Monday 20 May 2013

Teeny Dandelion Wine Update - And Chickens.

The dandelion petals are doing their thing - whatever their thing is.  They've had their first stir of the day.

They look like this:


And they smell... hmm... Planty.  I wouldn't go so far as to say floral, really, but I'm surprised they don't smell sludgy and haven't gone all brown.  Very pretty, really!  Bodes well for the vino.  Hopefully.

So now I'm jumping up every five minutes to see if that's the postie with the yeast and yeastnutrientwhateverthehellthatis, because the instructions say you're not to leave it an INStant longer than two days, so I am going to be needing that yeast by lunchtime tomorrow!

Meanwhile, as my previous chickeny post was actually typed at Christmas, I realise I never told y'all they're laying.  Well, Captain Morghen lays a reliable egg each and every day.

I know it's her, because she has had white legs since eggs started appearing, and this is a Sign, as we chicken wranglers knows.


The chicken on the right is laying.  The chicken on the left is a lazy bastard.

Also, the other two are plump and sleek, while the poor ol' Captain looks knackered, because she's ploughing all her energy into egg production.

For a couple of heady weeks, we were getting up to four eggs a day, but then, it seems, the other three lost interest and realised they'd get fed, anyway.  Lazy buggers.  Then my favourite, Bob Mar-lay, who had been watching Tom Daley's "Splash" through the kitchen window with an unnatural degree of interest in her beady little eyes, took it upon herself to attempt a triple pike into the bottom pond.

I found her, some time later, disconsolately perched on a rock with her wings spread out, half in and half out of the water.  A good towelling off and a nice cosy improvised bed in the warm greenhouse seemed to sort her out.  However, this may have lowered her resistance to an itinerant bout of avian flu, because a week later, she bought the farm.


RIP Bob

Another one bites the dust.  She's buried next to Brian, but with a lot less ceremony.  It seems the children are getting used to the idea that chickens die.

So now we're down to three little birds (there's a song in there, somewhere), and one egg a day.  Although Mr P almost mowed over a random egg in the lawn yesterday, so it's entirely possible that the others ARE laying (I shall be scrutinising the colour of their legs, later) but are less well behaved than the Captain, and are laying their eggs wherever they darned well please.  Tut!  How do you train a chicken, anyway?

Three little birds, sat by my doorstep



Sunday 19 May 2013

The Underratedness of Contentment

I have been thinking about contentment a fair bit, of late.  You don't read about it a lot.  People seldom answer "Oh, you know - content", when you ask how they are.  And it's generally not wildly fashionable.

But I like it.

I do.

I think it's the best thing to be.

Jumping for joy is pretty cool, and the odd bit of misery is helpful in the perspective stakes, but, on the whole, being content the whole damned time would be a jolly good place to be.

So why don't we hear about it more?

It's hard to write about being content without coming coming across downright smug.  That's why.  But I'm going to have a bloody good go at it.

*takes deep breath*

I'm lucky.  My job makes me jump for joy, it really does.  Actually, jumping for joy pretty much IS my job - that's what teaching Zumba is all about, for me, and watching new people come into class for the first time, all nervous and psyching themselves up, then seeing them realise that I'm not going to half kill them, humiliate them, accidentally make them feel small and unfit and generally unworthy, and then watch them start to relax, then maybe smile a little, then begin to grin and, as the class goes on and then the weeks go on, start to bust some &*^$ing moves.  Ahh - that makes me jump for joy at the time, and helps with the contentment in between.

Also, I love to cook.  As you may have spotted.  I really enjoy it.  It's a mental challenge, thinking up new stuff to do and making it work.  It's also of endless interest to me.  I will never, if I cook a different dish every single meal for the rest of my life, have cooked every single dish it is possible to cook.  Oooh hang on - I need to sit down - that's really freaked me out!  I'm going to die without having tasted things - yoinks!  Ohhh-kay.  Starting to be able to cope with that idea.

