Category Archives: food

Quite a lot has been happening over the last few weeks, most notably it has rained, day after day after day. We are not complaining, as we need the water, but a bit of sun might be nice once in a while. The good news is that we also had some snow, so we rushed up the hill to Smerna to make snowmen etc.

 

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I know itÔÇÖs not much, but for the Peloponnese this really is quite impressive Smile

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So, to get back to the important stuff, this is the time of year that lots of animals are born, and lots of animals get deconstructed and put in the freezer.

Our very first lamb ever arrived on the 5th of February, and is male so is entirely destined for the freezer. Despite this, he seems pleased enough to be here. Our other pregnant ewe is still proving coy, or possibly in denial. Not sure which.

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So, that was the life part of the deal -death has been a little more in evidence; we no longer have goats (HURRAH!!!!), but we do have 30kg of assorted chops in the freezer (also HURRAH!!!).

Oddly, the idea of “doing” the goats was much more daunting than the impending pig dispatching (next month?), perhaps because a goat is too small to shoot, so you just hack its throat open with a sharp knife and hope that you get all the important bits in one go. Therefore we resorted to plan B, i.e. asking a neighbour to do it for us. It helps if your neighbour is also Godfather to your child, and has been killing and skinning goats since he was a small child, and sold you the goats in the first place. so this is how we said goodbye to Allie and Amy, our best beloved one-year-old goats:

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Rachel (our current WWOOFer) was very impressed by the size of the animals – bigger than the ones she’s used to seeing in Africa, apparently.

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Lots of people turned up to get involved – it’s one of those events that attracts an audience.

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Note Yiorgos’ full compliance with Health and Hygiene regulations

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The finished articles, 15kg apiece, hanging on the veranda overnight, much to the delight of the local cat population. We decided the next day that it was too warm to keep them hanging, so we butchered and vac-packed the bits, to go into the fridge for another few days maturing, before being frozen. Butchery 101 was provided by an excellent article here from The Guardian, of all people.

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Note the brand-new hack-saw, which we thought would be a good substitute for a butcher”s saw -it wasn’t. At all. Apparently a tenon-saw works well, but mine is so old and grubby, I didn’t want it anywhere near my lunch, so we made do with just a sharp knife and a meat-cleaver.

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Given that it was a first attempt, and the animals are quite big, we spent the best part of three hours on this, but it really was quite easy, following the guide on the internet one cut at a time. (We did nip indoors with the odd bit of carcase to try and work out which but goes where, exactly – but only once or twice).

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Finished cuts are in the foreground – mainly ribs so far.

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Working into the small hours (6.00 pm, actually) – WWOOFer Rachel doing a great job of boning a shoulder.

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And that’s just about the end – what you can see on the table is two entire goats, minus heads and feet. Hardly seems worth the effort.

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Update – Friday, four days after killing the goats, we had shoulder of lamb a la Jaimie Oliver, and have to report that it was outrageously good. Not trying to be smug – we had many reservations that the meat would have a rank, goaty taste, or just wouldn’t be nice enough to want to eat regularly. Glad to report that one year old goat (no idea what to call it – it would be a wether if it was a sheep) tastes divine. Might not be the same if you have a billy-goat on the premises though.

We also made deviled kidneys, which was a success, and goats-liver pate, which was just about edible. Sweetbreads were enjoyed also. The rest of the grizzly bits are now dog food (although we have kept the intestines for sausage making, assuming we get time).

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Makin’ Bacon

The title of this post is a tribute to anyone (but especially Justin and Emily) who knows the game “Pass the Pigs”

First, take some wood-chips. For us, this means putting a lump of last-year’s olive wood through the chipper. Interestingly, it seems that the larger chips burn better than the smaller bits – perhaps due to getting more air in the tin.

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Next, apply heat to get smoke. Plan A, which we have used successfully for a while now, is to put a soldering iron in the bottom of a tin, and then put the chips on top. While the soldering iron works, this is great, but unfortunately it is pretty hard on cheap nasty soldering irons. (It has to be an unused soldering iron, unless you want to poison the bacon with tin solder…)

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You need somewhere to put the smoke, so we set ours up in the clay oven (we normally use a defunct gas barbeque, but we had 10 kilos of belly pork to smoke, which just would not fit, so….

