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]]>“I did think, let’s go about this slowly.
This is important. This should take
some really deep thought. We should take
small thoughtful steps.
But, bless us, we didn’t.”
I am pretty sure that Mary Oliver was writing about the adventure that is smallholding when she wrote that poem. I can’t tell you how many times similar thoughts have crossed my mind in the last 3 years – from buying far too many seeds to fill our not terribly big garden to ordering aproximately a dozen more meat birds than we could possibly house to getting a second crazy collie dog to keep our even more insane one company. However, the goats have taken our insanity to new levels.
I can’t remember exactly how the goaty Rube Goldberg machine started, but before we knew it, Dasha the British Saannen nanny goat and Freya, a companion British Toggenburg/saannen cross kid, arrived here and we were in the dairy animal owners club.
Our first few weeks were, um, interesting as we tried to learn to milk and contain two lively goats in what we learned was hugely inadequate fencing. Twice a day, Kevin and I would trudge out to the barn, each milking one side as we tried to learn the skills and build up the hand strength to get the milk out in a decent time. Dasha would kick and walk away and put her foot in the milk more often than not as she grew completely impatient with us both. For weeks we had to bribe her with apples to get her to stand and it has taken months to get her milked and out in a reasonable time. As you would expect, fencing has also proved challenging, with the goats unexpectedly arriving in my kitchen a couple of times over the summer or eating all of the holiday cottage’s roses.
All in though, the experience has been a good one. All of our milk needs are covered by Dasha’s twice daily milking, with plenty left over for 2 batches of goat’s cheese a week. I make chevre most of the time, but mozzarella has been an epic addition to Friday night pizza night. There is no question that keeping dairy animals is at the same time extremely liberating – with one of our main staples completely provided for on farm and intensely tying, with one of us needed to be here to do chores each morning and night.
The chevre has become a hot commodity on the estate and as I can’t sell it, the transactions are strictly barter-based, with wine, beer and even pottery used as payment.
My Soft Chevre Recipe
Makes about 500-800g of chevre
* I use mesophillic starter from Homestead Cheese Supplies prepared according to directions and frozen in ice cube trays once prepared. 1 ice cube = 1 T.
Heat the milk to 90C/194F. Cool rapidly to 30C/86F. I use a sink full of cold water. I pop the pan in with the lid and change out the water every so often.
When 30C has been reached, add the prepared starter. If it is ice cubes, let it melt. then, using up and down strokes (not circular ones) stir in the starter and then the rennet that has been dissolved.
Let it set covered for 24 hours. It will be a soft yoghurt texture when done.
Line a seive with cheese cloth or muslin (I use baby muslins or the cheapest dish towels from Ikea) and pour the whole mixture through. You may need more than one. Tie them up and let them hang with a pot underneath for at least 24 hours. Dont handle the curds too much, as it can change their texture and make them tougher. Discard the whey or use it in fermenting or breadmaking.
Once a soft texture has been reached, remove the cheese from the cloths and salt to taste. Cheese keeps for about a week, if it lasts that long.
I am often asked if you can use goat’s milk from the store for this. I would bet that you can, as my milk is pasteurised (the heating process) before I make cheese. I know that some people make this cheese from raw, but I have found that the natural bacteria interferes with the starter culture giving inconsistent and sometimes grainy results.
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]]>Breaking a long blog absence is always awkward – to mention the absence or not? That is the question. I am voting for generally skipping it and plunging straight back in. I will say that while it is my intention to start blogging regularly again, if you are after a regularly updated crochet blog, The Crochet Project will be your best bet. We have been working to build up our tutorials and all individual patterns going forward will be released through that.
Anyway, how about a list to bring y’all up to speed?
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]]>The post Notes on Failure appeared first on Slugs On The Refrigerator.
]]>My first review ever on Amazon was a bad one – a horrific one star, completely slating my first book Crochet at Play.
