Author Archives: Kate Watson

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About Kate Watson

Brewster, cook, poultry-keeper, curer & smoker, in other words, jill of all trades and mistress of none!

Built Like A Barn Door – or, how to make your own shed doors [Guest Blogger]

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Lemon TreeOur Guest Blogger is Ross, from Christchurch, NZ.  

You may recall the lovely series of lemon-glut busting recipes which Ross has shared with the blog.  As well as all that preserving, he’s been doing some DIY lately – and I was so impressed by this new shed door that I rather cheekily asked him for a write-up!

So, as they say, now for something completely different! But something which is still undoubtedly a very useful country skill – woodwork.

Scenario

We have a shed. It’s timber-framed, and until recently it was clad with asbestos boards. We got some professionals in to remove and dispose of it properly, and then had a local builder come and reclad the shed in plywood. So far so good, but his quote didn’t include reinstating the door – which, to be fair, was old, rotting, and had a sliding track which was ruined when the asbestos guys ripped it off.

Shed, doorlessWhat to do?

The aperture was 190-191cm high and 140-141cm wide. (Yes, the edges are not parallel; what do you expect?) An unusual size, and if I did get a door made to fit that, I’d also have to shell out for delivery as it wouldn’t fit in the car. Such a wide door would have quite a large swing, which could be a bother.

I got some door designs from various DIY books and websites. The traditional basic ledged-and-braced door design – described as having a “rustic” feel – would certainly work for us. In short, you lay out some planks side-by-side, then nail or screw two horizontals and a diagonal to keep them together, and there’s your door.

Single door panelI don’t have a good picture of the design that doesn’t infringe somebody else’s copyright, but – skipping ahead a bit – here’s what one of ours looks like.

I rapidly came to the idea of a double door to reduce the swing size. But if I made a pair of ledged and braced doors, I’d still have the same problem getting the parts home from our local DIY barn as the wood would be too long to fit in the car.

There was a bit of head-scratching, and a few minutes more spent getting the splinters out from under my fingernails, before I realised what I could do. Stable doors. That is to say, a pair of doors with the ability to swing independently but which fill the frame vertically.

So, to deal with the swing issue as well, I’d make a double stable door. That is to say, four doorlets to fill the space. What could possibly go wrong? I should point out that, between my partner and I, we have limited tools, skill and experience. We have an electric drill and a Workmate, and know what end of a hammer to hold (beginners please note, not the metal end), but New Yankee Workshop this ain’t…

Design

door drawingHere’s the design. H for hinge, S for a door-stop, and the brown rectangles are tower bolts.

If you compare it with other ledge and brace doors, you’ll notice this is a modified design. Traditionally the ledges would both be a little distance in from the top and bottom of each door. Here I have moved the central ledges nearly flush to the edge, for convenience in bolting them together. (I still needed to be able to bolt one side at the top and bottom, but I figured I would use off-cuts to extend the ledges where I needed to. You probably don’t want both ledges to be flush with the edges in case you need to shrink the doors later.)

So I spent a good while in Mitre 10 figuring out which of their available pre-cut timber widths would give me a reasonably convenient time of assembling it all. (I had hoped to find tongue and groove, but they don’t keep any. That was OK as their regular boards are uniform enough; some are a bit warpy but not too bad.)

It broke down like this:

  • Right side: 7x 13.5cm x 9mm boards per door
  • Left side: 2x 23cm x 9mm boards per door
  • Bottom half: Boards to be 1.2m long, uncut
  • Top half: The same 1.2m boards, to be initially cut a few cm too long, then later cut to fit precisely.
  • Ledges (horizontals): Cut to same width as their respective doorlets. I realised later they need to be a little smaller to allow for the swing of the door.
  • Braces (diagonals): Pythagoras tells us that these are going to be longer than the verticals or the horizontals. As they’re blocks with a non-zero width the length will be slightly longer than by Pythagoras, but it worked out within about 1%.

You may notice that (7 x 13.5cm) + (2 x 23cm) comes to 140.5cm, for an aperture that varies between 140 and 141cm in width. This would prove to be annoying later.

Assembling each doorlet

Assembling the doorletLay out your panels side by side. Use a spare block of wood to square up the ends. (For the 7-panel doorlets I did this in two stages, four boards then three, as my working area wasn’t quite wide enough.)

Clamp the ledges into place. I also used a sash clamp to hold the planks together laterally; I don’t know whether this was essential but I suspect I’d have needed more G-clamps if I hadn’t.

Then pin the ledges to the planks. You can do this with nails but I used screws (drilling pilot holes first, of course). I attached each end of the ledge to its corresponding board with three screws, then put one screw into each intermediate board; the same for the other ledge. This may have been overkill.

Next cut and attach the braces. We just marked these with a pencil and steel rule, then sawed as close as we could to the line (fixing up later). The braces have to fit well as they spread the weight of the door. I fixed each ledge with two screws into each end board and one into each intermediate. On reflection this was definitely overkill.

Then paint, varnish, or apply whatever decoration you wish. For efficiency we painted only the outward faces at this point (we have still to paint the shed exterior, after all) – in a less clement climate you might be well advised to paint all of it before hanging to try and prevent damp getting in and warping the wood to next week and back again.

The hinge conundrum

I had read in my DIY book that a tee-hinge was “traditional” for this sort of design of door, so I bought some without thinking much about it. Mistake! For an outward-opening door, it was only going to be possible to put these on the outside of the door, with the screws exposed to all comers: no good for security. (Thank you, Mitre 10 returns policy…!)

