Where the Wild Things Are

Rumour has it that they are about to release a film/cartoon based on this story. You have no idea how excited I am about this book, it is one of my most favourite books ever. How much do I love this book ? Well I went out and bought a copy before Spider was 6 months old.

I know it so well I can quote it in my sleep “The night, Max wore his Wolf Suit and made mischief…of one kind…or another !

Happy Happy Happy.

Spag Bol

I made Spaghetti Bolognaise on Friday night, it’s the same recipe I’ve used for years (but these days without the mushrooms) I learned it from my Mum, probably one of the first more complicated things I made – the best bolognaise I ever tasted is the one from Kitchen Diaries:Nigel Slater but I wasn’t in the mood for following a recipe, I just wanted something comforting and routine.

I made it partly to make amends and partly to calm me down and get my head straight as I’d just thrown my toys out the pram. I behaved appallingly but I am not apologetic for it, sometimes I think it needs to be done. I don’t make a fuss as a rule and sometimes when you don’t make a fuss you can get overlooked.

Things had kinda come to a head on Friday evening. I was finally getting fed up of the neighbours treating our garden as a thoroughfare because we had no fences up, I’d shouted at one of the neighbours visiting children the previous day because he’d ignored me when I’d told him not to go in our garden to get his ball, and that he should be asking me if I could get it for him – can’t remember what I said aside from emphasising that the garden was dangerous.

Anyway I insisted to the family that this weekend that we were sorting out the backgarden. Not sure how the Student got involved as we hadn’t actually asked him to help out but he started getting arsey about the fact I wanted to do it this weekend and how it was messing up his arrangements as he had to be in Rugby tomorrow to “see his boss about holiday work” and then he phoned someone and started slagging us off on the phone whilst we were in earshot about how the “people here keep changing their plans, and the plans are changing by the minute etc etc”. So I sort of told him that as far as I was concerned he could go home now, this minute, that I didn’t want him here and that his “attitude stank” and I’d rather a willing volunteer than someone who felt pressganged.

I suspect that Student thinks his Stepmother has an irrational hatred of him, no I have a very rational dislike, based on the fact that he is an arrogant knowitall who hasn’t the human social skills to realise that talking about someone in front of them, implying that they were too stupid to plan ahead might perhaps annoy them a little ! A dislike which is intensified by the fact that the very thing he is accusing us of is one of his biggest character flaws – he doesn’t think ahead and he expects us to change our plans to fit in with him – well sorry Student, but you are 20 now, you are an adult, start using your brain, start planning and start realising that other people (parents and such like) have lives too !

Poor Husband I think is feeling a bit bruised as he probably had to put up with Student sounding off in the car as he was taken back to Rugby…and was then probably worring that I’d give him an earbashing when he got home – nope, just Spag Bol !

The Spag Bol made an appearance the next day too, mixed with veg and hidden under mashed potato as a cottage pie.

I’ve also tried to make amends concerning the current state of the house – its tidier than it has been for weeks – well since I went on strike following the mess the house got in when Husband and Student came back from Le Mans – and ruined the hard work I’d put in to finding a place for everything in the 6 days they were both out of the house.

Tomorrow I may even clean the goldfish out…

Still Here…

I am still here and so is my cold – I can’t understand it, I appear to have had a cold and a sore throat since the end of April. I just don’t seem to be able to shift it – last time I had this I was expecting Spider, and no, he is not about to have company…

I don’t tend to cook for other people when I’m feeling under the weather, too scared of passing germs on  and if I’m not cooking I don’t post…so normal service will be resumed when I don’t feel quite so snotty and bunged up and horrible…knitting is happening on Being Frank, despite the weather…

“How absolutely fabulous !”

I have been the happy and lucky recipient of a totally unexpected ever so welcome random act of kindness.

A few weeks ago I did a Pay it Forward/planned act of kindness based round crafty type stuff and sent a bag that I had knitted and felted to wonderful  Mrs Lacer (Lacer’s Life) – she has written it up here, I haven’t cos I’ve been a bit of a slacker of late (there are reasons for this admittedly).

Anyway, completely out of the blue today I received a parcel, was very surprised as I never put my address on parcels, just my postcode, but Mrs L is a very bright cookie and traced me through the post offices address finder…

Don’t you think this is just fabulous ?  It’s made out of similar material to some  I’d previously admired on a cushion she’d madeand the rabbit is a design from Aranzi Aranzo (Let’s make cute stuff) which is doubly fantastic as I have an obsession with all things Japanese  (ok most things Japanese, I can’t stand Hello Kitty)  and a weakness for Miffy, and the rabbit is Miffyesque.

I am still jumping around the room with joy some 30 minutes after getting home, after an uninspiring day.

Thank you thank you Mrs Lacer – and sorry for leading you down the sinful path of Noro !

Golden Silence

Well our wi fi is still broken and I’ve had a weekend of actually finishing things due to not having the distraction of the internet…perhaps if we leave it broken we may finally finish off this house ?

It’s been a lovely weekend, despite the absence of Husband and the constant refrain of “we’re not friends anymore” from Spider when he doesn’t get his own way.

Unhappy

Not because Husband has gone to Le Mans with his eldest son leaving me and Spider to entertain ourselves for the weekend, but because before he went he managed to destroy our link with the internet.

Oh well at least I may achieve something over the next few days if I am not wasting my evening noodling away on the internet.

Let the Feast of Fish begin…

ps Cake making should be happening this weekend, I have a birthday cake to make !

Trying something new

At some point during this month my Mum will celebrate a rather special birthday. She has asked for a cake that is maple syrupish, butterscotchish, caramelish rather than any sort of fancy cake such as the wonderful whisky bottle the FGM made for Husband or the pirate cake I made for Spider.

She is evasive when the question of presents is raised, aside from the fact she is having a new bathroom – if and when they can track down a plumber.  So in the absence of any other suggestion I have decided to try something new, which I will probably stick up on “Being Frank” as its craft related rather than cooking…but not until after her birthday as she sometimes reads both blogs and I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

I have possibly bitten off rather more than I can handle…at least the birthday cake will be straight forward…

Fortunately I have a backlog of things to write up dating back to budget day – haven’t broken it to Husband that he’s on kitchen duty for the next few weeks – until of course he abandons me for motorsport for 5 days whilst he takes Student to Le Mans, and although I will miss him, I’m already planning meals for whilst he’s away involving several fish dishes, mushrooms and possibly a curry.

This probably sounds a bit heartless, but I know that from the moment he gets on the ferry to France until the moment he drops Student off on the return journey that he will have no room in his head for anything other than cars, so I may as well be brutally practical and make the best of his absence !

Guilt and a recipette

If and when Spider learns to read I shall give up this blog as he will start to know slightly too much about what motivates me  (and no doubt many other parents) should he ever stumble across these pages.

I have been very grumpy of late and not spending enough time with him, in fact have been jumping at the chance to let him stick his “Walking with Dinosaurs” videos on.

On sunday I made pancakes (american) for breakfast. This indicates a sense of guilt on my part and an attempt to make up for it.  We had no maple syrup, (but then I don’t think the Gingerbread pancakes need much really) so I made a storecupboard sauce out of cloudy honey blitzed in the microwave with some orange juice.

I then went on to make the Marmalade cake which I’d been threatening to make for ages plus the bean soup I mentioned a few posts ago, using fennel instead of tarragon, as that’s what I had to hand – the cake went down well. Comment from Spider “well I’d call it gorgeous” – he’s such a smoothy, he knows how to charm a grumpy and unresponsive Mummy round to his way of thinking !

Tomorrow, is the first day of the rest of your life…

Tomorrow is the first day of my campaign to get me eating healthily – I would like to get the rest of my family eating healthily but that might be slightly more than I can manage (Spider has potential he eats the more colourful members of the vegetable world).

Yesterday I tackled the building site of the back garden – its going to be a long job but at least I’ve strimmed the grass and made a start at stacking all the dead wood in one place

back garden pre tidy

I have also organised the shed, camping and toys on one side and my gardening equipment on the other. Am contemplating drawing a chalk line down the centre…have threatened dire penalties towards anyone messing up my “sanctuary” if a dark dingy cobwebbed infested place can be called a sanctuary.

All my tools are finally in one place, soon to be joined by all the various seed packets that inhabit every spare drawer in the house.

Unfortunately all the plants I grew in February and March have died off as I had nowhere to put them after the allotment fell through so I am looking for free or cheap plants of whatever sort I can get my hands on.

Later today I shall make the last cake (other than my Mum’s birthday cake) that I intend to eat until I have got my waist measurement down to 28 inches – still cooking for other people though..

I am also part way through 2 soups. There was a report on the BBC website last week that scientists thought that soup might be the key to dieting as it makes your brain think you are not hungry for longer – sorry can’t find the link. I am part way through as one of the recipes involves soaking beans overnight and then cooking them. I don’t have a lot of luck with dried beans so I doubled both the soaking time and the cooking time and I think they are now “cooked, with a little bite left”.

The recipes in question are Nigel Slater’s “White Bean and Tarragon Soup” replacing the borlotti beans with haricot and the tarragon with possibly thyme (I actually grew some borlotti beans last year and they were very easy and so beautiful to look at). The second recipe is from a blog I read Glittyknittykitty (Potage Crecy with Peppers – January 16th) and is purely because I have been given a jaw of Peppardew peppers and have a large bag of carrots in for Spider.

More tea vic ?

I didn’t in the end make the Marmalade cake as yesterday we celebrated the fine weather by having a barbeque with our next door neighbours, the wonderful queen of make and do and flapjacks (who ran out of golden syrup mid week and came round for some emergency supplies), and her family.

At 7pm I took Spider back home for milk and a story, with the intention of using the phone as a baby monitor but instead collapsed on our bed after reading his bedtime story where Husband found us both some 3 hours later snoring our heads off.

The side benefit of the barbeque is that I have managed to sneak some salad into the house, lettuce, cherry toms and some spring onions – although the boys don’t mind vegetables they are deeply suspicious of “green stuff”.

Today we have visitors, Husband’s brother and fiancee and  I was about to start beating some eggs when Husband decided that he would finally cut his birthday cake… now I know my limitations, and much as though I would have enjoyed making his cake, a 50th birthday called for something special, so I asked the Fairy Gothmother to weave her magic in the kitchen (she made our wedding cake) and she came up with this…

The Orange Blossom Special

I have been baking a lot recently. I think it’s because usually I make cakes for celebrations and associate cake with being happy, so when I am depressed or unhappy I bake to cheer myself up. Oddly enough I don’t feel the need to eat what I’ve made as if I’m honest I prefer something savoury.

The first time I cooked myself to a better mood was April, it was the week I stumbled on the most amazing recipe for Sussex Pond Pudding [recipe here] (which I subsequently made, but with disastrous results (a story for another time)).

The problem with needing to bake away depression is you don’t necessarily have the opportunity to go shopping for missing ingredients and it’s a matter of taking pot luck with what’s in the cupboards. So possessing as I did almost the entire worlds harvest for cashew nuts 2007 (they weren’t the freshest of nuts admittedly) a cashew heavy recipe was required and Google shortly provided

One of the first things to come up on Google was Allegra McEvedy’s Orange Blossom, cashew and semolina cake [recipe here]… I just loved the idea of it, I think it was the orange blossom that did it, as it always sounds so exotic and the idea of a fragrant cloud of orange blossom scenting my kitchen as the cake baked made me forget that I almost always have been disappointed in the things I’ve made using it.

Since I had all the ingredients to hand (apart from the rosemary which I “borrowed” from a complete strangers garden) I started it as soon as I got home, and yes, the kitchen smelt wonderful but not of orange blossom – If I’d read all the recipe up front I would have realise the orange blossom is  added to a sugar syrup which is poured over the cake 30 minutes after removing it from the oven.

The cake was very fresh and rich and buttery, reminiscent of a Nigella Lawson recipe I once made where half the usual ingredients are replaced by marzipan, not surprising really since marzipan is largely almonds, so the principle is the same. The cake was very nice I’m told, but left me feeling disappointed, I guess I had built the anticipation of eating it in my mind a bit too much…making it cheered me up though.

No photo, I have not, up to now at any rate been in the habit of photographing my cakes…

The honey cake that wasn’t…

I am informed, by the cake eaters in this house that it is the jewish new year about now, Rosh Hashana. As I have been known in the past to use the excuse of other people’s feast days to cook, I took this as meaning “Mummy, please can you bake something”. Said cake eaters also advised that THE cake for Rosh Hashana is a honey cake. Now I have a lovely recipe from Tessa Kiros “Apples for Jam” for honey cake but I wasn’t sure it was the right sort of cake, so after a bit of research I decided on Macy Goldman’s majestic and moist honey cake [recipe here] . However for this I was missing one vital ingredient…

Last week, I had a cold and sore throat and bought a new jar of honey to go with the lemons I always seem to have in the kitchen. Unfortunately I forgot to tell my husband that it was in the shopping bag, and it managed to slip from the kitchen counter and on to the floor… honey and glass is NOT a nice or easy mixture to clear up off the floor.

So I did the honey cake from Nigella Lawson’s “Feast” instead, which is remarkable for its complete lack of honey, substituting a light muscavardo for soft brown sugar, a mixture of cloves,

cinnamon and nutmeg for the allspice and accidently using baking powder instead of bicarbonate… I also halved the mixture as Nigella always seems to cook for legions, and I cook for a teenager and a toddler and the occasional visitor.

It didn’t sink as I’d expected and as advised by Nigella, I put this down to my mistake with the bicarb, it wasn’t, as stated a bit moist in the middle… my husband, who is the only one who has tried it so far said “the problem is, its too good, I mean your sponge is too light, it needs to be heavier and stickier” – so next year I guess I do the majestic and moist one, and find an excuse during the year to try Tessa Kiros’ version.

Postscript: Came home today to find half the cake missing, husband and toddler had decided it was nice, so there’s a vote of confidence then !

RECIPE: Honey aka Golden Syrup Cake

Apparently I forgot to put a link to a recipe in for the Honey Cake. If you google it you get the Chocolate Honey Cake from “Feast” which is a fantastic cake (very rich tho’), this one doesn’t seem to have been published anywhere however.

This is the cake I made, quantities halved from the original

250g plain flour

1.5 teaspoons baking powder

1.5 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

100g light muscavado

1/4 tsp each ground cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves

1 egg

125g butter

250g golden syrup

150 m milk

Preheat oven to 190 deg C – grease and line a 20cm tin

Add flour, sugar, baking powder, bicarb and spice in a bowl. Mix together

Beat egg in a smaller bowl. In saucepan melt butter and golden syrup, take off heat and add the milk, set aside to cool. When cool add to egg and then mix the wet ingredients in with the dry (bit like making a muffin). Mix to combine and then pour batter into the prepared tin. Cook in oven for about 50 minutes, may need a little longer. Leave cake in tin until cool.

Dead Slug Baking

I was in a meeting last wednesday when I was struck by a need to make cake. I just knew that if I didn’t go home and make a specific cake then I would not be able to get through the rest of the week without shouting at someone or bursting into tears.

And WHAT a cake ! On Tuesday I collected a library a book I had ordered, The Ottolengthi Cookbook (Ottolenghi for those of us who don’t live in London is a dei/cafe who make some truly amazing cakes). I devoured the book in one sitting on tuesday evening, read it cover to cover and spent the rest of the night trying to decide which of 3 cakes I would try first…and who I would give them to as all 3 are gloriously sticky, oozy and fattening.

The rest of the day was a blurr, the 2.5 hours on the motorway were hardly noticed. Ten miles from home I dived into the supermarket and bought cream cheese, apples and butter, stopped at my parents to borrow maple syrup, put Toddler to bed and got the ingredients out…I was inspired.

