Lintels

I haven’t taken the camera out to the site recently (which is laughable, considering we live next door to it) so I’m going to go back a bit in the building history, to aspects I haven’t touched on yet.

We used grader blades for our window lintels. Grader blades are fairly plentiful out here and we’ve been collecting them for a while. They’re ridiculously solid (and equally heavy) and make great supports above the windows.

These photos are of a couple of separate windows and show the different stages. Note that the chicken wire is placed once the temporary frames are removed but before the permanent frames are in place in order to make plastering easier. (The plaster pictured is just the rough coat, to protect the bags.)

temporary frame, grader blades in place

view from outside

bags overtop the lintel

permanent frames in place, rough plaster started

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Green Tomato Cake

We had our killing frost late last week. Unfortunately I didn’t see it coming, and the forecast hadn’t predicted it, so we didn’t manage to get everything out before it hit. The next day was a mad scramble to salvage what I could.

I was able to save quite a lot of leeks, I stewed the ripe tomatoes that were damaged, and I made cake with the green tomatoes. A couple of squash were unaffected, along with my onions, corn, and beets but it’s all been harvested now.

I’m not a big chutney or chow chow fan (other than the fact that it conjures wonderful childhood memories) so I was quite happy to find another use for my frost bitten green tomatoes. I don’t normally follow a recipe but having never made green tomato cake before I did find and use one, as a guide anyway, and I thought I’d share it in case anyone else is faced with the same dilemma.

Green Tomato Cake Recipe

looks, ummm, interesting

I need a bigger bowl

1 to eat & 3 to freeze

cream cheese icing

 

 

 

 

 

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