Mid-afternoon, I established that P did want feeding today (often at weekends, he prefers to eat very little meals), and took a bit of a stock-take of what was available, then went back to the computer to do a bit more work on a current project.

By 8pm, I was trudging back from the Co-op with a small amount of supplementary ingredients. By 9.30pm, we’d eaten the three-course meal I’d made, and the kitchen was
approaching normal again. Or as normal as it ever gets around here these days.

We had:

warm salad with melon (the one with orange flesh – very very ripe and gorgeous) and bacon, lettuce, cucumber and mini-plumb tomatoes with an elderflower vinaigrette

oOo

salmon parcels with onion, red pepper carrot and lemon juice, served with fresh potato wedges and runner beans

oOo

apple tart

Cooking it all was a mad nonstop frenzy in this sort of order

• make pastry (foodprocessor) and put pastry in fridge
• put bottle wine in freezer
• peel and chop Bramley apple for base for tart
• start simmering apple with a little water
• preheat oven
• chop potatoes into wedges, put in bowl, add olive oil, paprika, herbs, sesame seeds, mix, leave to steep
• chop onions, carrots into cubes, slice red pepper into attractive slivers. Juice lemon. Mix together in bowl with herbs, salt and pepper
• Make foil parcels with bit of frozen salmon, veg mix, bit of butter. Spoon in spare juice after partially closing parcels
• Put wedges and salmon in oven
• assemble apple tart: press pastry into buttered flan case, spoon Bramble apple purée over the top, slice 2 dessert apples and arrange over the top. Sieve icing sugar on top, pop in oven
• chop and fry bacon, prepare runner beans
• chop cucumber, tomatoes, and melon, wash salad leaves
• make vinaigrette: equal parts cider vinegar, hazelnut oil, elderflower cordial shaken together in an old jam jar
• mix vinaigrette with salad, place on leaves, start runner beans boiling
• serve/eat salad
• take tart out to cool, wine out of freezer
• unwrap parcels onto plate, arrange with runner beans and potato wedges, pour wine, serve, eat
• serve tart

Now all that remains…