Emphatically summer

You know I wasn't sure switching out my winter clothes this weekend was a plan... today, I'm in full sundress mode and grateful I've booked tomorrow afternoon off (less grateful I'm spending part of it on the tube, but...). And the fact dinner tonight involved peaches no longer seems wildly optimistic. 

This comes from the Home Cookery Year summer section, and I deeply recommend to those of you who are meat eaters - it was both quick and delicious. 

You need to cook a seasoned pork chop - any way that works for you but as you'll end up with it in a frying pan I'm afraid I firmly went for frying from the start. Recipe says 4 minutes a side hard frying, and 8-12 extra on medium, but that seems a lot to me, even for a chunky farmers' market chop. Anyway, at some point in that less fiery process add in some chopped shallot (aka spring onion, can I ever be bothered to have shallots in? Never) and let that cook down gently too. 

 

Meanwhile, make your sauce: one part honey to two parts balsamic vinegar and apparently also one part chopped fresh thyme but I definitely underplayed that. I like thyme, but I don't like food murdered by it. The recipe is the above in tablespoonfuls, for 4 chops. I did more like 3/4 tbsp honey, 2 tbsp balsamic, 1/2 tbsp thyme, for just one chop. It was maybe a bit much but not ridiculous.

Finally, a peach, sliced. The recipe says, and I believe, that disappointing peaches can be salvaged from this. This one looked okay (I stocked up with Good Peaches in M&S while taking shopping to parents), but it did do that hallmark of disappointing peaches and split its stone. One peach per two chops unless you're cooking for one, in which case go Total Peach, why not?

Bah.

Fortunately, if you only need your peach sliced it's easy to make this work without wrecking your peach shapes. Thin slices, mixed into the honey/balsamic/thyme. Hurl it all into your frying pan 2 minutes before your chop/shallot mix is cooked. Now: rest your panful for 5 minutes off the heat. Serve with bread. Or potatoes if you can be bothered.

This was a really nice plateful. Doesn't at all go with asparagus, but we've only got 3 weeks of the English stuff left, so go for it. 

Finally, because it made me smile and is so un-summery, a local postbox:

The sunshine is lovely. I'm still not all that relaxed into opening up and looking optimistic. That's partly some family stuff. It's partly learned apprehension, cynicism and genuine worry about Variant Delta. And I think we all need time to wind down, just when we are being invited to wind up.

Anyway. It's good to keep on cooking, even in much thinner clothes. If you'd like to read some more about how Katy presented our Confined Kitchen to the Post-Medieval Archaeology Congress, this is the thread for you: https://twitter.com/artefactual_KW/status/1399109400221061124. That gives you the twitter paper and also a conference report - it's good to see that our experiences this past year are not just interesting but genuinely unusual and worth reflecting on. Someday, we won't be living through a crisis.