Now with some cakes I follow recipes to the letter and this was to be one of them (needed to be). It was here that I hit a problem. I had no ground cloves. Glumly I put everything back in the cupboard and sat back on the sofa to sulk.

Not for long though, I felt too twitchy to sulk. Returning to the kitchen I went hunting for things that needed using. For once nothing, except some unrefined icing sugar that had gone solid and needed blitzing in the food processor…this gave me an idea.

I have made Nigella’s Winter Plum cake before without the icing and hadn’t been overtly fussed about it, however since she specifically states that it needs the fudgyness of the unrefined icing I thought I’d give it a go, substituting ground cashew for the almonds and guessing the amount of almond extract using some measuring spoons Toddler had got out of a christmas cracker.

Verdict: Cake itself nice but uninspiring, but then I’d spent the day dreaming of cake nirvana and this brown blob clearly wasn’t that, it wasn’t even “Miss Amelie’s famous plum cake”. The problem was the chopped tinned red plums, the sensation they left in the mouth was of eating cold dead slugs. The almond essence was overpowering but when I checked the cracker measures later I discovered I’d underestimated not over…the occasional chunk of not quite ground cashew added a note of interest. All in all a let down. Personally I think I would serve this hot as a dessert, substitute dark sugar for the light and add spices. As the family are still eating this cake almost a week later I am not going to post the recipe !

Postscript: Searching through Nigel Slater’s “Kitchen Diaries” last night for a pumpkin recipe I came across his version of plum cake which was very similar to the one above. I tend to trust Nigel’s judgement and descriptions of things so I was very surprised. I can only assume that using fresh plums and the addition of walnuts makes a significant difference.

THAT apple cake…hallelujah!

This Wednesday another meeting, this one in Bristol with 2 changes of train. Took my MP3 player along for once, not used it for awhile so had forgotten that it was chock full of the downloads from the evening we decided to find the definitive version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”.

So I had 2 hours of the same song over and over again, however in amongst the warbling were a couple of Nigel Slater Podcasts. I exited Temple Meads station on a happy cloud of foodie thoughts having had the joy of Nigel extolling the virtue of Autumn produce…despite his recommendation for Autumn cake being coffee and walnut (nuts being in season) I still have that apple cake lurking around in my head… I am also now in a “good place”, no blues despite it being 10 days ’til pay day and despite having sat through the same Leonard Cohen song (interspersed with the Sugar Plum fairy and the theme from Shaft played on a ukulele) for 2 hours straight.

So that Apple cake then ? Well I made it, and well it wasn’t a very restful experience, having come home in a good mood I was feeling distinctly frazzled by the end…

Firstly it turns out that I could have made this one last Wednesday when I was fantasising about it… it seems that I accidentally turned a page or two and had started reading the recipe for the carrot cake, secondly I messed up separating eggs as I was trying to concentrate on keeping the kitten out of the batter (omelette tomorrow then ?) and then finally, as I was smoothing out the batter across the top of the cake tin and fretting that I might have used slightly bigger than stated apples, I realised that my plastic spatula was half the size it was when I started the cake… anyway, all sorted now, cake is cooking gently in the oven and I wish I could say the house was filled with the sensuous smell of apples marinade in cinnamon, but truthfully all I can smell is virgin olive oil, but I guess I should look at the bright side, it could have been the acrid smell of sauteing plastic !

Recipe to follow tomorrow with a verdict as we have a friend for dinner (actually we have meatballs, as eating people is not recommended)

RECIPE: Apple and olive oil cake with maple icing

I can’t believe this recipe hasn’t been posted up before. It was truly worth waiting for, the teenager wants a bowl of just the topping…but since the perk of licking the bowl belongs to the cook he was out of luck.

Anyway, the ingredients are:

80g sultanas

4Tbsp water

280g plain flour

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsb baking powder

1 1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda

120ml olive oil

160g caster sugar

1/2 vanilla pod

2 eggs lightly beaten

3 bramley apples, peeled and cut into 1cm dice

grated zest of 1 lemon

2 egg whites

Icing

100g butter at room temp

100g light muscovardo sugar

85ml maple sugar

220g cream cheese

1 Grease and line 20cm springform cake. Place sultana’s in pan with the water and simmer until all water has been absorbed. Leave to cool

2 Preheat oven to 170 deg c. Sift flour cinnamon, salt, baking powder and bicarb. set aside

3 Mix oil and sugar in a fresh bowl. Add the seeds of the vanilla pod. Gradually add the lightly beaten eggs. Mix should be smooth and thick. Add the diced apples, sultanas and lemon juice. Then lightly fold in the dry ingredients.

4 Whisk the egg whites in a clean bowl until they have a meringue consistency. Fold them into the batter in 2 additions. (Try to lose as little air as possible).

5 Pour the batter into the lined tin. Level it with a palette knife and place in the oven. Bake for 1 1/2 hours or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin.

6 Once cake is cool remove from the tin and use a large serrated knife to cut it horizontally in half.

7. To make icing, beat together the butter, sugar and maple syrup either by hand or with the paddle attachment of a mixer. When mixture combined and smooth, add the cream cheese and beat until totally smooth.

8. Using a palette knife spread a 1cm thick layer of icing over the bottom half of the cake. Carefully place the top half on it. Spoon the rest of the icing on top and use the palette knife to create a wave effect. Can also dust with icing sugar.

9 Eat with friends…

Didn’t have time to take a picture of this cake it was eaten so quickly…

Remembrance of Walnut Whips (15th October)

My Nana passed away earlier this year, at Easter. Had she lived then today (15th October) would have been her 100th Birthday. Coincidentally had my Grandma lived, then today would have been her 106th birthday (she died the christmas before her 100th birthday).

Now, my Nana was a fantastic cake baker, she had a real talent for cake decoration. I’m told that she was still a pretty mean decorator even after she had a stroke (20years ago) and despite being paralysed down most of her right side managed to teach herself to do most things with her left !

My Mum taught me to cook. My first cake was Victoria sandwich cake. I had always assumed that it was a recipe that Mum had inherited from her Mum, and so today, when trying to decide what to make to celebrate what should have been I decided to cook a Victoria, as it sort of felt like a “legacy cake”. Anyway, I mentioned this to Mum and it turns out that she probably got the recipe from the Kenwood cook book and that if we have an inherited recipe going from Nana to Mum to Me then it is probably for pickled onions…

Pickled onions didn’t seem right as a memorial, so I used the sponge recipe as a basis and made a Coffee and Walnut cake instead because Nana loved Walnut Whips. I remember once, at about the age of 10 buying her a packet of 3 walnut whips as a christmas present – it was the same year that I bought Dad a packet of McVites Digestives (50p pocket money still didn’t go very far in the early 80’s, and we didn’t have that extensive a choice of biscuits).

Ingredients – given in imperial for sentimental reasons

6oz (175g) Margarine, Stork or Echo if they still sell it – I used butter as its what I had in the house, but my first cake was definitely marge

6oz (175g) Caster Sugar (If I’d had it in I would have used unrefined cane sugar as it works so well in a C&W)

6oz (175g) SR Flour (sieved)

3 Eggs

Coffee – I used 3 tsp of instant dissolved in a little water, but you could use camp coffee or even fresh brewed – just don’t use more than 2 tbs of liquid as you don’t want the cake batter to be too runny

Walnuts – optional – I don’t add nuts to my C&W but if you like texture then you could add about 50g of chopped up walnuts to the batter

* preheat oven to 180 deg C. Grease and flour (and line if you want to) 2 sponge tins of approx 18-20cm diameter.

1. Cream the butter/Marge with the sugar until all combined and mixture has a soft spreadable texture. You can beat it by hand or use an electric mixture – my preference is to use the K Beater of a Kenwood mixer, especially as for part of my childhood the Kenwood we had was one we had inherited from Nana – but as my Kenwood blew up about 12 months ago I opted for the manual method of a wooden spoon (which is probably why my cake hasn’t risen as well as usual)

2. Add 1 egg and a little flour to the sugar/butter mixture, mix until well combined. Do the same for each of the other 2 eggs.

3 Add in some of the coffee flavouring. Mix until well combined. Then sieve in any remaining flour. Beat well until combined. Taste the mixture, add more coffee if you like a stronger flavour. At this point add walnuts if using and combine well.

4 Put half the mixture in the first tin and the remaining mixture in the second tin. Smooth the mixture over and place in the oven. Cook for 30 minutes. Its cooked when the top of the cake springs back when you press on it. Remove from oven and leave to cool slightly, then remove from the tin and leave to cool completely on a wire rack

The Topping

A coffee flavoured butter cream is traditional and is what I would normally use. Smooth half in the middle and then the rest on top, decorate as you see fit with chopped walnuts (can provide a butter cream recipe if needed). Butter cream however makes my Dad feel ill, so I’ve tried a variation in the hope that it won’t upset his stomach.

I found this variation on butter cream in a sainsbury’s magazine circa 1998 but I don’t know who’s recipe it is…

3 level tbs instant coffee

12oz (350g) golden icing sugar

3 tbs whipping cream

4oz (110g) butter

5 Sift the icing sugar into a bowl and set aside. Dissolve coffee in 2 tbs boiling water.

6 Put butter in saucepan and melt over gentle heat. Let it bubble slightly (no more than 3 minutes or until it turns a light gold brown) – if you are lucky you should smell a smell reminiscent of butterscotch.

7 Add the butter to the icing and then quickly the dissolved coffee, and finally the cream. Beat all the ingredients together in the bowl until the icing is shiny and smooth. Leave the icing to one side for 20-30 minutes to thicken slightly.

8 Spread some of the mixture on the top of one of the sponges. Place the other sponge on top and spread the remaining icing over the top and sides. Decorate with any bits of walnut you happen to have in your cupboard.

9 Eat - preferably with a good cup of proper leaf tea

*I made half quantities of the icing and added more cream after waiting the 30 minutes, firstly because it was a bit too set and secondly because the coffee taste was VERY strong

No photo as its a very brown cake, it wouldn’t be very visually attractive even if I had inherited Nana’s talent with the decoration…

Postscript A quick google brings to light the fact that you cannot get coffee flavoured walnut whips anymore – however it does appear that they were first produced in 1910 which I guess is as near to Nana’s birthday as I’m going to get !

Autumn Spirits: Cake before Prozac…

The reason for starting these assorted ramblings was that I desperately needed something to focus on other than the contents of my bank account, and how I could juggle quickly dwindling pots of money, avoiding bank charges which caused already stretched resources to be further depleted.

I figured that if I had something else to think about I would be less prone to attacks of the blues. I am not depressed, and I am not sufficiently deluded to think that a good slice of carrot cake can cure depression. But I do think that a warm slice of a home made cake made by a friend can stop a pale blue mood descending into something that makes you reach for your guitar.

Here’s the twist. Firstly having been financially crippled all summer, there is now hope on the horizon that our finances may improve and secondly, the autumn is probably the one time of the year where I find it impossible to let anything get me down. In the autumn I am a regular little Pollyanna shouting “hello sky, hello trees, lovely day”.

I love the orangeredyellowbrown baked crisp rustling leaves as they shiffle shuffle under your feet. I love misty mornings and sharp October sunshine. I love pumpkins and rosehips and food for free. I love watching my Toddler pretending to help pick blackberries and then deciding he would be more help in quality controlling the ones in the box… I love Halloween, but not trick or treat, I love bobbing for apples and toffee apples, I love the explosion of black and green and orange that hits the shop window displays and I love the food – although partly this is an extension backwards from Bonfire Night.

Both Halloween and Bonfire Night are perhaps more notable for savoury delicacies than for sweet stuff (aside from treacle toffee that is), although last year having finally laid my hand on jellied lollipops I treated the Toddler to Nigella Lawson’s Ghoul graveyard cake.

 

Toddler was more impressed by the lollipops than anything else . The cake should anyone else think of doing it is a lovely moist chocolate cake, the icing is very sweet and if you can borrow the sprinkles from someone else – its been a year and I haven’t used them for anything else.

It seemed like a good idea at the time

Have you ever looked at an illustration in a recipe book and thought, that looks easy, that looks yummy I’ll give that a go? Have you ever been seduced by the name of a recipe. If so, then may I introduce you to Tessa Kiros Rosehip jam…If you go down this road then please learn from my mistakes.

One of the joys of this time of year is the potential for foraging. If you are that way inclined then there are all sorts of ingredients hiding in hedgerows waiting to be used.

I have been desperate to do something with rosehips for over 12 months now, since reading in our village’s monthly news letter some reminiscences about life in the early 20^th century when village children would get paid for collecting rosehips from the hedges.

I was not brought up on rosehip syrup but I love the images it conjures up. Sweet smelling and decadent, memories of Turkish delight and syrup drenched baklava. I couldn’t think of a use for rosehip syrup in our house but Jam, well that’s a different matter. The Toddler would live on jam sandwiches given the choice.

The illustration of the Rosehip Jam in “Apples for Jam” is delightfully old fashioned and the jam itself shines out from the page like rubies (if they’d been crushed and marinaded in twice their weight in sugar). The recipe is straightforward enough rosehips, water, lemon juice and sugar. Pick 200g of rosehips, freeze them if you are not going to use them immediately. When you are ready, cut the rosehips in half and scoop out the seeds…simple

If you try and cut a frozen rosehip the knife has a tendency to slide off the hip cutting a sliver of rosehip off, alternatively either the knife bounces off completely or the hip pings away from the knife and to the otherside of the kitchen. If you leave the hip to defrost then ease of cutting is sacrificed to loosing some of the rosehip pulp whilst extracting the seeds. Whichever method you choose, removing the seeds is a very sticky experience and you end up with itchy seeds everywhere. Best result was obtained from freshly picked rosehips, prepared as soon as you get them home.

Before I was halfway through I’d had enough. You are talking some 40-50 hips total, it gets quite tedious all that scooping. So I simply smashed the rosehips (well it works for Hugh Fearlesslyeatsitall !) and left them to soak in the pan. If you opt for this method then you need to put your cooked pulp through a jelly bag, otherwise you end up with teeny tiny bits of seed hair in your jam…something I didn’t find out until much much later.

The smell in the pan however almost makes up for the hassle, it has a lovely general fruity smell, similar to rhubarb cooked with sugar. The resulting jam is very very sweet and as yet I haven’t been able to persuade anyone else to try it. Toddler is suspicious of things that don’t come from the supermarket and admittedly he does have reason to be suspicious as Mummy has form for weird combinations aka the minty cream cheese pea pop…(from The Toddler Cafe).

RECIPE: Rosehip Jam (Tessa Kiros)

200g Rosehips

300g Sugar

Juice of 1/2 Lemon

Water

*TK suggests that if after picking the rosehips you don’t intend to use them immediately then put them in the freezer until you are ready to use them (in respect of that see my previous post !)

1. Cut the black tips off the rosehips. Cut rosehips in half and scoop out all the hairy seeds (throw these away). Put rosehips in a saucepan and soak overnight in 375ml of warm water.

2 Just before you make the jam, sterilize your jars by washing in very hot soapy water and then putting on a baking sheet in an oven which is then turned up to 120 deg c for at least 20 minutes

3. Put the pan of rosehips on the hob and cook until it reaches the boil. Put the lid on and simmer for 30 mins. Add another 125ml of hot water and puree thoroughly. Return to the cleaned pan. Add the sugar and lemon juice and bring to the boil again to melt the sugar.

4 Remove from the heat and pour through a sieve to collect any seeds. (note suggest using a metal seive)

5 Put the jam back in the pan and bring it back to the boil. Lower the heat and cook uncovered for about 8 minutes, stirring constantly so that it doesn’t stick. Test whether the jam is ready by dropping a teaspoonful onto a plate. It is ready when it doesn’t run off the plate when tilted but clings to the plate and slides slowly down.