In the weeks before the book’s release, I would lay awake in bed, heart pounding dreading exactly this moment. I was certain it would be the worst, most heart breaking creative moment of my career.
And then my exact fear came true…I can’t remember how I found out or why I was even looking, but I remember clearly clicking through to the full review, hand shaking, feeling sick to my stomach.
Despite my worries beforehand, the sky didn’t fall, the world didn’t end and actually, it wasn’t that bad. The review itself was about a technical issue with the cover, nothing more, but that was almost irrelevant. My worst fear came true and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d imagined it would be.
In the following weeks and months, other reviews came in and they were overwhelmingly positive…but its rarely the positive feedback that sticks. Criticism echoes much louder in the mind than praise and failures, real or perceived, haunt us long after the event. In retrospect, I am grateful for that review, it prepared me for a future of pattern support, complaints and failures that come with being a creative.
And I have had many failures along the way. I took 200 kits to a very well known craft fair and sold 5. I have designs that will never see the light of day because they are such an unresolvable hot mess. I was knitting a cardigan for myself and only realised once I’d done 2 sleeves and the body to the underarm that I’d made it 3 sizes too small. I burnt my sample of the Twist It cardigan for an issue of Simply Crochet on the Aga, after I had previously singed a pair of socks for my book Hook, Stitch & Give in the same way.
Each time, I just pick myself up, stuff the offending item in a closet and move forward, climbing the steep, hard climb of learning , improving my technical skills and refining my business strategy.
I was reminded of this particular aspect of my own journey recently when I was teaching a class on Crochet for Knitters. In the room were some incredibly talented knitters who were looking to expand their work into crochet. As they grappled with one hook instead of two needles and getting their fingers working in the right way. Learning is hard and much of my work as a teacher is reassuring students that there are few who get it from the outset, there are always mistakes and they won’t be the first whose initial attempts result is a tangled mess, but that its how they move on from it that counts.
Being creative is hard work, whether you are a designer, a maker, a writer, a baker, whether you write your own patterns or follow someone else’s, the simple act of creation puts a piece of yourself out into the world. That’s the nature of it…you make something that wasn’t there in that exact form before. You use your time, your money and your skills. You choose the combination of pattern and colour and material.
But creation and failure go hand in hand. Sometimes things work and sometimes they really don’t. Making anything involves some risk – it may be that the pattern doesn’t work or that the skills required are too steep a learning curve, but as makers these are risks that we not only willingly take, but love – chased by the eternal question of how is it going to turn out.
the truth is that I feel like a failure a lot of the time – whether I haven’t paid attention to the brief and have to remake something (as above) or I let a much-loved blog gather moth balls as I am frozen by questions of where to go from here. But accepting the downs as part of the process is really the only way forward, I have found. The failures are usually worth it.
A version of this post originally appeared in Simply Crochet issue 33.
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]]>Recently, everything has been about food. Last year I made a commitment to learn to be a better baker. I have always been a decent cook, but baking eluded me – something about it being a bit too prescriptive I think. I have tried to bake something every week and in doing so, I have really rediscovered my love of cooking.
My best Christmas presents all involved food. I have a new smoker and have hot smoked pork and am going to be cold smoking some bacon this afternoon. I am so in love with the process of smoking food, I have been reading up as much as possible and highly recommend the Curing and Smoking book in the River Cottage Handbook series if you are interested in the same. I have a bag of venison off cuts in the freezer awaiting processing into biltong and salami.
Much of the last few weeks have involved meat. Just before Christmas we bought a full pig from some friends of ours and 2 roe deer from the estate we live on. Its been a full blown education in meat – using as much as possible of an animal while not eating ourselves sick on venison pie and pulled pork (if that is possible, I will let you know in a few months). Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Meat book has been invaluable.
However, the gift in daily use around here is the book pictured above – Sourdough by Sarah Owen. Words can not express my love for this book. We have made the Brooklyn Sourdough recipe as our new standard bread and I have a loaf of the Butternut and Cherry bread cooling downstairs that I will be eating for lunch. It is a glorious mix of bread and other foods like pastries, pies, crackers and sweets. I am utterly besotted with it and will be getting it for everyone I know!
