New food, new plants

It’s yet another damp day. The rain is falling like a mist across the ground, not heavy, not long, just wet. Still at least it means the Fox won’t have to water the garden today.

Our gardener came yesterday, bearing pots of new plants she thought would improve the garden. She duly planted them. I always like to make sure new plants have plenty of water for at least the first week. By then I feel they should have got over the shock of moving into their new home & located the natural wetness of the lower soil.

I’ve just been making some Corned Beef Cutlets ready to fry up this evening. Corned beef seems to be really out of fashion in this country. I suppose it’s to do with the amount of salt in it, but these days they do use less.

I’m increasingly aware of how much fashion seems to play in cooking. We watched “Great British Menu” on BBC2. So many dishes seemed to use lovage, a herb I don’t think I’ve ever seen in restaurants or shops. I suspect it’s going to start to appear everywhere now.

Part of why the concept of culinary fashion has occurred to me is that I’m using up from the freezer once more. The next item is chorizo. Most of my cookbooks were written at a time when chorizo was unheard of, now it seems to pervade everywhere. We’ve got as far as deciding the Fox is going to make a sort of sausage & bean casserole tomorrow with chorizo in it as well as more traditional butcher’s pork sausages. I’ve yet to decide what to do with the other piece, but I’ve got a little while to decide.