Burra Maluca

Well we're half way through sawing and splitting and stacking that load of wood. Most of the bigger pieces are eucalyptus and there was a fair bit of bark around the place, presumably having fallen off the timbers after they were put in place. We call it woof rather than bark as burns so readily and I've stashed it separately to use as fire-starters.

I will have to sieve the ashes at some point to remove old nails but for the cost of the fuel to go and fetch it, it's a bargain! And it needed to be cleared anyway...

I also asked my son about the bags of clothes he was given. It turns out he still had two bags left as people just aren't very interested in used clothes, so I had another rummage through them and found a brown sweater. It's acrylic rather than lambs-wool but it fits and it's useful so I'm not too fussed, and a pair of shoes which will do for walking the dog, a pair of cotton sweatpants and, somewhat unbelievably, what I thought were two pairs of jeans turned out to be jeggings. Which are big enough and stretchy enough to actually fit me! I never thought I'd wear anything resembling jeans again but I'm happily pretending I'm in my twenties and hauling wood wearing denim.

We've had a few frosts, and the blood oranges are just starting to develop a bit of colour on the skin.



And apparently inside too!



They are still quite sharp but they have an awesome flavour. And they are nice and big and juicy. And free of pips.

We managed to blag all the old roof timbers from a job site to feed to the rocket mass heater.

That lot should keep us warm all winter!

Burra Maluca wrote:So I think this year I'm going to see if I can do a complete no-buy when it comes to clothes. I'm not so active any more, so it's not like I'm wearing them out like I used to. So for me, it's a make-do-and-mend year!

Ah, so I didn't manage the complete no-buy I'm afraid. I succumbed to temptation and bought a dress! Nothing fancy, just something I can throw on very quickly if I need to go outside where I might be seen during the summer when I've pottering around indoors in just undies. And then I found a pair of full-length curtains for 50 cents in a car boot sale in lovely rustic colours and couldn't resist them so they came home with me and one of them got turned into another very basic dress. Next, my son showed up sporting new jackets and carrying bags full of clothes from 'from a client as a thankyou for doing a delivery', which I admit totally freaked me out but it turned out he was delivering wood for construction and the clothes were being cleared out from a deceased relative. I had a rummage through the bags of clothes and selected a nice black jacket and an apple-green lambs-wool sweater. So rescued rather than bought, but new-to-me regardless. And then the boys took me to a second-hand warehouse as a pre-christmas treat and I bought all sorts of stuff for the house and an olive-green chunky knit infinity scarf for 50 cents.

So I didn't manage the no-buy, but I came pretty close!

Christmas biscuits and gravy!

The boys are out on an emergency digging job so I'm on cheap and cheerful comfort food for lunch, and finishing off the annual bag of brussels sprouts!

I'm testing the 'new' stove top oven, which unsurprisingly is just like the old one but with less danger of the glass in the viewing window falling onto the food as it cooks. The biscuits were made with half wheat flour and half linseed meal and worked very well. It also helps me use up my enormous stash of linseed... And I changed the method of making the biscuits, mixing them up in a saucepan then using the pan to make up the gravy so that the bits of flour left in there end up as part of the gravy-thickening. Which also means less washing up!

Ian Graham wrote:mine looks like this, I see the reply button but on the long threads it is impossibly far away from the post I want to reply TO.

Whichever post you are replying to, your new post will show up at the end of the thread and it's generally better to read until the end of the thread before replying anyway in my experience.

I generally use the scroll bar to get up and down the page faster.

The boys took me on a pre-christmas treat to a second-hand warehouse thing a few days ago.

I came home with all sorts of stuff..



An old camo tent-bag that's going to be converted into a harvesting bag. A load of silk flowers. A pretty Chinese vase. An olive green scarf that needs a bit of TLC. A ceramic divided snack-plate in lovely rustic colours with leafy designs. Some bowls. A nice glass for orange juice. And a spare stove-top oven, for a euro!

It didn't have heat-funnel thing with it but it was in much better condition than the one Alan found for me in the rubble heap and it was only a euro so I thought it was worth taking a risk that the funnel we already had fit.



Austin did a bit of panel-beating on our original one but the new one still looks better.

No dragon logo on the new one, and no heat funnel either but they look about the same size so I'm hopeful.



It fits!



The glass window is intact on the 'new' one too!

And to be fair, it's worth a euro to not have to fix the broken glass on the original.



Nice and clean inside too.

The hole looks a little narrower but that's hardly a problem. And I think my shiny new-fangled but a bit in need of a wash silicone insert should fit too.

I might need to test it by making something. Corn bread rolls, maybe?

That chicken stock got itself turned into leek soup yesterday.

Served in a giant mug with corn-bread croutons cooked in chicken fat.

Simple and delicious!



I couldn't resist just dumping all the croutons right on top of the soup. Much better like that...

The soil at our last place was too thin to reliably knock in a post to tether the donkey to, so we made a round concrete block with a ring set in which could be rolled around or moved in the box behind the tractor.



The underside looked like this, just to confuse people...



The new house has a tethering ring in the wall.  We'd just knocked a brick out so we could put a glass one in to let a bit of light in downstairs, which used to be just for animals, and my other half is helpfully pointing to the ring so you can find it...

My other half managed to pick up a bag of chicken offcuts. Not very big, but certainly worth having!

I sorted it out and put anything with bone in to make broth in the big crockpot and the skin and boneless offcuts in the small one. Usually for rendering I add half a cup of water but this was a different composition to my usual renders, which are usually  based on pork skin and fat trimmings, so I added a lot more water to make sure it didn't all just stick. When it was cooked I poured the juices into a pyrex jug and left it to cool then put it in the fridge.

This was the result.



When the fat was as hard as it was going to get I lifted it off carefully and set it on one side to be used as cooking fat.



The stock underneath set really, really well and smells heavenly and is likely to be turned into soup in the very near future.

I went through the skin and meaty bits and sorted them out. The skin was cut into small pieces and laid out on a silicone tray to freeze. I can add a handful when I cook the next batch of rice-and-lentils. And then the meat went into a bowl.



Then for lunch today we used the chicken meat in with the second half of the black-eyed peas I'd cooked up a couple of days ago and added smoked paprika, onions and green peppers, and served it with some galega cabbage, parsley, and buttered corn-bread. Which went down VERY well!