The flip side of cooking, of course, is cooking for kids.  Mine are pretty good.  They like snails, squid, good hot curries, octopus, blue steak, scallops - the little sods, of course, have no business even knowing what half of this stuff tastes like.  Meanwhile, they think mashed potato and baked beans are the devil's work, and seem to have divided up most of the remaining easily available foods between them so that what one likes, the other abhors.  Which makes it fucking difficult to come up with interesting, nutritional and varied meals for the pair of them on a daily basis.  Thankfully M is no longer allergic to tomatoes, but the years of no spag bol, Heinz spaghetti shapes or Queen Of Tomato soup were a challenge.  School roasts lunches, twice a week, used to be a nice easy one, until O announced that she no longer liked school roast beef.  I shone an anglepoise lamp in her face, got my jackboots on, and asked her why the .... heck not.  "Because it's brown".  I can't argue with that.  Overcooked beef is a crime.

So while cooking, generally, has always made me very happy - shall we go the whole hog and admit contentment?  Yes, let's - cooking for the ungrateful makes me angry, stroppy, very unhappy and, on occasion, positively bitchy, darling.

Gardening is a joy beyond belief.  Gardening while listening to Radio 4 is sheer unadulterated contentment.  For a middle-aged bint such as myself.  Gardening while listening to Zumba music is even better, but can be dangerous.  Well, YOU try droppin' it to da floor with a swoe in your hand and see what happens.

Going out to water the greenhouse and finding that some dark and eldritch creature has crept in through the door (left open by ungrateful beast children (I jest.  I adore them.  When they are eating up my food and not leaving the door to the fucking greenhouse open all night)) and dug up m'flipping runners during the night is soul destroying.

Listen, in case you think I'm having it easy, here - many far far worse things have happened to me in my life, and will continue to happen to me in my life, I have no doubt.  But we're talking about contentment here, so we'll take it with a pinch of salt and let my private life, or at least some small parts of it, remain my own.

There are many many other things which make me content.  Seeing my children succeed at stuff.  Seeing them try.  Having the time to make more or less any damned thing.  Sitting here, right now, in the sun, when the forecast said it would rain, on the purple table and chairs by the pond, wearing my big straw hat so I can see my screen, watching the fish sunbathe, the waterboatmen dive, the pond skaters mate, and the great crested newts bask, while I type up this nonsensical stream of consciousness - that's feeling pretty good.

Last week was a horrible time, and I don't want to go back there.  Luckily I can't, unless someone's been and gone and invented time travel while I've been watching the test match.  Next week will be fabulous, I have no doubt.  Or at least, it will be a cause for contentment.

I'm going to leave you with a stroll around my garden, and a series of things, in no particular order, which made me content just now.



The sound of massed mowers.  I love listening to Men At Work.

Things coming up in my rainy-day-office - AKA the greenhouse, which is calling out for care and attention, which is why I won't mind when it rains next week, apparently...

Flowers and plants and weeds and sunlight

Daisies.  So called because they are Day's Eyes.  Why do people get upset at having 
daisies in their lawns?  Are there not other things to get upset about?

A happy frog, basking in the sunlight, who let me get close enough to take this ponto 
(ponto?!  Photo) with my phone.

Freshly weeded stream.

Trip trap, trip trap, over the rickety bridge.  This is LETHAL and needs repairing, but the kids love to remove the slats and lie on their tummies watching the newts in the patch of slow water beneath, so I can't quite bring myself to nail the bastard back down again.  You have my full permission to laugh and point when I break my ankle running up there in the dark to lock the chickens in one night.

Primroses.  Always a delight, but now also food - yay!

Ground Elder.  Formerly a horrible, rampant, strangling weed.  Now reclassified as a crop - yay!

Swing, for sitting in, reading, listening to the pond gurgle. 
One day I will have time to actually do this (yes, I split an infinitive - hah!  Bite me!) but
meanwhile, just thinking about it is contentment enough.

Kids bouncing on the trampoline, with the incinerator in the foreground, 
holding all its promise of tidying the garden and BURNING STUFF in it, while
toasting marshmallows over its eyebrow-singeingly hot flames.

So that's me, just at this minute, content.

See, it's bloody irritatingly smug, isn't it?!  Even while trying hard not to be.  So if it's any consolation, and if it increases your own feelings of contentment at all, this is how I envisage the rest of the day.

