Mastered wordpress

After trawling through pages and pages of formats and themes, I finally seem to have something that works for my blog.


So here I am on word press:


http://theabsinthefairy.wordpress.com/

Happy New Year everyone

It has been a bit of an odd start to the new year so far for me.

For one thing, now that the 2010 projects are over, I find that I am scouting around to do something every day and then realising that I don't have to, but missing the hive of activity that the projects created around me.

So the dog has been out for a couple of very long walks.  And I have mastered reading books on my Kindle.

But there is more to life than this, so crochet is once again taking up my evenings, as well as a new tapestry that I have just started.

Added to two new jobs and a stinking head cold.


I have decided on the format for my 2011 project blog (even if I could not master wordpress to load it onto!).

The Three Cs project will work like this.

Every month I will post a complete how to with photos for the first C - Cook something new
Every month I will post a complete how to with photos for the second C - Create something new

Finally, through flickr and to ensure that I actually get around to using all that storage space on there, I have joined a 52 images to a theme group and will be attempting to keep up with this throughout the year.  I intend to post my best Captures here - and so build up a wider portfolio than I currently have.

I had considered a 365 images group - but as I have a tendancy to forget where I plugged the camera battery in for a couple of days at a time, it would not be long before I fell behind on that one.

I intend to try to keep up the momentum started last year through the daily projects and set myself daily goals to motivate me, you just won't have to read about them everyday now though.

And so with no more shilly shallying around this morning, I am off into the sunshine to clean out the animals and start my spring compost heap.

Last day of a fun packed busy year

How fast time goes by.

It does not feel as though 12 months have passed since I started this little project.  I have been so pleased to have achieved so much, from new recipes, to new clothes, to new friends.

I have really enjoyed the whole process, even when the only thing I got done in a day was to deal with some complicated paperwork at least the project gave me the focus to start and finish a variety of new things, attain some new skills and to stop procrastinating and shoving that complicated paperwork to the back of the to do piles building up on my desk.

And now on the last day of 365 projects over 365 days, there is just one last thing to do.

To work out what my project for next year will be.

Happy New Year.

Another Olympic entry

" - what on earth do you think you are doing now?"

Chicken tickling.

Take one leafy branch - not easy to come by in the middle of winter but I found one.

Then with branch in left hand and right arm outstretched attempt to round up eleven stubborn chickens into their new coop.

Fingers of right hand must continue wriggling throughout the manoeuvre and "tickle tickle tickle" must be recited in high pitched tone.

Branch is not allowed to touch the ground nor any chicken.

Picking up of chickens means instant disqualification.

Event is timed.

"- come near me with that stick - I dare you!"

Just enough light this evening to finish my crochet shawl, photos to be posted tomorrow hopefully.

I also managed to get the first stage of the costumes for Friday's murder mystery party sorted out. For everyone but myself. My wardrobe currently consists of two red feather boas. I think I need to add something else to that.

Preparing ducks for the freezer

The photos below include images of dead waterfowl.

If you are easily distressed - don't look.


Yesterday dawned bright and clear and for some reason that inspired me to get on with culling some of my ducks ready for the freezer.

I have kept these for too long really, well beyond growing on and into money pit levels, with them eating and eating despite having reached their peak weights.

With the chicken shuffle around the other day it just seemed to be the best time to get on with it.

They are Mulard ducks, which here means a Muscovy also known as a Barbary crossed with a Pekin, resulting in a big, sterile, predominantly white duck, hardy with thick plummage, fast growing and large areas of breast meat.

Long ago I gave up plucking ducks, except for the odd one or two for when I actually want one for roast duck and to conserve the fat.

My favourite technique for preparing them is to pluck a line along the breast bone, then slit the skin at the breast bone, peel back and expose both breasts then trim the meat from the bones.  Following the line of the meat, cut free the legs and pull back the skin then remove the feet either with a cleaver or snap the joint back and cut the tendon (the feet are the bits that the dog waits for and delights in most).

At this point you will be left with a skeleton with wings, head, tail and feathers attached and a full body cavitity.  If you want to recover the liver, this is easily done by breaking the rib cage open and scooping out the entrails to free the liver.

