A Year In Redwood

What a week it has been!  I haven’t been in a position to write anything for what seems like ages.  We’ve had visitors every night for the past 10 days.

Last night was our first night on our own … and I have to admit to having been completely whacked, and unable to even think straight.  While it was all exhausting it was fun to have people around, especially when one visitor – only 4 years old – was renaming people… Alfie was quite chuffed to be known as Farmer Alfie, and his cousin, Mary, who was also visiting became Mad Mary!

It is on weeks like last week that cooking for gangs of people becomes a challenge, when we are so used to cooking for just the two of us, but we did have some lovely meals.  I tried out the Beef Malay dish that Des Cahill had got his 5 stars for on The Restaurant and I think I could easily have gotten 5 stars for it too!  It is delicious.  I had tried it some months back, but for whatever reason it was even nicer this time around… definitely one to bring out more often.  Alfie’s pizzas were a big hit one evening, and then on Saturday night he did leg of lamb on the bbq.  Don’t think I’ve mentioned before but Alfie is hugely into barbecueing!  Any night of the year, Alfie will bbq.  Last year we had a moment of madness and invested in a Big Green Egg which is an enclosed bbq  – so now Alfie is thinking of trying to cook the turkey on it for Christmas!  Might be useful to do that though as we do generally have a power cut on Christmas Day.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have any of our own pork to tempt visitors with but hopefully by the end of this week we will have .  Sales are going well – word is obviously spreading that free-range pork is really nice!  So we’ve had lots of new customers come on board.  We know they won’t be disappointed. Hardly a week passes now that there isn’t an article in some newspaper or other about the benefits of free-range.

Did manage to get out on probably the only dry day this week to take some photos, so must upload them.

This week is going to be equally as busy but at a completely different level!  I am off to Dublin for the next instalment of the course at National College of Ireland, and am also going to a couple of other business meetings.  So the focus this week will most definitely be business, job hunting, getting a business plan together and networking.

I will share with you one benefit of not working…. it means I can listen to Marty Whelen on Lyric FM … now that he is on daily from 12 – 2 p.m.  This is not something I would have been able to do if I was working!!!  Marty is talking and playing away in the background as I write, so you see there is a silver lining!