Someone will ask me what's for dinner.  I will begin to panic, because I haven't thought this one through, and although I want grilled aubergines, that will go down like a cup of cold sick.  I will then turn unreasonably snappy and take to the bottle.  (Simon has just walked down the gorgeous garden with a dead rat on a shovel, by the way, just to prove my point, and I've had to bag it up for the bin - eeeeeek).  There will then be a panicked rummaging through the fridge for - ooh, just remembered, we have three chicken breasts, which, if I slice 'em up and coat 'em in cornflakes, should feed three - better still, I'll get Olivia to do it.  That will all take longer than planned so the promised watching of last night's recorded Britain's Got Talent will go on way too late, at which point everyone will remember that their school uniforms and PE kits are still filthy from last week, and will need to be hunted out and washed.  Everyone will get increasingly bad tempered about all of this, then lunchboxes will be remembered and will be found to contain things mouldering from last week, and smelling, curiously, of old bananas, despite the fact that they are strangers to bananas old and new.  We will then realise that school lunch tomorrow is "disgusting" to at least one child, but will have insufficient supplies in for decent packed lunches which won't be sneered at by other children with more organised mothers.  I will then remember that it's bath night and all the towels are in the wash.  Eventually, fed, clean and with uniform in the wash, the children will be put to bed at a reasonable but slightly later than planned time (and I'm a bedtime fascist, so "a bit late" is probably still quite early by most standards).  Mr P and I will then collapse on the sofa and watch last week's Dallas or something equally unchallenging with a bottle of red, and crawl upstairs to bed, whereupon we will be confronted with the fact that we thought, when we awoke this morning, that changing the bedclothes was a bloody good idea, but we only got so far as stripping the bed and never actually got the fresh sheets on.  Downstairs, airing cupboard, swearing, fight about whose method of putting duvet cover on is most effective, and, ultimately, collapse, horizontal, on the world's most comfortable bed.  Which I've just remembered, I noticed this morning when we stripped it, appears to have sprung a leak.

Bollocks.

The Joy of Pecks

Dreadful pun, my loves, I know.  But I never could resist a pun, bad or good.  My father-in-law was known as Squadron Leader Punnington, when he was in the RAF, and it seems we share a glee in the old jeux de mots.

So, here I am, laid up in a hospital bed with nothing to do, BUT!  With access to the internet.  About time I blogged, methinks.  And what, sez you, are you blogging about, today?  (fast-forward to when I am ACTUALLY posting this - I am NOT laid up in a hospital bed - I wrote this at Christmas!)

Well, it's got to be the chickens.

Rewinding several years, I have been talking about getting chickens for quite some time.  I've talked myself into it and out of it on numerous occasions.  So much so that I had got a little dizzy and wondered whether to shelve the whole idea.  With last spring having been so ghastly, however, and the veg patch hence having got itself into such a naughty MESS with that bastard Bindweed swarming up everything in sight and strangling the living daylights out of it, I had mentioned to my good friend S that I'd done a bit of research and wondered whether letting some chickens loose in the veg patch through the winter might result in the ground up there being pecked and scratched bare, naturally fertilised, and ending up ready for me to swan in in spring 2013 and plant the bugger up without having to have put in much effort at all.  THAT is a very long, nay epic, sentence.

Anyway, S thought this a good plan, so when she heard that some chickens were available and looking for a new home, she gave me a ring.  Well, I could have dithered forever, of course, but being presented with a fait accompli moved things along considerably.

The hunt for a henhouse began.  These seem to range from costing 99p off eBay for something which you go and collect from where it's been standing for the last millennium, and good luck if it falls apart, to almost £5k for a henhouse shaped and painted up like a gypsy caravan, if you please.  Very pretty, but you'd have to sew up their bums so they didn't poo in it, at that price, so not terribly practical.

S to the rescue again!  We bartered a copy of my book for a henhouse, which then appeared fully built and ready to go.  Gawd bless yer, yer ladyship!  We were in business!

