What I Cooked Last Night

I boiled three potatoes chopped into quarters and two carrots chopped into batons. When they were almost cooked I dropped a dozen green beans and two bricks of closely packed cabbage into the pot. When they were all done I drained them and placed them into little or larger piles on my large oval serving platter. The potatoes were a cairn in the middle, the cabbage made haybales at either end and the carrots and beans lay about like roadmakers' tar-brooms at smoko time. Meanwhile two eggs were simmering in another pot, chattering their undersides on its aluminium base. I cut two ripe tomatoes into eighths and scattered these about the plate, and took half an unpeeled cucumber and cut it into sticks and added them to the general disarray. Then I peeled the soft-boiled eggs, successfully this time after years of varied results, and sat them way up in the potato cairn like an eagle's eyrie. The sauce was bubbling away all of this time: two large tablespoons of natural peanut ...