6 Pour into the prepared jars. Close the lids tightly then turn the jars upside down, leave in this position until the jars are cool. This should create a vacuum which will help the jam keep. Store in a cool dark place. Consume within 6 weeks. Makes about 435ml.

An orange coloured day…eventually

Despite my comments earlier in the week about how much I love the Autumn, I must confess to being a little down, or rather a lot down, it was an indigo day in fact. I am suffering from a lot of stress and tension related to our financial situation. Because, although having returned to full time employment as of the 1^st October our human resources department still has not completed the paperwork. Furthermore unless they do it by the beginning of November then the chances are that I’m not going to feel the benefit of the extra days pay until the middle of December.

In order to meet bills we are having to watch our finances very carefully. I am running out of places I can save money, other than food that is and we’ve never really wasted that. Anyway, today I feel the hole we are in, I feel it in my whole body. I feel blocked, I feel constrained and I feel it in my gut, in my belly, in my intestines and my bowels. It is a taut string running from the top to the bottom and it cripples me, I can’t think and therefore I can’t work.

Food in the house the last few weeks has been very much comfort food. Husband has been serving up big bowls of pasta, tomatoes and cheese or sausage and mash. A bag of pudding rice has appeared. The Atkins diet has no place in this household, its carbohydrates all the way.

Tonight I need something simpler though, something my gut can deal with, that will cheer me up and comfort at the same time, something that looks happy in the bowl. Coincidently my kitchen has been dominated by the presence of a very large pumpkin, hoping to end its days as something more than a lantern on the 31st… I also have some cream that needs using, as do most of my spices which spent 6 months in storage during the house works.

I follow vaguely a Nigel Slater recipe for pumpkin soup, which can be found here but is also in Real Good Food which is a book compiled from early articles from Nigel’s Observer columns. This incidently is one of my earliest cookbooks. The soup recipe was possibly one of the reasons I bought the book (that and his description of BBQing sweetcorn). Hopefully, the remains of it will do for lunch for what’s left of this week…when my mind needs soothing I cook cake, when its my body that is in crisis I need more than sugars.

postscript The lovely Mrs Zee with whom I work has found a human in the cyber department our human resources has become and has persuaded them to press the right buttons on the computer so that I get paid the right amounts in November, even if the paperwork follows later.

My crimes against cooking: Allegations of Bad taste

Woke up in a bit of a grump this morning. The Toddler came into our room at an early hour demanding company and then started accusing me of waking him up ! So to cheer myself up on the journey into work I started remembering past times in the kitchen – but got distracted by memories of culinary experiments, some of which were quite funny, which at least made me giggle and got me into a better mood.

As mentioned I do have Form for slightly eccentric cooking. Show me a recipe with unusual ingredients and I find it hard to resist the temptation to try it.

The charge sheet

Minty Pea Pops (from The Toddler Cafe) – these are meant to be ice lollies made of cream cheese, chocolate drops, pureed peas and peppermint essence. These were not a success, the Teenager now, after having experienced these, asks me everytime I offer him cake or something he hasn’t tried before asks “It hasn’t got peas in it has it ?”. Toddler was not impressed either, and he loves peas. I tell myself that his rejection was based on his dislike of mint (insists on strawberry or banana toothpaste, boy will he have problems cleaning his teeth when he’s older)

Sweet Potato and Marshmallow from Feast (Nigella Lawson) This is just cooked sweet potato, with some lime juice baked with a layer of mini marshmallow across the top which gets kinda baked and caramalised and slightly toasted. Having thought that this was the sort of thing that both Toddlers and Teenagers couldn’t get enough of it turned out that neither of them would touch it.

Creamy Carrots –(Apples for Jam – Tessa Kiros) sounds innocent enough but it was not appreciated in this house. My fault, I didn’t have any parsley so I used tarragon. But to be quite honest I think carrots are nice enough without adding cream, you just need butter and black pepper.

Beetroot Cake This one worked, as long as I didn’t tell anyone what was it it before they tried it. I guess it’s the same principle as carrot cake, but because in the UK beetroot is usually eaten soaked in vinegar, its difficult to overcome people’s fears and get them to try it. It came from Nigel Slater’s Observer column and I carried the newscutting around for several months before I did it, fresh beetroot is not something it is easy to find in the shops out of season (because there’s no demand for it), so I guess this cake wins on the food miles stakes too. It was too tempting to resist as it also had orange blossom essence in it, so how could I not make it ? The thing that I don’t like about it is the linseeds, but that’s just me. I don’t like the sensation of small hard seeds in my teeth so no dried figs in my christmas pud ! If I did it again I’d just up the amount of sunflower and pumpkin and leave out the linseed.

There are no doubt many many more crimes and I’m sure that if the Toddler could read, or I pointed the Teenager at this site they would remind me of many more eccentric mixtures I’ve tried out on them. But these are the ones that I can remember over the past 2 years, and besides sometimes the journey to work is only 15 minutes long.

Birthday Party: Small numbers are best…

I have had a lovely day (saturday). I was invited to a birthday party by a young man… OK Toddler was and I was just the chauffeur. But I made a new friend and Toddler had fun.

I have also agreed to help with a Halloween party which is no big hardship as I love Halloween, especially as I bagsied the helping with the food… anyway, in expectation of a cake overload at the end of the week I give you, meatballs ! The other week a friend came for dinner, and despite serving her the apple cake mentioned below, which has had the most hits so far on this site, our friend would like the meatballs recipe…

These meatballs are from the Ottolenghi cookbook. Below is the recipe as stated in the cookbook. However, the variation today used coriander instead of parsley as that is still alive in the herb bed. Turkey mince was replaced by chicken breasts as they were left over from yesterdays stir fry (had to add an extra slice of bread as the mix was too runny due to blitzing the chicken breasts in the food processor).

Other changes are that I didn’t do the red pepper sauce as the family won’t eat chili. I didn’t oven cook the meatballs either as I dropped them in a home made tomato sauce that I made, to cook until ready (onions, passata and a spoonful of Rals el hamout or whatever its called)…oh and we served it over rice. I made 2 thirds recipe as there were only 2.5 of us for tea and only 300g of chicken leftover from yesterday.

Ingredients

100g sweetcorn kernels (fresh, frozen or tinned)

3 slices stale white bread (crusts removed)

500g turkey mince

1 egg

4 spring onions

2 tbsp finely chopped parsley

2.5 tsp ground cumin

1.5 tsp salt

1/5 tsp black pepper

1 garlic clove, crushed

sunflower oil

If you want the sauce also

4 red peppers

3 tbs olive oil

1tsp salt

25g coriander leaves and stalks

1 garlic clove peeled

1 small mild chili, deseeded

2tbs sweet chili sauce

2tbsp cider or white wine vinegar

1. Preheat oven to 200 deg c. Quarter peppers with a knife, shave off white parts and seeds. Put in roasting tin. Toss with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and .5 teaspoon salt. Roast in oven for 35 minutes or until soft. Transfer peppers to bowl. cover with clingfilm. Once cooled. Peel peppers. Place in blender with roasting juices and remains of sauce ingredients. Process. Add more salt if necessary. set aside.

2. Place corn kernels in non stick frying pan. Toss them for 2-3 minutes until blackened. Remove and leave to cool.

3. Soak bread in cold water for a minute then squeeze well and crumble into a large bowl. Add the rest of the meatball ingredients except the sunflower oil. Mix well

4 Roll mince into small teaspoon size meatballs. Fry 5mm of oil in frying pan. Fry the meatballs in small batches. Fry until meatballs are golden brown. Transfer to an oven tray. Place in the oven and cook for about 5 minutes. Serve hot or warm with pepper sauce on the side.

We had this over rice, which I just can’t seem to cook properly at the moment without it going stodgy.

Toddler and I have had another chat about the importance of letting Mummy have at least one lie in per week, especially this sunday morning if no other…

Are pre-school children scarier than being in debt ?

I received a very expensive hug from Toddler this morning. He was overenthusiastic and uncontrolled, his arm hit my eye and PING out went my contact lens to the further reaches of the bedroom. Twenty minutes of searching and nothing, left Husband carrying out a fingertip search of the bedroom, and I was late for work.

 

That horrid constricted feeling is back in my gut. It’s not the money though. Yes getting the car fixed did cost more than initially anticipated, (much much more L). But I had this feeling on Sunday night and didn’t know about the car until Monday morning.  So either I am allergic to beer (unlikely, as I split a bottle of Bombadier with Husband Sunday night), or…the thought of having a Halloween party for small children is haunting me !

 

My nice neighbour, the Flapjack Queen reassures me that its going to be a small affair.  Food does not need to be elaborate as after all 3 year olds are not as harsh critics as 4 year olds. So the menu is biscuits cut in Halloween designs, orange jelly pumpkins, sandwitches, crisps, melon monster eyeballs, possibly pizza and the monster cake, by special request from Toddler who remembers it from last year… may need to be a bit creative as can’t find the lollipops. M&S only have chocolate lollipops, John Lewis has some great characters on top of rice crispy clusters but at £1.50 a pop, so that’s not an option.

 

Still have that tense feeling…I think its fear of letting the Toddler down…his Mummy is making a cake for his friends…can I measure up to his requirements ?

Nigella and I: A tale of love, loss and Morning Glory muffins

When I was much younger and had a lot more money but presumably less of a life, I decided to cook my way through “How to be a Domestic Goddess”Nigella Lawson’s ode to baking. Now, admittedly this isn’t quite in the same league as Julie/Julia and my reason for doing so was a lot less admirable than Julie’s mission to tackle French cooking, and it was certainly a betrayal of any feminist principles I had acquired by that stage.

 

It was simply that I was trying to keep hold of my man, something I have only realised with hindsight. I had recently moved in with someone who loved cakes, and since I loved baking it was almost a perfect match. He worked in the city. He worked long hours. We had a deal. I would make sure he didn’t have to worry about anything domestic (food, cleaning, ironing shirts…) and he would make it his mission to come home at a reasonable time. I was just trying to make sure that there was cake, so that he would come home and eat it!

 

A colleague of his and I, had become friends. She, I found out was feeling down in the dumps and a little blue. To cheer her up I made some muffins, probably the best muffins ever invented, they have everything in them but Morning Glory (probably a good thing too since Ipomoea have toxic side effects). I made these little buns of happiness. I bought a posh box, some tissue paper and a ribbon. I sent the boyfriend off to work one day with 12 little baked best wishes wrapped up with ribbon.

 

I believe she enjoyed them. She probably said thank you. But to be honest I can’t really remember because very shortly after I’d made them my whole “gingerbread cottage’d goddess in the kitchen” ideal came crumbling down around me. As you can probably guess, (because the theory of narrative dictates it should happen that way, or do I mean the law of irony), over the course of the 4 months we lived together his appearance at the door got later and later…because as I later found out he was meeting his colleague for drinks and the reason she was depressed was because he was living with me and not her !

 

I gave up baking. I put my cake tins into storage. I learnt Spanish. I took up world travel and learnt to scuba dive. I took up rock climbing. In short I rediscovered who I was and reclaimed my life.

 

Morning Glory Muffins are however, pretty damn good…I do regret all that ironing tho’ !

RECIPE: Morning Glory Muffins

Apparently these muffins were first created by a Pam McKinstry in 1978 for her restaurant on Nantucket Island. They are unusual for muffins as they actually taste best the day after baking, whereas most muffins require immediate consumption or freezing.

I found them in a small book of muffins called “Perfectly Simple:Muffins” by Steven Stellingwerf – wherever they came from they are possibly the nicest muffin I have ever tasted.

Ingredients

225g plain flour

300g white sugar

2 tsp baking soda

2 tsp cinnamon

0.5 tsp salt

2 large carrots grated

100g raisins

100g walnuts

100g dessicated coconut

1/2 large apple, grated

3 eggs

250ml vegetable oil

3 tsp vanilla essence

1. Preheat oven to 180 deg Celsius.

2. In a very large bowl combine flour, sugar, soda, cinnamon and salt

3. Stir in carrots, raisins, nuts, coconut and apple

4. In a separate bowl beat eggs, oil and vanilla essence until well blended

5. Stir wet mixture into flour mixture until batter is slightly combined

6. Put combined batter into muffin cases, placed in 2 x 12 hole muffin tin

Recipe is meant to make about 24 muffins – I think mine made 18.

Share with someone who is worth it…

Leftover Chocolate Cake

“Appetite for Cake” is a title borrowed from a chapter in Appetite by Nigel Slater, a book championing escaping from the tyranny of recipe following. The chocolate and hazelnut cake mentioned there is the perfect cake for baking away the blues.

Because I can’t predict in advance when I’m going to feel down and because there is not a lot else I can save money on in my life at the moment, when I bake a cake it often has to be “pot luck” using up whatever is in the cupboard. Nigel’s cake is known in our house as “Leftover Chocolate Cake” because I make it with whatever chocolate I have to hand, including from time to time cadbury’s chocolate buttons!

I have made it at least twice to cheer myself up. The first time was in July. Can’t remember why, but I needed to bake and I needed to taste just one slightly warm slice of Nuttychocolate comfort…if it hadn’t been for the need to bake I’d probably have settled for Nuttella on toast…I left the rest of the cake on the Flapjack Queen’s doorstep, which very briefly made her the envy of friends as they all wished they had a cake fairy.This version had a mix of hazelnuts and almonds chopped roughly and a measure of rye flour as I didn’t have sufficient plain flour.

Second time I made it, the Teenager was staying over. He liked it so much that he asked for the recipe as it reminded him of a snickers bar. This variation was with milk and dark chocolate, white chocolate and some chocolate gingers that have been in the fridge since Christmas plus fair trade mixed nuts donated by the Flapjack Queen who had spotted the blues descending on me. A variation on the recipe is here . According to Appetite it started life as a wholewheat nut and chocolate cake from a recipe by Tamsin Day-Lewis.

It is a rich comforting hug of a cake, especially nice warm and can be varied endlessly depending on the contents of the cupboard, your mood or the nature of the blues. It is a wonderfully forgiving cake too, it doesn’t matter if your ingredient’s are not the freshest (my Rye flour has a 2006 date on the bottom) but nuts must not be rancid, as it’s not that forgiving a cake!

In honour of this cake I almost called these pages “Definitely contains nuts…”

Leon

I came home the other night to discover that the book fairies had been and left a parcel under the wheelbarrow. I had been muttering about buying the Toddler the collection of “Harry and his Bucket full of Dinosaurs” books from the Book People and had been persuaded by my Mum to order them direct as she wanted to get my nephew the same books and “oh, I saw a cookbook there I thought you might like, could you get that too”.

I had spotted that the Leon cookbook is being sold at a discount by the Book People and I had been planning on getting it and reading it on the quiet. You see I am not supposed to be buying anymore cook books until we are solvent again (which is why I keep having to renew the Ottolenghi book I have on loan from the library).

Anyway, it has arrived. I have handed it over to Mum and now have to wait until Christmas before I can peruse it. I did sneak a peak though and it looks fantastic. The book is divided up into 2 halves. The first half is a sort of introduction or guidance to ingredients, when they are in season, varieties, cuts of meat written in an informative but chatty style. The second half is recipes, primarily for food served in the restaurant but with additions from members of staff who were asked to contribute recipes which had meaning for them.

The book itself is beautifully designed and I’m not sure I would actually want to cook from it in the kitchen and risk it getting into the usual splattered state of all my other well used volumes. The only complaint I do have is just a general one about Allegra Mcevedy’s recipes which do tend to have a long list of ingredients

Anyway only another 57 days until Christmas. In the meantime if I need a dose of Allegra there is always the Guardian’s website once a week. The library unfortunately only has The Good Cook

Only good girls go to parties…

…and ones who have not spent the best part of the day either in bed or with their head over the toilet bowl !

