Apples! The amazing discovery by Nic and Katie of how amazing thinly sliced apples soaked in honey is on porridge ..and how un-amazing it is if you soak cubes of apple and pear in honey…
Baking, Beans, Bike Rides, Burrrito eating contests and…..BUNBURY (Nic and Mikes‘s new little puppy named after our lovely, sophisticated and exciting home town)!
Chopping wood. Excellent form of anger release. Composting toilet. Poo with a view. Satisfying. Constipation. Cheese Cheese Cheese Cheese Cheese
Digging holes. Composting toilet holes. Who would have knew this was rich’s dream job? professional poo digger.
Eating amazing foods. Curries, Roast dinners, Vegetarian delights and excellent beer and mulled wine. going to be hard to go back to a backpackers diet of crackers and tuna..
Forrest. Some of the most stunning scenic walks we have been on. Nic and Mike are one lucky couple.
Gigantic knitting needles. The talented knitter Nic and her epic needles that knitted the first ever once you start you can’t stop jumper.
Haircuts. Richard received a beautifully crafted Mohawk..with mike’s very short clippers. Henrik’s bullet wound! Shot by a rock in a poo hole!
Indoor soccer matches. Gave an insight into how unfit a few workaways were. Irish Football game – tragedy!
Jams. Henrik on lead guitar, Noel on the ear piercing tin whistle, Richard on deep smooth vocals and Katie with earplugs. Special note to Henrik for his talented guitar playing.
Kitty cats. With both of us not having the strongest of love towards cats we have made a complete turn around. Pavaoc, George and little Zizka made us fall in kitty love. Going to miss the morning cuddles from Zizka and the face plants from George.(don’t worry George..things will be ok without your balls)
Lifting bucket after bucket of rubble from the dining room. Tyre flooring experiment is now near completion. just waiting on that wood! Hopefully it will be a huge success!
Mushrooms. Eating mushrooms, picking mushrooms, cooking mushrooms and Noel drinking mushrooms. think we may have become part mushroom? Middlesborough = SHITE! HAHA
Nights out in Tabor. Epic. How could we not forget the Hoegarden beer, great feed at two cats and foosball tournaments and 12 hour sessions…
Oooooooooooooooo!! The discovery of a real breakfast in Tabor!! This had to be the happiest day of Mike and Nic’s life (ok maybe a slight exaggeration but still, you can’t go past a great cooked breakfast after a few too many beers at the Lev)
Porridge. sweet beautiful amazing porridge. thinking of marrying it rather than marrying Richard. And can’t forget Ping pong. Had our first ever game of epic ping pong. with everyone in the pub…going to bring this game to the Olympics. Pumpkin Pie! James thanksgiving treat. Poker – thanks again James….for your money!
Questionable motives behind Richard’s online dating service for Noel.
Restoration. The marathon restoration of the bookshelf. so satisfying to see it blissfully clean and varnished. Raw meat should also be mentioned here….Rich = thumbs up, Katie = undecided.
Sawing through massive logs gave us both massive guns and a massive need for tea breaks. Stalkers…Clay ones.
Tea glorious tea. Maybe the result of late night toilet runs but tea is VERY important in a days work needed at regular 2 hour intervals (or half hour ones).
Undulating hills on cute little bikes make the bikes seem less cute and more demon like…but so rewarding when reaching the destinations of Cernovice and Czech Castles.
Violent – Noels chopping technique! Actually just Noel in general.
Workawayers..Claire, Henrik, Noel and James. Our stay would not of been the same without the American arsonist, Smooth Swede, Impotent Irishman and the anti-dish American. Wedding of the century – Henrik and Lenke (BFG!).
Xrated on-line dating profiles of Henrik and Noel.
YES!Yes yes yes…the discovery of a hangover cure drink in Tabor. still yet to decide if it actually works or not..
Zizka adorable. We will very much miss Nic and Mike who made our stay so pleasant and rewarding. Thanks so much guys, we will send you a bucket load of cheese from England or maybe we will start a good cheese factory in Tabor.. Summer will most certainly bring upon a return visit to the beautiful Novy Mlyn as I don‘t think we can stay away for too long!
