We had our monthly medieval “pot luck” dinner in Goulburn last weekend.

Not everybody was there, but that’s the idea.  It’s intended as a monthly dinner with our friends, which just happens to be in medieval garb.

Ally made some portuguese custard tarts, which she often does when we are knee-deep in duck eggs.  As usual they were delicious.

I had another go at making some individual pies.

My goal is a little pie for one person, which looks medieval and has a rich and tasty venison filling.  This wasn’t it, as I didn’t get organised to pick up some venison, but perhaps it moved the quest a little closer.

A while ago, Ally gave me a 1970s-vintage book on pie-making, that she found while browsing in Bowral.  It had some good recipes for hot-water pastries, particularly in the context of cold pork pies and the like.

Allison and Fiona (a Canadian wwoofer who stayed with us recently) were experimenting recently.  Allison has been trying, with good success, to make large free-standing hot pies made without containers.

In medieval times they made very stiff pastries, with little shortening.  You would model them by hand, and you’d eat then insides then throw away the pastry, or pass it on to the poor.  I’ve made pies like that several times, once in the shape of little owls.  But it does seem a waste.

When we cater for large feasts we have to make some compromises.  And people are disappointed if they can’t eat the pastry.

Allison made me up some of the hot-water pastry, which has lard shortening.  We used one-third wholemeal flour to get a more medieval look.

My innovation was to make up the pies in little ramekin dishes.  The filling was put in, top put on, and the whole lot partly baked.  With practice, you can then wiggle the pies out of the ramekins and onto a tray, ready for glazing and their second stage cooking.  They slump elegantly and do have a visual authenticity.

I was pretty happy with how they worked.  In future I’ll drop the proportion of wholemeal, and our friend Del recommends using beef dripping to get a crisper pastry.  The filling was OK but not fantastic, but that wasn’t my major concern this time.

I hope to report back again later.

Sometimes our place is a madhouse.

This weekend we had grandson D over.  D has a new baby brother, and a visit to the farm gave his mum a chance for a night off and a birthday dinner.

D loves the farm and enjoys patting the various animals.  He particularly likes the quail, who were hand-raised and seem to put up with this more than most animals.

D is now 3 years old, and likes to run off at high speed.  Fortunately we had wwoofers Julia and Fiona there, who were usually a step ahead of him.  We also had my son Owen and his mate Gryff there to take turns with D duty.

D is good fun, and he has good language skills so we can teach him a lot.  This time, he came with a cold, which got worse over the weekend.

All three-year-olds go through the “glazed donut” phase, where the contents of their nasal passages end up evenly distributed over their skin and clothes.  So we had an affectionate but rather sticky little fellow.

On the Friday night, Allison cooked paella (a Spanish seafood and rice dish) at the Goulburn Club, who were having a Blues weekend.  Looked and tasted great.

We caught up with the Goulburn medieval club crew at the Old Goulburn Brewery (we’re having an event  there next month, and then they all came over to dinner.

At the last minute, Allison remembered that I’d promised to man the bar at the Goulburn Club, so I had to race in there.  Actually a fairly easy night with some great music.

On Sunday, we took D back to Sydney, which took most of the day.  When we left, the place looked like a bombsite, but by the time we had come back the magic wwoofer fairies had restored it all to some semblance of sanity.

And so for another week.

We’ve had more than a week of lovely weather, delightful at any time of year.

This has allowed us to bring the horses into work, courtesy of our wonderful equestrian wwoofers Katy and Julia.

Paulie my standardbred has been great; which was the case last time we rode him, too.  Last year we brought him into work *after* all the spring green grass, and he was a bit patchy to start with.

Gawaine my young Clydesdale-cross was perfect at the first attempt, and looks splendid as he races around the field.  Julia says that riding him is like sitting on a couch.

Katy did some work with Doc, a young horse of Jan’s.  I was worried about him because he’s cheeky, and thinks that anything humans do has to be more interesting than being a horse.  He too was exceptionally well-behaved at first go, and is proving a quick learner.  Unfortunately he’s got some sort of infection in his throat and he’s under vet treatment for the next while.

I have ridden just a bit, and have found that my trotting muscles have disappeared.  So I’m sore as I’m writing this.  Will have to keep it up.

**************************

We went to the Canberra SCA’s monthly pot luck dinner.  I made some gingerbread: basically it’s hot honey with breadcrumbs and spices mixed in.  The original recipe for some reason had no ginger — maybe it was an economy measure, or maybe the scribe just forgot it.  I used ginger, mace, cinnamon and plenty of white pepper.  Spicy!  Tasty!

Allison and the wwoofers made some pork pies.  She has a new hotwater pastry that she’s playing with; it’s really good.

There was a splendid range of food on offer, some part-singing and some dancing.  One fellow there has a “pipe and tabor”, a sort of medieval one-man-band comprising a kind of whistle or recorder, and a flat drum.  We wants one, my precious…

When Allison returned from the US, she worked out that we were missing a number of ducks.  It seems that Mr Fox had been jumping over the gate to the orchard behind our house, and removing one duck every couple of days.