I replaced them with some ordinary door hinges, of the kind that doesn’t require you to cut a rebate into the frame.

It’s important to think about where the hinges will attach to, on both the door and the frame. You can’t put screws into the end-grain of a block of wood and expect them to hold. Similarly, putting them into the side of the plywood cladding would have been hopeless. These were going to have to go into a door frame, the shed’s timber framing, or something securely attached thereto.

Shed frameOn one side I had the timber stud. No worries – just have to chisel away a small section of the plywood edge so I could attach the hinges properly into the stud and not foul their pins.

Existing shed constructionOn the other side things were a bit more interesting. There’s no frame to be seen – just the edges of the interior wooden cladding, and a bit raggedy at that.

Adding part-frameTurns out the frame is just behind, so I bought a couple more boards to act as a part-frame, which I attached with long screws through the inner cladding and into the frame.

Hanging the doors

Finally, it was time to hang the doors. You can hang a single door yourself, but it’s a bit troublesome and involves a couple of wedges; much easier with a spare pair of hands. (Sadly, I didn’t have a third pair of hands to photograph this process.)

I started out with the lower two doorlets. Obviously, the bottom doors don’t go all the way down to the deck; you want them to sit slightly off the ground (one source I read said 6mm) for clearance over any debris that may lurk. First fit the hinges (remembering not to put screws into the end grain of a ledge); then put the door into its open position, jacked off the ground; mark the positions of the holes, drill your pilots, then screw it into place.

Except, if you’re me, at some point in this process you think “hey, if I cut rebates for the hinges on that side, even if they don’t need it, I’ll save the couple of mm that will mean I don’t have to trim the doors.” Mistake! I’ve never cut rebates before, and they were distinctly less than even. Worse, the rebates I cut were sufficiently deep that when closing the doorlets fully the pressure tried to rip the hinges off! I ended up packing the hinges with cardboard and crossing my fingers. This may yet come back to bite me, but at least it’s “only” a matter of turning the fake-frames over and rehanging two of the doors, right…?

Offering up the second (larger) door it was clear I was going to have to trim a few mm off the edge for it to fit. On hanging it I found I had somehow managed to give them a 6mm height differential. I wasn’t worried; they swung well, and it’s not surprising as the ground isn’t flat, but if only I had realised this first and hung one to match the other…

Bottom doorlets installedBy now it was getting late. I had bought four heavy-duty tower bolts for securing the doors to each other and the frame, so I used one of them to keep the doors from swinging freely, then called it a night.

Fitting the upper two doors was very much like the lower two, but less close to the ground. We offered each up in turn and trimmed them to fit vertically, as planned.

On closing them for the first time (one at a time), one of the ledges prevented the other door from closing, so we cut a bevel into it. Then the doors fitted!… just. Very very tight, not really usable, so we spent a few minutes hand-sanding the mating edges down. It’s just about usable. I am reticent to take more off yet until the doors have hung for a couple of weeks as they may settle, changing their shape subtly.

Door furniture

All doorlets with boltMy plan for using the door was to treat the whole thing as a double door most of the time. I fitted a tower bolt across each vertical pair to keep them together; this is why I put the central ledges where they are.

Most of the time we won’t need the full width of the door so will only open the larger half. I fitted a tower bolt vertically at the top and bottom half of the smaller pair to secure them. (I added a couple of off-cuts in the corners, butting up to the ledges, so I could attach the bolts with the same deep screws I had been using on the rest of the door. The shed sits on a concrete slab, so making a hole for the bottom bolt to drop into required a couple of minutes with a big masonry bit.)

Inside view, bolts installedThe door is secured by a hasp, staple and padlock across the top pair. I may fit a further tower bolt inside the bottom pair so we can have it held fast while the top pair are open stable-style.

A couple of door stops (not yet fitted at the time of writing) will complete the security, preventing the larger half of the door from being forced inwards when the shed is unattended.

Next steps

After the doors have had time to settle (a few weeks) I will have a good look at them and see if I need to adjust or re-trim anything. I suspect I will want to plane a few mm horizontally off the upper doors where they stick. You can see they don’t sit perfectly; can I claim some sort of amateur’s privilege?

Finished, doors closed

If you have a big gap between double doors you might want to fit an astragal. I may yet fit one on ours – depends how much I remove after it has had time to settle.

Materials and costings

[The costings won’t be of too much use if you’re not in NZ, but they give you an idea. At the time of writing the exchange rate is about NZ$1.90 to £1.]

  • Materials cost: $384.08  – of which $233 was wood, $97 door furniture, $44 paint.
  • Consumables: Sandpaper and sanding block; several dozen screws.
  • Tools used: hammer, wood chisels, electric drill (several different wood bits, a countersink, and a big masonry bit I bought specially so the bottom bolt could drop into the floor), screwdriver bits for the drill (a big sanity saver!), hand plane, G-clamps, 1.2m sash clamp (bought specially for this project; $48.15). Black & Decker Workmate.
  • Time taken: The lion’s share of three days, including trips to the DIY shop. A little more time will be needed after the doors have had time to settle.
  • Labour cost: zero!

The satisfaction of doing it ourselves: *Priceless!*

Lessons learned:

Think through your design. No, really. Don’t assume that hinges will be so inconsequential as to not require thought.

Mortising rebates is hard – or, at least, I don’t have the knack. Beware, it’s very easy to cut too much, which you can’t easily undo.

If you buy hinges that don’t require to be rebated, don’t cut rebates for them!

