Cherry Vodka

It’s raining but that gives me time for a catch-up post on making the cherry vodka back in June.

While the spring here might have left a lot to be desired, the sour cherries took it all in their stride and produced a good crop back in the early days of this summer.  As I’d also had a good crop of the late dark cherries, which are far sweeter for eating, this year these cherries were just for Cherry Vodka and the rest left for the wild life.

Since I first started making cherry vodka back in 2008, the recipe I use has changed a little, basically because I have less time and do it from memory.  It may be simple but it is also very tasty – safety note here, consume in moderation as alcohol is dangerous in excess!

So, all you need are the sour cherries, or griottes as they are called here, vodka, large plastic bottle, and some sugar – as I said it’s really simple but it takes a bit of time.

I use around 1 pint of cherries for a 75cl bottle of vodka.  I also take the time to stone the cherries as having soaked them in vodka for 6 months, I have no intention of just throwing them away at the end of the process and stoning them now saves having to spit out the stones at a later date when you eat the vodka soaked cherries.

The griottes are quite small and I find it better to use the individual cherry stoner otherwise a very large proportion of the cherries are left with the stone in if I use the table-top one I show back in this post.  I stone the cherries over a bowl and the cherries are then dropped into the plastic bottle. 

I generally use 2 litre diet cola bottles I collect over the year and there is a reason for this.  I’ve discovered by trial and error that if you store these bottles without rinsing them nothing grows in them during storage – makes you wonder about what is in the drink though!  I give the bottles a quick rinse just before I need them and drain well.

Once all the cherries are done I then strain the liquid that has come out of the cherries along with the stones, from the stones and add that liquid to the bottle.

Next step is to add the vodka, but save the vodka bottle so you can refill it with the cherry vodka at the end of the year.  You will need an extra bottle then as the vodka will also contain cherry juice and sugar.

Then I mark the bottle with the contents and year.

After that comes the long bit.  Each day for a couple of weeks or so I invert the bottle once or twice and the colour of the cherries begins to colour the vodka.   Then I put it aside usually until the end of October or the beginning of November.

That's when the sugar is required – I hadn’t forgotten about it!  I think the original recipe said add 300g of sugar but I found that a bit too sweet for my taste so I add around 200g of sugar.  The bottle needs to be gently shaken each day until the sugar has dissolved.  You can then taste the vodka to see if you need to add any more sugar – hic.

Normally at this point of the year I would have to wait until I was adding the sugar to get photographs of the final stages but I forgot to do last year’s batch until just before I made this batch.

Once the sugar has dissolved, separate the cherries from the vodka; pour the vodka into the saved bottles and store the cherries in an airtight container.

The vodka cherries are a wonderful, if rather potent, adult hors d'oeuvre and a few of them with a drizzle of spiced cherry sauce on vanilla ice-cream make a lovely dessert too.

Work In Progress

 

It’s summer, it started today

On the left, the cherry vodka is starting to take on some colour. 

The blackcurrants are from friends in exchange for some cherries and are destined for blackcurrant jelly.

The little bottle has some vanilla pod in vodka.  I read a post on the Homesteading / Survivalism  Facebook page on making it and thought I’d give it a go.

And finally the bottle on the right is the start of walnut wine.  This is a wine, brandy and green walnut concoction which if left to mature turns out a bit like sweet sherry.

Elderflower Time Again

Stardate 25th May 2009


It was that time of year again; I really like the syrup, it;s great as a cordial, wonderful over ice cream and other puddings, and makes a wonderful kir royal.

Instructions here on previous post.

Confit of Duck

While I’ve been unable to surf I decided it was time to have a go at making confit, after all I’ve been here two years so I really should have a go. I was also encouraged by there being a really good offer on duck at the supermarket.

I decided to buy the manchons (the upper bit of the wings) and the cuisse (the legs). The manchons were very cheap, 2€60 a kilogramme so I had a go with those first.

The idea is to partially preserve the duck by salting and then to poach the duck in duck fat until it is succulent.


So part one was to sprinkle them with sea salt and fresh bay leaves and ground pepper. They were then left in the refrigerator for 24 hours. They were then rinsed to remove the salt and dried. Being the lazy type, I didn’t fancy standing over the stove for a few hours so I placed them in the slow cooker.


