Thursday 5 July 2018

Something other

The weather may remain hot. Indeed I’m sure it remains hot. But we need a change from salad. Even as I write some beef is plopping away in a mixture of stock & red wine, along with some onions & mushrooms, ready to leap into some pastry when it’s tender & cooled. In other words we’re having a Beef & Red Wine Pie for dinner tonight. My concession to the heat is that the veg I’m serving with it are also going in the oven so there is only one source of heat & that’s pretty well insulated. As for the spuds we’re just going to have a few boiled new potatoes. They can cook while we’re outside in the garden enjoying a pre-dinner glass of red wine. We feel we’ve just had so many salads this year we want something other. Tomorrow will be a slow cooked joint of venison. By Saturday we may well be ready for another salad.

When we came out of Morrisons supermarket yesterday we were pleasantly surprised to see a bank of white clouds appearing in the direction of Cumbria & the Lakes. Rain on its way? No such luck. Still the heat goes on, but at least there is a bit of breeze to make it a bit more pleasant today & stop it getting too airless.

We can’t help feeling sorry for the poor fireman still fighting the moor fires on the Pennines. The thought of so much physical work, literally beating the fires out, wearing breathing apparatus & protective clothing, in the heat of both the sun & the fires is just too much. I can only admire their grit & determination. And they reckon the fires will go on for at least another week. It’s not helped with people deliberately starting copycat fires around the area. I just can’t understand why anyone would want to do that.

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