Win £50 worth of B&Q vouchers with The Cottage Smallholder and Direct Line Grand Draw
For those of you who missed out on the metal bedstead competition: we’ve got another great prize to offer you! This time we’re teaming up with Direct Line home insurance to give you the chance to win one of two B&Q vouchers worth £50! Like most people these days, I review all of our insurance policies annually. Looking at all the options can be time consuming but definitely worth doing as it can save a lot of money. I use the comparison sites first to get the general lay of the land and then I look at the companies that are not...
read moreNew layout for CSH – testers wanted please
Danny here, everybody. 14% of our visitors use mobile devices, such as tablets, iPad, smart mobiles and so on. Interestingly, 85% of those are Apple. So it makes sense to adjust the presentation to improve readability for this growing segment while ensuring that users of normal computers and laptops remain unaffected. The site looks very different since we made the switch at 07:30 this morning but the content remains the same. We would very much welcome comments here on this article from mobile device users and “normal” computer...
read moreUpdate on the remaining Min Pins
It’s been seven weeks since The Conteesa died suddenly in her sleep. Danny buried her in the garden under the greengage tree that Celia of Purple Podded Peas fame gave us a couple of years ago. In retrospect I believe that this was the perfect end for The Contessa. No long lingering illness. She just went to sleep and never woke up. I was worried about her blindness too – she’d lost a lot of confidence. Perhaps her sense of smell had diminished too. A couple of days before she died I had to lift her onto her ‘safe place’ on the sofa....
read moreIt’s the little things that make the difference
I don’t often write much about the little things that give me pleasure. They initially seem too insignificant to merit a blog post but these small, precious moments buoy me up. I return to the experience during the day and often for many days afterwards. A couple of days ago I saw a Mistle Thrush pair resting on a pile of timber in the front garden. The husband calling voraciously, chest puffed out – a real swell of a male. His wife was demure, slimmer and looking much gentler. Watching her mate. They suddenly flew up to their nest above...
read moreRecipe for Fiona’s vegetarian cheese and potato pie: delicious hot and even better cold
“What is that wonderful smell, Conchita?” I had just taken my potato and cheese pie out of the oven when Danny arrived back from a day in Birmingham. I knew that he would have already indulged in some fast food so I took a chance this afternoon and worked on a new recipe for cheese and potato pie. Although this is supposed to be very filling, Danny might consider this a snack, as he does pizza. I wonder if he’s the only person in the world that regularly asks for chips as a side dish for pizza? “I did have a burger but give me a shout...
read moreSTOP PRESS! We have a winner for our Argos bedstead competition but she has gone AWOL!
It’s now a week since we announced the winner of our latest competition. Beki was the winner (comment 19). But like so many that are asked to leave an email address, she clearly didn’t leave her primary email address – rather a hotmail account. This is fine if you don’t win the prize and rarely check the account but for a prize winner it could spell disaster. I’m going to give Beki 30 days to claim her prize from the date that it was drawn (which was April 24th 2012). Please note that we don’t have ‘an email list’ on this...
read moreUpdate on Agatha
Monday: On Monday morning Agatha sprang to her feet when I went into the run. She had eaten all the food in her feeder and was hungry. She also wasn’t sitting on the eggs that I gave her last night. These were not the hatching eggs but eggs laid by our flock. I suppose that she was really rattled by being moved on Sunday night. Also Queen Zeb had been ripping up the cardboard from one side of the broody coop, which must have been disconcerting for poor old Agatha. I spotted Queen Zeb in action when I was pottering about in the run. Gradually...
read moreBest shepherd’s pie recipe: leftover roast lamb
As a small child I remember watching my mum mince cold roast lamb using an old metal mincer that was screwed onto the kitchen table. It was magical to watch big pieces of lamb turning into mince. I assume that she was making shepherd’s pie back then. Danny has similar memories too, standing in his big Irish kitchen, watching the mincer in operation – the air full of the smell of freshly baked soda bread. That’s why we both thought that we had to mince our leftover roast lamb to make a shepherd’s pie. Wrong! Thank goodness I had a...
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