Breakfast Pie

Woo Hoo!  We've finished the hedge-laying - all 70m of it!  Yesterday we put the finishing touches to it by planting in the gaps and weaving twigs and branches into the bottom to protect the new shoots.  That means that we can now plant our new hedge to divide the field (didn't want to do that while we were felling quite big trees or it'd get squashed).  We are also going to plant a few fruit trees in our bit - I think Rob and Becky are going to plant some in their half too, so they should all happily pollinate each other.  In my week off we also chopped down the other half of the Sycamore next to the beer bench (we did the first half last year) which was quite big and overhanging the bridleway.  We started sorting through the timber left by the quarry when they cleared the bit opposite, so we now have lots of wood to log (and loads more to pull out) which is all good.  We're going to hire a log-splitter for a weekend and get it all sorted at some point, it'd just take sooo long to split it all by hand.

We had a good few days in Hereford - strange for us to stay in a city (just 10 mins walk from the centre) instead of out in the middle of nowhere, but it made a nice change.  We had to do an emergency funeral before we set off though.  Bob went to let the chickens out for a bit before we went and found Dot stretched out on the floor of the chicken house.  Usually we have a fairly good idea that one is going to die because they go off their food, look pale and listless, but she was her normal greedy self the day before so we had no inkling at all.  She hasn't laid eggs for a couple of years and definitely ate more than her fair share of everything so perhaps that had something to do with it!  So, we have two second-hand chickens on order and should be able to get them in the next few weeks, just depends when the next cull at the chicken farm is.  Horse and Lottie both seem well and are looking pretty smart after their Winter moult.  Lottie was laying an egg every other day without fail until Horse started laying again (they stop for a while in the Winter), but since Horse started, we haven't seen a single egg from Lottie?????  Does that mean there's a pile of eggs under a bush or something?!

Way back on a rainy, cold day in November, we'd finished eating lunch and were sitting round the table when one of us brought up the idea of a breakfast pie.  An hour and a half later we'd come up with a plan with drawings and everything.  It was a very detailed planning meeting covering everything from what should be incorporated, how to segregate it so you don't get black pud if you don't like it to whether it should include fried bread (it shouldn't by the way).  By far the most time-consuming bit was how to have the eggs and how to keep the yolk runny.  So, three months later and after much subsequent discussion, we finally got round to making the prototype this weekend for Sunday brunch.  This is how it goes - shortcrust pastry base followed by a mixture of beans and cooked mushrooms, then a layer of thinly sliced cooked sausage.  Now it gets a bit complicated - an outer ring of either black pud or sausage and then partition walls to match and divide the pie into portions.

Crack an egg into each partition . . .

. . . carefully lay cooked bacon on top, trying
not to pop the eggs followed by more of the
bean/mushroom mix.  Add the pastry lid being
careful to mark it in some way to show the partitions
and indicate which bits have black pudding.

And, tah dah!  One very tasty (and very
filling pie.

It should be noted that this is the prototype and more work needs to be done on its design - namely, how on earth do you cook the pastry, but keep the yolk runny?  We hoped by cooking all the ingredients and keeping the pastry thin and with the eggs in the middle they might just stay a bit runny, but they didn't.  Very tasty, but how fantastic it'd be to cut into your portion and yolk oozes out . . . . . . work in progress!

Getting the life/hedge balance right!

Never mind that old thing about getting the life/work balance right, just now we're having to contend with the life/work/hedge balance!  For the last few weeks I'm either working or hedge-laying it seems!  Most days off seem to involve a bit of hedging somewhere along the line.  Still, the end is in sight aand I think we've got about 10m left to do.  We seem to have managed quite well with felling the bigger trees with Bob on the chainsaw and me (and Ben if he's around) on the end of a rope in the field.  More by luck than design, they have fallen very gracefully just about where we want them to which is a bit of a bonus.  We have this system of attaching a rope as high up as we can reach and then Bob cuts a wedge out of the side we want it to fall (standard practice) and then he cuts almost, but not quite, through the other side.  Then with my superior strength pulling on the rope the tree gently topples over.  Anyone watching might even be fooled into thinking we know what we're doing!  We did have a three-man tree to do this morning - actually two trees that had grown twined round each other and completely covered in ivy.  It was quite windy too, but luckily Ben was around to help and so we managed it without too much of a problem.  It's funny, we spent quite a while discussing how to do it, should we try and chop one first, untangle the ivy, have two ropes (one for each tree), try to climb up and cut a big branch off . . . . . in the end we said 'sod it just chop them both together and lets see what happens!' .  So, that's what we did and it was fine.

This is a bit deceptive and foreshortens it quite a bit - it's
quite long really, honest!

Rob and Becky are going to have to have a massive bonfire at some point - we've been piling all the branchy stuff for them on the other side of the field and then made lots of piles of wood for cutting for firewood along the edge of the hedge as we go along.  They have some catching up to do, but it should keep them going for quite a while!

The loneliness of a long-distance road sweeper!

Now that all the leaves and needles have fallen off the trees, Ben kindly spent a day clearing our lane.  It's surprising how thick the layer of sludgy stuff becomes.  Half the lane is fairly smooth tarmac and that's relatively easy to shovel up, but then the far end is quite rough and it is really hard work.  Sensibly, Ben started with the difficult end (there, can you just see him all that way away . . . he's got quite a lot left to do hasn't he?!), last year when I did it I started with the easy bit and it ended up taking me about three days!  So, now we need a good downpour to rinse off the remains.  Poor Ben pulled a muscle or something in his leg doing this and so is hobbling a bit.

Guess what this is? . . . . . . 

. . . . . hard to believe, but this is actually going to be a kitchen cupboard . . . . for us!!!!!  This will replace the caravan cupboard and worktop we are still using.  It has taken about 18 months to get this far because Bob had started it and just roughly cut the timber to size when he started making the pub furniture out of scaffold boards and got really busy with that, and then started making proper furniture for other people, doing shows and so on and so this got put on hold.  He could have just done a quick job on this, but we'd always planned that this would be a proper piece of furniture with dovetailed drawers etc and so we're sticking to that - it'd be a shame to bodge it.  We have a big slab of slate from a snooker table for the top and this Oak is all quite local, so it should look lovely when it's done.

Bob and I are going away for a couple of days tomorrow leaving Ben house/chicken sitting.  Before Christmas we planned to have a couple of nights in Hereford and do a bit of Christmas shopping, go and see the Mappa Mundi (a map of the world from the days of the crusades which, incidentally, a chap we know locally has just re-framed) and the Chained Library and generally mooch around.  We didn't go then though because we were going to have visitors, then we weren't, then we were, and then we weren't and by the time that was decided it was too late to go and so now we finally have it planned (but we won't have to do Christmas shopping which is a bonus!).

We have snow on the ground at the moment - just a very thin layer, but a couple of weeks ago we had quite a lot and Ben took this photo of dawn making our house glow!