Yes it would appear that earlier in the week I wasn’t suffering from “performance anxiety” but was about to come down with some sort of stomach bug. Fortunately Husband was enjoying his last week day of freedom so was able to take care of Toddler and take him and Teenager, plus the food to the party…Husband also spent 2 hours in the morning sourcing lollipops to finish off the cake. So a big thank you to him.

Flapjack Queen happens to be the high priestess of make and do, so their house (which I saw this afternoon) really set the mood – honest what she can’t do with some paint and double sided sticky tape really isn’t worth doing.

Husband took round what food I had managed to do before being incapacitated.

• Ghoul graveyard cake (recipe linked previously see earlier post)

• jelly pumpkins

• spider cakes
• halloween shapes biscuits

The spider cakes were made by Mum with the Toddler from a recipe and design from the Good Food magazine. The jelly pumpkins were made from orange jelly in a circular pumpkin mould that Tesco’s sold a few years ago.

this years version

Jelly The simplest way to make jelly is to use commercial jelly (chivers, rowntrees whatever). ..that had been the plan as I wasn’t sure whether my homemade jelly would set sufficiently hard to make the pumpkins keep their shape… I once sent Toddler off to lunch club with a small box of home made jelly which had the Pre-school asking what it was, as by the time it came to lunch time the jelly had liquified again.

Anyway, I forgot to buy jelly cubes so I had to fall back on my usual method. I married a man who, when I met him had 3 packets of gelatine in his kitchen cupboards, and 2 children – so I discovered early on that its very easy to make jelly using fruit juice, and a packet of gelatine.

Biscuits – I don’t like the recipe for cut out biscuits in most of Nigella’s book which a lot of people seem to be wedded to, they need the icing that the biscuits are decorated in and sometimes I prefer the biscuits to remain plain – partly because Toddler hates cleaning his teeth, and partly because I am useless at decorating. So I tend to use a recipe from Frost Bite by Susan Austin. The only real difference between this recipe and Nigella’s is a spoonful of custard powder. They also freeze very well uncooked, which means if I need to I can pretty much do an instant party out of the freezer.

Cheesy feet biscuits – from Nigella Lawson’s Feast. These didn’t go to the party. They went straight in the bin as I was afraid they might spread the bug, as I’d made them 12 hours before I was sick.

Anyway, I am now, after 48 hours without food feeling much slimmer, so am sat here with a glass of wine and a slice of ghoul graveyard cake…Husband, Toddler and Teenager are off watching racing cars and fireworks. I have a clean house and a sparkling clean kitchen and bathroom with every surface bleached… I then spent the day making birthday cakes, hence bleaching all surfaces, I didn’t fancy being the cause of my entire family coming down with food poisoning.

RECIPE: Cut out Cookies (susan austin)

The recipe is almost the same as the pervasive Nigella Lawson version, but I prefer these because they are ok without the icing…and they freeze well which as a (now) full time employee and Mummy is essential for me. The recipe in the book Frost Bite gives a recipe for icing as the intention is that these should be iced, but I don’t always want to be that nice a Mummy !

Ingredients

100g butter (softened)

100g caster sugar

1 egg

0.5tsp vanilla extract

200g plain flour

40g custard powder

0.5tsp baking powder

Preheat oven to 180 deg. Line 2 trays with baking paper

1. Cream butter and sugar until light and creamy. Add vanilla and egg. Beat again

2. Sift together flour, baking powder and custard powder. Add to butter mixture. Gently stir until combined. Add more flour if mixture feels too sticky.

3. You can freeze the dough at this point and take out later to defrost and cook when you are ready. Alternatively you can roll out the dough to 2-3mm thick and cut out with cookie cutters to required shape. (You can freeze when cut out by placing trays in the freezer and putting frozen shapes in boxes)

4. Bake in a preheated oven for 15 minutes or so, until lightly browned in at the edges. Leave to cool and ice as required.

Hallalujah…The forth, the fifth, the minor fall

My husband texted me last night to say “tape Radio 2 – now !”. It seems that Radio 2 devoted a whole hour to various versions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallalujah… unfortunately his text didn’t arrive until he himself got home at 8.05.

Anyway, if anyone out there was listening to “Elbow’s Guy Garvey examines the Leonard Cohen classic Hallelujah by talking to the artists who have covered it” on Radio 2 at 7pm last night and managed to record it then we would love a copy…unfortunately this one doesn’t appear to be on listen again

The best version, after intensive testing, admittedly fuelled by alcohol, appears to be the one by KD Lang which can be found on her Hymns of the 49th parallel

Zombies Awake

On Sunday morning we were woken by the gentle garlic infused breath of Toddler (Husband had taken Toddler and Teenager to Pizza Hut the night before on the way back from a bonfire display).

We had not had a good night having been kept awake firstly by the wind that had been blowing a Hooley around the house all night and secondly by the sound of Teenager, who’d had an even worse night, having been sick about 4 times. Definitely not a good start to what was meant to be a day of celebration at my parents for my Dad’s 70^th birthday.

Things went downhill rapidly as the birthday cake I made for my Dad was not looking too good, the icing had gone wrong. As I’ve mentioned before my Dad does not like butter cream so I’d used a mascarpone based icing. I’d left the cake out overnight, as sponge goes hard in the fridge and would have ruined the cakes texture. As a result the mascarpone had set hard in places and gone almost translucent in others. Fortunately I had a spare tub of mascarpone and some double cream so I was able cobble together a second icing to cover the imperfections of the first and then covered the lot with a later of black sprinkles and jammed a “7” and a “0” candle in the top.

The birthday cake was a simple lemon sponge with a lemon curd, mascarpone and cream filling (idea nicked from Nigella Lawson book)

Toddler and I went off to the party where we had a lovely time with the rest of the family. Husband and Teenager stayed behind gently moaning and dozing on the sofas. I of course was suitably sympathetic, but perhaps I should have kept quite. My comeuppance was that my tummy hadn’t been ready for rich food as a result I’ve been surviving on apples and oxo most of the week waiting for things to return to normal.

I was just about to post this when I realised that my head has been so full of work related things that I’d almost forgotten the reason for this post in the first place – rice pudding. A side effect of this tummy bug is that I am having problems digesting milk and I’ve been searching the cupboards to find things that are gentle on the stomach other than beef oxo.

The result is 2 rice puddings made with non-dairy milk replacements which in my case is coconut milk as I usually have some in for making Thai style curries. The first is a cinnamon rice pudding (sainsbury magazine circa 1998) and the second is Ubud black rice pudding (with banana) from Cook at Home with Peter Gordon – a similar recipe can be found here …I have a packet of black rice lurking at the back along with the semolina and other things no one will eat…

The Boy who grew up out of custard

In Eating for England Nigel Slater said “I am probably the only person in England to regularly buy a couple of custards from Marks who is still in possession of his own teeth”

When I read that I wanted to email Nigel and tell him that he was so wrong, and that not only could I name at least 10 people under 50 (without even stopping to think), who adored baked custards but that one of these was not even 3 yet.

Toddler has been addicted to custards since shortly after going on to solids. He refused sandwiches, but seemed to like pastry, so I’d tried him on quiches and then moved on to custard (after all, milk and eggs are good for you even if there is a healthy dose of sugar involved) as this seemed a sensible alternative than letting him go hungry on the (frequent – as I am less than the perfect mummy) days when I had forgotten to bring Toddler type food with me.

Custard tarts had become so much part of Toddlers routine that we had set his pocket money according to the “custard standard” as they retailed for 52p in the local post office. Long before they knew me in there they were able to greet my boy as he came through the door with his grandma. “Hello Toddler, come for your custard then”

So it came as something as a shock to be informed by a very solemn looking boy holding a new car that “Mummy, I don’t want custards anymore. I have grown up out of them. I have moved on” (yes he genuinely told me he’d moved on).

It would seem that either Grandma or Husband had decided  (rightly) it was about time Toddler learned about finance. He’d asked for a small car in the post office and been informed that it would cost him 2 weeks pocket money. So he had been forced to make a choice, and without complaining about not being allowed both, had opted for the car over the custard.
Now I think that this is a case of Toddler learning to priorities his interests so to test it I am going to try making a baked custard, something I haven’t done before, which in view of the fact that both Husband and I adore them, is rather surprising. But I did make a Tarte au Citron Verte (Lime Tart) at the weekend for Dad’s birthday and I guess the principles are the same…but that was not cheap cooking, using as it did 6 eggs (plus 2 yolks) and almost 7 limes and whereas I can justify some extravagance for a birthday meal, I’m not sure no matter how you spin it that using 6 eggs in one dish is “thrifty” cooking ! The recipe for that is here.

Baking a custard will have to wait as its been a very busy week. Nottingham yesterday for a wedding. Cardiff tomorrow, because I like Cardiff, oh and we may also get to visit the Student (Teenagers older brother).

RECIPE: Sweet Cinnamon-coconut Rice

This is from the Sainsbury’s Magazine (June 1999) and makes a great breakfast, correction, makes a great dairy free breakfast. I wouldn’t say that it otherwise would count as a healthy breakfast option as the pudding rice is white, not brown, coconut milk has a high fat content and it has 110g sugar in it.

If you were looking for a healthy option than have a smaller helping and serve with fruit. It is best served cold but I guess you could eat it warm. For me this does actually count as store cupboard cookery.

Ingredients

2 cinnamon sticks

1 x 400ml tin coconut milk

110g short grain (pudding rice)

110g golden caster sugar

2 teaspoons rosewater

seeds 6 cardamon pods, ground

1. Rinse the rice in a sieve under running water. Place in a saucepan with 450ml water. Bring to the boil. Turn the heat down and leave to simmer until water has almost evaporated.

2. Pour in the coconut milk. Add the cinnamon sticks. Stir gently and bring back to the boil. Turn heat down and let the mixture cook over a low heat, stirring regularly so that it does not catch on the bottom of the pan. Approx 10 minutes. (should thicken slightly)

3. Stir in sugar. Continue cooking and stirring for a few minutes until sugar has dissolved. Add the rosewater and ground cardamom.

4. Transfer rice to a glass dish, leave to cool and then refrigerate. Rice is best if really cold before serving

Serves about 4 people

RECIPE: The Baseline Brownie

I hadn’t intended to start with this recipe. In fact I hadn’t intended to put a recipe up about brownies without explaining why. But unfortunately the post I drafted on this subject is on a PC which is 67 miles away from me at the moment (I emailed it home to myself but for some reason the email didn’t arrive).

This is not the recipe I reach for when I need a brownie but seems to be one that I could do without shopping as it uses cocoa powder and margarine. It comes from The Usbourne Beginners Cookbook which Husband has just bought for Student and this batch will go in the post to him (although this will ruin my evil stepmother reputation).

Ingredients

175g margarine

350g caster sugar

Vanilla essence

3 eggs

100g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

175g nuts (walnuts, pecans, whatever)

2 tablespoons cocoa powder (more if it does taste chocolatey enough)

1. Grease and line a 22cm x30cmx2.5cm tin. Preheat oven to 180 deg c (350F or Gas mark 4)

2. Melt margarine over a low flame on the hob.

3. Beat eggs in a small bowl then add to the melted margarine a little at a time.

4 Sift flour into the bowl. Add baking powder sugar and cocoa. Stir everything together until mixed well

5. Chop nuts into small bite sized pieces. Add to mixture. Stir well

6 Pour into lined tin. Smooth the top. Bake for 50 minutes

7 Brownies are ready when they have risen slightly and a crust has formed on top. Remove from oven. Leave in tin for 5 minutes. Cut into 15 slices. Remove from tin and leave to cool on a rack.

Verdict: Changed my mind about posting these to Cardiff, they are really not very nice at all. Too much like a cake and not enough of the squidgystickysoft fudgelike texture that is essential for a good Brownie

The cupboard is bare

Actually that’s not quite true. I know this because I did a stock take the other night to establish what we have/have not as all our various resources are low.  I used up the last of the plain flour on Tuesday night making the Baseline Brownies and can’t justify buying any more until next Thursday as all the bank accounts, those that are not already drastically overdrawn, are dangerously low.

The more serious problem is that I can’t afford to put fuel in the car in order to go to work. My home work journey is 134 mile round trip. I used to do this journey by train but it is 50% cheaper by car. I have negotiated with work that I will occasionally work out of a local office nearer home but somehow I think they would object if I spend all next week in a different office.

We have been surviving this week by creative cooking and lucky bargains from the local co-op.

Monday – end of date sausages and mini baked potatoes. I made more pumpkin soup for my lunches out of the pumpkin my Dad grew.

Tuesday- “hope” omelette, as in “I hope this tastes OK”, primarily leftover potatoes and roast lamb bound together with egg. Husband had the leftover sausages from Monday as his lunch.

Wednesday – Toad in the hole with more reduced sausages and mini bakers.

Tonight I intend to use the leftover potato from yesterday with the remains of the pumpkin to make gnocchi. Using rye flour instead of plain and making a sauce from onions (the only veg left in the fridge), passata (soooo cheap from Aldi) and the meat from the remaining 2 uncooked sausages.

Can still make Toddler some muffins though as I still have SR Flour (along with several other more exotic types of flour) and a big bag of prunes which he won’t touch (doesn’t like the colour) unless I cunningly disguise it as something tasty. I may have to try my hand at bread dough as it is a truth universally acknowledged that children will eat almost anything if it comes in the form of pizza. Suspect that might not include lentils though…

Bread Therapy

Sometimes I like to make bread by hand, its not something I do often as I rarely have the time during the week, not unless I stay up til gone midnight to take the loaf out of the oven. Not a glorious prospect for someone whose wake up call is 6.30am

To which most people (well bread machine evangelists at any rate) say “what you need is a bread machine, it makes life sooooooo much easier !”. Now I would never under any circumstance knock the joy of a freshly made loaf from a bread machine – in fact I melt into the floor with delight every time Flapjack Queen sends her husband round with a plate of freshly made bread slathered in lemon curd – and yes, a homemade loaf, even in a bread machine, beats the hell out a chorleywood process plastic loaf but I want more than just the bread.

Bread is therapy. Making it can be calming – I love the sensuous feel of the dough beneath my fingers, to gently knead and fold – or it can be anger management, many cook books cite the joy of working out your frustrations on the dough with intense kneading, stretching, slamming the dough back down on the surface.

I even enjoy watching people making bread – there is a fantastic scene in channel 4’s Real Food series where Nigel Slater makes bread with Emily Green – he has a wonderful, infectious excitement over the feel of the dough, and a childish glee when finally consuming it as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich !

Earlier this year I decided as part of the economy drive to start making bread and bought in a new tin of dried yeast, white and brown strong bread flour. Since then I’ve made bread exactly twice…its because we haven’t bought a full price loaf of bread since march – honest ! OK so its honest we haven’t bought a full price of bread, but not “honest that’s the reason I haven’t made bread”. Basically I haven’t yet mastered the art of the loaf, I keep making mistakes…oh, and as mentioned I lack time in the evenings. [The secret to low price bread is that Husband has been buying end of date bread and filling the freezer with it,we take it out slice by slice as and when needed].

The loaves I have made have been fun though. The first was based on the idea of the Milk Roll which I remember from the ’70’s, roughly following the recipe in Apples for Jam: Tessa Kiros…it made me feel like a proper Mummy (the sort that is not at work from 7-7). Came out a bit yeasty, but slightly sweet. Toddler loved it (which is all that mattered really).

