To Hell With Pastry!

I'm getting into cooking these days, so one day while musing upon the remains of a roast chicken dinner, I decided to make my first chicken pie. Which it turned out was a rather fiddly procedure, accompanied by such strange concepts as 'shortening', 'baking blind' and running your hands under the cold tap so as not to overheat the pastry mix. Not to mention working out how much pastry you actually needed.

Anyway I stuck with it, rubbed up the flour and butter, cut out all the panels for the base and sides, and produced this:

which was voted a success (bearing in mind that to criticise another's cooking is to take on the burden oneself). 'Baking blind' was mentioned at this point. As were 'beads'. WTF?

However, butter is a bit of a no-no these days, so I came up with the brilliant idea of using a pizza dough mix for the pastry. A lot less work (fewer ingredients and you can use the bread machine) and a better grip on the amount (just use the usual three pizzas quantity).

Which produced this:

as voted a success and just as delicious.

This still needed a lot of fiddling with the panels however, as with making a stitch-and-glue plywood canoe (another story) where at least templates were provided.

However in another blinding flash I realised that if I just split the dough into three, as if making pizzas, I could make individual pies by just wrapping the fill up and baking in a stand-alone fashion.

Which produced this:

with the edges folded to the top and sealed. For some reason I was reminded of the pods in 'Alien'.

Another success!

Although the unbaked 'pies' did have a tendency to unfold, so I finally settled on this:

which is a sort of Cornish pasty I suppose.

The only way I can think of to simplify things further is to chuck EVERYTHING into the bread machine, a bake the result into a sort of conglomerate of chicken in a pastry matrix, but I'll hardly get away with this. I can't find any examples on the Web, so here's a picture of a lithological version, which gives an idea of what the result might looked like, although the colours would of course be different.

Firewood!

Along with food, the main concern of the hunter-gatherer. Bringing dinosaurs etc. back to the ol' cave is all very well but they have to be cooked, and you need a nice warm fireside afterwards. As by definition the wood has to be hunted and gathered, what's the procedure?

A visual guide follows.


Sources:

A man after my own heart, on the beach at Newcastle, Co. Down. We bonded and talked of driftwood we had known and loved. The HUGE advantage of driftwood is that it is in the public domain. Councils do have a tendency to tidy this up, so carpe diem.

Salvage from house renovations can yield a lot of easily gathered, but usually dirty and spitty wood. There may well be ownership issues too; approach with caution after dark. With gloves.

A good haul of hedgerow blackthorn. Council hedge operations are a great source for this, also elderwood, which doesn't burn well, but if dry enough will smoulder away to nothing.

A mixed bag of drift and other wood, saw for scale.

Firewood pornography, but too big, too public, and too owned!

Almost perfect. Four foot plus lengths of driftwood washed onto the large boulders of a reclaimed shoreline. Easy access from motorway-side cycle track, and the wood is off damp ground.

The Twelve (ash) Logs of Christmas. I cannot reveal my source for this. Gives out a lovely warm, green scent with the stove is hot.

You can get a lot on a transport bike! This sort of find cannot really be passed by, although it needs a lot of lifting, cutting and drying.

Drying:

Of course it needs to be dry. I don't have a woodshed but for small batches you can improvise.

A batch of driftwood maturing nicely.

Blackthorn, ash and pine, under the polycarbonate roof of the outside toilet. It gets REALLY hot in here in Summer.

A sunny spot.

Yule logs, 2011, carefully sorted and labelled. One problem is getting emotionally attached to your firewood, particularly prize items, or pieces which you have carefully matured over a long period.

Postscript:

Before...

...and After.

It's a man's world.

Endeavor to Persevere

(Quote)

All

Regrettably to date I have been unable to prioritise my activities to schedule an Autumn Briefing, which I’ve conducted in the past as typically 2 sessions of each 45 minutes duration on (each of the) campuses.

The good news is that today, I have completed a slide set to convey a vision of the ‘future’ based on what I consider to be the key points that I extracted from the “Reorganisation document” issued in June this year.  The team of managers and our Deputy Director has seen an earlier version, hence are aware of my opinions and of my view of the future.

It remains my interest to continue to communicate as I have been doing from May 2011 (in a formal way) as part of my contribution to change and hence to managing change.  The slides serve, I hope, to reinforce evidence of change introduced by the team, as well as to convey a picture of what I refer to as “Living the future today – be part of it”.

These slides are available to you and your manager has been advised to this effect.  If it transpires to be practice to achieve sessions on each campus ahead of the Christmas break then I will deliver them, using the resource I refer to.

Informally and through your regular monthly team meetings please become part of the future now and I hope that feedback from each manager, these slides and your personal active participation will empower ICT Customer Service to be the “living example” of tomorrow, today.

