The Hen Keeper - Ducks!

Apart from our flock of magnificent Buff Orpingtons plus one Old English Game Bantams, the Kitchen Garden is also home to a motley crew of mixed village ducks. It’s a springtime territory that’s fiercely fought over, judging by the squawking, quarreling, battling drakes and their poor put-upon ladies. One black and white cross call duck has a particular place in my heart and a regular nestsite under the yew hedge. On Easter Sunday she hatched a brood of 15 and two weeks on, they’re all doing well.

Like huge bumblebees they patrol the lawn for midges, watched at a distance by their drake, a handsome multi-coloured youngster. Lovely little fluffies, but as large flat-footed adults, their presence in the garden is not so welcome. Some domestic ducks, especially Khaki Campbells lay an egg a day, and are more prolific than the best laying breeds of hen. We have a Campbell cross who brings in her brood and three weeks later, leaves them here for me to babysit as she flies off to lay again - somewhere in a tree across the fields. So I’m unable to take advantage of this huge bounty.

Duck eggs have a porous shell so don’t keep as well as hens’ eggs. Their whites are lacking a particular protein so they can’t be beaten. So no souffles or meringues, but they are excellent in omlettes and quiches, having a rich creamy consistency. I love a pale blue really fresh boiled duck egg for breakfast. In order to keep ducks for eggs, buy domestic laying breeds and keep them in a run with plenty of space and a nice big pond. Access to an orchard or paddock, once they have settled is ideal, because they are not the best co-gardeners - apart from their addiction to slugs and snails.

Their only drawback is that they are huge time-wasters.

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The Pig Farmer - Snout to Trotter - On the farm butchery courses

Last Friday saw the first of this years on the farm courses. We welcomed nine people from variuos backgrounds, architect, marketing consultant, charity development officer, farmer - et al. At least three of the group don’t have pigs, and have no intention of having any, but were just very curious about what cuts you get from a pig and how to make sausages, chorizo and bacon. Yes you are a gorgeous piggy!

The day kicked off at 8.30am with bacon butties and tea and a general get to know each other chat and was followied with a guided tour of the farm and lots of cooing over two newborn litters of Oxfords.  Shaver presented the group with a whole pig hanging and ready to butcher. Shaver is an old Devonian, not the typical, miserable old git, resent every newcomer sort either,  he is very difficult not to like, partly because the child in you believes that he is Father Christmas! He has been butchering animals ‘on the farm’ throughout the Devon area for over 50 years. His witty banter and his old tales, excessively milked (but never let the truth get in the way of a good dit!)  relax and amuse everyone and he improves as the day progresses and his face grows ruddier with each glass of Port; his favourite tipple. We have a brilliant area outside where we work, undercover, in the garden and right next to our butchery  - this really adds to the experience being ouside. Shaver pointing out the delicious layer of fat on rare breed pork

Shaver, assisted by yours truly, throwing rude comments and insults at each other (and the attempts of the group! ) (slightly reminiscent of Morecambe and Wise demonstrates two alternative ways of making various joints, chops, loins for bacon or joints, boning out, chining, rolling and tying. Everyone gets a go at doing something - the day is hands on for anyone that wants it to be. This takes the group through to Lunchtime at 1.00pm when everyone sits down together for a delicious lunch. This time my very capable missus served up a fabulous dish of Pork Chops baked with garlc, lemon and sweet cider, accompanied by baked apples stuffed with sage and onion sausage meat, crispy roast potatoes, and generous servings of White and Red wine. This was followed by a refreshing cream cheese, fruit and chocolate sundae. Every plate came back clean, except for Shavers; who didn’t like the stuffed onions!! Too much Port I suspect.  Time for lunch and a tale from Shaver

The afternoon session was slow to start, not suprisingly after the wine,  I then went on to various demonstrations of sausage making, chorizo making, bacon curing, making a cold smoker and smoking. Everyone got involved, trying their hand at various things including linking sausage - which everyone wants to do, but not always very succesfully - it takes time to be able to link sausages of the same consistency and size and to do it with any speed. Hand cranked sausages

It was an excellent day, the feedbackwe have had has been fantastic, everyone in the group was eager to go away and get started, it even resulted in the sale of weaners to two people who didnt come to buy pigs! The next course is filling up and we have enough interest now to start booking more dates. If you are interested in a really fun and informative day out with a great feed inbetween go to www.snoutandtrotter.co.uk for more details.  we can also offer B and B to those that have to travel a distance. It’s worth it just to meet Shaver! A keen student learning the Butchers Knot

