What to do when it's been a seriously crap day

Today has been utterly rubbish.  The unending, ongoing, relentless awfulness that only really happens in January; when it's wet and cold and you're tired and just when you think you've got everything under control and generally heading in the right direction, and you've tentatively started to feel optimistic about things, something else gets thrown at you.

Today my car had to go into the garage because the clutch failed yesterday (£600 worth of joy), the Very Tolerant Boyfriend got delayed in Gloucestershire which turned his 14 hour day into a 16 hour one, I fell down the stairs and finally our lawyers called this morning to tell us that EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD had gone wrong with our house purchase and our exchange on Friday was going to fall through.  Fortunately the Lawyer was wrong, but that's never the sort of voicemail you want to pick up and it took quite a lot of shouting from me and (mainly) the Very Tolerant Boyfriend, or as I suppose he's been promoted to, the Very Tolerant Fiancé,  to get it sorted out.

So we're till moving on Friday and this evening all we really wanted was some comfort food and a large drink.

So this evening while waiting for the Very Tolerant Fiancé to get back from his very long day, I knocked together something warm and soothing (while drinking a very large gin).

Slow cooked pork belly
Low on imagination and energy, I kept this as simple as possible.  I heated a tablespoon of oil in a casserole dish and placed the pork belly skin down in the hot oil.  I fried it for ten minutes until the skin crisped up and then flipped it back over, turned the heat off and when the oil had cooled added a bottle of cider (I used Thatchers), some sage, salt and pepper.  I then heated the oven to 180C and cooked for 30 minutes before reducing to 120C for another two hours.

Bourbon and maple baked beans
I got the idea for this from a slow cooked vegan recipe and completely bastardised it (spoiler - it's not vegan anymore).
1lb black beans (dried)
1 cup tomato sauce
1 cup chopped tomatoes
1 cup coke
1/4 cup bourbon
2 tblsp maple syrup
1 packet lardons
1 cup water
2 tsp spice mix (really must write up the recipe for this at some point)
2 tsp garlic paste
2 tsp worcestershire sauce.
1 cup water
2 tbsp tomato puree

I had soaked the beans overnight, planning to make them in the slow cooker and then I had all the other rubbish to deal with today, so I skipped the slow cooking.

I fried the lardons off in the bottom of a cast iron casserole dish and then just threw everything else in and cooked it down for a couple of hours.  I have more beans than we will ever be able to eat, but I'm sure they freeze fine and they taste amazing

And then I served it all with some jacket sweet potatoes.  I'll probably need to run a couple of extra miles tomorrow but it was amazing.