Beer flavoured pork?

Sometimes you have to manipulate your own feelings. You have to, kind of, focus them. Send them in a certain direction. It takes practice.
I make myself feel excited inside when a pig carcass comes back from the abattoir. Otherwise, what’s the point? Once the pig has gone off, then it becomes meat – that’s the only way I can get my head around it and remain sane. Meat that I have produced myself, and I like that thought; maybe that’s a residue of the old caveman provider coming out in me. And it’s also respect for the animal. Imagine going through all of the rearing and looking after and then getting the pork back and moping and being indifferent about it. No, it’s got to be worthwhile. It’s got to be for a reason, and the reason is my own rare breed, free range, healthy, happy, pork – and that’s exciting.
Only today, I’m more excited than normal.
I don’t normally sell weaners (baby piglets just weaned from their mother), as I like to keep family groups together, but Shammy had a litter of eleven and she was struggling with them all, so I sold four to the local pub landlord.
The pub is situated on the top of Exmoor with wonderful views and a huge paddock out the back. The pigs would be happy. They would also have their feed supplemented with beer, and on a busy day, this could be as much as 20 pints.
I offered the landlord a deal, that if I kept an eye on the pigs and made sure they were healthy and happy and well cared for, in return for him rearing one extra pig for me.
The idea of a pig getting so much beer fascinated me because I know just how important the diet is, and how directly that diet affects the flavour of the meat. For instance, many producers will fatten their pigs on barley for the last month of the pig’s life, but the fat turns pappy and yellow and soft, whereas I finish all mine naturally and the fat is solid and as white as milk (guaranteed to crackle and perfect to render down as lard – and don’t knock homemade lard, it’s been proven to be better for you than butter!).
Another example of a pig’s diet affecting the meat is seasonality. Autumn pork, where the pig has been running in the woods eating tree bark and roots, wild mushrooms, slugs and snails, tastes dark, almost earthy, whereas a spring pig that has spent their time on fresh grasses, heather, gorse, and new saplings, tastes fresher, with just a tiny hint of something you can only describe as citrus, not orange, but a similar background zing you get from oranges; that clean, almost refreshing taste.
So a pig supplemented with beer (not lager), is going to be very interesting.
It went off to the abattoir last week and comes back today.
I have a feeling it’s going to be really special.
I always do all my own butchery anyway, so I’ll break the carcass down into the primal cuts, and then take a chop and fry it gently. I’m hoping to get a sense of the beer coming through in the flavour. I’ll let you know.

I'm not sure my mum understands

Mum is down and sitting in front of me. She lives in London and comes to stay with us a couple of times a year. I’m not sure what she thinks.
Of course she’s positive and complimentary when I talk to her, but it must be odd to see her son live such an alternative lifestyle, her boy who she remembers wandering off to school in a smart uniform, who used to play with the family cat, Solomon, and shy away from any dogs (oh how things change), who left school and began a career of working in offices as an estate agent, and now… now, has separate indoor clothes and outdoor clothes (a sure sign of a manual worker), and the front door step crowded with mucky welly boots.
Most of the time even I’m astounded by how different my life is; not from other peoples, but from my own. In London I had such a trendy apartment. It was Victorian with ceilings so high that when I wanted to fit a plaster ceiling rose, I had to hire a mini scaffolding tower. The walls and ceiling were yellow, and the rose, coving and all the woodwork a bright, crisp white, with jazzy curtains hanging at the windows. You could have photographed it for a magazine.
Now I live in a tiny cottage on Exmoor. In the lounge, about six inches away from my mother’s feet, is an incubator with half a dozen goose eggs and nearly thirty duck eggs warming nicely with the chicks growing inside. On the other side of her, curled up and asleep, is my dog. She doesn’t look comfortable.
I want her to be part of my life, but I know she doesn’t quite know what to make of it. She can’t join in because she doesn’t know how to. The other thing is, our life has lots of different stands to it, with the farm work, the farmers’ markets, the courses we run teaching others how to butcher and process meat, or smallholding courses, even self sufficiency courses. Then there’s the writing.
The writing is going really well and I’m actually now getting editors coming to me asking if I can supply articles, which is brilliant. I had a lovely one last week. There’s a magazine called Writers’ Forum, and for years I was a subscriber because they have a monthly competition where you write a story on a set theme and the winner gets theirs printed in the next edition. I entered every month for years, and every month I prayed this would be the one and I’d win, but it never was. I never even came close. Anyway, a little while ago I sent a pitch in for an article about getting my book published, and they accepted – but the really cool thing is, they want a photograph of me for the cover. What a turn around.
I told mum about it and she laughed. She keeps looking at me now while I’m writing, little furtive glances that I can sense rather than see. She’s not proud of what I do, she’s not—oh I don’t know, maybe she is, maybe that’s not fair. The thing is, it’s a Monday morning and I’m sitting on the sofa writing this, and then I’ve got an article to write for Devon Life magazine and some research to do for The Exmoor magazine, but I know she doesn’t think this counts. What counts is if I was up and dressed in a smart business suit and on my way to an office somewhere.
I guess it used to upset me a little. Getting the book published helped, and I think she can see that Debbie and I have worked really hard to achieve the life we have, even if she can’t understand it. I have got to take her back at the weekend, back to London. On route, I’m going to make a detour to Bluewater, the massive shopping centre in Kent because that’s where she shops and that’s what she knows, and I’m going to take her into Waterstones and stand her in front of my book. It probably won’t mean much to her, but for me, it’s going to mean the world.

