The Susanne

Well, that took about a day… haha. Yes­ter­day I was too ill to get to my lec­ture (read: too ill to take a bus and the tube all the way there just for a 45 minute lec­ture on the geo­graphy of USA) and I was in des­per­ate need of some com­fort food. And when I got to the super­mar­ket and saw they had a spe­cial on beef shoulder, I bought a huge slab and made Irish Stew! Ohhhh…yummm! Cooked some carrots, onion, celery and swede in a little olive oil with the bones for about 30 minutes. Then added 500ml water, 250ml Guinnes and 100ml red wine and brought to the boil - then added the beef (in big chunks) which I’d rubbed with salt, pepper and worcester­shire sauce, and let it simmer for about two hours with some lovely fresh thyme. Added some chopped pars­ley just before serving (The Ex came over for dinner, poor thing. I’m sure he will starve without me, or at least get mal­nu­tri­tion from all the tinned food and frozen pizzas). The meat was so per­fect — it just fell apart on touch. So tender and deli­cious! Still have loads left over — that’s the beauty of living on my own, I can eat for days on what would be gone instantly when I had a man in the house.

(This was really a sim­pli­fied ver­sion of the Irish stew I made in June — the recipe for that is here.)

We both ended up fall­ing asleep after, it must be the ‘comfort’ part of the meal.. Woke up hours later and real­ised I’d missed a whole after­noon of study time. I made it up today though — was at uni from 10am till 6.30pm. Very proud. I’ve joined the edit­or­ial staff of a lit­er­ary magazine pub­lished by stu­dents from my fac­ulty, which is very excit­ing. I’m think­ing about writ­ing an art­icle for the next issue, but I’m not sure what to write. The theme is ‘conflict’. Any ideas? I’m also taking over the layout job, which will def­in­itely be a chal­lenge, but fun I’m sure. And def­in­itely very valu­able exper­i­ence! They’re send­ing me to a  layout sem­inar which should be good. Also I get to go to a sem­inar called ‘writing for the Internet’! Which I’m really the most excited about.. As I love writ­ing for the Internet ;)