Big bird day

I’M FEELING uncomfortably stuffed this evening, and it’s entirely my own fault.

Actually, it’s one of the major cooking days chez nous today; we are doing our annual turkey.

It’s always a full-day turn, roasting this bird. In the morning My Good Lady is busy preparing the stuffing and the flavoured butter, and the whole of the afternoon is taken up with the roasting and basting,  Then, after the meal, we are occupied with slicing the meat off the carcass, bagging it up and taking it out to the freezer, not to mention all the washing up that needs doing...

The highlight of the day, though, is the long-waited-for turkey feast, our belated Christmas day treat.

This year, for once, we are trying one of these “bronze” turkeys, free-range, of course, and organic. It cost a bit more, but my goodness me, it’s certainly tasty – especially the dark meat.

And as usual we end up having far too much of it – a leg each and a fair portion of one breast. And the trimmings of course, the Brussels sprouts and roast spuds, plus a good slice of the minced pork stuffing. All very yummy! And unfortunately all too moreish!

I confess it, we overdo it a bit – so much so, I have to suffer for my gluttony, but when we have our annual big bird day a little self-indulgence is almost obligatory!

I consol myself with the thought that we shall be back to having our more abstemious portions of fish fingers tomorrow.

Light show

I SEE THAT My Good Lady has already reported on the joys of seeing a bright, frosty, winter morning.

I’m here to sing of the glorious twilight this evening.

We’re driving home from the Pub, where we have just had an amusing session with many of the Friday crowd.

We drop PD off at home, then we turn onto Marine Drive and it’s there we have to catch our breaths at the spectacle that presents itself.

The sun has just gone down over Morecambe Bay, but has left behind the most dazzling of light shows over the wet sands.

Bands of gleaming colour, from gold to orange to red, then yellow again to green to pale blue and then to the vast darker blue of the sky.

The silhouette of the little fishing boats and then, as we drive round the Bay, of Morecambe town itself, stands out in an enchanting relief.

One of these days I’m going to splash out on one of those dinky little portable phones that have a camera built into them, just for snapping sights such as this.

Truly wonderful!

Searching for the sun

IS IT just me, or has the winter seemed a long one?

What, with all the snow and ice earlier, and now with weeks of unrelenting grey skies and rain… and it’s still only mid January!

All the more reason, then, to see if we can spend a little time in the sun.

Despite her best attempts, My Good Lady has not been able to find a suitable holiday for us online, and my efforts too have proved fruitless and frustrating.

So, we’re off to our friendly local travel agent who, in the past, has come up trumps for us with ideas we may not have thought of.

The point is, we have to move out of our home in March for ten days or so – the disruptions of workmen knocking six bells out of our bathroom is more than either of us can endure.

And we might as well make the best of the necessity and take a late winter/early spring break.

So, where to go? Somewhere sunny, but not too far away – the Canaries perhaps.

We shall see.

Sore feet

WE VISIT the recently opened branch of Sainsbury’s on the site of Morecambe’s old football ground at Christie Park.

It strikes me right away as a poor choice of location for a supermarket: the place is cavernous, with wide aisles and what seems like endless rows of shelves in which one can so easily get lost and bewildered.

We only have about half a dozen items to buy but they take nearly an hour to locate in this overly-spaced and unfamiliar environment.

I seem to do a lot of walking today, I’m not sorry to get home and sit down over a nice cup of tea.

Evening. It’s my turn to be chief cook and bottle-washer today, so I set about making us a leftover beef curry.

The kitchen worktop seems covered in a variety of jars and containers, and I feel like an alchemist mixing up my concoction of spices.

It all has to plop away for a good hour and the aromas only serve to make My Good Lady and I even more ready to taste to result.

And very good it is too, though I say so myself.

Reflecting on our shop, though, we decide to revert to our regular supermarket, if only to spare my poor old sore feet!

A reassuring Bolognese

FOR MY first culinary effort of the year I do us a spicy spaghetti Bolognese – something of an old favourite, and an attempt to move away from this festive season to something a little more like normality.

Actually, I’m trying to brace myself for all these nasty cuts that are coming our way – I’m dreading what they may entail for My Good Lady and myself, and indeed for all of us.

We’ve already had a couple of shocks: the cost of petrol seems to have suddenly shot up and we’ve been notified by our energy supplier of a near doubling of the electricity price – and this latter, too, has been back-dated to 1 December 2010!

I know I still have much to be grateful for, whatever comes our way, I just wish I could feel a little more positive about life in general.

Too many bad things have happened in the last couple of years – not least all the friends we’ve lost – and I fear that somehow still worse is to come.

So yes, my spag Bol is something in the nature of a reassurance, a sort of clinging to the wreckage of tasty times past.