Tag Archives: Cooking

Children, Crafting, Food, Growing, Livestock, Preserving, Produce

2019 – a Difficult year

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It’s been quite a while since I posted here. A year in fact, and what a year. When I last posted, Sam was recovering from his broken foot, I was recovering from the pregnancy and the baby had started taking decent naps. I was feeling very hopeful for the new year and came up with a long list of things I’d like to achieve. Ah the joy of January resolutions.

It turned out to be quite a hard year again. We had a few good months but then physical complications of doing too much too quickly post-pregnancy came up. I need to be very careful these days as to how much I do each day or else I’m wiped out for a few days. Paracetamol, the hot tub and my trusty back heatpad have become so valuable to me. On top of that the baby proved the saying that no two are alike. My daughter was happy outside toddling around, she was very trustworthy in regards to eating anything and would listen in regards to things she shouldn’t do. My son’s a bit more of a free spirit, he doesn’t like being in the pushchair outside, but eats everything he touches and doesn’t listen to much. It made doing stuff outside quite a challenge. I tried using a sling or carrier but the lack of core strength just gave me awful pain. He’s getting a lot better now though and seeing him run around in the polytunnel or outside, shovelling soil and investigating (but not eating) plants, makes it all feel worthwhile.

  • Sling for lamb checks
  • They had fun with this
  • Setting him to work
  • Bringing in the harvest
  • Making friends with the ram
  • A back carry to do some butchery

Despite the difficulty I did get the duck patch cleared and set up (although strong winds have since taken the roof off). I love looking at that grassy area with its very young willow trees and remembering what a mess it was a year ago. We had our first lot of ducks and really enjoyed that. Walking them into the house each evening was lovely and they grew so quickly. We got 10 and raised them up, kept them a bit longer than we needed to but they were a good weight and they tasted delicious. We jointed 4 of them for us and kept one whole. The rest we sold to friends and family and got great feedback on them. We’d like to do the same again this year.

  • First paddle
  • Getting their feathers
  • Free range grazing
  • Walking to bed
  • The final trip
  • Wonderful meat
  • Before
  • During
  • A year on (with a dedge)

We made the decision not to hatch chicks in 2019 as we were struggling a bit and our flock was large enough. I perfected the use of our sin bin and broke broody after broody, but we still had 4 hens appear out of hedgerows with a total of 24 chicks between them! The cockerel chicks have now all gone into the freezer and the hens are set to join the laying flock. In addition to having more chickens than we had planned for we had our first ever encounter with redmite and it was awful. We used DE, smite, redstop and fire to try and get rid of them. I think we managed it, though I saw a couple at the last house clean. This year I think we are sending our two cockerels to the freezer to make sure we don’t get more surprise chicks. I’m a bit sad about Aramis, he is the last of our first animals, but he is 4 years old now and with 30 girls to chase around he is looking quite tired.

  • Drusilla was the first to have chicks
  • We had to rescue Daenerys and her chicks in the rain
  • This hen was our most vicious mother
  • The chick suite once the mums left
  • Ready to tackle red mite!

We did lamb in 2019 and it didn’t go as smoothly as we’d have liked. All but one ewe needed help, most were just a one leg back situation but our smallest ewe had our largest lamb who was overdue, stained waters and quite stuck. It ended up being a job for lambing ropes and a bit traumatic for her. We managed to get her mothering in the end but she went for meat in December. I couldn’t put her through another lambing and the vet said with her size it may well happen again. We also lost a lamb at birth, she just wouldn’t take a breath no matter what I did. That one was a bit traumatic for me. The vet says there’s not much I could have done differently, maybe pouring cold water over its face but there may have been something wrong with her. Then we lost one who strangled himself in a fence at a few months old. These were our first sheep losses and although people say ‘where there is livestock there will be deadstock’ it was quite hard. We have decided to not lamb this year, we’re a bit overgrazed and looking for more land. 2020 will be a take it easy year.

  • Wrapped up cosy
  • Big lamb, small ewe
  • All the lambs

On the growing front we managed to build 4 of the 5 polytunnel beds and started planting in the outside beds. The weeds ran rampant though and quite a few bits didn’t get harvested. I didn’t make a single jam or chutney, I only brewed 2 batches of wine and we did a batch of apple juice. It was quite disheartening, the intention was there but we just didn’t find the time or ability or energy to do much.

