Ady was off to market early this morning and had a really good day there with Amanda. They didn’t sell loads but Ady really enjoyed playing Market Trader and bantering with other stall holders and customers and loved the whole bartering and swapping of produce that goes on there. They came back having sold a bit and had fun along with getting a load of fancy filo pastry pies for everyone’s dinner tonight.
I spent some time first thing with Pete helping unhitch and attach bits to the tractor to move some silage over for the calves to eat and then had half an hour sitting in the sunshine with the kids listening to the animals around the farmyard make their various noises and free range about doing their thing while we sat on a wall chatting. There is so much about this lifestyle that makes all four of us so very happy. We’re seeing the really tough side to this life here with money worries, incredibly long hours, dirty, dusty, smelly hard work and various other challenges but we all feel really at home, are enjoying everything and seeing how it could really suit us and our skills and ideas. It was one of those lovely snapshots this morning 🙂
My next job was to wash down some plastic crates ready to stack meat into so the kids and I got busy with hosepipe and brushes and cleaned them all up then it was time to go into the cutting room. Our first job was to put loads of pork through the mincing machine so we did that while Pete cut up another pig. The kids were then tasked with weighing out the mince into batches ready for sausage making while I got shown how to use the vaccuum packer and label printing scales and packed up all the cuts and joints. I did some marinating to make some barbecue packs of ribs and chops and we all watched Pete do various cuts and tieing of joints. As the weather is so nice Pete cubed a load of pork and gave it to Scarlett with some bamboo skewers and tasked her with making kebabs so she did about 25 of those and we packed them in various numbers for barbecues.
That took us to lunchtime so we went in for a sandwich and then sausage making commenced in earnest. Pete showed us how to make up batches of sausage mix, using the bought in packs of flavouring and preservative. They have made their own 100% fresh meat sausages before but as you can’t vaccuum pack sausages (they squash flat!) the dates on them are simply too short without preservatives so they stick with these. We washed off the salt preserved sausage skins and put them to soak in water then put the sausages mix through the finer mincer setting to get sausage meat.
Pete then showed us how sausages are made through the machine, fed into the skins and then twisted into linked strings of sausages. Today was a very busy day with a massive workload so we didn’t get a go at actually making them but hope to next week some time. I suspect there is far more of a knack to it than Pete made it look like ;).
The kids went off to play then, having spent hours in the cutting room and I did the cutting into individual sausages, putting into trays, wrapping, weighing, labelling and packing which I quickly got the hang of, along with making up various other mixes of sausage meat including; cumberland, pork & apple, hickory smoked, sweet chilli and traditional. We made both chipolatas and sausages in the thousands. Trays and trays and trays of them.
I really enjoyed it; I like the rhythym of work like that and the big trays of perfectly packed and labelled sausages ready for market tomorrow at the end of it really appealed to me. Ady arrived back and cleaned out the 4X4 car ready for market tomorrow and Scarlett came back in to have a go at the wrapping, weighing and labelling for a while. She was pretty good at it – definitely able to do that to saleable quality within a few days I reckon!
Dinner time was noisy with everyone catching up on each others days and working out who will be where over the next couple of days – can’t quite believe we’ve only done 3 working days so far… I had a shower to wash all the little bits of meat off that were stuck to me and then we retired to the van for hairbrushing and ear cleaning out as Mum & Dad are arriving tomorrow and will no doubt be checking kids for neglect levels ;).
Pics are slowly uploading to flickr, will drop them in when done but right now I need to get the van turned into a bedroom – I’m off to market in the morning!
Looks like a great place! Great to see that they’re happy for D and S to be involved. I remember helping my Dad with things like the sausages when I was about the same age as S.
Hope you have a great time with your parents.
They asked after you in the library the other day.
Take care X
Comment by Lucy — 21 April 2011 @ 11:00 pm
Did you manage to get a brush through Scarlett’s hair?!!
Comment by Sarah — 22 April 2011 @ 6:17 pm
Did you manage to get a brush through Scarlett’s hair?!!
Comment by Sarah — 22 April 2011 @ 6:17 pm
Lovely to hear from you Lucy, I was only thinking about you the other day 🙂
Sarah – yes, it took ages and we had to empty the brush twice! The hair is now blowing around the field waiting for birds to collect it for their nests. And Scarlett’s hair looks just as messy as it did before!
Comment by Nic — 25 April 2011 @ 10:08 pm