Thursday 14th November - Thank heavens for the freezer

By the time I get to the tail end of the week, I'm definitely running out of steam.

Take a day like today: Music teaching full on between 9 and 2:30, quick bite to eat (as in the rest of lunch; I get to munch half a sandwich in a free ten minutes at about 12, and finish the rest after the last class lesson. Zip down the hill to visit my mother, who is currently spending a week in a local residential home so that my father can have a break, then whizz back home to start the evening's piano teaching.

Now it is half past six, and time to be thinking about supper.

I did actually chop an onion and some few sticks of celery and a couple of carrots, fry them for a bit, chuck in some braising steak, cider, passata, herbs, clove of garlic and seasoning and whack the whole lot in the oven (160 fan for two and a half hours), but that will take two and a half hours to cook. No good for tonight's meal, then. And getting that lot into the oven without slicing my fingers used the last joules of energy that I had left.

So, while I was doing that, Best Beloved was delving into the freezer to come up with a "here's one I made earlier". It turned out to be a variation on "sausage supper" made with chorizo sausage. It was a doddle to boil some pasta and microwave the contents of the plastic boxes. As I had a chopping board and knife out, I went the extra mile and chopped and fried a couple of mushrooms.

Meanwhile, the beef stew will be ready just as we go to bed - at 9:30ish, seriously, always assuming we are still awake enough to get up and go to bed - and will go into the freezer ready for another day.

Now, all that's left for me to do is hang up some laundry (on various racks over the bath etc - after all, it isn't going to dry outside at this time of night), type up the lesson reviews from today's lessons, and post this blog.

Toodle - oo!