A night after dark

Thank you to the very wonderful and creative people who put together the Winter Feast as part of the Dark Mofo event.  To bring together so many people on a cold and wet Friday night for a showcase of art and food is sheer brilliance and no doubt much hard work.  Our hearts went out to the stall holders spending hard days prepping and nights on their feet doing the same service delivering a seamless experience.  What must have originated from an out-there idea has resulted in a yearly event that is loved and growing in attendance.  We had a night in town free from farmyard noises and demands.  Whilst it was bliss to know that someone was cooking my breakfast in the morning I missed the early call of roosters and the sleeping lump of ragdoll at the end of the bed.  Our city stay reminded us that there is life beyond sun down and sometimes it's ok to let someone turn down your bed.  We soon returned the following day to grumpy faced cocker spaniel and where the hell have you been chicken looks.  Well worth it though.

Shirley's not tap dancing today

Living on a small farm it was always going to be that 

we would have sheep. Lawnmowers.  Pets not chops. Our four girls as we refer to them is a little misguided as one of them is in fact a castrated male.  He got into the mix when being selected for a privileged life.  Can't blame him really.  He now has to live with a girls name, Rosie but he considers it a reasonable sacrifice.  Betty has the most protruding eyes as in Betty Davis eyes and is always the last to the feed trough.  But today Shirley is our worry.  Shirley had the curl in the middle of her forehead which has almost disappeared now. Shirley's curls are the least of our worries as she has a front leg that she cannot put weight on.  She can hobble on the other three but needs some medical attention.  I rang the local vet surgery.  According to their website they look after dogs, cats, birds and horses.  But no sheep.  I thought that they might laugh at me for considering a vet visit for a sheep.  They didn't.  They asked her name and asked about her condition.  The vet is coming out to see her today.  I hope it's just a boxthorn in a hoof and nothing more sinister.  I know it's probably slightly hypocritical to be a lover of slow roasted lamb shanks but any animal in distress goes straight to the heart.  I'm staying away from her until the vet arrives as she sits on the ground and only gets up when I come to the wire fence.  She loves a slice of apple so I will save her some for later.  Fingers (and hoofs) crossed for Shirley.

Bugger the barley it might have to be rice

It turned very cold very fast.  The morning air froze and the sun revealed a layer of white crunch underfoot on the grass.  Then it rained.  And kept raining.  Today, it's raining still.  A weather pattern from the east they say.  Gotta blame someone. Muddy paw prints are a constant on the kitchen floor as number one son sports a smashing red doggie puffer jacket but alas no gumboots.  Can't convince him to leave the pre-loved bone on the back step and so forced to decide between bone and inside wood fire. He chooses bone.  I'll never understand dogs.  My barley boils on the stove, the desire to go down the ancient grain route may result in a bonus for the chooks as my superfood is taking super long to cook.  I've had a pulse influenced weekend with a red lentil soup that was enticed into flavour by garam marsala and ground cardamon.  For someone who is notoriously bad at soup making I did pleasantly surprise myself, and with much gratitude to Elizabeth David.  A purchased pumpkin from the Hobart Farmgate market will be roasted tonight with some every reliable thyme from the veggie patch still vibrant, where all other herbs have accepted their redundancy and terminated. Two pieces of salmon that came over the fence rather than upstream will be pan fried followed by a plan to clean out my stove filters in the coming days.  Ah winter.  Now back to the bloody buggery barley.

