the quarries were used as a convenient landfill tip which has in part guaranteed its status as a green area as the long grassed over tip produces too much methane for building to be safe. Instead it is mainly used by dog walkers, footballers, people taking shortcuts to work or school, teenagers needing a place to congregate and drink alcohol (less of them at this time of year) and thieves hiding from the police (in summer the noise of the police helicopter hovering over the valley using its thermal imaging camera is quite common).
Despite all this human  activity, there is a surprising amount of wildlife. Since starting my daily walks there with Jess I have seen foxes, rabbits, pheasants, jays a whole flock of magpies and amazingly a kingfisher. My route is beginning to be known to me by the animals I see in each location. Thus the thicket beyond my fence is where I have seen the foxes (dangerously close to the gardens with their chicken coops), I walk down towards the railway bridge passing the magpies field where a whole flock of twelve or more will often congregate. Turning right to walk by the railway I have twice seen rabbits dash across the path and into the embankment, further along is the jay;s wood, I saw a pair there this morning fluttering in the air together before settling on a branch. Doubling back at the next railway bridge, I pass a less than spectacular pond.

To my amazement at New Year, I saw the bright blue flash of a kingfisher there. It was as amazing as it was unmistakeable and I am delighted to say I have seen it once more since. On the hillside slightly above the pond I have seen a heron, with its huge grey slightly menacing presence. My route then takes me back past the magpies field (useless to try and hold on to superstitions when there are so many about), and up the hill past the bowling green, which I think of as the pheasant's territory having seen them on two occasions there.
Who knows what  I will see when spring comes and the days lengthen, fox cubs playing in the grass? Is the kingfisher a passing winter visitor or could we see chicks? As long as I have Jess to walk, I will be out there every day, marking the changes brought by the seasons.
I wrote this yesterday but had no chance to post it due to the internet being down, this morning's walk gave me the chance to examine paw prints in fresh snow. There were a surprising large numbers of rabbit prints which led to patches of grass cleared of snow by the wind. The presence of droppings suggested that the rabbits had come to take advantage of this.
It is snowing now and due to carry on until midnight, leaving me a fresh set of tracks to folow in the morning no doubt.

Winter Picnic

 So what do you do when the temperature outside is minus two and you have a boy and a dog to entertain? You go on a picnic of course.

Today we walked up to the woods at Temple Newsam, the remains of Monday's snow crunching underfoot. In my best primary school teacher manner, I pointed out to Oliver, that the ground which had been so muddy on Sunday was now hard as iron and all the puddles were now frozen. This was a mistake as he then took it as his mission to stamp on every puddle to break the ice.

Some puddles were less frozen than others, some of the mud was still quite soft. The inevitable happened:

 Oliver had become separated from his welly which was firmly stuck in the mud. Time for distractions:

So it wasn't exactly a picnic , just hot chocolate and home made flapjack and the hot chocolate had been made with water and was neither very hot nor to be honest very nice, but it was eaten outdoors which is the important thing, We walked back through the golf course. As Oliver was still  destroying every puddle, slowly and thoroughly, and Jess was off investigating every bush and tree, I had plenty of time to appreciate the beauty of the day. For all the coldness and greyness , there was a peace and stillness to the world, the frost had coated every twig on every branch throwing them into sharp definition against the pallor of the sky.

Sometimes You Can't See the Wood for the Trees

Sometimes in life, things become very familiar, so much so that we stop seeing them.
A year or two ago I rearranged my welsh dresser so that all my dried goods: oats, sugar, peas, beans, lentils etc were on display in storage jars. They look nice, they are to hand, I can see when I'm running out and it freed up cupboard space for less decorative items. I didn't quite have enough jars to fill the shelf so there were a couple of gaps waiting for the acquisition of suitable jars.
Yesterday, I noticed this jar at the top of the cellar steps:

I'm not quite sure how long it was been sitting there, my guess is about ten years and I'm not even sure what was in it. From the look of things when I prised the lid open, it may have been spicy orange slices. I must have passed it daily without noticing it.
It is now cleaned up and filled with butter beans and has gone to join its brethren on the shelf.

 Very like the ending to a Victorian children's book, the moral to this story is that you might already have what you want if only you have the eyes to see.

A Black Dog in a White World

We didn't get as much snow as I was expecting, but still as I walked out on the valley beyond the bottom of my garden, the combination of the snow and all encompassing cloud made everything eerily white

Jess disturbed a pair of foxes who bounded off into the undergrowth. Lovely to watch but disturbingly close to my chickens. On my return I checked on the beehives but there was very little snow on them.