At this point, what I should have done was spend a couple of hours attaching the roofing felt to the roof and making the henhouse generally weatherproof.  I realise that now.  I have been a very silly boy.

Instead, I rang the lady who needed the chickens rehoming, and we went to get them pretty much on the spot.  Excitement is a wonderful thing, but a bit of tempering goes a long way.

We - four adults and four (five?) children, then spent the best part of an hour chicken-chasing!  What fun - in and out of holly bushes, under sheds, around all sorts of assorted obstacles the clever chickens led us.  We got two safely stowed in the cat basket, only to fail to secure the door sufficiently, so they escaped and needed recapturing.  After much hilarity (and a discovery of an irritating diffidence in myself when it came to actually pouncing on the little devils) we eventually had four hens and a magnificent cockerel under lock and key and ready to move into their new home.

Now, a word about our magnificent cockered.  Magnificent is too small a word, really.  Look:


I know, right?  You want to see more, don't you.  Here you go:


Who's a pretty boy, then?

People keep asking me whether I realise that a cockerel is not strictly necessary - or indeed at all necessary - for egg production.  Yes, I know this.  The absence of cockerels and the presence of eggs at virtually all the houses of my chicken-owning chums has alerted me to this fact.  However, four hens and a cockerel were looking for a home, and we felt it would have been churlish in the extreme to have accepted the hens, while leaving the cockerel to his fate.  Not on my watch.  So four hens and a cockerel we accepted.  We were a little concerned when people told us that cockerels can be aggressive, attacking small animals and children, and not too keen on the whole crack-of-dawn-crowing aspect of the thing, but on the whole, we felt it was worth a go.  And we were assured that "Lucky" would not behave badly or wake everyone up.

Then we saw him, and it was, for me, love at first sight.  If anyone had tried to take him away, I would have done battle.  Just gloriously, hugely, cockerelly GORGEOUS from head to strutting toe.

I have to tell you at this point (and this is a bit of a spoiler, so if you don't want to know, look away), Lucky has since strutted off to the great hen coop in the sky.  

I just wanted to get that out of the way before you invested as much emotion in him as I did.  

However, for the time being, in blogland, he is safe and well.

We decided that Lucky was not the right name for him.  Insufficiently dignified, we felt.  So why we settled on Brian, I'm not sure - but the name fit and stuck.  Brian, he was.

Back at the house, we introduced the chickens to the henhouse, where, my dear friend R had told me, they must remain locked up for 24 hours and not a minute less, to allow them to "imprint" their new home on their tiny, mad, chicken brains.  This we duly did.  It was at the point when the chickens were safely (h)ensconced (sorry) in their lil' coop, however, that I registered that I hadn't yet felted their roof. Damn, bugger and hell.  Feeling that hammering endlessly and repeatedly on their roof on their first day might not help them settle in, and might indeed push them right over the edge, we hauled out the store of old growbags and plastic compost sacks and arranged them in a hideous, but relatively rainproof, layer on top of the house.

24 hours later, it was with some trepidation that we released the birdies into the veg patch, but there was no cause for concern.  They emerged happily from their little doorway, and attacked my cabbages with relish.

Look at Brian - his head's a blur.  He LOVES it!


The chickens all settled in very well, and entertained me endlessly with their sometimes curious, sometimes contented and sometimes mysterious bwooooaarking.  Getting them up in the morning is a pure joy, and they put themselves to bed at night, so we just slip up at dusk and lock them safely in.  I have had to force myself not to spend hours sitting in the garden with them pecking around my feet while I draw them, but I foresee some happy summer days coming up in 2013, doing just that.

For ten days, all continued in this fine and happy fashion.  Brian and the girls (who gradually got names - in order of naming:  Elvis Egg-Pelvis, Alex Eggslaid-Chamberhen, Bob Mar-lay and finally Captain Morghen) strutted, trotted and bwoarked their way freely around the garden during the day, and snuggled up cosily in their (almost weatherproof) henhouse at night.  No eggs appeared, but I wasn't worried.  Their winter job is to clear the veg patch, and I expected no eggs, due to them being of indeterminate age, having just been moved, AND the time of year.  Elvis is always first out in the morning, Brian always last, liking to have a bit of a peer out through the door for a couple of minutes to ensure that the world is just as it should be, before emerging, triumphant, into the morning sun.

