Rendering Fat

This is what Polly's been doing all week: cutting a block of Stilton into bits for the freezer (see www. stiltoncheese.com), making wonderful soups, and rendering the fat from the ham joint from Christmas.

For the latter, all I did was cut it off, put it in a meat tray in the Rayburn with the door open for about three days (bottom oven is too cool and this heats the kitchen perfectly) and keep pouring off the fat that comes off it. It is beautiful and cream coloured, and I might use it for a high cholesterol goulash or three, or I might just heat it up and mix it with bird food for the little boydies. Today my best pic would have been of a robin on a margerine tub of fat and seeds that I made months ago and just took out of the freezer to make room for all the goodies.

BUT ... the crispy bits that are left are probably the most delicious things I will ever eat. They are just so sweet! They are beyond tasty. And I am wanting to eat them with white bread. How amazing is that: fat and white bread! Luckily I have some white bread in the house for about the first time this year. It is so cold that surely we are allowed. It's surely okay to eat fat if you saw your own logs.

It is so cold but so unbelievably beautiful out there tonight. I had to put out all the rubbish which means a bit of a trek with the various receptacles, but I didn't need a torch as the moon is now nearly a half moon but still so bright.

I geared up for the rubbish treks in all my scarecrow country and lower-class ski clothes. But although it was minus 4, there was no wind chill or damp chill factor, and it was such magic out there I didn't want to come in. I wanted to go for a moonlit walk, but wouldn't really dare on my own. I bet I would see foxes and badgers, deer and rabbits and goodness knows what else: hear the owls probably, but here I am typing this in my big hot coat while the central heating creaks and groans and the beauty is all outside, not in.

The stars are surely the best in January, as in Laurie Lee's Winter Poem (The stars have talons / there is hunger in the mouth of vole and badger / Silver agonies of breath in the nostril of the fox / Ice on the rabbit’s paw). He was the first poet I ever bought. Not a bad choice for a teenager.

Oh I LOVE January. New beginnings.



Orion: the first constellation I ever learnt when I was a wee girl in Scotland.