A cold winter is actually better for bees, than a mild one. Mild weather at the wrong time can entice them out of the hive when there is no pollen to collect.The chickens are now benefiting from the roofing panels I put up over the chicken run, which has given them a dry snow free corner to get at their food. I may put up another panel though, as the entrance board to the house was covered with snow, which they wouldn't like.That can wait for better weather. This afternoon I will be indoors, on the sofa, wrapped in my knitted blanket. I would like to say that I will be on the laptop, working on the cash-flow forecast for the soap business, but it is more likely that I will be gazing mesmerised out of the window, watching the hundreds of tiny white flakes dancing dizzily down to earth.

Jess

Sunday mornings used to be a pleasant time, I'd go downstairs put the kettle on, let the chickens out, potter around the kitchen, maybe hang the washing out before returning to bed with much tea, to catch up on the news. In summer this might be at 6 am or earlier whereas in winter it needn't be until 7.30 or 8. All that has changed now, there is a tyrant in the kitchen who demands I am up by 7.30 and once up there is no possibility of sneaking back to bed, it is dressed and outside for a bracing walk.
Jess is a 14 week old doberman/collie puppy that we misguidedly brought into our home on Christmas Eve. This was a huge mistake, all the adults were already tired out with Christmas preparations, only to be kept awake all night by the puppy whining and scratching, terrified at being left on her own for the first time. She has gradually got better though, last Thursday was her first entirely fuss free night.

I know this is a very blurry picture but that is Jess, perpetual motion,
Her full name is Jessica Fletcher, named by a student daughter after Angela Lansbury's character in Murder She Wrote (don't ask me why), but I refuse to stand in the park shouting for Jessica Fletcher so she is just Jess to me.

.

Bread and Butter

No, I don't mean that figuratively, I really do want to write about bread and butter.

After Christmas and the New Year, I was left with a pint of double cream that we had not got round to opening for various reasons, much as I adore cream and indeed most fats, I was not going to eat a pint of double cream by myself so I decided to make butter with it.
It isn't difficult, simply put the cram into the food processor and beat as if you were whipping cream and then got interrupted at the point when it is whipped and left it to go very stiff. At this point add a cup of cold water and beat again until the butterfat separates from the buttermilk and it looks like this:

Pour off the buttermilk into a bowl and beat a little more, before turning the remaining lump of butter out on to a chopping board. It is then necessary to work the butter with a pair of wooden spatulas or spoons to get the remaining water out. You can buy specialist 'butter hands' which probably do the job much better but if you only make butter occasionally it isn't worth it.

After a few minutes squeezing and rolling, it looks like this:

Now is the time to add salt if you want, and work that evenly into the butter. 

So there you have a nice piece of butter ( I checked out of interest and it weighed 9 oz), and a bowl of buttermilk, which is obviously calling out to be made into soda bread or possibly buttermilk scones.

On this occasion it was soda bread:

It didn't stay like this for long, a few minutes later it looked more like this:

Oh the Business, Things are Beginning to Hum!

The title is taken from a song my mother used to sing, probably some Victorian music hall song learnt from her father. My sisters and I have all been imprinted with the songs and sayings of my grandfather to the extent that we find it impossible to leave the house in weather such as today's, without declaiming theatrically 'Cold, cold, it blows across the moor!' which isn't too bad for me in Yorkshire, but a little inappropriate for the heart of London.
To return to the matter in hand, I thought I would post an update on my plans to start a business. I have now had my official meeting to apply for the Enterprise Allowance which will give me £65 a week for 13 weeks followed by £33 a week for the next 13 weeks. Not a lot of money but every little helps. I also get a business mentor from the Chamber of Commerce although in actual fact I have been working with Donna for a few weeks now.
I am currently struggling to produce a cashflow. As my mood swings between huge optimism that everyone will love the product and complete depression over the number of soapmakers already out there and what makes me think people will want to buy mine instead, estimating sales is proving a little difficult. My first cashflow was on the ultra cautious side, Donna looked at it and said 'Don't show them that when you apply for Enterprise Allowance, they'll think you are running it as a hobby'. So now I have gone to the other extreme and am planning on selling at events (Great Yorkshire Show, Country Living Fair, Countryside Live) which would probably mean making soap non stop to keep up with demand. A balance will be struck.

Muffins and the Perfect Poached Egg

Having new laid eggs again, made me want to make Eggs Benedict which is basically a poached egg on bacon on half a toasted muffin with hollandaise sauce on top. Delicious.

