The Last Winter

Went for a walk in the woods and a visit to the farm before I left with some good friends!

Sweet little Piglet

Back and white style

One more attempt

A snowy forest

Snowshoes. I chose style over function. Possibly because I lack snowpants. My thighs were red and raw.

One of the girls running from the boys.

Didn't find what she was looking for, accept a white wash.

Terrified hugs.

TAKE DOWN!

The mode of transport

Will's Wood Pile

Food Successes, Failures and Chicken

I made a whole chicken make it 5 meals for two people! It was a free range chicken, so I spent a little more, but we made it go that extra extra mile.

What did I make?

Dinner 1 - Chicken Curry with rice

Lunch 1 - Chicken noodle soup 

Lunch 2 - Left over chicken Curry with rice

Lunch 3 - left over Chicken noodle soup

Dinner 2 - Lemon and chilli baked chicken breasts with bake potato fritters and cucumber (which was the biggest success)

So how did I a lot it so it lasted? Cutting it into smaller pieces allowed for it to go just a little further. 

For the soup, I took off the gloves, so to speak and remembered a passage from Rebecca Wells's book, The Glass Castle, when she's in a woman/local prostitutes home and is asked to help strip the meat from a chicken and at the end of it left with a good sized pile and the woman whistling through her teeth, impressed. I thought, why can't I do that, instead of chucking it. 

I came up with TWO cups worth of chicken meat and threw it into the slow cooking chicken noodle soup. TWO Cups! What a score. How much would that have cost me in the shop? 

Now there was one failure in all this and perhaps it was not following my mother's advice, but I did try to make soup stock from scratch. It didn't budge much beyond grasy water filled with the devil's veggie (onions) but it was one failure out of five. 

The failure. It looks food as a picture!

Additionally, I made perogies from scratch for the first time. They were pretty awesome, and I know at a second run I can make them even better, but for the flower, potatoes and cheese, I made enough of them for 2 more meals, easily. They're so low cost and making them myself, I can make them taste how ever I want. 

I've been discovering, if you want the taste of home cooked food, make it you're self. 

Want the recipes for the chicken and the perogies? Click their names and you'll be redirected. Unfortunately, wolves have taken off with my camera so all I can do is show pictures of Chicken and Perogies dancing :D

Cookin' Up Nothing

Can anyone cook anymore?

Its  a question that came to mind after watching dozens and dozens of one minute videos of people preparing food.

But that was not what triggered it. It was the juxtaposition of food videos and posts combined with the monumental pile of cook books I had to sort through about a month back. After tossing an easy two hundred to the "Unbuyable bin" it struck me. Why, if there are so many cook videos, is there no one out there buying the books to go with it. You know, the wireless, learn the basics version.

Or better yet, does anyone actually make the stuff they see? I'm sure some blogger somewhere has brought this up, but after seeing clip after clip roll by my eye balls, I'm left wondering if we're so visually food obsessed, that we've given up on making it?

There are t.v shows too. Every fucker can put out a cook book, and recipes (like this fucker writing it). But does anyone pick up the (kitchen utensil of choice) and actually make it? And I feel like its coming from my generation and the creepers underneath me. We satisfy our visual lust for good food and then go back to rayman noodles until we've saved enough bucks up to shell out for something exotic and fancy.

But I have been inundated with food for years now and to be fare, I've only really just started taking on cooking, but its been a revelation. I want that food I crave? Why don't I make it? I come from a long line of monkey people who have figured out shit way more difficult than a Cesar salad dressing or home made mac and freakin' cheese!

I am spending the next four months cooking as part of chipping in. But why don't we all just do it? Instead of settling for less. Settling for cheep salted noodles at the end of every night, learn how to change it to fit your budget and your taste buds.

Start by getting a basic cook book and googling when you're not sure how to do something. Use these tools that are now so freely at our disposal to better us.

Also, so for the next four months I'm going to try and cook a dinner almost every night, and  a lunch, so I've got to make meal plans. I'm really going to try and source locally when I'm in Scotland, to support the neighbors and what not. There should be postings about that stuff coming and how its going to all work out. Hopefully its not a huge disaster :D

This, among many other books, is the book to help me :) Looking forwards to its arrival.

Far Reaching and Fastholding is Love

Such choice in the months to come. Between two countries for some time. So many things to think about. So many practical business decisions. Most of all, though, we want to make sure the descision made is done with love.

Love, the merger of a number of desires, feelings and needs, is the glue that binds us.

How do you decide? How do you look at the whole wide world and say this one place is the place you and I are meant for? How do you move along a river and know this is the best place to stop, when there's still so many unseen miles a head?

The question of "where you gonna live?" has been brought to me so many times by loving family members, friends and half regulars from the local booktavern. Its such a hugely emotional question and the simple answer is I don't know.

They always want to know if he or I have been seduced enough by either side to warrant roots as they have but it is not the case. I love trees, and I love plants, but I am not one. I've never been them. My roots are with the man I love. It is apart from he that I feel my most starved for water and sun.

We both have people on either side of the ocean who have built ourselves to who we are now. Its such a hard thing to ask which one. If it could be so I would make it so it was both. I would make it so.

If I could I would fly across the ocean, any time I wanted.



Also Dream Report: I Dreamed last night (Jan 10th, 2016) that I was a shape shifting green dragon. I lived in a palace/castle that was also a Home Depot. The princess didn't like me, thinking me suspicious. Even dangerous. I transform and flew out over a field. It was dark, but a faint light shone bellow.  I landed and found a boy in a hut looking over a dark pool of water. There was a little river feeding it. The banks are thick with peanut butter. We could mine it, I suggest, and make enough money for the princess to stop hunting me.

The dream ends there, with me plotting the sale of peanut butter to home depot princess in the form of a great green dragon.

Hobbies of Interest

I've been looking into some unique hobbies as of late. I have me  some spare time and I wanted to try and learn something new.

I've tried many hobbies. Guitar, violin, piano, Jujitsu, sewing, Horse training, knitting, embroidery, Fencing, art, learning Finnish and German, and of course writing. There have been varying levels of success, Olka hyvva, but one has jumped out as a more serious interest.

Tablet Weaving.

https://mickytissages.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/le-retour-des-petis-dragons/

Don't I just no how to put a person to sleep? It came from rummaging around etsy, looking at some interesting  fabrics when belt/trip stuff started cropping up. I wondered how they made it and a few googles later I was intrigued.

I'm very aware of it being a niche art form, but never the less, I'd like to give advanced friendship bracelet making a try. So far, I've found a fair number of international websites and blogs dedicated to teaching people and showing off their hard work. It certainly doesn't look easy.

I don't think I'll do it until after I get back over to Scotland. I don't need anything else to try and jam into my luggage (which has more books than anything else in it, at this point. I'll wait until I'm on Terra Scotia then commence with the weaving and try to post some of my highs and lows.

Wish me luck!