7th September

Continuing on the theme of daily achievements I can report that I....

Baked an excellent loaf of sourdough bread without recourse to measurement tools.

Finished a superb bottle of Damson Wine so delicious that it made me want to cry.

Listened to a potential Ted Talk from my nearly eight-year-old granddaughter on the pointlessness of homework for primary school children. It was such a well thought out argument that I couldn't help but wonder if she had been listening to the same programme on Radio 4 that I'd caught a couple of days ago. Impossible, as she'd have been in school at the time. Bolstered by her argument, we polished off homework in about seven minutes flat then moved straight on to Horrid Henry on Netflix. She was middling on the spelling of 'sequencing' but she convinced me that it wasn't crucial.

Made (for the third time) that delicious tomato salad so good that I am duty bound to share the recipe. It's from The Guardian courtesy of Anna Jones.

This is my take.

Some tomatoes. Preferably home-grown, include a green one.

Put in a colander, sprinkle with sea salt and let liquid seep into a bowl. Discard liquid.

Add finely chopped chilli. Mine are home-grown. Yum!

Add two cloves of amazingly fresh and deliciously juicy home grown garlic cloves. Yum!

Season with black pepper. Add one part red wine or balsamic vinegar. (I'd run out so used cider vinegar - was OK.) Then three parts olive oil. Look, I know this is boastful but I used home-grown, home-pressed olive oil straight from Sicily. A gift from Hannah's boyfriend and probably the culinary highlight of my entire life so far.

Believe me, this is undoubtedly the best tomato salad ever.

Sourdough Day 4

This picture shows the little pinholes that indicate that airborne yeast spores are active in my starter. Les reckons I will be able to bake my first loaves on Sunday.

The chickens finished the last of the Les disasters today. Several days old now, I had to soak them in water to make them crumble. Little feathered friends loved it and it must have put new vigour into the seven new hens for two of them escaped when I was cleaning out their house. It was the sawdust spooked them. Happy as clams as I scraped and brushed but when I started throwing fresh sawdust down two of them panicked and soared over the fence and into what we like to call an orchard (three scabby apple trees and a bunch of rushes) and it was some job catching them. To make matters worse I was breaking the law for had a Defra spy been driving past we would have been in obvious breach of the keeping chickens away from wild birds rule. Or would we? What wild bird would ever go near a crazy woman chasing two chickens around a so-called orchard? Not even Bert's two tame robins, the ones that are really pissed that he has run out of mealworms, would have come near me and my henny friends.

Anyway, I caught the buggers and was very pleased with myself that I managed it, for this is how my life has narrowed - the big achievement of the day catching escaped poultry. That,  and cleaning out two hen houses and starting a damson wine.