… finish to the day, things seem to have settled down to something vaguely resembling normality today.
It’s probably only a short-term solution, because, of course, there’s another dialysis session lined up tomorrow night, and then we’ll be back where we started, I suppose. This is a never-ending cycle of dialysis – bad night – troubled sleep – day of recovery – troubled sleep – feeling much better but dialysis – bad night, etc., etc. It’s really getting on my wick, this is.
Last night, I quite literally fell in bed after waking up on my chair, and the sad thing about it was that I couldn’t go to sleep once I was in bed. There were all kinds of things going through my mind that were disrupting my thought patterns, even down to the behaviour of the doctor-in-charge yesterday at dialysis
However, I must have gone to sleep at some point because I have never ever been so far out of it when I heard someone in the mists of ‘I don’t know what’ call my name – insistently – for three or four times.
When I opened my eyes, the nurse was standing at the foot of the bed, duly armed with the cream to massage my legs and feet. And no-one was more surprised than me. I hadn’t heard a thing about his entry into the apartment or ringing the bell beforehand. It must have been a really deep sleep that I was having.
After he left, I had to pluck up the courage and the motivation to leave the bed, and after I’d sorted myself out in the bathroom, it was 09:27 when I finally made it into the kitchen.
The first job was to put the white beans in the slow cooker on “high”. They need to boil up quickly because later on this afternoon, I’ll be using them.
And next, I had to make the croissants. That involved brushing a roll of flaky pastry with butter, using the pastry cutter to cut it into six “pie slices”, put a teaspoon full of apricot jam in the middle of each slice, and then fold the slice up, with the pointed bit on top. Brush them with milk and then eighteen minutes at 180°C.
While they were baking, I made the rest of my breakfast – porridge and black coffee, with juice to wash down my morning medication. And not only was all of that delicious, the croissants were magnificent too. I had two of them, warm, straight out of the oven, and the other four are in the fridge for the next couple of weeks.
While I was eating breakfast, I was reading some more of THE REPORT OF THE WOOLHOPE NATURALISTS CLUB 1867.
Today, they are at one of the meetings that follows up one of their field trips, and the subject at the moment is the trees of Herefordshire. Last year, they examined some of the more famous yew trees of the county, and today, they are discussing the question of the oak trees, commissioning photographers, etc., to photographically record the larger ones.
After breakfast, I checked the white beans. They had absorbed the water and were busy bubbling away, so I took them out, rinsed them with cold water, put them back with fresh water and reset the slow cooker on “slow”. I’ll check them when I come back in for my midday medication.
Back in here, I made a start on yesterday’s notes. And they seemed to take ages to write this morning, I don’t know why. And I didn’t post them on line until about 15:20, and that was my day effectively gone, just like that!
What kind of time was this, then, to go for my midday medication and disgusting drink? And the white beans were only warm when I checked them, so I turned them up to “medium” to cook them quicker.
There was football to watch from Saturday. Firstly, Stranraer were at home to Clyde – top (by goal difference) v second. It was quite an entertaining match, even though it finished scoreless. Still there’s absolutely no change at the top of the table, although Elgin City, in third place, won their match yesterday to close the gap a little.
Then we had Greenock Morton, second from the bottom of the table, away at Partick, the league leaders. And after Morton’s dismal start to the season, the bookies had put Morton at 11 to 1 to win the match. And I know that a couple of my friends had put a fiver on it, just to show solidarity with their team.
And I bet that they went home happy last night. No-one, a couple of weeks ago, would ever have expected Morton to have won this match 3-2. What on earth was Ian Murray doing with this team earlier in the season that they played so dreadfully? Under their new temporary management since Murray was sacked a few weeks ago, Morton have now won three games on the run.
It was now time to go into the kitchen, and I began by chopping up 250 grammes of mushrooms and an onion. The onion went into the wok, followed by some frozen garlic, and then the mushrooms went in. When they were done, I added a tablespoon of cornflour and then 250 ml of vegetable stock and stirred it round and round to thicken.
While it was simmering away, I began to make the dough for the bread. It turned out really well, so I put it on one side to prove, and then I went back to my mushrooms and onions. I added the white beans from the slow cooker and then everything else from the recipe that my chatbot had found for me.
While that lot was simmering away in the wok, I found a small pie dish, and I cut another one of the flaky pastry rolls and lined the pie dish that I had greased. I cut another piece of the pastry roll for the lid and put it on one side.
When the stuff in the wok had had a good simmer and mix, I put it in a glass Pyrex bowl and put it into the freezer to cool down quickly while I gave the dough a second kneading, adding some chai seeds, some of the mix that my cleaner had found for me, and some of my sunflower seeds.
Once the dough was all kneaded, I put it onto the bread mould for a second proving, rescued the pie mix from the freezer and assembled my pie, brusing it with milk and putting some steam holes in the top.
The temperature of the oven should be 200°C, so I had to wait for the oven to heat up. When it was ready, I bunged the pie in for twenty-five minutes, and in the meantime, I’d been doing the washing up and making the place look respectable.
At the end of its time in the oven, the pie came out a lovely golden brown, and when the oven was empty, I wound it up to 220°C. When it reached the correct temperature, I put the bread in for eight minutes and then turned the oven down to 180°C for another thirty-two minutes.
The bread, when it had finished, looked wonderful, complete with a lovely thick crust and I can’t wait to try it. However, there’s plenty of bread left from last week, so it might be a few days before I can get my teeth into it.
Back in here again, I began to write up my notes, and they are now finished, even if it is horribly late again. I can’t keep on going to bed at this time of night.
But before I go, seeing as we have been talking about baking … "well, one of us has" – ed … a man walked into a bakery with a 50 lb pike under his arm.
"Excuse me, but do you make fish cakes? he asked.
"No we don’t" said the baker.
"What a pity" said the man. "It’s his birthday tomorrow."