Remember that the door swings. A thick door, or one thickened by ledges and other attachments flush with the edge, is harder to swing than a thin one.

When hanging a pair of doors that you can see the tops of (e.g. a double stable door like this project), you might want to try and make sure the tops are level.

Ross is an expat thirtysomething Brit who went to the Shakey Isles in search of adventure. Works in technology, enjoys creating, has a love-hate relationship with his kitchen.

Thanks, Ross, for this great DIY tutorial!

It’s been so much fun having these guest blog posts from Ross – and they seem to have been appreciated, too!  So if any readers out there have favourite ‘country skills’ they’d like to share with the blog – particularly if, like Ross, you live on the other side of the world, or have great ‘urban’ country skills – then drop me a line on kate@countryskillsblog.com and we can have a chat!

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When Life Gives You Lemons – Part 5: sweet lemon pickle [Guest Blogger]

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Lemon TreeOur Guest Blogger is Ross, from Christchurch, NZ.  

You may recall the lovely series of lemon-glut busting recipes which Ross shared with us back in November last year.  He’s back today, with another lovely lemon preserve.  He says of this one “This recipe is a keeper! Much, much nicer than the hot oily one.”

Sweet lemon (or lime) pickle

The hot lemon pickle recipe is, well, hot. Great if that’s what you’re looking for, but sometimes you want something sweeter, less oily and less incendiary. This pickle is easier to make, too.

Prep time: 20 mins
Maturing time: 3-4 weeks

This makes somewhere over 1kg of pickle (I didn’t think to weigh it).

  • About 500g of lemons. (Or limes. Confusingly, the two words seem to often be used interchangeably in Indian English. I haven’t tried this recipe with limes but I expect it’ll be just as great.)
  • 100g salt
  • 500g white sugar
  • 250g demerara sugar (Note: Some recipes call for grated jaggery. If you can get hold of some, great!)
  • 1 tsp turmeric
  • 1 tbsp chilli powder of your desired heat

This recipe is almost entirely jar-based. You need space to throw the salt and sugar around, so it’s back to our old friend the large kilner jar – sterilised, of course.

Wash and dry the fruit. As usual, make sure you’ve removed any wax.

Squeeze a few fruits until you’ve collected about 125ml (1/2 cup) of juice. Keep the skins!

Cut the skins, and the remaining whole fruit, into pieces that are the right sort of size that you want to find in your pickle. This might be eighths or quarters, depending on your taste and the size of the fruit. Put all the chopped pieces into the jar.

Mix the juice, salt and turmeric, pour it over the fruit.

Compress the fruit in the jar so that it’s all covered by liquid.

When you add the sugar, it sinks.Put the lid on and leave the jar in a warm sunny place. While it’s ‘cooking’, give the mixture a good shake-up every couple of days. You’re waiting until the fruit has softened; expect this to take about a week and a half, longer if it’s cold.

Throw in the sugar and mix well.

Put the jar in a safe place (doesn’t have to be sunny this time) for another week and a half or so. The sugar sinks, so give it a good stir every couple of days. Before adding the chilli.When most or all of the sugar has dissolved, it’s ready. I found three distinct layers – floating lemon pieces, the denser sugary syrup, and the undissolved sugar.

After adding the chilliFinally, add the chilli powder and stir well.

It’s now ready to bottle and/or eat immediately. If you bottle it later, be sure to stir well as the fruit tends to rise in the sugary mixture.

No need to refrigerate. Apparently it keeps for over a year if you leave it in a cool dry place – but it’s so yummy, I’m not sure it’ll be around that long!

The finished product

Afterword:

I’ll be making more of this, it’s awesome with poppadoms or as a side with a curry.

You could probably try this recipe to good effect with other citrus fruit, but the combination of the sour lemons and sugar really works well on the taste buds.

Ross is an expat thirtysomething Brit who went to the Shakey Isles in search of adventure. Works in technology, enjoys creating, has a love-hate relationship with his kitchen.

If you’ve enjoyed this recipe, have a look at Ross’s other lemon glut-busting recipes for lemonade, lemon liqueur, and lemon sorbet (which you might be needing, if you decide to experiment the hot pickle!).

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Horsing Around – the horse meat burger scandal

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Well, I’ve had a very restful almost-month off from blogging (hah!) but holidays can’t last forever, and it’s time to get back in the saddle…  An apposite metaphor, as it happens, as the foodie world has been up in arms this week about the horse meat burger scandal, affecting economy ‘beef’ burgers for sale in several British and Irish supermarkets.

'Cheval de Qualite'Let me start by saying, I don’t share many of my compatriots’ ‘shock-horror’ reactions at the idea of eating horse.  I’ve eaten horse meat in the past, and as it happens, it’s really rather good!  Horse meat is a perfectly normal part of the diet of many of our continental neighbours, and, when raised considerately, transported thoughtfully, slaughtered humanely, and inspected and prepared carefully, really presents no greater ethical problem than eating any other animal.

Yes, I’ve heard the cries of protest, that horses are sensitive, inquisitive, sociable animals.  So, I’m sorry to tell you, are cattle, sheep, and yes, even pigs and chickens.

Still reading? Good.

Why then the upset about the adulteration of economy ‘beefburgers’ with horse meat?  If it’s perfectly sound, healthy meat, why the howls of protest?  Surely we should be encouraging the incorporation of a cheap, healthy protein source into low-cost products?

Well, as always, it’s a bit more complicated than that!