I then covered them in melted duck fat and left them overnight on low to gently stew.

Once cooked to tender, or in my case, until falling off the bone, they were left to cool for an hour and then carefully packed into sterilised canning jars and covered with the cooking juice and fat. I then processed them for a while to ensure a vacuum seal.


There were of course a couple of bits left over and I know I’m a bit biased but they were delicious.

Dried Eggs

While I’ve not been able to post for a bit due to my Internet connection giving up the ghost – I do wonder if France Telecom/Orange France will ever be able to provide anything like the service I had in the UK – I luckily had looked on the web earlier for information about drying eggs. So unable to waste time surfing I set about putting what I’d learnt into practice.

I decided to start with 5 eggs; the idea being to get a thin layer in the dehydrator otherwise it takes too long to dry the egg. As it is, the tiers in my dehydrator are slightly tilted so the egg at the outer edge was deeper than the inside edge.

The eggs were beaten well and then poured onto the lightly greased tray. They were then dried for a bit over 5 hours at the highest setting, around 60°C. One of the posts I read said that this heat and time were essential as this in effect pasteurised the egg as well as drying it.

Because of the difference in thickness across the tray I set the original time to 4 hours and then stirred the mix, then continued dehydrating until all the egg was dry.


Once all the egg had dried I then ground the egg to a powder in an electric grinder and transferred the resulting powder to an airtight jar for storage.


Other ways described to store the egg is in the freezer, vacuum-sealed or in zip lock bags. Once I’ve got my Internet connection back I’m going to do some more research into the storage but for the moment the jar is going to live in the fridge.

To reconstitute the egg, it’s one tablespoon of dried egg to one tablespoon of water and that’s equivalent to one egg that can be used for cakes, omelettes or scrambled eggs. The next job is to try it out.

Picture Catch-Up

First a couple more pictures of the flooding this morning – the little brook that runs along the bottom of the slight valley just couldn’t cope so water meadows were the order of the day.


There is a mega storm forecast for early tomorrow morning too so more rain plus 70 mph winds – oh joy, I think I’ll keep the shutters bolted, thankfully there are no longer any tall rotten trees to fall on the house. There are also warnings of power/telephone failures due to trees falling on lines.


So what have I been doing during this last week of blog silence? It’s been lots of little things and time-consuming things. I did some baking as I had lemons to use up and the bananas I’d just bought had been in far to cold a place and when I got them home and they warmed up they went soft. So I now have lemon cake and banana cake. If anyone is wondering, there is no added colouring in the lemon cake, just free-ranging chicken eggs.


Time has also been spent going to the tree nursery, ordering and then two trips collecting the next batch of saplings. There are only 166 this time and I’m really hoping that having ploughed the ground I should be able to plant much more quickly than last years.


A rainy day earlier on and I decided to fit the oak workbench. It didn’t need a lot of work, battens on the wall and the other workbench cut back to give it room. Once I got started I realised that I had to cut out a section for some pipes; that was tough going, while the workbench might be made out of bits of oak, they are solid bits of oak, really tough and the bench its self is really heavy. So here’s just a selection of the tools.


The circular saw is on the floor having already trimmed most of the workbench by the sink. It could only get to about 4” from the wall, and then it was the turn of the jigsaw. That got to about an inch from the wall and then it was the handsaw. Having got that done, I set about the small cut-out for the pipes. Thankfully I had a corded drill as my battery one would never have had enough power to drill the guide hole through the worktop. The jigsaw took out the bulk but it still needed rasping and that felt like it took forever especially as despite my very careful measuring I hadn’t realised that the two walls weren’t at right angles.

Why I thought this corner would be a right angle when the other corner that gave so much problems putting up the corner cupboards wasn’t I don’t know. So a little trimming and a little bodging and it finally fitted and had its first coat of oil, just don’t ask how long it took, I really don’t want to think about that.

The Wood-Fired Cooker

With my continuing colds and the deterioration of the weather here, I decided it was time to light the ESSE. This is the first time I will have cooked using wood, barbeques apart, and the first time I’ve burnt plum wood. My neighbour had a lot of problems getting plum wood to burn although Ann and Regis use it all the time with no problems and have a blazing fire.