Then, one sunny Thursday afternoon, having had to release, feed and run in the morning and having hence not had time to admire Brian's slow emergence, I went to see the chickens and could find no sign of Brian.  Investigation (involving me crawling on hands and knees into the tiny run in front of the doorway) revealed him lying down, cold as stone, inside the henhouse.  Brian, it seemed, was no more.  

With a heavy heart, I pulled him out of the house via the roosting box, and gave him a hug.  It seemed that his feet twitched, so I tried to warm him up in case this was a sign of life, but half an hour produced no further movement, so Brian was wrapped in a towel and confined to a box while we prepared to tell the children on their return from school.  At this point, I realised that Brian actually appeared to have a couple of mites on him, which may actually now be on me, so I hightailed it upstairs for a very sad hot bath and to wash my hair in vinegar, sobbing noisily at the loss of this magnificent bird.

The children were informed.  A funeral was duly planned, by them - complete with order of service and invitations.  It was a funeral as dignified and ceremonious as befitted such a wonderful creature.  I have been hunting through my photos for the snap I was sure I took of Brian's order of service, but I can't find it.  Suffice it to say - and I report this with no small amount of pride - that the final item in the order of service was, in the handwriting of my cheeky little bugger of an 8-year-old-daughter - "We go to the pub and get drunk".  When questioned, the pair of them informed us:  "It's what he would have wanted".

Anyone got the number for Social Services...?



Dandelion Wine

Another big gap with no blog.  I have resolved to Be A Better Blogger, and try and get something down at least once a month, even if it's rubbish.

What's been going on here?  Lots.  Hence the non-blogging.

Can't even begin to remember what it's all been, so we'll just carry on from here, eh?!

Currently, beech leaves are steeping for gin:


If you want to know how to do this, see here:  http://mazsplace.blogspot.co.uk/2012_08_01_archive.html

I'd like to report that beech leaf gin is FANTASTIC.  I think it's the best booze I've ever made, which is why I'm making it again this year.  These leaves look a little more bruised than last year's example.  This is because I foolishly thought I had a load of cheap gin in the cupboard to pour straight on the leaves.  It turned out to be vodka.  So I had to whizz out and do a curséd weekly shop and stock up on cheap gin (they must think I'm such a dipso - oh!  I am.).  By the time I'd finished wading through the tedium of cat litter, cornflakes and loo cleaner (ooh, cheap coke is BRILLIANT for cleaning loos as a good friend informed me recently), the leaves had oxidised a bit.

I'm guessing it's going to turn out just fine, though.  It smells good already.

Bread is currently baking for lunch:
http://mazsplace.blogspot.co.uk/2012_10_01_archive.html

And tomatoes are roasting - also for lunch:
http://mazsplace.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/gluts-and-what-to-do-with-them.html

So while I've got half an hour - blog time!

This week, having noticed what a fabulous month this is proving to be for dandelions, and following an interesting chat in the pub with a drunken mentalist in a great leather hat, I have decided to make dandelion wine.  SO satisfying when a plant which is rampant in your garden goes from being a weed to a crop, and you can suddenly refer to weeding as 'harvesting'.  So oi been a-harvestin' me dandeloyns, me loves.


I'm not sure whether to be pleased or miffed that the entire front and back gardens, including the veg patch, which appeared to be solid gold when the dandelions were still a weed, looked a lot greener, suddenly, when they had become a crop and didn't yield the gallon of petals required by the recipe.  I sheepishly knocked next door and asked if I could possibly 'harvest' their dandelions, too - thank you, my lovely neighbours.  

Although their garden is far better kept than ours, it all adds to the total!  

I also then managed to find a recipe which called for three quarts rather than a gallon of petals.  Once I'd consulted Mr P to find out what the holy hell a quart is, and found an online converter, I was good to go.

