The Donated House

Scroll down for this week’s other entry, involving everything we’ve eaten lately, but here’s all the other news:

Anna brought all the rest of last year’s wood to be the first to be burned. Having started out kiln dried, it’s now up to about 15% moisture, through having been stored outside, but it’s the driest we’ve got.

Here’s a picture of the finished mosaic.

Having done the odd bit of laundry here, I’ve found that it really doesn’t dry in time to not get smelly except on the sunniest, windiest and warmest of days. So I went on ebay and found this really awesome mangle with rubber rollers, which works a treat. Better than the spin cycle on my washer in Barnsley.

Anna, among many other jobs, did some wood chopping and we managed to process and stack all the wood we’d been given from the neighbours’ gardening exploits.

It all amounted to this bottom row, which is a good month’s supply if it’s not all that cold. Thanks very much, neighbours! And the stuff we ordered from Black Bark is coming tomorrow. I hope it all fits in. We certainly will not want for wood this winter.

Ok, so we’ve done, like, a week of cooking, and now that Anna lives here, we cook to a very high standard. We went up to the farmer’s market cooperative and got a piece of belly pork, which I made a Chinese style sauce and slow cooked. Yum.

Ann cooked the next night, and after an unfortunate incident with some of the pasta ending up on the lawn, the result was nonetheless delicious.

We went on a bike ride/walk up to the Bride Stones and found a bunch of mushrooms, most of which we couldn’t conclusively identify, but we were pretty sure that this one was a bay boletus, or at least a cousin of it which was not poisonous. So we fried it up and ate it.

Yum.

I got a mexican cookbook from a charity shop, and although I can’t quite be bothered following recipes exactly, I did decide to do chimichangas instead of my usual enchiladas.

Yum.

Tonight I made cheese-stuffed mini peppers baked in a mexican-flavoured sauce of tomatoes, green beans (brought by Elmo’s parents who are visiting) and chickpeas. And we made guacamole with some really good avocados and a lot of raw garlic.

And while I was in the kitchen, I whipped up a cake to use it for tiramisu tomorrow. And if you’re going to make cake you might as well make two. So I made Boston cream pie, which I’ve never made before.

Obviously I had to test the ganache before I could inflict it on others.

It doesn’t look much besides a generic American giant-donut-style dessert, but it tasted good. That’s a MASSIVE SLAB of custard filling in the middle. I might not make it again, if I’m honest, but it was worth it once.

And I know it’s not strictly food, but Elmo brought home so many plums that we were forced to try plum gin with half of them, having made an enormous batch of jam as well. I’ll let you know in a couple of months how it is.

We’ve had squatter bees since they took possession of an improperly stacked hive (which was only there for storage anyway) earlier in the summer, and we’ve been meaning to open up the hive and see what the state of them was for ages. Since yesterday was a lovely, warm autumn day, it seemed the best bet before winter.

The blueberries are also at a particularly picturesque stage, so I thought I’d take this picture. That it includes Elmo’s bum is just a bonus.

Elmo suited up and took the lid off the hive. The first question we wanted to answer was what is the disposition of these bees? You never know with a swarm what you’re going to get, but happily they appear to be very laid back, friendly bees. Elmo even found one crawling on him an hour later, probably having found its way inside his jumper, and it seemed pretty unflustered by the experience.

The colony turned out to inhabit two of the supers in the stack; the bottom super and the brood box were pretty much ignored. There had not been enough frames in there, so the bees had built their own, on the diagonal.

Alec volunteered to wear the other bee gear and they removed the superfluous bits of the stack and added a feeder box on top so we can feed them through the winter. The plan is to try to make sure they’re healthy next summer so we can split the colony and have two hives (one of which we will put across the site where we actually want them) and eventually probably three. But we’ll have to look that up in the book to remind ourselves how to do it.

Meanwhile, Lizzy filled in the trench we’d dug for the new perennial garden with manure and topsoil and we went to the garden centre and came home with some hardy geraniums, irises, cistus, a late-flowering clematis and some other stuff I’m forgetting. I also moved the sweet william from the pots it had been in. Hopefully we can make something not too weedy out of this corner of the site for next spring’s splendour.

Much been going on. Made another bit of progress across the front wall with the rendering, though I wonder whether I’ll get around to doing the last bit until next year. It’s at least covered by the cupboards full of tools. Here I’m drilling holes for ventilation inside the roof.

It’s a good thing lime render gets better with age because I seem to be good at procrastinating.

But it’s nice to have done the awkward bit around the doorframe, and it looks great, although did I get a picture of it finished? Do I ever? I will do at some point.

We also got down to work on the mosaics, finally, and it went really well. Frances turned out to be really good at it, so I let her do as much as she liked!

Although I helped a bit.

It’s grouted and everything now, but did I take a picture?

She was enthusiastic enough to cut a bunch of tiles and do a colourful sun motif in the last bit of the wall mosaic.

It looks fantastic and I can’t wait to get it grouted, though it’s going to be back breaking to do. It’ll be well worth it to have it done.

Meanwhile, in food news, we went down to Kent last weekend, and the damson were out in force, so we picked about 5kg of them. I made about 2.5 litres of damson gin and the rest into jam. Elmo also picked two big bags of plums from the allotment, which will mostly be jam though I made a cobbler out of some last night.

And I bought coconuts really cheap, so I’m glad I had google to tell me how to get into them.

Frances cooked last night, a venezuelan dish called sancocho de pollo (basically, chicken soup) with a fresh local chicken, some squash and cassava, sweetcorn, peppers and other wonderful things. Absolutely delicious. She also did fried plantain as a starter. Proper spoiled we were.

Anna came home, after WAY too long away; we are very glad to have her back and I would say that even if she hadn’t brought me three Italian cheeses and five cured hams.

Yesterday it was sunny, so she did a bit of outdoor work while I iced and stacked Abi’s wedding cake for this weekend. Today it’s been horribly rainy all day, so she did a bit of admin and watched me decorate Abi’s cake.

Abi’s wedding is tomorrow, so I hope the weather gets better…