So it was with great trepidation I lit the first fire; it barely caught. It did produce a lot of smoke to start with, which was great as I took the opportunity to check there were no leaks in the chimneystack where it goes through the loft.

The basic building here can be a bit ‘interesting’. The chimneystack is a stack of hollow square bricks. Fine so far but the path from the kitchen to the roof is not vertical so my chimney has a curve in it. Add to that, when I went into the loft area on moving in, I discovered that the exhausts for both the extractor hood and the propane water heater just passed through the kitchen ceiling and vented into the loft! Hence why I wanted to check out the integrity of the chimneystack.

All was fine and I went back down to keep an eye on the fire. I reasoned that I needed to build up an ash bed. My neighbour who had the problems with the plum wood insisted you don’t need one but somewhere in the depths of my mind I have the recollection that wood fires need an ash base while coal fires don’t.

After about 4 hours the fire finally caught properly and the oven temperature gauge began to rise. Encouraged by this I started some bread. I still couldn’t get the oven into the hot zone but did manage to bake 3 large loaves and some buns.

By now it was evening and the next test presented its self. Could the fire last overnight? I added a few logs and closed all the dampers and went to bed.

Yesterday when I got up the cooker was cool but there was still a good glow in the ashes so I added more wood, opened up the dampers and waited. After about an hour I had a good blaze going again and this time the cooker heated to the top of the hot zone.

Time for more baking and yesterday it was buckwheat pancakes (because I had the flour and it let me see how well the ‘hot’ hotplate worked); some spice biscuits and some gingernuts. All were great, cooking times are a bit hit and miss, generally baking seems to be quicker. I’ve also put a casserole in the slow oven that’s looking good and should be perfect by tonight – the original slow cooker.

So I’m really happy with it, not only do I have hot water all day, it has a back boiler, I have a source of heat in the kitchen, I can cook more or less whenever I want (the other cooker is electric and takes quite a time to warm up as well as being expensive) and it keeps my cup of tea warm too. And if all the above wasn’t enough it can iron too, I think I’m in love!

Another Rainy Day

Well it’s not rained for the whole day but we had 13 mm over yesterday so the ground didn’t really have much of a chance of drying out today and then there has been a little light rain this evening too. It began to look like it was 10 pm not 8 pm, so no late night working tonight.

I did manage to get half the alpine strawberries picked though, nearly a pound/450 g of them. It will be another race against slugs and rain to get the rest picked tomorrow. Today’s batch is on a tray in the freezer as I want to see how well they freeze and more importantly defrost.

It’s also been a quiet day cherry wise too, the cherries in vodka have been shaken and are just beginning to give the vodka a pink hue while the glace cherries are on a day of rest. I may even have them ready for drying tomorrow evening, if not then in a couple of days. They are looking really red and close to what I think glacé cherries should look like. So I’ll get round to posting pictures of the results of the cherry haul when the glacé cherries are done.

Every cloud has a silver lining so the saying goes and the silver lining of the last couple of days is that I’ve been inside and have finally got round to clearing space for my children to stay. They will be here in a couple of weeks and I’m so excited but I’m sure they will appreciate somewhere to lay their heads and put their suitcases. So lots more boxes emptied and homes found for most of the stuff.

Next up will be tackling the loft. It needs all the old insulation removed and then a good sweep and hopefully all the rafters sprayed with anti-woodworm and termite stuff.

On the downside, the vacuum cleaner broke today; well it isn’t actually broken, rather the on switch doesn’t switch. As long as you press the switch it will work so I envisage me hopping round the room trying to vacuum with one foot firmly on top of the cleaner. Since I don’t have carpets I’m wondering if I really need to replace it; it’s about 6 years old now so well into its area of built in obsolescence. The only reasons I might are the cats, I really like to be able to vacuum where they sleep and I like to go over my mattress at least a couple of times a year too.

The ride-on mower has broken as well this week so I’m now wondering what the third thing will be. The car has taken to juddering/pulling back until the turbo kicks in; I think that’s what’s happening it’s at a bit over 2000 revs. I do hope it’s not the car, I was hoping that after 4 new tyres and the timing belt change I wouldn’t have any more major expense on it this year. To be honest I hope it’s nothing else either, so we’ll wait and see.

