Monday, May 11, 2009
Sussex pie day
Sussex pie day came around again yesterday. 7 pounds of chuck steak, decorated with 2 quartered onions lined up on top, done at 120C for about 7.5 hours. Good gear, but a couple more would not have hurt. And given that we could not use the mushroom ketchup indicated as it contained malt which contained gluten, decided on a bit of DIY. Take 2 onions, 5 sticks of celery and 6 small carrots. Simmer in maybe half a pint of water plus a small knob of butter plus a large pinch of hand-ground black pepper. Ground until the essential oils could be smelt at 12 inches. After a while, add 15 button mushrooms, coarsely chopped. Simmer the whole lot for another hour. Stand overnight, bring to boil in the morning and strain. Add stock to the port and pour the whole lot over the chuck steak before semi-sealing it into its foil bag. Semi-sealing because I did not cut the foil quite big enough and had a job sealing it. Strain juices off the meat at the end of the cooking period, now maybe a pint and a half. Add to stewed vegetables from the day before and pass through a blender. Add a little corn flour. Bring back to the boil. Serve as gravy - good and rich it was too - with the meat, mashed potatoes and Portuguese pointy cabbage. BH, inter alia, very taken with the Rully Rouge we had to ease it down with. Chosen because it came from Bourgogne, which, last time I was there, appeared to be the centre of the world of Charolais. Ergo, wine ought to go with cow. Which it did; nice and light for a red. According to the label did well with offal. Furthermore the tannins blended with the raspberry aromas on the palate. All in all, good stuff.
Followed by a boiled jam sponge. Which, inter alia, demonstrated the importance of appearances. We had no red jam on the last occasion and the sponge did not look or taste quite right with yellow jam (quince I think), although I doubt whether one could have told the differance in taste blindfold. This time we had red jam and it looked spot on. Bright red jam dripping a little down the light yellow sponge. Most attractive. This course being eased down with custard and some pudding wine from Adelaide. Chardonnay Semillon from d'Arenberg. Good gear but not much of it: tall thin bottle exactly half the volume of a regular one.
Just finishing off the remains of the gravy as soup today, when we took delivery of our swine flu information leaflet from the central nanny depot, maybe 2.72 days after the whole subject has vanished from our newspapers. Let us suppose they have delivered 20m of the things at a unit cost of 15p. That makes £3m. Add £1.6m for consultation fees and £0.4m for set-up and we get a round total of £5m for this contribution to global warming. Why didn't someone tell them that for this sum they could have had lots of second home allowances without needing to clutter our letter boxes at all?
Which moves me onto having a grump about the gas board. We are about to have our boiler serviced. A boiler which was chosen for us and installed by the gas board and which has never gone wrong, at least as far as I can remember. But now that they have sold us all the carbon tri-oxide detectors we could possibly want, they have moved onto moving some other goal-posts. This boiler that we sold you has now been declared to be unsafe. You had better take the door off to make it more safe, this peice of advice appearing to ignore the fact that the gap under the door corresponds more or less exactly with the input vents at the bottom of the boiler. (The door is now off for 2 days out of 365/6). And any time now we are going to condemn your boiler so that we can sell you a nice new one. Which will be very expensive as you can't have the new one where the old one was any more. And so on and so forth. I am sure I have boned on about this before.
But I have come to a resolution. If the gas board do indeed get difficult, despite having stuck to them, despite all the offers from the myriad strange people trying to sell me gas (although, sadly, we have yet to be called by the energy division of the potato marketting board), I shall move my account elsewhere. The whole point of the gas board used to be that they looked after me, not themselves. If that has stopped being true to this extent, I might just as well use one of the other bandits out there, foisted on us in the interests of fair play and competition.
Followed by a boiled jam sponge. Which, inter alia, demonstrated the importance of appearances. We had no red jam on the last occasion and the sponge did not look or taste quite right with yellow jam (quince I think), although I doubt whether one could have told the differance in taste blindfold. This time we had red jam and it looked spot on. Bright red jam dripping a little down the light yellow sponge. Most attractive. This course being eased down with custard and some pudding wine from Adelaide. Chardonnay Semillon from d'Arenberg. Good gear but not much of it: tall thin bottle exactly half the volume of a regular one.
Just finishing off the remains of the gravy as soup today, when we took delivery of our swine flu information leaflet from the central nanny depot, maybe 2.72 days after the whole subject has vanished from our newspapers. Let us suppose they have delivered 20m of the things at a unit cost of 15p. That makes £3m. Add £1.6m for consultation fees and £0.4m for set-up and we get a round total of £5m for this contribution to global warming. Why didn't someone tell them that for this sum they could have had lots of second home allowances without needing to clutter our letter boxes at all?
Which moves me onto having a grump about the gas board. We are about to have our boiler serviced. A boiler which was chosen for us and installed by the gas board and which has never gone wrong, at least as far as I can remember. But now that they have sold us all the carbon tri-oxide detectors we could possibly want, they have moved onto moving some other goal-posts. This boiler that we sold you has now been declared to be unsafe. You had better take the door off to make it more safe, this peice of advice appearing to ignore the fact that the gap under the door corresponds more or less exactly with the input vents at the bottom of the boiler. (The door is now off for 2 days out of 365/6). And any time now we are going to condemn your boiler so that we can sell you a nice new one. Which will be very expensive as you can't have the new one where the old one was any more. And so on and so forth. I am sure I have boned on about this before.
But I have come to a resolution. If the gas board do indeed get difficult, despite having stuck to them, despite all the offers from the myriad strange people trying to sell me gas (although, sadly, we have yet to be called by the energy division of the potato marketting board), I shall move my account elsewhere. The whole point of the gas board used to be that they looked after me, not themselves. If that has stopped being true to this extent, I might just as well use one of the other bandits out there, foisted on us in the interests of fair play and competition.
# posted by Jim @ 6:18 AM 