Second one was following recipe from Appetite: Nigel Slater for basic white loaf but following the instructions from Emily Green from the Real Food programme (see above) which involved rolling and folding to keep the air in the bread rather than slamming it periodically on the table and wow what a revelation ! This loaf really really rose. It was a very tall loaf, and sort of resembled a brain in shape. Lovely fresh taste, fantastic texture. No yeasty taste this time, but slightly doughy as I took it out of the oven to early – too desperate to taste it I guess.

Bread, no prescription necessary

Postscript: Found the time to make the first two recipes from The Bread & Bread Machine CookBook: Ingram & Shapter, one white, one brown, both were a little on the sweet side (too much honey or sugar ?) and the white still had too much of a yeasty taste.

The Brown loaf worked quite well except for the fact I got the tin measurements wrong and it ended up in too shallow a tin…very surprised it worked in view of the fact it required less than 1/3 of the usual kneading time.

Can you say “no” to a brownie ?

Almost everyone seems to like brownies, and almost everyone seems to have a recipe for them…from children’s cookbooks to real “cheffy type” writers, they all at some point seem to give a recipe for these soft squishy little chocolate cakes.

 

I’ve been longing to do a taste comparison, or rather a quest for the best, and an evaluation of the rest!  But since brownies are not exactly diet food, unless perhaps you are in training to be a sumo wrestle, it’s hard to justify having more than one batch at a time in the house. I can’t justify it on cheering myself up grounds either, as I’m never going to have that much chocolate in the house in one go, and baking away the blues never entails (for me) making more than one cake or batch of cakes. Finally it doesn’t fall into the category of “budget” cookery. Chocolate is a luxury ingredient except when you are using up odds and ends of bars, or you are using coco powder.

 

Fortunately we are coming up to Christmas and I have quite a few “thank yous” to make to people who have made the last few months bearable. Chief amongst these being the lovely Mrs Zee who has battled with HR to make sure I get paid correctly.

 

So between now and the 25^th December I aim to make at least 10 batches of brownies for sharing with friends, family and at times complete strangers.

The first batch despite my concerns has seen to go down quite well with my work colleagues. They agreed that they were different to brownies made with chocolate, but were nice all the same !

 

 

Indigo Days

Feeling down. Too blue today to want to talk, to communicate. Can’t get passed the grey skies this morning.

Evening: I know its silly to feel like this, by the end of the week we will be on the upward path again whereas some other people are only just discovering how painful it can be trying to survive on one income. We have managed it. We have survived on one salary for close on 15 months and it has been really difficult but we stayed afloat for most of it, and then just as we were starting to spiral down we got a lifeline of more hours for me and a new job for Husband.

But its been a long slog and I’m tired. I’m tired of watching the pennies and relying on selling books (mainly cookbooks) and other secondhand stuff for treats. I’m tired of the creative cookery (the tomato sauce worked, but the gnocchi didn’t as I forgot to drain the pumpkin enough). oh yes I can feel morally virtuous that we haven’t wasted any food since February but I would kill for a just cooked steak, peas, carrots, sauteed onions and chips with a glass of good red – no more Co-op claret…I want to splurge…well just a bit…but what I really want to do is spoil Toddler for Christmas without feeling guilty, but I can’t because mentally my head cannot cope with the idea of being in debt I am tired and I need a holiday. I am tired of being sensible and responsible and adult and so so reasonable…and yes the road ahead is the road to freedom but it is still going to be another long slog to clear the debts that have built up

So please excuse this little outburst. Tomorrow I will be sensible and reasonable again and start out on that long long road to solvency…but tonight I shall give in to my inner toddler, I shall cry, I shall suck my thumb and I shall hide under my bed with my teddybear.

Thank you for your custom and support…

 

Just outside of Henley, on the road to Reading there is a small farm shop/nursery type place. Outside the gates there are a set of boards where they used to advertise what was currently in season or what their special offers are. I often used to think as I passed that I must stop and see what was on offer – I remember one October, back when I fancied myself as a photographer, they had a lovely display of pumpkins right out front…

 

I never did stop, as I was usually in a hurry either to or from work, and not living in the area there was never the opportunity to visit at other times. And now I can’t as they seem to have closed down.  The yard stands empty the boards are blank and the whole site has an air of disuse and abandonment.  No doubt if I stopped and checked there would be a sign on the gate saying “We would like to thank our customers for their support over the years. We regret that we have ceased trading”… should have guessed there were problems when they started offering “free meat cuts” as a way of enticing customers in.

 

This sign is becoming more and more common, especially in niche shops. It started when fuel went up; people stopped spending on the treats, the olives and fancy cheeses. The town Toddler was born in has lost one of its delicatessens and what arguably was the best butcher in Oxfordshire. He was friendly, always happy to advise on the best way to cook various cuts and sold good quality meat, but at a price. The butcher never stood a chance due to his location. When money became tight the local passing trade probably dried up as it was not an affluent area and his meat although good was not cheap and lack of car parking meant a lack of out of area custom.

 

The village I live in is slowly losing services. The British Legion club closed last year and the pub closed 2 weeks ago. We try and buy some of our groceries from the co-op and there are some items we opt to buy from the post office even though they are cheaper elsewhere (but not without a car journey). Money is tight for us, but life in the village would be so less vibrant, so less communal if we lost our shops and I don’t want to be thanked, with regret, for my custom…

 

So buying less and shopping local, tomorrow I will have some spare change at last and can buy some more four !

What (no) pictures ? What (no) photographs ?

A number of people have commented over the lack of photographs on these pages, commented with some surprise in fact as they know it is rare to find any member of the family, including Toddler, without a camera.

 

There are a number of reasons for this. The first one is technical ineptitude. I am still trying to work out how to save my pics in the right format so that picture quality remains good without the file being unreasonably large. Managed it once so far but forgot how I did it!

 

The other problem is that when I bake it’s usually quite late at night. Although I hate the yellow cast the kitchen lights give the pics, I’m usually too tired to mess around with alternative lighting. Waiting until the next day is no good as by then the cakes, muffins whathaveyou have usually been partially consumed by the gannets I live with.

 

The final reason is that although what I cook usually tastes nice, its not exactly photogenic…I am not very artistic…

 

Anyway I am going to take a few days away from this blog to do a bit of redesigning and editing of the pages…and also to make a start on Project Brownie – having restocked the cupboards in the kitchen…and I guess I really should do something about Christmas as I probably can’t get away with ignoring it for much longer.

How Did We Get Here ?

Bit of a philosophical question for this time in the morning. You will be please to know that I am not about to launch into a discussion of life the universe and everything but instead an explanation as to how two sensible people with a  reasonable income, without profligate spending habits could have let themselves get into such a financial hole…we planned it.

 

Yes our financial situation is a result of planned agreed actions, and one or two unforeseen but predictable events.

 

Two years ago we bought this house, despite the fact it was far too small for 2 households to live in. We put down just over a 10% deposit; obtained a moderate mortgage, well within our incomes, fixed for 5 years. Then 8 months later after more budgeting and planning we moved everything we owned into the garage whilst a very nice man called Chris took the back and front off our house.

 

Our extension was paid for by the money Husband had left over from selling his house, the sale of an endowment policy (which we had been planning to use in 2011 for a family world trip) and 2.5 years of child benefit. About a month into the build Husband accepted a voluntary redundancy offer – seemed sensible to go now rather than to wait until they finally moved the rest of the office to Poland (or Milton Keynes). Husband concentrated on project managing, ensuring we stuck to the budget.

 

It wasn’t that we went over the budget really that caused the problem. We redid our sums and estimated that we could afford a bank loan to deal with most of the cost overruns and tighten our belts a bit. The problem was that just as we finished the build the costs of everything else started going up, specifically diesel which, when you have a daily commute of 134 miles, causes a big hole in your carefully planned budget. Add to that the cost of electricity, gas and food and unexpected problems such as the clutch pedal breaking one day in the middle of the commute and you suddenly find that one salary no longer covers the bills and each month the gap gets wider and wider.

 

We took what action we could. Kept our heads vaguely above water with the occasional sale of a big value item (husband’s motorbike, camera equipment). I periodically sold books through Amazon, switched suppliers, changed insurers, kept an eye on the grocery budget – but we kept sinking.  I arranged with my employers to work 2 days in an office closer to home and asked to go back full time whilst Husband looked for employment. Unfortunately it took 9 months longer than anticipated for Husband to find a new job and it took 3 months for employers to agree to me going back to full time employment.

How Did I Get On?

I decided last week to revamp these pages. Partly because I wanted to widen my brief a little to more than cakes. Partly because the initial posts were “thrown up” just to get me started and I needed to go back, include photographs where I could and correct typographical errors. Partly because I had discovered a blog which I liked, which occasionally covered similar topics, which was using the same “theme” (standard formatting provided by blog sites) and I wanted to avoid any hint of plagiarism.

 

Anyway I started by trying to find an alternative theme but after trying out about 15 other ones I came to the conclusion that I like the layout, so thanks Chris Pearson, I like the Cutline theme. So no change there.

 

Then I sort of lost my way with the revamp and found myself spending the evenings reading the archives at the blog I mentioned [here]…I’m very good at procrastination, I’ve also managed to spend a week not writing Christmas cards.

 

Anyway I have started adding photographs. I have rewritten the “About”. I have edited typographical errors and I have been making it a bit more personal. The most obvious change is to the header picture. I would like to have a more food related header but as I’ve mentioned before I am not in the habit of taking pictures of food. In fact the only thing I have taken pictures of in the last 3-4 years is my boy which is why, for the time being there is a picture of his tongue. It is not I hasten to add a picture of his reaction to the pea ice cream as one of my friends suggested!

 

The other main change is that Toddler is referred to from now on as Spider. I can’t keep calling him Toddler as he’s heading towards 4 at a rapid pace. Spider is his choice incidentally, he insists at the moment that I call him [Name] Bear Baby Spider [Surname] and he calls me Mummy Spider…we are a unique variety according to Spider, having as we do only 2 legs

 

Baking? No, not done any of that despite the fact that we have finally been able to afford to go shopping. Husband seems to have taken over the cooking and Spider keeps bringing back cakes and biscuits he’s made with Grandma – I have been made redundant by the men in my house.

Birmingham’s Fuzzy Navel

Too late now to write anything tonight. We went to Birmingham. We had a good time. We went to Wagamama’s. Will rewrite this tomorrow…oh did some baking on my day off… long day tomorrow, meeting in Surrey then back to Reading before heading home with a detour to Toys R Us…

Edit: The Fuzzy Navel refers to the ice lolly that Spider had after his noodles at Wagamama. Fuzzy Navel is the name of a cocktail from the ’80’s based on orange (Navel) and Peach (Fuzzy) – the original has alcolhol in it, am pretty certain that the ice lolly didn’t – can’t be sure as my boy wasn’t in a sharing mood ! His noodles were just that, have learnt from experience that he doesn’t actually want any of the meat/vegetables or soup, he just likes the noodles…

Birmingham currently has a german market on, set to run until the 23rd I think…we will be back after the next pay day, although that will bring it rather close to christmas and I am not a fan of shopping on the last w/e before christmas

Unidentified Breaded Objects

Circumstances meant I had a day off on Thursday. I tried to make good on a long held promise to Husband for scones, clotted cream and lemon curd (this was a celebration week).

When I was growing up my Mum would make scones at the drop of a hat, she even used scone dough as a pizza base…once, after I’d left home my parents visited me (160 mile round day trip) and I wanted to give them afternoon tea. So I telephoned Mum and got her recipe for scones, rolled the dough out, cut them out, put them in the oven. When my parents arrived however, what they got was not a delicate, light, fresh vehicle for cream and jam but dense hard little biscuits… Mum had assumed I knew that scone dough has to be rolled out quite thickly…

On this occasion I wanted to avoid any chance of the scone resembling a digestive and opted for a guaranteed light and delicate scone so followed the recipe for “Lily’s Scones” (Domestic Goddess: Nigella Lawson) which Nigella describes as “dreamy lightness” . I even got the tape measure out to ensure that the dough was at least 3cm high.

Anyway, should have followed my instinct

Scones ready for lift off

which told me that you don’t need a thick dough when using raising agent… this was the result !

Was more than pleased therefore when Husband announced a change of plan, we were going to Birmingham to indulge the family noodle obsession at Wagamama’s. Have therefore bunged both the scones and clotted cream in the freezer as the start of Christmas preparation.

Tomorrow I start the christmas cards, can’t avoid christmas anymore…the problem with christmas is that I am so used to “not” buying things that I’m not sure I know how to shop anymore !

RECIPE: Ottolenghi Macadamia and White Chocolate Brownies

A more traditional Brownie recipe this time full of melted chocolate (two sorts) and nuts, but the lovely bland but addictive macadamia rather than the more dividing walnuts (like marmite you either like them or you don’t). This recipe is from the wonderful Ottolenghi cook book which I have now had to return to the library (not for long I’ve already got it on reserve again).

It is a lovely rich brownie, chocolately and gooey with a curious melt in your mouth texture to boot. I wouldn’t recommend eating more than 1 of these babies in a sitting. Apart from the 1 (ok 2) I tried as a

Ottolenghi Brownie in all their macadamianutty glory - before the nuts fell off

taster (quality control) the batch was divided between the gorgeous KT Cupcake (who I have known since I was 11), who I owe such a debt of gratitude to as without her I would never have managed to plan, arrange and book my wedding in 6 weeks flat (guess its easier when one of your best friend runs her own craft shop and has a network of friends running hairdressers /florists/beauty therapy businesses), and whom I have hardly seen this year as I have been so wound up in my own misery.

The second batch went to Carthorse provider of free, seasonal, fresh non farmed trout and who, with the lovely Mrs Zee sorted out my employment problems.

If I do this recipe again I would be tempted to chop up the nuts a bit finer and perhaps not sprinkle them on the top as per the recipe, 30 seconds after this photo was taken I turned the tin over to take the brownies out and the nuts ended up all over my kitchen surface and had to be stuck back on with a bit of melted chocolate.

Ingredients

200g macadamia nuts

200g butter

280g plain flour

1/2 tsp salt

300g dark chocolate, broken into bits

2 free range eggs

230g caster sugar

1tsp vanilla essence

2tsp instant coffee

200g white chocolate, broken into pieces

1. Preheat oven to 170 deg C. Brush 22cm sq tin with melted butter. Place nuts on a baking tray and place in oven for about 5 minutes to toast lightly, do not allow them to burn.

2. Put butter and dark choc in a bowl and then place over a saucepan of simmering water. Stir constantly until both have melted. Do not let it get too hot or boil. Leave to cool slightly.

3.In a separate bowl mix eggs, sugar vanilla and coffee. Fold in the melted chocolate mixture and then the salt and flour.

4. Add in half the nuts and all the white chocolate (chopped up into chocolate chip sized bits).

5. Place mixture into tin and smooth over. Place remaining nuts on top

6. Place on centre shelf of the oven. Cook for roughly 25 minutes, Brownies should be crusty looking on top but not quite cooked under the crust.

7. Remove from the oven. Leave to cool in tin. When cool, divide into 15 pieces and remove from tin.

Hugh Fernley Whittingstall

Been meaning to stick something up here about Hugh for several weeks now, along with other “food heroes” and I will…at some point…

Anyway was pleased to hear on the Radio (Friday lunchtime on the way back from surrey) that Hugh has been voted Radio 4’s Food Programme’s Food personality of the year [more here]

Movie Night and the mythical “lie in”

I have hi-lighted in my future diary a particular day in 2018 which will be the day that Spider turns 13. By then hopefully it will be me nagging him to get out of bed rather than the other way round. My commute to work means that I have to get up at 6.30, my aim (some would say obsession) is for a small lie in on Sunday… one strategy has been the introduction of movie night.

