What Preps are you doing this week? Part 9

[GillyBee]

Changing the suibject to give Jansman a break. I think he will approve of my latest prep. I have been learning how to turn belly pork into streaky bacon and discovering how disgustingy easy it is to make something tasty and which will keep well. I have bought a copy of the River Cottage Curing and Smoking book but had a thorough Google as well so am using a little curing salt regardless of the River Cottage doubts about the stuff.
The next challenge is to figure out smoked bacon which will involve a little DIY. The simplest option is simply to hang the meat over our firepit as the (wood) fire dies down but it would need watching to keep any hungry pests away. I think a simple cold smoker would get me a better result.

[diamond lil]

Well you're a lot more useful than I am. My preps lately seem to consist of eating chocolate, roulade, and cheesecake. I suppose it comes under the heading of storing.
Body fat.

[Yorkshire Andy]

Just popped down the shed and put the heater on for an hour on low to stop everything freezing in there and boost up the batteries the solar is doing sod all at the moment

[Arzosah]

One vaguely useful prep I did yesterday was to cut a spare piece of pipe insulation up to make it useful for a bigger pipe than it was supposed to use. I've used plastic string as a quick and dirty way of tying it to the condensate pipe that comes out of my boiler - we had a cold spell of about 10 days a few years ago, and when my boiler broke down, the plumber that came out told me he'd been going from house to house the whole day, thawing condensate pipes. I'm not going to go through that again!

Otherwise, I'm creating space in the house, to help with air circulation especially when its damp: not just recycling, but shredding, waste textiles, and charity shop stuff. Makes things nicer too. Recycled electrics can now be put into a plastic bag by our normal wheelie bin rubbish, so I can do that later this week. Haven't been able to do any pruning in the garden in this weather, of course that's the only bad thing. The rest, pretty good.

[Yorkshire Andy]

One vaguely useful prep I did yesterday was to cut a spare piece of pipe insulation up to make it useful for a bigger pipe than it was supposed to use. I've used plastic string as a quick and dirty way of tying it to the condensate pipe that comes out of my boiler - we had a cold spell of about 10 days a few years ago, and when my boiler broke down, the plumber that came out told me he'd been going from house to house the whole day, thawing condensate pipes. I'm not going to go through that again!

Otherwise, I'm creating space in the house, to help with air circulation especially when its damp: not just recycling, but shredding, waste textiles, and charity shop stuff. Makes things nicer too. Recycled electrics can now be put into a plastic bag by our normal wheelie bin rubbish, so I can do that later this week. Haven't been able to do any pruning in the garden in this weather, of course that's the only bad thing. The rest, pretty good.

If it freezes a trickle of hot water over the outer pipe usually does the trick

[Arzosah]

One vaguely useful prep I did yesterday was to cut a spare piece of pipe insulation up to make it useful for a bigger pipe than it was supposed to use. I've used plastic string as a quick and dirty way of tying it to the condensate pipe that comes out of my boiler - we had a cold spell of about 10 days a few years ago, and when my boiler broke down, the plumber that came out told me he'd been going from house to house the whole day, thawing condensate pipes. I'm not going to go through that again!

If it freezes a trickle of hot water over the outer pipe usually does the trick

I should have added that that's exactly what my plumber did with some warm water.

There's a lot of laying snow out there, 2", and the foxes' winter coats look lovely.

[jansman]

Is everyone managing to keep warm?

[Yorkshire Andy]

Is everyone managing to keep warm?

Only minus two here but it feels much colder out the big down coat is out

[grenfell]

A friend came round on Saturday , "bloody freezing out there" he said and rushed to the woodburner to find it not lit. So he went over to the radiator "the heating's not on "he said. "No " said I . Truth is that with the insulation and south facing windows the house was still around 18degrees even though it was around freezing outside.

[Arzosah]

I'm plenty warm enough, with the heat on, except that my feet are freezing. I'm bringing a little bedside rug to put my feet on today. I've got some thermal underlay to put down, but I'm probably catsitting in January, and I'm not keen on the idea of all that uproar before Christmas anyway. I might watch tv while marching or something