How do you like the new look to my blog? Veronicaspent all day working on my new theme yesterday and I am really pleased with it. There are just a few minor tweaks that need to be done, like soften the white background to more of an ivory colour and then frog ponds rock is ready to roll into the year of the tiger. Yay.
It is nearly time to send the pigs off to be killed. This is the first time that we have ever sent animals off the property to be slaughtered and I don’t really like it. So I have been procrastinating about ringing up the slaughterman and the girls just keep on growing.
We could kill the girls here but we dont have anywhere to hang them after they are done. So I have made the hard decision to have a professional slaughterman do the job. I have no idea how we are going to get them into the trailer to transport them there but The Spouse is working on a plan.
I felt a bit foolish asking the slaughterman how he would kill the girls but it was very important for me to know the details, as some people just cut the pigs throats and let them bleed out, in order to collect the blood to make black pudding. He shoots them first and then cuts their throats once they are dead, so I was very relieved. I am still a bit worried that they will be in a pen together when they are killed and I will have to ask if they can be separated. The Spouse thinks I am being silly and says the girls will become more stressed if they are separated.
Ack! It is hard being a carnivore.
Duck season has opened and I am always reminded of the scene in a Bugs Bunny cartoon where Daffy and Bugs are arguing about whether it is duck or rabbit season and Elmer just blasts Daffy anyway.
This long weekend hunters have headed off to shoot ducks and protesters have headed off to protest and disrupt the hunt. A protestor has already been injured.
Police say the rescue helicopter was called about 9:00am (AEST) to retrieve a 35-year-old woman who was part of a campaign to disrupt the hunt at Moulting Lagoon.
The woman, from Battery Point, was thought to have been bitten by a snake but it was later diagnosed as a suspected marine sting to her foot.
I find it interesting that the woman was from an inner city suburb and then I wonder what sort of shoes she was wearing. And all I can think of is ’silly girl’ and shake my head.
The problem with these sort of emotive issues is that everyone gets all het up about eating poor cute little duckies and furry little wallabies. They ponce about the place waving placards and blowing whistles and then on the way home they go to the supermarket and buy a package of perfectly wrapped and presented pork chops, or skinless chicken breasts. They congratulate themselves on a job well done and don’t even give a thought to how the majority of our food is produced.
Where are the protestors with their placards at the top flight restaurants that serve wagyu beef. I dont see them being all disruptive in the deli section of woolworths protesting the hideous conditions pigs are kept in, to give us cheap bacon. The hypocrisy of it all does my head in.
Now to totally change the subject before I really get worked up. I used the contact form on the bloggies page and got the breakdown of the votes for the Best Australian/ New Zealand category. God had already sent me the breakdown (thanks God) but I went ahead and asked for my own anyway as I have always been a tad suspicious of direct messages from God.
Or in my case to get two uses out of one batch of chicken drumsticks.
Yesterday morning I was trying to work out what I could do with a kilo or so of chicken drumsticks. As I was thinking through my cooking options I also followed a train of thought to do with healthy cooking when you are living below the poverty line. There is so much negative publicity out there relating to low incomes being synonomous with poor eating habits. On and on whirred my brain, busily formatting blog posts until I slammed back into a wall of negativity relating to that blasted review.
I stood in the kitchen chopping vegetables and stewing on the fact that the reviewer had spat out the word recipes like it was a curse. And that moment was when I finally let go of the review. Of course I occasionally share recipes I am passionate about good food as well as playing in the mud. Tosser.
So I need to say a big thankyou to everyone that has humoured me whilst I have been sulking over that stupid arsed review. I am finally over it now and that really is all down to you, my dear internetz. Whilst I was analyzing my responses to the review and giggling at some of your responses to my post about the review, I also had a bit of a think about my blog and why I am blogging. The main reason that I am still blogging is because I really enjoy the ongoing conversation that I am having with you my readers. Thanks to blogging I now have a large circle of online friends and I am not lonely anymore.
Your ideas for the dragon eggs have made the air around me crackle with creative energy. Your feedback, friendship and support gives me respite from the sadness that threatens to overwhelm me. You have all given me a great gift and I am thankful.
So back to the chicken,I threw them into a large pot with a chopped onion, three or four cloves of garlic, some carrots and potatoes. I tied together some sage leaves and fresh thyme from the garden I also threw in a good shake of mixed herbs and a pinch of salt. I simmered the pot on top of the woodheater until the drumsticks were cooked through and then I fished them out and put them aside for later.
Somehow I managed to get sidetracked by twitter and the telephone and before I knew it it was tea time and the spouse was looking a tad gaunt. I kept the peace by giving him a drumstick and shooing him back into his cave shed. I browned off the drumsticks in some olive oil and more garlic and dished them up with mashed potatoes, peas and gravy. Simple comfort food for a Sunday night.
