Playing with her Christmas present. 

In preparation for our retirement it got me to thinking about cooking.  Food is never far from my mind as all my friends and waistline will testify, but this time I wanted to put a more serious edge to my thinking.  I wanted to come up with a plan that would allow me to spend time in the kitchen cooking nutritious foods – on a budget, but not give that much time that it would eat into the day where we could be doing other things.   Whilst cooking yet another batch of chick peas that were refusing to soften, I for the sixteenth hundred and twenty fifth time during my marriage swore that I needed a pressure cooker.  And after twenty seven years I thought blow it, I’m getting one.  So then I started the research and found much to my delight that there was a new gadget about town, an electric pressure cooker.  Wow. So then I started to research those and after much peering at websites, calculating costs versus quality and versatility I decided to go with…

The Instant Pot.  A seven in one miraculous invention that needs no attending, no turning up of hobs or turning down of hobs or looking at gauges rattling around on the top, you simply press a few buttons and it does it all for you.

Well what does it do?  It does everything!  Pressure cooking, slow cooking, yoghurt making, rice cooking, steaming, its a warmer and you can use it as a frying pan to brown your meat.  A one pot wonder indeed.

When I first got it I made a pasta dish, which involved simply throwing in vegetables and pasta and water and setting it for ten minutes and it came out really well.  There is a big community on face book, utube and on the internet and if I was thinking about buying shares in one company this would be it. It has a stainless steel inner lining which means its dishwasher proof, (although not the lid)  many of the others I looked at had non stick liners and we all know as experienced housewife’s what that means…  People are making cakes and lasagnas and curries etc, it looks really promising.

So last weekend I decided to make a beef stew.

And I assembled my ingredients. Beef, carrots, onion, swede, garlic, mustard, tomato puree, Worcester sauce and chicken stock, plus salt and pepper and a couple of tablespoons of flour.

I fried off my beef in batches using the saute button adjusted to high,  then made a roux sauce in the left over fat with the flour and a little chicken stock, adding the aromatics, Worcester sauce, mustard, garlic and tomato puree, salt and pepper to make sure they all were evenly dispersed.  Added the rest of the chicken stock, the liquid level then came up to 4 cups.  Which is much lower than you would normally make a stew but the liquids don’t disappear like the do in an oven baked casserole and it would become too much like a soup if you added the normal amount. Then I added the meat back in on the bottom, followed by the carrots and swede, onion and potatoes on the top.

And we are just up to the maximum the pot can hold. Then I put the lid on and made sure it was not venting and hit the meat stew button, which is thirty five minutes, you can adjust that for more or less time, but I didn’t. The pot then comes up to pressure and then it cooks.  I was busy when it had finished and it will keep it on a keep warm cycle for ten hours!  It was keeping warm for thirty minutes before I opened it,  I let the pressure off and we had this.

See how much more liquid there is.  Oh the smell was divine. I greedily dished it out.

The potatoes were perfectly soft and fluffy, the meat was juicy and moist you could cut it with a spoon and the carrots and swede tender and succulent.  The flavour was off an old fashioned stew that had been burbling on a low heat for two hours, absolutely delicious.

Yep, I think we are going to enjoy this new toy.

(Recipe suitable for Instant Pot operating on 11.6 psi, if using a 15psi pressure cooker you might want to reduce the cooking time by 7 – 15 %)

Today, at approximately 1.30 p.m. Hubby retires.  At well over 70 years of age the boy has worked full time for all of his adult life. That is no mean feat and may we all applaud him. Even now it has taken six months of concentrated nagging to get him to down tools and I for one am very glad he has finally seen sense.  You’ll be glad to know that having at last made the decision he has breathed a sigh of relief and will be very glad that he doesn’t have to walk up that hill to work again, he actually counted the days down on that one.  Our intentions are to find him some hobbies  (help!) and to trot around London for the next couple of years.

Well done Hubby, you are amazing!

As you walk up Canon Street there isn’t much to see being right in the City of London, apart from a small stone cage containing for all intents and purposes a little piece of rock.  But you would be mistaken for thinking that this was an unimportant piece of rock as all our fortunes in London rest upon it.  Like the ravens in the Tower of London our fortunes are tied by superstitions and the survival of this stone. “So long as the stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish” says the proverb.  This relates back to the myth that this stone was part of an alter by Brutus the Trojan, the legendary founder of London.

