Happy Belated Pumpkin Pie Day!

So many things to be thankful for this year. Most importantly, that Danny and I are now here...

But also, on Thursday, the library came!  

(I know, horrible photo, but on a rainy day, it's dark enough at 3pm that my camera decides to use its flash...)

The library comes to Sanday every other month, and the last time it came was the DAY BEFORE WE MOVED IN, so I have been waiting for this for a while.  So nice to stock up on fresh reading material again!

This year's pie began with the world's biggest butternut squash (egg for scale).

This squash is from the Community Shop, but next year's will be one that we grew ourselves...

The pie itself was inspired by this recipe.

The gooey layer underneath the squash is basically chopped walnuts, brown sugar, and butter.  The overall effect is pumpkin pie baklava.  I went to all the effort of doing all the stuff with the crust that I normally am too impatient to be bothered with -- chilling the crust after rolling it out and putting it in the pie plate, blind baking it, and thoroughly cooling it before filling -- and it really is worth the effort -- possibly the best crust I have ever done if I do say so myself...

In other news, there was still one more chimney that needed topping, but this one is in the middle of the house and thus harder to get to so Danny the monkey did this one.  He says the views from the top of the chimney are lovely...

And Storm Arwen, though fierce, seems to have hit a lot of other places in the UK much harder than us.  This was all we had in the garden this morning...  For a snow lover, I really do have a talent for moving to places that don't get much...

Fog vs Mist

I don't often photograph the weather/scenery as either:

1.  By the time I've gone and got the camera, the thing I wanted to shoot is gone.

2.  A lot of weather is really hard to capture -- how do you photograph wind in the absence of trees?

3.  I don't want this blog to look like an inspirational Instagram account!

That said, this morning there was some truly spectacular mist -- this is the sort of thing we used to see in Wales all the time but this is the first time I've seen it since we've been here.

This shot is just before sunrise:

And this one is a few hours later:

And now the sun is shining brightly and it is pretty much all gone...

Obligatory chicken photos:  The hens follow Danny around like they are his dogs -- one of these days they will watch the cat and figure out how the cat flap works and then we will have chickens in the house!

Killing two birds with one stone...

More fun and exciting tasks -- mucking out the barn...

...and spreading the muck on the site of the future vegetable garden.  This will then get covered with a layer of seaweed which will rot down ready for us to plant in the spring and full of nutrients and fertility...

And speaking of birds, Danny foraged us a pigeon, so for lunch today we had wild Orcadian pigeon breast with fried onions on homemade bread!  Yum!

 

Presenting... THE OVEN!

At last!  We finally have a working oven!  How on earth Jean lived here without one is beyond me.  The last six weeks has really taxed my figuring out what to have for dinner abilities -- I totally didn't realise how much I use the oven...

Installing it was a bit of a palaver...  Danny said if we were starting in a completely empty room from scratch we could have done it in a few hours, but working with the existing kitchen cupboards, which are a total mishmash and have been amended multiple times over the years, took us the better part of two days and lots of swearing on my part...

 

But we got there in the end, and we even managed to preserve and use the original vintage cooker point, which I am guessing dates to when electricity was first installed in this house sometime in the 60s or 70s...

Now I have to run the oven through its initial heating cycle to burn off whatever residue is on it from manufacture, but TOMORROW I CAN BAKE!!!!!

 

Chinese takeaway... NOT!

No Chinese takeaway on the island?  Not a problem, here's one I made earlier...  :)

Dan y Berllan honey & garlic fried Eday pork chops, Orkney Tatties cabbage stir fry, Y Pantri Glas basmati rice.  Yummy!

 

Heights

I am NOT a fan of heights, but needs must.

Fitted a clay terminal on this chimney pot which is the disused chimney in our bedroom.  This will stop the water getting in and making the wall damp and will also stop any rats or other wildlife getting in to the loft.

There's one more to do on the middle chimney which is the one for the fireplace in the living room -- that will have a stainless steel cowl -- but my legs are still trembling, so that is enough being on the roof for one day...

On the chicken front, Danny has got the girls literally eating out of his hand!  The boys are not particularly interested...

 

The Value of Things

One of the most bizzare pieces of junk mail I have ever received arrived the other day:

Now, we have here on our property a disused quarry -- as you can see in the photo, full of old scrap metal of various sorts:

When we first came here, we foolishly thought that we could sell this metal for scrap and get a bit of money.  Anywhere else, this would be at least a few hundred pounds worth.  Scrap metal prices are actually going up at the moment.  But no.  We have since discovered that the cost of getting the metal off the island means that it effectively has no value.  So we will have a quarry full of scrap metal forever.

You see this all over the island.  Piles of scrap metal.  Cars that have reached the end of their useful lives, just parked up and left to rot.  When my last car spectacularly failed its MOT, I was offered £85 by the scrappie.  Not here.

Don't get me wrong, I like a glass of whisky as much as anybody else, but what does it say about this world that I can get my whisky collected for free to sell, but not the metal -- which seems to me in the long run to be a more inherently useful and practical substance?

 

Cocks...

No, not that kind...  :)  

We went to Mainland on Wednesday and picked up some new additions to the flock!

They are settling in nicely and getting to know each other...

And this we spotted from the ferry -- in case you are thinking that where we live now is remote, can you imagine living on THIS island???!  :)

 

Not all fun and games...

Lest you think that life out here is an endless round of going for walks on the beach and playing with chickens, I hereby give you today's tasks/accomplishments:

And, just so they don't feel left out, the chickens -- who are still refusing to be photographed together -- every time I see them together I run for the camera, but by the time I get back, one of them has wandered off!

Start Point

On Friday we went for a walk to Start Point lighthouse, which is at the Easternmost point of the island.  Designed by Robert Stevenson, this was built in 1806.  It is the only vertically striped lighthouse in Scotland, and it was the first Scottish lighthouse to have a revolving light (an original 4th Order Fresnel lens to be precise!!!).  AND, we can see the light from our house!

Island Logistics

Eventually we will have our own pigs, but until then, in our quest to shorten our food chain, we found somebody on Eday, the next island over from us, who was selling 1/2 a pig for the freezer.  So far so good, but how to get the pig from Eday to Sanday...

Fear not, the pig farmer had the answer...  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the morning ferry from Kirwall calls at Eday before it comes to Sanday, so he put the pig on, and I went down to the ferry to meet it, and after docking, one of the ferry staff comes walking off the ferry with my box of pig...!

Tasting larger cuts of meat will have to wait until we get an oven, but I can say that the sausages are yummy!

Plum Jam

Not a huge quantity of fruit on the wild plum/damson we found in the garden, but I thought I'd better make use of it before the birds eat it all -- been a while since I last made plum jam!

On today's nature walk/fishing spot scouting expedition we saw cormorants!

And obligatory chicken photo because chickens rock...  :)

 

Bring on the power cuts...

Chicken duties aside, our days at the moment are mainly spent trying to get the house arranged and liveable.

The previous owner died, and we have "inherited" quite a lot of her things, some more useful than others.

In this case, as we have been warned to expect power cuts in the winter, this lovely candle holder has made its way to my bedside table in case of emergencies...