Market Drayton

Yesterday evening the boat moored in front of us kept it’s generator running well after the 8pm turn off time. When eventually it stopped (suspect it had run out of petrol) the engine was turned on for another half hour. There can be reasons for running your engine out of hours, we have been known when returning late after a day away to run over by half an hour to help the batteries top up to last out the evening. So this morning when I saw him walk past us with a jerry can and then start up his genie again I thought we’d be in for a noisy day. We decided to let Tilly listen to it and went out to the shops with a bike to act as a sherpa.

Market Drayton has three supermarkets, Asda, Morrisons and Lidl. The hunt for my preferred yoghurt and a few other things took us to all three. Asda was first, an older store not very big, but they did have boxes of wine and sawdust for our toilet. The three boxes fitted nicely into the bike front panier and we headed to Lidl next.

We don’t often come across a Lidl and it warranted a good look round. Plenty of the things we were after but no parsnips for our Sunday roast. In the chilled section there were plenty of free range chickens waiting for us. At about £2 less per bird than other supermarkets I hunted through for the two biggest. Our freezer had space for one once it was jointed and the other would be for dinner tonight. Once the full trolley had been loaded onto the bike I popped into Morrisons to see if they could fill any of the gaps we still had. Mostly successful, apart from my yoghurt, I’m going to try a substitute as I know there is very little chance of finding the one I prefer on the remainder of the Shroppie.

Special offers of booze were sat by the front door. I know if Fatso (my Dad) was still around he’d have sniffed out the offer and a special trip would have been planned. If my Mum was still around I’d have to look no further than the green litre bottles of gin for her Mothers Day present. I’m not sure what she’d have made of todays fashion for gin everywhere. Either she’d have embraced it with her glass or poo pooed it as a fad, sticking to her Gordons with Schweppes tonic, ‘Not slimline, Thank you!’ I am not fond of the stuff, I suspect it has something to do with having had too much whilst I was in the womb!

Back at the boat we were relieved that the boat in front had moved on, this meant that we would stay put for the rest of the day. The doors were opened up and Tilly allowed to come and go for the rest of the afternoon.

One chicken was chopped up and skinned, put into freezer bags, making four meals in the waiting. The carcass put in a saucepan on the stove for stock. The second chicken was accompanied by a leek, an onion, carrots, thyme and a jot of wine into my cast iron pot and put next to the stock for four hours. Checking it after a couple of hours proved a mistake as it’s legs made a bid for freedom and the lid didn’t want to sit back on top of the pot tightly! Foil was needed. Once the four hours was complete the chicken came out and was nestled in amongst the roast potatoes, carrots and parsnips for twenty minutes to brown up the skin. This worked a treat. The chicken totally cooked was falling to bits and cooking it for the most part on top of the multifuel stove had saved us an hours worth of gas.

The end result was very tasty indeed, the gravy was almost tasty enough to have just on it’s own. I’ll have mastered all varieties of stove top roasts and then it won’t get lit for months!

0 locks, 0 miles, 6 boarded up windows, 3 supermarkets, 3 boxes, 1 bale sawdust, 2 chickens, 3 leeks, 1 bag potatoes, 1 bag carrots, 2 Chernobyl parsnips, 2 cheese twists, 4 hours in the field, 0 woofers allowed, 4 hours on the stove, 1 tasty chicken.