Last week I put up a post on facebook and a couple of other sites asking for people's photographs of self sufficiency, and, with a huge thank you to everyone who sent some in, here they are...

Brawn or Pork Terrine, Sir?

Okay, traditionally brawn is made by boiling up the pigs head, which i can understand might put some people off tasting it. It wouldn't put me off eating it, but i do have a thing about using the heads, only from the point of view that the pigs are my mates and although i have learned to disassociate the individual who goes off with the meat that comes back, i couldn't lift the lid off a pot on the hob and see my friend looking back at me through the steam (i don't have a problem using the head of a pig i don't know, though).
But i do love brawn, so i had to find another way of making it.
If you haven't tried brawn, imagine a chunky meat pate held together with gelatin, almost like the innards of a really good pork pie. Heaven on hot toast.
So, how to make brawn without using the heads...
My only concession is to use the bath chaps (the cheeks) that i carefully remove from the heads, and toss them into a large pot. Also in go the trotters back and front, the tail, ham hock and any trimmings and bones. A pinch of mace (small pinch), a few juniper berries, black pepper corns, a couple bay leaves, a whole onion skin on cut in half and a carrot. Cover in water, put a lid on and simmer for five or six hours.
Allow it to cool and strip all the meat into a pile before packing reasonably tight into a loaf tin, and then strain the juice until it just tops the meat, then pop it into the fridge to chill down completely, before turning out and slicing.
I admit it is a bit of a faff, but I'm really keen on the whole nose to tail eating, and i think that if I've reared the pigs it shows good respect for the animal to use as much of it as possible.
The funny thing is when we come to sell it at the farmers' markets, and have learned to have two trays of identical brawn, but labeled differently. For those who feel brawn is old fashioned and can't stand the thought of eating something made from a pigs head, we call it Pork Terrine, and for the other half, it's good old Brawn. We sell out every week.
As far as I'm concerned, brawn or terrine it's hansom!

Just how healthy is self sufficiency?

Face value, I haven’t been to the doctors in fourteen years. I don’t get colds, I don’t get sniffles (if I’m unwell it is of course the worst illness in the history of the household, but because I’m a man I soldier on and don’t bring it to the attention of those closest to more than once or twice a minute). However, the fact that I don’t seek help can be a worry in itself.
The last time I had my blood pressure checked was that last visit fourteen years ago. A lot has happened in fourteen years. Until ten years ago I was living in London and was living the opposite to self sufficiently – would that be dependently?
Anyway, I guess it’s been on my mind a little lately, so when I saw an ambulance parked up offering free blood pressure checks, I decided to take up their offer.
It was a Saturday morning, and not surprisingly business was slow for the paramedics manning the stall, most of whom were sitting inside the ambulance fiddling with the equipment. Just outside were a ring of chairs. I smiled at one of the ladies and sat where she indicated.
The thing is there are times when I think my lifestyle is hard on my body. In the depths of winter I often get soaked to the skin and freezing, literally freezing cold. I’m out feeding, watering and bedding down every day in conditions that even the animals I’m caring for don’t venture into. In the house there’s no central heating and away from the fire I can quite often see my own breath.
On my diet I’m pretty sure I score points because I keep it as natural and pure as possible, but I never consider fat content, or calories, or salt levels, but then I don’t eat anything that’s processed and not made from scratch at home, and my only big no nos, are additives and preservatives. I eat butter, not margarine. I eat cheese, I drink wine, and when I get the beginning sensation of a wobble to my tummy when I move about, rather than cut back on what I’m eating, I’ll just go out an hour earlier each day and work a bit harder until I feel as though the extra weight has gone. I have never been to the gym and I don’t own any bathroom scales.
All of which you could take two ways; either I’m living a natural life and listening to my body, or I’m being foolish and not taking advantage of ‘healthy options’ offered in the shops.
All these thoughts rushed through my head in the time it took the paramedic to bring the equipment over. I gave my name, age and signed to say I wouldn’t sue them if they gave me bad news.
She wrapped the black strip, like a bandage, around the top of my arm and began pumping it to inflate.
There’s the book as well. I have felt a lot of stress lately with the book coming out. That’s natural, I don’t want to let anyone down, the publishers, my agent and not least of all my family and myself, and have found the pressure much higher than I thought it would be. I can imagine that pushing my pressure up.
When the bandage was fully inflated, she wrote on a clipboard before address me.
‘The best today,’ she said. ‘It’s very, very good.’
I felt my insides sag with relief. Only now I realised that all of the lifestyle analysing wasn’t weighing up which way the result might go, it was gathering excuses in case it was bad news.
But it wasn’t. It was good news.
Very, very good – aren’t they lovely words?
So there you have it, self sufficiency is a healthy lifestyle for good blood pressure. As if I had any doubt…