First, there are the cultural considerations, of course.  We don’t ‘traditionally’ eat horse in Britain & Ireland. The ancient Celts may even have worshipped them. Whatever the root of it, for most Britons horses are pets and working animals, not food animals – much closer to the way we perceive dogs than the way we consider cattle, and we have a strong, reflex, cultural taboo against eating them. Of course, that doesn’t make their meat unsound, or unsafe, we just prefer not to eat them, in much the way that some people prefer not to eat shellfish. We need to take a deep breath and realise that this view is pure cultural preference, nothing more.

Tethered HorsesSecondly, it’s fair to concede that there are some reasonable concerns about the welfare of horses in the European food chain.  Often kept tethered or hobbled during life, they can then be transported by road over long distances under less than ideal conditions – overcrowded, and without food and water – before being slaughtered in a process more adapted to cattle, which may fail fully to take into consideration their particular needs as highly-adapted ‘flight’ animals.

There are, of course, equivalently serious concerns with many of our food animals – the over-bred over-producing black and white dairy cow who in many cases can no longer meet or control her own metabolic state and requirements, resulting in chronic stress and ill-health; industrially-reared pigs kept in denuded, overcrowded environments, on mesh floors, with a legacy of aggression, lameness and respiratory diseases; and who could forget the iconic battery hen, whose fate may or may not be  improved these days by the introduction of ‘enriched’ small group cages.  The bottom line is that we treat many of the animals whose lives are lived to feed us less than entirely well.  While the welfare of horses before and during slaughter can sometimes leave a lot to be desired, we need to accept that they are hardly a special case.

Thirdly, and most relevantly here, really, is the question of adulteration.  The horse meat was not declared as an ingredient in the burgers concerned (neither was pork, which was also detected as a contaminant in many of the beef burgers examined in the FSAI findings).  It’s quite plausible that the immediate manufacturers of the burgers (the Irish plant squishing them into burger shapes and packing them into a variety of wrappers) had no idea it was there, since it’s likely that the majority of the ingredients received at their premises would have been less than entirely recognisable.  I gather that the leading theory is that the horse protein entered the production process as ‘filler’ – mechanically recovered meat from carcasses which bears an awfully close resemblance to the ‘pink slime’ of recent North American food-panic.  ‘Economy’ grade burgers are permitted to contain just under 50% recognisable carcasse meat – the sort that can be removed from the bones with knives during processing – ‘fillers’, ‘extenders’, rusk and so on make up the other half.

The filler in these burgers may very well have been imported from a third country (so could the rest of the beef, for that matter, and the burgers will still have been labelled ‘Made in Ireland’, which is its very own joke on the question of provenance!).  If it was, then we can hope that the horse meat came through the official slaughter and inspection processes and had been duly found to be fit for human consumption.  Let’s give the manufacturers of the filler the benefit of the doubt and assume someone accidentally ‘slipped’ and a horse carcass made it onto the ‘beef’ MRM line.  Of course, one might have to wonder how many horse carcasses were ‘slipping’ into the beef filler line to give an estimated 29% total composition of horse meat in a burger required to be very nearly 50% ‘real’ beef.  Mmm.  Incidentally, the ‘real’ beef percentage is permitted to includes fat and sinew ‘naturally associated’ with the lean muscle tissue.  I’m going to bet the people doing the carcass trimming aren’t getting paid to leave any of that behind!

Boucherie ChevalineThe food safety concerns only really start to stack up if we consider that the horse meat may not have come in via a licensed slaughter and inspection process.  We do in fact have a small number of licensed horse slaughterhouses in the UK and Ireland – their meat is exported, for the most part.  [Interesting to note, is that it may not be incorporated into pet food intended for sale in the UK – which is required only to include meat and meat by-products from animals passed fit for human consumption, and which are traditionally consumed in the country of sale.]

For some years now, all horses in the EU have been required to have horse ‘passports’.  These identify the individual horse, usually by a combination of described markings and hair-coat characteristics (though sometimes via microchip), and contain a variety of important details about the horse and its health status, including vaccinations.

There is a page in the passport which contains a declaration that the horse is not intended for human consumption.  Some horse owners immediately endorse this declaration for their animals, presumably on emotional grounds, but some, more pragmatically, wait until the issue becomes relevant.  The relevance is one of veterinary care, and administration of medicines in particular.

A number of the veterinary medicines in common use in horses – especially in the UK – are specifically prohibited from use in animals intended for human consumption, because of their potential to cause significant ill-health in humans should they enter the food chain.  The cannot be administered to horses unless they have been declared to be barred from the food chain.  Some are carcinogens – substances that may cause cancers – some can cause blood dyscrasias – abnormalities of blood cell production which can be irreversible and sometimes fatal.  Potentially nasty stuff.  There is undoubtedly an argument for these medicines being withdrawn from use in horses full-stop, however this needs to be balanced against their genuine value and utility in maintaining the health, welfare, and working lives of scores of horses whose entry into the human food chain was never in question.

It’s often noted that the system of horse passports is a bit ‘soft’, with multiple issuing authorities – in particular, since there’s no central register of identification marks, there is actually relatively little to prevent an owner ‘mislaying’ a horse’s passport and procuring a clean replacement.

'Mangez du Cheval'Should – and I think this is unlikely – the horse meat in the burger have been slaughtered ‘irregularly’ in Ireland and not subjected to the normal pre-slaughter and post-mortem health inspections, and checking of documentation, then this would open the possibility of entry of unsound or pharmaceutically-contaminated meat into the human food chain.

