A Hint of Winter

It was a lovely crisp autumn morning and I already had dinner pretty much cooked. I'd sealed and started to slow cook these great hunking chunks of oxtail the night before and they were snug in the fridge when I went to work this morning awaiting another hour on the stove and the addition of the swede and carrot. When the girlfriend got in from work the kitchen was smelling incredible, that warm meaty smell of reduced wine and long slow cooked meat tinged with bay leaves.

This was a harbinger of winter, this meal. A look forward to the long dark evening and short days, the smell of bonfires and the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot. The big fat Bourdeaux we drank with it adding a hint of heady Christmas spice to the proceedings and some welcome decorum to the slurping of bones that accompanied this meal. Summers gone, bring on winter say I.

Like Billy Connelly said: " There's no such thing as bad weather only the wrong clothes..."