Sacrificial lamb etc

Last time that Little Brother came to visit he told me he had left some meat from his farm in my freezer.   So he had.   Two large roasts, one mutton and one beef.   Last week I had the brilliant idea to roast it for one meal and then mince the remainder to make cottage pie.   However our daytime temperatures are in the mid-twenties celsius now and our house is west facing so gets very much hotter than that in the afternoon.   Nothing daunted I rose at 5am this morning and set the roast going then went back to bed having set my alarm clock for two hours later.   Roast cooked to perfection, a slightly longer sleep than normal for me and I still got to church on time:-)
This afternoon I sliced/carved the leg of mutton, retained some for dinner tonight and minced the other in my good old fashioned cast iron mincer.

Herewith, sacrificial lamb which shall tomorrow be made into cottage pies for the freezer.  Enough energy has been expended on this for one day.   This will make several cottage pies for several people for several days :-)   I shall freeze them for cooler weather.   Lean cuisine this is not but it is delicious.

I have been diligently stitching on the Quaker Friendship Book and it is all but finished.   My initials and the year fill in  gaps on the cover and I need to stitch a couple of small motifs to fill in the gaps on a couple of others-  the ABCD square and EFGH square have gaps.   Gaps have arisen because I have not done this as a round robin with initials of friends. So here she is in all her glory - including the two false starts which I just left.

This may be the last finish before Christmas as this week looks to be really busy.