Allison was less than pleased with this situation.  She moved the ducks to the bottom chookhouse, once a pen for racing pigeons, to which we have added an outdoor area fenced from (under)ground to an enclosed roof.  She locked the alpacas in the surrounding woods paddock just to be sure — they hate foxes and can kill them.

Alas, on the first night under this arrangement, the fox dug under the outside wire and took several more ducks, wounding a couple more.  So much for the alpacas.

This leaves us with one pair of mallard ducks, including our sentimental favourite Nellie.  The male has a damaged leg, and we hope he’ll recover.

We have three muscovy girls left — including one with a bodgie leg from an earlier attack, which I would have euthanised if it hadn’t been such miserable weather at the time.

For some reason we still have all three indian runner ducks that someone gave us.  Maybe they’re faster, or smarter, or just taste bad to foxes.

We’ve had three years without any problems, and now even careful precautions aren’t working.  Our idyllic rural lifestyle really takes a beating at times like this.

Allison was by this stage apoplectic.  We and the wwoofers spent the weekend building fortifications.

Fort Knox, once the bottom chookhouse, now has galvanised roofing iron buried in a trench, as well as heavy iron bars laid along the edges, and the whole lot covered in field rocks.  There is an internal sliding steel door to provide an extra layer of defence.  I was just able to dissuade her from electrifying everything.

Alcatraz, aka the top shed, already had heavy steel walls and a buffalo-proof external run.  It now has a new door, a gate to cut off half the run, and rocks.

God help the fox should Allison get her hands on it.  Because we’re being organic, we can’t lay poison baits.  Because we front the highway, we’re not meant to shoot on the property, and I might not be safe with a gun.  There’s no way Ally is getting one in her current mood!

We do nevertheless have some plans for Mr Fox, suggested by our neighbours, so we’ll see what comes of them.  Further suggestions most welcome.

We’ve had some nicer weather, and things are looking up.

Our wwoofers Fiona, Katy and Laura are all good fun and easy to have around.  They are helping to get the farm back under control.

We have had the incubator on since the fox visited, and now we have eight chickens.  The wwoofers got hours of entertainment from them as they hatched.

Three of the chickens are silkies; luckily we got some eggs in the false spring just before the weather turned really nasty.  So these are the last remnant of our silkie bloodlines.  They will be well looked after.

The other chickens are Light Sussex and one is half Isa Brown, the modern egg-laying breed.  (We got given some hens from Ally’s sister’s neighbours, and despite being thoroughly unmedieval, they are actually rather sweet chooks having been family pets.)

The Light Sussex are great for meat, but I’ve been underwhelmed at their egg production in cooler weather.  I’m inclined to get some fertilised eggs of some other breed, and grow some of them.  But the chooks are Allison’s domain so it’s up to her.

Speaking of whom, Allison is back from her US trip, amazed at the sheer size of things in Las Vegas.  And now she’s gone again for a few days — her daughter Jess has a new baby son.

After our early spring, winter has returned with a vengeance.

We’ve now had a couple of weeks of really miserable weather. Strong and very cold winds.

We have branches down all over the farm. A tree fell over Barker’s Lane, and we were rescued late one freezing night by Sam, our neighbour’s son, who got the tractor out to clear the way.

The roof of one of the shops in Goulburn blew off. The emergency services people were extremely busy.

Last week we got a couple of German wwoofers, our first for a long time. They stayed for just a day. One I think would have kept going, but the other was adamant that she had come to Australia for sun and this just wasn’t it.

We then got a Canadian wwoofer, Fiona, who said that she knew all about cold. And two more Germans, Laura and Katy, who knew about the others and decided they’d stick it out.

Last weekend was the coldest I remember in this part of the world, minus 5 degrees in a howling wind. We had the wood heaters on in both houses, and electric heaters, and the wind just sucked the warmth away.

I told the wwoofers to do the absolute minimum outside, and they mostly just stayed in bed. And at last the windy weather has passed.

We’re now back to what I consider a normal winter: crisp mornings with a bit of sunshine during the day. Six weeks till spring.

Allison has avoided much of this, being this week in Las Vegas for a work trip. Sunny Las Vegas. No further comment necessary.

