Confit

We've spent the last couple of weeks making duck and goose confit. Aldi has been selling frozen ducks and geese at pretty reasonable prices, and Asda have taken to selling duck legs for £2.70 a pair. Makes a change from chutney - on which subject, SWMBO cooked up a huge vat of green bean chutney using our entire green bean crop from this summer. And then threw it all away as it wasn't at all nice... First up, dissect your bird - separate the legs and breast, and perhaps the wings if there's a bit of meat on them. Marinade in salt, oil, pepper, thyme, bay leaves and juniper berries. After a couple of days stewing in the marinade, clear off the salt and vegetation and sear the meat. Put it in a casserole dish, cover with goose fat and cook at 150 degrees C for a couple of hours. Yes, all that liquid is goose fat. Then put it in jars and cover with lashings of...
Read More

Concorde

On Friday we went to have a look at Concorde at Filton - hurry if you want to go and see it, as it closes at the end of the month and there is no guarantee that it will ever re-open. A fantastic looking aircraft, and a friend of our neighbour designed bits of it - he worked on the air intakes (surprisingly important) and the wings. He was in a BBC documentary a few years ago, and they showed him stood underneath pointing at bits going "I did that bit, and that, and that..." ...
Read More

Elan Valley

We finished off our trip to the sunny delights of North Wales by driving down through the Elan Valley - a series of dams and reservoirs built to provide water for Birmingham. SWMBO was trying to convince me that the feral sheep of the Elan Valley were meat eaters. Mind you, this one was staring at me for quite some time. This tower is apparently the point where water is extracted for Birmingham. There was a real temptation to add my own personal donation... ...
Read More

Waterfalls

Heading back from Bodnant across Snowdonia, we stopped at a couple of waterfalls. The first was the Ogwyn Falls, at the western end of Lyn (lake) Ogwyn - we just happened to notice it from the car and stopped for a look. The second was the more well known Swallow Falls in Betws-y-coed. As there had been a reasonable amount of rain, there was quite a decent flow over the falls. ...
Read More

Bodnant

Having said that the weather on the Friday was awful, it was in parts. Fortunately we had decided to head to the north coast, and ended up at Bodnant Gardens - the weather had cleared up as we passed (we were originally headed for Penryn Castle because some of it was indoors) so we decided to go in. And what a good decision that was - one of the best gardens I've been to. Thoroughly recommended. It's made up of several levels. At the top, there's a fairly traditional formal flower garden With more butterflies! Below that, there's a rose garden, then there's this lily pond And below that, there's *another* lily pond And then below all that, there's a path through the woods, with a stream. And a particularly photogenic waterfall. ...
Read More