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The Italian Personal Chef - twitting (twittering?) about food

i hate recipes.
i really really do.
i admit they look nice in old battered notebooks handed down from grandmother to grandmother (not mine though, they couldn’t cook).
and they are essential to link up to some tv program or other and make a few quid on the side.
oh and to make cakes with.
but i don’t like making cakes.

so i don’t do recipes. never did.
until now.
now, you know, there is twitter. it’s been around for some time but people like me tend to take a little while to acknowledge the new.
twitter allows posts that are no more than 160 characters long. and that includes spaces.
perfect for recipes, methinks.

so I’ve given myself the challenge to post recipes that are real, good, doable and 160 characters long. including spaces.

follow the experiment at
http://twitter.com/la_cena

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The Wine Merchant - Leaden Hall Market for St George’s Day

St George’s Day celebrations are running throughout the land this week in celebration of our Patron Saint. Leaden Hall Market in the centre of the square mile in The City of London, as organised by Nick Johnstone, be-decked in Union Jacks was the central point for sampling English wines.

[caption …

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The Wine Merchant - Father’s Day Vine & Dine Exerience - Press Release

Father’s Day Vine & Dine Experience
Saturday 20th – Sunday 21st June 2009

Treat your old man to a unique ‘time-out’ experience. English Vine Tours and Pelham House Hotel, Lewes have joined forces once again to create this great experience.

Saturday 20th June – Check into Pelham House for 2pm and enjoy a …

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The London Forager - Forage for victory

The competitive nature of the human spirit manifests itself everywhere it can- and foraging is no exception. This weekend, in Mytholmroyd West Yorkshire, the fiercely fought battle of the World Dock Pudding Championships is taking place. I doubt there’ll be many internationals flying in, but it’s a West Yorkshire dish so it makes sense that the cream of Dock Pudding makers would be found close by.

Dock pudding is a breakfast dish made from Dock leaves, onions and oatmeal. Here’s a recipe from www.calderdale-online.org

 

Traditional Recipe

 

Ingredients

 

2 lb fresh, sweet variety dock leaves (polygonum distorta)

2 large onions, or 2 large bunches of spring onions

½ lb nettles

A handful of oatmeal

A knob of butter

Salt and pepper to taste

Method

 

Wash and clean the dock leaves and remove the stalks

Wash and clean the nettles

Chop the onions

Fry the vegetables in the butter until tender

Add the oatmeal and cook for about 20 minutes, stirring to prevent the mixture from sticking, the pudding is then ready for eating or for storing in a sealed container

 

I think this must be a vegetarian recipe, as I’ve seen elsewhere that it should be fried in bacon fat- but then again these sorts of things are always fiercely debated, with recipes hidden behind picture frames and buried in tins under trees (or maybe I’m too much of a fantasist). Anyway, if anyone is tempted to try it, it’s not the same dock you’d use to balm a nettle sting. It’s a different plant that grows mainly in the north of the country, but you could always use more nettles, or young burdock leaves (might be a little bitter though) or hogweed.

 

The Hawthorn blossoms have broken through. I’m making some wine and filming it this weekend, so my next blog may well be a Youtube link.

 

I’ll be doing some guided walks in May in  places around South London, so let me know if you want to come along for a stroll and a snack.  

 

www.londonforager.com

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The Pig Farmer -

Sorry I haven’t blogged for a while, certain events have taken over in the last couple of weeks, not to mention kids on holiday and a dead computer. We have an abundance of piglets at the moment, being born daily, much to the delight of the holiday makers in our cottage, and our weaner sales are good. There is a greater demand  for fatteners this year from people starting out in pig keeping, perhaps as a result of the economic climate, more people seem to be tightening their belts and are growing their own food, which is excellent, we should all try to achieve a higher degree of self sufficiency.

Last week a friend came around to my house with his son and asked if  I would help them to butcher a pig that they had reared and had slaughtered. The son, James is just 18 and was really enthusiaistic, making bacon, sausages and faggots. Not the way a lot of 18 year olds choose to spend their Saturday but it was really satisfying that he was so interested to see how his food was made and where it came from. Making faggots was good fun, choosing a variety of herbs and spices to throw in, and believe me they taste nothing like the rubbish churned out to the masses by the frozen food companies. If an abbatoir is small and friendly like ours, they have time to cut out and save the Caul fat from inside your animal, this is the webbing like fat that faggots are wrapped in.

Our pigs are ready for slaughter at approximately 7 to 8 months for a pork pig and 10 months plus for a bacon pig. A bacon pig is left longer in order for the loin to fully develop.  We always ensure our pigs are clean before they go off to slaughter as the abbatoir is not keen on receiving muddy pigs and it does not benefit the finished carcass that you get back. Not all abattoirs will take pigs and if they do they may not be able to deal with pigs over a certain size and ours tend to be much bigger than average because they are rare breeds.

