Tuesday 21st October

Churchmouse · 21 October 2008 at 11:00PM

Thanks folks for the Anniversary wishes:D It's been a *different* one, but very nice. Went with M&S;) ( it's a heck of a lot closer than Waitrose!) Had a lovely lamb dish, loads and loads of veggies, followed by chocolate profiteroles and cream. All washed down with a rather nice Chablis. Just finishing the bottle now. And before anyone says lamb should be accompanied by red wine, I love Chablis, and at £12 a bottle it needs to be my anniversary, so I'll drink it with whatever we're having:rotfl: Now I just need to chomp my way through the choccies I so thoughtfully picked up when I went shopping. Well I knew DH would want to treat me;)

(we had agreed the holiday was our present, but I *knew* he'd not want to keep to that. He was very grateful for my thoughtfulness:rotfl: )

Snowy, I'm sorry things are looking poor for Dylan. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope. He's so young, it seems very unfair

((hugs)) to you both. And on the spelling/punctuation area, I am in broad agreement. (I sometimes make mistakes, but do try:D ) My boys laugh whenever I text them because I write "essays", fully punctuated. To say anything worthwhile I often have to send one or two continuations, because I run out of characters:rotfl:

pigpen · 21 October 2008 at 11:04PM

see I hear people type the word flylady and here I am.. come drop in over there.. nice bunch.. and we get your housework done.. with the added advantage you know other addicts are cleaning their bog at the same time as you and other grotty jobs!!

Anwen_2 · 21 October 2008 at 11:17PM

:wave:
Hullo, new to this thread, but have had a fairly OS type day and thought I'd have a bit of a celebrate type thing!

So, first I went with DD to the local city farm for eggs, unfortunately they'd sold out but we got to say hello to the hens and pigs and so on. DD saw some of the River Cottage Autumn program with HFW talking about slaughtering some of the cute duckies on screen and I think it shocked her a bit - she's 9 and knows full well where meat comes from, but I suppose she hadn't quite associated it so directly before. At first she declared she would never eat meat again but I pointed out that it's ok to eat meat so long as the animal has had a nice life with people who will look after it properly (JMO, of course!) and that if she liked we could try to make sure we only buy free range or organic meat, and mostly from the farmers market on Sundays. I do mostly try to get FR/O anyway, but not always.

She was happy with this, and so this morning I pointed out to her that the reason some farms don't look after their animals so well is because it is much cheaper and they need to do so in order to have cheap meat in the shops, and because we don't have a lot of money, if we are going to go over to only buying animal friendly meat then she's going to have to start eating a bit more veg, and what if I made her some nice thick gravy (she doesn't like shep pie or tom sauce or anything but loves gravy) with some veg and lentils hidden in it? Amazingly she said ok!

We went to the free range butcher and got a chicken breast quarter thing, where it's still on the bone, plus half a lb of nice looking chipolatas - with visible herbs! - and went to the greengrocer for some veg - she chose carrots, potato and celery, and I got a leek and some onions 'for me'...

DD's staying the night at my mum's, so I went to Tesco and got 2 packs of organic chicken thighs (2 for £5) and some reduced lamb chops.

So, I roasted the chicken and lamb chops, and also came up with the cunning plan of making a jar of 'wedge mix' from a bit of various herbs and spices, all bashed up with the pestle and mortar, so I made some wedges to go with (with leftovers for tomorrow night!) - added a bit of plain flour when I put the spice mix in the pan with some fat drained out of the roasting tin halfway through. Took the meat off the bone and took the skin off as well, added the bone and skin to the stock pot (which curiously contains a bit of leek and onion, wonder how that got in there??) and put the chicken away for tomorrow, leaving me with some gorgeous lamb and wedges for tea! Hurrah!

I also used the same water from parboiling the wedges to go in the slow cooker, and the oil and a few scraps from frying off the onion and celery stayed in the pan for the wedges. I made lovely gravy for my lamb from the bottom of the roasting tin and the leftovers of that have gone in the stockpot too. So, all in all, feeling rather pleased, though DD will probably hate her gravy...