Some of our chickens are moulting
I went down to the run today and it was covered with a light sprinkling of feathers. My initial gut reaction was slightly panicky. Had a fox got in or a giant rat? Then I remembered that sometimes chicken moult at this time of year. As chickens get older they are more likely to moult. It’s never the whole gang and that is why it’s a bit disturbing. We have three hens, looking great with bright red combs stepping about perkily. The other two look as if they haven’t seen a hairbrush for months. My bantam book is reassuring. As...
read moreGuest Spot: Steve Catchpole’s Cucumber, Tomato and Onion Chutney Recipe
This is the launch of the brand new ** Guest Spot ** on the Cottage Smallholder Blog. Lots of visitors email us. We love this and always respond. These emails have loads of great stories about others’ attempts at self-sufficieny. Some are hilarious. Others are full of new ideas. A few include recipes that sound really promising. We thought it would be good to include some of these contributions in our blog and invite a guest article from time to time. Seve Catchpole, from Helmingham, Suffolk, has the singular honour of being the first...
read moreCottage Smallholder Plum Chutney or Damson Chutney
This chutney recipe works well with plums, wild plums or damsons. It does not need months to mature and keeps well I had some spare time today so finally retrieved the stock pot from Danny, swooshed it out with bicarbonate of soda to get rid of the taint of clove chutney (see Tricks and Tips below) and found the plum chutney recipe from Anne Mary’s old cook book. This was going to be the base of our own Cottage Smallholder Chutney. I had collected three pounds of windfall wild plums yesterday and simmered them last night for 20 minutes...
read moreClove Chutney. Beware!
Due to electricity power cuts our large vat of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Glutney Chutney simmered on and off for about eight hours. When the marathon chutney stirring bonanza finished Danny reached for a spoon and tasted the brew. “This is great. I don’t think that we have to keep this in the larder to mature. Let’s give it away, advise people to keep it for a couple of months and see what happens.” Within a week or so people were coming back for more. “If we make chutney again,” Danny said as he...
read moreSlow cooked roast Spanish lamb recipe infused with thyme and white wine
One Sunday many years ago, Danny and I were pressed for time before a lunch party. In a desperate, ‘they’ll be here in 5 minutes’ move, we threw all the dirty pots and pans from the sink onto the lawn. It was deep winter and we felt confident that our friends wouldn’t venture further than the kitchen table. Danny locked the door to the garden, just in case. All went well until a child, bored with the extensive lingering over coffee and Armagnac, got up and peered out of the tiny window that overlooks the garden. I knew...
read moreInca, the Min Pin, our gourmet optician. How to stop your puppy destroying valuables.
Even at eight months our pup chews everything. Clothes pegs, lighters, ice cubes, sea shells and now two pairs of my spectacles (actually it’s three pairs now: updated March 2007). As Danny spelt out on the fridge with the magnetic letters that she had not yet gobbled up, ˜Inca is a goat amongst Min Pins.’ This morning I managed to prise open her jaws and retrieve a large and presumably tasty cheque and noticed a glint behind her in the gloom of the basket (a sort of fur igloo). My second pair of specs lay in pieces. She had crept...
read moreBook review: Two good books for winemaking by C J J Berry and Gillian Pearks
Back in the seventies, when buying a bottle of wine was an expensive treat, the author C. J. J. Berry shot to fame with his series of amateur winemaking books. This is the rather smooth looking character on the left. He cashed in on the great home winemaking boom of the sixties and seventies. As glugable wine began to fill supermarket shelves, the home winemaking craze declined and you could often find his books in charity shops. Now that country winemaking is enjoying a small renaissance his books are becoming sought after again. The best of...
read moreSlow cooked Steak and Kidney Pie Recipe
One great thing about autumn and winter is savouring a really good steak and kidney pie. Another is that we have streamlined our weekday cooking but still eat well. We both love good food; even our mid-week meals of sausage and mash consist of Newmarket sausages (superb!) with creamy mashed potato and heaps of vegetables fresh from the garden. Neither of us wants to spent hours making supper during the working week. Even those ’30 minute meals’ seem to take us at least an hour. Eventually we twigged that we could avoid kitchen...
read more
FD