Chook in a bag !!!!

One of the British traditions is their roast dinners - cooked particularly on a Sunday. This would be their main meal at lunchtime and it can be a leg of lamb, beef or a whole chicken and of course a nut roast if you are a vegetarian. These would traditionally be accompanied by Roast Potatoes, Yorkshire Pudding [no, not a sweet pudding desert but very crispy and savoury round batter (in the opposite picture) cooked in a very hot oven] followed by some stuffing and a bit of gravy.

Last Sunday I decided to roast my chicken in a bag, not your household run of the mill normal plastic bags - bags which are oven proofed!! I have seen supermarkets selling prepared chicken (i.e. seasoned or stuffed) in a bag to be roasted in the oven. I thought I will give it a go myself and see how it turns out. If I were to roast a chicken in a normal way I would have a basting mixture for my chicken made up of chopped two sprigs of rosemary (from my garden), two cloves of garlic crushed or finely chopped and two tablespoon of butter. All these are mixed up with a bit of salt to take the taste a little bit further. As I have decided to keep things simple I will use the same basting combination for this roast too.

By "stuffing" my basting mixture between the skin and breasts of the chicken it will, not only flavours the breast meat but it will also keep them moist. I then loosened the skin with the back of my spoon pushed in towards the top of chicken on both sides of the breasts. I needed to be careful not to break the skin or else all the juices of the bird would have leaked out during cooking thus not doing what it is supposed to do so I needed to concentrate on pushing my spoon downwards towards the meat when I was pushing it upwards towards the top of the bird.



As illustrated from the pics below(in first picture), the basting mixture was then spooned in and then carefully pushed towards the top of the bird, with my fingers, (in the second picture) to distribute it evenly over the meat of the bird. The remainder of the mixture was then spread on to the legs and wings (in the third picture) and lastly what's was left, if any, over the top of the bird too . In the fourth picture you can see that I have dusted some flour over it to (hopefully) keep the bird from sticking to the bag. I then placed the bird in the bag (pic 5) , tied the bag up tightly and then slashed the top of the bag with a sharp knife - three times - to let only some of the air out while it was cooking but not too much as the steam created in there would also help keep the meat moist. Place it in a baking tray big enough to hold it with the ends of the bag tucked in it . It was then roasted in a reheated hot oven Gas Mark 5 (about 180 celcius) for about 2 hours. It came out nicely roasted and golden ! The meat was flavoursome and moist - the meat was falling off the bones - it was that moist !! I think I shall be trying this out again !!! Yummy !!

Wonders of the human anatomy...

We were invited to two drinks parties organised by my brother in law's friends and we walked there on both occasions instead of taking the car so that everyone can enjoy and have a few drinks. Had a couple of days of difficulty in walking as the top of the sandals were pressing onto the cut. Luckily it got a lot better by Sunday and I managed to try out their newly built pool. The weather there was really warm - 28 celcius !! Thought I would cool off in the pool thinking the 26 degrees shown on the pool thermometer would be ok. I was wrong ! We were only in there for 1/2 hour and I couldn't get out any quicker!! At least I can now say that I had been in.

Their house (I would say mansion!) is half finished. The fittings in there are of very good quality. Their lounge has a HUGE fireplace and is as big as Kit's 2 lounges put together. On top of that will be the master bedroom with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the fields and lake in front of thier house. When it is finally finished they intend to rent it out during the summer and I think they are aiming for the rich - looking at what they have done so far.

The pic above shows the kitchen looking out onto the pool and the vast expense of agricultural land. The fields just next to their pool are owned by their french neighbour and they had wheat grown in there this year. Last year was sunflowers and from the pics below you can see that the view was breathtaking!!

Silly me!!

