Cooking Skate

I woke up after a good night's sleep at half past seven and posted the Morning Prayer link on Whats App, listened to the news and Thought for the Day, then got up for breakfast. Before going to St John's for the Eucharist I made the video slide show for next week's Morning Prayer and uploaded it to YouTube. There were six of us for the service, including Meg who celebrated. 

Clare went into town to the bank, and moved her share of the money for the new roof to our joint account, ready for paying the bill after the weekend. Too wet again today for the scaffolders to arrive, but we did have a visit from the plasterer who will come on Saturday morning to finish off the surrounds of the new Velux windows. 

I cooked lunch while she was out. Rice and veggies as usual, but there were two large skate wings to cook, a fish I don't recall having to cook before. They were so big they wouldn't fit side by side in the pan, not even in my skillet, so they had to be cooked separately. I wasn't sure how to know for certain if they were properly cooked, I had to 'wing it', as the saying goes. Five minutes each with a small drop of oil seemed to do the trick, and they tasted fine and didn't need to be returned to the pan for an extra burst of heat. It's a mild bland sort of taste. The flesh must be combed out from between the supporting strips of gristle as you eat. An odd experience. A dash of lemon or lime would have helped maybe, but for a first time experience I wanted to know the un-garnished taste of the fish. If there is a next time, maybe a marinade beforehand?

It rained on and off from lunchtime until nearly five o'clock. After sending out this week's Sway link via Mailchimp, I paced around the house in frustration, rather than go out and get soaked again. When rain turned to drizzle, I donned rain gear and wellies and left. Then the drizzle halted for an hour and didn't resume until I was out of the park, five hundred yards away from home. 

It seems unfair that Andalusia has been in drought conditions while we are getting an overdose of winter rain, not even a flake of snow. There's often torrential rain on the Costa del Sol and in the sierras behind at this time of year, refilling the reservoirs, but the best the region can manage at the moment is showers. Our temperature today is 13C, while in Malaga it's 18C. When I was there this time last year 12-15C by day was usual. The average is higher at both latitudes now.

After supper, after neglecting reading for several months, I returned to reading my Spanish novel 'Travesuras de una niña mala' for a couple of hours. It was easy to pick up where I left off, although I hadn't left it with a bookmark. The language reflects the Peruvian background of the protagonist, with unfamiliar turns of phrase. It's certainly broadening the range of my understanding, having to decipher apparently strange words whose meaning in Google Translate only emerges when a whole phrase is typed in. Fascinating stuff.