  • Ready for planting
  • Covered in weeds
  • In full swing
  • We got some nice carrots though
  • Plums!
  • Rhubarb
  • Harvest time
  • More harvest time
  • Even more harvest time

On the upside I did make my first ever soup (butternut squash), I followed it with some lovely broth soups. I also finally braved my Mehu Liisa and made rhubarb cordial which went down really well.

  • Butternut squash soup
  • Duck carcass
  • Nommy duck soup
  • Mehu Liisa
  • Rhubarb cordial

I did however manage to get back to my monthly smallholding crafting meetings this autumn. I may not have made any pegloom rugs but I started needle felting which I really enjoy. I also picked up the knitting needles and crochet hooks, getting a few very old works in progress (WIPs) finished. I’d really like to make a felted sheepskin rug and tan my own sheepskins in 2020. Meeting with some like-minded folks really helped to inspire me to craft some more and it is so good for my soul.

  • Finally a finished object that fits!
  • Cheeky knitting while waiting for a lift
  • Needlefelt sheep
  • Felted from our wool
  • 2D felted decorations

We had a lot of talks in 2019 about selling up, moving to a detached house with a big garden and going on lots of holidays. Smallholding with children, very young children, has been far more challenging for us than we could have imagined. I see lots of families on instagram managing it well but we’ve found it hard. Despite the attractiveness of selling up we do see the joy smallholding brings us, the health benefits and the fact that everything changes each day with the kids (the one constant of children is that nothing is constant!). We’ve decided that we are trying to do too much on our acreage, it’d be great for ducks or geese or chickens on their own. Or pigs, plenty of space for them. The polytunnels are great for growing and you can build on the established fruit trees. The problem is when I really sit down and look at everything about smallholding I find it’s the sheep I love and there just isn’t enough land here for a breeding flock of slow growing sheep (keep until min. 14 months). We’re looking at a larger acreage to better support a similar number of sheep, something that will also justify a bit of machinery as my back and core strength just isn’t what it used to be.

Me and my bestie, Arha

Looking to 2020 we’re not lambing and not having chicks. We’re working on sorting out our grass (quite mossy and overgrazed at the moment), repairing the sheds and polytunnels that have fallen into disrepair, growing veg, raising some ducks and hopefully finally having a holiday or two to ease the stress. I’m hoping to find the time to keep posting here, I do enjoy sharing the ups and downs of smallholding with you all. Hopefully even our struggles will be useful to other people who are smallholding or thinking about it.

Dans

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Food, Livestock, Produce, Sustainable living

Our first homebred hogget

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*TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES* There are pictures on this post but unfortunately they aren’t showing up. Please let me know if you can see them, as it’ll help me fix this.

 

Our first homebred lambs were 18 months old in November. Cisco was a really lovely ram in looks and a good temperament so was traded to another smallholder in exchange for Django, our new ram. Cisco has 6 girls of his own and I’m crossing my fingers that we hear of some lovely lambs from him next year.

 

The shearling ewes were put in with Django along with our 3 mature ewes. If everyone lambs then we’ll have a lot of sheep on our 2.5 acres, especially if the shearling ewes have twins. If that happens then I think we’ll be looking at selling some ewes with lambs at foot. We could also sell some stock at weaning. Everyone has been covered by Django at least once so its a wait and see what we get now.

Lots of lovely coloured bums

That left Crichton and Crais. Although Crais had done a lot of growing he was still smaller than Cisco and his horns weren’t quite growing in the right direction. As he was kept intact there was no option of him being a friend for a ram. Crichton was lovely and friendly but that also made him a bit dangerous. He thought he was people but he was also most likely to butt you. He did it a few times to me through the fence if I wasn’t scratching his chin right. Both boys were destined for the freezer.

From left to right, Cisco, Crais and Crichton

The night before they went, after they had been penned up safe, Sam and I had a discussion about meat. We raised these lambs. Crichton was so friendly. Could we eat them? Did we want to eat them?

