#facotmk

You know, absolutely they do this kind of thing, and you're right: this is a weird sort of blind spot. I need to look into this.

...Though I've (ostensibly...) been trying to concentrate either on recipes that have appeared in the books so far, or ones that I know will be appearing in books to come. (muttering a bit here: I need to find a way to tag these recipes in the list so they can be sorted by the viewer for the book they appear in, the general category of ingredients, the category of usage [entree, dessert, snack, whatever...], etc. etc. There has to be a plugin for WordPress [probably menu-based] that'll do that for me. Something to sort out in the near-ish future...)

...In the "Food and Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms" Test Kitchens: Lorn gets ready to carve the pumpkin.

As I said earlier: I fed this to my OC in 1977 in my first published novel, and have been thinking about it (occasionally/on and off) ever since.

...I mean, you could serve this as stew, and it'd be perfectly respectable. But why not add some pie crust—even maybe some puff pastry—and make everybody a little bit happier? Pies are nice. :)

(And turns out that wholemeal puff pastry works perfectly well. It is, after all, simply about getting the butter to explode correctly in the oven...)

So, off this post from yesterday:

We put the stew, at a full boil, into the "hay box" last night around 23:30. After I got up this morning I was busy with other household stuff for a little while, and so didn't have time to deal with the stew until about 10:30.*

I was surprised (and pleased!) to find that the pot was still too hot to touch. @petermorwood, who'd also surfaced at that point, went for the oven gloves and pulled the pot out. The above image shows the stew's temperature in ºC just after we took the lid off. Nearly twelve hours after being taken off the stove, it was still cooking; though very low-and-slow.

And here's an indicator of how tender the beef is. (This being a second attempt just to make sure of the result, because I'd just tried a bit and wanted to make sure it wasn't a fluke. It wasn't.) :)

...So now come some further steps before this dish is in the same state it was in when they served it to Herewiss at that inn down in Havering Slides. The meat and veg have been removed from the cooking liquid, which now gets to be first skimmed and then reduced, and its seasoning corrected. (Specifically, the heat quotient needs to be increased—the chilies were calmer than we expected—and other spices intensified too, before it's turned into gravy.)

Also, I have to go make some whole-wheat rough puff pastry. So, time to thaw some more butter and deal with that. Then back to work...