New residents

Finally, after weeks and possibly months of chicken house and compound building everything was ready to welcome our feathered guests.

I happened upon a ornamental chicken breeder website within our locality and . . . well, we had to go and look. The original idea of yr usual rusty specimens evaporated on seeing the selection available. Of course they still 'do' eggs but unlike the bred-for-egg production variety, these are slow-motion eggers. And that's fine. The former produce many but over a shortish space of time, the latter, less, but produce for longer. And they are soooo funny and beautiful. We may still buy a small flock of rapid egg producers but for now we'll see how our four new lodgers do.

Freezing weather speeded up the choosing otherwise I think we would have been there for hours cooing over the various 'models'. So, we opted for a mad looking Russian breed with black feathered hairdo, two 'peking' fat brown and white speckled ladies who walk as if they have shoplifted masses of items within their amble father gowns, and a funny little beige and white female with two feather earrings who I think may be actually a small dog.

They were introduced to their new home yesterday and have spent much time scratching away in the undergrowth of their pen, and sleeping in the straw of the timber framed chicken mansion. We might just have to go and get a few more, budget allowing... 

And, they have names . . . Above, the Eerie One. Below, Mussorgsky. Below, below, Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

I can't believe it's not, was, is, might be, might have been, maybe never again, butter

Interesting how we all act on 'scientific discoveries', or on what 'they' tell us - they being government groups set up to inform us about what we should be eating and doing in order to maintain our health.
I recall the NO FAT scare in the mid eighties? well, for the last few decades in fact. I had friends who went on scary diets where they would only drink skimmed milk, eat no-fat yogurt and special no-fat cereal bars, and cook with one squirt of an oil spray - not even a squirt, a microscopic misting of oil.



I was looking for an 80s diet food image but couldn't resist the sauna exercise suit . . .


We kept on with the butter - in fairly modest quantities. It tastes nice, where as Utterly Butterly, does not. We kept sloshing the oil into bolognese, stir-fries, curries and so on, and after having blood tests for a medical 'M.O.T' discovered that our cholesterol levels, etc, were fine.
It's like eggs in the 1970s. After Edwina Currie's (what sort of a name is that . . .) declaration that salmonella was present in most of the UK's eggs, sales crashed and four million hens were destroyed. It seems she had meant to say 'much' rather than most; what a difference a tiny word can make. However I think 'much' would have still had a fairly drastic outcome.
And how many veg and fruit a day is it now? Five? ten, eight and half, does that count peas? How many peas is a portion? Who decides all this and how much fruit and veg do they eat?
We're having a butter shortage in France at the moment which has been compared to shortages during the war. Shelves are devoid of the rectangular foil packets but plenty of Marge-U-Like, or whatever the French equivalents are. Apparently this is due to lower milk yields, a bad grazing year (dry weather) and massive exports of butter, cream and pastries to the newly-French patisserie-loving Chinese, who will no doubt in time be having a health crisis and told to eat, 'I can't believe it's not butter' instead.

                                                  

                                                                         mm, yum

Rationing would probably be good, for our own sakes as well as the long-suffering dairy cows. Less butter, from better cared for animals. Anyway, we should all eat less of everything in our overloaded part of the world: less fat, certainly less sugar, less alcohol, less meat; more cabbage and lentils, and more education about how to cook, shop, avoid food manufacturers hype, and take anything 'they' say with a massive shovel full of salt.



                                                    

Inflated things

I wonder what the daily domestic life of Mr Trump is. Now't I should imagine.
Maybe he should take up cooking to calm himself a little, find something to fire up his creative (?!) side; something to calm those twitchy nerves and divert himself from bigger, longer and more expensive things to fire off.
Egos can be quite happily inflated without having to spend, what was it, fifteen million dollars on that last penile display.