We have inadvertently stepped through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia. After a brief hailstorm, the snow began to fall… not a flurry as we were expecting, but a blizzard which continued for days, not hours. The temperature dropped suddenly and rapidly… fortunately the day before we’d bought two new fire stoves – one for the bathroom (how nice, to have a bath alongside a wood burning stove) and another for our bedroom. With the old range in the kitchen and giant barrel stove in the upstairs lounge we have been able to keep all the rooms in use at a decent temperature – though the hallway is now down to 12 degrees c.
More worryingly, there are still green leaves on the trees here, and I have heard the sound of migrating birds taking a rest from flight through the blizzarding snow. As with the flooding early in the summer, the locals say that these kinds of weather conditions are seen every 5 years or so in the Czech Republic, but it certainly must wrong foot many species to have winter arrive mid October. I hope this is temporary (we have lots of trees to plant yet, and not enough wood cut by far) however the snow is still falling five days later.
Luckily, as well as chopping wood, we have been insulating in recent weeks. Rosie – a workaway visitor – put her carpentry skills to use by ensuring that all the secondary windows were able to close properly. I also had an idea to use the cheap Ikea Irja curtain poles (29kc) installed directly into the wall* around the windows to hang a secondary layer of curtain (behind the thin, decorative curtains we have in the rooms currently used. As insulating curtains we have used the cheap Ikea single Mysa Gras quilts (69kc) which fit perfectly into the alcove of our Vienna windows. They are lightweight, washable and allow some light through, but substantially thicker than curtain material. We can keep these curtains shut during the longer winter nights, when the temperature outside drops off as soon as the sun goes down. Claire and Emily did a sterling job on Thursday – putting up many more curtain rods so we are now as insulated as we can be until I next visit Ikea for more supplies.
Did I mention the number of pairs of socks the house came with? We have put these to use as insulators of the current (temporary) plumbing system. They look rather like an art installation… I need to think of a good title for it.
Yesterday morning I had to clear a path through the snow to the composting toilet outside… we moved it to the back of the garden because though it was convenient to have it close to the front door, you did feel somewhat exposed when trucks came past the garden. Now we have a fantastic view up the valley… currently a wintery landscape of frost and fir trees, and beautiful white scenes from every window. Definitely not what I was hoping for in mid October.
*The curtain pole goes in via a parallel parking type manoeuvre. We cut the metal curtain pole to 3cm longer than the gap, then on the left hand side of the window, with a masonry drill bit the same diameter as the poles, drilled a hole 3cm deep angled towards the corner of the wall on the right, then again in the same spot, parallel with the glass, and a 1cm hole on the opposite side.
This year, we wasted not a single apple at Nový Mlýn. In terms of sustainable living, the two of us could probably live on apples alone as we have a vast number of trees here. Experiments in the past which failed included storing apples in the cellar wrapped individually in paper in 2007 (out of sight equalled out of mind, and we never got round to using them before they turned bad), cooking apple sauce for the freezer in 2008 (which is still in the freezer), cutting them up and putting them raw into vodka – which created great apple flavour vodka, but not so great vodka flavoured apples which we didn’t use. I tried adding apple to recipes such as West Country Stroganoff – however Mike wasn’t keen, and in general we don’t eat deserts – so though the Tabor Apple Bomb was nice, it wasn’t going to use up even a small percentage of apples.
The process of juicing the apples was really messy (especially before we had water here), and we need a device to crush the apples before putting them in the press. This is something we need to work on when we have a larger apple crop. We plan to make cider in the future – I do hope that the apples are of a good variety for this.
So, this year, as soon as apples started falling from the trees, I began to experiment with sun drying apples. At first I carefully cored each apple and sliced it using a kitchen mandolin from a Moseley jumble sale. It’s possible to prepare the apples really quickly – you need a very narrow sharp blade to cut out the core by cutting a circle the size of a ring around the stalk. As you slice the apple, you can pick off any bits of seed, and the fibrous flakes around the core are no problem as they are sliced so thinly.
Leaving them in the sun directly dried the very thin slices of apple out quickly, but was way too interesting for all sorts of flying insects – a layer of muslin above and below the apples solved the problem. I needed some kind of wire rack so that air could circulate underneath, and came across two wired bed bases in the attic – once we’d cleaned these up, they were perfect. We positioned them in the middle of the garden – for maximum sunlight and apples would dry out within a couple of hours on a hot day.