Tomorrow is dentist day, part of me is happy as I’m hoping that my teeth will be fixed but part of me is worrying whether it’s going to hurt. I think the root is finally dead as it doesn’t ache any more, so with luck all will be OK

Cherry Update

All the cherries from the sawn off branches have now been picked in what was a race against the slugs and snails. I haven’t weighed them but guess I had 3 or 4 two-gallon bucketfuls; now the race is to process as many as possible before they go off.

The David Lebovitz candied ones, about a pound starting weight, are done and in the fridge. They aren’t what I would call glacé but more like ones you would get in jam. I won’t be using them in cherry sponge but I think they will be really nice with ice-cream.

The 7lbs I’m candying using the long process look and taste far more like glacé cherries – I’m just on day 4 at the moment.

I’ve a batch of the No-Recipe jam on the go too, no idea the weight of cherries used but it was a layer of 2 and a bit inches in the bottom of the jam pan which made about 2 and a half pints of liquid and cooked cherries.

Following the old adage of waste not want not, I zested the lemon before adding the juice so I’ve lemon zest for cakes or maybe a batch of lemon shred marmalade and the squeezed halves are going in the bottom of the dishwasher where they act as deodorisers and rinse aid.

I was going to make some cherry syrup with the remaining cherries but I’m going to have all the syrup left over from the candying process so the remaining cherries are going to become cherry jelly as I can’t be bothered to stone any more – just cook, squidge and strain, a lot faster.

And I’ve 1 lb of cherries sitting in a bottles worth of vodka destined to be cherry liquor in 8 months time.

There are still a few more cherries on a couple of the trees but I’ve strawberries to pick tomorrow so I don’t know if I will be doing anything with them yet. If I do I think it will be pie filling but at the moment I getting close to my limit of cherries, I even see them in my sleep.

Sour Cherry Recipes

I was going to leave this post until I had the final picture but I think that the cherries will be over by then and the post wouldn’t be of use until next year so here goes:

Glace Cherries

This recipe is taken from one of my favourite cookbooks, ‘The Complete Book of Preserving’, Marye Cameron-Smith; it’s old, battered and falling to bits but the recipes are good.

It says choose fresh firm fruit so I guess slightly under-ripe sour cherries would be good. I use ripe ones but they do produce a lot of juice, which doesn’t help the candying process.

Rinse and dry cherries and then stone. I started off last year with one of the hand-held stoners and very quickly decided it was worth investing in the model shown in the photograph. This is a very messy business, lots of cherry juice everywhere and don’t be fooled by it’s clear or slightly pink colour, cherry juice stains dark brown. I’d been using a towel to dry my hands and later wondered why it was stained all over, then it finally dawned when there were the same stains on the cream covered throws I use on the settee – I’d sat there to stone some when watching the news.

So in the picture below are the essentials, a mass of freshly picked cherries, on the floor a bucket for any waste, on the table a heatproof bowl for the stoned cherries and a nifty cherry stoner. The cherries are loaded into the hopper and they fall (eventually) into a depression below the plunger. Depressing the plunger stamps the cherry stone out through the cherry and then the cherry is lifted slightly and falls onto the discharge chute where you have to catch it. On the table too is the essential cloth to mop up all the cherry juice and to dry my hands on.

Weigh cherries and place in a pan. Cover with hot water and bring to the boil, simmer until the fruit is just soft.

Drain the fruit into a heatproof bowl and reserve the cooking liquid.

To make the syrup, for every 450 grams of fruit make a syrup using 175g sugar and 300 ml of the cooking liquid. If you run out of cooking liquid, use water. Dissolve the sugar in the liquid over a gentle heat, then bring to the boil and boil until you have a thin syrup. I have no idea what they really mean here so I boiled it for about 5 mins.

Candying Process – the book notes at this time that this is a long process.

