persian-style lamb and rhubarb stew

Finally, a weekend when it's scorchio! Driving lesson out of the window, today is all about preparing the ground for the imminent arrival of Dr Robert Peter Manwaring Esq and his sidekick, Tilly Tickle.

In practice what this means is a day spent sorting the garden out and going to the tip, but in between we do some fun stuff. We plant some salad leaves, although milo doesn't quite get the timescales involved and is very disappointed to discover they hadn't grown by the time he had his lunch. What else? We watched The Hole in the Wall Game, read lots of stories, researched buying ladybirds to tackle our aphid infestation, and then monkey spent the afternoon sat in a bucket eating bombay mix in the sun. Marvellous.

Many glasses of wine later, we start dinner whilst he has his bath, safe in the knowledge there's an amazing, amazing stew only 2.5 hours away. This time I do it with extra gravy, which the cous cous soaks up, and there's even a little bit left over for monkey's tea.


Honestly, to pick up one of your questions Brenda, this is rapidly turning into one of my favourite saturday summery stews to cook. It's everything I love about cooking - it's a casserole, it has a long cooking time and is super tasty. I'm salivating just thinking about it now...

Food of the Milos
As we're all around he has a fairly full day of food and snacking. Whilst I'm driving, ana gets him a boiled egg on top of the daily Caligulan intake of breakfast picnic snacks. We all have toasted cheese and ham sandwiches for lunch, and then for tea we make him fish fingers and homemade chips. I wasn't expecting much given he'd eaten so much bombay mix that afternoon, but you know, he ate it all with only the modicum of force feeding. Now if only he could do it on his own...

sources
I've lost it again, sorry. I *will* find it, I promise!