Actually, it’s quite likely that the horse-meat burger scandal presented no risk to health – or, should I say, no additional risk to health compared to these economy ‘beef’ burgers if they’d been manufactured according to their specification.  The more processed your food, the greater the supermarket buyers’ downward pressure on costs, the more links in the chain, the more ingredients in the list, the more hands (quite literally) it has passed through on its way to you, the greater the chances both for accidental contamination, and of intentional adulteration in pursuit of a profit.

'Healthy Living'This is the crux, for me.  Highly processed, cheap meat products like these economy burgers are just plain nasty. They taste nasty. They’re nasty to your health. And they’re undoubtedly nasty for the poor animals that have been reared to a price point eventually to be minced up into them.

I make little apology for my view that we should not be selling and eating food like this.  Yes, I’m aware that there are people out there – elderly or disabled, living on benefits – for whom these highly processed economy meat products are the ‘best’ they can afford.  I’m afraid I don’t believe that we have a right to eat meat every meal, or every day.  In fact, we’d all – even those of us lucky enough to be able to afford it if we want to – be healthier if we chose not to, never mind the benefits to the environment and animal welfare which would result from fewer animals being raised with greater care.  If you can’t afford, or can’t source, a recognisable piece of an animal that has been raised with care and slaughtered with consideration, you should not be eating meat today.  Not all good meat is expensive, there’s a very long tradition, in the UK as everywhere else, in making great food from bargain cuts.  Yes, I appreciate that there’s a huge deficit in cooking skills, particularly among my generation, which means many wouldn’t know where to start if presented with a brisket, a shin of beef, or a breast of lamb – all quite marvellous, cheap, real healthy cuts of meat – but surely *this* is what we need to address, rather than filling the gap by selling people adulterated, industrially produced convenience-papp in brightly coloured cardboard cartons.  We should not be eating this.  No one should be eating this.  It’s just nasty.

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Stocking Fillers – perfect home-made giblet stock – Blog Advent (24)

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We made it, WE MADE IT!  First of all, a huge thank-you to those of you who’ve followed me through this little blogging adventure, for your kind comments, ‘likes’, and contributions.  We did it!  24 days of daily blogs for Advent.  Well, it’s Christmas tomorrow, NORAD is tracking Santa towards us as I type (best get to bed before he gets here!), the Boxing Day ham is boiled and glazed, the gifts are wrapped, and the giblet stock is made.

Giblets are so often overlooked.  The grotty little plastic bag that accompanies any ‘special’ roasting bird (sadly now completely absent from generic supermarket chickens) and which, I fear, most people will be throwing away some time tomorrow morning.  Offal is so horribly out of fashion that an awful lot of people – certainly those who aren’t of the older generation – have no idea where to start.

Last year, on Christmas morning, while I was waiting for my guests to wake up, I blogged my ‘how to’ for giblet stock.  I didn’t have any photos at the time, so here it is again, in the hope it’ll be useful to some of you, re-edited and with some new photographs to help you along!

If you’ve bought a bird for roasting today, there’s a good chance it’s come with a little plastic packet of ‘bits’.  Whatever you do, don’t throw them away!

All the gibletsThese bits are the giblets – the offal – from top-left, clockwise –  the neck (in one or two pieces), the gizzard, the liver, and the heart.  The gizzard is a thick, muscular structure with two hard abrasive grinding plates that the bird uses to crush up corn and other food items to make them digestible.  

Giblet stock is quick, simple, and makes the most wonderful Christmas gravy.

I have a goose this year, but the following applies just as well if you have a chicken or turkey.  Personally, I use the goose heart and liver in one of my stuffings, so only the neck and gizzard are available for the stock.  But if you’re not going to use the heart and liver this way, just chop them roughly and add them to the stock-pot with the rest of your giblet meat.

Stock vegetables, herbs and spicesIn addition to the giblets, you need the following:

  • Stock vegetables.  I use one onion (red or white) and a couple of carrots.  I don’t like celery so I don’t use it, even though it’s the often-quoted third member of the stock vegetable trinity.  But if you do like it, you should add a couple of sticks.
  • A bouquet garni.  This is just a posh culinary term for some herbs. I use some bay leaves, rosemary, and sage, along with some whole peppercorns.  Dried herbs are fine, if you don’t have fresh to hand.
  • Water.  Glug of white wine (optional).
  • A splash of olive oil.

Prepared gizzardsPrepare your gizzard by cutting away and discarding the hard plates (use a small sharp knife inserted below and parallel to the plates).  It can be a bit tricky to get your knife through the outer membrane, but once it’s in, as long as it’s sharp enough, you can just run it behind the plate.  Discard the hard plate material, along with any grotty-looking offcuts.  Then, simply chop the rest of the meat roughly into cubes.

Brown giblets and vegetablesAdd a splash of olive oil to a nice big saucepan, and brown the neck and gizzard meat, and then add the roughly chopped onion and carrots and sautee for a couple of minutes.  Now add about a litre of water (and the splash of white wine if you want) and the bouquet garni, bring to the boil and simmer for about an hour.  

Stock, before simmeringOnce you’re happy with your stock, strain it, discarding the solids, and return the stock to the pot and boil again until reduced in volume by half.  That’s it.  Set aside in the refrigerator until you make your gravy (the stock will easily keep overnight – so make it on Christmas Eve if you have time). You won’t regret it!

