Chickens!

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 30 June 2010 in chickens | 1 comment

Yesterday, I alluded to needing a quick dinner because we were going to be busy doing exciting things (the casserole was yummo, btw) – well, the exciting thing was this: we got chickens!

We’ve been planning to get them for about 18 months and a chicken-facilitating garden was on my desirable-but-not-necessary list when we were looking for our house. In anticipation, I read loads about them and went on a course about keeping chickens in April last year, and got super excited about having them ASAP – then the house purchase got delayed and delayed and delayed… When we eventually moved in, it was late autumn and we couldn’t do that much in the garden. Then our plan from just having a random coop and a wire fence around the bottom of the garden evolved into levelling up a section of earth and building Fort Chicken (pictured below) – and, well, we’re slow and disorganised, with a billion other jobs needing doing at the same time.

But anyway, anyway, they’re here now. We went for point of lays – more expensive than hatching eggs or day old chicks but better for first timers and when we expand/replace in the future, we can look at those options, letting our existing chickens do the hard child rearing work for us*. Following a recommendation from a friend, we went to Edward Boothman near Silsden to get them and brought four home last night. Fort Chicken’s coop can apparently hold 15(!) chickens but we think the space in there and the run is more suited to 6-8 — we’ll get settled in with these girls then get the others as POL in the late summer/autumn (spring chickens come of age).

These girls are ISA Brown/Warrens – Edward’s recommendation for first timers as they’re good layers (300-325ish a year each!) and have friendly personalities. I’d like a few different types eventually but these are good to start with. Names to be confirmed when we get to know them but likely to be either chemical elements (if we follow our main pet naming scheme) or Buck Kar, Stanley Chicken (my best friend’s grandfather’s name), Warren Buckland (a lecturer of mine at uni) and Warren’s Song, Pt. 7.

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Bargain dinners – lamb curry and lamb, chorizo & chickpea casserole

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 29 June 2010 in cooking, eating | 1 comment

I intended to write more about wild garlic pods today but we cooked up such a bargainacious storm last night I can’t resist telling you about it.

I spotted a perfectly-fine looking 2kg shoulder of lamb in the reduced-to-clear section of the supermarket a few weeks ago. It was less than an hour before closing and the shop was pretty empty to they’d marked it down from £12 to £1.35 (it had originally been on offer at £12 too!). A 2kg joint for £1.35! The reduced meat gods were looking out for us that day – one of the staff had wrapped a couple of packs together with the sticker price of 75p – the top pack was ox tail, a less observant person might have thought the bottom pack was too. It wasn’t, it was £8-worth of sirloin steak! We ate the steak the following evening but the lamb went straight into the freezer until a time we fancied a nice roast.

I got it out to defrost yesterday and fully intended to slow roast it yesterday afternoon but work was a bit frantic and it just didn’t happen. By dinner time, we needed something quicker than a 5-hours-in-the-oven roast so I decided to hack it up instead and let John whip up a curry with it instead. There was so much meat though that I had enough to make a casserole with it too – a slow cooked one so I could use up the tougher meat.

John’s made a few excellent Achars recently but lacking yoghurt today, made a jalfrezi instead. Then forgot to add the egg, the numpty. We’ll add it when we have the leftovers though and add some more spices to freshen it up again.

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Pickling wild garlic (Ramsons) seed pods

Posted by louisa on Monday 28 June 2010 in eating, wild food | 1 comment

I love wild garlic. It was the first wild food I really tried and the one I’m still most comfortable with given how easily identifiable it is, and how it makes the world green when everything else is still hitting the snooze alarm after winter.

Usefully, the woods next to our house are *filled* with it, more than anywhere else I’ve seen – we’ve even got a sizeable patch growing at the bottom of our garden, which made it very easy to forage for a few handfuls of leaves at a time when I wanted to fling them in a recipe. Unfortunately though, like when you have most things in abundance, you don’t think about the time when they’re not going to be there any more – and I didn’t think about preserving any leaves until it was pretty much too late.

I’ve got a baggie full of stems in the freezer though – for using like spring onions in stir frys – and I was already thinking about how to preserve some seed pods when ManUpATree Nick Weston published a post on pod pickling. Very convenient timing!

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Growing salad leaves – frugal, organic & green

Posted by louisa on Friday 25 June 2010 in eating, growing | 0 comments

I just sowed my fourth pot of loose salad leaves of the season.

We finished the last of the just-about-to-bolt Winter Gems lettuce this week and have got a tray of Lollo Rosso seedlings in our porch/greenhouse but loose leaves has been filling the gap between those beautifully – and in three or four weeks, this new pot will be offering up its tasty leaves too.

Until we started growing our own, my partner John and I weren’t big salad eater, but mostly from disorganisation than anything. We didn’t have meal plans and we’d regularly find lettuce going soggy/brown in our fridge – we’d buy it for one meal, then eat some more at a second but then we’d have meals that didn’t work with salad or eat out, and soon the lettuce would be past it. We realised that didn’t make sense from a frugal or food waste point of view so tended to not have it at all at home, to save the waste.

Now though, from early spring to about the first frosts, we can eat fresh salad leaves whenever we want them – and without waste. A little gem lettuce is just the right size for a meal for us, or for a sandwich, we can just pick a handful of loose/”pick and come again” leaves.

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First post! Welcome to The Really Good Life

Posted by louisa on Thursday 24 June 2010 in admin | 1 comment

Hi, welcome to The Really Good Life. I’m Louisa and I live really well – but frugally.

I already write about reusing and recycling on my blog “How Can I Recycle This?“, and about composting on my site “Can I Compost This?“, as well as blogging and running other sites but I wanted a new place to talk specifically about growing, making, foraging, cooking – and living a frugal life in general.

The name of this blog was originally going to be something highfaluting and fancy but thinking about it the other day, I realised it boils down to this: I’m living a Really Good Life. Like Tom & Barbara, I live in a city (specifically squished between two industrial cities), I grow my own veg, our chickens will arrive shortly and we live cheaply & sustainable – but with tasty food & pretty things, inside of nasty homemade wine and scratchy woollen underwear.

This blog is about the journey I’m making – because it is a journey – my thoughts, my questions (that hopefully other people will be able to answer!) and where I’ve got some info to pass on, my recommendations & my mistakes – and I hope you enjoy it.

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