The answer to the latter for me was yes. I am a meat eater, I don’t see that changing, and with the way my gut is, meat is one of the few things I can eat without trouble. Despite being a meat eater I also care passionately about animals. Some people find that hard to marry but I believe that it’s ok to eat animals if they have had a good life and a good (quick, low stress) death. I’m not completely there yet but I’d like all my meat to come from animals we have raised or have been raised by people we know. As to the former question, I feel that if I can’t eat meat I have raised then I shouldn’t eat it at all. I guess I believe that I should be aware of the animal and the life that was sacrificed.

The hogget from our homebred sheep wouldn’t be our first homebred meat. We have eaten chickens that we have bred. Sam felt that the sheep were closer to us, more relatable and that made it more difficult. We both went to bed with slightly heavy hearts that night.

Ingredients for a homegrown feast

One thing that came out of the conversation was looking at our consumption of meat in general. As a family we eat a lot of meat. We also have a lot of meat on the freezer. We talked it through and realised we were saving our homegrown (and other smallholder grown) meat for ‘special occasions’ and sharing with friends and family. Whilst it’s nice to share, doing this was keeping us away from the aim of only eating meat from known sources. We need to stop ‘saving’ meat in the freezer. We also decided to make an effort to reduce the amount of meat we buy in. I am working on buying only 2 fresh dinner meats a week. Everything else should come from our freezer (or kievs and pizza – our meals for overwhelmed days). Lastly, we decided to reduce down our consumption. See about meals without meat where we can and reducing meat portion sizes where we do eat meat.

A mutton shoulder from last year that we decided to stop ‘saving’

When we got the meat back I have to admit I was nervous. As they were intact rams which were living close to the ewes I was worried about ram taint. I didn’t even advertise the meat for sale in case it was inedible. As soon as I got the meat into the fridge and freezers I cut a bit of us and fried it. I’ve never sniffed meat with such suspicion. Thankfully I needn’t have worried. It was delicious and we tucked into fried chops that night.

Pan fried hogget chops – delicious

Despite not advertising we sold 3 halves by word of mouth. Selling always worries me in case people aren’t happy with what they bought but everyone reported that the meat was the best they’ve had. It’s a wonderful feeling producing good meat.

We got the horns and skins back as well. The skins are salting on the polytunnel and will be sent for tanning in the new year. The horns are outside waiting for nature to work it’s magic and the cores to come out.

One of the skins pre-salting (it was very dark by the time I could work on them)

All in all I’m feeling very positive about the whole thing. Now that Django has covered the ewes the ball is rolling for the whole process to start again.

Dans

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  • Cisco
  • Django sniffing out the girls
Brewing, Food, Preserving, Produce, Recipes

Adventures with rhubarb

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So this year we haven’t been doing as much with growing but there are two very prolific rhubarb bushes just by our bedroom window. I’ve never been very good at using rhubarb. I tried for several years to do rhubarb wine and it has bested me every time. For some reason I always get a smell and taste of old socks from it. One day I will try again and I will master a rhubarb wine. My only other experiment with rhubarb is the Finnish fruit soup which comes out ok but does need cream or milk with it. I planned to change that this year.

I started with the Finnish fruit cake I do but doing first an apple and rhubarb and then a rhubarb on it’s own. They were both lovely but the I really like the solo rhubarb one. Unfortunately I haven’t mastered a gluten free cake yet, the only gluten free flour our Tescos does is Doves farm and it just comes out too thick, even with extra baking powder. I tried the Tesco cake mix but due to not checking the ingredients it just came out as a molten sugar mess, my biggest baking disaster yet, it actually got scraped into the bin. I’ve bought some flour from Morrisons though and I’ll give the Tesco cake mix another try but without adding sugar. Fingers crossed I can make a decent tasting cake that my body approves of. Home made cake with home made custard is just so lovely.