Today I will tart up the soup base that I made yesterday, by throwing in some greenery from the garden, kale and silverbeet. I have a heap of zucchinis that I was given so I will probably throw some zuke in to the pot as well. I normally have frozen celery tops in the freezer that I keep specifically for soups and stock but I have just run out and the celery in the garden is looking very sad.
This pot of vegetable soup will be our main meal tonight and probably lunch tomorrow.I will also freeze three portions for my lunch this week whilst I am at the studio. So I think that I got my moneys worth out of that batch of drumsticks.
And just because I can here is a photo of the moon I took last night. I couldn’t be bothered setting up the tripod so I just went outside and pointed at the moon and hoped the shots wouldn’t be too blurry. They weren’t. Yay.
So Dominos Pizza has jumped on the gluten free bandwagon and is offereing a gluten free pizza. Fantastic, until you read the small print that says your meal may contain traces of gluten. Now I find this disclaimer to be very confusing. Does the gluten free base contain traces of gluten? Or will only the toppings have gluten? Is a trace amount of gluten supposed to be ok? Possibly gluten free, certainly doesn’t sound as enticing as gluten free.
@frogpondsrock@Pizza_Dominos is doing the best they can in providing meal options 4 a variety of target groups.
My grand daughter isn’t a target group. She is a little girl with Coeliacs. Gluten damages her intestines, it gives her stomach pain and diarrhoea.The damage to her intestine takes three weeks to heal during which time she cannot absorb any nutrients from her food at all. Can you imagine not being able to eat for three weeks? How ill you would become? How much weight you would lose? A target group bah.
Then there was this @ reply that I only saw by chance.
Ok? How exactly will they be in touch with me to discuss? I dont have an email address listed on my twitter account. Will @Pizza_Dominostweet at me once or twice and think that is enough? Will they hope that because I don’t respond to their tweets that I have forgotten, or that I am busily ordering takeaway poison for my grand daughter right this minute.
Gluten free means gluten free. It doesn’t mean sort of gluten free-ish, or we would like it to be gluten fee so we can capture a niche market. I smell a marketing ploy that hasn’t been properly thought out.
Talk to me Dominos and we will see what comes of this. Explain your position and I will publish it here. My teenage son loves your pizzas but as I am the one that pays for them, I think he will be going through a bit of a Dominos free stage.
*edited, it has been brought to my attention that Dominos wasn’t responsible for the tweet referring to target groups. It was Andrew sticking up for Dominos and he would like me to get my facts straight.Or my tweets straight in this case.
When something isn’t quite right my grand daughter Amy wails, “I cant like this!”
I have been on an emotional rollercoaster all week.The bloggies nomination has had me on such a high that I have been skipping around the house hugging myself with excitement.The counterpoint to that joy has been the pain of knowing that the new people would be moving into Mum’s house sometime this week as well.
It has been a big week.
Yesterday I was out on the balcony admiring the beauty of the morning and mentally composing a blog post when I noticed a glint of shiny metal in Mum’s driveway. It was a moving van, the new people were moving some of their stuff into Mum’s house.
All my words vanished with a pop and I wanted to wail like a three year old, “I cant like this!” I wanted to screech my displeasure at the injustice of it all.I wanted to tell them to go away, get out of my mum’s house. But most of all I just wanted my mum.
Today the real estate agent rang me asking if I had noticed the new people moving in and if there was a trick to getting the hot water running as they were having some problems. I offered to go down and see if I could help.
I dont think I can adequately describe how it felt to see their furniture in Mum’s house. It wasn’t quite as horrible as I had imagined it would be and sitting here trying to analyze how I am feeling all I can think of is relief. I am feeling less stressed, my shoulders feel lighter and I now have a small measure of closure.
I couldn’t help with the hot water and after some small talk I came home. It isn’t Mum’s home any more it is the new peoples house.
So this afternoon I sat down to write a blog post about Tasmania in reply to some lovely emails from my new American readers. Just as I was about to start writing the pigs escaped from their yard. Blue, the larger of my two girls just went through the hot tape as if it wasn’t even electrified and they are having a fine old time wandering about the place wreck rending. After following the pigs around for about an hour or so, to make sure they didn’t wander off the property and become somebody else’s dinner. I snuck inside for a bit of a rest and to grab my camera because if I was going to follow them all over the place, I was at least going to photograph them for you as well.
Pigs are really friendly, intelligent animals. They are supposed to have the cognitive ability of a three year old child. I can certainly vouch for the fact that they are able to get up to as much mischief as a couple of toddlers.
I have been experimenting with the video function on my camera. I am going to make some more videos. I need to have a bit of a play around to see if I can amp up the quality without making the file too massive.
