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.