There are strict rules around the transportation of livestock and to transport your own stock you need a transporters licence, a movement licence and an FSA Food Chain Form to hand to the Abattoir. When the pig goes to the abattoir we ensure that rather than having an ear tag in, the pig has been slap marked. The reason for this is to ensure that the carcass that comes back is ours, once all of the hair is removed it could be difficult for an untrained eye to tell the difference.  We are told that there is a very profitable black market in rare breed meats!

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The Herb Gardener - Successional sowing ensures success

Well it’s pushing it to say that success is ensured by successional sowing, because there is many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip when it comes to growing your own herbs and veg. However, if you want a constant supply of your staple fresh summer foods from your garden there has to be some planning…..and discipline in carrying out the plan.

This week I have been sowing loads of seeds, and many of them were already my second or third sowing of the same plant. When selling Coriander or Dill in pots at the Farmers Market the most frequent comment from customers is “what am I doing wrong? My Coriander/Dill never lasts long”. Well no it doesn’t, and it won’t, because it’s a short-lived annual, so you are doing nothing wrong madam. You can find varieties that have been bred specifically for leaf production, these will yield for longer than those types that just want to set seed, but for a summer-long supply you have to sow fresh seeds every 3 or 4 weeks. I suggest that you let your early sowings flower and set seed, because you can then collect the dried seed to use next year, or use the seeds in your cooking - a thrifty and easy tip.

For salad crops like Rocket, Mizuna, and Radish, I sow a new batch almost as soon as the previous lot has formed true leaves, but with these, and also Pak Choi, Tatsoi, and other Oriental leaf crops, you also need to protect them from a real problem pest - the Flea Beetle. If you don’t you will find that the leaves will become absolutely peppered with small unsightly holes. Because I follow organic growing practices I don’t use any chemicals to control the bugs, instead I cover my crops with horticultural fleece to create a physical barrier. To be honest, for personal use a leaf with holes in is neither here nor there, but because I am selling my harvest I have to present the product looking as blemish-free as possible. The supermarket culture has brainwashed the public to expect aesthetic perfection in all fresh produce, and operating as I and many other non-chemical growers do, it is extremely difficult to meet those levels of expectation. Fortunately most of my customers are tinted green to a greater or lesser extent and are intelligent enough not fall for all that baloney (I resisted my urge to use a different word beginning with b!).

Here in Suffolk we are in the midst of a mini-drought; there has been no appreciable rainfall for weeks now. It’s not that I am not enjoying the early ‘heatwave’ (what’s the spring version of Indian Summer?), but the aforementioned seeds/seedlings could do with a drink, and I really don’t want to start irrigating yet. Every day it seems that the Met Office is forecasting precipitation for the following day, but thus far it has failed to materialise. Still, apparently we are due a shower or two tomorrow, but I am taking no chances, I’m off out in to the garden in my loincloth to perform a raindance - not to be confused with Riverdance; all that high kicking might upset the neighbours!

Take a look at www.langhamherbs.co.uk to see what i’m all about.

Phil

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The Hen Keeper - Hen Party a Huge Success

Just a brief blog after a chaotic opening to our season here at the Kitchen Garden. 850 visitors might not seem a massive number, but we are a small business in a tiny village, and try to offer personnal attention. Our customers were offered a marquee on the lawn housing a dozen or so breeders, their hens and tablesof fertile eggs for hatching.

There were 30 or so different breeds, from Orpingtons, Pekins, Silkies, right through to Transylvanian Naked Necks - a big hit with small boys. More bantams than standard birds, and lots of interest in Orpingtons and Araucanas - the hens that lay the pale blue eggs. We sell baskets of different coloured eggs, from dark brown, tinted, white to blue, in differnet sizes from huge to bantam sized, they’re always popular, though obviously they all taste the same under the shell. It’s the food the hen eats that determines the taste of the egg, and it’s the greenery they eat that makes the wonderful yellow yolks.

I hope you’ll excuse just a short blog this week, as I recover from a day of continuous chat and heavy lifting. More next week……….

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The Wine Merchant - Easter Weekend Vine Tour

A superb Easter Weekend Vineyard Experience. Working in-conjunction with Pelham House, Lewes we had on offer a fabulous weekend experience. With a half-day vineyard tour, tasting at Carr Taylor, over night stay in a 4 star country hotel followed by a day at the races, Plumpton Race Course.

The group had …

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