Oh that rings bells with me too!

Luckily Danny cooks the roasts here each Sunday

Burnt cabbage – yuk!

I suspect it’s the cook’s revenge on a family not willing to help. I didn’t know that it was possible to burn cabbage. Even I didn’t manage to do that in Chelsea.

Hi Chris

I’m sorry but I don’t have any tips as D cooks all our roasts. I do know that his beef recipes have had rave reviews on the blog.

Hello Dee

I loved your story! Thanks for sharing.

Hi Tamar

It was so ghastly that I can still see snapshots of the scene all these years later.

I must check out the meat thermometer route – thanks for the tip.

Thank goodness D is roast chef at the cottage.

I seldom cook large cuts of meat, and can’t forge ahead with the confidence I have with other types of cooking. A meat thermometer — the kind with the long lead and the remote read-out — changes everything.

Nevertheless, there was the leg-of-lamb incident. In involved take-out pizza. Sigh.

My story goes back 35 years when I was young and when we had brown, oven to table, concrete dinner services and handmade napkins which matched the orange and yellow curtains.

My fella and I were invited to Tony and Rosemary’s for dinner (not their real names). We had beef bourgiewatsit which presented itself as chewy kernals of black bits and globular button mushrooms floating in a thin black gravy, accompanied by huge dry, powdery roast potatoes and some whole carrots. Although the company was sweet, the meal was hard to get through but we managed it and Rosemary beamed as we told those little white lies.

Then came the tour de force ! A gateau of pancake ! Six layers of chewy pancakes spread with lemon curd, and placed thoughtfully, one top the other. It was the hardest thing (so early on in our lives) we had ever had to swallow. It was so dry, so dreadful to dispose of – horrible memories of secreting most parts of school dinners into my gymslip pocket rendered me almost conversationless as I concentrated on getting the pancakes down. Finally, as we put down our forks Tony turned to Rosemary and took her hand

“Darling…” he said “Darling…yet another culinary masterpiece.” Rosemary was beaming again.

They were so in love, Rosemary and Tony, they had two lovely children and fell off the dinner party circuit as did I, but Tony died young and Rosemary has been a widow for 20 years now. Oh, isn’t life sad sometimes !

Sorry about my little story, it did vaguely have something to do with beef didn’t it ?!

Oh, Barney, what a shame.
I do not believe that you cannot cook roast beef. I think that, like me, you were never shown how to do it. That’s all.
Do not lose faith and remember that it is all in the temperature and timings. Fiona never cooks Sunday lunch if we have guests, only because she can get distracted by conversations.
As the cook, you have to concentrate. It’s just like cooking veggies. But it’s not a secret or a black art.