Do enough potatoes on day minus one that there are around four ounces of left over mashed potato for day zero.
Buy a lump of pork belly, the fat (sense 1) sort, about two inches thick and from which most of the fat (sense 2) has been stripped off. Bone the pork and put the bones, cartilage and so on on to simmer gently. Dice the meat down to around cubic centimetres.
Add small knob of lard (the best sort is imported from Indonesia) to a thick bottomed pan and melt. Add the pork and let it simmer for a bit. Meanwhile finely chop a couple of medium sized onions. Add them to the mix, topping up with enough water to just about cover. Add lid and continue to simmer.
Finely chop a green pepper and a red pepper and add them to the mix. Continue to simmer.
When the meat is cooked, stir in the cold mashed potato, adding a little stock from the simmering bone pan. Five minutes before eating, add six ounces of small button mushrooms; stalks thinly sliced, caps halved. The resulting stew should be damp but not wet. Serve next to two day cut brown bread, dry but not too hard. Very good it was too.
For day two we move from stew to soup, starting by draining the stock from the bone pan into the blender jug. Strip the meat and other eatables from the bones and add to the jug. Blend vigorously and add the resultant mix to what is left of the stew. Bring back to the boil and simmer for a bit longer, taking care not to catch it: the mashed potato tends to sink and stick so occasional stirring is advised. Five minutes before eating, add the remaining four ounces of mushrooms, as before. Serve next to three day cut brown bread, dry to hard. Very good it was too.
Having bought most of the ingredients from Waitrose, the topic of conversation was the pink lady apples from Tesco's, first mentioned on 17th September and following which I sent an email to the customer service people at the Tesco HQ. In fairly short order I get a return email (from their computer) telling me that my communication is so important to them that it has been allocated a reference number which I should quote in any further communications. A day or so after that I get a signed email, from a person, asking me to supply all kinds of details, including, quite reasonably, the batch number, eat by date and such like. I should have realised that such like was essential to any decent quality control process, but instead the packaging was on its way to the waste transfer station, the timing of all this, relative to the waste transfer weekly cycle, having been unfortunate. But I was able to dig up the till receipt (see above) and one of the labels on the offending apples, so scanned that in and sent it off.
Followed the next day by a call to my shiny new mobile phone by a heavily accented gentleman who may have been based in Dundee rather than Madras (to judge by markings on the subsequent letter). He explained that he would send me three pounds (decent of them to round the amount up) and asked whether there was anything else he could help me with before wishing me a nice day.
Followed a few days later by a letter enclosing a blue plastic Tesco money card, good for £3. Vouchers out and money cards in. They might even be quite useful; a card onto one can put money for subsequent spending at a Tesco. A card which one can lose without getting into as much of a lather as one does if one loses serious plastic; the same sort of advantage as having a pay as you go mobile phone. No deep pocket for the finder to tap into.
A satisfactory result. One could not expect Tesco to do more, leaving aside getting the quality of the apples right - but that is much harder than running a quality control call centre.
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