1. Pour the hot syrup over the fruit ensuring that the fruit is covered. If there isn’t enough syrup, make up another batch until the fruit is covered. This hasn’t been a problem as the cherries produced a lot of juice.
2. The next day, drain the syrup into a pan and add 50g of sugar, bring to the boil and pour back over the cherries.
3. Repeat for two more days remembering to add 50g of sugar each day
4. On the 5^th day, drain the syrup and add 75g of sugar, then add the fruit and boil for 3 minutes. Return the fruit and syrup to the heatproof bowl and leave for 48 hours
5. Repeat step 4 but this time let the fruit soak for 4 days. At the end of the 4 days the syrup should have the consistency of honey (my guess is that they mean runny honey not the set variety). If it isn’t very thick, then repeat step 4.

After that it needs to be dried, so remove from syrup with slotted spoon and dry somewhere no higher than 50°C. It is ready when it is no longer sticky although I left my last lot of cherries a bit sticky.

I’ll try and remember to update this as I go along with this year’s batches.

Edit. Last year as I said the syrup didn't get very thick at all and thinking about it this year I only added 50 g sugar where stated even though I'd made up more than one batch of syrup so this year I'm adding the said amounts of sugar per lot of 450 g fruit I used e.g. Where I had 3 x 450 g fruit I'm adding 3 x 50 g sugar for the first 3 days, adding 3 x 75 g sugar on day 5 etc.

Other recipes I’m going to try this year.

One of the blogs I drop in on is David Lebovitz and by chance one of his latest blogs was on sour cherries. I’m not keen on the idea of pickling them but here’s the link to his version of candied cherries which is much simpler but I’m not sure if they are really glacéd – I’m going to try a batch though – and a recipe for cherry jam which again looks nice and simple and is one that is for any amount of cherries.

Also from that entry is a link to another blog, Chez LouLou, where there are a few more recipes and I’m looking to do the Sour Cherry Liqueur, the recipe for which is given in the comments.

And the nice things about the blogs is that I’ve learnt that the sour cherries are called griottes.

Cherry Picking Chain Saw Style

I may not have been blogging for the last few days but 'stuff' has been happening and I'll do my best to play catch up over the next few days. Like many of the people round here I lost most of my fruit in the frosts at the beginning of April. I have 2 plums and I think it's 3 reine claudes and that's about it with the tree fruit. The sweet cherries have a little fruit on them but it has already split but a couple of the sour/wild cherry trees were spared so some of the time before today's thunder storms was assigned to picking them.

The trees have not been pruned and have just been left to grow resulting in the lower branches having very little fruit while way up above the reach of my ladder there is lots of ripe fruit. So cherry picking was combined with a little mega pruning.

I managed to pick about 10 pounds of cherries before the heavens opened. They are too sour to eat as is but I experimented last year with making glacé cherries and a good proportion of this year's harvest is designated for candying - a further post on this is to follow in a week or so when process is complete.

I will have far more cherries than I can use as glacé cherries so if anyone has any good recipes for wild/sour cherries I'll be really grateful.

I could bottle them but I have yet to eat last year's batch. I've preserved some in alcohol which I will taste when my children are over and I made some cherry jam last year. I still have a few jars of jam left mainly because it set solid in the jar and is impossible to spread on bread or toast. With so little other fruit to look forward to I'm loathed to waste these cherries so I'm off to check my many cookery and self sufficiency books for ideas.

A Productive Rainy Day

I was hoping to get the front lawn mown today, its getting on for 6 inches high in some places and plant the last of the garlic, but around 10 am, well before the grass had dried sufficiently to be mown, it started raining again. Time for a change of plan.

My son A, has finished his university course out in Singapore and is arriving at the weekend for a visit so I though I would get some bread made so I didn’t have to do that next week. I decided that if I was making up 500g of bread flour I might as well make up 2kg. It doesn’t take that much longer and the oven only has to heat up once.

I got the dough mixed and on its first rise and started on the next project when the ‘phone range. It was Ann to tell me that as Regis had been unable to get on with his work today because of the rain he’d rung round some local contacts about the fencing and hay making equipment. Ann and Regis are such good friends I would be really struggling without their help as I just wouldn’t have the local knowledge or contacts.

The guy who has the post machine it turns out doesn’t hire it out or do work for other people but he may know someone who does so Regis is awaiting a telephone call tonight about that after which he’s going to talk to someone else who might know a direst supplier for the 500 odd fencing posts I’m going to need. So nothing actually sorted but very definitely in progress.

