Lamb, Jersey Royal potatoes, honey-glazed carrots / chocolate cherry brownie pudding

It has been very hot in the UK today, a fact to which mum was, at one stage, alerting me every few minutes. Personally I don’t mind hot weather – my sister always joked I must have a salamander in a previous life¹ – but mum isn’t keen.

Much of the morning was spent with mum in full flow complaint mode, again, but thankfully by the afternoon she had mellowed (or possibly melted) a little. I accompanied her out into the garden, then came back inside to use the loo, which mum found a great source of mockery: “seriously? You’re in there again?!”

Given that the past couple of days I have repeatedly no sooner gone in there than mum is calling through the door that she needs to go, this is more than a little hypocritical.

I tried to order some compost from the local garden centre – I do try to shop locally when I can – but they charge £8.50 for delivery. They are literally no more than a three minute drive from our house, but it’s a flat-rate fee regardless of amount or distance.

So instead I went onto the website of B&Q and ordered compost and a new fan, with a delivery cost of £6. Sorry, local store, I did try. 🤷‍♂️

This evening I did a simple, mum-friendly dinner of lamb steaks, Jersey Royal potatoes, and honey-glazed carrots. If you’re not British you may not have come across Jersey Royals, a variety of new potato with Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) in Jersey – i.e. you can only get this variety of potato from that one small island.

They are genuinely special, with a nutty, buttery flavour and a creamy texture. They really are, as a current tv advert says, splendid spuds. Sadly if you’re outside the UK you’re unlikely to get the chance to try them: 99% of the annual spring crop is imported to the UK.

Mum dished up her meat and veg, then served it with… well, I’m trying to think of it as a very under-seasoned creamy sauce, served cold. It was single cream. 🫤

That did make me feel a little less guilty about squirting salad cream over my potatoes, though! And it distracted mum from noticing that the lamb was still slightly pink in the middle – far the best way to have it, imo, but mum prefers hers cooked through.

[Which reminds me: I always hated roast dinners as a kid, as the meat was always served blackened on the outside, and grey and dry inside. Every Sunday lunch was a test of endurance. Not until I was an adult did I discover that my dad, an otherwise excellent cook, had an odd preference for his roasts to be what most people would consider inedibly overcooked. The first time I tried beef roasted only until the centre was a delicate pink was a genuine revelation!]

For the currently essential sweet course I did a molten-middle chocolate cherry brownie pudding, which sounds fancy but was just a packet of supermarket brownie mix with added defrosted frozen cherries. The moisture from the cherries meant the brownie ended up not so much fudgy in the middle as simply liquid. It tasted good, though, which is all that matters.

Tomorrow our new, new freezer will be delivered and will hopefully stay working for more than a week. I have a box of lolly moulds I bought last summer and haven’t yet used, and have some big ideas of what I can make with them, but of course I need a working freezer to do anything other than moulds full of liquid.

As always, I’ll let you know. Goodnight, everyone!

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1. The mythical salamander that lives in fire, that is, not the real ones that are unassuming amphibians. ↩︎