Stuffed!

I hope you had a lovely weekend? Ours was very pleasant. A quiet Saturday, letting little’un slowly regain his appetite and energy levels after such a rotten week of illness, which seemed to do us all good. We started the day with a very indulgent breakfast – homemade (or ‘scratch’) waffles served with some beautifully fragrant strawberries from the greengrocer. I am loving having a decent greengrocer nearby again, but I have to admit he’s a bit random in terms of his pricing. The business was sold about 6 months ago and the new owner has caused confusion and discord among his staff by putting in a fancy new till, then only programming it with half the prices. Prices for some items are scribbled on a ratty sheet of A4 kept under the till. Prices for other things can be found on the shelves. Sometimes there are two prices and you just have to bat your eyelashes and persuade the counter staff that the lower price is obviously the correct one. It’s a bit confusing but it’s worth popping in regularly to see what’s on offer, particularly when they’re the only place that sells delicacies like russet apples, pickling onions, blood oranges and Turkish Delight thins (think After Eights but full of Eastern promise…)

 

Matt had cream with his, little’un and I opted for a tiny sprinkle of caster sugar and orange juice.

Saturday also saw the arrival of The Beef. A friend of ours, like me, regularly does a ‘yellow sticker’ run to her nearest supermarket about an hour before closing time, and recently scored a 2kg silverside joint for £3. She hauled it out of her freezer on Saturday, lugged it down the hill and left it in our kitchen to be turned into Sunday dinner. Silverside is a very lean, potentially quite tough cut of beef, so in the early afternoon Matt heated up our big cast iron skillet til it was smoking and then sealed the beef joint on all sides, before de-glazing the pan with a little merlot. Whilst he was doing that I made a little beef-bed in a casserole dish with three sliced onions, a handful of crushed garlic cloves, a couple of sliced carrots, bayleaves, thyme, and black pepper. Once the beef was had a decent seal on it, it was tucked into the dish, I added a pint of beef stock, and it was put in a low oven with the lid on for three hours.

 

It was BEAUTIFUL, served with roast potatoes and parsnips, steamed spring greens with butter and nutmeg, and plain boiled carrots, and gravy made from the contents of the casserole dish after the beef had been removed to rest, passed through a sieve. We followed it with gluten-free apple crisp (for our beef-bringing friend is gluten intolerant), decorated with pom-arils and cream. I have leftover beef and veggies for my lunch today and am feeling extremely smug about this (I overcook in terms of quantity whenever I do a roast, mostly because I think I enjoy the leftovers more than the meal itself).

But before lunchtime, there must be typing, scheduling and website editing. *Sigh*.