He then contacted the guy who has one of the old style small balers sitting rusting in his field. The guy had said that he wasn’t using it any more and had received hundreds of enquiries about it but wasn’t selling it; so there it will sit and rust. So plan B was to visit a business near Villeneuve that sells second hand agricultural equipment and that Regis would be at my place at 13:30 to take me there.

The project I’d started was a cherry cake that required an hour and a half cooking time. Since it was already 12:30 the cake went on hold. I’d decided on cherry cake as I still had some glace cherries I’d made last year so it was time to use them up before this years harvest. Well I hope there will be a harvest; I found just one fruitlet on the Reine Claude and one on the normal plum, one of the sour cherry trees has no cherries this year along with the nectarine. The sweet cherries seem to have a few fruits and there is one sheltered sour cherry that has a reasonable amount at the moment.

I’d decided not to use the food processor today and set about creaming the butter and vanilla sugar by hand. I’ve not done that since school cookery lessons and had forgotten that it was reasonably hard work, well at least until the butter had softened quite a bit. Thankfully I’d not added the flour before Ann called so it could safely wait until my return. I still can’t get over how yellow the mix was using my free range eggs

The trip to Villeneuve took place in a heavy downpour which wasn’t too bad in its self, the only problem was when we were on a piece of road that was only tarmaced yesterday; it was noticeably slippery.

At the dealers, my luck was in; while he didn’t have a baler there he had one coming in next week and I have first option on that. Apparently a lot of the old equipment suitable for small farms like mine is being bought up and shipped for sale on Poland where there are far more small farms so I’m quite lucky. This baler was used last year so hasn’t spent the last 10 years rotting in the corner of a field so I’m hopeful it will be fine. I’ve also an option on what I think is called a tedder, the piece of equipment that turns and fluffs the hay. This one will also move the hay into the lines ready for baling. All I need now is the flail cutter as there wasn’t a suitable one there.

We came back via another couple of dealers, the first only had cutters that were far to big for my needs and therefore too expensive and the second was just far to expensive, quoting nearly double the others for similar stuff. The guy at the first place is going to telephone me if he gets a suitable cutter in so a very positive outcome there.

Back home and cake was put in the oven to bake, bread dough was divided up into 3 loaves and 8 large baps and left to prove again on top of the now warm cooker – what next? Well I’d also remembered the rest of the home-made pasta dough I’d frozen when Sue was here. That had now defrosted so I’ve turned that into tagliatelle to have when A is here.

Sue’s Week

And what a week it’s been. Lots of late nights, a lot of work, a few bottles have been drunk and lots of chatting; it’s been really good to catch up on news and put the world to rights. The week has passed really quickly and despite saying that I should have noted what we did each day, I didn’t so the following is what I think we did each day! Oh to have a memory that works as it used to, the ‘craft’ memory is appearing far too often for my liking these days.

Sunday - We had a gentle start to the day and then made our way over to Issigeac market. This Sunday market is held in the narrow streeted medieval town a little way from Bergerac. This week, there was an addition to the market, a flower section and the square by the church was a riot of colour with garden and bedding plants everywhere. Needless to say I forgot to take my camera. While we were there, we purchased a few supplies for our next destination that day, a general bbq/picnic at Ann’s to discuss what fundraising events would we be willing to help with to raise money to cover the sterilisation/neutering of stray cats in the area.

Monday - While Sunday had been just that, a day of sun, Monday couldn’t have been more different; it rained and rained. There were 25 mm of rain over night and another 24.5 mm during the day. I braved the rain to see how the draining ditch at the top of the new vegetable area was coping. In short it wasn’t and this was the view of the top of the field that greeted me.

It wasn’t much better at the bottom of the field either. The trench at the top of the field was overflowing and the only option was to dig channels to the ditches to drain the water at the bottom of the field. I thought the pump house had come off without problem, between them, the ditch at the top and the furrows left by the plough had diverted the torrent that usually lapped against he back wall but when I looked inside the water was half way up the pump, it was being flooded by the water table so I will have to have a think how to fix that, as currently the pump cannot be raised any higher off the ground.

