Sunday - Monday - Tuesday

SUNDAY

Weather was OK for the time of year: reasonably bright but with temperatures only around 7C. Windy, too.

We took my mother out to lunch at the Miller & Carter in Sutton Park. Got a great table overlooking the pool and good service from Emma: thanks.

We ate:

Grilled Chicken Breast with Pancetta, With a tomato & chorizo sauce, served with green beans and crushed herb baby potatoes (Ali & Bob)

Smoked haddock with a crumbed poached egg & new potatoes (Mum)

Crème Brulee (Mum)

Glazed Clotted Cream Rice Pudding Served with strawberry jam (Bob)

Deep Filled Bramley Apple Pie With custard and vanilla Beechdean Farmhouse dairy ice cream (Ali)

It was a pleasant experience and not expensive, though there were some parts of the meal that were not as good as others (Ali didn’t think much of the dessert, for example, though mine was excellent).

By the time we got home, it was raining, cold and windy: we still went for a walk though, feeling very virtuous.

MONDAY

At home. A grey, blustery day.

We ate:

Wild Alaskan salmon fillets, crushed new potatoes with garlic & parsley, broccoli, green beans, parsley sauce.

TUESDAY

Sunny for the most part. Not warm.

Spent the day externaling (a made-up word that means ‘being an external examiner for a programme at a West London university') MA dissertations. Some excellent; some less so. Will have to try to get them returned asap.

Walked a couple of miles, suggesting that the new medication might be beginning to work. Everyone I talk to about it says it has to build up in one’s system – still waiting...

My plan for tonight’s meal was to have pied de cochon farci (stuffed pigs’ feet). This was a debacle since it turned out that the trotters I’d got were really too big and hairy to be useful. It was an interesting experience trying to bone them out, though. Good for the knife skills! Eventually abandoned this and boiled them up to make jelly (absolutely fantastic – set like rubber!).

Therefore, we ate:

Seafood Risotto.

(For reasons that I won’t go into here, the rest of the evening was a bit of a disaster, resulting in our returning home at about 05:15 hrs. Hopefully not to be repeated!)

Thursday - Friday - Saturday

The weather was cool and grey on Thursday (9C) but had become cold on Friday, a front moving in from the north-west, and Saturday arrived with the first real frost of Autumn, Had to scrape the car. Temperatures have been low ever since (Max. Around 5C on Saturday). Forecast is warmer and wetter for the rest of the weekend ...

A strange week, for lots of reasons. But not unpleasant, for the most part.

On Thursday we went to Bohemia (usually, we eat out once a month with one of our friends, but he hasn’t managed to be in touch for a while --- he’s fine, just further up the autistic spectrum than we are). A pleasant evening with a chance to chat to Andrew & Ross who own/run the place.

We ate:

Smoked salmon & prawn Parcels (Bob)

Falafels with a date & mint raita dip

 Lamb chump, pesto mash, redcurrant & rosemary jus (Bob)

Fish pie with spinach (this turned out to be Ross’s ‘emergency’ dish when he found he’d run out of tuna – Ali said it was good.)

Peas & carrots

Apple crumble & ice cream (Ali)

Friday

Included a visit to the GP practice to review my hypertension and give blood sample (a 6 monthly thing because of medication). As usual, learnt that the obesity/waist-size/whatever rules have changed .

We ate:

Well, we’d got leftover kidneys Turbigo and some cold roast pork, so I made a tomato-ish sauce and chopped everything up and served it over pasta. Good!

Saturday

Cold (as stated above) air temperature around 0 until 10:00 hrs. Shopping and then a trip into Birmingham (I’m looking for a jacket). Found a nice leather one in TK. Turned out it was nice because it was Ralph Lauren and was still £400. Not quite what I was willing to pay.

We ate:

BLT (well, my take on it – eggs stuffed with a mayo/egg yolk/chopped lardon mix on some home-grown rocket, with baby plum tomatoes & pea shoots.

(I need to work on my food photography, but this shows the idea)

 

Toad in the hole (any readers who believe that we ate amphibians should do a few minutes research on the WWW )

(Toad in the hole is one of Ali’s favourite meals, so this was a special thing to say ‘thanks’.)

Wednesday

Did anyone else notice the Observer Food Awards bias towards Nottingham for the Midlands? Now I like Nottingham, and it's got some good restaurants and suppliers, but REALLY?
 
Another really grey, damp and dismal day. At home, doing odd bits of work and playing hearts on the PC. Cold's nearly gone now (Ali's back at work).
Suffering from premonitions of mortality, I think ...

