Tag Archives: cookery

The Brain Cells v Old Age

Ham, cheese, mushroom, spring onions

Yesterday, whilst writing the blog post, I had three ideas for prose sections to haibun/tanka prose poems. In my mind, though I am probably wrong, the two things are interchangeable.

Anyway, with three ideas in my head, I thrashed along through the blog post, added photos and tags and a title and sent it on its way into a world of pixels.

At that point I realised I had only two ideas in my head so I immediately set to, wrote one and hoped the elusive third idea would come back. It didn’t. Instead, I forgot the other one.

Three ideas. Two forgotten. One remembered. I really must remember to use a notebook.

And so I made my way to the kitchen. I did not, if I’m honest, fancy the cleaning, so I didn’t do a soda bread, just a couple of quiches, a rice pudding and yellow split pea soup. The quiches involved ready-made cases (mine always do) so it was just a case of filling them. One is Stilton and Leek. We had that last time too, but we do have quite a lot of Stilton left. The other is ham, mushroom, cheese and spring onion. As regular readers will by now have realised, it was filled with what I had knocking round in the fridge.

Stilton and Leek. Stilton does not photograph well.

The yellow split pea soup is ana amalgamation of several recipes as there are some very strange recipes out there for what is essentially a bowl of cheap peasant food. Mine has celery, carrot, sweet potato and spring onion in it along with the peas. It would have been carrot, onion and celery, but it’s another of those leftovers things. I could have started a new carrot and a new onion, but I have wilting spring onions and half a sweet potato left so what am I to do?

Later, I will move on from this very plain version to something slightly more fancy. Perhaps. If it’s OK I will stick with this version. It takes a bit longer than usual because the peas need around an hour to cook down, so I will have to see if it is worth it. Otherwise it’s back to red lentils.

Latest news – the timer went off and I got to the kitchen just in time. The soup was very thick and the water was gone, but I got to it just before it started to burn. I have mashed it so far and it seems OK, though will probably need diluting as it’s more of a thin porridge than a thick soup. I don’t think it needs the hand blender as that will take the texture and the orange speckles out of it.

The rice pudding meanwhile, a slightly fine-tuned recipe, is done too. All that needs doing now is for Julia to come home, congratulate me on my industry, compliment me on my cooking skills and enjoy a yellow pea soup lunch. Tonight we have the pasta bake and tomorrow we start the quiche and salad lunches.

Veg for the soup

The only fly in the ointment (an expression which, Wikipedia tells me, comes from the Bible) is hat I have to finish cleaning the kitchen before she gets back. Then I have to do some of the actual writing I was planning. So far I have written what is going to be the second post of the day (I will have to do something else for tomorrow) and one part of a poem. It’s a start, but a poor one, and I need to do better.

Yellow split pea soup, or porridge. It needs more water.

A Hard Week for Me, a Harder Week for Julia

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Julia – looking sophisticated in Bakewell

It’s not been a productive week. I’m finding it surprisingly hard to concentrate while Julia is recovering. It’s not a quick or easy process. Each morning I have to check the wound in her neck. It’s sore and swollen and tends to weep a bit, so it’s always difficult to tell if there’s a problem. On Tuesday shr had to go back to hospital and have it looked at.

The fresh bleeding that had started overnight was judged to be harmless after they had cleaned her up and prodded her about. She emerged from hospital after six hours, with clean dressings, another course of antibiotics and the promise of seeing a specialist to do more checking on the wound. It clearly isn’t healing. She is in pain, can’t sleep and is very tired all the time. She is also worried. So am I. It would be a lot easier if it was something I could bind or push or pitch, but it isn’t and all I can do is wait and worry about my inability to help.

Julia with Peter rabbit

I am doing my best to be upbeat, encouraging and to feed her lots of spinach. That’s all I can think of. Fortunately we have a bag of frozen spinach which I bought by accident. I thought it was fresh and would last us a week. It turned out to be frozen and has lasted us a month as I’ve gradually worked it into stews and curries.

We had Cajun inspired rice tonight. Rice is good because people with a three inch gash across their neck don’t enjoy too much chewing. Actually, due to a lack of spices it ended up as Cajun uninspired rice. It had sausages and prawns, peppers, peas, onions, mushrooms and tomatoes with garlic, cumin and chilli. It’ll do. I’ve ordered some Cajun seasoning with the grocery delivery and will see what happens next week.

