a chicken-y … thing

Cooking has been conspicuous by its absence chez Jordan for the past couple of weeks – we’ve been eating out of the freezer, or takeaways, but I did have a final fling with my ancient gas cooker Sunday before last, and roast a chickie!, with Yorkshire pud and roast potatoes.

By the way, in case you didn’t know, Yorky batter freezes perfectly well – I didn’t know, so I tried it out, and it was fine. That’s useful for us, because one egg’s worth of batter is too much pudding for two of us.

We had cold chicken with baked potato and red cabbage (from the freezer) one night, and then it languished in the fridge, because the cooker had been disconnected. On Friday, Pete dismantled the carcass and there was a fair bit of meat left. The bones went variously into the freezer and into the cats, and I bore the meat into the Makeshift Kitchen. I had a tub of veg left over from Sunday – carrots, leeks and green beans cooked in my ever faithful Marigold veg bouillon, so I thought I could fashion something from it all.

I set my big Le Creuset sauté pan on the halogen hob, and fried off a pack of bacon lardons in some olive oil. Then I added the veg, then two heaped teaspoons of grain mustard and some flour, and fashioned a sort of white sauce affair with milk. In went the chicken meat, and it was all stirred together till it was warmed through.

We had it with rice (our method is 13 minutes on the hob and 13 minutes off, so this chicken affair cooked in the second 13 minutes). It wasn’t terribly special – was lacking something in the flavour – but it used up the leftovers, and there’s another tub of the mix in the freezer: I shall fashion it into a pie when I have a kitchen again.

Today the plumber came and did his first fix, and so now we have no water either. However, we do have dry rot in the kitchen floor; isn’t that nice? So we’re waiting for Mr DryRotMan to tell us when he can come and rip it all out and charge us a fortune before the kitchen can be fitted.

Lend us a tenner?

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

— weekend 19/21 March 2011 —

The last few days have involved first fix electrics, covering absolutely every bloody thing in Yet More Dust, after I’d cleaned it all up. We went to Ikea while they were here, and bought a kitchen sink (which we now don’t like) and various bits and pieces such as a new rug for the dining room, and so forth. Got home to find total chaos, and they had discovered dry rot in the kitchen floor. Aargh.

Got someone in to have a look on Friday morning, who quoted us £850 to fix. Got someone else in on Saturday morning, who quoted £995. Both of them said they could do it this week, but the dearer chap phoned back on Sunday assuming we wanted him to carry out the work, only to be told that we could find no trace of him on Google*, he turned up in a plain van, had no business card, and we weren’t about to hand over a grand to someone with no public presence.

On Saturday we took the rubble to the tip, where we picked up a load of wood for the stove from someone who was about to dump it (hurrah), went to Asda (which was manic), then home via Anlaby to visit the inestimable Fields. We bought pasties (no longer Cornish), three sorts of sossidges for the freezer, a hand made Shepherd’s Pie and some pork stuffed with basil and ricotta (I’ve got no kitchen, OK?), and some cat bikkit that the Tribe particularly like from the pet shop up there – haven’t seen it anywhere else.

I spotted an ad in the local freesheet for a cats/kittens Open Day for Beverley CPL, admission cat food, so we bundled up the tins of Breeder food from Makro that the Tribe liked until we bought lots of it (sigh), and took that over to Woodmansey. We hardly saw any kittins, but no matter – the fud has gone to a good cause.

Then we drove over to Paull and walked a couple of miles along the foreshore; it was a beautiful day, and hardly anyone about, and we really enjoyed it. Then we went and had a Sunday roast in the Crown Inn in Paull, which was very nice. Home via B&Q, where we bought Danish oil for the worktops, and some spotlights to be wired into the external light point, and some spare bulbs for the lamp beside my end of the sofa in the living room, which turned out to have been unplugged …

The plumber came to do his first fix this morning – he very kindly rearranged everything so that he could run his pipes under the floor before DryRotMan did his stuff. Which he is now saying he might not be able to to until Saturday, which means messing the plasterer about again. However, we now have no water downstairs apart from the outside tap, so we have to wash up in the bath. I am never, ever doing this again.

It’ll be lovely when it’s finished.

*Not strictly true – there were two or three ads on Loot, none of which were for timber treatment.

Mirrored from kestrel.org.