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After about half an hour of smoking, the soldering iron died (brand new as well!), so we had to make an emergency plan B. Also, the clay oven was not a good site, as the smoke was only circulating on top. Given that it was hot (35 degrees during the day), we wanted to get the bacon smoked ASAP, so mucking about with a failed smoking device in a failed smoke box was not an option. Here is plan B:

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One rusty 50 gallon drum with the wreckage of an old door on top to keep the smoke in. The tin with woodchips, now without soldering iron, is at the bottom of the drum. Two bricks and a grid (from the dead barbeque) keep any bacon from falling on to the bottom of the drum (lucky I thought about that, as one of the bits of bacon did fall off, and this drum is in no way food grade equipment!

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And here it is, smoking away. The chips kept going out, and so every hour or so I had to check and then relight the chips with a blow-torch. I think it will work, if the tin has more holes in it to let more air circulate. Need to experiment more. The actual smoking part worked extremely well, and we now have 10 kg of smoked streaky bacon, sliced and packed in the freezer in handy 200 gram packs. Breakfast just got better…..mmmmmmmm

More musing on Aquaponics

Having lost sleep over the last few weeks, what with being so excited at the concept of (almost) water-free gardening, I have finally come to the conclusion that aquaponics is not the way forward, to use management-speak terminology.

The thing is, as I see it, aquaponics is not so much a seamlessly integrated natural cycle of life using fish and plants to merge into one holistic food-system, as a method of fertilising plants using fish waste. Now, if we only had a tiny balcony and no room to grow stuff, and were keen fish-fanciers, I could see the point. However, we do have enough room to grow things, and we don’t really care about the fish, and more importantly, we have lots of other animals with an enthusiastic ability to defecate, so why keep fish (which are tricky), when we have stacks of other animals all producing nitrate waste by the bucket-load?

However, we are still very, very keen to find a way to reduce the water consumption, and we have found it. Wicking Beds. Here’s the plan: make a raised bed, a foot deep. However, under the raised bed, there is another foot of some medium that acts as a reservoir, and below that an impermeable membrane (or sheet of plastic), that stops the water heading off into the ground. So simple. So easy. So CHEAP! We may even get some fish to provide a lovely rich nitrate soup for fertilising the beds, but that will be later, and we can just as easily add chicken, sheep, cow etc. manure, via compost or just composting worms in the beds themselves (google wicking worm beds if you need more info).

So, this might be the end of the aquaponics heading, although I still have a hankering for a hydroponics style tank 20 metres long growing umpty-thousand head of lettuce all at once, so you never know. The good news is that the wicking beds will work with or without the fancy stuff, are just as thrifty with water, and hopefully will make a huge difference to our ability to grow stuff. Figures being bandied about suggest that we will need somewhere around 15,000 litres of water a year for the size of beds we are looking to make. Currently we use about 3,000 litres a DAY! Or to put it another way, we are hosing away a year’s worth of water every five days!

Of course, there are a few down-sides to this new system. Namely we will need to dig up just about every plant and flower we have and replant them all on top of plastic sheets. This could very well be a longer than long-term project. I feel for the strawberries, which are moved every six weeks, it feels like. Hopefully this will be the last time, and we can be all swanky and talk about “The Strawberry Bed”, as though we are somehow organised and professional. This will have to be followed by “The Raspberry Bed”, “The Red, Black and Blue Berry bed”, “The Bougainvillea Bed” and so on. Eventually, each olive tree could have its own private and personal bed to sleep in. I don’t think so.

Will have more info and photos as the huge infrastructure project gets started, maybe at the end of the week.

 

Why double-glazing is a really bad idea.

 

All w arm and snug and cosy, tucked up in bed with no drafts, no ice on the inside of the windows, no eleventh blanket to keep the cold out – why not have double-glazing?

Because it’s sound-proof, that’s why. Last night (actually, very early this morning), we lost 15 chickens and 3 Guinea-fowl, brutally murdered, and we didn’t hear a thing. It wasn’t until we were making breakfast that we finally heard one of our Guinea-fowl making a racket (which is why we have them!) and I wandered out to investigate. Bits and pieces of chicken spread all over the place, some very sad and sorry-looking survivors, and two unknown dogs rushing about in a frenzy. So much for electric fences and predator-proof chicken-coops.

