pumpkinstrokemarrow

New stew pot had its second outing today with a 5 pound lump of chuck steak. Lump being the word so it needed a bit of tying it to make it look a bit more decorous. Then followed the radiation line in braising. Brown in dripping, remove. Brown onions, remove. Add some flour and work up a brown sauce. In this case, there wasn't a lot of dripping left after the onions so did not get a proper roux and had to add additional flour half way through the process. Add turnip, cabbage and carrot. Return beef and onions, simmer for two hours. Remove beef, liquidise what is left. Serve with carrots, cabbage and rice.

All very good: not a particularly cheap meal but differant. Only proviso being that another time I would ask the butcher to cut the lump so that one wound up carving across the grain rather than with it.

Further inspections through the newly renovated inspection cover. Spent happy hour with head down a drain. But removed half a bucket of debris from the sump (including the plug which should be over the rodding channel) and established that the pipework is sound. Not completely clear yet but enough for one day. Hopefully we will not be reduced to the dyno-rod people. And the new cover survived two cars running over it at 8 days.

Completed making the home compost bin - a u shaped brick affair about 5 foot square and 18 inches deep - fox proof. This way we can put meat, fish and fat waste in the thing without having the foxes chucking the stuff all over the garden. Final lap with four peices of melamine. Probably won't last terribly long but it is as good a way as any to get rid of the stuff. Several square metres of it having been sitting in the garage for ages.

Rather to my surprise, taken up DHL again. More readable than I would have thought. Finished the Lost Girl having been prompted by going to Gypsy, now into the Trespasser, found in a charity shop. A bit pompous but we will get there. Also Ritter and Pitt on Iraq. What a mess.