Tag Archives: vegetarian sausages

Must Work Harder . . .

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Teasel

It’s been a day of moderate effort and I’m hoping to pick up the pace a little in the coming days.

Success, in my case at least, isn’t built on skill, charm or inspiration, it’s built on work rate, and that’s what has been missing for the last few months. Yes, I’ve been busy moving house and writing for the Numismatic Society Facebook page, but I’ve also allowed myself to use it as an excuse for laziness. This was exposed with the last set of submissions. I was lucky to get away with that like I did. Finding and reanimating old poems, and writing some of them just minutes before the submission deadline is not a sustainable model.

But enough of that. It looks like I’ll have six out of nine accepted, possibly seven, so that’s good so far. I doubt my average will look that good by the end of the year.

Dunnock

I have searched through looking for extra places to submit work and found four more. Three have 100% records of rejecting me and I’ve never tried one of them. We will have to see how it goes. My average will undoubtedly plunge but I said 100 submissions was the target, so I must do eight or nine a month to get there.

Part of the problem is that several online journals are cutting back. Two that were monthly are now cut back to four and six times a year. I sympathise, as monthly must be hard work, but it does make it harder to find places for 100 submissions.

The squirrels, meanwhile, are finding it harder to access the bird food. They can still manage to get too it, but they can’t feed in a sustained manner as they tend to slip more they are now at full stretch. After they have fallen off a few times they tend to eat bread from the floor feeder then wander away. It’s about in balance, though I’m going to save up for some better feeders with anti-squirrel cages. We added a new species of bird to the record today, though nothing exciting – just a white dove from the small flock someone seems to keep round here. Still, it’s nice to break the monotony.

Robin on feeder

For tea we tried Quorn sausages as my sister came round to tea. They were quite good and when paired with onion gravy and mustard mash (plus sweetcorn and green beans) made a very acceptable substitute for meaty sausages. I may start using them on a regular basis as they are probably better for me than proper sausages. They are definitely no worse than the budget supermarket sausages available these days (which seem to get worse and worse). It looks like we will buy these regularly and only get meat sausages when we happen to be near a proper old-fashioned butcher.

A struggling squirrel

Cabbage and other things

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“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”
H L Mencken, A Book of Burlesques

We had visitors yesterday and I wasn’t able to get to the computer, so it looks like today will be another day of two posts.

I had intended a full scale media day yesterday, with plenty of photos, Twitter postings and a blog post detailing our place in cutting edge sustainability.

Sort of.

It started coming unglued when I forgot to turn one of the ovens on when cooking red cabbage on Monday night, meaning I only had two thirds of it ready in advance and leaving me feeling like an idiot.

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Braised Red Cabbage

On Tuesday morning I found that one of the four ovens wasn’t working, which was a bit of a blow. Although it’s not a particularly challenging meal, even when scaled up for 35, baked potatoes, sausages, braised red cabbage, carrots and onion gravy does rely on having quite a bit of oven space. When you want to cook vegetarian sausages and gluten-free sausages separately things get quite interesting – more like circus skills than cookery.

The result was both hectic and bad for photography. The plan to take loads of photographs of happy visitors and great food did not come off. The visitors were happy, and the food was OK but the time just flew by. It wasn’t all cookery, of course, the hunt for sufficient cutlery took far more time than it should have done.

The problem with having a kitchen on a farm is that cutlery, wash basins, plastic containers, scales and much else is seen as fair game when the farm needs supplies. Give it another four months and it will be like we are constantly visited by a team of phantom pilferers and the words “It’s in the lambing shed.” will be heard regularly.

And talking about the iniquities of the farm staff – guess who knew that the oven was broken, but didn’t bother telling me?

Anyway, back to the visit. The majority came from ACCOR Hotels, who have a sustainability strategy called Planet 21. Along with the Woodland Trust, who made up the rest of the numbers, they are supporting our agriforestry project.

In the end I only got two shots – one of the left-over red cabbage (which is being frozen for next week’s visitors) and one of the empty box of vegetarian sausages. I’m not normally a fan of vegetarian sausages but these had a good texture and taste, though I fried them due to the lack of oven space rather than following the cooking instructions.

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Red onion and Rosemary sausages

The fact that I was struggling for subjects may have also had a bearing on the selection…