Cleaning the freezer.

Most people, I guess, find stray and forgotten food parcels at the back or in our case the bottom of their freezer when they come to clean it out. Well OK there are one or two people who have colour coded labeling and super strong clips so that not even a rougue frozen pea escapes scrutiny. I am not one of them. We have a largish chest freezer which makes it even easier to loose things. The things lurking at the bottom of my freezer turned out to be random pieces of pig.  To be precise two stomachs, three tails, two trotters,and three packs of cawl.
I am slightly unsure how long they have been there. The reason for my uncertainty is because they were gifts, I know, I know normal people get chocolates or flowers not pig guts! I have a bit of a reputation for being willing to cook and eat anything so sometimes when friends do have a whole pig they bring me the bits that they don't want. I accept anything but I have to admit not always with a great deal of relish for the cleaning, scraping, salting or boiling that such things enevitably require to make them taste good.
I was for a moment (of weakness) tempted to bin them,however I have been a bit vocal in the paste about the crime of wasting food and we are as ever on a bit of a budget. I thawed one of the stomachs and repackaged the other things in the quick access basket. I then girded my loins and beafed up my determination, and set about trying to remember what to do with said stomach. We had cooked one once before and it had been surprisingly good.  It turned out that I had kept the recipe for the stuffing but not the cleaning instructions, YouTube came to my rescue of course. I have to ask who gets up in the morning and decides to video themselves cleaning out a pigs stomach? The answer is quite a lot of people apparently.
To cut a long story short, having spent two days brineing and scrubbing I ended up with a cleanish almost smell free casing for my pork meat sausage and potato stuffing.

These are the pictures of the cooked result. It was really delicious though I should have realised when the recipe (taken from a book of Amish memoirs) noted that it is a good recipe for a barn raising that most of it would end up back in the freezer. I better remind myself not to let it lurk!

Trials of motherhood

Ok so far I haven't done too well at keeping this blog up to date, I have had no shortage of ideas simply a shortage of time. A spell of sunny weather provided a chance to get some planting done  in the garden
and our helper Jane has been looking to buy a house here so we have spent some time helping her with that, and of course because nothing happens quickly here so it is an ongoing process. I have no complaints though, poking around old houses is great fun, it is only Spanish bureaucracy that can be a little tedious.

We have also had a bit of a disaster with our duck breeding plans. We had our first brood of baby ducks last summer and the mother was very good at keeping tabs on the babies and protecting them from all comers, all we had to do was provide her with somewhere separate to sleep at night so that the ducklings  didn't get trampled by the bigger ducks.

Muscovy eggs take about 35 days to hatch so when this duck had been sitting for 35 days I was quite excited by the time she had been there for 40 days I had decided that the eggs hadn't been fertile and was waiting for a chance to throw them away, we were pretty busy and I didn't get real get the chance till three days later we came home and found random ducklings all over the garden but no mother. I raced over to try and find the mother and round up the ducklings in itself a fairly impossible task. It turned out that the mother was back in the nest but for some reason hadn't waited for the babies. I managed to rescue 7 and got them back to her, not easy as she attacked me every time I appeared with another one. I was too late for the remaining 3  sadly. It quickly became apparent that she panicked and ran off every time there was a threat leaving the poor duckings trailing behind.  The other ducks started grabbing the scattered duckings and running off with them.  Chasing a duck round the garden with a ducking in its beak is exhausting if amusing for the onlooker. Amazingly the duckings survived the raids but didn't survive being left in the cold and wet when mum disappeared.

The world through bars

 When we got down to four duckings we decided to put her in the spare rabbit cage where she and the babies were safe. Not a permanent solution nor ideal as she needs to show the babies how to get on in the big wide world. Haven't decided on the next step yet. Its all a bit traumatic for for me and has caused more than one duck related nightmare.

Tapas

Better news with the rabbits though, I initially thought that mummy rabbit had only two surviving babies  when we found a dead one in the cage. Its impossible to check properly as rabbits cannot be disturbed when there is a new litter or they kill and eat the babies. When they emerged into the sunshine yesterday there were six fat and healthy babies. Six is still a small litter but it is way better than two.

At times like this I begin to wonder why we describe our lifestyle as simple, surely a quick trip to Sainsburys for a shrink wrapped pack of chicken breasts fits the description better.