We had a roast chicken last weekend. The Systems Administrator bought the largest possible free range one, so it cost something over ten pounds. It did two helpings of roast chicken, and then the rest of the breast meat made a chicken, leek and mushroom pie that lasted us for two meals. The brown meat went into an English curry, one made with Schwartz mild curry powder, and the carcass was simmered overnight, yielding enough stock for two lunch's worth of soup, and a small pudding basin of scrap meat for the cats. Eight main course's worth of meat, the basis of four helpings of soup and about fifty pence worth of cat food isn't bad for a tenner.
The stock was cooked overnight in the simmer oven of the Aga. In fact I forgot all about it, and only remembered mid-morning when the smell of boiling chicken began to permeate the kitchen. If you don't have a range of some sort and have to put the oven on specially then making stock is not a virtually cost free activity, something I think cookery writers who urge the poor to buy chickens and get multiple meals from them should acknowledge. Though if you planned it right you could simmer a week's worth of stew and chile con carne at the same time. I picked the carcass over carefully, since chicken bones are not good for cats, though probably not so lethal after they have been cooked for about sixteen hours. The boiled flesh looked horrid, slimy and quite revolting, but the cats loved it. They seem to like it better than the odd tiny scrap of roast chicken we have slipped them from time to time. But who am I to say that slimy is bad? Maybe when you evolved to eat raw meat, and have grown up eating tinned cat food, slimy is just what you fancy.
Today's soup was to be mushroom, after we both enjoyed the home made mushroom soup at my cousin's birthday lunch. The only time I made mushroom soup previously, it came out a strange and off-putting shade of green, but looking at the professionally made soup in Aldeburgh I decided that that was what mushroom soup looked like, some of the time. I compared recipes from The Good Housekeepers, Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book and a paperback book of soups published by Pan in 1967, and decided that the general principle was to include some onion for flavour, some flour for thickening, and to add some cream at the end, so that's what I did. The Pan book suggested including two egg yolks and a shot of sherry, but that seemed a bit much for lunch, given it was already going to contain stock, butter and cream, and I didn't have any sherry and didn't want to be stuck with two egg whites. I did try asking the Systems Administrator enthusiastically if the SA fancied learning to make mushroom soup, since it was a lovely morning and I'd really rather have been out in the garden than in the kitchen, but the SA just stared at me bitterly and said No, not this particular morning. The effects of the dentist's novocaine have worn off, and the dying remnants of the nerve that the dentist couldn't reach to drill out are spectacularly painful.
I wouldn't say today's soup was as nice as the one in the hotel, though it was pretty good. Perhaps it needed a slug of sherry. For my next act I shall make leek and potato, since we've got a left over leek. I was amused to see in last night's episode of The Sopranos that I have the same sort of blender as mafia boss Uncle Junior.
By the time you get to my age you are recycling fashion, as well as chicken remnants, if you have spent your life buying clothes on the basis of getting well made things that were never the outrageous height of fashion to start with. Sometime back in the 1990s there was a craze for fake fur hats. I bought a Gilly Forge number in Liberty, in a soft black with a deep yellow quilted lining. It was cut like an enormous cloche, and you rolled up the hem according to how low over your forehead you wanted the hat to come. The fashion passed after a couple of years, and Gilly Forge fur hats began to look distinctly last year. Old hat, in fact. I put it regretfully in a drawer. Fast forward the best part of two decades, factor in the Downton effect and the film version of Anna Karenina, and gigantic fur cloche hats look entirely acceptable. And I already have a vintage one, with the added advantage I know it has been on no head but my own.
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