Any Way You Slice It

Much of my labour this week seems to have been cutting things up into smaller bits, whether it be turnips, trees or pigs.

It was my turn to make lunch on Wednesday, 32 mouths to feed. Normally cooks have free reign for lunches - anything as long as it’s vegetarian - but Wednesday lunch is always soup. I was determined to use the turnips from the garden. They had been sown by a turnip-loving volunteer who has since left and sadly he seems to have been the only one who actually likes them.  Nevertheless, they had been grown in our vegetable garden and they were not going to become pigfeed if I had anything to do with it. 

So after breakfast I was out in the bright day digging half of the golden spheres up from the soggy clay with a fork. Once I had snipped the tops off I was left with a trayful which turned out to weigh five and a half pounds. Then began a good hour of peeling them all including the little ones which are apt to ping out of your grasp across the kitchen, and dicing them all, resulting in four pounds of usable turnip. After frying them in a massive saucepan with diced potato and onion, adding sixteen pints of boiling stock and leftover veg from yesterday, letting it simmer for an hour, blending it up fine with the electric whizzer and adding cream, a very fine lunch was served up to several compliments and not a single turnip-related complaint.

The pigs have an outdoor pen near the chicken enclosure, and whilst living there a previous sow had killed the two young trees by ring-barking, i.e. gnawing the bark off all the way round at the base. One of them had fallen part-way over into the fence. As the only resident chainsaw operator it was my job to get rid of them. This meant felling the free-standing one, and sawing both of them up into chunks for firewood. The long twiggy branches Stephan* and I threw onto a nearby pile of debris for burning, the rest we stacked in a neat pile. Then it was onto the huge felled oak for further dismembering, involving me standing on it five feet up and sawing protruberances off below me. No wonder my limbs ache today.

Goodbye bull! He gives Farmer Arthur a friendly life-threatening nudge.

I drove the pick-up to the abattoir on Monday morning, reversed it up to a high-up door which slid open, out of which were thrown six half-pigs. Thankfully they were no longer alive. They had been split down the centre from head to tail, although the heads had been left whole and attached to one side. That morning was spent in Pilsdon’s butchery room under Farmer Arthur**’s tutelage, using an array of sharp knives, hacksaws and cleavers to convert the carcases into a variety of joints for the freezer. Each joint, whether leg, belly, shoulder or tenderloin, was bagged and weighed with the date, weight and type of joint scribbled on each bag. Chops were simply counted into a bag, ten each. Future cooks can then assess how many joints to use (normally one or two) to feed the hungry rabble for one meal.

So give me a power-saw, a hacksaw or a kitchen knife, and I’m your man for dicing and slicing.

* Not his real name.

** Also not his real name. But he has been a livestock farmer most of his long life.