On Saturday evenings we have movie night where Spider gets to watch Disney films until late (9pm), I get to watch Spider watching Disney (I love watching the expressions on his face change as he gets caught up in the story) and Teenager gets to enjoy watching the films without having to remember he’s a teenager and therefore Disney isn’t cool…they also get to eat home made popcorn and hot dogs, pizza and other cinema related food.

The ulterior motive of movie night is that a late night for Spider usually means a lie in for me as he tends to sleep for just over 10.5 hours straight… there is the added bonus of course that Husband and I get to watch the films too and spot all the jokes or references that went right over our heads as kids.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Spider is currently down stairs watching cbeebies (having spent an hour in hour bed pretending he was camping) with a stand in snack of grapes and apple and a digestive. I am here drinking a cup of tea and working out which way is up…I know I know “bad Mummy” but in my defence I do have one hell of a sore throat and the beginnings of a cold…when I am slightly more alive I shall go down and make some Banana Pancakes (Feast:Nigella Lawson) as I have a banana that won’t survive to see another day and most of an egg left over from Thursday’s scone experiment – we even have some maple syrup somewhere… so that hopefully will win me some “good Mummy points”, and some green points for using up leftovers.

Anyone got any suggestions with what to do with half a plate of cold chips and a leftover hot dog in bun…?

ps. Having just visited the BBC website to get the link for cbeebies I noticed links on the front page to some upcoming christmas cooking. I knew that Nigella had a new christmas show/book – it would have made my Christmas if Nigel had too, but unfortunately its just his christmas recipes on the bbc food pages.

Can I have that one mummy ?: Rare shot of pancakes, normally they don

‘t last long enough to be photographed…

RECIPE: Gingerbread Pancakes

The pancakes in the picture in the post below are made using the recipe from Feast:Nigella Lawson. I know the recipe is on her website and I was just going to post a link but I couldn’t find her site this morning…so I thought I’d post an alternative version of breakfast pancakes from Frost Bite: Susan Austin which I occasionally make when I haven’t any banana’s… but then I do keep banana’s frozen in my freezer anyway, a tip I got from one of Nigella’s books and from Frost Bite… I also tend to keep frozen pancakes in my freezer (plain, banana, gingerbread, whatever) so that I can be an indulgent mummy even when i don’t get a lie in !

Ingredients

240g SR flour

100g  brown sugar

1.5 tsp ground ginger

1.5 tsp cinnamon

0.5 tsp ground nutmeg

2 eggs

250 ml milk

60g melted butter

1. In a large bowl combine all the dry ingredient. In a jug whisk together the wet ingredients.

2. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and  stir them until they are combined in a smoothish batter – presumably you could also bung them all in a food processor and whizz them together that way.

3. Heat a small amount of oil or butter in a frying pan. Then drop small amounts of batter in the frying pan, should be able to do 3 or 4 in the pan at the same time

4. Cook the pancakes until small bubbles start forming on the surface, then flip the pancakes and cook the otherside for a minute or 2 until golden brown on both sides. Makes about 15

Can be frozen once cool. Defrost in microwave when needed or slowly in fridge if you have the time

Pandoro Birthday Cake

Spider

This is our (Me and Spider) version of Tessa Kiros’ PBC. This is our birthday present to one of our neighbours, I’ve been dying to makes this for the 18 months that I’ve owned this book, but its only at Christmas that I can find Pandoro’s at a reasonable price.

Spider calls this his “volcano” cake as it is vaguely cone shaped and the orange icing does look a bit like lava… Spider doesn’t like following directions which means that if we had actually made and then decorated a cake together we probably wouldn’t be talking to each other as I would be feeling so frazzled by the end of it, this way of doing things means that we remain friends and have fun…whilst we were waiting for the icing to set he entertained me with his virtuoso drumming with wooden spoons on the saucepans – wok lids make great cymbals.

Now that its past bed time I am off to deliver the cake…only I’m sure there more sweets on it earlier today…that may explain why Spider was hyper by bed time.

Dunstable:Citadel of the Elite

Another long commute todayfor a meeting and a day of “hot desking” plus 20 minutes in a traffic jam in central Dunstable. For once being in a traffic jam was actually quite interesting as Dunstable makes an effort to tell passers by about itself, but then A roads tend to be more interesting commutes than motorways.

At the first hold up, glancing to my left there was a blue plaque telling me that Gary Cooper lived in a terrace house on the A5 whilst attending Dunstable Grammar school.  At the next set of traffic lights there was another tablet telling me about the Eleanor Crosses.

I wish all towns made more of an effort to entertain people stuck in traffic jams…

No food related talk today – likely to be home late as have to go back across country, in the dark, in what will probably be by then bad weather and through Milton Keynes which is likely to be packed with Christmas shoppers.

“Citadel of the Elite” – sorry, nothing to do with Dunstable, its just a phrase that someone on the radio uttered as I was leaving Dunstable – it was his discription of the hotels targeted in the Mumbai attacks this weekend…I found it a bit of an odd phrase so it stuck in my head.

How could you forget Thanksgiving ?

Although I use any excuse for a celebration (and some baking) I did not celebrate Thanksgiving, mainly because this year it clashed with a more important (to me anyway) family event (so nice to know that 265 million Americans were sharing our day with us !).

Besides I find turkey unbearably dull, even though Nigella Lawson does seem to have countless ways of making it seem new. Pumpkin pie however, well that is a completely different matter. I adore pumpkin pie but I never try and make it for the simple reason that my Mum makes the best ever (don’t all Mum’s ?). I asked her once how she got such a warm, spicy slightly caramel taste to it and it turns out that it only really works with tinned pumpkin and what’s more the best recipe is the one on the tin !

I will be making my own pie at some point but I’m waiting for the NQG ( Spider’s “not quite Godfather”) to come back from the USA where he has been visiting his in laws as he swears that his wife makes the best pie ever and has promised me the recipe…

Anyway, I’m not allowing myself to do any more cooking until I finish off the Christmas cards. I have promised myself that I will, this year at least make sure they arrive before Christmas.

LBD: Champagne and chi chi canapes

I have a weakness for the idea of a cocktail party…but learned a long time ago that it is better to attend someone else’s than to give one yourself – unless you employ outside caterers !

Besides, I don’t live that kind of life anymore where you just pop round in the evening to friends for drinks and nibbles – not unless squash and fairy cakes at 3.30 in the afternoon fall into that class.

But I still dream of them, of opaque tights and black kitten heeled shoes, knee length black dresses with a bit of sparkle and chic drinks like mojito’s, kir royale or canapes.

This evening however I managed to attend a “do” in London, business related, I attended for a whole 46 minutes and 13 seconds and consumed 1 glass of champagne, ate 2 sticky sausages, 1 chicken satay skewer, a fake bit of sushi and something in a mini tartlet, before having to run to catch my train – no Little Black Dress (”LBD”) but I was at least wearing a jacket and some trousers that matched – not quite living the dream, more faking the illusion.

I felt a bit naughty, like a teenager cutting lessons, a glorious guilty pleasure of a stolen evening. I will pay for it tomorrow morning when faced with Spiders accusing glare “why did you miss story time mummy” – but then sometimes you do need to make time to be the girl in the LBD…

Yesterday I celebrated having finished all my christmas cards bar a few addresses – remembered when I got home that I haven’t done Spider’s cards. Think I may be tempted to send a batch of cakes in on monday instead, after all 3 and 4 year olds don’t really understand the card thing, but they do seem to enjoy the occasional cupcake…and I will go easy on the icing…

What I don’t want for christmas…

London again today. Popped into the House of Fraser before heading home. My big boss (the grand fromage ?) had some money off vouchers for HoF which he didn’t want and I was a more than grateful recipient. I had a vague idea of perhaps getting a new handbag – I think it may be time to smarten up my act a bit and take a slightly more professional attitude towards things, be a bit less Slummy Mummy…was a little bit embarrassed yesterday when visiting a firm of solicitors when I realised I’d turned up for a meeting with all my papers just stuffed into a Sainsbury’s hemp bag !

But, as anyone who has known me for longer than 3 years will tell you, my laid back approach to my appearance pre-dates motherhood by many years. I remember one year my school mates gave me a selection of plastic bags as a Christmas present as a comment on the fact that my school files were carried around in carrier bags as I never seemed to have a proper school bag – mind you that was probably one of the most useful presents I’ve ever had, lasted me well into university years !

But to get back to House of Fraser. I was happily browsing in the homewear section when I came across an electric pizza oven. Yes, for just under £50 you can have an electric pizza stone which not only will cook your pizza base almost as crisp as a restaurant, but you can also use it for making omlettes and heating pastys…

I am doing home made pizza this weekend with the Teenager. We acquired a pizza stone the other week following a suggestion from one of the Jamie Oliver books (Jamie at home I think) which suggested that any slab of granite would do. I’m trying out a 50cm x50cm floor tile which Husband picked up from a skip a few months ago – so can I spend the £50 I’ve just saved on a new handbag/briefcase or do I have to donate it to the “pay off the credit card fund” ?

Was planning on making more Brownies tonight but tomorrow’s meeting has been changed into a site visit, which means I won’t be seeing the future owners of the Brownies until monday and I don’t think they will last the weekend if I do them now

Experiments in Pizza

Lunchtime – In the fridge at the moment I have some pizza dough – correction,the dough is slowly rising. I made the dough itself at 8.30am, just before taking Spider off to pre-school using the dough recipe from Apples for Jam:Tessa Kiros I had to adapt the recipe however as my yeast refused to foam using the method from the book so I adapted the recipe to match the instructions on the tin – will be changing yeast brands as this tin has been very fussy as to what it gets added to!

After making the dough I followed a tip from Nigella about leaving the dough to have a long slow rise in the fridge. I have to head off now for a site visit in the wilds of Oxfordshire. Hopefully by teatime my dough will be ready for stretching and rolling and having toppings added. Off to find some mozzarella… I’m also going to buy some new yeast as I was concerned about the dough when I was kneading it, it started off as a little tight ball of dough and stayed that way…now I know that’s not supposed to happen.

Dinnertime: The dough did not look promising when I got home, it was a little bit softer than when it went in the fridge. I punched it down, divided it in two and left it to rise a bit more in the warmth of the top oven – in the lower oven I had 2 granite tiles warming up – tip from Jamie at home (who needs a pizza stone). After 30 minutes it was pliable enough to stretch it out as a base. Decided that simplicity was best and just did a simple tomato and cheese (cheddar ) and wow, after about 10 or 12 minutes we had lift off !

Not quite wood fired oven, but good enough for now

If I were to do this again, which I will tomorrow I think the only thing I would change is the dough… don’t know why but it didn’t quite work, I think perhaps my yeast may be on its last legs.

Anyway for Saturday night I shall buy some new yeast and let Teenager have the run of the kitchen and the fridge and see what he comes up with – but for now I am happy that I have found a good cheap alternative to frozen pizza and one that does not entail too much preparation in the kitchen…

I feel a bit like a kid who believes in magic – its been almost as much fun today as the first time I tried developing a photograph from a negative… mind you I did that in my bathroom not my kitchen !

Further Adventures in Pizza

Today’s pizza has been brought to you by the letters T and…well OK that’s not going to work as I’d have to list 6 letters. Yes we’ve been having another go at pizza, my role this time has been restricted to buying some mozzarella, easi-blend yeast and then sitting on the work surface reading out the recipe whilst my minions scurry around the kitchen obeying my every whim – except it doesn’t quite work like that as there’s lots of “are you sure that’s what the recipe says” and “HOW much olive oil !”

Teenager has been chef for the evening with Husband as comis. No need for the fridge technique as we’ve had time to spare this evening. The other main difference was the recipe. Like a lot of people who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s Husband and my immediate reaction to a recipe that doesn’t work out as planned is “well what would Delia do ?” So we dug out her cookery course and I sat there on top of the washing machine reading the instructions out to the Teenager.

Apart from the fact that the bottom of my cooker is covered in melted mozzarella (put the topping too close to the edge of the pizza), it was a very successful and fun evening – don’t know if it was the new recipe or the yeast that resolved yesterdays problems but we have had a very successful movie night… the rest of the day has been a bit of a disaster but its been nothing too serious – I’m saving the Brownies for tomorrow though as I seem to have lost my cooking mojo.

The things we do for love…

I did it for Spider. I’m not doing it again, not for anyone, no matter how much they pay me…

Milton Keynes 3 sundays before Christmas.

I am feeling wiped out and it’s not even 6pm yet – tired I mean, I didn’t spend more than £20 the whole day, and most of that was on Father Christmas.

My name is…I am a shopaphobic

According to the news, it is expected that today will be the busiest day in the year for on line shopping with the busiest time being between 1pm and 2pm.

I am no good at shopping. I hate it. I do not have the girly shopping gene. But then if you asked people who like shopping you will probably find that they only really like certain types of shopping and my shopping interests are very very narrowly defined. In a book shop I can be happy, it is my oasis of calm from the storm of the high street, my cathedral, a place of worship, and in the case of Waterstones in Reading this is literally true as I believe it used to be some sort of methodist central hall or similar.

Milton Keynes yesterday really was my idea of hell on earth. My only reason for going was that I had a long standing agreement with a friend that we would take our children to see Father Christmas in his grotto – we did and it was fun, but as usual we needn’t have gone out of our way as when asked what was the best bit about the day Spider replied “going under the bridge and pretending to be a train” (in the carpark on the way into the town centre).

Anyway, as a result of the trip to MK I am behind with my cooking, had hoped to have another batch of Brownies ready today plus some biscuits for Spider’s preschool…I also now have plans for some Ottolenghi cupcakes as a present for luscious Lulabelle who heroically drove to MK despite her terrible cold, as I’m too much of a wimp to drive on icy roads.

Anyway, recipe for Brownies will go up hopefully tomorrow morning.

It’s gone…!

It has, it’s really gone – I’ve lost my cooking Mojo !!!

It’s just over a week since I was teasing Flapjack Queen about having lost her cooking Mojo (she hadn’t, she’d just used the wrong tin and her sponge sank like a stone) and here am I making a hash out of carbonara. This is unheard of, I can make carbonara in my sleep, yet tonight it turned out like scrambled eggs.

I have been putting off my planned Brownie experiment for several days now, as I’ve been scared that its going to stick to the tin, and I’m sorry but there is no way I can try it tonight, or any cooking even, I’m off to hide under the duvet…will post the recipe tomorrow morning as promised but I’m not going to try it myself until Wednesday morning when I have the day off to go to the pre-school nativity play.

RECIPE: Toffee Brownie (Ottolenghi)

I have been very cautious about doing this recipe, more so about posting it. For a start I have lost the bit of paper with the amounts written on it. I have the advantage of having made the butter toffee over a week ago (it is, surprise surprise stashed in the freezer) and I know from the previous recipe I made that the brownie mixture is very similar to the previous one. It is the jam that is making me delay cooking this, partly because I can’t quite remember the exact amount used and partly because I am a little worried about adding jam to cake mixture and then cooking it in a very shallow tin…sounds like a recipe waiting for disaster to me…

Ingredients

200g unsalted butter

280g plain flour

1/2 tsp salt

300g dark chocolate, broken into bits (at least 65% coco fat)

2 free range eggs

220g caster sugar

1tsp vanilla essence

About 140g Jam (raspberry, apricot or banana)

For the toffee

75g caster sugar

25g unsalted butter

1. Preheat oven to 170 deg C. Brush 22cm sq tin with melted butter.

2.Grease a baking sheet. Place the toffee sugar and butter in a pan and heat until it starts to caramalise and go a dark brown colour. Do not burn, remove from heat. Pour the caramel onto the baking sheet and leave to set.

3. Put butter and dark choc in a bowl and then place over a saucepan of simmering water. Stir constantly until both have melted. Do not let it get too hot or boil. Leave to cool slightly.