Well, here we are – the advent candle is all but burned down, and the Blog Advent journey is over.  I’d love to say it’s been an undiluted pleasure – more than one evening I’ve got home from work, sat down after dinner, and muttered something about ‘still having to do the sodding blog!’, but it’s great to know that I can do it, even at this time of year.

Advent - day 24

I plan to have a few days off now – I think Hubby’s feeling like a bit of a blog-widow!  I wish you all a wonderful Christmas (don’t forget that tomorrow is only the start of the 12 Days of Christmas, which go on until Epiphany – it’s not called Twelfth Night for nothing!), and after the dust has settled I’ll have a few updates, and things which are still secrets for now, to share with you.

Merry Christmas everyone!

I’m trying to write a post a day during Advent, so, please come along with me while I try to Blog Advent – the Country Skills Way – and forgive me if I don’t quite manage it!

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Pressing The Flesh – home-made coarse farmhouse pate – Blog Advent (23)

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While I suppose a lot of people have their eyes firmly on Christmas Day at the moment – family and friends, food and drink, gifts and treats – I’m also looking through and out the other side, to Boxing Day.  Probably if I’m honest I put more time and effort – certainly ahead of time – into the food on Boxing Day than I do to the food on Christmas Day itself.  After all, Christmas dinner, in the end, more or less boils down to a roast dinner with pretensions!

Boxing Day dinner so often is Christmas leftovers – but in my house it’s a feast of cold cuts.  The ham, which I smoked earlier this month, is slowly defrosting ready for cooking tomorrow. I have a handful of lovely cheeses, all ready.  The spiced plum chutney I made in the summer is now nicely matured.  The sourdough, of course, I made yesterday.  There may be some leftover goose, depending on our appetites.  There’s a game pie, which we collected today from our local farm shop butcher.  And to complete the feast, of course, we’ll be wanting some pate.  I’ve always bought this in the past, and always been slightly disappointed compared to the rest of the wonderful spread.

This recipe is mostly inspired by Delia Smiths’ recipe for Coarse Country Pate, and by the Farmhouse Pate recipe in Raymond Blanc’s classic ‘Cooking For Friends’ which I picked up in the Oxfam shop last time I was in Launceston.

Pate ingredientsTo make this pate, you will require –

  • 800g of really good quality minced pork.  Mine was a mix of minced shoulder and minced belly pork from the butcher. The unidentified packs of minced pork in the supermarket will work, of course, but I suspect at the expense of flavour and quality.
  • 275g of smoked streaky bacon.  I used my home-cure smoked Christmas bacon – so I suppose you could substitute the most expensive artisanal pancetta money can buy… not that I’m biased!  More seriously, make sure it’s dry cured, you don’t want nasty phosphate water from smoke-flavour brine-injected bacon leaking out into your pate!
  • 225g of liver.  Strictly the recipes call for pigs’ liver, but I couldn’t get any this morning I used lambs.  Actually I prefer lambs’ liver, it’s softer and creamier in flavour, but it will be interesting to see how this affects the flavours.
  • To season, 20 each of juniper berries and mixed peppercorns, a teaspoon of salt (I used smoked salt, but this isn’t compulsory), a pinch of mace, two crushed cloves of garlic, and a heaped teaspoon of chopped fresh thyme leaves (dry would do, but make it a level teaspoon).
  • To lubricate, a small glass of dry white wine, and a single measure of brandy.
  • Finally, to decorate, some bay leaves, a few more juniper berries, and a couple of slices of streaky bacon.
  • A 2lb loaf tin, or terrine, and a roasting tin big enough to contain it.

SeasoningsMince up the bacon in a food processor, leaving a bit of texture to it (how much texture is up to you!).  Then, seperately, mince up the liver, again to leave a bit of texture though this will go smoother faster, so watch carefully!  Combine all of these together in a mixing bowl, do it thoroughly and for goodness’ sake use your hands!  Now crush the juniper berries and peppercorns in a pestle and mortar along with the salt.  Add the herbs and spices to the meats, and again mix as thoroughly as you can.  Finally, add the liquids, and mix again.

LubricantsSomething magical happens when the wine and brandy mix with the meats – what started out a bit like a big bowl of sausage meat suddenly becomes silky and the aromas, oh my! Allow the bowl to rest for an hour or so in a coolish place.

Arrange the bay leaves and juniper berries in the bottom of your loaf tin.  Now take your two rashers of streaky bacon, and place then between two sheets of baking parchment.  Roll them out really thin with a rolling pin. They will easily double in width, and a bit more.  To get them into the loaf tin, I cut away all but the parchment under them, and push this rasher-side-down into the bottom of the loaf tin before carefully peeling away the paper.

Bay leaves & juniper berries   Streaky bacon  Rolled out streaky bacon

Now pack all the pate mix into the tin, levelling it carefully.  Put the loaf tin into the roasting tin and fill this half way up with boiling water, and put the whole lot in an oven at 150 degrees for an hour and three quarters.

Bacon in tin  Before cooking  After cooking

The block of pate will shrink back from the sides of the tin during cooking, and will be surrounded by fat and jelly juices. Let it stand until nearly cool, and then it’s time to press the pate.  It’s pressed for two reasons – firstly, to compact it and reduce the risk of it crumbling when you slice it, but secondly – and just as importantly for me! – to compact the bottom so you can turn it out neatly!  It smells *wonderful*, just as I would have hoped.  To press it, I covered the top with a double layer of tinfoil, put an old tupperware container on top, and then piled it up with all the weight I could muster.  So, four tins of beans, and four litres of fruit juice ought to do the trick!

