I have been plodding along on the wood fired kiln reconstruction for the past couple of weeks. It’s a slow job. Each morning cleaning 150 of our used fire bricks in the mornings and then laying them in the afternoon. This weekend I had my friends Warren and Jim come and give me a hand with the arches. I had the arch formwork built and 250 bricks cleaned and ready in advance. I had to weld up a jig to allow me to cut tapered arch bricks on the diamond saw.

I dismantled a couple of shipping pallets that came here with goods on after the fire, during the rebuild. I always save good useful wood for when jobs like this crop up. By carefully dismantling the pallet i got all the wood that i needed to make two arch formers. I also kept all the nails that I took out of the pallet, straightened them and reused them to nail the form work together.

We managed to cut all the bricks and lay the two arches, finishing on Sunday afternoon. My next job for this week is to weld on all the bracing steel angles and brick up the back walls.

I caught another rabbit in the vegetable garden this week, so we had rabbit cooked very slowly with herbs, bacon and onions, finished off with some sour cream. He was delicious, fattened up on our home grown vegetables. A very local meal of vegetables and meat, all from our garden.

The stone fruits have all finished now and the blueberries have just one more pick. but the strawberries continue to produce well and we have started to eat the first of our apples. The hazelnuts are just starting to fall now and will need to be shelled and roasted in the coming week.

We have started to make a few batches of tomato passata now that the tomatoes are in full production. We bottled the last few picks of blue berries, as we were just about full up with Janine’s blue berry ice cream, blue berry jelly and blueberry sorbet. She has now turned her attention to strawberry ice cream and jellies.

As it is now February, so we picked the first of our apples. It’s a really good crop off these young trees. I made an apple and almond flan tartin. Its not a tarte tartin, as there is no pastry. I used just one apple that weighed in at 461 grams.

I got the recipe from Ian Parmenter’s book ‘Sheer Bottled Bliss’. Sprinkle a couple of spoons full of sugar onto baking paper in a flan pan, slice the apple and sprinkle with almonds, cover with a mixture of 200g each of butter, sugar and almond meal, 3 eggs and 2 tablespoons of flour. Bake for 40 mins at 190oC. Flip over onto a plate and remove the baking paper. Simple, quick and easy. it has a lovely toffee, caramelised apple and almond flavour. Yum.

To introduce a little bit of difference into our menu of constant blueberry deserts. Janine had dried some of our blueberries, so I made some little tarts. Pre-bake puff pastry squares, when cooled, pop your finger in to crush the centre open, then fill with a mix of fresh and dried blueberries, some sugar and mascarpone. I also added a few currents and glace cherries. I have found that this mix is greatly improved with the addition of a sprinkle of cinamon pawder, a little vanilla paste and a dash each of some rose petal water and orange flower water.

They didn’t last long either.

It’s a tough life attempting self-reliance as a Post Modern Peasant