The day started with prepping bread batch No.754, after which it was time to do something with the young marrow picked up for a quid at M&S. Or perhaps it was Waitrose, with their rather larger selection of green vegetables.
Six ounces of lentils, rinsed a couple of times and cooked separately for around 40 minutes. An ounce of butter, two cloves of garlic, four medium onions, five medium tomatoes and 200g of smoked lardons from M&S. Ingredients added to the pan serially over around half an hour. Lentils stirred in a quarter of an hour after that.
A bit more than half served to fill up the marronic cavity, as snapped above, after about three quarters of an hour in the oven, under foil.
On the plate. We did very nearly all the marrow, skin and all, and something more than half of the lentils. The left over lentils and rice will serve today.
The only catch being that I forget to check on the second rise of the bread, to which I shall return shortly.
Notwithstanding the marrow inside and the heat outside, got out for a short circuit in the afternoon, starting with a medium small M&S trolley from Station Approach, snapped above looking back towards West Hill.
With a second from the bottom of the Kokoro Passage. Unusually, a small trolley from M&S, perhaps a stray from the store at Ashtead, given their rarity at Epsom.
It was indeed a Light 70, as noticed at reference 2.
It has also acquired some grot from somewhere. Spilt food baked on in the sun? Given the the grot and the fact that the stack at M&S was often already quite cluttered with too many different sizes of trolleys, I did wonder about returning it at all. But then I thought that it was certainly an M&S problem rather than an Epsom & Ewell Borough Council problem, so returned it was, to be tucked inside a larger trolley.
At some point, picked up some more Sweeheart cherries from Spain, from Waitrose.
Paused on my way out, about to head up to East Street, to admire the flowers on one of the trees in the market place. Looking really well on this bright summers' afternoon - but with some confusion now as to whether the flowers were white or yellow. White above, but yellow below?
On the grounds that they are more white than yellow, Google Images says first choice Japanese pagoda tree (Styphnolobium japonicum), which looks plausible at reference 3. Second choice, Golden Rain Tree (Koelreuteria paniculata). I go with his first choice, pending a closer look at the flowers.
Should I try phoning up Civic Trees to see if they can tell me? One confused telephone operator?
Two more trolleys outside the passage leading to the library, and I opted for the smaller, M&S trolley. Which was shut by the time I got back there, so I had to leave it outside the entrance inside the Ashley Centre. Given that this last is shut during silent hours, the trolley was reasonably likely to stay there until gathered up when they open up in the morning. So fair to score it.
I wonder this morning, whether the fact that the centre is closed during said silent hours helps to keep it looking a lot smarter than the Swan Centre in Leatherhead, which I think is open all the time, in part because of the need to access the car park above.
Home to try the bread, by then cooled down.
Not too sure what to expect, as the second rise had been left too long and the dough had risen to about an inch above the rims and was starting to bubble up - by the time that I put it into the cold oven, continuing the experiment started with the previous batch. Bringing it to heat slowly seemed to do the trick and the dough did not collapse, although there were some interesting wrinkles and some bubble sign. The bread itself was fine, so I think for the moment I will stick with this cold oven approach.
Maybe recipe books often telling you to put whatever it is into a pre-heated oven, is all about making it possible to give precise cooking times, not confused by the (variable) time it might take for the oven to come to heat? Not an issue here, as making bread is something that I do every two or three weeks and can cope with a bit of confusion.
Contrariwise, I remember reading that starting with a hot oven seals the juices in the meat. And putting green vegetables into boiling water is better for the Vitamin C than bringing it to heat slowly. Indeed, I was reading only yesterday that gently warming DNA up in a watery bath is just the thing for partially separating the two strands in an otherwise non-destructive way.
PS 1: 'quid' seems to have vanished as slang for a pound note. Common when I was young.
PS 2: how long will it take Congress to work out that government by geriatric executive order is not really a very good way to run a large and complicated country? All a bit medieval really. Maybe OK for a city state, maybe even places like Venice and Athens of old, but not these days. Long live bureaucracy and due process!
References
Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/08/trolleys-939-and-940.html.
Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/08/trolleys-933-934-935-and-936.html.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styphnolobium_japonicum.
Group search keys: trolleysk, 20250810.
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