Fried Green Tomato Recipe

The tomatoes are doing a lot better this year than last - they all died of blight last year. We bought little plants this year rather than growing from seed.

A branch snapped of recently so I tried making fried green tomatoes. V good

Some green tomatoes

Some flour

Egg

Salt

Spices eg paprika and chilli

Mix the flour, salt and spices on a place

Best the egg in a bowl

Slice the tomatoes about 1cm thick

Heat about 1/2cm of oil in a frying pan on a medium heat. The oil should not be smoking, but should sizzle enthusiastically when you add the tomatoes.

Dip the tomato slices in the flour, then the egg, then the flour again and put in to the frying pan, fry until brown then turn and do the same on the other side.

Hainoa has a sore eye

Hainoa has a sore eye. As usual, reading about symptoms on the internet is very scary - with many gross pictures.

For now we have sprayed with salt water and then an antiseptic spray but we are going to keep a super close watch to see if anything changes for the worse. We are also watching the other cows closely in case it is catching. We don't want to call the vet too soon, but equally we don't want to wait when we should not.

You can't see it very clearly but there is a big swelling in the corner and a little kind of split in the eyelid. I was quite suprise that I managed to spray things in her eye without her having a mental fit and either running off or at me!

Animals are such a worry!

Maybe we will get the car back

After 2 months of arguing with Nissan about who is going to pay for a new clutch and flywheel they have finally offered to pay a good part of it. They admit no fault and say they are doing it for customer relations. How a 2 month wait for this decision is good for customer relations I am not sure.

We are not getting to overexcited until the work is actually done. It is going to be great to be able to use the trailer again, so many things are held up for want of it.

Thank goodness for our vry kind friends who are lending us their car!

Something ate the little chickens

A couple of days ago Doug went to feed the chickens and found there had been a massacre of most of the little chickens that we hatched this year. There seem to be two left alive. We assume it was a fox and either it got at them because they have a habbit of wandering around outside the electric fence, or it is possible it got inside the fence when it was dark and did not get the big chickens because they have a door that closes with the light. Doug and the dog found a number of corpses (which we fed to the pigs so there was some benefit) but some had disappeared altogether.

V sad, but I think rather inevitable. Everyone with chickens round here seems to lose at least some. We need to get on and get a new chicken house with an automatic door for the growing chickens so we can avoid the same thing happening next year - it is on the shopping list but had not made it to the top yet.

New friends?

We put the cows (the Jerseys) and the coos (the highlands) in to the same field today. We were a bit worried that they would fight, and there are a lot of horns involved. However we watched them for an hour or more and nothing much happened. They had a few chats, but we are not very clear on the nuances if cow language so we weren't sure of the significance of wandering up to each other, then wandering of again (grazing all the time). The most exciting moment was some very tentative sniffing near each other. We hope they have sorted out who is who in the herd as they have been in adjoining fields since the Jerseys arrived. Hopefully it is not going to get any more exciting overnight. The neighbors giant cows are in the field next to ours at the moment and they all looked on in great interest - including the GIANT bull who is a very scary looking fellow.

Milk from our cow

Buttercup still has a little milk, so we gave milking a quick go. This was just a squirt from each teat. We are going to go back with a cloth to clean the teats and give getting a bit more a go. She doesn't have much as Bluebell is 14 months old and should really be weaned but is obviously continuing to take a little bit of milk.

We also milked one of the sheep the other day, just a few squirts again. From afar her udders looked a bit large so we caught her, but we decided it was just because we had sheared her we could see the udder more clearly than normal. But we decided to give milking a little go and have a taste. Pretty nice. Being such small sheep i don't think there is much to spare, but interesting anyway. Maybe we could make a tiny tiny sheeps cheese one day.

Rabbit Tagine Recipe

1 rabbit cut in to pieces

Morrocan spices (I used ones called 'for chicken' that we got in morocco, but ras el hanout is fine.

1 confit lemon cut in to quarters - or a normal lemon if you can't get confit or make your own - http://www.thebittenword.com/thebittenword/2009/08/lemon-confit.html

3 largish carrots cut in to batons 

1 large onion or 2 small ones chopped

Add the onions, then the rabbit to the tagine and sprinkle the spice over the top followed by a bit of oil a dash of salt (careful if the confit lemon is salty) and half a cup of water

Put the lid on and cook for 30 mins

Add the carrots and lemon and cook for a further hour.

