I bought a small gammon joint from the butchers yesterday, it's Christmas since we last had one so that's been cooked up today. Proper ham sandwiches, roast chicken and the fact that I can't eat pulses are the three reasons I could never become a vegetarian.
I don't know how many people saw Ilonas post over at Life After Money the other day when she had been reading about all the nasty bacteria that can be in chickens, she avoids this hazard by not eating chicken or any other meat come to that. It sparked a huge number of comments which - had the people been face to face looked as if it would have come to blows!
I'm all for live and let live and if people want to eat meat or not it's up to them and I've no intention of getting into any of the debates about how much grain/water etc it takes to raise animals or how much CO2 is given off by cow manure or what would happen to upland farmers if they couldn't raise animals. I'll leave that to people more knowledgeable.
For most of the years we've lived here we raised all our own meat. I've eaten our own pork, lamb, goat and dozens of chickens. Since the children all moved out it has never seemed worth keeping sheep and pigs just for us, then along came double tagging, electronic tagging and the paperwork got more complicated so we'll not be keeping animals here again.
Over the last few years we've cut down on meat eating and it's more usual for us to have a veggie curry rather than a meat version. I can't remember the last time we ate roast beef and a leg of lamb is a special treat for when we have friends around.
Our son's girlfriend doesn't eat meat so when they visit we all leave out meat, although I'm not at all keen on some of the replacement 'pretend meat' products available which they use regularly, although I've probably not given them a fair trial.
One thing we never go without here is fresh vegetables and fruit. I was reading Dawns ( Doing it for ourselves) post on Thursday when she mentioned figs. FIGS I said loudly, put the lap top down and rushed outside. Our fig tree is near the now empty chicken shed and not needing to go there for egg collecting I'd forgotten to look for over a week to see if any figs were ripe . Drat it! 2 over ripe and squishy but 5 ready to eat and delicious. C doesn't like figs, which bothers me not one jot as I get to eat them all myself. Mmmmm. The worst thing ( no probably not THE worst thing , but nearly) about being in England is all the baby figs on the fig tree that never get to ripen each year. Such a shame.
I'm keeping a much closer eye on the Victoria plums, squeezing a few gently everyday to find the first ones ready to eat. C made three props to keep the branches from breaking. We lost 2 branches one year because of their heavy load.
I've picked up some of the fallen pears and picked some that the wasps have had a go at off one of our small pears trees. They are rock hard and nowhere near ripe, but hopefully cooking them will make them edible.
We've sold the first of the cauliflowers for £1 each, they are supposed to be autumn ones for cutting September/October. 16 plants were purchased for £6.50 from Marshalls, that makes them a tad over 40p each. I always buy cauliflower and Brussels sprout plants because every time I grow them from seed they seem to get too leggy, yet I have no problem with red cabbage from seed.
Thank you for comments about the library book haul, I do read quite quickly but may not get through all these in 4 weeks and I never bother to finish a book I'm not enjoying.
Welcome to Mikemax and Freyamae who are new followers on Google friends.
Back Tomorrow
Sue
The forecast for tomorrow is awful - car boot sale visit unlikely :-(