Julia – not looking sophisticated in Bakewell – Coconut macaroons and hilarity in Bakewell

Good intentions, but a bad memory

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When Julia returned home today one of the jobs I told her I had done was “blogging”. I’m not sure it’s actually a job, or that there’s much effort involved. However, on viewing eBay I realised that I hadn’t blogged. I’d sat down at the computer with the intention of blogging but I’d drifted off, checked a few auction results, looked up “cruciverbalism” (another word my spellchecker doesn’t like) (you will have to ask Derrick what it means) and cooked a pan of Italian-style sauce to go with the meatballs tonight.

I’m hoping they are going to be better than last night’s meatballs, which I managed to overcook and douse in quite a dangerous sauce. It was honey, soy and chilli but it became quite clingy after cooking, coated my tongue in burning sugar and then set on the plates. In culinary terms, I have had better nights. It tasted good, but Health and Safety probably wouldn’t have been keen. The meatballs, having been browned, left, then reheated, had a tough coating a and fought back when I tried biting them.

Tonight’s sauce won’t be quite as clingy and will be divided into two parts – one for tonight, one for tomorrow. I will cook the meatballs when we need them.

The other “job” of the day, which I accomplished successfully, was sitting in the back room of a shop drinking tea and talking about the old days. It may not be particularly hard, but you do need certain skills, such as a functioning memory, and broad knowledge of deceased dealers and an infinite capacity for depression and dullness. I score highly on all subjects.

Mainly, however, I must confess to researching bartitsu for a project I am starting. And I ate lentil soup. It was quite good but needs some work. However, it was cheap and, by grating the carrot as advised by Helen (Growing out of Chaos) it became easier, quicker and less dangerous, as my dwindling knife skills are not called into use.

The start of an Italian-style sauce.

The Day Part 2

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Sunset, Codnor, Notts

It has not been a wasted day. I have mustered my rejects from the last round of submissions and have improved several of them. I have identified my new list of targets, including one that has resisted me so far.

In non-poetry matters i have cleared a small patch of desk and finished the first draft of an article on medallions. It’s only for the Numismatic Society but it’s a start.

Julia is at the hairdresser so I am now going to make soup and something for the evening meal. This is a twofold win. First it saves her having to cook and second it means the house smells good when she walks in. With any luck I will remember to tell her that her hair looks nice. I have a terrible record of forgetting that.

All that work and it’s only just mid-day.

Sunset and chimney pots

I made soup (sweet potato and chilli) and a mixed vegetable hash (though it could have been stew or more soup). This raises an interesting point bout my cookery. Change a few ingredients and it becomes something else. For a moment I felt guilty at serving general purpose slop over the years, then I realised that Sunday Lunch, roast pork and sausages with roasted veg are all basically the same thing too – just roasted veg with dead animals. Yes, you need Yorkshire pudding for one, apple sauce for another and different flavours of gravy, but they are all pretty much the same too. Having sorted that out in my mind I no longer feel so bad.

It’s not “chicken liver parfait, with pear chutney, pickled cranberry ketchup, chicken skin & toasted sourdough” as offered by one of our local restaurants, but it ill do. Incidentally, if I could be bothered I would definitely book a meal here – even at £45 per person for three courses it looks good compared to ringing Just Eat and ordering second class food to be delivered lukewarm. I suspect that one of my faults over the years has been that I have settled for second best. I like fried chicken, burgers and generic curry but “pork tenderloin with sticky miso glazed cheek, apple & BBQ hispi cabbage” sounds so much nicer. Maybe I should have valued myself more highly.

(And yes, I did remember to mention that Julia’s hair looked nice.)

Sunset, Langley Mill by-pass

An Unimpressive Monday

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Well, I can’t say I’ve covered myself in glory from a work point of view. It’s past 3pm and I’ve only just remembered to draw the living room curtains (it was still dark when Julia left this morning). I have tinkered with a few poems, completed two (I think) and checked up the recipe for tonight’s meal. Not that it’s much of recipe, I was just checking I had all the bits.

I’m now going to do the washing up to make it look like I’ve done something useful. When I finish I . . .

Oh dear, Julia just came back and I haven’t even washed up. I’d better go and be attentive.