I'm going to have to wait a year to find out whether this stuff is any good, and there's going to be demijohns and bubble traps involved, possibly even rubber tubing (lawks!) - all kindsa malarkey.  But my paternal grandmother used to make all manner of country wines, so I figure it's probably in the blood, and worth a go.

I'm going to copy out the recipe I'm loosely using, and put it here, because then I know I can't lose it.  Clever, eh!?  But bear in mind, it's completely untested (by me, at any rate), I will probably mess about with it no-end, and I can't vouch for it in any way.


3 qts dandelion flowers
1 lb white raisins
1 gallon water
3 lbs granulated sugar
2 lemons
1 orange
yeast and nutrient

Pick the flowers just before starting, so they're fresh. You do not need to pick the petals off the flower heads, but the heads should be trimmed of any stalk. Put the flowers in a large bowl. Set aside 1 pint of water and bring the remainder to a boil. Pour the boiling water over the dandelion flowers and cover tightly with cloth or plastic wrap. Leave for two days, stirring twice daily. Do not exceed this time. Pour flowers and water in large pot and bring to a low boil. Add the sugar and the peels (peel thinly and avoid any of the white pith) of the lemons and orange. Boil for one hour, then pour into a crock or plastic pail. Add the juice and pulp of the lemons and orange. Allow to stand until cool (70-75 degrees F.). Add yeast and yeast nutrient, cover, and put in a warm place for three days. Strain and pour into a secondary fermentation vessel (bottle or jug). Add the raisins and fit a fermentation trap to the vessel. Leave until fermentation ceases completely, then rack and add the reserved pint of water and whatever else is required to top up. Refit the airlock and set aside until clear. Rack and bottle. This wine must age six months in the bottle before tasting, but will improve remarkably if allowed a year. [Adapted recipe from C.J.J. Berry's First Steps in Winemaking]

This recipe is exactly as it appears where I found it.  Personally, I think it's a bit odd to tell you to measure out a gallon of water and put a pint aside for what will amount to several months, but then this winemaking stuff is new to me.  As are gallons and quarts.  If I could be arsed, I would go and work out what a gallon is and work out what it was minus a pint, but I can't.  Oh, hang on, I'll ask my Imperial guru!  He says that would be seven pints.  So why not tell people to use 7 pints, then add a pint right at the end ... oh, anyway!  Mine is not to reason why, mine is just to make some wine.

So the dandelions are in a big pan, where they will be stirred twice a day for the next two days, by which time Amazon, curse their non-tax-paying convenience, will no doubt have delivered my yeast and yeast nutrient.  Whatever that is.  It's all very exciting.

I fear the machine that goes 'ping', aka the oven timer, is about to tell me that the bread is done, so I'm going to post this before I change my mind.

More nonsense will follow soon - I promise.







Saturday 26 January 2013

'Twas The Morning After The Night Before


I woke up this morning thinking ‘ooh, ouch my head’
Whilst I rolled myself gingerly out of my bed.
It wasn’t so bad that I wished I were dead
But I looked at the whites of my eyes – they were red.
I stumbled about thinking how did this happen
But soon I remembered:  ‘twas the wee Bunnahabhain
I knew there was something - my feet, they were itching
The urge was so strong to get down to the kitchen
I opened the oven and all became clear
Twas the lure of cold haggis that was lurking in there
A spoonful of tatties, a mouthful of neeps
The state of my being improving by leaps
A thimble of coffee, a bucket of milk
Slip down my throat just as smoothly as silk
A mountain of toast, Marmite, jam, peanut butter
The pleasure of it is complete – it is utter.
Tearing myself from my plate and my knife
I tidy my place (cos I’m such a good wife)
It’s back up to bed with me – hmm well, for now
I’ll get up again later, if I work out how.
The breakfast I’ve planned, for me and the nipper,
Is quite the grand feast – poached eggs and a kipper.
How I will eat it I really don’t know
It will be my third breakfast in a very short row.
But eat it I must, every last bite
It will help with the aftermath of a great Burns Night.
One thing I have learnt very well down the years,
After nights on the whiskies, wines, ciders and beers,
Of all of the meals, breakfasts, dinners and lunches
There’s none so delightful as hangover munchies