Island lentils

Having done lentils about a fortnight ago, as noticed at reference 1, we felt the need the other day, despite the continuing heat.

Pretty much everything from Tesco's: greens, rice, lentils, onions and sausage. All except the oil, which was decanted into a small jam jar and brought from home.

The 120g sausage was a new to me brand - Beretta - from the people at reference 2. Got up like a French one from Waitrose, but without the metal clip at the end. A different sort of casing, thicker, stiffer and a lot easier to get off. Probably much less natural, much less organic.

8oz of lentils washed three times in the now usual way. Dead flies of reference 1 more or less absent, even on the second outing. But no butter and no garlic, with the onions going into hot but neat oil. No celery, no cabbage.

The resulting stew was fine, but the flavour was different, a little flat is the only word I can come up with. Was it the absence of butter? The new brand of sausage? The relatively small amount of sausage, the usual ration being nearer 200g? I don't suppose that we will ever know.

But despite the new flavour, we did most of it in the first shift, and the left over rice and stew served microwaved for a pleasant lunch time snack a couple of days later.

PS 1: a weather curiosity from BH's telephone: it seems like more or less every day it has told us that it will be a couple of degrees cooler the next day. It did not seem to learn that actually the temperature was staying pretty much the same.

PS 2: Gemini tells me that 'Beretta' is a common name in northern Italy, originally an occupational name for hatters. After telling me about sausages and guns, snapped above, in response to a supplementary, he tells me about berets.

'... The words beret, beretta, and barrette all trace their lineage back to the exact same linguistic ancestor: the Late Latin word birrus, which referred to a short, hooded cloak worn by the Romans to keep off the rain...'.

A story confirmed by Bing/Copilot on the clue 'birrus latin'. Time for breakfast.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/06/too-hot.html.

Reference 2: https://www.fratelliberetta.com/en/.

Reference 3: https://www.beretta.com/en-us/firearms/. Looks to be a site for gun nuts. Maybe directed at the US market? Aside: we have been watching crime dramas from Amazon recently, and I have noticed a lot of loving shots of guns. Not the sort of thing you get in a crime drama made here in the UK.

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