All I needed was to pick up a pack of muffins from the supermarket, but then I thought it would be cheaper and more fun to make my own.For bread makers amongst you, it is a pound of flour (I used half and half strong white and wholemeal) and then uses milk instead of water, the recipe said 12 fl oz but as always, I added more liquid when it looked too dry and then had to add more flour. A teaspoon of dried yeast (I use the sort that has to be reconstituted as I find it more flexible to have a tub rather than sachets), a teaspoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of butter. Put all that in the dough maker and set it to dough and go away and leave it for a while, or thump it around for ten minutes if you are kneading by hand. My bread-maker was the cheapest model available, is now three or four years old and is invaluable, but I only ever use it on the dough setting to take the effort out of kneading and give the dough a good start that it wouldn't get otherwise in my none too warm kitchen.

When the dough was well risen ( I went out and left it for a while but I'd say a couple of hours after the dough programme had finished), I rolled it out and cut it into 3 1/2 inch rounds and left them twenty minutes or so to prove. The recipe said to sprinkle them with rice flour or semolina, I had ground rice in the cupboard which worked just as well but I don't think it would have mattered if I'd skipped that bit. Certainly not worth buying anything specially.

Then came the interesting bit of cooking them on a griddle which I haven't got so used a frying pan instead.

It said cook on a medium heat for 7 minutes each side but I found myself turning the heat down so they didn't become too brown too quickly. Probably because my frying pan is too thin.

So there you are, eight large muffins for maybe 30p. Four of them have already been tucked away in the freezer to stop me eating them all at once. Another time I would make a double batch, as it was a bit of an effort for only eight, I would also make them thinner as they are too fat for my toaster.

So this morning, Rosie, said she would like a poached egg on a muffin. The huge benefit of keeping chickens is the freshness of the eggs (when they lay) and the ease with which they will poach. All that is needed is to slip the egg into an inch or so of barely simmering water like this:

And a couple of minutes later, you have the perfect poached egg, like this:

DIY with help

Today is my day for looking after my grandson Oliver who is nearly three. It was a beautiful sunny day  so I thought we could be outside in the garden with Jess the pup, whilst I tackled a DIY project that I have been putting off for a couple of months.
I have been wanting to give the chickens a roof to their coop or at least one corner of it. Last winter they hated the snow so I covered the run in a tarpaulin which worked for a while but sagged when full of heavy rain and made the run darker than it need be. So I thought a quick solution would be to screw clear PVC panels to the roof.
 My first worry would be whether I could get the 8ft length of them into the car but we just managed it.

















That was in November and somehow the panels were put into the garage and left there. Either the weather was wrong or I was busy with something else or it was Christmas but today there were no excuses.
It was a lot easier than I'd imagined, it would have been even easier if I hadn't had a toddler climbing the ladder behind me saying 'What you doing? What you doing?' on a loop/ Pup also had to be shut in the house when I needed to get in the run with the chickens and then whined piteously the whole time.
Still it is finished now and will give the chickens a nice dry place to go to.

I was intending to post this last night but had one of those unfortunate accidents that happen when you have a toddler, a puppy and a bowl of soup. I left the laptop overnight to dry out and things seem okay now.

Eggs!

I went out to do a much needed clean out of the hen house and found two eggs! This is exciting as it is the first time they have laid since the beginning of September when they started to moult. I rushed back inside to get my camera and record the moment.

Not only is it wonderful to be having fresh eggs again, it means I can use my Christmas present for the first time.

Admittedly it will look better when it has more eggs on it.

To honour the egg producers I tried to take their photographs but they were more interested in what was going on in the compost heap after I had emptied the contents of the hen house on it.

I should say that the chickens are a rare breed, Marsh Daisies. When I was choosing chickens I wanted to do my bit in a small way to preserve rare breeds. Eighteen months on I am beginning to appreciate why they are a rare breed as egg laying isn't their forte. Bertie, on the left has never laid at all, I suspect that some early infection led to a hormone inbalance which stops her functioning as a normal chicken, indeed in the summer time she frequently attempts to crow. A harder hearted person would have eaten her by now, but at the moment, the hen house would be an even bigger and draughtier place if there were only two chickens.
The other drawback of Marsh Daisies is what the books call 'flightiness' which makes me think of an unsatisfactory housemaid in Victorian times but means they are good fliers and keen to escape at all times. Having just repaired the fence between myself and the neighbours, I watched this morning as Amelia cleared a five foot fence from an almost vertical takeoff. Time to clip the newly regrown wings I think.