Yet again, it's been a busy week,along with being the start of Lent.  Last year, for various very good reasons, Lent was a complete disaster but this year I thought I'd try again.  So I'm doing 40acts - a slightly different approach.   Rather than the traditional "giving something up" the idea is to take a more positive approach and it gently invites you each day via email to undertake a positive step. Today's was about moving outside our normal social sphere, and trying to engage or connect with someone from a background or culture that you wouldn't normally come across.  As things turned out, this was perfect.  

My friend Caroline, who is a Dog Warden and runs dog training classes does a great deal for local dog charities and of course knows nearly everyone involved in dog rescue and welfare in South Wales.  By a series of chances, she was offered the use of Fonmon Castle, a glorious castle in the Vale of Glamorgan, by Sir Brooke Boothby to use as a venue for a dog related event to raise money for local dog charities.  Caroline contacted me to see if I'd like to be involved and of course I said Yes.  We held the first organising meeting on Saturday, and already a huge amount has been accomplished.  My responsibilities are to act as secretary and minute taker during the meetings, to organise and run the dog show and to provide and run the show's website (with help from Andrew on that). 

From a standing start, we've got a date (Monday 4th June), a venue, a range of events, demonstrations, displays, two dog shows, sponsors, a gundog display, huskies, bouncy castles, a show raffle with great prizes, face painting and even paddling pools for dogs! The show will principally benefit three local dog charities - Friends of Cardiff Dogs Home, Hope Rescue and Four Paws Animal Rescue.  Hope and Four Paws take a lot of pound dogs from local authorities.   I've been charging around doing various elements and this morning, we were able to go over to the castle for a site meeting and to meet Sir Brooke to go over a few site details.  Unfortunately I had to drive over there via a great deal of rush hour traffic, but it was easy to find, being very close to the airport.  The castle is beautiful (see their website here) with lovely gardens and grounds.  Caroline took me down to the castle to meet the office manager and Sir Brooke joined us before we walked back to the group and did our site visit.  This went very well, and helped to clarify our thinking about the site layout, parking arrangements and so on.  I don't know many baronets so this was a perfect example of meeting someone from a social background that's outside my everyday experience.  Mainly, like the rest of the group, I was highly impressed by Sir Brooke's generosity in allowing the use of his land for the event, and even more so by his very positive, can-do approach - really helpful.  The site is used each year to host a variety of other events such as the Vale of Glamorgan show, polo matches and weddings so the estate team are well used to hosting this sort of thing, but even so we all found the morning a very positive experience.  

Firstly, my apologies for the hiatus in posting.  Things have been busy and in particular I've been involved with Cariad, a partnership of twenty eight different animal welfare organisations in Wales, who are campaigning against puppy farming.  WG published the second draft of their dog breeding regulations so it was essential we got together to do a detailed, authoritative response that covered all the areas of concern.  We managed to do most of this by email but had a long meeting in Carmarthen just over a week ago to thrash out this and a few more issues - it was very productive and also a pleasure to meet up with people who I'd previously just known as a voice on the phone or via email.    I'm delighted with what we've finally produced - I think we've managed to capture most of the key issues, though of course it remains to be seen how many of these will make it into the new Regs.  Cariad have also been busy with another huge planning application for a puppy farm in Carmarthenshire.  The planning Committee are having a site visit on Tuesday, so Linda, the founder of Cariad, hit on the excellent idea of sending Valentine's cards to the Planning Committee encouraging them to "have a heart" and say no to the proposal.  I made and sent four cards (pictured above). 

On Tuesday, I went over to Helen's for a sausage making party.  Helen had two pigs back from the slaughterhouse that she wanted to have a go at turning into sausages and bacon - so I went over to lend a hand.  We rubbed some cure into some bacon joints - these will now cure for around a week to ten days in a cold, dry environment.  We also made some sausages - my first time doing this and it was fun.  Took some large joints, and separately removed  the skin, the fat and then carefully chopped the meat into dice.  We massively overestimated this bit of the work and even with three of us this took ages.  We ended up with about fifteen pounds of meat.  

Some of the cubes were put into the freezer for casseroles and then we minced a mix of the fat and lean twice to produce a nice fine texture through an old fashioned heavy metal hand mincer.  This stage could probably be done in a food processor but again it's all about experimentation.  Once we had the minced pork, then we added water, cereal and seasonings, mixed again and test fried a couple of small patties. They were delicious - a lovely meaty taste.  So then it was time to have a go at the sausage machine.  The casings were carefully soaked and rinsed to remove any salt then threaded onto the extrusion bit of the machine  - this bit was exactly like applying a condom! Then the sausage machine handle was gently pushed and the auger pushed the mix out into the tube then through the casing.  I suspect it's definitely a case of practice makes perfect, but I'm delighted to have done it, we had a wonderful afternoon and I came home with a bag of sausages for us to try out, as well as some lovely meaty bones for the dogs.   I can definitely see how it could be a very addictive thing to start doing - you have total control over the ingredients for one thing, and you can do almost endless variations on flavour, size and texture. Picture below shows the meat before we started.  

Today, we had James and Alex over for the Greyhound Welfare dog show.  It was Boola's twelfth birthday on Thursday and he enjoyed celebrating by spending time with his favourite small boys and meeting lots of other lovely dogs.  James is now an old hand at these events and Alex had expressed an interest in coming along.  It was decided that he is now old enough to have a night away so he came along too, with the idea of starting at a nice small show by going in the ring with James.  The plan worked well and Alex ended up coming home with a rosette in his own right (2nd in Best Veteran) and James picked up three - 1st in Best Child Handler, 2nd in Best Hound/GunDog and 2nd in Best Matched Pair - which involved his jester costume and Boola's matching jester outfit which I made last year.  The show was quiet since of course it clashed with the Wales match (at home to Scotland) but again, for Alex's first outing that wasn't a bad thing.  Alex has said that he'd love to go to some more later in the year.  Boys then came home and had a quick chat with parents and grandparents.  We had some chicken followed by Boola's birthday cake and the boys watched a bit of TV before heading up for bed.  Both were absolutely shattered and I suspect will sleep well tonight.  Tomorrow Claire is coming over to collect them and to stay for lunch, and will be bringing their older brother Thomas who's been away at a Scout camp. So we're looking forward to a good family day tomorrow.  Some pics attached from the show.