Getting ready for Hazel

We were having a day at home in the garden doing 'stuff' in readiness for Hazel's arrival on Saturday - fortunately after Saturday's Gorillas in the Mist Day the weather has bucked its ideas up but not before time.  One of our first jobs was to uncover the Do-Jo.  We put the temporary cover to one side ready to fold it when it was fully dry - the only trouble was that Boris got there first and voiced his dissatisfaction at being moved on.

I was concentrating on giving the borders a good haircut.  This picture was taken after I had finished - the reason why everything looks wet is not that it had rained but I had done some Cypriot Slooshing to get rid of the crap I had generated.  Less flowers in evidence now as a lot of them got chopped off but much neater and tidier.

After the back border I did the area around the living gazebo.  Ellen very kindly gave me some little led fairy lights which I have wrapped around the bare stems.  The osteospurmum at the front had grown enormously so had to have a right old haircut.  Only trouble is they look rather sad when they have been cut back but it shouldn't be too long before they get going again.  Charlie was totally unimpressed and unconcerned by my hard work and remained sound asleep on the steamer.  No chance of cleaning that one any time soon.

My reward for all my hard work was that John was cooking tea tonight - he had seen a video where a pork tenderloin was prepared and cooked in such a way that it was like having spare ribs but without the bone.

We had some chips left over from the other evening which I could double fry and some coleslaw left from our meal with Mum so it was all systems go.

In the photograph John has prepared the tenderlion by removing any sinew or fat then opening out and scoring before basting with oil and paprika and cooking for 10 minutes.

Whilst he was doing that I was refrying the chippies and zhuzhing up the coleslaw which always seems to turn the dressing into something runny and unappealing once it has been overnight in the fridge.

After the initial 10 minute cook he had to take the meat out and then baste it with the barbeque sauce and cook again for another 10 minutes - this was exactly what it said to do in the recipe but we said that if and when we cook it again we could slightly alter the cooking times but that isn't unusual as different peoples ovens cook differently and some people like their meat more or less than others.

This was the meat after following the recipe.  We had two observations, the underside of the meat was pale and a bit insipid looking so we would have wanted to brown that off and it needed to go under the grill to make the sauce good and sticky but other than that the meat was tender and tasty and we will definitely give it another go with these two refinements.  

We had a lovely gift of some fresh local cherries this afternoon as Argy and Lakis had been to Peristerona and Lysos in search of them.  We could have eaten them all in one go but have shown restraint and limited how many we had for our pudding!