The next step was some jam. I made jam late last year for the first time and really enjoyed it, but for some reason I have had cold feet about doing jam this year. Which is kind of crazy as I am hoping to be making jams and chutneys for sale next year as an added income from our fruit trees. I finally bit the bullet when Chi was settling in for her first long day at a new nursery. She seemed to be settling well but I wanted to be close to the phone and not too tied into a job. The rhubarb was also getting a bit overgrown at this point too. I’m very glad I gave it a go as it really is simple and Chi had us down to our last jar of jam (blackberry), she really does like jam on her toast and porridge. The rhubarb and vanilla worked well but I was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t as sharp as I was hoping, in fact it was really a bit too sweet. I’ll try again with less sugar and see if I can get one to our taste. That said Chi loved it on her porridge and Sam enjoyed it on his toast.

The recipe was taken from the BBC and is simply equal amounts of sugar and fruit (1kg) with 2 cinnamon sticks stirred until the sugar dissolves, then the juice of 1 lemon added and proceed as you would for any jam. You do have to scrape the scum off the top though, we used a metal spoon for this and once cool Sam gobbled up the scum! Waste not want not here.

Lastly I’ve had my first go at a cordial. I found this a bit daunting too, but that seems to be a trend for me with new skills. It was really simple once I carved out the time for it, another day of Chi at nursery where other commitments meant I couldn’t get stuck into a big job outside. I used  another BBC recipe for this one, using an orange and a lemon as well as rhubarb. I was meant to use ginger too, and even had it in the house, but completely forgot to add it. Maybe for the best as it would be nice for Chi to have this and I’m not sure how the ginger will affect her liking of it.

I have to say that I’m not sure I did it quite right. I did it in the jam pan as that is easy to pour from and I don’t know if the thicker bottom will have affected things. I also think I left it too long. The recipe said ‘until the rhubarb is falling apart’ but I wasn’t sure if that was just some of the rhubarb or all of it so I waited until it was all coming apart. The cordial was very thick. The recipe expected 600ml to be produced but I only got about 250ml until I pressed and squeezed the bag with a metal spoon. I ended up with about 400ml which seems like very little. The rhubarb I used was quite old though, very thick stems, and the weather has been quite dry, so it is possible the fruit itself had less moisture to give. It is lovely and tasty though, maybe a bit more orangey in flavour than I was expecting,. the ginger may balance that out.

I had heard that cordial needs to be stored in the fridge so I called Vigo Presses to see if I can pasteurise it for a longer cupboard storage. We bought our pasteuriser and apple pressing kit from them a couple of years ago and I am still really happy with their customer service. They said I can absolutely pasteurise it but also suggested using a steamer to produce a cordial that will store in the cupboard without pasteurisation.

As I only got 400ml this time I haven’t bothered to pasteurise but we do have a Mehu Liisa in the cupboard that I think I will use to make the next batch of cordial. It came straight from Finland so doesn’t have English instructions but I think I will ask my mother in law or some of our Finnish family for help with it. It looks like it will take a lot longer than just on the hob but it can be left and I like the idea of not having to pasteurise separately. I might also get a better return. I think I’ll do another post about that when I get around to giving it a try.

The only picture I have of the Mehu Liisa in action (blackberries)

Dans

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Food, Preserving, Produce, Recipes

Eggs everywhere

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We have too many eggs. Seriously too many eggs. 20 boxes of eggs in the fridge for our use. We are getting between 16 and 22 eggs a day from the chickens, we try and sell as many as possible, but any small eggs, dirty eggs or eggs with shell defects go into our use. We also only keep eggs at the gate for 7 days before bringing them into our use. I like to only sell fresh, decent sized, clean eggs to those who choose to buy from us.

Eggs for sale on the gate

The downside is the sheer number of eggs we are getting at the moment. The Derbyshire Redcap young hens should increase their egg size soon and if it ever stops raining the eggs will be cleaner. In the mean time though we have a glut!

One day’s harvest of eggs

So what to do with all these eggs. We’ve been having scrambled eggs for lunch and omelettes for dinners but it’s just not cutting it so I asked on facebook for some ideas. The first one was Spinach and soft cheese fritters. There was no recipe and I’ve never made fritters so I winged it. I greased a muffin tray with butter and put a whisked egg into each one. We didn’t have spinach but we did have kale so I chopped that up and put a bunch into each one. I finished it off with a dollop of soft lactofree cheese. Into the oven at 200C for 10 mins. They came out quite well but a bit plain. I think some salt or bacon or even herbs mixed in would help. My second tip would be don’t use butter, a week later I’m still trying to scrub the muffin tray clean, oil may have been better.

