Wednesday 1st November

I have never been a breakfast type of person. I never have been really I think it came about when I was in my first teaching job in Nottingham and had to get up really early to catch the first of 2 busses to get to school. When we go away and are staying in a hotel I will go for poached eggs and where available smoked haddock or salmon. 

I don't have a sweet tooth- in fact the opposite. I can quite happily eat a grapefruit or even a lemon.

A few weeks ago I came across a suggestion for lemon, fresh ginger and apple blitzed into a juice.

I tried it but ditched the apple and now enjoy this as a really vitalising start to the day! 

Today it was half a lemon and about 1.5 inch of ginger.

Sieved with my Bing personalised kitchen utensil!

 

My Rayburn

 This is our Rayburn. The top right oven is my main cooking oven - the one below is a warming oven.

We have no mains gas in our village - the Rayburn is solid fuel and doubles up as our central heating boiler. Jon looks after the running of it really, stoking it up and filling it with whatever we are using as fuel, could be anything from anthrocite to wooden pallettes. The top left oven is where the fuel is put - the bottom left oven is where the ash pan is removed. The temperature can be affected by the wind and the fuel. During the day it just ticks over, warming both the kitchen and the snug next door. The radiator in our bedroom and the towel rail in the bathroom are always warm too, without us having to switch the electric pump on. 

My cooking therefore is really down to the temperature of the Rayburn so this is why I tend to slow cook our food, the Rayburn is always on so it makes sense to always have something on the go in the oven.

Bing is a fan and knows when something is cooking!

To the right of the lids is the black flue. All the cooking smells go straight up the flu which joins the chimney - this means if I forget something is cooking it will burn. The typical example is at Christmas if I put mince pies in to warm through, forgetting and then discovering a couple of incinerated lumps of coal a day later!

The silver lids lift up to reveal 2 hotplates.

Before the Rayburn we had an AGA for 20 years - the tales I could tell, the accidents, the fires the fun! Seen it all!