Month: November 2014

With the copious amount of chestnuts available again this year, I decided to try making some chestnut liqueur. I used the same recipe as last year’s hazelnut liqueur. Well, it was ready today. Quite nice, but fairly sweet. So, what to do with the chestnuts which had been removed from the alcohol? I know! Cookies!

LSS loves them. I can’t see them lasting very long.

The latest batch of rabbit pelts were ready for scraping, and as it rained most of the day I did this in my workshop. Now they just need to remain in the pickle solution for another week, then they can be hung up to dry.

Tomorrow I need to go and buy some more bags of lime – I’ll use the Renault 5 because it’s road-legal, unlike the Citroen. Then on Wednesday I’ll need to use LSS’s car (because it has a towbar) to take the trailer to the local quarry for another load of sand. I’m sure as soon as I have all the ingredients, we’ll have a frost, so I probably won’t be able to pour any concrete!

As we have a glut of bunny-meat at the moment, LSS prepared a rabbit stew. Sundays are generally major cooking days; she cooks enough food to last us through until Friday.

Wildlife diary: A day of unusual wildlife. I saw a black woodpecker hammering away at the dead tree near the pond. I initially thought it was a green woodpecker (which we have here in abundance). However this one was much larger. When I rapidly grabbed the binoculars and focussed, it was totally black. I couldn’t quite make out if it had a red cap though, as it flew away shortly after I started looking at it.
In the evening LSS called me into the garden. She’d found a fire salamander . It’s the first one we’ve seen here.

Unfortunately we lost another bunny last night. This one was the runt of the litter, but also happened to be the prettiest. So we rapidly went from having six female bunnies, to only three (excluding the mother, of course). It’s a shame, but this is one of the things which happens when you have livestock. The three remaining bunnies are Not Happy. At the moment we’re just giving them dried hay to eat. So they’re looking at it mournfully, as if to say “Yes, this is all very well, but where’s the nice green stuff?”

Speaking of livestock, we really enjoy keeping hens. Not just because they provide us with eggs, but they are very amusing to watch. Whenever we visit their pen to collect eggs or feed them, they all run towards us at great speed, and their gathering around our feet makes it exceedingly difficult to walk anywhere. And no matter what food we’re giving them – whether it’s the usual bread soaked in water, wheat, kitchen scraps or unwanted bits of rabbit, their reaction is always the same. “This is The. Best. Thing. Ever!” One inevitably grabs a large piece of food, and attempts to run away to eat it in peace. The others then think that this particular piece of food is The Only Thing Worth Eating, and try and steal it. Cries of “MINE! MINE! MINE! MINEMINEMINEMINE!” result.

We had a visit from T&M just before lunch. We haven’t seen them for a couple of weeks, as T had been working in the medical recuperation centre in a nearby town (actually the very place that the aged FIL will be attending after his operation) as a sort of handyman, on a temporary basis. This job has now come to an end, so he’ll be going back to brewing beer. He has an idea that he wants to start a micro-brewery, but we’re not holding our breath.