Once the apples were dry, I put them in large jars with a piece of fabric held in place with an elastic band as a lid. These were placed in the kitchen window so that they could continue to dry if necessary. They have been a great success. We put them out on the kitchen table as snack food in the evening, and they are quickly devoured. I’ve now labelled the jars with the month for consumption so that we can share them with visitors throughout of the year.
A note: the first apples were not so ripe and produced sour apple rings – which were good, but different from the sweet apple rings later in the season. We tried pear, however these dried rather differently – rather thin and lumpy – Rosie & Esther’s Pear Chutney was a far better use for them.
* 4 (1 ounce) squares semisweet chocolate, chopped (I USE ¾ BAG OF TRADER JOE’S CHOC. CHIPS… WITHOUT MEASURING…. DOESN’T SEEM TO MATTER MUCH.
* 1/2 cup butter
* 3/4 cup white sugar (less is more. not too sweet, brings out choc.)
* 1/2 cup cocoa powder (plus a little bit more to coat the pan with)
* 3 eggs, beaten (by hand)
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
DIRECTIONS
1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C). Grease an 8 inch round cake pan, and dust with cocoa powder. (JUST SPRINKLE COCOA POWDER OVER A GREASED CAKE PAN WITH A SPOON. THEN TILT IT BACK AND FORTH SHAKING IT AROUND, TILL THE COCOA COVERS BOTTOM AND SIDES WELL.)
2. In the top of a double boiler over lightly simmering water, melt chocolate and butter. Remove from heat, and vigorously stir in sugar, cocoa powder, eggs, and vanilla. Pour into prepared pan.
3. Bake in preheated oven for 30 minutes. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely. Slices can also be reheated for 20 to 30 seconds in the microwave before serving.
IMPOSSIBLE TO GO WRONG. NOTHING MUCH IN IT. NOTHING MUCH TO IT. EXCEPT, OF COURSE, HOW FABULOUS IT TASTES.
I watched an interesting documentary recently about a family involved in an eco home project. In order to speed things on a bit when their home was inaccessible because of road conditions, they USED A HELICOPTER TO FLY IN BUILDING MATERIALS.
Did these people genuinely believe that their efforts could in any way be labelled ’sustainable’ when, surrounded by forest, they airlifted wood in to build their home? What did they think this would do to their carbon footprint?
In a similar vein – I listened to a radio program this morning about sustainable travel – in which they skirted round the fundamental problem – if you are travelling by plane, it’s not a sustainable holiday. The man interviewed, who runs a sustainable travel website, recommended that we travel less frequently by plane, and, I quote “we should all start taking less frequent, longer holidays, like we used to” – like who used to? the landed gentry?
And if another person tells me that “using a dish washer actually uses less water than washing by hand” – I will scream (at the sheer horror that so many otherwise intelligent people can be so easily ‘greenwashed’). Do the maths. Do you really use a bath full of water to wash up a cup? What research did the marketing department of said dish washer manufacturer base their claims on? (update: the comparison was with people who wash dishes under a running tap). Why would you accept this without question – unless you were looking for a convenient excuse not to modify your lifestyle in the face of global warming.
We’re going to hell in a hand-card, and it’s our own stupidity wheeling us along.
This morning I was thinking about chimneys. A strange thing to wake up wondering about but bear with me. We had our chimneys swept by Vaclav Havel on Thursday (namesake of the first president of the post-communist Czech Republic). It was all very high tech – surprisingly – we had been expecting Dick Van Dyke I suppose. The 21 century equivalent brings with him a camera and lights in order to film the chimney lining to check that it’s safe.
After our chimney fire two weeks ago, I cleaned the sand out of the chimney (filled to extinguish the blaze). With the sand came out big clumps of carbon, solid like soft charcoal. When I had looked into the burning chimney, the walls glowed like a furnace – it was this charcoal like lining which was burning.
Carbon sequestration has been happening in our chimneys for the last 20 years (Vaclav Havel said they had not been cleaned for a considerable length of time.) Currently the science exists to take the harmful carbon out of the pollution from coal burning power stations. The problem has been the cost of including such technology – and seeing as global warming has until recently been intangible – then there is no direct financial benefit to energy companies to include the technology.
