Making Chicken Stock (note - not from ours!!!)

Continuing our theme of not featuring any recipes, today I'm showing how to use left over chicken from Sunday's roast to make a tasty stock. (In case you are wondering - no not from ours!! Anyway we don't have any chickens, we have hens. There is a huge difference!!)

The ingredients - according to the cook book I'm using - are, in addition to the chicken carcass, including all the skin, bones and bits of gunk; a roughly chopped onion; a couple of carrots and celery sticks, all chunked up; some peppercorns, garlic cloves and herbs.

Here they are all nicely laid on the chopping board.

Neatly laid out - it's obviously early on in the job

The herbs are supposed to be tied together as a bouquet garni - as old Mickey Roux would call it. Here's my attempt - pretty stylish, no? The book suggests, parsley, bay and thyme. I've got rosemary, sage and thyme, so close enough.

A quite dreadful picture of some herbs.

Then you are supposed to cram all the bits in a sauce pan just big enough to take all the ingredients covered in water. This took two attempts - as with ingredients, I never seem to be able to judge the size of pot, pan or dish needed first time, thereby doubling the amount of washing up required - but the assembled dish now looks like this:

Now I bring it up to a simmer and leave it for a couple of hours, keeping an eye on it and skimming off any gunk that floats to the surface. Lord knows how much gas that's going to use - I wonder whether this is as cost effective as it's made out to be!!

Then when its done, pour it out the pan through a sieve, into a bowl and leave to cool.

I know, I know - you've seen more appetizing dish-water

Finally, after a bit more skimming - honestly no need to go mad on this bit - pour into a plastic pot, put in the freezer and forget all about it (ha! kidding!!). All the cheffy chefs make and keep stock in the kitchen, and chuck it in just about everything, soup, stews, gravies, anything that needs a 'liquor' as I think they call it. You can make stock from fish, beef and lamb, I guess any joint that you end up with bones and stuff left over, but I've only attempted chicken so far. I can report it's great as a base for a gravy to pep up bangers'n'mash (all right I nicked the idea from Nigel Slater, but he probably nicked it from somewhere else, anyway).

I'd recommend having a go and keeping some to hand to chuck in your next culinary masterpiece. Sure beats wasting a couple of glasses of perfectly good alcohol.

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.

"Blimey, where've you bin??"

Well, that was quite a gap - I'm not sure where the time went!!!

I must admit I didn't realise until I made a concerted effort to write some new posts that blogger.com and IE explorer weren't talking to each other any more. I thought the laptop was on the blink. So I've now installed google Chrome so's I can access me own blog!!!

Anyway I'm back now, so a quick update, to start before I get some meatier posts together.

Almost a year has gone by since my last post, and a few things have happened since then.

We lost one of our chickens a couple of weeks ago - I just went into the coop and there she was just lying dead on the floor under the roosting bars - we hope she went peacefully in her sleep. One out apparently means four in according to the chicken arithmetic around here, so we now have an additional 4 girlies added to the, well, flock I guess you could say. They are just settling in and a few feathers are flying to be honest at the moment as the pecking order gets established. We also have one hen in a broody state, oh, and a female cat who appears to be having some kind of menopause (no pun intended) so there are a huge number of hormones flying around the home at the moment. Thank gawd for Real Ale I say...

Garden wise its harvest time now at least on a modest scale, as the beans continue to come in and a couple of compost potatoes have fruited. (Compost potatoes are those you accidentally sow when you spread your home-made compost on the garden in the spring. We also have compost tomatoes, raspberries and even the odd melon plant try and grow in the past. This year I'm going to leave the compost a full year before I spread it, the village I live in isn't quite ready to embrace vegetables in the front garden.)

There's a definite Autumnal feel to the air now, and the rain has returned after a fairly dry August so thoughts are turning to Winter round here. My first batch of logs are ordered and should be here soon, better clear out the log stores - it's surprising how junk seems to wash up in them like flotsam and jetsam. There's a tree branch up the side of the house that I can turn into kindling as well so that's a job for the next few days. We had our first Sunday roast for ages today and I nearly made a crumble to go with it but we had some meringues to eat up, so an Eton Mess type thing was thrown together, an attempt to hold on to summer just a little bit longer.

That's all for now, just a short reboot for the moment. Speak again soon.

Chicken Run!!!

I came home tonight to the sound of a strange chicken-like honking emanating from the back garden. I thought 'Uh-oh' Matilda's got herself in trouble. Matilda's the biggest chook, and turning out to be the One Most Needing Rescuing at the moment. We are in the habit of leaving the chickens to run around the main garden on Friday's and weekends when we are mostly at home. As you will read that policy may need refining....

Although I could hear Matilda I couldn't find her. I checked the house and could find only three of the five chooks, perching sensibly on their roosts. I turned back to the house and spotted a fourth on top of the roof of the utility room. This was Connie, I still didn't know where Matilda was. Connie was mildly distressed and straining to look over next door's garden. That would be the neighbours with the really small garden. And the giant St Bernard dog...

Then I heard more clucking, from over the fence. I stretched up and peered over. There was Matilda poking around in a thankfully dog-free garden. I grabbed some sweetcorn and dashed around, greeting the neighbours with the classic line 'Please may I have my chicken back?'.