Kale and soft cheese egg things

My next attempt was custard. A few years ago a friend told me custard was easy to make. I love custard but being lactose intolerant I don’t get to have it much. I looked it up but separating eggs seemed far too scary so I left it. I bought an egg separator a few weeks ago and have finally put it to use. I found a really simple recipe online here but as I’m rubbish at following recipes I modified it a bit.

My modifications were small, mainly using 3/4 a cup of full fat milk and 1/4 a cup of single cream. I am also terribly impatient and whisking continuously is far too boring so I just turned the heat up to high. I was meant to pour it into a jug once it hit boiling and then whisk until thickened but I honestly couldn’t tell if it was boiling because the whisking was creating bubbles (I may have had some white left in). In the end I whisked until it very suddenly got harder to whisk which turned out to be it thickening. I checked it and it seemed thick enough to now be called custard. I was quite nervous but as soon as I tasted the spoon I knew it was a success, I didn’t even get a photo of the custard in a jug, it was gone far too quickly. It was really tasty but I might do slightly less vanilla in future. I’ll scale it up tomorrow for dessert with Chi as I waited for her to be in bed before attempting this.

My last egg adventure is whisking eggs up and freezing them. I tried in a muffin tray to start with but I found it very hard to get the frozen egg out. It does work well in silicon fairy cake molds though, popping them out into a bag once frozen. I’ve yet to try defrosting and using them. That is on my to-do list for this week.

Eggs ready for freezing

We’ve been doing all the usual egg dishes as well; egg fried rice, eggy bread (french toast), fried eggs, egg salad, hard-boiled and dippy eggs. Hopefully there’ll be some more posts of ways to use up eggs soon. Quiche and meringue are my next challenges.

Dans

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Crafting, Food, Livestock

Our first mutton, sheepskins and horn

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Yes we are still here!

My laptop had a slow death and went completely out of use a couple of months ago. Since then I have been limping along with my phone but it was a lot harder to get things done. Now I have a nice new laptop I’m back again. I’ll catch you up with the various goings on as new stuff comes up, but I want to do a post about our first experience of sending sheep to the abattoir and getting the meat and other products back.

You may remember that we ended up getting more breeding ewes than we thought we could have in the long run. We wanted to see how they lambed and then cull down to our final number of breeding ewes (3). Two of the ewes, Anya and Aelin didn’t get in lamb, there was a chance they would if we gave them a second year but we just couldn’t justify keeping them on. They were earmarked for meat once we were certain they weren’t carrying lambs.

Lambing went pretty well for our first time. Alanna’s lambing stood out though. She scanned as a single and had a small lamb with no difficulty. We saw another sack but she showed no sign of pushing. A very small lamb literally wriggled it’s way out of her, it dropped to the floor, she looked behind her and then continued licking the first lamb. I waited a bit to see if she would do anything but then cleared the airways. We gave her 2 hours and still no mothering towards the second lamb. We did finally get the lamb up and feeding, which she allowed after a bit of a fight. She never did ‘mother’ Crais though. She would allow him to feed if he was by her but she never answered his calls or went to him. Both lambs were a lot smaller than any of the others and Alanna got marked for meat once her lambs were weaned. Her not looking after Crais gave us so much extra work.

So weaning time came around and we booked the ewes in. I spent the week before trying to come up with ways to avoid it. Maybe we could sell them – but we want meat, if we sell them we have no mutton. Maybe we are being too rash in writing them off – but if we keep them we have 12 sheep on the land over winter, far too many. It really was a decision I wrestled with and I am kind of glad I did. I hope I always feel at least a little tug in sending animals off for meat.

Aelin, Alanna and Anya

Abattoir rolled around quickly, the trailer had been scrubbed out, the sheep dagged and checked over, everything was ready. We got a little lost driving to the abattoir, despite doing a test run a couple days before, we pulled up at the butchers expecting the side road to be a route to the abattoir but it turned out it was further so Sam had to do a u-turn in the trailer! The animals unloaded fine and we had all the paper worked needed to get back our Category 2 animal by-products. We drove back home feeling a bit solemn but not with the tears a lot of smallholders had reported.

