Winter is coming

Winter is coming - as Game of Throners might say - and Chook Towers is preparing for the coming season.

First up, wood, lots of it, dry and light and ready for burning. OK I have to pay someone else to do the cutting and drying, as I don't have any woodland (now is that an investment opportunity to look into, I wonder...) nor the space to leave wood to season naturally for a few years, but the site of our two packed log-stores is - figuratively speaking - heart-warming.

Incidentally, the log shed furthest from the camera was bought,

 the nearer, better-looking one built from odds and ends and a 

few lengths from a local timber yard. Smug rating, ooh, about a 7 I think...

I love an open wood fire, but they are not very efficient, and a bit dangerous, so we have a log burning stove fitted in the front room. I know summer and winter are currently deadlocked at the moment - we're getting really warm days followed by much cooler days, then warmer ones again but we've already had a couple of fires, using up the last of last winter's wood and various scrag ends of timber I've scrounged up during the summer tidy-up. The stove is great, as it can whack out a fair amount of heat, yet is very controllable, and can be shut down overnight, then if I've stoked it right, flamed-up again in the morning. It's even therapeutic just watching the flames, especially with a glass of something warm and whiskey-ish to hand. Beats watching TV anyday.

Lovely, but pointing a flash at a glass-fronted stove doesn't do it justice. 

(Must clean that stain off the hearth as well someday....)

Its also a great weapon against identity-theft. Don't mess around shredding and tearing up credit receipts and old bank statements - just chuck 'em in the fire and watch them burn. The ash even goes in the compost bin, then eventually on the garden, so they never leave site. Perfect!

Also using the wood burner, and the pre-paid fixed-price wood from the piles, means burning less unpaid, variably-priced gas from the mains. Unfortunately, I'll never not burn gas, we cook and heat water with it, and because we have too much house, inevitably the central heating will come on at some point in the next month or so.

 I know the papers say you should compare the best deals and switch as soon as you find one, but in the grand scheme of things I wonder does that really make much difference? I mean, ultimately the UK doesn't make much of its own gas, oil and coal these days, so most of it has to be bought in wholesale. Presumably all the companies have to buy in their supplies from the same place anyway so the 'deals' can't really be that good long-term. 

Of course there's no point heating a house full of holes, so another job is to fix up draught-proofing around the doors, and get the windows sorted. They don't close properly - never really have done since they were installed, a bit of a botch job by the double-glazing company before they went bust (we do pick them!). I'll get on to instructables or somesuch and find out how to adjust them, I already figured out how to fix the back door as the hinges keep dropping and the door needs to be raised back up again regularly (why is a simple thing like a door now so complicated? And why can't a company do what they say they are going to do on the blimming order form!!?!?!)

We are determined not to put the heating on until we absolutely have to, we'd rather take advantage of the novel idea of putting an extra layer of clothes on. Or moving around a bit. Or going outside, which bizarrely at the moment sometimes  seems warmer than indoors!

Mind you when I do go outside when the fire's lit, there's a strong slightly acrid smell of burning coming from somewhere close by - maybe I should have got the chimney swept as well....

The reason you'll not find any recipes here

It's because I can't cook.

Least ways I can't cook without following a recipe. Tonight's tea is a case in point.

We had originally planned to make up a cottage pie last night - well my wife intended to do all the complicated stuff - which meant all I had to do was bung it in the oven and cook it through for tea. For what ever reason that didn't happen, so I said 'I'll make the pie when I get in from work' After all, I can make corned-beef hash shepherd's pie, so surely this couldn't be much different, could it?

Well the problem was Mrs Chook gave me the recipe over the phone. 'You fry some minced beef, then add some vegetables - onion, carrot - a bit of tomato sauce, a stock cube and some flour, a bit of water; cook it through then spoon the mashed potato on top.

Now I ask you 'How much is a 'some' or a 'bit'?? That's the problem, there's no setting on the scales for 'some' . Consequently,  I never seem to be able to judge the proportions right. The potatoes were fine, but when I'd prepared the mince filling and spooned it in to the dish

well, you can see for yourself, it barely covered the base. We'd be eating quite a lot of fresh air in this pie. I struggle to balance meat and veg content first time. Luckily because there was oodles of time, I could salvage things. So I quickly chopped up some more onion, another carrot, and rooting around in the fridge found the remnants of a rather sorry-looking celery. That was chopped up and chucked in as well. This went back in the pan for another fry,

then when soft enough I spooned the meat mixture back in to mix through, as well as a dollop of pasta sauce from a jar we'd opened last night (see, I understand what a 'dollop' should look like). I won't show a photo of that stage, you may be eating your own tea. Once mixed through it went back into the dish and this time - as you can see a much better coverage. Look, I even captured the steam rising off it, I bet you can almost smell it!

Then the potatoes on top, farrowed with a fork and ready for the oven (I think that's my finger wandering in to shot on the left there)

'Andsome, as my old dad would say. Just need to bung it in the oven for 30 to 40 minutes and tuck in! But look at the kitchen now, a bit of a bomb-site; if you look closely you may notice one of the pans hasn't been used. Neither was the bottle of beer hiding on the left, by the way; that was last night's mid-week tipple on its way to recycling. Honest.

I have since tidied up of course, and even wiped down the hob. I'm good at tidying up my messes, it's just there's always a lot to tidy up in the first place.

Mind you the final product didn't turn out too badly:-

So as you see, don't look to me for cooking advice, apart from studying me carefully and doing the exact opposite.

Or read a cook-book.