lamb jalfrezi – derrickjknight

Catering For Boxing Day

On the only dry morning of a largely dreary day we visited Tesco for Jackie to obtain further ingredients for her Boxing Day curries, and to acquire petrol.

Having now read fifty more pages of ‘Dombey and Son’ I scanned the next nine of Charles Keeping’s exquisitely detailed illustrations to my Folio Society edition.

‘Painted and patched for the sun to mock’

In ‘The horse, in his struggles to get up, kicked him’ features the artist’s trademark dog, with Keeping’s own imagination demonstrating the animal’s distress at the accident.

‘Awake, doomed man, while she is near’

‘Mr Dombey, in a paroxysm of rage, pulled his hair rather than nothing’

‘She confronted him with the same self-possession and steadiness’

‘ ‘Don’t mind her,’ she said; ‘she’s a strange creetur’

‘She cast the gems upon the ground’

‘The captain carried her up’. Note how the stairs are indicated.

Of all the delicate details in ‘She dared not look into the glass’ perhaps the mirror is the cleverest.

Later, I published https://derrickjknight.com/2021/12/13/a-knights-tale-78-divorce/

The Culinary Queen perfected her Boxing Day Chicken Jalfrezi during the day,

saving enough of the sauce prepared yesterday to see us through the week on lamb jalfrezi and pilau rice, which we began this evening with her favourite Hoegaarden and more of the Malbec for me.

At The Trough

James Peacock of Peacock Computers spent most of the morning with me on the phone and at my desk resolving the banking/computer problems. Naturally this has been a great relief.

While James and I clicked on icons and stuff outside the kitchen door our nostrils were treated to the delicious aromas of Jackie’s lamb curry bubbling and steaming on the hob.

This afternoon, continuing what Jackie had begun this morning,

I watered a few pots and hanging baskets while she

chopped the ingredients for mushroom rice.

It was far too hot for any further gardening this afternoon, so we took a short drive into the forest.

A group of Highland Cattle were slaking their thirst in the cattle trough on Wootton Heath. The comments on https://derrickjknight.com/2013/02/27/why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road/ give intriguing additions providing an explanation of how this London icon found its way into the New Forest.

Most other animals kept out of sight of the scorching sun, as we discovered when traversing

Bisterne Close, where sun dappled woodland scenes were all that was on offer for a photographer.

From Lyndhurst Road we could look down onto field horses, two of which wore masks protecting eyes and ears from irritating flies. As usual the galleries can be accessed by clicking on any image and viewing full size by clicking the box beneath each picture which may then be further amplified.

Photographic clues earlier in the post will make our dinner no surprise when I tell you we enjoyed

Jackie’s excellent spicy lamb jalfrezi with mushroom rice, with which she drank Hoegaarden and I finished the Carinena.

It was the Assistant Photographer who, dinners in our dishes, dashed out to photograph what she could see from the kitchen table. I would never have got away with it. The landscape format shows bronze fennel in the Pond Bed; the portrait, fuchsia Chequerboard.

Before And After: The Shady Path

As I wandered around the garden this morning, a Speckled Wood butterfly flitted across my path and settled, to cast its shadow, on the outside of the sitting room wall.

Like the roses

Absolutely Fabulous, still living up to its name,

and Chris Beardshaw, just needing a bit of a trim,

it still enjoys the sunshine.

Here is the next section of the series charting the progress in the garden.

The Head Gardener’s Walk links into the Shady Path, seen here first on 7th, then 19th May 2014. This path, although now opened up to the light is so named because it was then mostly in deep shade.

This was one of the first paths we had begun to clear. By 27th July, we had reset the extant Victorian edge tiles, and thinned out invasive euphorbias, some of the roots of which were quite stubborn.

The following day Jackie was able to relax on the Ace Reclaim bench that we had bought from that architectural salvage outlet.

Here, on 5th September, Jackie is working on clearing the bed on the opposite side.

This is what the Shady Path looked like on 20th October 2015. The trellis in the background now borders the refurbished decking.

In preparation for the winter which is bound to come, and in particular for the twice-yearly tampering with the clocks which results in earlier darkness, The Head Gardener needed lighting in her shed. Off we went to ScrewFix in Lymington and bought a battery operated lamp.

On our return Ron and Shelly arrived to help sort out the problem I am still having sending the party photographs to Ray Salinger. His son transferred them to a memory stick. Our visitors stayed for dinner.

As attractive as the taste of Indian food is its colour and its aromas. The fragrance of Jackie’s superb simmering lamb jalfrezi alongside the fresh scents of the chopped peppers were extremely appetising, so who could resist an invitation to share it.

Jackie drank Kingfisher and the rest of us shared a bottle of Mu red wine 2013 that Ron had brought back from Spain.