Saying bye to the girls

I was back there a few hours later though to pick up the skins and horns. It would seem that the abattoir aren’t used to people doing this, they weren’t sure about the paperwork at first and the horns were cut at varying lengths, they did apply an initial salting though which was nice.

Cat 2 products for transit

When I got them back home the skins were laid out and any flesh removed, in future I think I’d actually ask them not to do the initial salting if I’m going to collect them so quickly (they were still warm), as it seems to make the flesh harder to remove in places. I got them as clean as I could though and covered with salt. A week or so later we covered them again and then about a month later we sent them off to be tanned. I’ll try a do a more in depth post about the skins once I get them back.

The horns I had much less of a clue about. I’d read about burying them, or putting them on a high roof far away. Unfortunately we had neither of those and so we popped them in a dog cage near the back door until I could read more about the boiling method. As it turned out when I next checked on them the maggots had loosened the core on one despite the cold weather. I left them longer and the maggots loosened the core on 3 more, not really much of a smell at all until you removed the core. There are two more and they are now in the conservatory. I should give them a try again soon.

Collecting of the meat was ok. The butchers got a couple cuts wrong which was annoying as I had to drive back to get it corrected, I didn’t want to disappoint the customers. We sold 5 halves in the end, keeping one half back for ourselves. One was collected fresh from the butcher, one was collected fresh from us, two were frozen and then collected from us and the last was posted fresh. The last one was probably the most nerve wracking for me. I pretty much loathe polystyrene so we went for Woolcool packaging which is cardboard boxes lined with a wool insert. We sent it next day delivery via courier and it arrived fine thankfully. I think we’d definitely be open to posting in future.

The contents of one of the meat boxes

We ate our first home grown mutton the next night and it really was delicious, just a quick dish of chops lightly fried but the meat wasn’t tough at all. We saved a leg for Christmas dinner and slow cooked it, the meat really is different to lamb, it is genuinely richer. We’ve had lots of positive feedback from the customers which is really nice.

Our first mutton meal

We should have a very limited amount of hogget over summer, so if you’re interested get your orders in, I have a feeling it will go quickly!

Dans

Food, Growing, Livestock, Produce

Just a little leek

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Well when we set up the first veg bed back in January last year, I was very eager to get planting. So eager that I looked at what seeds I had that could be planted that early and went mad on them. As such we ended up with a lot of white onions (not too bad apart from the fact we pretty much only eat red onion) and a ton of leeks.

Now I love a good chicken, bacon and leek pie and was interested in finding other ways I might like it. I didn’t realise until after I planted them that Sam isn’t keen on them at all. Of course, once the excitement of my first planting waned, my attention got caught on other things. We ended up with 3 rows of leeks that hadn’t been thinned, sown so tightly that if you tried to pull one you got about 5!

Once Nov rolled round I needed to find a way to cook and eat all these leeks despite me being the only one who likes them. I’m firmly of the ‘if we grow it we eat it’ mentality, trying to waste as little as possible. I may just have to have a bit of a longer think before I plant things next year. My first experiment was to chuck some leeks in the roasting pan. When I do tatties I add in red onion and garlic half way through anyway, and leek is related so that’ll work right? Well it did, and Sam even liked it to boot! Roast tatties with garlic, red onion and leek are now a staple with our roasts. It also works well in my modified bubble and squeak.

I’m not entirely sure Chi is liking them but she is going through a phase of rejecting certain textures, she had been a big fan of cooked onion but has gone right off it. She is however fully embracing the food preparation. I’d been giving her pieces of garlic to peel when I’m doing meal prep, she just needs you to loosen the skin and she does the rest. I gave her a leek the other day and she loved peeling it, even though it was taller than her!

Start them young!
Start them young!