Thankfully after a brief chase around the garden, trying to catch a chicken whilst simultaneously avoiding St Bernard poo (the dog, not the saint), the girls were all re-united and are now locked back up in their run for the day. No more adventures today.

Problem is this means we need to seriously re-consider our stance on not clipping their wings. We thought it might be a help when strange cats venture in the garden. By leaving their wings in tact it might give them a better chance to escape. Though preferably not over into next door's garden, please, or beyond. This is farming country, ladies, you're not considered just egg-layers.

Ah, the joys of chicken-keeping. Those eggs can't come soon enough.

"Summer's lease...

...hath all too short a date".

Me neither, but I think it's to do with the fleeting nature of the seasons. September is sliding inexorably towards the equinox, beyond that point of course each day gets fractionally more hours of night than daylight til the vernal equinox next March.

We were clearing up the garden this weekend, chucking the last of the summer bedding into the compost bin for spreading next spring, cutting back the pumpkin flowers to give the 4-5 fruit chance to ripen before Hallowe'en, generally tidying up before the winter comes. I thought this would be a good moment to review what worked and what didn't veg-wise. Some things went surprisingly well, others a complete disaster.

The greenhouse tomatoes were a complete wash-out, but whilst I was emptying out the growbags I noticed they were sodden, in fact they were really heavy to drag out of the green house. They also smelt a bit whiffy and were full of worms - I wonder if that contributed to our poor tomato harvest. Next year I'm going to do what my father in law did, and just buy a few plants, rather than several packets of seeds that might not take. I'll also build a raised bed in the greenhouse rather than use growbags, think I can control the watering a bit better. I have a plan in my little note-book of a nifty multi-use bed and stage thing that I'm going to build, just you wait and see!!

Courgettes I messed up on completely - the ones I planted in 'spring' rotted off, and I didn't keep any spare plants back - I won't get caught like that again. Carrots I never seem to be able to get right - might not bother next year.

On the plus side the french beans did well - when they weren't being stripped by a voracious 7-year old - potatoes were good, and we are currently enjoying a autumn-raspberry bonanza, as this is the first year the plants haven't been denuded by pet rabbits (gawd rest 'em). Think I'll put more plants in next year, they seem to be fairly robust, and have been left alone by the birds - at least the wild ones anyway. My son came in this morning and announced he'd fed a raspberry to the chooks to see if they liked it, and was happy to report they did. Thanks, mate.

We've moved around some of the shrubs - including making a little garden for the chooks in their run to give them somewhere to relax in - honestly, these chooks are living a life of riley. Anyway the space freed up will be turned over to more veggies next year, we'll try that Alys Fowler edible garden approach and stuff veg plants among the shrubs, make as much use as we can of the limited space.

Now the days are drawing in; it's the time of hearty soups and casseroles, log fires and candles, fallen leaves and low mists. The chooks are taking longer each morning to get up, apparently they slow down as a response to the dwindling daylight. They're even going to bed earlier as well. Don't think I'll be seeing any eggs too soon.

Happy Michaelmas to you all, unless you're a goose that is...

Finished!!!

Well that was a bit of a gap between postings – you must have thought I’d given up with it all. Well, I hadn’t. Its just that things took longer to do than I thought – a recurring characteristic of mine. I didn’t think that postings along the lines of ‘Done a bit more but not finished yet’ would prove of much interest to either of my readers – so I laid off writing for a while.

The good news is – it’s finished! After a two-day final push the chooks now have a place to run around that’s completely fox-proof. It was hard work for me at least, as the pictures will show you what a weird shape the run is, butted up in that odd-shaped corner. I’m not the best at carpentry, or DIY in general, so the finish is – how can I describe it – ‘rustic’ to say the least. Still, I’ve seen the prices some people charge for bespoke runs a fraction of the size, so can’t complain too much.

So here it is in all its glory.

Oh, and by the way the chooks are here. They have been here for two weeks actually, but as we were all off for the school holidays we could keep an eye on them during the day, and still lock them safely up at night. When ‘the girls’ – as I believe it’s popular to refer to pet chooks – first arrived they were a slightly sorry bunch, all huddled together as one mass in the corner of their house. We think they must have spent most of their lives, certainly the two weeks between us choosing them and then picking them up, in very confined conditions, and probably found the echoing vaults of their new home a bit daunting.

However they have soon overcome their initial shock and are acclimatised to their new (spoilt) lifestyle. Even now their characters are coming through. The youngest seems to be the first to exhibit new behaviour – the first to come out the outer pop-hole, the first to try roosting; the partridge pekin seems to be the explorer, going the furthest around the garden, even jumping into my lap and perching on my knee for a better view.

They are, it must be said, total time-wasters; we catch ourselves spending ages just watching them scratching around, calling and clucking to each other, exploring their new world. It was also a useful exercise being on hand, as they have got into the occasional scrape. Chickens can fly over picket fencing when they want to, but they can't reverse out of gaps behind the shed. Luckily we were on hand to avoid any major disasters or trips to the vet.

They've established a routine for us (note closely how that sentence has been constructed!), and expect to be let out pretty early in the morning, scratch around all day in their run, get let out for a general scratch around after school, then take themselves to bed around 7 in the evening. They've worked out that their house keeps the rain off their backs and that scratching in the dirt brings up all sorts of goodies. And that there's plenty of cover if they feel threatened.

Don't know what I was worried about.

Just need a few eggs now, m'dears.