hands, hash, cold dog

Last year it was feet. This it's year hands.

Every scrap of the turkey has now been eaten. Risotto as usual, a salad of cold turkey with various chutneys and soup as ususal. But a new left-over dish proves equally succesful: turkey hash. A mixture of white and brown meat is finely chopped;  sliced onion is softened in butter and the turkey added and slowly cooked until the butter is absorbed. A little stock is then added and and cooked slowly and cream and seasoning added to make a sauce. Meanwhile mashed potato is lightly fried until a golden brown and arranged  in a dish round the creamed turkey. You  can of course make hash with almost any left over meat. Or perhaps, though I have not thought of it until now, with left over fish.

At lunch in a restaurant yesterday Heidi who has popped out for a smoke returns indignant."There is a little dog outside shivering in the cold," she says. The dog belongs to a family eating away in  the warmth. Instead of ticking the family off, Heidi collects the dog and the bowl of water beside it and brings them into a covered lobby at the rear of the restaurant, where she re-tethers the poor animal.  No dogs are allowed in the restaurant. After quite a while the pater familias rises to see how the dog is getting on. When he sees that it has gone, he goes round to back, walks straight past the dog which he fails to notice, and goes into the car park where he begins to call the dog, assuming that it has run off. We are still laughing when he returns only then to notice the poor creature, who greets him with an unenthusiastic wag or two of its tail.