With Sam on board for roast leek I decided to brave a chicken, bacon and leek in a creamy sauce with pasta. It is horribly unhealthy for the amount of dairy in the sauce but it’s had a big thumbs up from most people (a friend who doesn’t like leek at all wasn’t very keen) and is now Sam’s request for me to cook when we have people over, with my apple and pear crumble for dessert. I’ll pop the recipe at the end of this post.

Noms

I’m starting to see a seasonal flow to my cooking. Before the smallholding we would eat pretty much the same meals all year round. In spring we had a lot of goose egg omelettes. Then in early summer egg and chips from our chicken or goose eggs and our tatties was a staple. As the polytunnel really started producing I ventured into ratatouille. Sam has labelled my chicken, bacon and leek my autumn meal. It’s not quite as home grown as the others but I’m starting to really look at what we are growing and cook that with bought foods that compliment it. I used to buy peppers and mushrooms year round, but even once the polytunnel has stopped producing them I’m still not buying them, I’m switching our meals to more seasonal. It’s exactly what I wanted to happen and it feels so wonderful.

The pinnacle for me, food wise, of this year has to be our Samhain dinner. For those who don’t know Samhain is a pagan festival that falls on Halloween. My general celebration is to do a pumpkin (or failing that a tea light in a lantern) to guide any spirits home, then cook a nice meal and eat it with some wine and a spare place set at the table for any spirits who wish to join. After the meal I libate (leave as an offering outside) some food and wine for the spirits. I spend much of the day thinking of those who have gone before (ancestors and friends) and those who are yet to come. I also view it as my new year.

Pumpkin!
Pumpkin!

Every Samhain I try and cook something really homely, if I can with as much of our home grown food as possible. Sam came home this year to a carved pumpkin and a roast dinner being laid on the table. He knew the pumpkin was ours, and the chicken as we had killed two of Aino’s cockerel chicks the day before. As he tucked in he asked about the origin of various foods and in the end I said it’s all ours, right down to the wine we were drinking. That really was a satisfying meal, roast chicken, roast tatties, roast onion, roast garlic, roast leeks, roast pumpkin, roast carrots and fried chard washed down with plum wine and followed by an apple and pear crumble for dessert.

Plus we had passed what I thought would be our hardest challenge. Could we see something born, care for it, kill it and then eat it? If we can’t the whole lifestyle falls apart and I would have had to seriously think about eating meat, but we passed and knowing the animals had had a good life made it all the more satisfying. There’s still somethings I’d like to change (a better broody coop and a much bigger teenage run area) but I am happy with the lives our animals are living.

Right I promised you a recipe for the chicken, bacon and leek. The creamy sauce is adapted from this recipe.

Everything prepped for a tasty meal

  • 5 chicken thighs (cut into strips or chunks)
  • 1 pack of bacon (cut into cubes)
  • 1 bulb of garlic (cut all but 1 clove into thirds, finely dice the last one and put with the cheese)
  • 3 medium leeks (chopped)
  • 2 red onions (diced)
  • 150g mature cheddar cheese (grated)
  • 50g unsalted butter
  • 200ml single cream

This goes a lot better if you do all your prep first, it’s a 3 pans going at once meal (4 if you’re doing pasta, more if other veg)

Pop your butter in a small pan and melt on a low heat.

Put a splash of vegetable oil into a saute pan and cook the garlic until you can slightly smell it/it starts to brown.

Add the chicken to the saute pan and cook.

Pop the bacon in a frying pan and cook, trying to break the cubes up as much as possible.

Your butter should have melted now, pour in your cream and raise the temperature to bring it to a simmer. Then let simmer for 5 mins. Try not to let it boil.

The chicken should be pretty done and the bacon done by the time the cream is simmering. Add the cooked bacon, the onion and leek to the saute pan .

Once the sauce is simmering add in the cheese and garlic and stir quickly to ensure it all melts.

If things have gone smoothly your sauce will be ready before the leek and onion are soft so you can just pop it to the side.

Once the leek and onion are soft in the saute pan pour your sauce over and stir everything together.

Serve with rice or pasta and some veg. We did home grown corn on the cob the other day which was tasty. I’m also tempted to do some mashed potatoes and make it into a pie but I haven’t braved that yet – pies are scary.

Enjoy and don’t think of the calories!

Dans

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