More lentils

Lentils came around again this week, with most of the ingredients visible above. The stump of lettuce was a snack for the chef rather than an ingredient.

10oz of lentils washed three times, the third wash coming fairly clean and clear. Made up to 1.5l with water and brought to the boil at around 11:30. Boiled for five to ten minutes then down to simmer. After a while added a few sticks of celery, sliced cross-wise.

Ground up around eight black peppercorns, with the grounds tipped onto about an ounce of butter while it melted in the sauté pan (foodie speak for a heavy frying pan with a lid rather than a handle). Added a couple of cloves of garlic, chopped. Add the chopped onions. When soft, add the chopped tomatoes. With all this chopping meaning that the knife (visible left) needed to be sharpened a couple of times during the process.

Chop up the dodgy looking left over potato in the foreground and add that to the lentils. And the small amount of left over rice to the lentils.

At around 12:50, add the onions etc to the lentils and continue to simmer for a few minutes. Adding 200g of coarsely chopped Black Mountain sausage from Sainsbury's along the way.

In parallel, cook the beans and the brown rice. Beans I think from Morocco. How do they get here?

The start of my conversation with Gemini is snapped above. The gist of it seems to be keeping the bean cool from plant to plate, which means refrigerated shipping containers. And sea transport to somewhere like Tilbury for speed - much quicker than trucking overland. The exchange or less closes with:

'... This entire process, from farm gate to supermarket shelf, is designed for maximum speed and minimum temperature fluctuation to ensure the beans remain turgid, tender, and fresh...'.

In response to a supplementary, he says that the same sort of beans from Egypt, which is a good deal further away, would be air freighted as anything else would take too long.

Like the acorns of reference 2, this use of sea freight and air freight ought to be checkable. But will it take me a day or more?

In response to my initial query, Copilot is hot on documentation, food regulations and Customs, but Bing turns up the helpful looking reference 3. Maybe a bit later.

On the plate, somewhat upstaged by the fine stewpan from ProCook.

More or less repeated on the second day, adding a little water to the lentils.

Taken on brown bread for supper on the third day, that is to say today, adding a little left over mashed potato to the lentils. Warmed up in the microwave on this occasion. Meat supplies running a bit low by this point.

PS 1: I still miss the heavy iron skillet we once possessed. A proper skillet, made before non-stick took over the world. But it was not suitable for the glass top cookers we have had for years and we did not use it on stove or fire often enough to justify its hook in the garage. 

It was good for frying pancakes (in very hot lard), but tossing was a bit heavy on wrist and forearm. I doubt if I could manage it now.

PS 2: my donation to Dignity in Dying today may have got caught up in something Cloudfare related. No idea what the Dignity people might use this stuff for, but I then happened on reference 4 which suggests that there was indeed some incident or outage today and that lots of services could have been affected. Something else to read properly later.

PS 3: later: not much the wiser from starting to read reference 6. Beyond thinking that running your own website has become a bit of a business if you have reason to worry about bad actors. Much easier to leave all that to the likes of Google.

According to Gemini, the drop in share price in 2022 was more to do with how the market was feeling about the high-growth, hi-tech sector generally at that time than with anything to do with them in particular. 

To think that one could once just buy shares in water companies and forget about them. Paid their divis as regular as clockwork - with no fancy footwork in the Virgin Islands.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/04/more-beef-from-ben.html. The arrival of the stewpan.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/11/gemini-pigs-and-acorns.html.

Reference 3: https://www.cargorouter.com/freight-shipping/Egypt-to-United-Kingdom/.

Reference 4: ChatGPT and X hit by outage at online security group Cloudflare: San Francisco-based company blames incident on ‘spike in unusual traffic’ to one of its services - Melissa Heikkila, Financial Times - 2025.

Reference 5: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudflare.

Reference 7: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/.