It's the end of a long, long day toiling in the sun and I've just put the tools back in their rightful places after wiping encrusted sweat off them. Not garden tools, but carpenters tools. We have new residents:
Three Belgian D'Uccles and a solitary French Maran I've called Mirabelle. They're pullets so it'll be an awful long wait for those little hens to lay some little eggs, but that's not why I have them. Chickens are the ultimate kitchen garden companion: they turn leftovers and food scraps into manure, which becomes compost, which becomes food for plants, which becomes food for the family, which becomes food scraps which becomes...
If you've never had bantam eggs they're like a concentrated big egg. Twice as rich and twice as golden in half the space. Custards will never be the same again.
Building their run took twice as long as I bargained for, and with the kids being devils after a long hot day themselves, I snuck outside to get a moment away from the noise and found myself unexpectedly relaxed by the soft cheeping of the young ladies. It turns out that it's not just me: watching chickens is known to lower a person's cortisol and heart rate. If only they had the same effect on cholesterol.
What's better than one apple pie? Two apple pies! Unless the second one is to replace the one that you knocked off the kitchen bench 30 seconds after taking it, in all its bubbling and flaky glory, out of the oven.
The first used apples from my friend's orchard and what didn't end up full of broken glass[1] tasted glorious. The replacement used apples from Woolies and the difference was obvious. But the pastry was much better the second time around. C'est la vie.
The sum total of my workshop activities this week has been taking a self-portrait to accompany an article I'm writing for the Australian Woodreview Magazine.
On the bench for Monday is templates for the desk legs. This is one of the most relaxed parts of a build, but by far the most time consuming.
- Borosilicate glass is the best pie dish and I'll never give it up. But a steel one would at least have left the remnants safe to eat, if cosmetically challenged. ↩︎