Black magic

This week’s blog comes to you with somewhat of a large health warning: if you are not a fan of pork or pig-based products (that excludes most of my Jewish friends then - you know who you are…) please look away now. In the aftermath of dear Peppa’s demise our house has been swept away on a tsumani of sausages and hams and salamis. Every available hook and freezer drawer has been filled to bursting with one body part or another and all of the kitchen shelves and table are strewn with dog-eared (or should that be pig-eared, fnar fnar) books of porcine wisdom, invariably hamming the process up (gerrit?) to be some bucolic, mother-earth experience where dismembered pig is somehow magically transformed into perfect-looking meals with not a jot of mess in sight.

Mind yer head!

Let me tell you that the scene in our kitchen these past couple of weeks would very much not have made it onto the pages of said tomes. Storyboard for ‘Psycho 6: The Return’ or ‘The North Wales Chainsaw Massacre’ maybe. Hugh Fearnley-Wassisface’s whimsical recipe books, not so much. But then I suppose it would be a bit tricky to make black pudding without the main ingredient: lashings and lashings of good, old-fashioned blood. That said, we could have given some of your hippy, self-sufficiency gurus a run for their money with our gluten and dairy free version. It just so happened that one of our dearest friends from Scotland was visiting during Peak Pig and as he hasn’t been able to eat shop-bought black pudding for years because of his dietary constraints we thought we would give him a little treat. He seemed chuffed to bits but not sure whether he was fully aware that he was actually signing up to eat black pudding in every single meal for the whole weekend (no kidding). Just as well that, being a nutritionist by trade, he assured us that it has now been classed as a ‘superfood’. Get in! As if my husband needed any more encouragement to eat as much of the stuff as possible.  

Black magic

I’m not sure whether the superfood classification extends to the sausages that we’ve made. All 96 of them. But they do taste super fine. Plus the kids thought it was a fabulous game trying to leap up and grab the strings of bangers that were hanging, somewhat precariously, from meat hooks on the curtain rail in their playroom (social services please note: this was only for one afternoon as the sausages were drying out and the children were fully supervised at all times. Ish). We’ve also seen in the Chinese year of the monkey with some amazing sticky pork ribs, slathered in maple syrup and ginger and spices and slow cooked until the bones simply fell away from the meat. Baby wipes all round after that one, hands off kids. And who needs to wait for Christmas for a roast ham, studded with cloves and dripping in honey? Not us. It was supposed to be for slicing and packaging to last us all year so we don’t have to buy the salty, nitrate and water filled crap from the supermarket. Except we can’t seem to control ourselves and ended up eating the whole lot in one sitting. Oh dear. At least we have five more where that came from. As for the bacon, that seems to be disappearing offy quick too, as they say in Scotland. A sneaky rasher here, the odd bacon butty there. There seems to be a permanent smell of fried breakfast lingering enticingly about the place.  Ah Peppa, our first little black pig. You are gone but not forgotten!

Bacon butty anyone?

A ham is not just for Christmas...

As a sign of respect we did endeavour to use every last bit of her, from snout to tail as they say in those trendy restaurants down Shoreditch way. We were doing offally well (groan, sorry) in making industrial size quantities of liver and heart paté which tastes as good as anything I’ve tasted from a shop. We’ve also been experimenting with pork scratchings by puffing up the skin in the oven with a bit of salt and pepper and pig fat. Surprisingly tasty and crispy but without the fear that you get with the ones you buy behind the bars of old men’s pubs that you are going to break a tooth and spend an expensive and painful few weeks getting things fixed again. I’d love to tell you that we heroically made brawn from the head but I have a phobia of the smell after some drunken antics after the hog roast at our wedding so drew the line there. And as for the trotters, it turns out we didn’t quite get all of the hair off so did contemplate nipping down the chemist for a tube of Immac but decided that might taste a bit funky so chucked them out. However my husband assures me that next time around absolutely nothing will go to waste. Chitterlings (whatever they are) for sausages, crispy pigs ears and jellied trotters. Mmm. Might become a vegetarian for that particular week…

Mr Porky eat your heart out...

