Having noticed the dry run at reference 1, a week or so we went in for the real thing, with the principal change being cutting the amount of flour from three tablespoons to one and a half. With the snap above being taken after the meat had been cut up.
Which cutting introduced a new error in that I failed to notice and cut out a few bits of gristle - it cutting easily enough - gristle which did not chew easily enough and rather tainted the dish as a whole. And in the event I went for chopping up a couple of real tomatoes rather than using tomato purée snapped.
Five and a half ounces of Basmati rice, the stuff which tends to be sticky, cooked in plenty of water. Plus the broccoli in the colander at the back. Plus the quartered caps and chopped stalks, just a few minutes before the off at 17:30, just about an hour after setting off. Pretty good, better than last time, but just a touch more boiling down would have been even better.
Taken with a bottle of the champagne first noticed at reference 2, this one with a picture of a statue of Urbain II on the cap rather than a duck. The pope who kicked off the first crusade who happened to have been born in Châtillon-sur-Marne, maybe 30km to the west of the home of the wine. Perhaps they ship the wine there to be bottled up. You can read all about it at references 3 and 4.
Followed by cake from Bachmann, described as a hazelnut praline. A good cake, with my only comment being that the chocolate topping should have been thinner and weaker, perhaps more brittle, so that it cut more easily.
The interior; mostly praline. I puzzled about how on earth you could make such a thing. The praline was quite soft and I couldn't see how you might have got the cake out of the mould. Frozen or chilled first?
Taken with most of a bottle of Chassagne-Montrachet from M. Miolane. Good stuff, but perhaps not quite the thing after champagne. The 'Mademoiselle' we did last time worked better, not that we had any of that left. While on Christmas Day, we took the wrong wine after the Chassagne-Montrachet, as noticed at reference 5. More homework needed. But I mustn't make too much of it; it all went off well enough.
A discussion on the subject of park life, important when our children were teenagers, it not being something that either BH or I could recall being a feature of that stage of our lives. What has changed? Surely something more significant than the ready available of tinnies?
By the time we had finished, the full moon was just rising in the east.
Tried, for the second time, having walked out on the first occasion in the cinema, something we do very rarely, 'Moulin Rouge' with Nicole Kidman, but far too noisy for us, both visually and aurally, and having access to a volume control was not enough. Flicked over to the much more soothing pantomime that is 'Midsomer Murders'.
Impressed by truffles from Fortnum & Mason. And the packaging, delivery etc was well up to standard. Just what you want for a luxury product.
Put the fat and gristle out for the crows around 10:00 (BST, first day) Sunday morning: they took about ten minutes to turn up for it. With one of them doing most of it. Then the magpies turned up and did a dance with a fox that turned up shortly after, seeming to be happy enough so long as the fox kept a couple of metres away, which it did. The fox seemed more interested in the smell of fat than in the magpies. Luckily, there was nothing left for the fox by then, foxes not being animals I care too feed. Indeed, I wax indignant when I hear of neighbours doing it.
PS: novelty birthday card, brought on by lack of access to shops. Reflecting my scouting, boating and carpentry past, a contraption cunningly designed to take a sheet of A4 in portrait orientation with the help of a couple of staples. Sadolin finished. Image turned up by Bing. It also did quite well as a draught detector on the window sill and I dare say it will be used again. Snapped here, complete with modesty napkin.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/wine-buffs.html.
Reference 3: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbain_II.
Reference 4: https://champagnedeville.fr/fr/.
Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/part-iii.html.
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