My coat was soaked through after about 20 minutes so in the end I did without it and just got wet. The main ditch at the bottom of the alpaca field was just about up to capacity too while water poured off my neighbour’s field creating mini ravines. He had only the day before been out there spreading the fertiliser so how much went into the soil had how much washed straight into the ditch is anyone’s guess, It’s turning into a tough year for farmers here.

The rest of the day we spent making bread and a cake, nice, dry indoor things. We were joined by Mr Tibbs who decided to make a claim for Sue’s lap much to the disgust of Snowy.

Tuesday we set off for Villeréal, a bastide town here in Aquitaine and set off on the town walk. In the back streets we found this wonderful doorway, the old lepers house. From there we headed off to see fellow bloggers Debs and Bob from the Lehners in France for a delightful afternoon chatting, meeting the menagerie and sampling the lovely apricot and walnut brioche Debs made for us. I’m now looking forward to a return visit from them.

Wednesday was designated tree day, I fitted the trailer to the ride-on mower and we loaded up with trees, tree guards, spades and most importantly, flasks of tea and set off for the top of the tree field. It’s not that far really but there were a lot of trees in 4l pots. It was a really productive day and when I counted the empty pots at the end we had done the 25 truffle trees plus 65 ordinary trees. It was really beginning to look like a wood in waiting.

Thursday was another day out and we set off for the Prune Museum that I like at Granges-sur-Lot to get some of their wonderful plum/prune based chocolates – I just adore their plum eau du vie filled chocolates. We decided to keep with the food theme and then headed for Monflanquin, which is another bastide town and was hosting a wine and cheese fete; Thursday was a bank holiday, WWII Victory Day. There we treated ourselves to a couple of bottles of wine and some one-year Comte cheese followed by a trip to a tearoom for a cuppa and a slice of carrot cake. Thus fortified we headed home and after dealing with the alpacas we planted another 30 trees before sunset. We’d just got the mower and trailer back through the alpaca enclosure when it stalled and refused to start again. A project for next week.

Friday - As we were just about at the end of Sue’s stay we had a trip to the supermarket in Bergerac and then back to plant some more trees. Sue was determined that they would all be planted before she went. With no mower and trailer to help it took a bit of time but eventually the last 38 trees were all carried up to the new wood and planted, a total of 155 trees over the week. And somehow we still managed to fit in a trip out to a local restaurant for a duck supper before collapsing in bed after a very busy week.

As you will guess, I’m really grateful to Sue for all her help this week; the trees would have taken at least another week or two without her and somewhere in the week we also planted a couple of kilograms of potatoes too.

Saturday was down as a nothing day, the timing of Sue’s flight meant that there wouldn’t be time to do anything before we set off for the airport, however, we did get a bit of excitement. Someone left a piece of baggage in the departures café at the airport and managed not to hear the three or four increasingly urgent messages over the tanoy to go and reclaim it. Eventually we were all evacuated from the building for half an hour or so. We had arrived early and checked in straight away so as soon as they had tracked the guy down and we were allowed back into the terminal, Sue was able to head off to her plane.

A Middling Monday

After I’d posted yesterday, Cid decided he would like to try out Snowy’s spot on the monitor. Snowy, not one to give up her position as top cat decided to jump onto the other monitor despite the top being covered with bits and pieces which went flying everywhere.

Today been a very middling sort of day today, nothing outstanding but progression has been made. The glossing of the work surfaces isn’t fully dry, as I found out kneeling on it, so my hand and knee prints will be there for posterity. It was dry enough that I could start filling the holes in the wall behind. I still need another coat of whitewash under the sink and to fill a couple of large holes there where the water pipes used to be. The holes are large and deep so will take a couple of goes to fill but as you can see, the shelf is there in the corner unit.

While pottering round on that and mixing chicken feed I had another go at bread making and I just had to show you the results. I’d followed up Debra’s tip about the bread flour in Netto’s and had got myself some multigrain flour. I decided to stretch it a bit, having read a lot of the tips on the Old Style forum of MoneySavingExpert and made up a 50:50 mix with plain flour, adding a teaspoon more yeast (the multigrain was a ready made mix), sugar, a tablespoon or so of olive oil and a touch of salt. Then it was a really good kneading and two rises. I don’t have any loaf tins but chucked it into a couple of cake tins and et voilà!