On that note and before I sign off, a quick and very promising update from the vegetable growing department. Our first tomato seed has germinated! Hurrah! It never fails to amaze me how placing a seemingly inanimate seed less than a millimetre long into compost, then keeping it moist and warm can miraculously create new life. What magic lies within that black soil I ask you?! Fingers crossed that this will be the first of many and that we’ll have be eating our very own BLTs in a couple of months. If there is any bacon left that is…

Back to the Future

I’m writing this as I sit on the train pulling out of Euston station after a week working back in the City. As I click-clacked my way along the platform in my suit and trench coat, faithful wheelie bag at my heels I could almost have been mistaken for a Londoner. But anyone paying closer attention may have clocked the traces of mud on my boots from falling foul of the muddy puddles on our drive. They may have spied the callouses on my rough hands from dragging heavy branches across the lawn after cutting down an enormous Western Red Cedar on the land last week. They might also have detected the scars on my arms from battling vicious brambles whilst trying to tame out of control hedges as part of our vain attempts at a garden ‘spring clean’. Yes, underneath this cool, City exterior lies a crazed, country bumpkin going half mad in her craving for fresh air and daylight, like a smoker with a 40-a-day habit desperate for a fag.

So how was it, my first excursion back to the corporate HQ office since our Big Move? Well, to be honest I felt like a character in one of those films where they wake up to find they’ve been transported to some vaguely non-descript time in the near future. Not at first. At first I bowled in and it felt like absolutely nothing had changed. But then it turned out that someone had nicked the bloody photocopier and replaced it with some colossal indecipherable machine that does any number of things except copy (spent the whole week hand writing notes instead). And the new coffee machine requires a PhD in Engineering to just work it out (too embarrassed to ask anyone I’ve not had a hot drink all week). And don’t even get me started on the new video conferencing technology. I did not have a Scooby Doo what was going on (which was somewhat unfortunate given that I was supposed to be the one running the show.) And just when did they start employing children to work for the company? These new joiners are so fresh faced and enthusiastic reeling off the names of tools and apps and gadgets that are a complete foreign language to me. Ask me anything you like about the process for butchering a pig or cultivating your own asparagus but when it comes to the latest social media technology it turns out I am completely in the dark.

The view I would have had all week (had I not been in a room with no windows...)

Then you have the slightly more subtle changes like the fashion which all seems to have moved on in the last year or so. Ankle boots and dresses, all the rage apparently. Flat brogues for the ladies, very much the order of the day. And seems like long hair is quite the thing, which is just as well since I haven’t yet found the time to find a hairdresser in North Wales and I didn’t quite fancy taking up my husband on his offer to cut my hair with on his various cutting implements previously used in the dissection of a hog. Then you have the crazy, futuristic iWatches strapped to the arms of every bloke in the office, providing yet another source of distraction and instantaneous information overload.  And who had the genius idea of putting wifi on the tube? That would be utterly brilliant were it not for the fact that you are so tightly packed in that you literally can’t move your hand from your pocket to retrieve your phone to avail yourself of this service. Either I had forgotten the sheer horror of travelling across London at rush hour or they have made the trains smaller. Either way I have never been in such close, uncomfortable proximity to strangers. I felt like one of the cows that our farmer brings over to our place in the cattle truck, except in comparison his cows are travelling on the bovine equivalent of the Orient Express: room to move, swish their tails, a nice view and fresh air – talk about the lap of luxury!

As we leave the urban sprawl of London and the South behind (we’ve just left Milton Keynes) time to turn my attention to the tasks for the weekend. Apart from spending as much time as possible outside, getting dirty and having incomprehensible conversations with my children and chickens (not the fancy ones obviously, they still consider themselves too posh to deign to speak to me), it is about time that we dig out our propagator and sort out the seed box. It is one of my most favourite times of the year as you put together a plan (in my head, not in any Microsoft application, thank God) of what you want to grow and eat for the coming year. You can pretty much guarantee that roughly half of what you plan to produce won’t actually come to fruition but every year that we do this I think we get just a little bit better.  Well that’s the optimist in me speaking. And the best thing about growing vegetables is that it can’t be ‘digitized’, you can’t build an app for it and you certainly can’t replace it with some new-fangled technology. With all this focus on the future and always trying to do things faster and better, there is some wonderful consolation in working with the timeless rhythms of nature and surrendering the control that we seek to exert in other areas of our life to just ‘wait and see…’. And on that somewhat philosophical note (it's been a hard week), it’s time for me to switch gear, take off the heels and the make-up and slip back into quiet(ish) sanctuary of the Welsh hills for a while. Happy weekend!

24 hours later

Hatches, matches, dispatches

It feels like spring has sprung early here in our little corner of the world. The snow drops are out in full force, little white heads nodding in the wind like extras in a Daft Punk video. The primroses are holding their own too, nuzzling up against each other in their enviable spot overlooking the stream. And we have even seen daffodils bravely poking their heads out of the mud to see what 2016 is all about after a nice long snooze.  Pretty much the same as last year I’m guessing, give or take a few trees and a little less water sloshing about the place. At least I hope that’s what I’d be saying if I were a daffodil living here.

Get Lucky?