Pressing the pate

Once it’s had a really good squeeze, and cooled right down to room temperature, put the pate and whatever weight you can conveniently keep on top of it, move it into the fridge, where it will keep quite happily in its juices and rest and improve for three days before serving.

It’s a new recipe to me, so I’ll be back to tell you how it worked out!  But the smell, oh my, I can’t see it being anything other than lovely!  With crusty (maybe toasted, even?) home-made sourdough.  And pickles!

Advent - day 23

I’m trying to write a post a day during Advent, so, please come along with me while I try to Blog Advent – the Country Skills Way – and forgive me if I don’t quite manage it!

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Not Long Now – final preparations for Christmas – Blog Advent (22)

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So, somehow it’s got to be the final weekend before Christmas, and it feels like only a few days ago that we hung out the fabric advent calendar, and I started on my mad-cap plan to blog every day in Advent, as if there wasn’t enough to do in the run up to Christmas!

There’s always a lot to do in the final few days, and while today has been almost entirely occupied with preparations for the big day, there’s not an awful lot in there which is very blog-worthy, mostly for reason of avoiding spoilers for guests and gift recipients reading this blog.

christmas sourdough

The sourdough loaves for Christmas and Boxing Day are baked.  Sourdough has been one of my great discoveries this year – I really can’t figure out how I lived without great home-baked bread!  On Christmas Day, we’ll have it as a starter, with home-cured and smoked trout and goats’ cheese.  On Boxing Day, it will be part of the traditional day-after spread of cold ham, meats, pates, cheese, pies and pickles – and I think it’s going to stand up to that, really, very well!

We did our final shop for food and drinks today – it’s always a blasted nuisance, but fortunately we’ve planned ahead and sourced as much from local suppliers, farm shops, and home-made as we could, so it was less of a chore than it might have been.  Good to feel everything is under control, and we collect the goose from the local farm butcher’s tomorrow.

I spent quite a bit of time this afternoon sorting out, labelling, and wrapping the Christmas gift hampers that are a big part of my gift giving for close family and friends.  I know that some of them read this blog, so no details for now I’m afraid!  But here they are, all packed in recycled boxes (I’ve been saving, begging and borrowing Amazon boxes and suchlike from colleagues the last few weeks!), and the contain jams and preserves (which, if you’ve been paying attention over the last six months, you may have had a hint about!), hedgerow liqueurs, and some other home-made surprises which I’ve carefully not been writing about here!

Hampers almost ready to go

And we’re very close now, three sleeps ’till Christmas, and the Advent candle that started burning 22 days ago is now very nearly gone…

Advent - day 22

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Not The End Of The World – but the beginning of the return of the light – Blog Advent (21)

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We’ve made it to December the 21st, and while this might be a bit premature, I feel reasonably confident in saying that it’s not the end of the world!

Winter sunrise

It is, however, the Solstice.  Hurray!  In the northern hemisphere, the shortest day is over and the light is coming back into the world.  We’re a few days from celebrating Christmas, of course, but there’s very little doubt that the early Christian churches essentially crashed the existing, pagan, solstice parties for the second biggest ‘do’ of their religious year.

Like a lot of people, I feel the dark days of winter pressing down on me.  I joke sometimes that I must have evolved from something that hibernated, because I could quite happily pull the duvet over my head in mid November and not come out until March.  Honestly, I really wish I could!  Christmas is a bright light shining from the long dark days of winter, and I fully understand why our forefathers would have celebrated the arrival of the solstice – and the return of the light – with much feasting and drinking, even though the hardest, hungriest days of winter were still to come.

Token reindeer!I’m always fascinated to find out how we come to hold the folk beliefs that we do, so I was particularly interested to hear a couple of years ago about the Sami goddess of spring and fertility. Her name is Beaivi (or variant spellings), and she was widely worshipped among the people of Fennoscandia (broadly modern Scandinavia).  Her main celebration was winter solstice, when she was believed to fly through the sky with her daughter in sled of reindeer antlers.  Her followers would sacrifice a white female reindeer, and thread pieces of the meat onto a wooden stick, twist it into a circle, and decorate it with bright ribbons.

Beaivi, incidentally, is the goddess of fertility and sanity – particularly beautifully observed, I would say, as both are brought back by the light of spring.

Santa ClausThe Father Christmas / Santa Claus character is such a great cultural cocktail of a myth.  Clearly there’s some northern European solstice god(dess) in the mix –  at least that’s the best theory I can find about how the reindeer got there!   Add to this a good measure of Christian crusades Saint (step forward, St Nick!), and then top up with a generous glug CocaCola!  Since, while the Victorians had all but invented modern Father Christmas, his suit is not usually one of red with white trim – his colours ran much more to the spruce green!  It’s not entirely clear that CocaCola were the first people to dress him in red and white, at the start of the 20th century, but certainly they popularised the choice, and then published it widely.  Well, consider the branding…  **holidays are coming… holidays are coming…**

Jolly Fat ManSo the jolly fat man, with a red suit and a big white beard, rides around in a sleigh pulled by reindeer (they’ve got off lightly, then, since Beaivi’s day), bringing toys to all the good boys and girls, but no longer threatening the bad boys and girls with a lump of coal and a righteous beating…

But Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen (and their latterly-discovered friend, Rudolf) have an identity problem, because at this time of year, the only reindeer with antlers are the female ones!