4.In a separate bowl mix eggs, sugar and vanilla . Fold in the melted chocolate mixture and then the salt and flour.

5. Break the toffee into bit and add to the mixture.

6. Place mixture into tin and smooth over. Add small teaspoon drops of jam to the mixture and stir with a knife.

7. Place on centre shelf of the oven. Cook for roughly 25 minutes, Brownies should be crusty looking on top but not quite cooked under the crust.

8. Remove from the oven. Leave to cool in tin. When cool, divide into 15 pieces and remove from tin.

Some days I do what I want to do…

…the rest of the time I do what I have to…

Not been a good day today

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, but I couldn’t be a full time Mummy, I’m just not that patient. But I do believe that if you have children you should want to spend time with them.

I didn’t want to go back to full time work quite so soon. I had always intended that I would be a part time Mum until Spider went to school (next September) but it hasn’t worked out that way due to our huge financial mess up.

Now I don’t think Spider is suffering because he gets time with his grandma, who he adores and he also gets 5 mornings at pre-school (which he needs) and I am using my leave to ensure that we still have time together – we go swimming once a week, which as far as he is concerned is the best fun a small boy can have away from the seaside…but I miss him, and some days it is really hard to do what I’m meant to do and not what I’d really like to be doing…splashing in puddles or hunting dragons with the smallest knight in the land…

RIP Bagpuss 08.12.08

It is a blue blue day in the Bunn household…Oliver Postgate died yesterday.

His creations were loved by all of us, we even managed to indoctrinate Spider, he loves Bagpuss and the Clangers (which he thinks are pink mice). Very sad today

Edit- This site had a lot of hits today because of this post about Oliver Postgate, I hope those that went searching for him found what they were looking for somewhere on the web. I only had a minute to post something before work, and besides there is not a lot I can say that isn’t in the BBC obit anyway.

He created some wonderful worlds, that gave me, along with millions of other small children our own small piece of magic and I am very very grateful to him for adding an extra bit of happiness to my life whilst I was growing up, in regular 5 minute portions. I am happy to share these portions with my Spider (who has a dragon called Idris).

It’s a wrap

Last night I had a happy potter around the kitchen and made the Toffee Brownies – verdict ? Very rich, very addictive. Raspberry goes so well with chocolate. Not too sure about the toffee, think next time I might use some form of commercial toffee bits as I prefer my toffee a bit chewy and more caramel in taste.

Hidden Brownies

Forgot to take a photo of these before I cut them up into small pieces for delivery to the lovely Mrs Zee and Mrs OD  – Mrs Zee is the main reason I can relax over Christmas and forget about my finances (despite the fact I paid too much off the credit card this month and am back to watching the pennies until payday), Mrs OD has been introducing colour back into my life with large doses of purple objects appearing on my desk…

Anyway hidden beneath the pink there are Brownies – the recipe says cut the tin into 15 pieces, these are very rich – I would recommend more pieces of a smaller size…would I do this recipe again, yes as a variation but I’m begining to think that its hard to beat my favourite Nigel Slater Brownie recipe…

Today has been quite quiet on the cooking front, but  large doses of Ikea has left me considering baking some cookie decorations for the tree and perhaps making a gingerbread house…what I will be doing this weekend is making a ginger cake as my entry into the office Christmas cake competition – the question is, which ginger cake ?

The main event today was watching Spider be 1 of 2 kings in the nativity (3rd king was a victim of budgetary pressures), I was in tears, for no reason, I mean there he was just being Spider, happy vivacious little Spider, and I’m in tears watching his love of life – it’s so weird this Mummy lark !

Dead Time:M40

Didn’t make it to work today, instead spent almost 4 and a half hours in a traffic jam on the M40, most of which was spent covering a distance of 5 miles – so I phoned in and took the day off – I gave the Brownies to luscious Lulabelle, the other bag was to go to the ladies at Spider’s pre-school but I didn’t get back until 1pm.

I was cursing myself for having removed my book from my bag in a misguided attempt to carry less junk around – at least I had the radio to keep me company and a Toddler cookbook which I was taking to lend to a colleague. Got back home just in time to see the wicked witch of the west taking photographs of the drive…looks like we are in for a boundary dispute, fun, not !

So headed off to Stratford, my feel good town as having found the bank statement on the mat I really needed cheering up…

It has not been a good day but at least we all came home in a Christmas mood

Blue Friday

Feeling down again today. Don’t usually come into Reading on a friday, and whats more I’m working here all day, having used my leave to cover the time I spent in yesterday’s traffic jam.

Yesterday’s problems are still there waiting to be dealt with, I had fun in Stratford yesterday but that was really a more enjoyable form of sticking my head in the sand.

The financial problems are the easier one to sort out. Don’t know how to sort out the boundary issue, both choices (instruct a solicitor or employ a builder to finish off the work we didn’t have done in February because of that woman claiming that it would mean going over the boundary of the properties), are likely to prove expensive.

BOOK REVIEW: The Toddler Cafe: Jennifer Carden

This is the book I had with me in the traffic jam yesterday.

I bought this book after it got favourable-ish reviews on Lunch in a box. I was having concerns about Spider becoming a picky eater, I’ve since realised from watching the Teenager’s appetite develop over the last 6 years I’ve known him, that he’s not, children take time to develop an interest and taste for food – I just have to be patient.

This book may work for some parents but it doesn’t work for me, because my boy is not the type of kid who will be persuaded to eat something, he has to choose to eat it and no amount of trying to make food fun is going to help.  He’s a very determined boy, when he decides he’s going to do something he usually does, which is why he was dry at night by the age of 3 because he decided he wasn’t going to wear a nappy at night and he  wasn’t going to wet the bed either !

The intro to the book is good, in fact its great, having just read it again I am really fired up to try and make mealtimes fun, to ensure that Spider gets home made good food and to introduce him to new tastes.

There are also in this book some very helpful suggestions about shopping, the essential pantry (with some useful photocopeable shopping lists), recommended utensils and how to make food and eating a fun activity for all. Additionally, throughout the book there are useful hints and suggestions about using leftovers or substitute ingredients (such as making greek yoghurt out of ordinary yoghurt).

The recipes themselves are a bit of a mixture. Some are just serving suggestions (admittedly instant apple sauce is one that I do use but was kinda doing already), or fun ways of playing with food (polka dots: spaghetti and a plate of olive oil and balsamic vinegar). Some of it, surprisingly for a book about cooking proper food rather than convenience food, is a bit “Delia’s How to Cheat at cooking”. The rest, although there are some interesting recipes, are not much different from what you can get from an Annabel Karmel book.

Recipes of note:

• minty pea pops/corn pops – interesting but not to everyone’s taste
• lily pad pancakes – a hit with Spider but without the need to pretend to be a frog
• popcorn soup – variation on the “people soup” from my childhood
• rainbow rice balls – good way of introducing kids to onigiri (and beetroot)
• knock knock gnocci – gnocci from instant mash !
• soup ghosts
• I heart tofu
• peanut butter globe globs – protein packed toddler truffles from the store cupboard

I’m going to try going through the book again and getting Spider to choose what we cook, but if he shows no interest then I’ll list it for sale on Amazon.

The first Christmas cake

So called because this is the first Christmas cake I am making this year, for the works Christmas Cake competition – the idea is that anyone who wants to enter makes a cake and then people who want to try cake pay a £1 for charity (probably Water Aid) and then vote on the winner.

Anyway, my entry is not a traditional cake but is something that I associate with Christmas, gingerbread or rather ginger cake…my kitchen is currently full of the lovely smells of ginger and cinnamon and caramel and…cake ! The version I eventually went for is from The Kitchen Diaries:Nigel Slater and is one I am particularly fond of because it has a hidden surprise of real stem ginger hidden deep in side. The recipe for it was published some years ago in The Observer also [here] and its kinda appropriate as when Nigel made it for his article in the observer “the rain is crashing down on the kitchen roof”, and that’s just what it’s been doing here all day.

The intention tomorrow is to ice it with the lemon icing for Ginger Cake in Nigella’s How to be a Domestic Goddess because as she points out, its hard to sell something which is so unrelentingly brown…

Other than the cake today has been quite quiet, Husband went down to pick the Student up from Cardiff and Spider and I cleaned the living room, including moving the sofa which is where I found the Toffee Brownie recipe – I have now amended the quantities in the recipe I posted several days ago.

Next weekend I will be making this years actual christmas cake – again not traditional because last year we were still eating it at the end of January…

Double Ginger Cake with lemon icing...

M40: It happened again…the fates hate me !

Yesterday morning as I approached junction 10 traffic slowed to a crawl. “Oh no, not again” I felt as if I had my own personal carbon footprint genie directing me to start using the train again. But within 20 minutes it was back to its usual speed and my pangs of green guilt were sacrificed to pocket concerns once again.

Until, that is, 6.45pm, when I was again on the M40 but heading north this time. I approached junction 9…I continued to “approach” junction 9 for a further 2 hours 40 minutes meaning that I missed Nigella’s Christmas thing on BBC2, or so I thought, but fortunately Husband is a thinking kinda guy and not only had dinner ready for me but a dvd he’d prepared earlier…

Anyway, on the subject of Nigella, the lemon icing I mentioned previously in connection with the Gingercake is incredibley easy

Ingredients

175 icing sugar

1 tbs lemon juice

1 tbs warm water.

Sieve the icing sugar. Mix in the lemon juice. Then add the hot water a little at a time. Keep stirring until you have a thick paste. You may not need all the water, you may need a little bit more. Icing needs to be quite thick so that it gives a thick snow like covering to the cake.

Ride an emotional rollercoaster to Banbury Cross

This is rapidly becoming a blog about not baking cake…101 excuses for not cooking.

I was worried yesterday that I was in a bad luck cycle. Today had the potential to be good as I was due to be in Banbury for a planning inquiry which meant that my commute would only be 20 minutes rather than the usual 1hour 20 minutes. However whilst waiting at the station for my work colleagues our barrister phoned up to advise that she had a flat and needed to call the RAC. Then my colleagues turned up, 2 instead of 3, we were 1 short…

Fortunately we had time for things to improve as we’d turned up an hour early so that we could talk things over with our barrister beforehand. Whilst sitting in the Council’s cafe I put a call in to the barrister for an update and discovered that the RAC were on their way but that she was unlikely to be there on time which was a bit unfortunate as the our concerns were being discussed first, anyway this is how the next 90 minutes turned out (after establishing barrister is fully comp insurance):

9.26 Get into car to look for barrister

9.40 Find barrister, give her my car keys and directions to council building

9.42 RAC turn up and I get text from missing colleague saying she’d missed the train due to Oxford traffic and would be there as soon as she could

10.00 Tyre changed, paperwork completed, say goodbye to lovely man from RAC

10.01 First girlie moment. knock on RAC man’s window and ask him if he could show me how to adjust the seat in a jag

10.02 onwards Scary drive into Banbury in car that doesn’t belong to me, costs considerably more than a years salary !

10.15 Arrive at council offices, spend 5 minutes trying to find somewhere to park

10.20 Girlie moment 2: telephone Husband to ask how you put a Jag into reverse.

10.25 Arrive at inquiry

After that the day started to improve. Was back home by 2pm, discovered my Mum had collected my reserved library books and that they were all in, an email from Facebook saying that the husband of a friend I had accidentally lost touch with had found me on Facebook and then from the emails I had it looked as if things were going well on things I was involved with at work.

Anyway by 4pm I was drooping and fell asleep – I think its been all the low level stress of the last few days what with the traffic and worrying over the planning inquiry…have watched Nigella again tonight and am feeling inspired to cook, although not by anything she made oddly enough, apart from the coffee martini !

Oh, if anyone needs a planning barrister then I would recommend these guys – promise next thing I post WILL be about baking as I am giving food as presents to a number of people anyway…

Nigel last year, Nigella this…

Last year I cooked a “traditional” Christmas dinner, turkey, gravy, small sausages, roast potatoes, hell I even did sprouts and chestnuts.  We had a home made christmas pudding (as did several of my friends as I made slightly too many) and a home made iced and marzipan’d Christmas cake (both from The Kitchen Diaries: Nigel Slater)

One of Mummy and Spider's joint ventures

Now you might be wondering why is this even worth mentioning ? Well perhaps because this isn’t how my family normally has its christmas’. About the time I was 13 we had a family discussion and decided that Christmas would be about food that we wanted to eat because it was good and tasty not simply because it was traditional.

Anyway, last year we wanted to introduce Spider to tradition and besides both Husband and Dad like turkey (and sprouts) and I adore christmas pudding. I also splashed out on a gingerbread train kit from the American shop  in Milton Keynes… of the bakes stuff, the pudding was lovely but I wish I’d left the figs out as I don’t like little hard seeds, the cake was nice but as a family we are not keen on the icing and marzipan…the gingerbread kit was horrible and besides Spider lost interest half way through…and more icing went on Spider than on the cake when we tackled that.

So this year we will be doing one of Nigella’s many alternative Christmas cakes – although not until the weekend as I have yet another cold and I don’t cook for other people when I’m ill, it just doesn’t seem hygienic!

As for last year, well Nigel’s pudding recipe is here as is the cake recipe just slightly further down the page

Christmas Cake indecision

I was flicking through How to be a Domestic Goddess:Nigella Lawson trying to choose a Christmas Cake which wouldn’t end up sitting on the sideboard like last year and I came across her Certosino which is a “fabulous spicy fruit cake” which is decorated with dried fruit and nuts. It seemed to fit the requirements of our family namely fruit cake, nothing too heavy, perhaps slightly alcoholic, easy on the icing. Also I have most of the ingredients in, just need to buy a few things.

Anyway I was all set to make this when I got struck down with the lurgy meaning that I’ve since had a lot of time in bed and between sleeping have been reading cookbooks and have of course changed my mind. Same idea as the Certosino just the cake itself uses up more of what I have in the cupboard including a tin of chestnut puree which has been sitting neglected in the kitchen since last christmas.

The Easy Action Christmas Cake (from Feast) can be found here. Normally with recipes from Feast I automatically halve the quantites but this recipe actually suggests if you don’t want a large cake then you could make a small cake and 12 muffins – so that’s what I will be doing between now and Christmas as soon as I get the all clear and can cook again. I know I’m cutting it fine, but since there is no icing involved, just sticking fruit on the top and glazing with jam, I can if I need leave it until Wednesday night…not going to mention christmas cake again this year but will post a pic when I finally get myself off this sickbed and into the kitchen.

My new years resolution is less procrastination, more action… sitting here reading a time management book !

Food Hero: Oh Allegra, you temptress !

 

Allegra has only recently joined my list of food heroes. I have mentioned before how I discovered her by an internet trawl for something to use cashew nuts in. I then started to read her articles in the Guardian and found that she has a disturbing ability to make me want to go into the kitchen and cook – fortunately though there have been very few cakes/baked goods and a lot of things that the rest of the family won’t eat !

 

The downside of Allegra is long lists of ingredients some of which do tend to be rather more exotic than my family will eat. Fortunately this has tended to be the “earlier” Allegra  (see The Good Cook). The more recent Allegra has concentrated more on eating seasonally (see Allegra’s Colour Cookbook and Colouring the Seasons which I think may be the US version of the Colour Cookbook).

 

What I have cooked so far:

Cashew and Orange Blossom Cake

An Iranian chicken curry (using pomegranate molasses which I have already)

Sweet Potato Falafel

Lemon and Ginger Sussex Pudding [recipe here]

 

Her latest book Leon  from the restaurant of the same name (of which she is a co founder) again concentrates on good quality, organic ingredients to make good food for take away. I am getting this book for Christmas (only another 48 hours to wait)  and have had to pass it over to my Mum for safe keeping to stop me using it…not before I had copied out the ingredients for George’s Breast Milk Bread (not what you might think thank god !) which I have slowly (with the Flapjack Queen) been collecting together.

