pumpkinstrokemarrow

The lead was all about how the Lib Dems had sunk the Conservative plan to have elected police commissioners. What with the lead and interior coverage the whole affair got maybe a page. But nowhere could I find any discussion of the merits of the change. Lots of discussion about political angles of the sinking, but nothing about the thing itself. An irritating if common failing of the posher papers. In their defence, they might argue that they had discussed the substantive issue ad nauseam a few weeks ago and that they did not want to bore their readers with repetition. But there was no reference to any such discussion. Online, where one might reasonably expect a click here to see the discussion, they would have no such excuse.

Then there was some coverage of the 8 year old murder of Milly Dowler, with which a rather unpleasant sounding man has been charged, a man who, it turns out, is slightly linked with certain inhabitants of TB. My problem here is the lack of what I would call decent evidence. No blood stained knife or anything like that. What little that has appeared in the paper so far is mainly about how nice the girl was and how horrid the man is plus a certain amount of circumstantial. Nor have I found any explanation of why the case surfaces now, so long after the event. I am mindful here of how we managed to bang up the wrong unpleasant man for a murder on Wimbledon Common. Also of the legal dictum that the worse the crime, the less the evidence needed for a conviction.

On a lighter note I was amused to read that a former big cheese in a company called 'Dorset Cereals' (http://www.dorsetcereals.co.uk/) whose watchword is 'honest, tasty and real', was mixed up in some elaborate tax avoidance scheme, now struck down by HMCR. A company which trades on the orgo-country-cuddly associations of the word Dorset when selling well known west country products but which are actually a ' ... tasty blend of Chilean flame raisins, apricots, sultanas, banana, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, blanched flaked almonds, whole hazelnuts and multi-grain flakes'. What a lot of old tosh.

Moving onto truly serious matters, following the lentil report of 17 April, I can now report that I have tried the recipe again, substituting real tomatoes for tinned tomatoes. Much better. Maybe all an illusion down to my prejudice against tinned tomatoes, but better nonetheless. As we used to say in meetings in the world of work, 'if you think we have a problem, we do have a problem'.

We have also tried some gluten free beef burgers from the Manor Green Road butcher. First time around I grilled the things and on serving them was rather alarmed to find little yellow lumps scattered through them. Clearly some kind of carbohydrate, looking a bit grain like. Had the butcher confused gluten free with wheat free? After peering at the lumps, FIL chomped bravely on with, as it happens, no ill effects. The yellow lumps were not the barley I had suspected them of being. But I did find the burgers a bit heavy going. A bit too firm and chewy. Second time around I tried frying in oil and while I did not get to sample on this occasion, the burgers looked much better. Plump and moist rather than thin and dried up.

We had the crabs' legs reported in the last post with a 2009 Mosel, from one Dr. Loosen, via Waitrose. The crabs' legs were quite eatable but did not strike me as very fresh. Also a bit firmer than I think proper. I did wonder, despite the market man having claimed that the things had been swimming somewhere off Grimbsy dock early that very morning, whether they had not passed through a freezer on their way south. The Mosel was good. Very slightly fizzy and quite sweet. BH very taken with it. The only trouble was that I mistook the nature of the cap and instead of just twisting it to get it off, I peeled the stiff foil wrapping off from around the neck of the bottle prior to extracting what turned out to be the non-existent cork, in the course of which a shard of the foil attacked a finger.

And then yesterday was tempted by a quite different type of wine. Get off the train at Epsom to find the place swarming with very lightly dressed and very slightly inebriated young ladies, one of whom had left a three quarters full bottle of pink wine invitingly in the top of a litter bin. All neat and tidy, with the screw cap on. I paused and wondered about whether to take advantage and eventually decided not to. Perhaps if it had been a bit later and the regular pubs had shut I might have made a different call.