Yesterday (after trying to call you) I decided to pack for our long weekend trip to France this Friday, to visit my brother in law. Half way through that I was distracted by my rumbling tummy so I went down to the kitchen to start fixing myself some lunch. I opened my kitchen cabinet door to take a saucepan out to boil a couple of eggs for my egg sandwich and then everything was quite a blur after that as all of it happened in a split second !! I felt a thud on the top of my left foot and looked down and a pyrex dish was in pieces on top of it. I could also see a deep laceration and there and then I thought "oh no I need a plaster now !" I then stepped back to get one and immediately felt a sharp pain on the bottom of my other foot, looked at it and saw a small piece of glass poking out of it and thought " *# + !!" . Pulled that out and it started bleeding! By this time the deep cut on my other foot was bleeding quite a bit too !! Then I said "Sh#*!! Not now!" thinking I have got a plane to catch in about 4 days time! Then I rang Robert at work to tell what had happened and he suggested that I get an ambulance while he was driving back home. The ambulance got here very quickly and I was then taken up to the A & E of the local hospital with my foot temporarily bandaged. Robert met me there and it was not until about 2 1/2 half hours later that I was seen. Came home with a bandaged sore foot and sore arm (!!) as I had to have a tetanus injection for the cut and still no lunch yet (that includes Robert too !) LOL !

Anyway, we had a chinese take away for dinner instead so that cured our hunger straightaway. My foot was quite sore last night in bed but I am glad that this morning it's beginning to feel a lot better and hopefully it will heal up by the time I get to the airport on Friday! However I don't think I can test their new swimming pool though :( !! which would be a real shame as I was really looking forward to that. Still I am not going to complain considering how bad it could have gone the other way!

Tiny Tomatoes !!

Well - tiny for now - hopefully they will be big and juicy. Having said that some of them are supposedly cherry tomatoes as well. Will keep you posted!

This year we are very lucky to have been given about 20 tomato plants. In the past we hadn't been having any success with growing them because we keep getting the tomato blight which the leaves will blacken and then followed by the fruits before they were ripe! So hopefully we will have better luck this year.

These plants were given to us by my neighbour (aged 81 !!) and my father in law (aged 85 !!) who are still very keen gardeners. I hope I will still be as active as they are when I get to that age let alone digging over my veggie patch!!

BEANS AND MORE BEANS!!

As promised close up photos of the runner beans ...... You can see their blooms are bright red, very pretty and a bean is emerging from one of them after having been pollinated.



These purple ones are a different variety - the green bean there will turn dark purple as it gets bigger but when it is cooked it turns green again !!










All of them will grow to about one foot long !! Will upload pics of them when they get to that size.

Garden update !!!!

I HAVE GOT BEANS !!!
I HAVE GOT BEANS !!!





I HAVE GOT CARROTS !!!!!
I HAVE GOT CARROTS !!!!!

SOOOOO HAPPY !

Point to ponder.....

Saw this article a few weeks ago in a newspaper column and I think it is worth pondering on as the subject is not discussed as often as it should (in Asia especially, at least when I was living there) thus a lot of its symptoms can thereby be wrongfully diagnosed as a mental one resulting in having to unnecessarily rely on lifetime medication.

It goes as follows:-

Charles Dickens when attending the patient’s dance at St Luke’s Hospital for the insane on Boxing Day 1851, was struck by the preponderance of women inmates. "It is well known that female servants are more frequently affected than any other class of persons," he said.

We live in a more enlightening times and those forbidding mental institutions have disappeared but the sexual imbalance noted by Dickens persists. Women are more prone to suffer from, and be treated for, mental illness than men.

The stresses and strains of juggling the demands of work and family life is one plausible social explanation of why this may be so.But “hormones” may be a contributing factor, particularly for those prone to one of the trio of conditions relation to hormonal fluctuations; premenstrual tension, postnatal blues and menopausal melancholia.

So it would seem only sensible to consider some form of hormonal treatment for those with, say, severe depression or bipolar disorder who are also, or have been, troubled by such problems.But, claims Prof John Studd of London's Lister Hospital, this rarely happens. Instead, these women fall into the hands of psychiatrists who, due to adverse publicity around hormone replacement therapy, don’t believe in hormonal treatment. Prof Studd has encountered women who have been treated for years in the standard way – with antidepressants or Lithium or who may have undergone ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy) or required admission to hospital. Many of these women, however “respond dramatically” to a combination of oestrogens and other drugs that restore the hormonal balance.

The above is taken out of the Second Opinion written by Dr James Le Fanu in the Sunday Telegraph.