New Year festivities

As things turned out, New Year's Eve was a bread baking day, the day of Batch 592. As it turned out, a record breaking first rise of over five hours, possibly the result of the cold water being especially cold after a cold night. Sometimes a long first rise means a sticky second knead, but not on this occasion. Followed by a second rise of three hours. Given that we had been late up that morning, that meant that the batch went into the oven at around 1830, by which time it is usually long out of the oven. Outturn: two good sized loaves, quite dark, quite nicely shaped. Not much in the way of bubble. Furthermore, by bearing down on the second rise, I seem to have cracked the problem of the false roof, with the top of the loaf being an inch or more above the crumb below.

So all well and good on the bread front, the only catch being that all this was coming to the boil at the same time as our festivities.

The starting and main course of which was built around lamb steaks - that is to say slices of leg - grilled. Taken with onions and mushrooms cooked in a little oil and with just a drop of water at the end, in our AGA sautée pan, otherwise a rather heavy frying pan with a lid. A pan first noticed at reference 2 and which I might say has been one of our more successful kitchen purchases. A versatile pan, used more days than it is not. Dear, but good value as it turned out. And we could have spent a lot more. Plus crinkly cabbage, plus boiled brown rice.

All this worked out very well, with the onions and so forth working much better, for me anyway, as a moistener for the meat than one of those French buttery things they are apt to give you in restaurants.

The starting wine, for once in a while, was the bottle of champagne noticed at reference 2, which came with a top which came with an enamel (?) picture of a duck. The following wine was Mademoiselle, noticed, for example, at reference 3. Which turned out to be much better sequencing than we managed on Christmas Day.

For dessert, baked apples (with dates direct from the middle man in Cullompton on this occasion), having decided that mince meat and apple tart (mince as in mince pies) might be a bit much on this occasion.

Lightly dried peanuts in shell from Sainsbury's to follow.

At this point, an interval as BH wanted to watch something on telly about seaside villages. I read about Ayn Rand of reference 4, prompted by having cracked out the DVD again at some point. A strange lady, but a good film, even if I don't usually much care for Helen Mirren. Peter Fonda did well as the long suffering husband and Eric Stolz did well as the creepy acolyte. When we will get around to the third viewing? I'm sure there will be one.

Winding up after the interval with the traditional Chocolate Orange. Luckily, BH had been taking advice on how best to open them up without smashing up all the segments, and she did the job with one neat blow to the apex with my ball pein hammer - using the pein end that is. Sometimes peen. Just the one segment damaged, which was not a bad result at all. Very much the sort of thing snapped above, turned up by Bing. Identical even.

Suitably fed and watered, I turned my mind to the 1,100 pages of Brexit agreement, presumably mostly a cut and paste job from the one that May agreed some years ago and which our fat leader was instrumental in getting thrown out. I was amused to learn, that despite all the lawyer time which must have been spent on it, the text included a rash of rather anachronistic references to more or less obsolete Internet technology - although I did not get as far as finding out why it needed to mention such stuff at all. Clearly paying lawyers £10,000 a page does not run to them actually reading them.

PS: on inspection of the big document at reference 5 this evening, I was surprised to find how much detailed IT stuff found its way into the agreement, with the relevant sample being snapped above. To be found by searching for 'internet'. It struck me as rather odd that such stuff - all too likely to become obsolete quite quickly - finds its way into an international agreement of this sort. Perhaps that is just one of the many prices we pay for leaving. Did the £10,000 a page lawyers bother to read it at all, or did they just ask to tea boy to take a look between cuppas? Young chap who probably knew about such things.

Do we get great chunks of text about the minutiae of food technology? Or of fish processing technology?

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/ask.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/01/aga.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/lenquete-porcine.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/rand-concluded.html.

Reference 5: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/agreements-reached-between-the-united-kingdom-of-great-britain-and-northern-ireland-and-the-european-union.