I hadn’t seen Mr Tibbs since last Tuesday when he finally came down from the loft but today he was back again and I just called to him from the kitchen and he came in, all be it very gingerly. There are four other cats who are not actually anti him being here but are a little jealous over me. After a quick bite of food, he climbed onto my lap so he has had his flea and worm treatment too. This afternoon he was on the patio when I went out to feed the alpacas and I was able to call to him and he came in via the front door. I still have food for him in a separate place to the other cats so that they don’t feel too threatened but it’s looking like he will soon be an inside cat. In fact, as I write this, he’s curled up on a cat bed in the kitchen.

Early post tonight as I need an early night so I can be up in case my oil delivery comes first thing. I’ve done well over the winter but now the tank is nigh on empty so it will be around 850 litres tomorrow – shudder, and the price is still rising. But while I can do without the heating I can’t do without my tractor yet. Just how long would it take a couple of donkeys to plough 5 hectares?

Cherry Blossom Time

The forecast rain didn’t materialise today and instead we had a lovely sunny spring day. I got another tank full and a half of spraying done but have now used up all the herbicide. Rather than get another bottle and have it lying around only part used I’ve decided to leave the final strip of land and rely on weeding that by hand. It’s about 100 meters by a meter to a meter and a half but I think it will be doable. I then finished off the day by making a start on weeding the first of the herb beds.

The next trees in the succession of blossom in the garden have come into their own, the sweet cherries. This is the sweet cherry on the front lawn; there is another one in the chicken enclosure at the rear of the house. The sour cherries bloomed a couple of weeks ago and are now looking decidedly green, as the leaves are all appearing.

Next up will I think be the apple blossom, it’s already showing large buds just waiting to open. After that I think it will be the quince, not the ornamental but the tree quince. I’m really looking forward to that as the quince flower is really pretty and the poor tree had such a hard time of it last year sitting in a pot on my patio.

I mentioned in the last post that I’d been making starters for a meal and completely forgot I’d taken a photograph. I’d decided on savoury tartlets using home grown or home made where I could. So we had spinach and goat cheese, red onions caramelised with a little honey and a sort of quiche Lorraine made from my home salted pork and of course lovely eggs courtesy of my Lacey Ladies.

Tomorrow I should be back working on Regis’s orchard but rain is again forecast, this time with 80% probability rather than the 20% of today, so we shall see

Internet Again

After 3 days without any Internet connection and another 4 days before that with a connection that only just worked I am able to log onto the world again. I really missed my morning peruse of the BBC news site and the blog community I read (only 23 blog entries left to read now).

So I hung around the whole day – the weather was lousy too -, and the engineer ‘phoned three quarters of an hour into the hour slot I’d been given. It took him less than 2 minutes to check the line and then announce that the line was fine and that he would have to send someone round on Monday morning to check out the line to the house. So I resigned myself to another 3 days without Internet connection. Complaining just doesn’t work here, if you threaten to take your business elsewhere they just say “fine”, and you find that the service is just the same where ever you go, so the best thing is to just accept. Then less than 20 minutes later the connection starts working again – so I am a happy bunny tonight all be it with a lot of posts to load.

As I was in the house I decided on another baking morning. This time I made some burger buns. The only ones you can get here are slightly sweet and so full of air, they collapse and you don’t feel you’ve eaten anything which tempts me at least to having seconds; not a good idea if you are trying to lose weight as I invariably am.

Tomorrow I’m off to get new front tyres for the car, not an extraordinary thing but one that fills me with trepidation. Nothing to do with getting the tyres but due to Chestnut. He’s decided that the grass is greener, or in the case of the alpaca paddock actually present, on the other side of the fence and that if he tries hard he can just get his head through the wire mesh. The problem is of course he can’t get it back. If I get to him quickly I can usually fold his ears down and push him back through, but if I don’t spot him for a while he lies down. Then it’s difficult to get him to move his neck back far enough to push his head back through.

When he copied Ashan on this trick the other day, and of course Ashan being smaller doesn’t get stuck, I raced out in the rain with the lawnmower and managed to cut most of the long grass along side the fence. Unfortunately it was just too long and wet to cut it right down so I had to use a high cut, but as soon as the grass dries out I will cut it as low as possible.