We are going on holiday on Saturday, and I am already in getting ready to go away, pre-holiday mode. This does not entail last minute leg waxing or purchases of beachwear, because we are going to Northumberland, and visits to beaches will be limited to walking along them while wearing several layers of clothing. No, while we used to put the cats in kennels (they didn't much like it, and now they're old we don't even have them vaccinated every year, which boarding catteries insist upon and the vets say is not especially good for elderly animals), you can't put chickens into a chickenery, not to mention the plants in pots. There are a lot of those, and though they won't need as much watering in mid-September as they do in the summer, they still won't last for a week by themselves.
So we have got housesitters booked. A nice, sensible couple from Royston will arrive at around ten on Saturday morning, and live in our house while we're staying in an apartment in Alnwick. In fact, we are paying more for them to live in our house than it's costing us to rent our holiday accommodation. Besides feeding and watering the pets and pots, they will need to cook in our kitchen and bathe in our bathroom, which means the house needs to be clean and tidy before the weekend. This morning I got three quarters of the way round the kitchen before I had to go out. I didn't want to leave all the cleaning until the end of the week, in case it took longer than I was expecting, leaving us washing, wiping and vacuuming late into the evening in an increasingly exhausted and fractious mood, which is not the best way to start a holiday.
The housesitters need space in the fridge to store some food, so I thought I'd better do something with some of the accumulated collection of eggs. The Systems Administrator is still not all that keen on eggs for lunch, since the gastric flu, which means I haven't been eating them either, since my insisting on an omelette while the SA had a piece of ham or something is just too anti-social, though I did have a sort of frittata with eggs and leftover sweetcorn on Monday night when the SA was out. I've given away about as many boxes as seemed polite, without deluging anyone with so many eggs that they began to feel a sense of obligation leading to oppression. This morning there were still at least six boxes in the fridge, taking up rather a lot of space, and holding forth the prospect of our returning from Alnwick to a fridge full of ageing eggs. The SA has talked in the past of pickling them, but not actually got round to it.
I looked up pickled eggs in the Good Housekeeping Book of Preserving and it seemed very straightforward. Hard boil eggs. Shell them. Cover them with spiced vinegar. Job done, and the eggs will be ready after six weeks. The SA had got as far as buying some ready made pickling vinegar, possibly with pickled beetroot in mind, which saved me the task of boiling plain malt with spice and cooling it again, and had kept a spare vinegar jar complete with lid. The pickled eggs accounted for a dozen, so that was two boxes gone, and I gave a box to my mother. I want some yolks for ice cream, which will use another three. The eggs now left in the fridge are fairly new so will still be good to use when we get back, but if I can't persuade the SA to start eating them again then I'm going to be doing a mammoth amount of baking. If you are going to keep five hens you do really need to like eggs. We will urge the housesitters to eat as many as they possibly can.
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