A serving of with or just go without

Deciding what to cook for dinner has been a problem ever since we came out of the cave and discovered there was choice.  Many choices in fact.  Not just the supermarket version of choice between premium expensive brand and theirs.  The biggest question is what will Max have for dinner.  To describe him as a fussy cat really doesn't give it justice.  He's gone off most of the standard cat food varieties and he won't even look at anything raw.  Fresh chicken slices was met with a look of disgust and the offer of a morsel of freshly caught flathead provided a response that could only be interpreted as offense.  I can't think what goes through his mind.  That we would somehow insult him by offering something that didn't even come out of a tin or a pouch.  Long ago I discovered that the cat foot labelling was somewhat vague.  The majority of brands describe their offering as with Lamb, Beef, Salmon etc.  But they don't actually tell us what 'with' is.  So in our house Max has a can or pouch of With and we hope for the best.  We've tried with all the varieties but lately he's bored with them all.  Frankly we've run out of tinned species.  All that's left are endangered and rare breeds.  And I can't see Whiskas running with a range of With bottle nose dolphin in seafood sauce anytime soon.

Who needs a truffle pig when you've got an egg dog.

It's a bold step to respond to anything that would indicate I knew about farming but I will say this.  When there's a report in the newspaper that eggs are in short supply in the local supermarket, I know why.  There was the reasons officially given which talked about supply chain problems, new industry regulations about how many birds you can shove in a phone box or something to that effect, but I know it's gotten cold.  And when it's cold my chooks lay less eggs.  They don't know anything about super foods, consumer demand, and free range is actually very free indeed.  Trends don't matter but winter chills do.  They're in bed before I get home sometimes and I apologize for a late offering of the dinner service.  They lay a couple a day at this time of year with one in the nesting box and the other, well anywhere really.  Lately it's in the old shed.  The one that is being held up by the spider population and when it's windy it creaks.  Or that's the sound of all the spiders yelling 'hold on boys, she's blowing a gale'.  I try not to go in there.  My ever faithful cocker spaniel actually goes in there and collects the eggs for me now.  He's a soft mouth breed trained to retrieve pheasants.  Well we're a bit short on those so he's happy to have a job to fetch eggs.  He places them ever so gently at my feet and gets a big reward.  It took a few goes to get it right and a few casualties on the back step but we got there.  Better than fetching a newspaper, what do they know about eggs.

Betty wasn't keen on the final team building activity

When you're a chicken being a good team member is important.  No matter who your parents were, if in fact you even know, you will be assigned your reporting line rooster each day.  Should you fall out of line with your direct reporting line rooster there will be a fuss made with loud flapping of wings and much chasing about.  Your reporting line rooster will determine the best route for the day.  He will determine best use of sunlight, preferred patch for scrounging (not my bloody roses again) and appropriate scrub area for resting.  But don't expect much of that from what I've seen.  You will eat when told (stay out of my goddam lettuces) and take time off for laying when required, but be quick about it. Team building activities will include running when told, getting yelled at for falling behind and other unspeakable acts that roosters and chickens do.  So sign up and remember, there's no I in TEAM ...or FLOCK.

Some days you should just stay in bed

Are we destined to really only do what we want to?  In a veiled attempt to create some variety into my cooking regime, I decided to increase the limited range of soups on offer.  I'm not a soup fan.  I have always associated it with illness or failing dentures.  Tomato soup is acceptable and onion soup only with the boldest of stocks, and a melted cheesy baquette boat serving as a delicious dive wreck at the bottom of the bowl.  The other reason I'm considering upping the soup ante is that I have succumbed to the shared household pre-winter lurgy.  So I started with a pumpkin. A fine specimen to be had from a recent trip to the Launceston Farmers Market.  A joyful looking colour of a vegetable.  So I made pumpkin soup and it was awful.  How can you get something so simple so wrong?  I combined a few recipes and roasted the pumpkin with took dispute with the recipe variations.  Then I added more sour cream and the whole thing became bad soup trying to be a desert - too much cream.  Then it hit me. I just don't like pumpkin soup.  Never have.  Unless it's disguised with enough spice to register itself either Moroccan or Thai the old faithful is never my chosen option.  Perhaps we are just destined to turn out joy in our cooking only when we truly want it.  Or maybe I should just go back to bed as Max suggested and ride out my failing energy levels.  There will be no soup today.