Though there is a logical argument for us burning wood as a source of heat – it is a renewable source of energy as the wood is taken from a sustainable source – I wonder how far down the line is development of domestic sequestration.
On Sunday we learnt an important lesson – why chimneys should be regularly cleaned. The lesson was, of course, too late – as we had by then already set our house on fire. To our rescue came Chynov fire brigade. With great efficiency they poured sand down our chimney and put out the blaze. When the police arrived, I told the officer that the firemen were on the roof, putting songs in the chimney. My Czech is not good.
This is the second time I have been rescued by Czechs filling something up with sand.
When he was a child, my grandfather watched as Exeter was set ablaze during the second world war. As he watched it burn, a bomb fell a few feet away from him. He felt the ground heave up… but the bomb did not detonate. When the bomb disposal officer arrived, my grandfather followed him to the crater where there lay a 1100 pound bomb ‘as big as a dinner table’. When they opened it they discovered a note written in pencil saying ‘to the people of England from the people of Czechoslovakia, this bomb will not explode’. The bomb had been filled with sand.
When we got married in Prague (31st May 2005, Old Town Hall), I tried to tell the story about the bomb to the official conducting the service… a strange feeling – if it had not been for the bravery of unknown saboteurs…
So… we’re just sitting down after the fire crew have left.
To dry the plaster going on in the new kitchen/dining room we lit the old boiler fire. A while later the chimney set light.
Ironically, sweeping the chimneys was something that I had asked our previous builder to arrange for us before we came out to visit Novy Mlyn before we lived over here. It didn’t happen. I didn’t think about it… one of those someday soon jobs.
So, when I went up to the attic to see what was going on there were flames coming out of the access hatch. Mike et al put out the old boiler fire & Zdenek called the fire service, then we used wet blankets to block up all the access points we could find for air to get into the chimney.
When the fire service arrived they carried sand up onto the roof and threw it down the chimney. It did cross my mind that we could walk away from the house at that point. Leave Novy Mlyn and the problems there contained and simply walk away into the forest – it was strangely calming. The fire is now out, but the fire inspector said that the chimneys hadn’t been cleaned for many, many years. We need to get them all swept and inspected before we can light the fires again. There is a risk of reignition over the next two or three days because of the heat still in the chimney.
Our gorgeous cat, George, has gone missing. He ran away while we were away in the UK. We are all very sad. Pavouk, in particular, is pining. We are devastated at the loss of such a fine character.
Here he is getting in on the act while I try to pitch learnitlists.com:
So that our lives are not completely dominated by computer work (such as learnit), all four of us normally go for a walk together in the forest every evening:
Once, while out walking, both cats decided to explore the hunter’s cabin (essentially a shed on long sticks with a window). I was lucky to get a picture of George actually looking out of the window of the cabin. What a fine hunter he is: Sell photos on photrade | By EveryDayEnglish
I have put up posters in the local villages, but people don’t seem to care very much about cats here. Our last builder expressed surprise when we told him we planned to bring our cats over from the UK – “Why don’t you just get them put down and get new ones here”. The single most unappealing Czech habit I have come across is that if a cat is run down on the road, nobody will stop to remove the body.
I really, really hope that George found new owners, and more than that, I hope he will find his way home some time. But the snow will be here soon – he’s running out of time.
We thought we had it sorted… after a ridiculously long process we had agreed the mortgage and drawn down the first payment to cover the cost of the roof and rewiring… until a call today.
Apparently, we have some buildings missing. Because of this, the Czech government register of property will not enter our mortgage on the property register. Potentially this means that we are not meeting our side of the mortgage agreement. And this means… that the bank could ask for it back. After all, banks need money at the moment.
We’re totally stressed out at the moment, with George missing and the house in such a mess. Extra pressure is the last thing we need. With my doom-mongering head on, I think they’ll take the house off us and sell it.
The missing buildings have been gone for years – but somebody should have let officials know about it. Let’s hope we can get this sorted out, and quickly – unlike the water permit, which took 18 months. My positive motivation is nearly completely destroyed.