As much as I love these ones, I am always on the lookout for new cookbooks. Do you have any you love and couldn’t live without? I would love to hear more!
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]]>The post Is, Was and Will Be appeared first on Slugs On The Refrigerator.
]]>I am sitting down at the computer for the first time in over 3 weeks. The kids took over the space over the Winter break to play minecraft and the room smells like salt and vinegar crisps and chocolate milk. I’ve had to push aside roughly 75 photocopies Georgia made of various items of clothing in the copier and I found Theo’s shoes we looked for all throughout the break. I found the wrappers of a box of chocolates that went missing last week and sticky labels have been stuck on every item with Georgia obviously practicing her writing skills.
I feel like I should be annoyed with them, but am not because the office’s neglect sort of parallels how I have felt over the last few months about work…an outward expression of the mental neglect this space has had.
2015 was a strange year. It started, like so many things do, with good the intention to “Tend” my life, my garden, my business, but within days I found myself back in my usual pattern of over work, anxiousness, careening towards (and often missing) deadlines and generally not taking care of anything, especially myself. The kids lived on a diet of beans on toast and frozen pizza and I felt like all I did was fail everyone, at everything. I lived with near-constant anxiety attacks, where even thinking the word “anxiety” would drain the blood from my hands and send my heart pounding. I had chased big business dreams for so long that I lost sight of what I really wanted.
Miraculously, change happened. I took charge, cut back over half of my work, slowed down, got help. The last few months have mostly been about learning how to run my life on something other than pure adrenaline – a long slow process about finding motivation from something other than panic and fear.
And just like that it is 2016 and for the first time in a long time, I feel tentatively hopeful that I can find the balance that I have sought for so long. Rather than ambitions that are big, this year it is the small things I want to focus on. Enjoying Theo’s last few months at home before school, seeing the sea more often, cooking, growing, making, spending time with Kevin, being outside, crocheting and working with Joanne, building a sustainable business.
In many ways, I feel like all I have done is come full circle, back to doing the things I love and that sustain us, capturing the journey on the way.
I am off now to round up the kids, dogs and the last of this amazing clementine cake for a morning out, maybe at the sea, maybe in the woods.
“As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with gladness — just the pure air to breathe and the strength to breath it; just warmth and shelter and home folks; just plain food that gives us strength; the bright sunshine on a cold day; and a cool breeze when the day is warm.”
-Laura Ingalls Wilder
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]]>The post Around Here appeared first on Slugs On The Refrigerator.
]]>I am sitting at the computer today. There is a bearded collie snoring loudly on the bed next to me. Yesterday I counted he slept for 22 hours – waking up only to go on his walk and to play with the puppy for about half an hour. He couldn’t even be coaxed out to go for a second walk in the afternoon, taking one sniff at the rain and heading back to the sofa.
I can empathise. Normally an outdoorsy sort of family, it feels like we haven’t left the house in weeks. Even calls for normally exciting adventures are met with replies of “But we just want to stay home!” and tears. I get it. I may have cried a couple of tears the other morning when I was out doing chores and I realised the hole in my wellies were bigger than I thought and a large amount of muck leaked in. Joanne tells me that the UK average was only 36 hours of sunshine all month. I believe it.
However, all of the pent up energy isn’t going to waste, deciding finally to spend some time decorating the house and sorting out many of the jobs we just haven’t done since we moved in – arranging book cases, cleaning out the laundry room, sorting mountains of school-related paperwork (I am registering Theo for school next month! Eeep!!!) and generally just being home.
Even though we have lived here 2 years, I still catch myself being so overwhelmed with gratitude that we found this place. That we are able to live here, so see these views to have these neighbours, to be able to hold early morning kitchen dance parties with our only fear being whether or not the game keeper will be out feeding the pheasants and watching my (really embarrassing) dance moves. Home is so good, so I am OK not to go out.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am off to take a nap with a bearded collie. Have a lovely weekend!
