Veggie day

Veggie Wednesdays continue, having been invented just about a year ago, as noticed at reference 1.

There being some left over vegetables - potatoes, leeks and carrots as I recall - I decided to go for a new lunchtime snack, a change from orange lentils. Cook up three and a half ounces of pearl barley. Liquidise the left over vegetables. Retrieve Knorr vegetable stock cube from the cupboard - a sort of flat, dark brown version of the Oxo cube of old. Mix all together, taking care with the stock cube which does not seem to dissolve under its own steam. Which all added up to a very acceptable broth, taken with a little dry, brown bread.

Having taken care to stir it from time to time, as the barley is quite apt to stick.

BH was also in an experimental mood having bought a packet of the soya bean mince snapped above from Sainsbury's. Detailed below at reference 2.

Padded out with quite a lot of chopped vegetables and tomatoes, it made a very acceptable sauce to go with spaghetti. I don't suppose it would have occurred to me that it wasn't meat if BH had not come clean. On the other hand, I am not sure that it would work so well as plain mince, just cooked up with a little chopped onion. My take is that it needed the camouflage of lots of veg. Maybe one day we will get to find out.

Enough sauce left over to make a very respectable lasagne the following day. Two day's veggie for the price of one. And again, I don't suppose it would have occurred to me that it was not meat had I not known already.

On the other hand, I had cheated at breakfast, spicing up what was left of the vegetable broth with a few rashers of bacon.

PS 1: along the way, Suella Braverman suffered the indignity of being doused with some household cleaning product which had leaked out on the way home from Sainsbury's. Just one of the perils of choosing to be in the public eye. I had to commandeer the clothes horse and spread the pages of the Guardian out on it to dry out in the front room. At least they dried dry, rather than sticky, as I had feared. By way of restitution, I was moved to look her up in Wikipedia: not exactly a posh girl but clearly an able one, even if not one who finds much favour in our part of Epsom. And I was pleased to read at reference 4, that after the Portuguese refused to return their Goan enclave to India after independence, the Indians eventually just took it back.

Most of what was the enclave is now the state of Goa, far and away the smallest state in the Indian Union. But not that small, maybe both ten times the area and ten times the population of the Isle of Wight.

PS 2: maybe one day we will get around to returning the Malvinas to Argentina and Gibraltar to Spain. I am sure that with a bit of time and good will, something could be worked out. Maybe this is something that the maverick new leader of Argentina will try for. Places like St. Helena a bit more awkward: far too small to be independent but not having any natural owner.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/11/embassy.html.

Reference 2: https://this.co/products/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suella_Braverman.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goa.