We ate:
Grilled marinated lamb with vegetable cous cous

Tuesday

What a grey day! Misty all day with occasional rain. Ali's got a terrible cold, so wasn't at work.
The cat (Kat) seems to be slightly insane today, alternating trying to catch invisible (well, to me anyway) animals or sleeping in strange places. Brief walk and answered a lot of emails.

We ate:
Roast belly pork (with crackling, despite what Prue Leith says), steamed new potatoes, sage & onion stuffing, french beans, gravy.

Thursday - Monday

I seem to be writing catch-ups again. I’m not going to apologise for this; life’s complicated and busy.

We were promised ‘mild’ weather this week – another error by the forecasters. It’s been grey and misty and cold ...

In terms of food, it’s been a varied few days:

Thursday

I went out to eat with a ex-student. An excellent evening of food and conversation. Got to ride in her black Mercedes convertible, which was an interesting experience (also interesting to be in a car that does fewer miles to the gallon than mine!). Wouldn’t be a vehicle I’d choose though (and the fact that the trip computer insisted that we were travelling at 14 mph while stationary in the car-park was cause for some concern: if that bit isn’t working, what about important things like ABS?).

We ate at the Dilshad in Selly Oak (Bournbrook, really) which I contend is still the best ‘Indian’ (Bangladeshi) place nearby.

We ate:

Special Biriyani. Naan

Friday

Indian delivery! (Ali had wanted Indian food and this was a way of achieving it).

We ate:

Special Biriyani (there’s a theme here, I think)

Badshai chicken (tandoori chicken, minced lamb, egg)

Naan

(all from the local Indian takeaway)

Actually, it wasn’t great L - sauces were too spicy. The naan was nice, though.

Saturday

Shopping for food. I had the start of a cold, so we didn’t do very much, as we were saving ourselves for the evening.

We went to the Liaison Restaurant’s ‘pop-up’ at a garden centre next to Birmingham airport (fun to see planes coming over at about 200 feet!). This is the penultimate pop-up because the garden centre has been sold for redevelopment (Pretty sure I mentioned this in an earlier post).

We ate:

Wild mushroom  velouté (amuse)

Minestrone with ham hock tortellini, pecorino & parsley crisps x2

Braised ox-cheek pudding, rump steak, smoked potato gratin, Gentleman’s Relish butter x2

Gin & tonic pannacotta, angostura syrup, lime chocolate crisps (Bob)

Pear & vanilla tart, Baileys sabayon, toasted walnuts (Ali)

It was a really nicely cooked meal with some good flavours. We thought that the main course pudding needed a more substantial crust, but the flavours were excellent. Not sure about putting a ‘crisp’ in soup – it wasn’t very crisp, really. The desserts were interesting: the gin & tonic thing was splendid, but quite astringent. The tart was pleasant, but unexceptional.

Sunday

Cold is developing nicely by now, so again we didn’t do much.

We ate:

Kidneys Turbigo (look on Google if you want a recipe, possible origin of the dish is that fine chap, Napoleon who seems to have eaten dishes named after his battles, Turbigo is in Lombardy).

Monday

Cold now very well-developed. Ali’s got it, too (I think it originated with her mother). Visits to GP and new pills to try!

We ate:

Seafood linguine (Prawns, squid, mussels in an onion, garlic & cream sauce with basil and parsley).

WEDNESDAY 17th October

It rained heavily in the night: parts of the garden are actually under water! Temperatures remain around 12^o C, with occasional sunshine. At home today, supposedly not working, but actually spent most of the day being an External Examiner at a London University (online, of course) approving exam papers – well, correcting spelling errors and deciding not to pick them up on split infinitives, no matter how much they irritate me.

For dinner tonight we ate:

Gammon in a mushroom sauce with rice

Recipe

2 gammon steaks, fat trimmed off and cut into pieces about 10 mm square.

1 onion, finely chopped

2 cloves of garlic, finely sliced

6 oz mushrooms, quartered

A few peas

¼ pt stock (I used vegetable, because it was handy)

Olive oil for frying

3 Tbl Sp cream (I used whipping cream)

1 tsp corn flour

Method

Fry the onion until soft and add the gammon pieces. Fry until sealed, add the garlic and cook for a few minutes. Add the stock, peas and mushrooms. Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Take off the heat and add the cream. Season as necessary. Put back on the heat; when it’s warmed through, use corn flour and water to thicken as much as you like (a lot of this depends on the cream, double cream may thicken it enough on its own).

Serve on boiled rice.