Fortunately she’s in a forgiving mood, so I will make tea and toast some crumpets and be an all round good husband.

Later . . .

The tea and crumpets worked. I then made the baked salmon with rice and vegetables which turned out to be quite pleasant (even though I’m not keen on salmon) and the evening went well.

Overall, the day was not a great success as I didn’t really get enough done. I will do the washing up sooner next week and make a more impressive evening meal – perhaps something with Hasselback potatoes, though they aren’t so impressive now that they are advertising frozen ones on TV.

The trick, if you feel like making them, is to lay the potato between the handles of two wooden spoons so that when you cut down the knife cannot go all the way through.

Not sure what we are having tomorrow, though Julia did suggest that standard vegetable stew would be fine. That’s good, because it’s very simple. I am, in case you are wondering, doing most of the cooking at the moment as Julia had three weeks of it over Christmas because of my incapacity. It’s payback time.

Vegetables – Carsington Water

Kites, Curry and Carrot soup

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I now have all the paperwork assembled for claiming my pension. Now I need to assemble the documents so I can give money to one of my own children. It’s all very vexing. The pension company ws happy to take my money and hang on to it, why do they suddenly need to know who I am? As for the “money laundering” regulations, I’m sure they would all melt away if solicitors were not able to charge for doing then checks. They would suddenly remember that the law relating to gifts isn’t quite clear and may not apply.

To restore some calm to my life I have been cooking. I dismembered a parsnip of considerable size, chopped some carrots, softened an onion, added lentils, garlic, stock cube, water and boiled it up. It is now blended and waiting to be eaten for tea tonight with crusty rolls and mackerel pate (Julia is buying the rolls and I will make the pate later). I think it is quite tasty but it’s difficult to tell because I’m also cooking a curry for tomorrow and I tasted that before the soup. Schoolboy error.

I will try again later when the feeling has returned to my tongue. It’s very difficult getting the right degree of bite when adding chilli in the form of crushed chillis from a jar. It also features onion, sweet potato, chickpeas, tinned tomatoes, garlic and curry powder. And the leftover tomato soup from earlier in the week. In turn, we will add the remains of tonight’s soup to the leftover curry and use it as a base for something else, probably curried vegetable soup.

This the first time in a while that I have felt fit and organised enough to get stuck into some planning and batch cooking, so it’s a good sign.

A bad sign of trouble to come is that my WP screen is acting a little differently at the moment, and I cannot access the comments. They are still there, but in a flickering diaphanous form. Probably a sign of more changes to come.

Red Kites in Wales

Something I Forgot

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I forgot to tell you the most interesting bit of the day on Sunday. I got home, tried to ring my sister to check she was home safely, and found that I had no phone service. No telephone, no texting and a big notice telling me there was no network service. This was still the same when we went to bed, and still the same when we got up next day. Julia had the day off, so while I dressed and made breakfast she checked in with my phone provider. No help. They reported no faults and suggested she contacted the airtime provider. They, in turn, suggested turning it off nd turning it back on.

It’s like something out of a joke isn’t it?

But it worked.

21st century technology which includes, if you bother to use it (guess who doesn’t?), enough technology to fly you to the moon. And it responds to the old switch off/switch on method, which is little better than the way we used to slap the side of the Tv to correct faults.

I now have four and a half hours to submit four sets of poetry. I think tomorrow’s blog may be a selection of excuses. Sometimes you jut have to rest and regroup. I’m going to be washing up and cooking for the next hour or so, which leaves three and a half hours. I may as well skip the poetry and just start writing the excuses.

Talking of which, I can smell burning, so I’d better go and prod the potatoes.

The picture is Trinity Bridge in Crowland. It cropped up in conversation recently.

Trinity Bridge – Crowland, Lincolnshire

Day154

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The second day of the Jubilee Bank Holiday. One of the neighbours has been flying bunting originally used for the Coronation in 1953. It was flown on the same house as in 1953 too, as the house has been in the same family since it was built in 1928 (or thereabouts).

Julia went to the park with one of he friends last night for the beacon lighting, but there was some confusion over the timing of the events so they came home without seeing much. They did meet the lady who walks her tortoise, but he wasn’t there.