Serve with cous cous.

Beer Battered Rabbit Recipe

Some rabbit cut in to pieces

Small bottle of beer

Some flour (enough to coat the rabbit pieces)

Salt and pepper and other spices (cujun mix, paprika, chilli, whatever you fancy)

Put some oil in a pan sized so the rabbit pieces cover the bottom of the pan but are not piled high. The pan needs to have a lid.

Heat the oil and then add the rabbit pieces followed by enough beer to half cover the rabbit.

Simmer on a gentle heat for an hour with the lid on. Then remove the lid and boil until there is just a small amount of gloopy liquid left. Careful towards the end not to burn it.

Mix the flour, salt, pepper and spices on a plate and dip in the rabbit pieces carefully coating all over. Dip in the remaining cooking liquid and then flour again.

In a smaller pan heat about 1 cm of oil. Add as many of the pieces as will fit at a time and fry until golden brown. You can also do in a deep fat fryer.

The Jersey cows are finally here!

It is a month and a half since we bought the Jersey cows, we have been waiting all this time for some paperwork to come (it was applied for by the previous owners - there seemed to be various technical hitches, hate to think what would have happened if we had been trying to do it) so they could be delivered.
Finally they arrived today. In a van hired from Super-U (a supermarket!)
We have decided to call them Buttercup (the mother - with no horns) and Bluebell (the daughter - with horns). They seem quite calm and have settled in well. We have put them in the field where the highlands were and moved the highlands in to a little field next door so they can all get to know each other.
We are super excited as Buttercup is still in milk and we got a tiny little squirt out of her and tasted it! We are planning on trying to get a bit more tomorrow after buying a head collar - updates on how that goes soon!

Riding Daisy and Owen

While Katie was here, Doug took Daisy and they went for a ride with Katie on Owen. It went pretty well although Daisy's boots broke good and proper. She’s fine without anyway…

Lucky Pigs

The pigs have two purposes, one is to be yummy food for us next year, the other is to clear the land in the woods. They had quite a large enclosure, but we have made it much bigger to something like an acre. To do this Doug had to push through some almost impenetrable thickets with the strimmer to get the fence through. We are hoping they will now clear the thicket within their enclosure.

Perky admiring all the work going on

Along the top of the original part of the enclosure

Before strimming

The mighty strimmer

Beautifully cleared track ready for the fence

After strimming

This is just the top of the enclosure. There was worse thicket along the bottom, made a bit more difficult by the fence on the hay field. But Doug did a heroic job and got it all done. We then had the fun of putting fence round it all, in some places we have used existing fence posts and trees and in others we have put in plastic and metal posts.

We may extend it again depending on how they are getting on. We kind of hope to be able to leave the fence in place for pigs next year but we may well end up having to redo it as things grow so fast and engulf fences. It isn't very easy to strim with the fence in place as it is too easy to chop through.

Cow field saga

After the cows escaped from a normal field YET AGAIN. Doug did a bit more fencing and added a third strand round part of the field. I won't say anything too extreme as it might jinx it, but they have been in the field getting on for a week. Islay did jump out (or rather blunder through and a bit over the fence) once because we thought they weren't in the field and we went storming around to find them and she got frightened. So it is looking better anyway.

Chanterelles

Doug found a little patch of chanterelles (or girolles in French - I thought chanterelle was French but ere you go). It seems that mushrooms are coming out quite early this year. We had them fried gently in butter with a little lemon on. Delicious. 

We have a big book on mushrooms to help identify things, these are pretty destinctive with only one similar thing - which isn't really very similar. There is a good service in France where you can take your mushrooms in to any chemist and they will tell you whether they are safe to eat (they will always err on the side of caution of course)

Another black pudding recipe

4l pigs blood

300g pearl barley (not cooked)

150g porridge oats

200g back fat, diced small

500g onions

600g skin and fat from a boiled pigs head (like you would do it for brawn). Use the meat from the head for pork pies

6 tsp salt

Spices (I used black pepper, nutmeg and ginger and then added smoked paprika and a bit of port to the 2nd half)

Sausage skins

Fry the onions gently until soft then put in the blender with the fat and skin from the head until a smooth paste.