Now, I don’t object too much if we lose animals to foxes or pine-martens (actually, I object a lot, but you know what I mean) – they were here first, they’re just trying to earn a living etc. But dogs? We have toted up the year’s losses, and at over 50 birds we have decided that the chicken-ark system is just too expensive to carry on with. No more moving our animals around the farm, ensuring a even spread of grazing and manure. All locked up in a big secure cage, just like the locals do it from now on. And why?

Because the worthless, feckless, useless idiot Greeks have a great system for un-needed dogs – if you don’t want it, throw it away. But don’t do anything responsible, like find a new home for it, take it to a rescue shelter or some such. Oh no, much more sensible to take it off to the countryside and release it into the wild. “Fly free my beauty! Cretins, the lot of them. What they are actually doing is saying “I don’t want to be responsible for killing this dog, so I’ll get some other poor idiot to do it for me”. So, one dog, suddenly homeless, makes a bee-line for the nearest house, gets side-tracked by chickens, and blood-bath ensues. Dog then shot by owner of chickens, and good result all round, except for the poor chickens.

If it was just an occasional thing, I could understand it, but it is constant, and getting worse, what with the economic position at the moment. So, if you are Greek, and reading this, tell me please why you are so offensively uncaring. unthinking, and generally all-round useless. Thanking you in anticipation.

In case you think I am being a little harsh – here is what we salvaged from this morning’s entertainment.

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Hard to believe, but this used to be 20 chickens….

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Had to count up heads (the only bit left in a couple of cases) to make sure some weren’t just missing in action. Our final surviving Guinea fowl is very sad now – hardly has the heart to bully anyone. Here’s another question – if you are planning to breed guinea-fowl, and you only have one, who does it work? Immaculate conception? Cloning? Answers on a postcard, addressed to the dogs’ original owners please.

Still, there is some good news – we still have a pair of turkeys, and the sheep weren’t bothered (locked up for the night, but then so were the chickens ). We also have 25 layers still, so we can fire up the incubator and crack on with the next generation, just as soon as everyone gets over the shock of new housing and starts laying again. The circle of life continues.

Turkey for Christmas

 

Having bought ourselves three turkeys, it seemed sensible to dispatch one of them for Christmas. Question is, how do you decide which one? Bless their cotton socks, neither of the two fugitives seemed to be playing hard to get, so the decision came down to which one was closer. We had lots of theories about keeping the larger of the two for breeding purposes, by frankly, how do you tell? They are (were, in one case) both enormous, and with all that constant posturing and displaying, it is nigh-on impossible to tell how much is bird and how much is feathers.

So, grab a turkey by the leg, do the necessary, hang it up and pluck it. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezey, as Lexi would say. Actually, as it was the first one, it seemed a little daunting. Just killing the thing was a puzzle, and then dry-plucking and drawing a monster (6.5 kilos = 14lbs). Not the best way to get into the Christmas spirit.

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For those who need to know, put a stick on the ground, put turkey’s head under stick (with back facing outwards, breast towards you, so the stick goes on the back of the neck), then put a foot on either end of the stick  and pull upwards). Works a treat with chickens; turkeys are a little more exciting once the flapping starts. Our volunteer WWOOFers were on-hand to experience the full Christmas spirit, as it were, with anatomy class and guess the name of the internal organ game played to the full.

To our surprise, dry-plucking was nowhere near the mission we were expecting, which made life easier. Drawing was easy too – just like a chicken, but not so fiddly. We use tin-snips to cut off neck and feet, and don’t worry about the tendons –there’s so much meat on the bird you won’t find them until three days after Christmas, when you are stripping the last of the meat off the carcass for that curry, mmmmmmmmm

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We decided not to hang the bird with the guts in (nowhere to hang it in sunny Greece that is cold enough!!), so we plucked and drew it straight away, and then shoved it in the fridge for 5 days.

 

Never had a turkey like it! Moist, succulent, astonishingly fat (perhaps we have been overfeeding them?), and more flavour than you can shake a stick at. Finally understood why they are considered worthy of a Christmas Feast. Quite looking forward to the next year, assuming we get the two remaining birds to breed.