Mrs Downs Diary Aug 5 2009

There is always at this time of year and weather permitting, a heap of fresh field mushrooms on the kitchen table ready to fry in butter and serve up on toast for my first meal of the day. Lovely. What truer sign of devotion.

My sign is to make sure that if I ever dare to go out and leave my husband alone at lunchtime (which is more frequently than he likes), I ensure he has a meal ready for 12 noon sharp.

To this end my slow cooker is a boon. Our Rayburn cooker (which we are soon to change) is oil fired. It was converted from oil over 20 years ago when I could no longer stand the daily slog and threat of blocked lungs from keeping the darn thing topped up with phurnacite.

Since then it has functioned reasonably effectively, but there is no temperature control, it is 180 centigrade or nothing, and the bottom oven is barely fit for warming, and certainly not able to cook anything that requires anything hotter than a baby's breath.

So into the slow cooker, before I leave at approximately half past six, goes either a frozen duck or pheasant, pork or lamb chops, braising steak or similar. Then a small bag of salad potatoes.

A boon for wives whose husbands only require potatoes as their sole veg.

Slurp of wine, or stock or yesterday's gravy (what a slob you are thinking) and that's it.

Switch on and forget.

Once my new cooker is in with an efficient slow bottom oven I can ditch my slow cooker and slow roast slowly. It's slow time.

It is reassuring to hear that I share my vice of ditching John on occasional lunchtimes with other farmer's wives, who adopt similar long distance culinary skills.

But although you would think that life has been made very simple for such fortunate men, they still need instructing on exactly what it is and where it is that they are supposed to collect and eat when their wives have gone to all the trouble of bunging it into a dish for them.

For example. Off for the day went a neighbour's wife. Note on the table propped up against the salt pot. "Lunch in bottom of Aga, cake in tin, warm apple pie up for pudding if you want one."

On her return she was chastised by her husband for "the plain do" she had left for him. He had been very disappointed by the standard of the day's catering arrangements.

"Greasy and chewy and no flavour to speak of" he said. As you can imagine in no uncertain terms he was advised that in future he could cook his own lunch.

As far as his wife was concerned, she had poured love and devotion and a casserole into that dish to becooked in the bottom of the cooker.

Come evening time she reached into the bottom of the Aga to retrieve the meat she had left on slow cook for the dogs. The minced entrails and offal she bought weekly from the butcher and cooked up for their Labradors delectation.

That night the dogs dined on a delicious, braised steak hotpot with all the trimmings.