Dreams, hopes, adventures and reality...

Long time no post! 

Well, we have done it. Moved house.

We dreamed of a farmhouse with room for veges and fruit trees and ponies and kids adventures.

  With space and opportunity for our own adventures.

 We moved from a new, spacious, insulated, air conditioned home (with a pool, and built in cupboards) to an old, crooked, hot, small farmhouse.

 In the middle of a heat wave. 

The reality set in somewhere around the time that the temperature hit 40+ degrees and we melted in an uninsulated old house and wished for our old pool. And as I was struggling to find a place for all our stuff in a small house with zero storage. When we had a visit from a second brown snake in just a few days. As two different bushfires burned nearby. As I tried to cook in a miniscule kitchen with an oven that turned out to be broken, right next to the dishwasher that is also broken.

 We found a few nasty surprises under the house...

 

Somewhat in shock, we have set out to work hard to turn this place into the gem it has the potential to be.  First up, removing all the many bits of yarding and fencing...

And then the weather cooled, and we all breathed easier.  We relaxed and looked up from this little old house and were reminded of why we came here.  Six and a half acres. Space.  Open skys.

My own horse in my own paddock :))

Then the rain came (lots of it!) and our little creek flowed.  Adventures in swimmers, gumboots and the rain.

As the shock subsides, the dreams and hopes resurface.  There is lots to do here, especially on the house. I suspect this blog will be overtaken by renovation stories now.  We have plans to extend the house, put in a new kitchen and bathroom and generally repaint everything. Fix the floor framing.  Polish the 75 year old floor boards.  I can see in my minds eye how this place will look when we are done, it's just going to take lots of hard work to get there :)

 

Stay tuned :)

 

Digging History!

I do apologise for such a corny post title! I couldn't help but call it that :)

This term we have started the history program The Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer. So far we are enjoying it, mainly becuase it is something all the kids do together and because there are lots of hands on activities to do along the way.

It starts with an introduction to history and archaeology.  The kids made a family tree last week and this week we did an archaeological dig.  We talked about what kinds of things we could bury in our archaeological site, and what they would tell people about the way we live now.  

Some of the items the kids chose are shown in the photo below.

 Here's some of our dig tools used to unearth the "artefacts".

 Digging for artefacts...

 

Yay! Found something!

 Brushing off the dirt...

 An unexpected find :) Our dig site was an old vege bed...

Not really enough there for dinner, but these spuds were the find of the day :))

Camping at Dingo Tops

We recently had the pleasure of spending a few days camping at Dingo Tops, which is right next to Tapin Tops National Park north-west of Wingham.  It is a really beautiful area, with lots of towering trees in a semi-rainforest ecosystem.

We camped at Dingo Tops rest area, and were pleased to have the place mostly to ourselves.  

There are a couple of trails leading straight out of the campsite.  There are also some old forestry relics, including a steam engine and a horse drawn grader.

 I took so many photos looking up trying to capture the magnificence of these huge trees, but of course the photos don't really capture their size and beauty sufficiently. 

 This funghi? was growing out of a fallen tree.  It was bigger than a dinner plate and quite hard.  The top was rippled and lined but the underside was super smooth.

 

The 360 degree view at Blue Knob was amazing, and even more stunning from the top of the old fire tower, if you were brave enough to climb the partly broken ladder to get up there.

 It was also quite cold...

 Next we drove across to Ellenborough Falls near Elands.  Once again the photo doesn't do it justice as these falls are very impressive.

 We descended all 641 steps to see the falls from the bottom.  The climb back up was hard work!

 As if our legs hadn't worked hard enough with all those steps at the Falls, the next day we trekked up the steep walk to Rowleys Rock.  The view was just as stunning as at Blue Knob.

 Then a bit of off-road driving to finish off our weekend.

Gifts

Lili's enjoyment of her new reading skills...

 

 My sweet daughter colouring carefully...

 A golden friend...

 A stick to chew and a shady spot...

 Orchids in bloom...

 Pretty posy from the garden...

 Scent of Spring's first Jasmine in the house...

 Tall trees, a warm winter's day.  That blue.

And time to notice and treasure it all.

I'm reading and being inspired by 1000 Gifts

Going the whole hog

Well half a hog actually.  We have been wanting to try curing and smoking our own ham and bacon for a really long time. We bought books about it, even read them, but that's as far as it went.  Then I came across an opportunity to buy free-range, heritage breed, almost organic pork in bulk, and before we could say "Charcuterie" we had about 30kgs of pork to deal with.

Thus began a steep learning curve. I started by unpacking the boxful of unidentified lumps of meat and sorting them into three piles.  One: Ham and Hocks.  Two: Chops.  So far, so good. Three: Unknown Other Bits.  Unfortunately pile three was the biggest pile.  Enter our savior - this book:

I found a diagram of a pig cut into it's various pieces and we set about trying to match our lumps to the cuts in the picture and therefore decide what to do with them.

Then it was onto to the curing.  The first thing to decide was whether or not to use pink salt (curing salt/sodium nitrite).  The info and debate out there about this additive is confusing.  Those for it say that it is essential to prevent the risk of potentially life-threatening botulism poisoning and to create a ham/bacon flavour and colour.  Those against say that it is potentially a carcinogen.

We ended up going without it, and took care to always keep the meat either above or below the risky temperatures.

The bacon was dry cured in a salt/sugar mixture and then hot smoked in our BBQ.  We used cuttings from our Mariposa Plum for the smoke.  We chopped small pieces, placed them in foil and sat them over one burner.  The meat was placed at the other side of the BBQ and the lid closed.  It stayed there for several hours until the meat reached about 75 degrees Celsius in the centre.

Here's the bacon (pork belly) curing:

 And here it is after hot smoking:

It is as yummy as it looks.

We also made some pulled pork - first seasoning it and hot smoking it, then roasting it a second time. It took all day really to cook and tasted wonderful, but maybe not good enough to bother with again.  Here it is seasoned and ready to go and then finished and being shredded:

The ham and hocks were cured in brine and then hot smoked.  The photo below shows one of the hams and a piece of pork belly.

So would I do it again? Yes and no.  

Half a pig at once was quite a lot of meat to deal with and to find room for in the fridge as it cured, particularly the big ham as it cured in a large tub of brine.  I have said before that prosciutto, ham and bacon are the reason I could never go to a fully vegetarian diet, even though at least half our meals are vegetarian.  Handling large amounts of raw pork though, was well... a bit gross.  Off-putting.  It took me about a week to recover before I felt like eating any of it.  I think doing just some pork belly and one ham at a time would be more manageable.

Then there was the constant checking of the smoking process, including the desperate dash to the servo for a new gas bottle when we realised it had run out just a half hour into the smoking.  Next time we would be confident we weren't going to poison anyone, but this time we fed it to the Hubster first, just in case, then waited a few days. We figured he was the one with life insurance.

The taste of the ham and bacon? Sublime.  And that's why we'll be coming back for some more home-smoked goodness in future :)