pumpkinstrokemarrow

My first puzzle from King, so of my total of 9, 5 are from Falcon and the other four are from other outfits. This one, despite the English flavoured packaging, originated in the Netherlands.

Paid the large-for-me sum of £3.50 for it from a charity shop - but it was still in its original shrink wrap and it was probably in a good cause. Pieces quite small and thin and not having been used at all meant that sometimes one had to use a bit of force to get the right piece in the right hole. A lot of irregularity of the second sort - that is to say a good proportion of the time one did not have four pieces meeting at a corner, which made solution harder than it might otherwise be.

Started with the edge, then the waste paper bin, then had a go at the white patch bottom right. But then settled down to do the flowers which meant getting lots of little islands, two or three pieces apiece, scattered across them, but having to work for quite a long time before they got connected together. Then there was a clear tipping point, about half way, when the flowers had sunk far enough down into the frontal cortex that one could pick up what was clearly part of the flower part of the picture and within seconds get it into the right hole, possibly after a couple of false positives. Accelerating into the finish, after which one had the background to fill in in slow time. Not too bad though, being reasonably clearly colour coded, with the colour including a soft diagonal stripe to give you orientation in addition to position. Only beef was the cover picture which had not been cropped to match the jigsaw, causing a little confusion in the early stages. Jigsaw colour sometimes a bit adrift from the cover colour but then it nearly always is.

Celebrated by buying another jigsaw new from the same outfit from Amazon, which after postage came to about double what I paid the charity shop. We will see how this branching out into a very different product area affects their recommendations: I have not yet been moved to buy one of these but they have not been that far off the mark.

Followed up by a ham sandwich, on white bread with just a touch of mustard. The bread came from a foody fair at Hampton Court and came to me as French but it seemed entirely English to me, both in shape and texture. Just the ticket for the ham, whatever. Not that it ought really be called ham as wanting some smoked, went to the butcher in Manor Green Road who explained that he only did smoked ham at Christmas. Didn't shift otherwise. But he did have some smoked loin, so I had a go with a 3lb piece of that and handed over to BH for cooking, that is to say gently boiled with a few veg.. A bit crumbly fresh but very good now that it has sat for a couple of days. Lots of fat to keep it moist and gunk up the carving knife. I shall have to look into whether one can properly call smoked loin ham: does the use of the word ham to designate a way of preparing meat predate its use to designate a part of the body?

The other culinary novelty has been some butter, garlic, onion, yellow pepper and tomato sauce, sauce to which I added maybe a level tablespoon of sugar towards the end of the cooking period, this last being the novel bit. Maybe half a cup of water. A good way of energising some otherwise rather dull grilled spare rib.