Every Which 'Whey'.

365 Pic of the local church and the rose
garden Liz is now helping in and advising on

One of the 'rules' you find in every cheese making book is "DON'T throw away the whey!" It is nutritious, tasty and valuable stuff, we are told. Feed it to livestock or use it in the kitchen where ever a recipe says to use stock and in lots of places where recipes say water. To taste, you might have guessed, it resembles very watered down milk without all the chalkiness and with most of the protein and fat removed; "very skimmed milk" if you like. It is a savoury, rather than a sweet taste.

The taste of nostalgia - currently on promo in
the local Lidl supermarket.

Use it in soups, sauces and stews, the books advise, for extra richness. Use it in bread making instead of water or milk. We have done both of these - Liz turned out a beautiful brace of white loaves and followed through with an epic chowder.

I give some of it each day to the pigs. As part of their ration they get rolled (flaked) barley which I had been wetting with water to make it a bit more palatable; everybody knows pigs like a good schlurrrrpy mash to snuffle about in, not dry dusty barley. Now I glug in whey. I have in schoolboy memory (I used to LOVE Geography) that the famed 'Danish Bacon' industry ballooned up out of the industrial/commercial scale dairy industry, with most cheese factories tacking on a pig unit to the end of their buildings. Win win.

One of our 3D foam 'field' targets. Despite its new 'porcupine'
look this rat would actually still be alive under competition
rules, only "wounded". You can see the 'heart' circle straddled
by arrows but not actually hit. 

In the Archery Dept we had an interesting diversion mid-week this week when our club was asked by the local equivalent of the Sports Council to hold a taster session for local teenagers (etc). This happened at our indoor venue, Castlerea's "The Hub" Badminton courts/gym. Instructor Con had to do the serious training (he's the only one insured) - we 'foot soldiers' went along to set up the hall and the targets and to be on hand to help if there were floods of hopefuls. In the event there was no flood, so we got an hour or so of free practise at some targets down the far side of the hall and occasionally got used as models in the training. "Look at that guy, notice how his upper body is in exactly the same position for every shot?" etc. We dismantled it all once the session was over. Interesting. The club do it every year, I am told.

A rather embarrassing scatter of holes around this hare and very
few hits but in my defence, that is my blue stripey arrow scoring
a bulls eye into the 'kill' zone. Blood-thirsty lot!

Other than that, not a great deal to report. I was back into the 'buildering' on Thursday with a vengeance - we had the cement mixer out just like old times. Part of that day's effort was to lay the limestone slabs into Carolyn's walk-in pantry / scullery, to match the rest of that (Utility room / extension) area.

Red currant jelly, anyone?

We enjoyed a goodly harvest of red currants (for jelly) and also a smaller haul of goosegogs from the 'red' gooseberry bushes. We are leaving the green ones for now as they are as hard as bullets and bitingly sharp to eat. All these bushes have been grazed a bit by chickens and Guinea Fowl who jump up and snatch the low hanging fruits.

Every time we see gooseberries we are reminded of an old neighbour from the Faversham days. Eric, a fisherman, always amused us with the same gooseberry comment when he gave us some first, new season mackerel so fresh the eyes were still bright and the skin iridescent. He was a mad keen mackerel fisherman but didn't actually like them to eat himself. "There," he always said, "is proof that God exists if you ever needed it. He makes the gooseberries come ripe just as the mackerel season starts!" No arguing with that, I guess.