Category: home

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Cupboardage and loaned animals

Things are moving in the right direction with the build. We’re gradually making cupboards, wardrobes and shelves so that we can utilise the storage spaces in the house. And get some of our boxes unpacked. Husband wants his shed back!

This is the wardrobe in one of the bedrooms under construction. It will hide the remaining exposed ducting and provide good amounts of storage.

Internals being built
With the doors on

This one below is the boot room cupboard. As soon as the doors have been osmo-oiled for protection and we’ve attached handles we can start to fill it.

With the doors on …

We’ve got a loaned dog staying with us right now who delights in rolling in the puddles on our drive, and this space is proving very useful to dry him off in before he plasters mud over the rest of the house.

Great practice for when we have our own dogs again.

We’ve also started the process of building the huge bookcase in the living area. Progress has been temporarily halted whilst we await the arrival of some batons (isn’t something small but essential always missing?) but the base storage unit is built.

We are still wiring sockets and lights, have another bathroom to build and have only unpacked the most basic of our things awaiting completion of these elements, but it’s comfortable, dry and warm. And so good to be in.

It’s feeling like home.

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The cold has come

In the race to get into the house before the highland winter really bit, we’re down to the wire now.

The weather over the last few days has been much colder as the winds have veered to the north east, and snow is forecast.

We are still at least a week away from moving in. Husband is trying to fit a toilet, sink and shower so that we have basic facilities in place, but it’s slow going. We have water to the upstairs bathroom now, we just need the fittings in place!

Mornings in the caravan are painful now. Temperatures drop to a few degrees centigrade overnight and even with the gas fire on full blast the caravan doesn’t reach more than sixteen degrees centigrade all day. I have dug out my fingerless gloves and thermals.

When it’s like this I retreat to the house and sit in the warmth of the bedroom whilst husband gets on with the plumbing. I can’t unpack anything whilst it’s still a building site, but I can sit and imagine. The solar gain from our big windows, combined with the underfloor heating are very efficient, and it’s warm!

Sunshiny day. But cold.

I dream of hot showers and drying off in a warm room without having to do the shivering dance to race into clothes before anything freezes.

Not long now.

I popped into the polycrub earlier this morning to see how things were faring. The temperature gauge recorded that it had dropped to 0.5C in there last night, but everything seems fine. The kale is looking perky, the slugs are having a bean feast with my pak choi, and the beetroot is looking pretty bulletproof.

I am still awed by the miracle of my winter lettuces.

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Sweet picklin’

There’s something very primal and satisfying about preserving food that you’ve grown yourself. Crazily so. It must be somewhere buried deep in RNA, and it seems to be triggered by the first wisps of autumn or the smell of woodsmoke.

The sweet days of summer are still with us but I can already sense the onset of autumn with my harvests.

Even though there were just a few handfuls of shallots and onions from the croft that could be used it somehow felt important to mark this, our first ever crop, by preserving them.

Small Shallots being prepared

I’ve been pickling onions for years, but have never really settled on a recipe that I love. This year, watching the storm roll in across the mountains of the mainland from the comfort of the caravan, I browsed through the few preserving books that I have here and created a blend of spices that I think may work well for us.

Pickling is a bit of a time consuming exercise at times. The onions have to be harvested, dried off, then peeled and trimmed.

Onions in sea salt overnight

Salting them is supposed to keep them crisp once preserved, so into a bowl with lots of coarse sea salt overnight they went. Nobody wants soggy pickles .

This morning they were rinsed and dried ready for next stage.

Spiced vinegar being prepared

The vinegar that I’ve used is white wine vinegar rather than the usual malt vinegar that seems to be traditional in UK kitchens. It has a 6% acidity count, slightly higher than malt or distilled vinegar. It’s been sweetened with sugar and spiced with black peppercorns, coriander seeds, mustard seeds, chilli flakes and bay leaves.

All my kilner and preserving jars are still in storage so I’ve had to make do with sterilised, recycled jars. They seem to have worked well.

Recycled jars

A kind neighbour has offered me ridge cucumbers to pickle and I’m scheduled to pick them up next week. I’ve kept some dill and dill flowers back ready for this moment…

May you savour the remaining sweet days of summer, and sweet picklin’ to you all.

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Blackcurrants and Beetroot

The food preserving gene is kicking in strongly now that August has rolled around and the croft produce is starting to come in.

I neither have freezer nor room to store jars of produce yet, but the inner ancestor is urging me to start putting up food for winter.

I am trying my best to resist. Even though there is little more satisfying on a cool, cloudy summers day than preserving jars of loveliness to enjoy over the winter.

This week with my veg bag I scored a punnet of local blackcurrants. I am growing these in the fruit bed on the croft, but the bushes are still only inches tall and too young to produce anything yet.

Blackcurrant coulis

As they’re as tart as they come without the addition of something sweet they’re best cooked. So I weakened, and made a simple blackcurrant coulis, filling a couple of small jars with it. I reassure myself that surely we have room for these…

Drizzled onto breakfast muesli

These will live in the fridge and be used drizzled on pancakes, porridge, meringues or venison over the coming month or so. They won’t last as long as a jam, but that’s OK because we will use them more widely and often than we would a jam anyway.

Beets ready for pickling

I also grew a few rows of beetroot which are starting to reach maturity. A mixture of Touchstone Gold and Pablo. I picked a few earlier this week to make into a jar of pickled beetroot, or maybe a roast beetroot relish.

Note to self: must grow more beetroot next year.

I love the process of making something delicious from things you started from seed some months ago. So satisfying. Growing is wonderful..

