Yet more sausage

The other day saw another outing for the trusty saucisson from Bastides. 

Proceedings started with a visit to the large compost heap, the one used for our bulkier garden waste, at this time of year autumn leaves. No need to trouble the council with such stuff - in which connection I might add that that current holders of Stamford Green allotments, where I gardened for some years, seem to need a great battery of the brown wheelie bins used for same. Clearly gardeners who, despite having sizeable allotments, don't bother to compost down their own waste. Very strange. Never happened in my day.

While at the eastern base of my heap, in the shade of the copper beech, some quite decent looking field mushrooms have sprouted. At least that is what they look like, although I remember as I type that the last ones, which were much bigger, failed the scrape test. As noticed at reference 1. Just about a year ago, and I had been thinking that it was a bit late in the year for mushrooms.

Nevertheless, the much bigger ones noticed at reference 2, were June. Maybe the good mushrooms (Agaricus campestris) are summer and the bad mushrooms (Agaricus xanthodermus) are winter. Who knows.

Back with the sausage, the usual drill. Fry up a couple of cloves of chopped garlic. Add two or three coarsely chopped onions. Add a coarsely chopped yellow pepper and a few stalks of celery, sliced cross-wise. Add four or five large tomatoes, coarsely chopped. Tinned tomatoes not being the thing at all in my book; they always seem to taste of tin, quite apart from giving the stew the wrong sort of texture. No water on this occasion. Allowing a little gentle cooking between each addition. 

Towards the end, add 200g of sausage, some button mushrooms and some left-over boiled rice. No potatoes on this occasion, left-over or freshly prepared.

Seven ounces of tubular pasta. Some Brussels sprouts and off you go.

Stew a little wetter than I really like, despite not having added any water. Should have paid a bit more attention to boiling it down a bit on the last lap. Before adding the sausage etc that is.

Pasta and sprouts more or less all went, but we did a little more than half the stew at the first sitting, after which we decided that there was enough left for a second sitting. More economical and less fattening that just snacking it away in the margins.

PS 1: following the trouncing at Scrabble reported at reference 3, I am pleased to be able to report that yesterday I went some way to retrieving the situation by losing by maybe 10 points on a much bigger aggregate score. Part of this was, quite late in the game, scoring 42 points by putting down just two letters, to make 'box' and 'ex' with the 'x' on a double word. This provoked a challenge and I was slightly surprised to find that OED allowed it, not marking 'ex' as foreign or with the double bar for not fully naturalised. But not quite enough points to carry the game.

PS 2: I can also pick up on a point made about the hard of hearing, made in the second part of the Barry book noticed at reference 4, to the effect that one can try too hard. That if one relaxes a bit, stops focussing too hard on the details, what had been hard can sometimes suddenly become tractable. A point which has been made elsewhere about both playing golf and playing the cello. Maybe it reads across to games like Scrabble too, and when one is on a losing streak one just tries to hard. One obsesses with all kinds of mental trickery to try and crack it - and fails. While the person on the winning streak just sails along without seeming to make any effort at all. But to keep things in proportion, the losing streak is only two games so far.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/11/dangerous-games.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/06/something-going-down-bottom-of-garden.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/11/two-people.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/11/partial-sight.html.