when the going gets tough

The tough get … cooking.

perlmonger has been up to his eyes today configuring servers; that’s not something that I can really help with, so I had a cooking frenzy.

I made

• Some soda bread for lunch - my Irish grandmother made a loaf of this every morning, and it’s delicious. I actually use a mix of plain flour, strong white, and wholemeal. Fab - I ate mine with some smoked cheddar, and red pepper relish. And now I want to make chutney.
• I cooked up half a huge gammon - I buy these from Costco, at about £18 a time. Half went in the freezer uncooked, and the other half was cooked up in my splendid new cast iron cauldron (conveyed from Forn Parts by that nice ccomley, cos they’re much cheaper there). It’s so huge we had to rearrange the kitchen to find somewhere to keep it, and I can’t actually lift it when it’s full, but ne’er mind - it is a splendid cooking recepticule. This (half) gammon was cooked with a quartered onion, two star anise and a slosh of maple syrup, and very nice it is too.
• Next up was a piece of top side, supplied by that nice Mr Rawlings. It was too small to roast, so I did it innapot, very slowly, and it’s nearly ready to eat. I put the potatoes in with it today for a change.
• Then a huge pot of soup was constructed for next week’s lunches - I chopped carrots, celery, leeks and courgettes, sweated them down in some olive oil, and added lentils and a carton of passata (something no larder should be without). Once the gammon was cooked, I stole most of the ham stock and bunged it in the soup pan. It will be gorgeous. I hope.

P is now requesting bananananana muffins, but I think I might be too tired. I’ll see.

[edit] Oh yes - I took the half of fresh pineapple that was left, liquidised it, and cooked it down with a little sugar and some cornflour. It’s gone in the freezer as a cheesecake topping or summat similar.

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a spectacular badger moment

In the mornings, I’m currently drinking Chai, made by dunking a teabag in a mug. perlmonger is far more pernickity, and mixes his own blends in an ad hoc sort of way, and brews the resulting beverage in a Bodum tea pot.

I went down just now to fetch our second cups. I filled the kettle, put the tea bag in my mug. Then thought “that’s odd - the kettle’s boiling, and my mug is full of tea and a teabag”. Perhaps I made it with cold water - no, water was hot.

I transpired that I had poured tea from Pete’s pot into my mug on top of the chai teabag, giving me a truly revolting mix of chai and jasmine.

It bodes …

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don’t have a cow, man

Yesterday afternoon, we trundled up to Telford, to collect half a cow from the inestimable Steve Rawlings. This is rather less meat than it sounds, as Dexters are small beasts anyway, and this was a small beast in Dexter terms too. On the way home, we stopped at a farm shop somewhere in Shropshire for some fruit and veg, and then at Ludlow Food Centre, which was very impressive, and not as expensive as it looked.

We bought a variety of sossidge (as we generally do when we spot new ones), a small shoulder of pork for perlmonger’s birthday tea (a rather excellent looking pork goulash seen on The Boy Oliver’s prog the other day), a red cabbage to accompany it, and an astonishingly looking elderflower and lime cheesecake*, just because we could, really.

Today we have to do the “up to the elbows in gore” thing and get this cow bagged up for the freezer. We also have to deliver some Parish Plan questionnaires for data entry to two different households, go on the village walk this afternoon, and cook this goulash, which I have just discovered requires three hours in the oven after a load of prepping. And there’s the red cabbage to do.

I’d better get on, I guess. Still, there is a bottle of Pelorus to look forward to after all our labours :)

* This was very disappointing, as it happens

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