Dinner disaster!

After a breakfast of banana porridge this morning, we were back to Weedon for Sophie's first Covid vaccination. I managed to park in the tiny car park and watched as people arrived and left. Most of them were the same age as Sophie, and I was so glad she was able to go and get her jab. She was a bit nervous, but emerged about twenty minutes later, elated that she had been vaccinated!

We returned home and made a start on tonight's dinner, a Hairy Biker's recipe for Moroccan Pastilla. We had decided to cook it as it looked interesting, but I was a bit worried that it wouldn't go down well with the men in the family as it was a mixture of sweet and savoury.

When I opened the packs of chicken thighs, they smelt a bit funky, and Sophie said they looked grey, which is never a good sign. I washed them (I know you're not supposed to) and we cut away the white gristly bits and then shallow-fried them. Once that was done we set them aside and fried onions, garlic, and spices including turmeric and ginger. Keith came into the kitchen and asked why he smelt fish! To be honest it did smell as if we'd added a Thai fish sauce to the pan!

We then put the chicken back into the pan, added stock and let it simmer for half an hour while we had leftovers from the barbecue for lunch. Outside it was very grey and stormy looking, a complete contrast to yesterday!

The next stage of the recipe was to remove the chicken from the stock and dice it finely. We had to reduce the liquid in the pan by half, and then add four eggs so the mixture resembled loose scrambled egg! After then adding dates, orange zest and ground almonds, we put the chicken back in and let it cool. The mixture looked horrible and didn't smell any better!

We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing as all we'd seemed to do since we got back from Weedon was wash up! Outside we had a torrential downpour of rain and it turned very humid. I was pleased as I'm watering our neighbour's garden at the moment while they're away, so I had the evening off!

Sophie and I played Scrabble in the evening with cocktails, and I said to her that I really didn't fancy dinner at all. I felt bad that we'd spent so much time preparing it, and that it was a terrible waste of food, but it smelled horrible. Sophie agreed so we told Keith who was fine about it! He did say that the chicken had been stored in our fridge outside and that he'd noticed the door wasn't closing properly, so that might have had something to do with the unsavoury odour!

We decided to order an Indian takeaway from Mawsley instead, and Sophie and I shared a vegetable curry with mushroom rice. Not really what we'd been planning, but I think we'll give that particular recipe a miss in future!

After dinner Sophie and I made a huge decision - we have booked to go to California again in September/October 2022. We contacted the Airbnb we stayed at in San Francisco who have accepted our booking, so we were enormously excited! We are staying for two weeks, and spending longer in Napa and Monterey and we can't wait!