Tag Archives: piglets

Pi, Pie and Piglets

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I am home alone, abandoned by my wife, who has gone out for a meal with a group of people she used to work with. It is cold and there is little in the house to eat. So far I have kept body and soul together with a few crumpets I found hanging around and I am going to fry a few onions in a minute as we have a couple of finger rolls and some hot dog sausages left over from yesterday. It is, as repasts go, adequate.

Tomorrow we will have mushroom pilaff as a neighbour brought us a dish round, having made more than she needed. We will eat it with the last of the hot dog sausages. There are eight in a jar and only two of us. They are the big ones, about a foot long and doubtless crammed with more animal detritus than I would wish to know about. However, they are cheap and I like them. Eight for £2 and they last for 3 meals. At that price you don’t expect actual meat. I once spoke to a man who owned a food processing factory and he said the best ingredient for hot dog sausages was chicken skin. Well, it’s often the best bit of the roast chicken so why not use it?

He used to have a great line of pork pies too. They used chicken and pink food dye to produce the meat filling, but he had to stop using the recipe when picky politicians passed a law about having pork in pork pies.

And I can’t tell you about the cow head machine, or you’ll never eat a processed meat product again.

Header picture is a proper pork pie. Footer is a group of cute piglets, as they pause to smell the flowers on their journey towards a sausage skin.

Politics you say? Yes, there has been some politics, but I’m placing it exactly in the hierarchy where it deserves to be. First I will discuss poultry byproducts, then I will go and fry some onions. Maybe after that I will return and discuss politics. I may even discuss biproducts – they are not the same as byproducts but they don’t set off the spellchecker so care is needed. Fortunately I checked, as I was hazy on the spelling. A biproduct is a term used In category theory and its applications and as a result of my diversion I know that it is both a product and a coproduct and of no possible use to anyone but a mathematician.

I am not a mathematician and prefer my pies with an “e”. See what I did there? Mathematical pun. I’m on a roll tonight.

Piglets – like a pork pie but not as crusty

The Captains and the Kings depart

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Second post of the day and it’s not even 4pm! Seemed a waste to keep things to myself when I have a perfectly good set of Kipling-inspired titles to use. Anyway,. I have other things to do, like checking out the mushroom book!

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Here are the new piglets, though there only seem to be six when we were told there were eight. Could be that two were hiding, or that tragedy has already struck. You can never tell with livestock.

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I’ll probably be back later but I’m catching the Twitter disease – posting little and often.

It’s good to be getting back to a cycle. I know the rush of schools in June/July is all part of a cycle, but it’s not quite as meaningful as animals being born and harvest coming round.

New Arrivals

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Arrived at the farm to find that, unlike Nottingham, there was no snow here and no sign that it had snowed overnight. That was a blow as I’d been hoping that more birds would be forced to use our food. As it turned out there was a flock of tits, finches and buntings feeding in the hedge and on the bird feeder. I actually had a long-tailed tit stand on the fence and watch me from no more than six feet away. Of course, my camera was in the car.

There was some sleet as we planned out the jobs for the day and went through a technical session on pigs designed by one of the group. It was mainly on terminology and I now know I should call a group of small pigs a litter rather than “sausages” and that a stag is not just a male deer or male turkey but a male pig that was castrated later in life. Seems a strange word to use in this context but farmers are a strange bunch.

One of the sows farrowed this morning. She’s called Ginger because she has a lot of Tamworth in her, though you can’t tell . The nine piglets are a strange spotted mixture – some ginger with a few spots and some black and white with lots of spots.

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In the other half of the barn the new goats are settling in. A couple of them are pregnant, so with piglets and lambing and goats we’re going to be in for a lively time.