Incidentally, if you haven’t yet come across Terry Pratchett’s ‘Hogfather’, I can heartily recommend it for a great bit of seasonal reading (or viewing, the TV adaptation from a few years back is remarkably good), it’s a fabulous bit of sideways-on myth re-imagining!

Advent - day 21

I’m trying to write a post a day during Advent, so, please come along with me while I try to Blog Advent – the Country Skills Way – and forgive me if I don’t quite manage it!

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Light ‘Em Up – candles in Christmas trees – Blog Advent (20)

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Like Scrooge, we’re all haunted, a little bit, by the ghosts of our Christmases past.  In my ‘Blog Advent’ post on December 6, I wrote a little about my memories of St Nicholas, from the time I spent growing up in Switzerland as a young child.  These were my formative Christmas memories, so of course I hark back to them every year.

A very Swiss tree

One tradition which is still widely practiced in Switzerland and Germany – and not at all, in the UK – is the habit of putting real candles in domestic Christmas trees.  I love this – it feels so utterly ‘proper’ and festive to me!  Yes, of course it’s a fire risk – but so is any lit candle or open fire.  Our neighbours, in the small Swiss village where we lived, seemed to manage to avoid setting fire to their houses every year!

Tree candlesHubby is very British about this – the whole idea seems to him like a huge fire hazard just waiting to burst into a ball of flames.  I asked him to suggest a title for this post and his suggestion ‘Flaming Torch of Christmas Death!’ rather sums up his position on the issue!  It’s not so black and white, to me – after all, people were managing to set fire to their living rooms with the small incandescent Christmas tree lightbulbs well into the 21st century.

But all good relationships are about compromise, so while I wait for him to come around to my way of thinking (this, folks, may well be some time!) I picked up these pretty hanging baubles designed to take tea light candles.  Rather than equip them with a naked flame, I’ve used some LED tea lights which, while not *quite* convincingly the real deal, flicker gently with a warm golden light, and, at least out of the corner of your eye, might just be little candle flames in my tree.

Compromise candles

Not many days left on the advent candle, either!  I had so many bits and pieces I wanted to get done today – my last weekday off between now and Christmas – but instead I spent most of it gently nursing this nasty cold.  Here’s hoping it’s gone by the weekend!

Advent - day 20

I’m trying to write a post a day during Advent, so, please come along with me while I try to Blog Advent – the Country Skills Way – and forgive me if I don’t quite manage it!

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Life’s A Beach – driftwood decorations – Blog Advent (19)

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It feels like a very long time since we were on the beach in Cornwall with Dave, back in October!  Dave adores the beach – the seaside is his favourite ever place.

Dave on the beach

After he was done posing for his portrait (well, doesn’t the backdrop suit him??), I indulged in a spot of beach combing along the strand line, and collected up some pieces of driftwood. Only small lengths, the longest was about 8 inches long.  They had to fit in my pocket!

Driftwood Christmas tree

I put them together into this small driftwood Christmas tree.  It’s lashed together with jute twine, a bit like the twig and twine star decorations I made earlier this month.  If you wanted it a bit more solid, it would be simple to add a blob of hot glue or other adhesive between the ‘stem’ and the ‘branches’ before wrapping with twine or ribbon in whatever decorative way you favour.  It makes a very pretty hanging decoration – I’ve got it on the end of a bookcase in the hall.

The scale is a question only for your imagination and your driftwood supply!  I had visions of making a tree a couple of feet high, possibly hanging, with a thick piece of jute rope threaded through a drilled hole in the centre of each of the driftwood branches.  An idea for the future, perhaps – I need to live a lot closer to the sea!

Advent - day 19

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Take Your Medicine – my perfect hot toddy – Blog Advent (18)

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One of the Christmas traditions I don’t relish, but seem to ‘enjoy’ every year all the same, is my traditional pre-Christmas cold!  Well, it’s here again, and almost perfectly on schedule! You have to look for the silver lining at times like this, and the up-side of a filthy winter cold is the perfect excuse for a beautiful hot toddy.  It’s medicinal, honest!

Toddy ingredients

My toddy is whisky based.  But don’t use your best single malt – if your nasal passages are as stuffed up as mine, there’s no chance of you knowing the difference!  You also need some honey, a lemon, a few cloves, three or four whole allspice berries, and a cinnamon stick.  Oh, and some hot water.

Cut two thin slices from your lemon and stud each with a couple of cloves.  Put these in your glass (I use a big red wine glass which I know can take the heat – they’re the glasses I use for mulled wine – but a tumbler or a glass with a handle are more traditional!) along with your allspice berries and cinnamon stick.  From what’s left of your lemon, cut a wedge amounting to about a quarter of a lemon and squeeze the juice into the glass.  Add two teaspoons of the honey (more or less to taste – that’s my personal preference) and a double measure of whisky, and stir with your cinnamon stick until combined.

Now top up with water from the kettle, which you’ve allowed to go just off the boil.   If you’re not *that* keen on cinnamon, take the stick out at this point, otherwise leave all the whole spices in.  Stick your nose in the glass and breathe deeply – you should be able to appreciate the spicy aromatic hit through even the thickest head cold.  Then sip, and enjoy.  All the Christmas spices with a bonus dose of vitamin C, and some lovely soothing whisky.  Drink it while it’s still piping hot.

How could something that tastes so wonderful fail to be good for you???   You know, I think I may be poorly enough that I need to take a second dose!

Advent - day 18

I’m trying to write a post a day during Advent, so, please come along with me while I try to Blog Advent – the Country Skills Way – and forgive me if I don’t quite manage it!

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