After much of the day spent painting the lounge ceiling in a fresh coat of brilliant white matt emulsion, Midsomer Murders proved boring [ 😀 ] so I retired early to read. On the way, I put out the remnants of a lamb shoulder and, hoping to see a badger, a pile of peanuts … unsalted, of course – we don’t want badgers wandering around looking for a pint. Actually, these were the birds’ peanuts so I hope they don’t mind sharing.
Incidentally, I’ve been trying out roasting bags in an attempt to keep the oven clean. Our lamb shoulder was cooked at 160°C/gas 2½ for 90 minutes, then I split the bag open along the top and wacked the oven up to 200°C/gas 6 for 30 minutes more to try and crisp the skin up a little. It didn’t work. The keeping clean part works but sadly the roasting part doesn’t work. The food is cooked perfectly well and remains moist but roast, it ain’t. The other problem is that the cooking juices stick to the inside bottom of the roasting bag so you cannot deglaze the pan for any gravy/sauce [depending upon how posh you feel]. Back to oven cleaning … what a thrill.
I was surprised to see that we’d captured a fox’s early visit shortly after 21:30. I was even more surprised when we realized that this was not our [fox formerly known as] Limpy; we haven’t seen any other fox for some time. This was the fox I’d tagged Sleek. He/she has a larger, more prominent white tip to its brush with more extensive black markings on the muzzle. Not many of the frames show a clear picture ‘cos it moves around so much.
Limpy did pitch up shortly before midnight but the lamb had gone, snaffled by our earlier visitor. Limpy did manage to tuck into the peanuts, though. They really are quite distinct – the foxes, I mean, not the peanuts, all peanuts look much the same. 😀 Well, not peanuts with salt on compared to unsalted, obviously. And [taking lessons from the BBC on starting sentences with a conjunction] dry roasted peanuts look quite different … not even much like peanuts. 😀
But strewth, the blasted BBC even starts whole new paragraphs with conjunctions these days. What has happened to the former guardians of the English language?
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