What's Cooking?

After a leisurely start to the morning, arising gently from the duvet realm after ten and a half hours bed-rest, within an hour I felt sufficiently energized to face the shower routine. In the remnant of the morning I applied a further blanket weed treatment to the pond and, quickly returned to the house to grab some headgear as the baldpate quickly felt the full force of the sun’s rays.

During the afternoon, we called around to Helen’s chapel, to drop off some flowers and the weekly notices that my beloved had prepared but, decided it was too warm to endeavour a walk. In any case, I was getting a bit hungry by this time, having only had a bowl of breakfast cereal at lunchtime.

Having eaten a delicious ciabatta based sweet chilli chicken pizza, it was nearing the time for me to prepare tomorrow’s lunch. First, I prepared the griddle pan with liberal sprinklings of ginger, garlic, coriander, cumin, a little chilli and paprika. After preheating the spices to release the aromas, I added a generous amount of olive oil to sautée a couple of sliced onions before adding the lean minced beef. A generous sprinkling of garam masala intensified the already wonderful aromas. Next, I threw in a liberal amount of chopped peppers, a few sliced mushrooms and, after a while, added a tin of plum tomatoes. To finalize the preparation, added a little crushed garlic and some chopped chilli, before pouring in a jar of spicy Jalfrezi sauce for good measure.

All that remains, tomorrow lunchtime, is to pop a casserole dish full of this wonderful concoction into the oven and prepare the saffron rice. Et voila!

Cooking complete, ma belle et moi settled down to watch the latest episode of ‘Doctor Who’ (BBC1) and, a behind the scenes programme on BBC3, before venturing out to do a little more clearing up in the garden. By this time, around 8.30pm, the temperature seemed ideal for such pursuits.

Apart from the occasional bout of hollowness, a non-specific sense of despondency and frustration, it has still proved possible to rejoice in this day the Lord has made.