Sunday lunch

A Sunday for which we had chosen shoulder of lamb, a cut I am coming to prefer to leg. Needs to be properly cooked so that the skin is crispy and a good part of the fat has drained off, but when it is properly cooked it has a fine flavour. Whereas our legs are not terribly reliable. Sometimes good, but not always. Both do well cold, although some will be put off by the cold fat in the shoulder. Others just cut it off and feed it to the crows, taking care that it has all gone by the evening when the foxes come out. Farmers might have shot both crows and foxes, but it is the foxes which are the nuisance around here. Notwithstanding, the crows are usually pretty quick off the mark, turning up minutes if not seconds after the fat has appeared. Clearly some kind of corvine communication going on.

Started off with the Jubilee Way run, on which I managed [20, 23, 29] on number plates. That is to say, no score. There was also a cold, northerly wind.

Last gazebo vanished from the front garden of the Blenheim. Al fresco lunching (or dining) out done for the year.

Followed by a spot of Schubert, D.958, taken with a spot of Surrey Gold. During which I got completely lost in the score. Quite hopeless on this occasion. And then into the main business of the day.

The English shoulder weighed in at 5lbs 5oz and after some palaver we decided on 2 hours 30 minutes at 190C, including 10 minutes resting time. Which turned out to be spot on. Taken with the usual boiled vegetables - potatoes on this occasion rather than brown rice. Plus, for a change, a little celeriac. Not to mention a spot of red from M&S.

With the red coming from Lucien Lurton of reference 2, a family with a long history in the drinks business, with their modern business seemingly kicking off with a distillery, as snapped above, and moving back into wine towards the end of the 19th century. With tafia being a cheap version of rum, strong in fusel, on which subject there is much learned debate. Are fusels a good thing or a bad thing? See reference 3.

For once Google Image fails me and fails to come up with a better quality version of the image above, doing no better than pointing back to reference 2. But I suppose, to be fair, that is clever enough, given that it was Microsoft's Bing/Edge which found the image in the first place.

And as for the wine, I liked it well enough, but BH liked it more. I found it a little dry, a little thin on the palette. Maybe we need to give it another go.

The scene, with BH's plate in the foreground, about half an hour later. BH takes mint sauce with her lamb, which I do not. Although on this occasion I was provided with some red current jelly, which was interesting. An ordinary brand from Sainsbury's, rather than a heritage brand, which I thought insufficiently sweet for the the purpose. Also that a smooth jam might have worked better than a jelly.

Not my best day with the carving knife, and the joint looks messier than I would have liked. But the meat was neat enough and tasted very well.

Dessert after we had finished with it for the day. I think it did one more meal. It came with properly yellow custard, although BH did admit to the use of the microwave. Some story about being short of rings. And I don't suppose the supervisor would have approved, it not being in a little white plastic tub saying custard on the outside and with a foil lid on the top.

Wound down with a little Calvados from Majestic. About the same price per litre as the stuff from Waitrose, but to my palette, better.

Perhaps fuelled by the Calvados, lunch closed with my wondering about the vagaries of the border of the Customs' seal on the bottle. That is to say that the solid red disk (marked with a green splodge right) is not truly centred on the outer, white patterned disc (marked with a purple splodge left), with the white pattern being partially swallowed up by solid red on the right. Is this a cunning plot to deter those who seek to fake such seals or is it simply a bit of sloppy printing, the result of the continuing, inexorable pressure to take the lowest bid when placing public contracts?

After lunch we turned the pages of Roy Strong on Royal Gardens, checking a point arising from our recent visit to the Palace at Hampton Court. Where I learned that there was an impressive looking mausoleum for Victoria and Albert at Frogmore, in Windsor Home Park - and learned a little later that it was never open to the public, unlike most of the rest of the V&A heritage. Also that Albert, unlike some of our royals of today, was an educated, thoughtful and hardworking chap. Brought Victoria on nicely. There was also a striking snap of Strong arranging tulips in one of the fancy tulip vases in one of the Palaces, something like that snapped above from reference 4. Must be quite something when done properly - although they would probably look a bit silly in the average suburban house.

Finished the proceedings of the afternoon with Scrabble, managing, despite the food and drink taken, a combined score of something over 500. With a fair bit of help from the big fat dictionary from Oxford. We like to think we have more classy brain supplements than FIL, who kept a handy list of two letter words in the bottom of his Scrabble box.

Reference 1: https://www.masterbutchersepsom.co.uk/. Our place for festal meat. Not to mention genuine bacon, black and white puddings. A place which, I am pleased to say, appears to be weathering the storm.

Reference 2: https://www.lurton.com/.

Reference 3: Royal Gardens - Roy Strong - 1992.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafia.

Reference 4: https://www.delft-art-gallery.com/.