And life moves on...

Actually I wasn’t sure whether to call this week’s blog, ‘And life moves on…’, or ‘Shattered!’ as both are appropriate. This time of year, this transitional period between winter and spring is crazy. There is just so much to do, and although I adopt the ‘hit the crocodile closest to the boat’ philosophy, which at any other time of year helps me prioritise, right now it seems to be working against me, as the bloody crocodiles seem to be climbing over each other to get at me, and I keep changing focus and now have a farm full of half finished projects.
You know how it feels? I don’t know if you can still get those kids toys where you have a flat picture in a frame cut into lots of square pieces with one piece missing, so you can move the pieces about to form a picture or mess it all up, but if you want to move one square, you have to move other squares out of the way in a complicated sequence first. That pretty much describes my land at the moment.
Sorry about the metaphors one after the other, that’s my allotted two for the blog so you’re okay, there won’t be any more.
Okay, so in a condensed form, this is what I’m facing: I need to bring all the wood that I have cut down in the woods into the stable to dry, but before I can do that, I need to move Maddy and her babies who currently occupy the stable. In order to move Maddy, I need to build her a new enclosure. To build her new enclosure, I need to cut straight, slim lengths of wood to use as fence posts. To cut the fence posts, I need to start burning some of the brushings from the last lot of wood so that I can get to them. But, in order to start burning, I need to move the horses out of the field that’s right next to the burning area.
No, no, don’t glaze over, there’s more…
I can’t move the horses up into the top field until I burn the brushings from the hedging I did up here. I also need to do work on the vegetable plot, and, and, AH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You see? The kids picture metaphor works, doesn’t it?
Last night I almost worked until it got dark. By quarter past seven I was completely shattered, and kept looking at the sky willing it to get dark so I could go home and have a glass of wine in the bath. I gave up at seven thirty, figuring it was almost dark, and last thing put the chickens to bed.
With spring in the air, the three cockerels have turned into little sods. They absolutely refuse to go to bed at night, and the only way I can catch them is to wait until one of them jumps on one of the hens and then grab him.
So last night, tired, aching, hungry and smelly, I had to stand in the middle of the chicken field waiting for the cockerels to get randy (which wasn’t long), and then when they did rush over and grab him mid-coitus, but, worried I might do some damage if I simply dragged him off, had to hold him gently until he had finished. I desperately wanted to laugh but I thought it might put him off.
Honestly, the things we do…

The self sufficiency bible is out!

Of course I understand this is a blog about my self sufficient lifestyle, but right now my whole life is dominated by my book coming out, and come out it has! Anyone who has ever dreamed of writing a book will have wondered how it would feel to wander into a branch of Waterstones or WHSmiths and found their book on the shelf. That's the dream I had, anyway.

It's got something to do with feeling that I've achieved something.

It's got something to do with Debbie, and my mum, and my family and how they see me.

It's got everything to do with sharing my passion for a lifestyle that at its most simplistic, living close to animals and nature and growing or making what I need, and at its most complex, the daily struggle to survive financially and emotionally, is just so rewarding and (most of the time)such fun.

It's funny, but sitting here I can't think of another way of life that is so enriching. Of course that's subjective, and of course I understand that someone else will have an entirely different point of view and would hate to live the way I do, and that's fine, that's how it should be, but for me, living as self sufficiently as I reasonably can and at the same time sharing many of my discoveries and understandings in a published book, this is everything I have ever wanted. I really am very lucky.

So how does it feel to see your book on the shelf of Waterstones and in the front window? Absolutely bloody marvelous! Scary as hell too, but bloody marvelous none the less.