I think it might be Saturday today. Tracy is at work and the rest of us are having a very lazy day. My excuse is a very sore left foot from having stood on a nail yesterday. I managed to clean it, treat it with tea tree oil and put a new dressing on it. I did take photos, but I doubt anyone wants to see a puncture wound in the sole of my foot, apart from Tracy who likes that sort of thing (why else would you go into nursing?)
Lego houses
Lucy continues to evolve her Lego house and spent some time explaining her new acquisition of the word ‘renovation’. There are a couple of new rooms, and some of the other rooms have changed significantly. She has been building almost all day, with only a brief break to jump on the trampoline and to make her own lunch.
Modelling
I did some modelling of my own, there’ll be a separate blog post about that, but not today because I want to reflect before I share.
I took all the open source data that I could find about what’s happening in the UK and built my own pandemic model. There were some surprising insights, but the big caveat is that the data is only partial.
Food
For dinner I made jambalaya with king prawns and chorizo. It was the first time I’d made jambalaya and also the first time I’d cooked prawns. It wasn’t as hard as I’d expected it to be, although it wouldn’t qualify as a twenty minute meal!
I made quite a large pot, with enough for today and tomorrow. Largely because Tracy was very late home from work (just after half eight) and she didn’t eat any jambalaya. I found a recipe on BBC good food for chicken and chorizo and adapted it a bit. I used risotto rice (two different kinds, because an open packet with 200g in it was a different kind from the fresh packet, not for of any poncy hipster reason). I had a large red pepper and a large yellow pepper, a red onion and a whole chorizo sausage as well as a bag of king prawns.
I fried the onion and peppers with some garlic and Cajun spices. When they were softened I added the rice (400g in total) and some chicken stock (700ml, but not all at once). I cut up the chorizo and lightly fried it in a separate pan while I added a can of chopped tomatoes and about a third of a jar of hot salsa to the rice.
Once the chorizo was fried a bit I tilted the frying pan so that I could scoop out the chorizo while leaving the fat in the frying pan. The chorizo for stirred into the rice, peppers and tomatoes along with the remainder of the chicken stock. I turned the heat down on the jambalaya mixture and covered it.
The frying pan that had the chorizo get in it got a bit of olive oil added. I then turned up the heat (8 on my cooker). I drained the prawns in the sink and let them drip for a moment while preparing a couple of cloves of garlic. Then I threw it all in the frying pan and stirred the prawns until I was happy they’d cooked. I was looking for them to change colour, and they did, but it was sort of masked by the orange from the chorizo!
When the prawns we cooked I poured the content of the frying pan into the jambalaya pot, but I didn’t stir it in. I left it for about fifteen minutes on a low heat so that the rice would cook properly.
It tasted really good, and the only trick I think I missed was having some freshly baked bread to accompany it.
