Four day week celebrations

Today is my first four-day week for the next three months, and I celebrated by making JoJo blueberry pancakes for breakfast. I completely smudged a batter recipe (putting in a third of the flour, which was self-raising not plain, omitting the butter etc. etc) but it turned out ok. Batter always turns out ok! I was aiming for a thicker batter so the little cakes were fat and small, and then dropped blueberries on top: when flipped over, the berries popped or squished.

On the plate, the squished-berry side was half covered in greek yoghurt, more blueberries and the maple syrup that Deb brought me from Canada... pancake folded over: yum. I am having to write this blog and do desk-things rather than go swimming now as intended, because I ate everything that Jo didn't and am afraid of sinking :/ I'll wait until after Stephen Fry on Radio four, and then get my cozzie.

Last night's news was about a chicken and chorizo stew, which I must have mentioned before. I was in Selfridges food hall - intending only to look, as always - when I remembered this stew and that my butchers isn't open on a Sunday. So I availed myself of the chorizo man, bought six hot cooking chorizo sausages, and also came away with a lump of 75% reduced of the eat-me-now type of choirzo. Sales patter is lost on me, I just say yes.

So I browned three legs and three thighs of chicken, removed them to a plate, then in the same pan sweated three chunkily cut onions, added in four chopped up garlic cloves, several carrots (to finish the end of the veg-box-carrot saga), an oversize courgette and two tablespoons of smoked paprika. At this point I admitted to myself that I really did have too much oil in the pan, but never mind. Then in went a tin and a half (left overs, again) of chopped tomatos, some water, a couple of handfuls of pot barley (I don't know the difference between this and pearl barley, but I suspect it is organic naming shenengans as it looked and tasted the same...) and a tin of aduki beans. For some reason I thought I had a tin of canelleni beans in my hand, so it was a bit of a surprise to see tiny red aduki; and it was all because we didn't have my first choice of chick pea anyway.

I returned the chicken to this mix, slipped in the chorizo, and after an hour in the oven, with the lid off for the last twenty minutes to let it thicken, it was perfect. Jojo was my taster and said FOUR times how much she liked it.

I even did knubbly new potatos and cabbage with it... with the result that I have at least four more portions left of it. Happily, I don't think I could get bored of something so rich, spicy and unctious... I am just pondering what else to do with this smoked paprika.