Mix everything together in a large pan or bowl

Fry a small amount of the mixture and taste for seasoning. It will be a bit weird but better than tasting the blood raw!

Fill the skins by taking about 60cm lengths and tying string on one end then filling with a funnel

and tying the other end off with another piece of string.

Put in to a large pan of water at about 80C and cook for about 30 mins until when you prick with a needle it comes out brown not red.

When cooked cool on a rack and then refrigerate or freeze.

RIP Tyson

Tyson died yesterday, we are very sad.
He seemed a little off colour for a few days, then yesterday Katie found him lying with his head in the fence (not an electric one) and on inspecting him with Doug they found him still alive, but COVERED in maggots. This is a really really REALLY gross thing that is fairly common in sheep called 'fly strike', where the blow fly (which is green and shiny) lays hundreds of eggs on the fleece and when they hatch they head down through the fleece and start eating the sheep alive! Generally it occurs on animals that are weakened for some reason, healthy ones can knock off the eggs and maggots by grooming themselves.
We did an emergency shearing and then tried to kill all the maggots by picking them off, then hosing them off with water when there were just too many, and with fly spray. More gross than you can possibly imagine.
In the time between finding him and getting back with the shears and emergency treatment kit he had collapsed on to his side and started having fits with his legs stretched out and his eyes rolling. He was finding it hard to breath too.
Once we had him all cleaned up we put him in the barn wrapped in a towel to keep warm. He seemed slightly better in that the fits had mostly stopped and he seemed a bit more conscious. But sadly while I was at the vet getting some antibiotics he died.
We are still not quite sure what caused the fitting as it is not mentioned in any cases of fly strike I have read about. I am reading about magnesium deficiency which can cause fitting, we also wondered whether a maggot had got to his brain. Whatever it is, it is likely that that was the root of the problem and it was him being weak that allowed the fly strike to progress. It progresses really really fast and the sheep can go in a few hours from just having eggs on it that you can hardly see to having big holes eating it it. Nevertheless of course we feel sad for not having spotted it sooner and having let him suffer like that. It is our first attack of fly strike and we can see now why people are so afraid of it. I was going to say I felt guilty, but I don't, just sad. Realistically we cannot inspect every sheep close up in the wool the twice a day it would take to spot a strike early on. In general the older breeds like the Ouessant are held to be less susceptible to it - when healthy anyway. You can get products a bit similar to frontline for dogs that can reduce the chances of it hitting. We need to consider if we want to treat all the sheep, all the time just in case it happens again as it gets expensive, plus all the treatments are pretty poisonous so do we want to be around that and handle it on the sheep all the time. Sheering can help so we will try to do it earlier in the year. We will also certainly get some better stuff to kill the maggots if it happens again, and continue to keep a very close eye on the behavior and health of all the sheep to spot ones that might be susceptible.

Break in the rain

We are having quite stormy rainy weather at the moment, but there are enough breaks to make it not unpleasant. We had a nice walk this afternoon and sat out for lunch. We only got a little bit wet! The view from the front door looks dramatic.

Boo the cows escaped!

While we were having breakfast this morning, our neighbour the farmer knocked on the door saying our cows were in the field he wanted to put his cows in. It seems our cows had just got out when he arrived with all his cows in the lorry.

Luckly we didn't feel hungover - they usually wait for that before escaping - and it is a cool day for trailing around fields to get cows. We turned up just in time to catch them before they got in to the field with the giant cows and even more giant bull. Islay seemed keen to go home, but Hainoa less so.

They are back in with the sheep now. Not sure of the next move.

Yay cows are still in the field

We moved the cows in to the hay field yesterday. It was exciting to see them still there this morning. They have now stayed in a 'normal' field for record breaking time!

They seem very happy, but who can tell what will happen when the neighbours cows are in the field next door again (they seem to rotate through fields quite fast).

Photos of sheep and lambs

This is the new little lamb. Mummy is a bit protective at the moment so couldn't get closer.

No they are not dead! Just resting. Miss Suffolk is the dark brown one - who needs shearing. Little Miss Suffolk is her younger sister, you can see she has been sheared already. Rug  is not quite in the picture, he is their brother from this year and is looking good and chunky.

Here is Harris's new hair cut. Slightly uneven, but such is life.