                               

This is my first souffle. Cheese and apple, made with five eggs from our hens. How very satisfying it was to open the oven and take to the table this erect and smoking hot main dish.
Oh, the cries of wonder and amazement. How my ego swelled, and the whole thing only cost about seven euros including the cheapo souffle dish, corn for the hens, cheese, a plop of flour and some milk - maybe factor in part of the cost of the wood for building the chicken pen and perhaps a few pence for the gas used, BUT, it was pure testosterone excitement and totally harmless.
Give the president flour, eggs, a Nigel Slater cook book and a few sharp knives. Either he might whip up something quivering, tumultuous and tasty or perhaps slip on a butter paper and impale himself on a Sabatier, his last phone operation a call to the E.R rather than another victory tweet.

Finally . . .

After many years of thinking about it and then my lovely brother (and my son) building a pen, we have chickens.
Four, from our local farm shop; each a piece less to buy than a deceased organic one in the supermarket - I could have found cheaper ones but weighing up travelling to somewhere further with the looming petrol crisis . . . well, support local shops, etc.
Anyway, they are magnificent, shining birds with bright eyes and wonderfully fluffy bottoms - I don't think I'd ever really looked at chickens bums that closely before but they are quite wonderful; rather like giant powder puffs.
I was amazed at the casualness of buying them. The girl serving me marched into the pen, hauled up four by the legs and stuffed them in a couple of cardboard boxes. I didn't ask if they would get car sick, but paid and drove carefully home where the reception committee awaited - husband and three very curious dogs.
I opened the boxes; the birds hopped out and started investigating immediately, uttering those little contented warbling sounds which is one of the reasons I've always wanted to have a few wandering about the place.







The day passed; them accustoming themselves and me hovering a little anxiously wondering if they were bored or disgruntled with our food offerings.
The Italian tenor (also chicken-keeper) came for his music lesson with Mark and waved his arms about.
"Magnificent - what a palace, of course they like it, everything! You should see what mine live in!"
I felt much relieved and went to get on with what I should have been doing until dusk came and the small flock were pacing a bit, obviously looking for the old coop.
I put them in their new house, asked if they wanted hot water bottles or a final bit of rice/apple/corn and as there was no reply, went back indoors to do a bit of, rather too late, internet research about the correct way of building a coop.
Morning came and I approached the chicken house. A few faint clucks greeted me as I opened the lid and observed them all squashed tightly up one end. They trotted out, and like feathery robots, started their never ceasing search for food.
Two days on, we have had five eggs - a bonus as the shop girl said expect to wait over a week. Thinking in pure monetary terms that's probably fifty euros per egg, taking all in to account, but the pure delight in seeing them happily scratching the soil, preening and lying in their 'chicken pits' is well worth it, and if I could be bothered to do the sums, probably in about a year it will all work out, looking at the amount of eggs we usually get through in a week.

 The first egg

Uh?

On our recent trip to London the mega-publicities of the moment were Fifty Shades of Grey - the film and this McDonald's ad.

The F.S of G one was fairly straight forward: bondage, fluffy handcuffs, brooding man looking out of plate-glass office window and blindfolded woman biting bottom lip, etc, etc - yes we got the message: sex, writhing, sweat . . . whatever. Anyway the ad works, whether you want it to or not, in that I gathered what the film was about (how could you miss the meaning unless you have lived in a yak-herders shed on a mountain somewhere without connection to the outside world.
But the Mc D ad . . . er, what?
A freshly cracked egg? What does this mean exactly? Cracked eggs to me mean when I used to work as a cook in an extremely disreputable nursing home, and trays of cracked eggs came in cheap from the supplier. They were fresh in that I had just cracked one into a pan to make an omelette, i.e the action was fresh, but not FRESH as in straight out of a hens behind.
Is this what they mean? A physical person cracking an egg on a hotplate? Or do McD eggs usually come glooping out of some massive egg holding container, ready cracked, days/weeks ago. Surely the last thing a fast food eatery wants us to do is think in any depth about where food comes from and how it is prepared . . .  Perhaps just a 'fresh egg' might have been better, or better still a free range one.
The word FRESH is wildly overused in advertising generally: fresh eggs, fresh milk, fresh fruit, veg, salad . . . I did once see a chilled goods lorry on the M1, its sides blazoned with the words - Beyond Fresh.
I wonder if the ad exec responsible for that gem is now considering what to with their redundancy payment.