The Bloody Bathroom, More Chicken and Pancakes

I bade farewell to nephew and great-niece on Saturday morning as they continued their journey to Chester University. This was another exploratory visit for potential university places and later reports from them indicated that they did offer the type of journalism course she was looking for. My tagine experiment seems to have worked well as nephew muttered that a family sized one was going to be on the shopping list. As both he and his wife have a varying working day so something which could sit quietly in the oven for hours would be useful. The hearty appetites of my relatives had also stretched to demolishing the pudding. My great friend Margs always arrives with something in the way of a gift and on her last visit she had presented me with a panettone. A few attempts had made a significant impact but there was still quite a bit left. I solved the problem by making a panettone bread & butter pudding with a reasonable slug of sherry in the custard. That cooked quite nicely and slowly underneath the tagine.    
I did have a slight casualty when I caught my arm on the very top of the tagine lid leaving a fairsized red weal on my arm. I thought nothing about it until I had a shower later in the day. I didn't take any initial notice of the expected stinging sensation until I saw red spots all over the bath and shower screen. It seemed my earnest scrubbing had removed the already damaged skin. I have often been called a bleeder in my life and have never had any problems providing the required pint of rare blood to the Blood Tranfusion Service. I was, however still dripping water and liberally transfusing red corpuscles all over the bath and, to my horror, all over the new clean cream towel. The Horns of the Dalai Lama once again. Did I dry first and then apply first aid? Naturally all the necessary equipment was not in the bathroom. I knew this because I had removed the sticking plasters to the kitchen, figuring out that they were much more likely to be needed there. I won't paint too much of a picture of a damp, naked Kojak moving around the house but fortunately net curtains prevent severe trauma to the neighbours.
Having staunched the flow I then had to attend to the other victim - the cream towel. On nephews departure I had already changed bedding and towels and set the washing machine chugging so I smeared some stain remover on the bloody towel and put it to soak. I then had to attend to the bloody bathroom which looked like a limited version of a chain saw massacre. Having completed the First Aid and cleanup I then had to replenish supplies. I had taken some bacon out of the new fridge-freezer in case bacon butties were needed for breakfast but my visitors had been content with tea and toast so somehow the bacon needed to be used up.  Mr Tesco provided some chicken thighs which, wrapped in bacon and cooked in a cheese sauce made a tasty meal for a day or two. 


Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday so the last of the chicken was forsaken for pancakes. I may have mentioned before that I believe there must have been an army cook somewhere in the Kojak family tree as we can't seem to cook in small quantities. And so it was with the pancake batter. I lost count of the number but I did end up with a rather large plate of pancakes, sprinkled with sugar and lemon juice. I need not look at another pancake for some time...