Pork and Nuts

I could forage all day long and not keep up with the fruit, nuts and fungi about at the moment. While Morris the fox terrier sniffed out rabbits this morning in Lakes Field, I picked a carrier bag full of crab apples for our next apple pressing day and later picked up a few sweet chestnuts, which I'll heat up on the simmering plate of the AGA. The apple trees are still laden and if I pick carefully, there's still a few blackberries to be had.





 The peppers in the greenhouse are finally ripening, so I used one of them together with some of the walnuts I picked at the weekend to make this sauce for pasta.

Last week we took the three Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs (Dave, Clegg and Harriet) to be slaughtered.  They'd spent summer in the grass paddock digging holes, wallowing and generally lying about but at six months old were ready to go.  I do miss going into the field with their food; at the sound of the latch being lifted on the gate, three heads would go up and as soon as they saw the bucket of food they'd run over at quite a speed with their ears flapping.
But the point of keeping pigs every summer is so that I know the provenance of my meat and yesterday I collected seven boxes of pork from the butcher. Three of those boxes were filled with sausages and the other four were joints of various shapes and sizes. The remaining pig (and I know it's Dave because he was the biggest) is being cured so in a couple of weeks I'll have bacon and ham to collect. Not surprisingly, we had sausages for supper last night and very good they were too.