The other advantage to this way of preparing a bird apart from not having to pluck it completely is that you then do not have to cut around the vent and attempt to remove it and the fecal contents risking nicking them and contaminating the flesh.

 8 very large duck breasts and 8 large duck legs, skinless and ready for use.

Whatever method of dispatch you use, the birds have to bleed out.

I hang the birds by the feet and break their necks by pullling down and back sharply.  Death follows swiftly and a sharp knife ensures that they bleed out fully before starting on plucking.

They can also be more easily dispatched with a .22 pellet through the fontanella but will still need their throats slitting to bleed out fully.

They will flap madly in their death throes so a bit of baling twine at the wing joint helps minimise this.

Plunging into hot water can make plucking easier, but to be honest I find that doing it while the bird is warm is the best time and the quills are at their easiest to pull out freely.

I am now left with 3 geese of which one should already be in the freezer and another 2 ducks to be done.

But the surfeit of rabbits is next on the agenda.

Feeling a tad apprehensive

Our birds are split into two separate flocks who spend the day together.

The white meat birds who also live with the pet Orpingtons, and our older egg flock.

Tonight is the first night that they will all sleep together.

It only took an hour of trying to entice the meat birds into the big coop with the egg flock, before I gave up and carried them to bed one by one, jostling for space on their behalf on the perches.

I don't pick them up to carry them around on a daily basis but tonight really highlighted the weight difference between meat and egg birds. The Orpingtons are a month younger than the meat birds give or take but weight wise there is probably a kilo and half if not more between them.

The perch peck-a-thon is over (I hope) and, fingers crossed, not too many bloody combs and wattles in the morning.

Pixies stole my marbles

There are days when I am sure I am losing my mind.  I am sure it leaks out in gloopy dribbles during the night onto my pillow (no that is not drool!).

I am stuck in the vicious of list making - which looks like this:

(click to enlarge)

Today is a good example.

For four days I have been intending to charge the battery in my camera.

For the last 24 hours I have been loath to admit that I have mislaid the battery in its charger whilst roaming around the house trying to find a free non Christmas fairy light bedecked plug to plug the charger into.  This morning I re-found the charger (in the laundry hamper - don't ask).  I also found a free plug in the pantry.  This afternoon I went to take the camera out so went to replace the battery.  No battery in the free plug.  No charger in the free plug.  In fact no battery nor charger to be seen anywhere in the pantry.

Back to hunting the battery and charger.

And no this time it was not in the laundry hamper and thankfully not in the washing machine either.

Going down the garden to beg the pixies to give me back enough marbles to allow me to get through the day.

All over for another year

Christmas is over for another 12 months. Everything drops back to normal instantly.

There is an anticlimactical air to this post Christmas period. Never really having been one for big New Year celebrations, Christmas is my personal big event, and once gone it all feels like a bit of a wind down before gearing back up towards spring and the first bits of gardening.

Especially so in France, as here bank holidays do not carry over into the working week, therefore today is just another Monday work wise, and Boxing Day is not a celebration at all.

In that spirit of Monday bleurgh and back to work, Thea and I set to a bit of cleaning up around the chicken house, sorting out some fresh hay and straw for the rabbits, attacking the piles of washing lying around, tackling the mounds of leftovers and a general air of putting away and tidying up around the house.

We finally found the stash of eggs hidden in the upper barn, from one of our meat birds who has decided to be a house chicken and is laying like mad in an endeavor to endear herself to us and preserve her life. Unfortunately the -18°C the other night froze the eggs solid and they have all cracked. Eggy popsicles for the dog though who was quite happy with them. Dread to think what effect that is going to have on his guts later this afternoon.

With my freezer now refilled with left over turkey pie and a left over lamb pie and a lamb curry bubbling away ready for tonight now, I have a sense of achievement. The sun is out and the snow is glistening so may even get to take the dog out for a post Christmas 10km stroll.

Or perhaps I may just relax with my new Kindle.

Very impressed with the screen on it, (even if it did take me an hour on Christmas day to pair with the internet modem and get it to perform its WiFi functions), so impressed in fact that I have even bitten the proverbial bullet and bought some books for it.

