Busy Sunday

Posted by louisa on Sunday 25 July 2010 in cooking, eating, growing | 0 comments

Today, I’ve:

• Built a cold-smoking cabinet/mini-smoke house
• Cursed the sun because just as I finished the latter, it came out and made it too hot to cold smoke cheese without it melting all over the place
• Cleaned out the chicken coop
• Hung out a load of washing, which, of course, caused the sun to go in
• Jumped for joy because the lack of sun meant I could start smoking
• Started smoking three types of cheese (more on this in another post)

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Smoked cheese – my first attempt at cold smoking

Posted by louisa on Sunday 25 July 2010 in cooking, eating, smoking | 3 comments

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of curing & smoking food for a while but I only started to seriously consider doing it when Martin from Old Sleningford Farm mentioned a) how cheap cheddar can be transformed by a little time in a smoker and b) how easy it is to build a garden smokehouse.

About a month ago, I decided it would be a perfect project for this year’s birthday new fun craft/experience/skill and started reading into it in more detail. It’s a lot easier to build a hot smoker and there were a number of smokers-cum-bbqs on eBay – but that wouldn’t let me do cheese, and I like smoked cheese a lot. I thought I’d have to build a smoker with an external firebox, feeding the cooling smoke into the chamber via piping – and the thought of that overwhelmed me a little. Then by complete chance, I stumbled upon the ProQ Cold Smoke Generator.

The ProQ Cold Smoke Generator was only developed last year but it’s a wonderful combination of simplicity & genius. Obviously I’m new to smoking so I can’t compare it to other methods – but every other method I’ve read about was way more complicated that this. It’s a carefully (but not overly) engineered spiral of metal mesh. It doesn’t use gas or electricity – just a few seconds of a tealight to get started, then the sawdust smoulders away of its own accord for up to 10hrs, without any further intervention, stoking or encouragement. I think what finally won me over though was the instructions on the ProQ/Mac’s BBQ site showing how, with the CSG, you could make a smokehouse from a cardboard box, two bits of dowel, an old baking tray and some cooling racks. Recycling and frugal!

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Making our pets zero waste: the dog

Posted by louisa on Friday 23 July 2010 in frugal, green, zero waste | 4 comments

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about drying ox heart and other offal to make dog treats for our springer spaniel, Lily.

We adopted Lily from the Dogs Trust in March and she very quickly made herself a core member of the household – and here, that means being green and frugal :)

Food

As first time dog owners, we accepted the Dogs Trust’s recommendation of a certain type of dry food, with water – or whey or gravy, when they were available. Following feeding advice online, I tried feeding her veggies too – mixing them in with her food or giving them to her like a treat – she politely took them, because she’s a very polite well-mannered dog, but then gently dropped them to the floor and gave me a look. If you have animals/children/beloveds who you regularly try to deceive and betray by handing them a carrot when they expect beef, you know that look.

So, anyway, her food is very low waste: the dry food comes in giant paper sacks = recyclable. And because it’s biscuits, they don’t go off like meat does, so there is no food waste.

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Growing vegetables for chickens

Posted by louisa on Thursday 22 July 2010 in chickens, growing, wild food | 1 comment

As I mentioned in my post about the economics of getting started with chickens, we’re hoping to feed the chickens a combination of bought-in food (nutritionally balanced layers pellets) and “free” food – scraps, foraged stuff and things we’ve grown especially for them in the garden — and it’s the latter I want to think about now.

Before they moved in, I had started growing some stuff for them (specifically radishes because they’re such a quick crop) and I’d left some lettuces in the ground for longer than I would have done normally, because I thought they’d like them as a snack. They didn’t. The radishes were slightly more successful but only for the green tops, not the red roots – which would be great if we liked radishes because we could easily share but since we don’t, it seems inefficient to grow them.

So anyway, I’m trying to find crops that I can grow for them to supplement their pellets. They’re currently snacking on borage (which they’re eating in the somewhat blurry pics here) and bolting spinach. I’ve got some perpetual spinach & chard growing too – we’ll use some of it, but it’ll be mostly for them. I should be able to start picking those in a few weeks. Around the same time, we’ll be harvesting carrots so they’ll be able to have the tops from those. For late winter/next spring, I’ve sown kale & spring cabbages, and there should also be lots of brassica leaves/surplus — but there is a bit of a gap in the middle between the autumn and late winter/spring harvests.

Next year, I’ll be more on the ball and have early winter cabbages ready to feed them then but now I’m trying to plug the gap with quick-grow stuff. Any suggestions? I’m too late for planting comfrey for them but there still maybe a little time for clover?

