Tuesday 28 February 2012

The Pershilla Cookbook - Sausage & Onion Casserole

We have a fairly small, although very well equipped, galley on Pershilla. It's diesel powered and consists of two hot-plates and an oven. There isn't that much space on board, so although I will be taking my favourite cooking bits and pieces, there isn't much room, so I have to try and manage on less than I usually do.



One thing I cannot live without is my slowcooker. We love casseroles and soups. It's a small slowcooker, so won't take up much room and uses a tiny amount of power.

This recipe can be cooked in the oven too, I think that between and 1 - 1½ hours would do the trick at about 150c

  • 8 sausages
  • 2 onions, chopped
  • 2tbsp plain flour or cornflour
  • 300ml stock (I used beef stock, but use what you have to hand - cubes are fine!)
  • 2tbsp chutney or HP sauce
  • 1tbsp Worcester sauce
  • Handful of red lentils
  • Black pepper
And this is what to do:
  • Put sausages in the slowcooker (I don't bother to fry first, but you can if you like)
  • Put onions in
  • Sprinkle flour on
  • Add stock, chutney/sauce, Worcester sauce & black pepper
  • Add lentils
  • Stir
  • Leave for 6-9 hours on low (or cook in oven for 1-1½hours)
  • Serve with mash
Enjoy!

Tuesday 21 February 2012

A Weekend Away (Part 2)

It seems a long while ago now that we were down in Watchet, visiting our boat, Pershilla, but actually it was only 10 days ago. However, what still seems very fresh in my memory was the wonderful meal we had at The Star Inn.

The Marina office staff gave us three recommendations, but said they thought The Star was the best.

So, after a short walk through the town we located The Star, right beside the old mill basin, where the river runs down to the sea.



The Star was a perfect pub, lovely atmosphere, good beer (CAMRA award winning), live music (but not too loud!) and fabulous food. Stephen had the honey roast duck and I had the game casserole, which was soon re-named "Roadkill Stew" in recognition of its ingredients - venison, pheasant and partridge. It was so delicious we had to ask for bread as we couldn't bear to let the gravy go to waste.

Once full of good food and good beer it was back to the boat. By now it was about -4c, but the central heating had kept the boat warm and the stew and beer was keeping me warm!

Tuesday 14 February 2012

A Weekend Away (Part 1)

Last weekend was our much awaited trip down to Watchet to see Pershilla - our first visit as owners!

Given that we has quite a lot of snow in Surrey and the weather wasn't much better in Somerset, I did wonder what we were letting ourselves in for. We'd arranged to go down Saturday afternoon and spend the night on the boat, meeting Peter, the previous owner, on Sunday so he could give us a run through of how everything worked.

When we left Godalming  the temperature was -3. We arrived in Watchet three hours later and the temperature there was much the same. The boat has a central heating system, plus we'd taken our thickest duvet and two fan heaters, but I wasn't convinced we wouldn't end up making a dash for the nearest B&B late at night!

But, thankfully the central heating worked well and topped up with the fan heaters we were soon pretty cosy (well, we were after we worked out how to stop tripping the power supply!). So then it was straight down to reading all the instruction books. You can see from the picture below, there are a lot of instruments to learn.


Since my parents were looking after Emma for the weekend, we also had the chance for a "grown-ups-night-out". We took the recommendation of the Marina Office staff and decided on the fabulous Star Inn - review in the next post.

Thursday 2 February 2012

Emma's All Equipped!

One of the main things on my list for the London Boat Show a few weeks ago was a life jacket for Emma. She can't swim yet and although most most canals are so shallow that if you fall in, you just stand up, obviously we don't want to take a risk.

So, with loads of suppliers, a child's life jacket shouldn't be a problem, right? Wrong!

Each stand we went to said no, they didn't do life jackets for under 5's "because they fiddle with them". Errr, so, an under 5 without a life jacket is better off in the water than an under 5 with a life jacket that they fiddle with from time to time?

Eventually, we found a great stand with children's jackets who were also able to explain the problem. The jackets inflate for two reasons, either the water-sensor activates automatically or the manual pull-cord is pulled. And this is the "fiddling" apparently.

Easy solution - tuck the pull cord inside the life jacket and tack the velcro opening shut, so no "fiddling" can occur.

And this is Emma, modelling her jacket:


She's looking like a proper sailor!