One task is embedded in another this morning like a Russian doll. We are going to go and buy a Christmas tree before the weekend while there's still choice, my theory being that while we might get a fresher one by leaving it later if the local garden centres were to order more in when they got low, they probably won't and if we leave it until next week we'll only be scrabbling around the broken and misshapen ones left over from today.
In order to buy the tree the Systems Administrator needs to put the roof rack on the Skoda, now that we no longer have a truck, and in any case the SA doesn't want to go out until the postman has arrived in case the parcel from Germany that's out there somewhere turns up today and needs signing for. So I thought I might as well fill in the time by making the soup for lunch, only now the vegetables need to sweat for fifteen minutes with my only input being to swirl them around occasionally. It is going to be curried parsnip soup out of Gregg Wallace's vegetable cookbook, though he admits he took it from Jane Grigson.
I made his lamb pasties last night, except that half way I wimped out and made a pie instead. As I read the instructions about cutting six inch circles and sealing them down around the pasty mixture with beaten egg, and began to realise quite how much pastry he was telling me to make for only four pies, and looked at how runny the lamb and diced vegetable mixture was, and saw that I should have boiled a potato in its skin ready to peel and dice to add to the filling, only I hadn't, I decided that life was too short and that it would be easier to put the lamb mix in a pie dish with a sensible amount of pastry on top.
The pasty filling was rather nice except that I should have simmered it for longer to really soften the celery before proceeding with the pie. I have been caught out that way before with celery. You cook your minced lamb (only I used finely diced because Waitrose had run out of mince) in a pan until lightly coloured then add a mixture of diced carrot, parsnip, swede, celery, onion and garlic and sweat it some more. Then you flour it, cook it a little more, and add lamb stock (or in my case a stock cube) and simmer it until it's done. He breaks the timings down into little slots of five, ten or fifteen minutes and I followed them to the letter, but they weren't quite enough. It is seasoned, rather bizarrely, with sage, rosemary and soy sauce, which turn out to work together remarkably well, and the end result is quite sweet, what with all the root vegetables. Cutting the vegetables into tiny dice is a bit of a fiddle and did seem like a wasted effort once I'd decided I wasn't making pasties, but it does mean that each mouthful is a meat and vegetable medley rather than being neat swede or concentrated parsnip.
The end result is very, very retro, and made me think of the sort of thing I might have had if we'd gone for lunch in the middle of winter at one of the Sidmouth sea front hotels some time in the early 1970s, with a view of the promenade through steamed up windows and plain boiled potatoes (which is how I served it). The Systems Administrator liked it. The SA's mother was in her mid forties when the SA came along, fifteen years behind the older children, and we never dared ask whether it was an accident. Her core cooking repertoire dated firmly from before the 1960s bistro revolution in British eating habits, leaving the SA with a great fondness for plain pies and boiled potato.
The previous evening I took another trip back to the 70s with Rose Elliott's Baked butter beans and cheese. This is good, and really simple. You sweat onion, carrots, celery and garlic in butter, add a tin of butter beans and one of tomatoes plus a bouquet garni, a dash of chilli powder and some stock, and cook for a good hour so that the celery's done. Rose Elliott's method assumes you soak dried beans and gives cooking times accordingly, but Waitrose didn't even have dried butter beans when I looked. Then you transfer it to a casserole dish, top with a mixture of breadcrumbs and grated cheese, and bake until it's crisp. It says something about modern times that Waitrose do sell pots of ready made crumbs, and out of curiosity I must check how much they charge for them the next time I'm in there. The SA's guess was more than a loaf of bread. I don't think it enters into the spirit of this sort of food to buy crumbs, as part of the point of it is to use up ends of bread you have in the fridge. Wednesday's bean bake finished off the heel of a white loaf and the last six inches of a French stick, and both had gone satisfyingly hard so that I could grate them.
The postman still has not come.
Addendum There were no rabbits in the traps. It is going to get repetitive if I keep writing that so from now on no news means no rabbits.
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