I am going to keep foraging for them too, with the rule that unless I can identify something so definitely that I’d be confident to eat it myself, I won’t feed it to them. It’s a cautious route to take – probably missing out on a lot of good stuff for them – but I’d rather be cautious than have a poisoned chicken. They very much like nettles which is a good thing given how many we have around here! I’ve been wilting them to lessen the sting but I’m tempted to dry a lot now to have for over the winter.

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Birthdays – how do you do it?

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 21 July 2010 in anti-consumerism | 2 comments

Yesterday was my birthday – the big 3-1.

In general, I dislike special days that have been hijacked to become days of mass consumption – I don’t celebrate Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s day, anniversaries or anything like that, but a few years ago, when I worked six days a week, every week, all year, I decided that I’d start celebrating my birthday again as an excuse to have a very rare day off work. I actively discourage cards & presents (cards & for-the-sake-of-it presents really annoy me!) but for the last couple of years, I’ve tried to spend my birthday doing fun stuff: a day off work to try something – a craft, a skill – I’ve not done before. Last year, it was cheesemaking; this year was supposed to be cold smoking but the supplies didn’t arrive and the weather was a bit too moist, so it was more cheesemaking but will be smoking stuff today (if the items arrive in the post or at the weekend – postponed birthday fun stuff).

John pretty much ignores his birthday but if his mum asks what he’d like for a present or if he’d like to go out for a meal, he asks her to cook one of his favourite meals instead. Big family meals out are compromise and too distracted/busy to actually talk to people – he’d prefer to spend the time more comfortably in their family home.

I know other frugal people who ask for gift vouchers etc for their birthday so they can buy what they want with it and/or spread the gift out by having little luxuries over a longer period.

As for giving, I much prefer to give presents throughout the year – when I see an item that I think the person will like, I get it for them then rather than hanging onto it. The one exception is my best friend Katherine – her birthday is special to her and because it’s right next to Christmas, often gets overlooked – so I always make a special effort to find presents for her and also make at least one item.

Do you celebrate your birthday? What do you do to downplay the almost ubiquitous consumerism? How do you handle gifts – do you like to give/receive them? Do you discourage for-the-sake-of-it gifts, and if so, how? What about other people’s birthdays, especially children – how do you handle those?

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Using up the glut: Marrow cake recipe

Posted by louisa on Monday 19 July 2010 in cooking, growing, recipes | 25 comments

In my previous post about saving marrow/courgette seeds, I mentioned that the marrow I had was just going from ripe to overripe. I had no particular plans to eat the marrow – we like courgettes a lot but thought, since the variety was billed as a courgette, it would be tasteless as a marrow. I was happy just using it as a seed nursery – but when I’d stripped out the seeds, it seemed a waste to throw it in the compost. If the chickens liked courgettes/marrows, I’d have given it to them but they’re strangely fussy birds so I was left with pounds and pounds of edible flesh.

I test fried a slice and judged it to be alright – not as flavourful as its younger siblings but certainly not bad. Tough skin though – edible but tough, so that had to go. I used half of it to make a cheesy-bacony comfort food bake thing (a variation on this recipe from the Indy but with mixed cheese – parmesan and jarlsberg – because that’s all we had in and also goats cheese makes me gip) – I had some on its own last night and we’ll have the rest tonight with pork chops in a tomatoey sauce. The other half, I used to make a marrow/courgette cake.

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Saving seeds from courgettes/marrows

Posted by louisa on Monday 19 July 2010 in growing | 1 comment

As I mentioned in passing in my last post, we’re in the middle of a courgette-glut. Unfortunately the glut started in the second busiest week of my year (the summer showcase at drama – meaning I work about 60hrs instead of the usual 35hrs) so the courgettes didn’t get picked on time – and they stayed on the vine growing into marrows. I’d intended to let some of the fruits grow to marrow size anyway to collect seeds for next year so it wasn’t the end of the world.

I harvested one of the marrows yesterday – it weighed in at 1.8kg (just under 4lbs). I managed to slice a good number of the seeds in half while cutting it open (doh!) but still got 30 or 40 good size seeds from it. I’ve not saved the seeds from marrows before so I’m not sure whether or not it’ll be a success – the ones I’ve kept look fully formed and are the roughly the same size as the ones I bought this year (there were a lot of smaller ones which I discarded), but only time will tell if they’ll germinate.

When saving seeds, you’re supposed to leave the fruit on the plant for as long as possible to allow the seed to fully develop. Over ripe but not rotten is the usual guideline. This marrow was probably just edging toward over-ripe from ripe – still edible but the skin was tough (it’s over-ripe if you can’t push your thumbnail easily into the skin).

Anyway, I’ll see how these seeds dry and will try growing them next year – it feels like there is little to lose. I’ll let another couple of fruits stay on the plant longer to see what the difference is.

(Surprisingly/frustratingly, the chickens don’t seem to like courgette/marrow – a shame because there is a lot of it to go around!)

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