Stuffing

No stuffing Christmas past as we failed to eat fowl and the first notice I can find is more than two years ago, at reference 1. Surely we have stuffed since then?

Leaving history aside, we did have fowl yesterday and I thought, rather late in the day, to take it with external stuffing, the sort made in the sort of white enamel pie dish which was common when I was a child and is becoming common again, albeit in a smaller size, in the sort of middle range restaurants which we use. See, for example, reference 5.

Too late in the day to arrange for some white bread crumbs, so as at reference 1, reduced to using brown, of my own baking. Along the way finding that an ordinary fork is just the thing for stripping the maximum amount of crumb out of the shell of crust.

A modest amount of celery, maybe a cup when chopped.

Two medium onions, maybe two cups when chopped.

A couple of tablespoons of chopped hazelnuts, probably bought entire from the Epsom branch of the people at reference 4, good at that sort of thing.

A tablespoon of freshly chopped sage, a tablespoon of dried - our rather tired sage plant not being up to both spoons.

Half a dozen black peppercorns, freshly pounded. Pound until they can be smelt at six inches.

Two eggs.

Fill tin, cover with wet bacon from Sainsbury's. Bake for around an hour and serve with fowl.

Quite good, gone within four hours of serving, eating rather well cold. But I still think I would have preferred the white version.

PS 1: I felt sure that I had mentioned the people at references 2 and 4 before, but it took me a while to track them down. Searching the blog archive with 'organico' turns up nothing while 'epsomorganico' produces reference 2. Maybe one day I will get it clear in my head about which searches do things like startswith and contains by default, and which don't. And I think that 'organico' is the name of a product rather than the name of a shop.

PS 2: the business with startswith and contains is probably a good example of the requirements business noticed towards the end of reference 6. Microsoft, Google and other suchlike people have probably worked hard to tune the default search settings for the various contexts in which they offer a search feature. Which is good up to a point, but irritating when doing something a bit tricky and one gets confused about which search does it which way. An irritation which would not arise if they all did it the same way. Perhaps all offering not too tricky ways around the defaults, perhaps offering options like 'startswith=yes' and 'endswith=no' which can be tagged onto the end of the search term, just to make sure.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stuffing-external.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/stuffing.html.

Reference 3: http://www.organico.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://www.facebook.com/epsomorganico.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/sewing.html.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/on-similarity.html.