Regards

(Head of Customer Services)

(Unquote)

'We thought about it for a long time, "Endeavor to persevere." And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union.' - Chief Dan George

Ten Details

Shot with a Nikon Coolpix 4300 (Closeup mode) on a beautiful November day at the harbour in Glenarm, Co. Antrim.

Lichen

Rope

Chain

Chalk

Belemnite

Brick

Sand

Plant

Crack

Paint

A Year in Haiku...

...on my country estate.

Composed in my head at the time and on the spot, these can be seen as an alternative to camera snapshots, hopefully involving more senses than sight. The 'traditional' form of three lines of 5,7 and 5 syllables is used here, and while composing I would count them out on my fingers. Recently I've read of a 'better' way to do this (i.e. more in tune with how Japanese haiku are set out), which is two have three lines of 2,3 and 2 stresses, which tends to give 12 syllables or so. For example the second verse here could be set out as 

setting sun

lights larch tops - 

absent thrushes

but it's too late now!

Given their genesis, both nature and the seasons feature strongly, and I have also kept the idea of a 'cut' to "implicitly contrast and compare two events, images or situations", as Wikipedia puts it.

cold north wind, brittle sun -

bullfinches in the hedgerows

of muted colours

fire in the larch tops

kindled by the setting sun -

few winter thrushes

distant hills and shores

no sails on the shining sea -

gleaming green ivy

wind in fir needles -

boots crunch on dead leaves and trip

on clinging brambles

celandine hedges

windy buzzards wheel and cry -

dreams of sunny spain

eager chaffinches

grey slate red tile pink blossom -

an upturned canoe

the first celandines

cower beneath cool grey clouds -

rain on yellow gorse

woodpile, trapped queen wasps

waiting patiently for light -

gone in seconds, hup!

the sunshine of spring

lilac leaves, blackthorn blossom -

cool clear dappled hills

high sun forty greens

blackcaps singing windy trees -

apple blossom storm

mid may, ocean air

days rain, swollen streams -

breaking hawthorn blossom

blue haze beech green wind

from the butterscotch valley -

distant picnic sounds

buzzard leads the way

tree dimmed track, shower dimmed trees -

older by a year

orion fading

nail paring moon in turquoise

bird sounds - bike wheel song

warm woods ears alert

for garden and wood warblers -

at butterfly speed

after morning rain

scudding clouds muted birdsong -

trumpets of the sun

late august my feet

are cool in plastic sandals -

go and find some socks!

gazing at the sea

like fulmars over green fields -

fish out of water.

in between the tent

and the smoking brazier

summer leaves glow green

in the august woods

looking for fritillaries -

rocky stream below

alone, out of sight

i can wear my hat backwards -

sunshine and showers

blackberry autumn
birds talking of africa -
the smell of night rain

golden treetop wind
draws up the damp stick day fire -
quiet acorn plop

glenarm thick with sloes -
flames of grey cloud going north
a hard rain easing.

hawk call, wild water.
signs of nature on the run -
i have no towel!

after the tempest
hydrangea heads in the pond -
sweet sweet feverfew

Nature at Long Range....

...with a rubbish camera.

These pictures should speak for themselves.

Whooper Swan on the Six Mile Water, Antrim (M. Shannon)

Merlin (K. Hanvey) 

Redstart on the Alcazaba, Málaga (B. Stocks)

Lapwing, Rathlin Island (E. Stocks)

Family of Mallard, River Lagan (E. Stocks)

Geese (?) over Toledo, Spain (E. Stocks)

Buzzard, Glenarm (B. Stocks)

Moon in conjunction with Jupiter (B. Stocks)

Supplique pour être enterré sur la plage de Sète

Way back in the 1960's I managed to spend several days in hospital in Espalion, on the river Lot in France, having finally succumbed to my diet of bread, cheese and cheap red wine. My mate Richard was befriended by a bunch of Parisians on holiday, and when I got better, we hung about with them for a couple of days. One of these guys had a guitar which at the time was vastly intriguing for us both, and he serenaded the group with an assortment of French and English folk songs. The only song which stuck in my head was a long French one with a distinctive chordal riff between verses.

The other night I watched Les Plages d'Agnes, a film by Agnes Varda,and to my amazement this song popped up on the soundtrack at the point where her family moved to Sète during the war. George Brassens (a native of Sète) got a mention at another point in the film, so it didn't need much detective work to track the song down.

Hearing it again takes me back to the ruins on the hill in Espalion with swallowtail butterflies everywhere, and a very tender stomach.

Shortly after this I was sick all night on the train from Rodez to Paris, and our bikes got lost, but that une autre histoire.