Windmills, jacket spuds and decorating

I have some family over in the USA, in North Carolina, including my sister Emma, who frequently sends me excellent recipes, and I'm gradually getting a grip on some of the strange measurements and terms in American cooking. That is, apart from the strange foodstuffs I've never heard of and the ones I have, but under another name, I'm a metric man, having been schooled exclusively in metric measurements, while America is apparently not even close to considering joining the rest of the world on that one.

But although I can't for the life of me visualise what a pound looks or feels like of any given substance, if the numbers are written down I can simply follow the instructions and trust in my dual-unit scales not to lead me astray. And Emma very kindly sent me some offical "cups", which have saved a lot of conversion shenanigans.

Helping me to make the most of the season, she recently sent me a recipe for pumpkin cornbread, though I struggled to find the "cornmeal" required (what we call maize flour) as the maize that's grown in this area is generally either canned as sweetcorn, eaten fresh on the cob, or sold as bio fuel.

On the way to Boston for the school run, I passed by the turning for Sibsey and wondered if the windmill there might do it, as I recall seeing all kinds of fancy grains on their shelves when I went to help with the sacks they milled for us at Heckington, while our mill was out of action (at Heckington we just do wheat flour and porridge oats). On the way back I saw a sign (only visible from one direction) saying it was open, so I swerved in and there on the shelf was just what I was looking for: maize flour from local corn, milled by wind power.

I suppose that's another unique feature of doing what I'm doing here, as opposed to anywhere else: the fact I'm within easy reach of five working windmills (Lincoln, Alford, Heckington, Boston and Sibsey). Pretty cool, eh? :)

So I'll have a go at that cornbread when I'm feeling energetic enough to make my own pumpkin purée, seeing as how I've never seen such an item on any shelf in any British shop.

Meanwhile, decorating the kitchen has continued today. So many fiddly bits! And no big expanses to blast with the roller - it's all been brush work, painstaking and tedious and with much use of masking tape. But now that end of the kitchen's finished - the end with the cooker! - the other end should be quicker to do. And I can cook again!

So tonight I put some of those large potatoes in the oven for an hour and a half, while I got on with painting the edges of the other end in prep for the roller work tomorrow. Then when the spuds were done, I fried that beef mince I got from Handson's in some rapeseed oil with two small onions and a bit of garlic and a beef Oxo cube, then tipped in the leftover hash from the other night and cooked till it was all heated through.

We ate it with some cucumber and one each of those tomatoes, and a bit of Poacher cheese thus: 

Yes, we have three potato halves each - after all that decorating, going without lunch and not having dinner until nearly 9pm, we were hungry, so this soon vanished!! Of course, the washing up can wait until tomorrow. Or whenever the kitchen is back to rights again after decorating. 

Progress might be delayed tomorrow by the arrival of a satellite dish installation engineer... no, it's nothing to do with Sky TV - more on that later!