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]]>The post Embracing the Season appeared first on Slugs On The Refrigerator.
]]>November is halfway over. When I realised this morning that it was already the 16th, I had this moment of blind panic – partially because both Kevin and I forgot it was our 14th wedding anniversary – but mostly because I realised that 2015 is almost over.
It feels like I just got used to writing 2015 in my diary when I am already making plans for New Year’s Day 2016’s first footing. We went to see the switching on of the local Christmas lights, but even standing on the high street, dancing to “All I Want for Christmas is You” in the rain with the kids, I still couldn’t get my head around the fact that Christmas is even approaching, still feeling stuck somewhere in mid-September.
But whether my head is with me or not, Winter, as they say, is coming. On Friday, snow graced the hilltops for the first time this year. My office time has to be limited to a few short hours in the morning before my fingers seize up and I have to go into the house to work (not helped by the chimney sweep condemning the stove in the studio and my oil filled radiator giving up the ghost). It’s already approaching twilight when I collect the kids from the bus at 4pm. The social calendar speeds up to a point where most evenings and weekends are accounted for with school plays, Christmas do’s, family visits and seasonal preparations.
And while my head may be slow to catch up with the time of year, for the first time in awhile, my body is obviously ready. I’ve been going to sleep before 9, spending as much time as possible knitting in front of the fire, craving soups and bread and as much tea as I can drink in a day. With a mountain of making to do between now and March, I feel like I am ready for the months of dark and wet and cold that lie ahead.
What about you? Are you ready for Winter?
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]]>The post For the Love of Bread. appeared first on Slugs On The Refrigerator.
]]>When we first moved up to Scotland, Kevin was unemployed for 6 months. Despite searching for a job, it just didn’t happen right away. He would spend his days writing a novel (that I accidentially deleted – oops!) and making bread.
It is amazing the magic a freshly baked loaf can work – he never cleaned the house, rarely bought groceries, we were barely making it on 1 income, but who cared because when I got home from work each day, there was a warm loaf of bread with butter waiting for me.
For 8 years we made bread almost daily – working our way through more traditional loaves, to the “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day” method and then back again. We rarely bought bread – except for the odd pregnancy induced cravings I had for shop bread, our house was our own bakery.
Then we moved here, to a house with a beast of an Aga-style range. On our first day here, we set pizza on fire. No matter what we did, everything baked unevenly, if it baked at all. 18 months in, we finally had someone out to look at the 35 year old Rayburn to discover that the innards were rusted to bits and nothing could have cooked correctly even if we wanted it to.
In the last 6 months, we have slowly been experimenting with baking – a cake here, a pie there, but last on the list was bread. There were some mega-fails – flat hard, burnt loafs that not even the chickens would eat. However, we seem to have fallen into a groove with it all, having perfected a sandwich loaf that is not only light and delicious, but a hit with the kids. Its honestly a strange sort of relief to be able to reliably make bread again.
As a rather introspected aside, I don’t think its a coincidence that just as my crafting mojo returned, my baking one came back as well. I have this sort of manic desire to just make things all the time. I was up at 5am this morning to knit and bake and as soon as I possibly can tear myself away from the computer this morning, I will be back at the baking and making again. I forgot how good it feels to make things (other than sentences or pattern layouts or crocheting for deadlines)!
Basic Sandwich Loaf
(Makes 1 – 2lb loaf)
Ingredients:
Sponge:
320g strong bread flour
7g of instant yeast
350ml warm whole milk
Dough:
200g strong bread flour
3T sugar (or less to suit taste)
60g melted butter
3t salt
1 egg yolk
Method:
Mix the ingredients for the sponge, cover and set aside for about an hour until its frothy and has swelled.
Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well – either use a machine with a dough hook or knead until it is silky and smooth. the dough should be sticky, but not too wet. If you are using a machine it will stick to the bottom of the bowl but not the sides, so adjust the mixture accordingly.
Place dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover and let rise until doubled (about 1.5-2h).
Punch down and reform to go into a loaf tin. Let rise for 1-1.5h. Bake at 180C for 35-40 minutes.
This recipe is easily doubled and makes delicious light dinner rolls as well.
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]]>The post The Second Act appeared first on Slugs On The Refrigerator.
]]>Like everyone else, I spend a lot of time on the internet. My journey starts out on Facebook, then I click off to ready about the 28 best Scottish tweets, then click through to Wikipedia to look somethings up, then over to a news site then an article on Mashable, and so on and so forth. This circut can last a good hour or more a day, just a drop in the ocean of what is on the internet. And like the ocean, the vast majority of it washes past me without taking any real notice of what I’ve read. Bit sometimes, something remarkable sticks.
Earlier this week, I read this article about Brene Brown’s new book Rising Strong (via Lottie). The idea that life and movies have a difficult second act:
In the first act, the hero is introduced, the adventure presents itself and the hero accepts the adventure. In the third and final act, there is some sort of resolution and redemption. But the second act is basically a shit-show. Everything goes wrong.
Rather than being something that you can skip over, Brown writes:
it’s a non-negotiable part of the process. Experience and success don’t give you easy passage through the middle space of struggle. They only grant you a little grace, a grace that whispers, ‘This is part of the process. Stay the course…’ The middle is messy, but it’s also where the magic happens.”
Other than immediately putting Brene’s book on my wishlist, the article really hit home and it rings so many bells for me on so many levels. On a project level, the middle bit is where I chuck my crochet across the room and cry, swearing I WILL NEVER DESIGN ANYTHING AGAIN. On a business level, the enthusiasm of early entrepreneurship wore out some time ago and I am at this middle bit where there is so much work and so little motivation to do it. When I think about it there is no part of my life where I can’t see that process at work – from chicken keeping to keeping the house tidy.
I have to be honest, things haven’t been that great here for some time. I know that I have hinted at it on and off for the last year or so – burnout, struggles with the kids, making a living in a low paid industry is fucking hard. It feels like all we do is run from some catastrophe to another. This week – more of the same. But this idea – that it is normal, that its part of the process, is a life raft through it all. I suppose its the same when you suffer from a mysetry illness, only to get a diagnosis. Having a name for it doesn’t change anything about what you are going through, but at least you know what it is.
So here is to the second act. And to last minute costumes for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And to a weekend full of wool, wood fires and enjoying the small things, even if the big ones are hard.
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]]>The post Autumn Living appeared first on Slugs On The Refrigerator.
]]>I suppose it is only fair (not that the weather has any obligation to be fair) that after a miserable summer, Autumn arrived in a glorious burst of warmth.
I know I say this about pretty much every season, but this year at least, Autumn is my firm favourite. I am working on slowing down a bit more and enjoying the things I love about Fall – foraging, cooking, gorgeous light and an excuse to wear all the shawls I can.
After a long pause due to a dodgy oven, we have started baking bread again. We have two staples on the go – the Smitten Kitchen’s whole wheat and oat sandwich bread, which is a firm favourite with the kids and the River Cottage Sourdough that is my morning staple. Wild hedgehog mushrooms and smoked garlic sauteed in butter and eaten on a slab of soudough toast could well be my Death Row meal (not that I am planning on ending up there any time soon!!).
It always amazes me that simply making something helps me feel so much better about everything else – be it bread or a crocheted something – having something tangible to show that I have DONE something at the end of the day helps put everything else into perspective.
And the making in October has just begun. We have also ordered an apple press for cider (American and UK) making, the hazelnuts are just about ready to pick and I have a red deer coming my way in the next week or so (the benefits of living on a hunting estate). If I put on 20lbs in October, you know why!!
I hope your October is starting on the right foot!! Have a gorgeous weekend.
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