From the BBC 100 greatest books - I am going to try to work my way through the unread books on the list, but I was quite surprised how many of these I have not only read but stand well thumbed on my bookshelves.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

I love Christmas

Everything about it.

From our traditional champagne breakfast, to the pressies and all the wrapping paper strewn across the floor, to preparing the veg, cooking the meat, choosing pretty things to scatter across the table to flopping on the sofa for a game afterwards.

And yesterday was another great Christmas, spent with good friends.

Our menu for our final Christmas day of 2010 was:

Selection of starter nibbles including olives, a meat platter, tomato and mozzarella.

Slow roasted leg of Ernie Bastard (also known as lamb), roast turkey and garden vegetables.

Selection of cheeses

Chocolate mousse served with Chantilly cream.


Once again dinner took a number of hours, another thing that has become quite traditional for our Christmas, I aim for a course an hour now, which is one of the reasons that we have a starter selection, we sit and drink and nibble for an hour, then eat the main, then usually go off and play a game, I get a chance to clear the table (and a sneaky Christmas cigarette) then we have cheeses (before the dessert in the French fashion) before finally finishing off with some dessert and choccies.

I have bowed to family pressure this year and not served any brussels sprouts, in fact I did not even grow any this year.  But I did make chestnut stuffing.  Another thing that once upon a time I would never have done from scratch, out would have come the box of Paxo and I would have considered it job done, but with chestnuts in plentiful supply every autumn (over 5 kilos this year thank you Brendan!) it has become another tradition.

Chestnut and potrine stuffing.

Potrine is what we have in place of smoked bacon, it is a thick smoked slab of pork belly, and very yummy.

In a food processor, whizz up a couple of handfuls of cooked chestnuts  - cook and peel these then freeze prior to Christmas and this way you are not doing fiddley bits at the last minute, just take them out of the freezer the day before and allow to defrost.

Add a couple of slices of smoked bacon or potrine, cut into lardons.

Add a medium peeled onion, salt, pepper, and a couple of teaspoons of dried sage leaves.

Toast 4 thick slices of bread, or dry in the oven and crumble into the food processor.

You should now have a gloopy mix that does not quite stick together but is a bit wet due to the lardons.

To stick the stuffing together either add butter, or as Brendan does not eat butter I add a little bit of grape seed oil (flavoured with sage).  Add it to the mix while it is whizzing around drop by drop until the mix sticks together into a big ball.

Flour your hands and roll the mix into little balls on the palms of your hands, spread out on a baking dish and pop in the oven alongside your meat for an hour.

This year's Christmas main meat was a lamb leg from last year's hogget, Ernie - or to give him his full name, Ernie Bastard.  

To cook the leg, once defrosted I removed the thicker layers of fat from it because I don't think that the fat is particularly nice on lamb, then scored the meats, seasoned and studded with whole cloves of garlic unpeeled and sprinkled with some dried rosemary.  

I put the bits of fat I cut off in the bottom of an oven dish, then put a grill above it and placed the meat on the grill.  This way the fat cooks and helps to keep the meat moist without flavouring it.

Loosely cover with tin foil and cook on a low heat (in my Rayburn that works out to about 120°C to 150°C) for about 4 hours, don't turn or baste or anything else, just leave it in the bottom of the oven for a long time to slowly cook.  The leg was so tender, the meat was falling off the bone.  Just uncover the studded top for the last 20 minutes to brown the meat off slightly on the top.

Now it is Boxing Day, Brendan is pleased that no more snow fell so he gets to lie in bed rather than drive the snow plow around, I'm off to work shortly, and then going to try out my new Kindle.

Mrs Claus

I have been outside in the snow playing Santa today.

We took a walk around to our neighbours dropping off little gifts for Christmas, crackers for those with family visiting, mince pies and knitted hats for everyone else.

We don't have that many neighbours - which is not a bad thing considering that we have been stopping for a little apero with every neighbour too.

Rolling home down the lane by 1.00pm full of tawny Port.  Christmas cheer is here!