Life is just a bed of (prim) roses

And of course spring would not be spring without the arrival of some new chicks, freshly hatched from, in this case, Gloucestershire. I never, ever thought I would end up married to a chicken fancier but I fear, alas, that this may be now the case. It turns out that my darling husband, fully embracing this smallholding lark with both arms (and legs), has been doing a worrying about of homework into old breeds of hen and decided that life could not go on without the addition of some Cotswold Legbar and Burford Brown chickens to our brood. Now if you, like me, haven’t exactly got your chicken breeds down pat, these pretty birds are the poultry equivalent of an It girl on Ladies Day at Ascot. All flamboyant feathers and Farrow & Ball colours with a permanent look of disdain on their beaky faces. Perhaps rightly so as these (hugely expensive) birds were hatched in a heated, designer barn, I daresay made from the finest Cotswold stone, with oak beams and floor to ceiling windows that would put our house to shame. So imagine their disgust as they were wrenched from their plush living quarters to be ignominiously bundled into a cardboard box and hurled into the back of a beaten up Landrover Defender (that my husband now assures me is a collector’s item and worth a fortune since they stopped making them last week). Four hours later they arrive to find themselves in the middle of a muddy field in the pissing rain, not a silk cushion or a Waitrose corn meal in sight. No wonder they didn’t venture out of their little house for a week. I could see the look in their eyes which said, “WTF am I doing here? I’m a Cotswold Legbar don’t you know. Perhaps this is all some horrific nightmare and I’ll back in the balmy, affluent south of England in a few clucks”. At times I can totally empathise with that!

WTF am I doing here?!

Tough luck chucks. You’re Welsh now. And that means you get to support the best rugby team in the world. Yes spring wouldn’t be spring without the Six Nations and that of course means lots of matches. So don’t expect to get anything done on a Saturday or a Sunday for the next eight weeks. It seems that everyone and everything around here stops for the rugby. It's like a scene out of 28 Days Later when Wales are playing: no cars, no tractors, no people, even the sheep seem to fall silent until you hear an audible cheer or groan (or just an almighty sigh in the case of today's nail-biting draw) rolling around the valley when the final whistle blows. Even time itself seems to work differently while the tournament is on. Our builder came round this week to ummm and aaarrr at various wonky walls that we want removed and at the end we asked him when we could expect the quote.  In a momentary lapse to my City alter ego, I was fully expecting him to say something along the lines of COB Friday (Close of Business for those of you not subjected to BS corporate speak day in day out) but instead he simply responded, “before the match”. Fair enough. Given the score, it's just as well we didn't wait until afterwards as we might have borne the brunt of some of that red shirted frustration.

Come on Wales!

And finally to dispatches. What better way to herald the start of spring than to feast upon a lamb grown in ones’ own fields. What a charming idea, we thought. Let’s ask the farmer next door to bring us one, we thought, fully expecting our request to be met with the delivery of a neatly, vacuum packed lamb in all the requisite cuts, ready to cook. Little did we expect said beast to arrive at our front door on the back of a quad bike, bleating away to its heart’s content and still very much alive. Fortunately my husband has the wherewithal to quickly resolve such situations and before you could say, “are lambs allowed to ride on those things?”, it was fleeced, gutted and hanging up in our larder fridge. Meat doesn’t come fresher than that, as Greg Wallace might say.  And no sooner had we butchered little Larry, then it was time to say goodbye to dear old Peppa. Now you may have gathered from reading my blog that my husband has no compunction about knocking off the odd animal or two. But with Peppa I definitely detected for the first time a flicker of hesitation as he prepared for the big P-Day. He deliberated for ages about which rifle to use and then which ammunition to ensure it was all as quick and painless as possible. And then when the day finally arrived he kept putting it off and putting it off, sneaking up to the pen to feed her one last scoop of pig nuts and give her one last scratch behind the ears.  He also went to huge amounts of trouble preparing her bath, finding an enormous cast iron thing on eBay and then spent SEVEN HOURS filling it and heating the water to exactly the right temperature (which, incidentally, he has never done for me). It would all have been quite endearing if said bath was not to be used to scald dear Peppa to remove her hair once the deed was done. In the end, after one final scratch, she was happily munching away on a banana (her favourite) and knew nothing about it at all. All very peaceful and stress-free. Less so for my husband and his (sort of) willing helpers who were then tasked with defuzzing her and cleaning her up for the larder. I wandered in later on and poked my head into the fridge to see the end result and it was all a bit Lord of the Flies to be honest. The bacon butties will be worth it though.  Especially with a Burford Brown fried egg thrown in for good measure. And perhaps a win next time for Wales. I don’t ask for much…