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Lambing snows

The islanders call late snows in April Lambing Snows. They’re usually the last gasp of winter and come suddenly, just when the lambs are being born in the fields.

We went from bright, warm days to plummeting temperatures within 24 hours. The wind veered suddenly to the North and before we knew it, there were snow blizzards upon us, sweeping rapidly down the Sound in ominous curtains of grey.

Luckily the only thing in the outdoor raised beds were garlic, onions and perpetual leeks. Listening to local advice I’d held off planting out anything tender, and don’t plan to until May. It seems that this advice was very sound!

Temperatures fell to minus 5 degrees centigrade overnight, and barely struggled to hit 2 degrees during the day. The wind was bitingly cold.

Nothing for it but to hunker down indoors..

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Gales, rain & lentil soup

The cold, crisp winter days of the last month have been replaced by a storm front bringing with it high winds and torrential rain. I knew it couldn’t last.. 😊

Last night the wind veered to the South West from the Easterlies that had been dominating for the last few weeks, and the caravan started to flex like a boat in the wind.

As I write, curled up on the cushions in the caravan, everything is moving. The noise of the wind, which is about 55 mph at the moment, is incredible. The rain sounds like a thousand marbles being flung at the windows, rattling and crashing loudly against the glass.

I can no longer see the mountains across the Sound or the sea itself through the sheet of rain that has wrapped itself around us.

Then it clears, replaced with an incredible luminosity until the next bank of rain-heavy clouds bear down on us.

Luckily we are well strapped down, so I don’t have any real fear of being scooped up and tumbled down the hillside, although at times it feels like that!

I drink my tea and soothe our rather startled old dog who doesn’t understand why everything is moving. He’s never really understood the caravan.

I’ve made some garlic lentil soup to warm us both through later.

It won’t change the weather, but it will provide some comfort on this wild winters day.

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The teapot of desire

I love tea.

Husband not so much… We generally stagger into the mornings fortified with coffee, but I could drink tea at any point during the day. When I was working it was only the consumption of several cups of tea between meetings that kept me going.

After reading about the amount of microplastics that leach into your cup from most brands of teabag, including Yorkshire Tea – my go-to brew of choice for many years – I decided that enough was enough. I would go back to using proper leaf tea and make a bit of a celebration of it.

And so, I bought a teapot. Made by a potter from a local village, I loved it as soon as I spotted it.

I loved the shape, and the subtle markings on the clay body. I loved that it holds 1.3 litres of tea! That’s a goodly few mugfuls, with the capacity for seconds if needed.

My afternoon routine now revolves around time for a proper cup of tea in the caravan, as I browse the seed catalogues, look out at the rain/sleet/snow of a Skye winter, and prepare dinner.

I’d quite forgotten how delightful that was.

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Snow flurries and hot, spiced apple juice

Storm Bella took hold last night. Winds of up to 70 mph, and driving hail and sleet for most of the night.

We didn’t get much sleep with the caravan rocking violently in the wind, but we awoke this morning to find the storm blown out and to a light scattering of snow on the croft.

When it’s windy the caravan is especially cold.

It’s not well insulated and the windows and doors are badly fitted and allow a gale to blow through them. We’ve done what we can with insulating tape and thermal curtains, but we can’t avoid the wind up here on the top of the hill.

After breakfast, which was taken sitting in a blanket in front of the fire, I made hot, spiced apple juice to warm us up.

Full of cinnamon, nutmeg, cranberries, juniper berries and slices of clementines, it’s definitely helping with our Vitamin C intake as well as being comforting and delicious.

We’ve run out of apple juice now until I brave the shops again so from here on in it’s going to have to be hot, spiced cider… 😊

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Wintering

It snowed last night.

When we awoke it was to sleet and snow pounding the roof and windows of the caravan, and it had settled on the hills. The morning was very cold. It took all of our willpower to leave the warmth of our bed and stagger through to the kitchen to make hot coffee.

We ate breakfast watching the snow swirl around the caravan, and both decided it might not be a bad idea to head out to do our weekly food shop now in case it got any worse.

We already have food stocks of oatmeal, pasta, tinned goods and flour, even within the very limited storage capacity we have within the static. I think it’s just prudent to keep long-life food available in case roads become impassable or we got ill. You never know. And whilst the weather is doing this it just reinforces the stocking up instinct further.

Whilst husband is working in the house filling gaps between the SIP panels in our desire to have the house as close to passive house standards as possible, I’m doing most of the food preparation. It’s just what we can both best do to contribute to pushing this build forward at this point in time.

Food has become reduced to simple homemade soups, curries, stews and occasional bakes. Tonight, for example, I’m making a cottage pie. Yesterday was bean and vegetable soup. Nothing fancy, just home made food that fills us up and is filled with nourishing ingredients.

I’m also making Athol Brose this evening. A small, sweet, creamy whisky based treat that we’ll take a glass of before bed each night.

Absolutely essential preparation for wintering in my book. 😊

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Irres Cran

We love good bread. We eat a lot of it, especially seeded, malted grain bread.

So it was with great excitement that whilst shopping in our local Co Op on the island I spotted that they’d just put out a selection of speciality breads.

I read the ingredients. Irres Cran, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds. What the heck was irres cran?

Intrigued, but assuming that it was some sort of ancient Scottish grain, like Emmer wheat, I popped it in the trolley and brought it home.

I tried googling irres cran but nothing came up. There was nothing left but to try it.

It was cranberry bread.. 😂.

The bread range is called Irresistible and they’d clearly abbreviated the label to fit all the ingredients on.

Irresistible Cranberry. Irres Cran.

Priceless.