pumpkinstrokemarrow

Tried silverside on Sunday. Not something I recall doing before but we take the plunge into the fine not so new stock pot. 6 pounds, brown it a bit in dripping and boil gently for 20 minutes to the pound plus 20 minutes. Stick a whole lot of vegetables in somewhere near the beginning - the Radiation book being very firm that this should not include green vegetables so we used carrot, swede and onion. Celery and chopped cabbage stem (waste not want not) towards the end when I spotted the celery. Remove meat towards the end, turn some of the stock into gravy. Serve with entire boiled potatoes, carrots and cabbage.

The gravy was interesting as one couldn't make a regular roux as the stock was already pretty fat laden. So we stir a bit of flour and stock together and gradually feed more stock in. Tendency to lump but worked OK apart from the colour - it was really a bit pale and we were reduced to a bit of gravy browning - recently reappeared in a new shaped bottle in Mr Sainsbury.

I had been a bit puzzled why the butcher had bothered to tie some fat along the top of the roll but it made a lot of differance to the appearance. Bit of boiled fat running along the top of the joint was just the thing. Also true that the silverside itself was fairly dry - fine so long as not too cooked and not too cold (thinking ahead to the sandwiches of today).

Served with the last bottle of posh Bordeaux from Christmas. First taste it seemed a touch thin but impression rapidly improved with further tastes. Followed by a bottle of Hungarian white masquarading (?) as a bottle of Australian - in the sense of the way that the labels had been got up - I seem to recall that some French wine is into this now. All in all a good meal. And I seem to remember that in the good soldier svejk there is some talk of boiled turkey being superior to roast. Has roasting taken over because roasting has become equated to posh or more expensive?

Fruit enclosure fencing continues apace with the first line wire and three of the six intermediate posts in place. We will be into the chicken wire in a day or so. Door to the enclosure now more or less complete with only one accident which I doubt whether anybody else will notice.

I learn rather too late about something called postmix. This being a species of concrete that one pours and damps down dry into the posthole and then waters a bit. Presumably it turns into some sort of low grade concrete. So would a post sunk properly in the ground be improved by having a collar of low grade concrete wrapped around the surface section? I am not so sure given our clay. When it is hard it is rock hard and when it is wet it is soft, collar or no collar. Plus the stuff is around £5 a bag and you need a bag for a post so it would have been a significant increase in expenditure. Maybe if it all turns out to be a bit wobbly we might try redoing some of the posts.

AMH has lost his chance. The allotment that he might have been thinking about - that is to say the one that used to contain the willow tree that I cut down before Christmas - is being colonised by one of the ladies one down from me. What chance that he will put his name on a waiting list?