We have serious chickens, of the Light Sussex breed, for meat and eggs. And we have some Silkie Bantams for amusement and for brooding eggs.
Silkies look like toys, all fluff. Over several years, we bred them to have a range of lovely colours. Last summer, they hid some nests of eggs and we ended up with a lot of them.
With the recent warm weather, they thought it was spring. We had far too many roosters, and they were loving the hens to exhaustion.
So on Saturday we ‘harvested’ six of the roosters. This left our favourite roosters: Rufio, with gorgeous black feathers; Silvan, russet and gold; and a really beautiful silver-grey one without a name as yet. And a few spares, as we could only manage to do six of them in a plucking session.
We did keep the meat, though it’s hardly worth the effort. They have tiny bodies under all the fluff, and their meat is black. Great in Chinese medicine apparently.
************
On Saturday night, we were babysitting Xavier, who belongs to our friends Tony and Claire. Tony came by about 10pm to pick him up, and mentioned that he had just seen a fox in our house paddock. And we realised that we’d forgotten to lock up the chickens.
I raced up to the serious chickens; they were fine. Allison ran to the silkies, and found about 20 corpses, no survivors.
************
We are trying to work out what to do about the fox. We had a rabbit plague earlier this year, and the neighbours poisoned them, so the fox may well have been hungry. No need to kill 20 chickens though.
We don’t have a gun, and there are rules limiting shooting so close to the highway. We do have a bow, and Allison’s a good shot — but shooting accurately at night is very difficult.
We’re hoping he shows up on the lane while we’re driving home…
************
We visited the Canberra medieval club on Sunday night, for their monthly pot luck night. I made some chicken pies, with silkie meat and vegetables from our garden — and they were generally agreed to be delicious.

We’ve passed the winter solstice. I always hold this out as a faint hope for Allison: the days are getting longer now and spring approaches.

Nonsense, she says, this is when the really cold weather starts… Which I have to agree is usually the case. We have great weather most of the year, but winter here is tough.

But last Saturday was glorious, like the golden autumn days we usually get so many of. (Except this year.) Saturday was warm enough to be outside in a t-shirt, a great day for wandering about the farm chatting to the horses and alpacas. We’ve been rare visitors lately.

Sunday was also quite acceptable, but with a little bit of cool breeze. But who’s complaining.

We’ve had reasonable weather lately, including a couple of heavy frosts on sunny mornings, and this week looks like it will be OK. But cold weather is coming again from mid-next-week.

My theory on living in Canberra or Goulburn is that you need an aunt with a holiday house on the coast, for a couple of days’ respite in the middle of winter. Which we don’t have. Allison has a sister in warmer climes and sometimes sneaks up there for a bit, and in fact she’s going to the US for a few days soon with her work.

But for me it’s another couple of months of cold weather, wood fires and a chance to focus on my family history hobby. Which is not all bad.

Last Saturday, we had the local Landcare club over.

The plan was to have a nice sunny winter day, and have a medieval campfire lunch in our feasting tent.  Usually we just weed the Yarra Community Park and eat some yummy slices (which is all very well…) but we thought it might be fun to give them a taste of medieval life.

Alas, Saturday turned out to be windy and freezing cold.  Not wanting to be responsible for the collective deaths of many of our neighbours, we moved inside, with a little campfire in the orchard to meet the minimum requirement.

We had a great time anyway — they are a fabulous group.  We did a beef and turnip stew (as hearty winter fare), an onion tart, some heirloom carrots in a spicy juice, and some berry fool.  And our friend Elva brought along some fruit and an outrageous amount of chocolate.  (Which I think we’ll agree is honorary medieval food.)

Sunday was the first of our “pot luck” dinners for our medieval group in Goulburn.  This was at the Guide Hall, and we had about 15 of us there, including Master Del visiting from the Sydney SCA.

Members brought all sorts of dishes along.  I made hedgehogs and another onion tart.  Allison did the purple and yellow carrots again, and some rather gorgeous custard tarts in a cinnamon pastry.  But we didn’t win the competition: our mate Georgia did by cheating — she made home-made period pasta (like a macaroni cheese) and went so low as to provide some documentation on the original recipe!  All bets are off for next time.

We had a very pleasant evening with our friends, and are looking forward to the next one.

We had Allison’s grandson staying with us for the weekend. And we held his 3rd birthday party.

Allison made chocolate crackles, tiny jellies and a radioactively green birthday cake. Plus some “adult” chocolate crackles with 80% bitter chocolate and a brandy coffee cream topping.

My contribution was jelly cakes, a nostalgic trip back to my 1960s childhood.

There were a couple of technical issues with my first attempt, so I looked them up on Google. The closest to my mum’s were those by Kylie Kwong. She’s not quite clear on why her Chinese mother was making these in the 1960s, but they’re just the same.

I cooked a plain packet cake in a patty pan tin, then coated the cakes in nearly-set jelly, then coconut. To get the full effect, it’s best to use a cheap jelly with as much artificial colouring as you can find. Luminous pink is what you’re after. I used two packs, but one was port wine flavour and a bit dark for this job.

They were delicious. My mum used to put some whipped cream in the middle, which I’ll do next time.

He had one playmate, the son of our new friend Kim. Deacon and Andrew played beautifully together, despite all the sugar.  The favourite game was — throwing rocks in the dam.

On Sunday we drove to Allison’s parents’ place for dinner, and dropped off D.   He was rather disappointed not to be coming back to the farm.

We played the 500 card game with Allison’s parents. The boys won, not surprising given that I had the joker and most of the bowers nearly every hand.  I can’t remember such a good run.