Baking delights!

Sourdough bread is one of those holy grails of self-sufficiency - grow your own yeast, rather than having to buy it.  It's notoriously difficult to get a good one.  But!  If you happen to have a friend who has a good one (in this case, passed on from someone met on holiday) who's willing to share, it's a sure thing.

So, here is Marmalade Cottage's first ever sourdough loaf on its first prove.

Second prove.

And baked.

And the proof will be in tomorrow's breakfast...

All is calm

With Bernard's, erm, demise, the hens are getting back into a rhythm.

The reinventors, and although they've been too polite to say, we suspect the neighbours too, are quite pleased not to be rudely awakened before dawn.

Alice's feathers have grown back nicely, and Enid is much less skittish.

Great survivor

It was touch and go for all of summer, but the little lemon tree has survived, and with judicial application of the creative reinventor's wee, is now thriving.

We're working our way through the lemons - the skin is too thin for preserving in salt, but they're very juicy.

Digression

The practical reinventor is a bit jealous of all her sewing friends who have sewing blogs, but given the irregularity of posts here, isn't going to start one. So here's a random sewing post.

  

This is a Lekala pattern, so while it's been drafted according to the practical reinventor's dimensions, its instructions are all but unintelligible.  Fortunately, it's not too complicated a design and most of the pattern markings are clear enough.  The green is broadcloth, bought for $6 a metre and the birdies are what's left of a dress that never stood a chance.

Usually the practical reinventor just wings her buttonholes with the zigzag foot, but this time, she busted out the proper foot.  And, yes, reluctantly, it does a better job.

  

It was the perfect project for these metal flower buttons.

 

And it will go nicely with the sensible tweed Miss Marple skirt she made last week.

The vine that gave its all

The pumpkin vine that grew out of chook shed muckings out has finally died.  But not before it gave us 16 fruit.

We think that might be a record.  It is for us.

Even though the last few fruit are fairly small, they're ripe and sweet.

We've saved some seeds for next year.  Just in case the chook shed muckings out of spring don't contain any pumpkins.

And now we can all get some sleep

Bernard is no more.

The reinventors have been working up to this for some time and now its done and we're feeling a bit out of sorts.

The agreement has always been that we will not keep roosters.  It isn't fair on the neighbours and it's unpleasant for the hens.  (Poor Alice has lost a significant amount of feathers thanks to Bernard's attentions.)

So when the chicken-who-started-life-as-Marjorie declared himself vigourously as male,  his fate was sealed.  It was just a matter of when.

We consulted every nonna we could find and debated the merits of axe versus a quick grab-and-jerk to break his neck versus fashioning a killing funnel.  In the end our bucket arrangement didn't work and we had to improvise.

It was mercifully quick, although the cliches about headless chooks are disturbingly accurate.  Then the messy bit began.

We put him in a pot of boiling water for a minute, hosed him off and proceeded to get him ready for the pot.  It's not nice - you rip all the feathers off, and there are a lot, not just big ones that are easy to grab, but lots of little downy ones that once you pull them out, stick to the skin.  Then there's the butchering bit - taking out the crop (we managed to rupture it, yuck), chopping off the feet, removing the innards. 

But there is a recognisable chook sitting in our fridge.  It's not as plump as what you find wrapped in plastic in the meat department, but I know exactly what it ate (grain, veg and snails, slugs and assorted bugs from the garden) and what chemicals it ingested (none).

Now we just have to decide how we're going to eat him.

No crapitalism here

The reinventors hate the modern push to buy, buy, buy: replacing perfectly serviceable stuff with newer stuff just because it's newer.

There's almost nothing new in Marmalade Cottage - even our animals are rescued!

Rarely do we have a problem with our thrifted, rescued and second-hand stuff.  Except last night.

The dishwasher, an elderly, but prestigious brand, has given us three and a half years faithful service, moving house with us twice.  But it died.

Straight to Gumtree, it was!  With a free one waiting on a verge, that, apparently worked.  Except it didn't

Sigh.

But there was, of course, another one, a suburb away.  And off we trotted.

This one is quite new, immaculately clean, efficient and very quiet.  It was $100.

Seriously - why would anyone buy new?

It's all a bit confusing

This is Enid's first egg.  It fits into a teaspoon and is a little irregular in texture and colour, but it was neatly laid in the middle of the nesting box.

Enid has always been Enid, likewise Violet is still Violet.  But Gordon appears to be Geraldine and Marjorie is most definitely Bernard.

Shows what we know about chicken sexing!

Pretty

This is a pot of garlic chives.  They a fabulous hit of intensity to a coleslaw and look much more understated in flower than they taste!

The great survivors

These cavolo nero - black Tuscan cale - were sprouted at the reinventors' last rental property.  Then dug up and left in pots for several months.  They were the first vegies planted not long after we moved in.

They've now been through two summers and are heading for their third winter. 

The ravaged leaves at the back are the result of a bug and some attention from the chooks.  Each stalk is more than a metre tall, and look at the lush new foliage.  We can't bear to pull them out.

Not one of those, then.

Another vine from the chook pen muckings-out.  We thought it was a cucumber.

And neither of us particularly likes rockmelon.  Oh well.

Bounty

This vine grew out of chook pen muckings-out.  We've had one enormous pumpkin already that, after we gave chunks of it to three  neighbours, fed us for four meals. 
This is the ripest of its next five fruit.

And they're r-r-r-r-roasting!

A cheeky blend of columbian and guatamalan arabica beans, roasted on the creative reinventor's home-wrangled roaster, in our stable and sold only to the most discerning customers.

The monster

The reinventors bought a range of seeds from the Diggers Club, including Boston Marrow pumpkins.  Which don't seem to be available any more.

The  plants, two of them, took to the spring garden with great gusto.  The muckings-out of the chook pen most probably helped.  The bees took to the flowers and we got our first pumpkin a couple of weeks ago.  It started off looking like this:

A mere two weeks later, it's considerably bigger than a basketball:

The reinventors are a little worried that, by the time this pumpkin is ripe, it will be so big as to be inedible.  Thanks again to the chook pen muckings-out, we have another pumpkin vine, probably a jap, that has fruit.  We shall not go without.