Other theories abound, it was a Roman distance marker, part of a prehistoric standing stone, an important point in London leylines or part of an important Roman building of which it is known were on this site.  But one thing is for sure, we simply don’t know, its origins being lost in the midst of time. For me its true meaning is that for over nine hundred years it has been revered as the London Stone in a state of constancy in an ever changing world.  May we never find out its beginning for surely that would truly spell the end.

There is nothing nicer than entertaining on a cold windy winters afternoon, my friend brought still warm from the oven home made banana bread, I stoked up the boiler making the house nice and cosy, boiled the kettle and chilled the bubbles. We had the most blissful of afternoons knitting, nibbling at cake, slurping tea and sipping bubbles, followed by more tea and crispy hot sour dough toast dripping with best butter.  Such a perfect wild and windy afternoon.

Last week a fellow knitter and I decided to indulge in a little light art and culture and ventured forth to see Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse at the Royal Academy of Art. To say it blew me away is an understatement, it is simply the most beautiful exhibition I have ever seen, I loved it unreservedly.  As I wandered the rooms, looking at the various artists works and the abundance of dhalias, chrysanthemums, irises, roses and waterlilies I was lost in my imagination of the gardens of these great impressionists with their blooms, colours and scents heavy in the air, the crunch of gravel underfoot, the sound of water trickling nearby.

When I came into a room devoted to Monet and mostly to his Waterlilies I simply gasped for air, it was stunningly beautiful.  There was painting after painting of waterlilies, painted year after year, it was fascinating to see the interpretations of the same scene.

Some of the other artists are not to be sniffed at, with glorious pieces from Matisse, Manet, Le Sidaner, Van Gogh, Klimt, Bonnard, Cezanne and so  on.

The ending of the exhibition is simply breathtaking, we see Agapanthus Triptych in all its glory, three panels united as Monet intended.

The exhibition ends on April 20th.

It was a comment from a fellow London photographer that alerted me that The Shard were issuing Love London cards to enjoy unlimited free of charge access to The View for the rest of the year, for the princely sum of £20.16, much less than a ticket for a single viewing – available to London residents only.  But the news came too late and there were huge queues and I thought they would all be sold.  Then later in the week I heard that people had turned up late that day and tickets were still available.  Which got me to thinking, what if there were some tickets left?

I tried to ring them on the Saturday and couldn’t get through and as I lay in bed enjoying my lie in on Sunday,  I thought I would give them a ring, what was the worst that could happen?  So I rang them, as you do, and was told they were releasing another 500 tickets, that day!!!  That stopped the lie in dead in its tracks I can tell you.  Hubby went hunting for passports and documentation to prove we were residents whilst I dived in the shower, 30 minutes later we were out the front door.

Trekking in from London Bridge underground, following the signs for The Shard you are met with this,

and then this,

and it starts to get exciting. Next you surface from the underground, walk across a paved area to go down these,

and follow that around for a few paces and then we found the queue.

And we stood and waited for half an hour or so. Producing all of our documentation we were presented with these,

and we did a little squeal of glee.

Next we were directed to the lifts and we were so very excited,

and we were met with a rainy day in London.  Apparently The View had just been engulfed in cloud, which I would have loved. Even though its a drizzle day it is still amazing.  Then just as we were leaving,…

how’s that for a Loo with a View, it did make me giggle.

As much as is possible I do like to walk next to the Thames, or at the very least cross a bridge or two. It energizes me and lifts my mood immediately, all thoughts of whatever is playing on my mind disappear as I sense the power and majesty of this huge river.  Then I inhale great big lung fulls of air, the smell of ozone brought to me snake like from the sea. I love it so much that come the day, I would like to be scattered into this great river of ours to travel the oceans in perpetuity.

But until that day, let me show you a few pics of our latest walk, it was wonderful.

I was lucky enough to secure a ticket to see Lord of the Dance at The Playhouse before it ended its run. I really enjoyed it, beautifully dressed young ladies, powerful, often bare chested, handsome young men, wonderful choreography, fast paced violinists and the leading men and women simply blew you away with their dancing skills.  It was a sheer delight and a lovely way to spend an afternoon in London.