Ok, it’s high time we talked about food, though the promised water story will come in a minute. I made barbecue sauce (see last entry) and cooked it down til it was very thick, coated some chicken legs in it, put them in my barbecue cage and raked out some hardwood coals to cook it over the fire.
It was awesome. Absolutely delicious.
We were quieter around the campfire than we’d ever been before.
That was a lovely evening. The weather’s been amazing (well, until today) and it’s finally felt like summer.
We also had another go at devising a haloumi-roasting technique, but the metal skewer version was only marginally better than the old pointy wooden stick version. Still an unacceptably high rate of haloumi loss due to dropping off the end of the stick.
We broke open the various fruit gins I’d made a couple of weeks before, including raspberry (too much like cough syrup), blueberry (ok, but not very exciting), strawberry (life-changingly good) and rhubarb (Anna’s favourite)
Elmo found the stop-tap that should allow us to connect to the water mains, but we couldn’t reach it to turn it off.
We devised a series of tools, culminating in this one with two bolts in the end of a log and a cross-bar to turn it, which worked, but not well enough to completely stop the water. Foiled again. Perhaps Yorkshire Water can help. Elmo promises to call them soon.
Alec and Kate got quite a way towards sinking the stones that will hold up the frame for the outdoor kitchen. In the background, Elmo and I are re-setting one of the wall stones that had been pushed out by roots and was threatening to fall. Dave did quite a bit of digging out roots in the “vegetable plot” (though it may be next year before it contains vegetables at this rate; there are a LOT of established perennial weeds, including mare’s tail.)
We took out the rest of the bits of the willow (not including the massive bit of stump) and Anna and I stacked them on a pallet to keep them relatively dry.
Anna, triumphant.
We picked out a good looking piece of holly and stripped the bark off it to make some kind of art or furniture out of. Not sure of the plan yet, but we thought it was good enough to be worth keeping some of. In the big house, I’d like to use a big piece like this to make shelves in the kitchen.
The finished article is now drying on the couch. I’m sure the right use will present itself.
We (inevitably) whiled away the hours of darkness playing the Zombie game. It has overtaken Robo-Rally as the game of choice around here.
And for no reason other than that it’s a pretty remarkable picture, absolutely ripe for use in a caption competition: a picture of me and Elmo the moment after I got a piece of my own toenail in my eye. Don’t ask. I really must invest in some better toenail clippers.
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