Up and down and getting there

It’s been a bit of an up and down, good news, bad news type 24 hours. First off, we had an excellent meal with the picanha mini roasts I’d got from the Betty’s Farm butcher. These are the chunky cuts off the rump cap I described the other day. I marinated them by smearing with a mix of some hot pepper rub (mainly paprika and chilli) with half a tablespoon of balsamic syrup and the same again of Worcester sauce and leaving them covered at room temperature for an hour.

I next parboiled some potatoes as if I was going to roast them, but then added them to a roasting tray already containing oiled chunks of parsnip, carrot, marrow and wedges of onion.

I put that in the centre of an oven pre-heated to Gas Mark 6 for ten minutes, took it out and shook it about a bit and put the meat on top. Back in the oven for ten minutes, remove, shuggle and turn the meat, back in for another ten minutes and dinner is served.

It was yummy, though parboiling the parsnips might have worked even better.

This morning, we knew that we should see a CityLink delivery any time between half seven and half five. Maybe that's why neither of us slept all that well last night (can't have been the meal.) I was over at the lodge by eight and Sheila joined me at nine. We pottered about the lodge all morning, waiting for the delivery. A bit before twelve I went over to the boat for lunch and on my way back, guess what, Jules popped her head out of the office to say that they’d got a parcel for us.

Presumably the CityLink guy had dropped it off with them to save driving round the marina and no one had thought to give us a ring to let us know.

Heigh ho.

Never mind, that stuff, together with an Amazon delivery via the marina shop, means that we’ve got a good set of pans, a carving dish and a carving fork. All we need now is for Dunelm to deliver and get ready for collection the stuff we’ve ordered from them.

In addition, we’ve already got two firm bookings, one for the 26th for at least three weeks and another in March of next year.

We’ve just had another conversation with Jules and Kath who heads up the cleaning team; on Thursday afternoon we’re going to have a meeting with them in the lodge about the details of the arrangements for turn round and so on.

Tonight, as it’s meat free Monday, we’re having the other half of last week’s Chennai curry; well, it’s Bean Madras, anyway.

/floor