Cooking With Richard

Strange old day at the “village day”.

Wonder what they’re running away from …?

A resident of Frome St Quintin:

This is what £60 of compost and soil looks like:

99p each! Cheap!

I soaked them for 6 hours, changing the water twice, to reduce the saltiness. After that I simmered them very slowly for 2 hours with some carrots, onions and other vegetables.

Separate them from the bone and chop up the meat:

Serve with a simple vegetable dish:

Verdict: cheap and delicious.

I ordered a morello cherry tree. I hope it does better than our lemon tree which eventually died.

It is a maiden tree, which means it will be 1 year old, and won’t fruit for several years.

In the language of flowers, cherry blossom signifies a good education.

Slightly better photos of the pigeon pie:

Everyone should have one of these at home …

… and we do!

I made the pheasant pie again, much better this time. Unfortunately I didn’t take any good photos :-(

The pheasants were from Gibson’s in Watford market.

I found three shot while I was making it, and N-sama found another two:

My not-so-new but favourite blog is Cooking Issues, which is the French Culinary Institute‘s tech blog.

Some interesting articles to start with:

• pressure cooking
• liquid nitrogen (looks like I won’t be using this then)
• rotovap
• and finally .. drinking shots
  

Paratha is a type of fried bread which I discovered and decided (wrongly) was naan. Anyway, here we’re eating it with a mouth-watering slow-cooked lamb curry made with shanks from the local butcher and sweet potatoes from the local shop. Oishii!

Sorry about the terrible photo. Notice in the background the JML pedometer which registered 3000 steps an hour on my treadmill before it overloaded and died. Bloody JML!!

Wikipedia: Treadmill desk

This is ridiculously easy to make, and very tasty. It’s a kind of English okonomiyaki. Just mash up yesterday’s roast potatoes and veg and mix with lots of eggs.

Here is the Wikipedia page on bubble and squeak.

Oriental City was a large South-East Asian mall and community centre in North London, reasonably close to Colindale Station. It closed for redevelopment on 1 June 2008, though as of early 2010 the redevelopment appears unlikely to actually happen, and the new Pacific Plaza in Wembley looks much more promising. THIS LINK is a partial list of where the Oriental City traders have moved to. (Was it worth destroying a few acres of land and an entire cross-London community for this?)

Possibly Pacific Plaza might replace it. They have the Japanese crockery shop, but not yet the huge supermarket.

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Image from NASA’s Terra satellite, huge version here.