The only interesting feature of the day was a rejection from an American haibun magazine. I could write a few hundred words on the subject but I’ve decided not to bother, as I’ve said all there is to say on the matter and I’ve forced you to read it several times. Well, actually I did write several hundred words on the subject, but it wasn’t very original or interesting.

Tonight we are having hoisin meatballs for tea, and I am about to make them from scratch. It’s one of those kits from Gousto, a birthday present from Number One Son. It’s nice to try new recipes, but it’s a bit of a culture shock to start slicing garlic again. Over the years I’ve adapted my cooking style to use garlic out of jars and ready chopped veg, as it gets round the problem of having stiff fingers. I can still use a knife, I just can’t be certain I’ll still have all my finger tips by the end of the slicing.

So, to sum up. I’m going to go and cook and while I slice vegetables I’m going to try not to think of editors . . .

Back to Normal

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I went for a haircut today. Julia’s orders. Because of my lack of dress sense she’s keen on my looking as tidy as possible in case someone mistakes me fora tramp. I was going to do my own hair (it hasn’t been done since the start of lockdown) but it can be tricky getting it right so I agreed. I haven’t actually had my hair cut by anyone else for about ten or twelve years, when I had it done on a whim while was in the barber with the kids. For some reason they would never let me cut their hair. The time before that was about 25 years ago. It’s saved me a fortune. Anyway, after enduring a conversation that hasn’t changed a lot in the last 25 years (despite the fact it’s a different barber from the one that did my hair in that shop 25 years ago), I was then charged a price that hasn’t changed a lot in the last 25 years. To be honest, I may start going there regularly as it’s so much tidier when someone else does it. And I had my eyebrows touched up. That’s when you know you are getting old.

The nurse who took my blood this morning is the mother of a kid who went all the way through school with my kids. He joined the army when he left school, went to work on cruise ships and liked the sea so much he’s now joined the Royal Navy. Quite an adventurous life so far. It was nice to catch up.

I also went shopping. They ask you to be considerate to their staff by wearing a mask (and most people do). Sadly, two of their staff and a security guard couldn’t be bothered to wear a mask. Makes you wonder why you bother. Also makes me wonder what message they think they are sending.

I’m now going to think about trimming my beard. If I’m careful I can tidy it enough to satisfy Julia whilst leaving it long enough to scare small children.

Oh, the shopping? I bought her some flowers. And a quiche. I’m back at work tomorrow and I fancy a slice of quiche. also bought steak. I’m going to cook tonight. Baked potato, steak, salad. Looks good, virtually no effort. That’s my sort of cookery.

Time to Try Tanka

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Breakfast was baked eggs. I put chopped spring onions, mushrooms. ham, tomatoes and grated cheese in an oiled dish, broke on three eggs and seasoned with black pepper. It’s a substantial brunch designed to last until this evening (with possibly a scone to keep us going) so I think three eggs is OK.

In the oven for twelve minutes (it wasn’t fully heated when I put them in) and Julia said hers was a little too firm for her tastes. She will get ten minutes next time because she is a barbarian who eats eggs before they are decently hard. I was happy with my 15 minutes as I like mine hard, and don’t mind them rubbery.

It’s a simple recipe, but one I seem to have forgotten over the years. Do you have recipes like that?

There are no photos as I ate it well before thinking of them. Maybe next time…

I managed to get three submissions off last night and this afternoon I had an acceptance from the batch sent out on the 18th. I sent ten haiku and eight tanka off to two different editors at the same magazine (they often have different editors for different things and allow you to submit to both) and have now had one accepted by each editor. I’m counting it as two submissions and two acceptances. If it had been one editor at the magazine I’d have only counted it as one. This is one way I’m upping my submission numbers. The other is trying new magazines. I’ve just submitted to one that holds the record for my speediest rejection. I thought I’d give it another go. The editor has changed and the so has the system – if they like it they accept within 14 days. If they don’t like it you can submit it elsewhere after 14 days. It’s a little imprecise, but simple enough as a system, and at least they aren’t going to set any new records.

Julia is making something complicated with chicken and marinades and stuff (she takes more trouble over the food that I do). It smells good, and she has just taken it out of the oven. Time, I think, to load this and eat.

I’m also sending two tanka prose off (the inelegantly named tanka equivalent of haibun) – one of them features crepuscular rays, hence the photo.

quercuscommunity

Life after the Care Farm