 

Anyway, she has done it to me again. In the other weeks Observer she was enthusing about how you can do Christmas dinner on the cheap (well £60)…and well you see, I have been muttering about how I want to try goose for several years now but have been unable to get one for less than £40 and well she mentioned that Lidl do one for £16, and then I was in Aldi on Saturday and discovered that they also do a frozen one for £15…so I now have a goose in my freezer and nothing else planned for boxing day.

Actually, I quite like mince pies…

A long evening cooking and I’ve run out of time again…more at a more normal hour!

The morning after

I don’t know where the time has gone. Thanks to the flu/virus I have ended up with a backlog of cooking, so last night I made:

· Nigella’s star top mince pies

· Nigella’s mini apple pies

· 2 batches of “24 carat brownies”

· finally cooked the Christmas cake and “iced it” with turkish delight

I’d made my Christmas cake on Monday night but ran out of time to cook it, so it had to stand over night until I got back from work. Whilst it was cooking I made my mince pies.

Turkish Delight topped Easy Christmas Cake

I have had a lot of hits on these pages for people looking for Nigella’s star topped mince pies so I thought I may as well do them and then post a link. Basically it’s a straight forward shortcrust pastry recipe using a mixture of fats and replacing the water with orange juice. The recipe can be found here. Mine are made with lard instead of vegetable shortening as that’s what I had in the cupboard (besides am a little concerned about transfats and vegetable shortening) and mine are heart topped as that’s the only cutter I have the right size.

heart topped mince pies

Since the only reason I was making the pies was so that Spider had something to leave out for Father Christmas I only made 12. The rest I turned into apple pies using the apple filling recipe (which I will post up later).

Finally I made a double batch of my favourite Brownies. I had been planning to make some flourless brownie’s following my post yesterday on Allegra (as I was short of flour) but Husband put in a request for some nut free brownies to take to work.

nigel slater’s fantastic brownies

Anyway the worlds best Brownies can be found in Kitchen Diaries:Nigel Slater but it also appears in various places on the web and can be found here. My version missed out the cocoa powder as I’d run out (put in extra flour instead) and used a mixture of soft brown sugar and caster sugar…they seem to be hitting the spot at my work though – but then we are all in a Christmas mood anyway.

Its been a week…if not more…

My sister in law, Islay asked me about the goose and whether I was going to write anything about it.

Well I did cook it and I will write something about it but not yet as I am really not feeling up to writing at the moment, I do not have the same stamina as the lovely Mrs Lacer over on Lacer’s Life who, like a true writer can keep going even when her body is falling apart – me I’m a bit of wimp.

I haven’t done a lot of cooking over Christmas as I have been down with a very nasty lurgy that leaves me with no energy. I did cook the goose on boxing day but it was only for the immediate family who presumably already have what I have, and also the Teenager and the Student. But I figured that catching something from me that means they spend most of the day in bed sleeping reading and listening to music would be no change in the norm for them !

Today has been one monumental cock up in organisation and I fear I may have upset both my sister in laws by ending up seeing them both on the same day and not really spending much time with either…and then at 5pm it all became too much for me and I once again retired to bed. Its odd this bug, apart from the hacking cough its very reminiscent of glandular fever in the way it saps your energy.

I was going to leave you here with a natural cold cure remedy from Leon:Allegra Mcevedy which I have been reading avidly since the 25th…but I had no rosemary (slugs, drought and then flood in the summer killed it off) so I followed a Peter Gordon recipe which was remarkably similar.

RECIPES: LEMON AND GINGER COLD CURE

I have in my vast collection of recipe books at least 3 for a classic lemon and ginger cold cure remedy. The basics are the same lemon, ginger, honey and hot water. Its just the proportions that vary and the added extras. Garlic apparently has antibacterial, anti fungal and antiseptic qualities and rosemary seems to assist breathing and also has antiseptic properties.

Lemon and Ginger Coldbuster (Leon:Allegra McEvedy)

200 ml lemon juice

50g fresh ginger, grated

5 tablespoons stringy bark honey

1 big branch rosemary

Place ginger, lemon juice  and rosemary in a saucepan. Heat. Once warm stir in honey until it dissolves. Remove from heat and cool. Once cool pour entire contents into a sterilised bottle. When you want to use pour 4 tablespoons (60ml) into a mug and top up with boiling water – sweeten to taste with more honey.

Lemon, garlic and ginger tonic (Cook with Peter Gordon at home)

1 lemon cut into slices

3 cloves garlic, peeled and roughly chopped

1/2 thumb peeled and sliced ginger

200ml honey

600 ml water

Place all ingredients in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Reduce to a simmer, cover with a lid and simmer for 10 minutes. Either strain the ingredients as you pour into a jug or include the lemon and ginger and eat as you drink. Should make 2 big mugs

Lemon, Manuka Honey and Ginger (Innocent Smoothie Recipe book)

1 lemon

1 inch of fresh ginger

6 teaspoons manuka honey

300 ml boiling water (from kettle)

sprig rosemary (optional)

Squeeze half lemon and pour juice into a mug. Slice the other half of lemon. Finely slice the ginger. Add lemon slices , honey and ginger to the mug – if using rosemary give it a quick bash with a rolling pin and drop into the mug. Pour on boiling water and leave to infuse for 5 minutes – enough for 2 servings.

What on earth possessed me ?

This title can refer to 3 things equally

• cooking a goose
• going for a run
• making Christmas presents

I planned to cook a goose. I was full of enthusiasm right up to the moment when Husband and Spider drove off to spend the day with Teenager and Student. The arrangement was that I would have dinner on the table by 7pm…so they drove off and I sat there looking at this flat, floppy defrosted, large goose in the kitchen and a fridge full of vegetables…I sat and looked, I made a coffee, I ate a slice of Christmas cake, I sat and looked. This went on for about an hour when I suddenly remembered I had no potatoes and I’d left the “back up chicken” (in case no one liked it) at my Mum’s…so a trip there wasted another 30 minutes. Then at 11.30 I sat down and wrote a timetable working back by 3 hours.

Now, those who have read the blog before know that I had been inspired by an article in the Observer by Allegra McEvedy. I did however have doubts about her timetable as it was a bit vague on times and seemed to imply that a 4.5kg goose is going to take 1 hour 45 minutes. No, as a rule you are looking at for poultry, give or take, at least 20 minutes per pound – judging by the search terms showing up on my blog this evening (allegra goose complaints) other people have been having problems with this recipe – I took the opportunity whilst at Mum’s to check with Mum and her copy of Delia and we agreed on 3 hours total cooking time.

Anyway, once I had leavered my bottom off the sofa and had a plan to follow everything was fine. OK having to pour off the fat every 30 minutes was a pain and the last 30 minutes of a roast trying to get everything on the table at the same time is always a pain and involves a lot of shouting at everyone else… there was also the problem that the oven was taken up with 3 sorts of stuffing (Nigella’s chestnut from 2 years ago which I found in the freezer, Nigella’s gingerbread stuffing specially requested by husband and the fruit and nut stuffing recommended by Allegara)

verdict : goose doesn’t do it for me anymore than turkey does. You don’t get much meat from it and I’d rather cook 3 chickens instead. But it is almost all brown meat which I love, the leftovers make great sandwiches, there is a lot of free range bones for stock and lots of fat for later roast potatoes (have stoked the freezer with it). On the stuffing front the fruit and nut stuffing from Allegra is amazing, Nigella’s gingerbread didn’t hit the spot for anyone and I am left wondering what on earth you do with left over stuffing ! Also I ended up with 4 empty plates, Spider though didn’t touch any of it but then it had been a long day…

The run – my neighbour Flapjack Queen (FQ) has a dog. The last time I volunteered to walk the dog was at the end of August when FQ was overdue on giving birth. Smiler, the dog did a runner on me and after 40 minutes fruitless searching I went home to own up to being useless only to discover she had been back for ages ! Anyway, FQ was visiting relatives and asked if I would walk Smiler. “Yes no problem I said” thinking Teenager would be back by then and could be bribed with hard cash. Nope, come 4pm I was on my own and the goose had been in for 30 minutes. I poured off the latest collection of fat and went next door to get the dog…

Because of our “history” I decided to put the dog on her lead to walk her as I couldn’t risk her running off as I had the goose in the oven and needed to be back to pour off the fat and avoid the kitchen going up in flames… Smiler, unsurprisingly was not happy and set off at a trot which quickly became a run and then a gallop dragging me along behind her…note to self a goth skirt and chelsea boots are not suitable for running in…although they did have the wonderful effect of hiding the “thunder thighs” I was accused of having at 15 (which is why I stopped running in the first place)…side note here – looking back on pictures of me when I was 18, I had a good figure, I was slim…shame that in your teens you don’t have the confidence to realise it…now I admit, if I run at my age I should have a sports bra on my legs to stop them bouncing up and down…oh oh oh to be 17 again – right nostalgic moan over !

End result, I had my first run of 2009 some 7 days early…it wasn’t too bad in fact and I may well repeat the (with proper footwear) I won’t be repeating the goose unless we get another bargain buy !

And making Christmas presents ? Well when I was younger I used to knit – I wasn’t bad. I have lost count of the number of friends whose children have had hand knits inflicted on them. Anyway, I have under the bed a teddy bear that my Mum knitted which was awaiting clothes…and had been for 4 years. So at the beginning of November I started knitting clothes for this bear but kept running out of wool and then went ill and then ran out of money (again) – and I also had a tiger hat and two dinosaurs to knit and yes I ran out of time and have decided to put the lot on ice until the children’s respective birthdays (Spider, and FQ’s 3 children)…oh yes and having 2 cats haven’t helped as my whole knitting bag is like one great big spider’s web…

RECIPE: George’s Breast Feeding Bread

This recipe is from Leon:Allegra McEvedy. I haven’t actually made it myself but I’ve been helping my neighbour FQ collect up the various seeds and flours to make the bread. Apparently she finally made it last night but has since promptly come down with a very bad case of the flu…this evening I helped her put herself and her children to bed – did not think the timing was right to ask to try a slice !

The idea of this bread is that the seeds and spices encourage a nursing mother’s body to ramp up the milk production to niagra quantities… not something I am planning on needing again despite Spider’s requests for a “baby sister” (he imagines himself as Charlie from Charlie and Lola).

Ingredients

soft butter

330g strong wholemeal spelt flour

170g strong white flour

5g fast acting easy blend yeast

2 tsp crushed sea salt

1 tsp aniseeds

1 tsp caraway seeds

1 tsp fennel seeds

1 tsp fenugreek (ground in pestle and mortar/coffee grinder)

40g pumpkin seeds

40g sunflower seeds

2.5 tbs extra virgin oil

300 ml warm water

15g extra sunflower/pumpkin seeds for the top

40g pine nuts

1. smear 1kg loaf tine with butter

2  Mix all the dry ingredients (except pine nuts and seeds for top) in a very large bowl

3 Add the oil and then the water stirring until the mixture sticks together. knead in the bowl for a few minutes until smooth.

4. Shape, then put in the tin. Cut a pattern in deep gashes on the top and sprinkle the reserved seeds in the gashes. Slightly push the pine nuts into the surface and sprinkle a little extra spelt flour all over

5. Put tin in a large plastic bag that can be tucked under the tin to leave the loaf enclosed with plenty of air. Leave until dough has double in size – about 2 hours in a warm kitchn

6. Bake in a preheated oven at 230 deg C for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 200 deg C for a further 20 minutes.

7. Turn out and cool on a rack.

Get well soon Flapjack Queen

Cupboard clearing…

Haven’t been baking much the last 10 days as there is plenty to eat and I keep being given left overs from people I know.

Started sorting the cupboards out last night, doing a stock keep of what I have and what needs using up, other than the obvious stuff in the fridge…

Still feeling run down so trying out a “tonic” rather than copious cups of tea as I still have some ginger left from my cold cures and I discovered some forgotten lemon grass in the freezer, which if I was in the mood I could turn into a Thai curry (as there are 2 tins of coconut milk lurking with the rice pud) but I am not in the mood…although there are still loads of goose bits in the fridge…and I wonder if the co op sells corriander…

Anyway rather than the curry I haven’t made here is the tonic (makes 4 cups, I’ve only made 1 as I may use the rest of the lemon grass on something else)

Lemon grass and Ginger Tea (Cook at Home with: Peter Gordon)

2 stems lemon grass bashed flat with a hammer or rolling pin

100g ginger skin scrubbed and roughly chopped

1 litre cold water

sugar, elderflower cordial or honey to taste

Place all ingredients in a saucepan and bring it to the boil. Reduce the heat, out the lid on and simmer for 5 minutes. Strain before drinking.

lemongrass tea - a break for the liver

ps ooooh, whilst rooting around in the veg drawer for the ginger I found the beetroot I bought just before christmas to do Hugh Fernley Whittingstall’s Beetroot Brownies, so I may do one last baking session before new year…

verdict on the tonic: Well I feel invigorated, the ginger was a bit strong for my taste, but perhaps its less intense if you drink it hotter, mine was a bit on the cool side as just as I made it, Spider dragged me off to show me a 3 he had just found – we’ve been playing a number recognition reward game, if he correctly names a number then he gets a small toy as a reward…it probably would be cheaper with sweets…!

B is for Beetroot…

I have come to the conclusion that I don’t do this Mummy thing very well. Flapjack Queen does, she hardly ever shouts at her children (and she has 3 of them) or gets cross with them, she talks quietly and gently and reasons with them… I even have another friend in the village who is in my phonebook as “Supermum”. Me, well I’d like to think that at least some of the time my snappy mood is down to the fact that Spider is a very determined little boy (his Grandad describing the same trait in his daughter calls it stubborn !), he knows his own mind and has very strong views on how things can be done, but honestly I know that its mainly me who is at fault. Example, I am not a talker. My life is full of long silences, long periods where I am on my own (134 mile round trip commute) so to spend a day with someone who never stops talking and provides his own running commentary is a little bit hard to say the least !

Anyway, Spider is having an extra movie night tonight as a treat (Valiant and now Cars) and I have been in the kitchen trying to bake away my snappishness and ill temper – Bake your way to a better mummy…

So beetroot then ? Well I have just realised why most of the beetroot in this country is eaten pickled as it takes so bloomin’ long to cook.

I am in the process of cooking Hugh Fearlessly Eats it All’s Beetroot Brownie’s and I have made the classic mistake of not reading the recipe properly as it says use 250g of cooked beetroot. No problem I thought I’ll just cook it, won’t take long. Wrong – beetroot can be roasted in a moderate temp oven (200 deg C) for 1-2 hours or boiled/simmered for 1.5 -2 hours…if you have a pressure cooker then it takes about 20 minutes…so a energy saving recipe this is not ! Although you can buy pre peeled and cooked beetroot in most supermarkets.

I haven’t had much experience with beetroot before – I avoid it due to horrid memories of salads in the late 70’s early 80’s where it caused the cheese to go pink…Husband on the other hand adores pickled beetroot (hates most other pickles) so I usually put a jar in his stocking each Christmas.

Of the 3 times before I have cooked it only 1 was it a pleasurable experience, so I have no idea how these Brownies are going to turn out, fortunately I have chosen the one night of the year where it won’t really matter if I have to wait 3 hours before I can start cooking as I wasn’t planning on going to bed until after Jools (he IS new year…!).

The last 3 occasions just for the record were a chemistry project at the age of 13, making natural dyes I think – all I can remember is the beaker getting to hot, cracking and the bench being covered with hot purple liquid. Second was a recipe for borscht from the Cranks Entertaining book – didn’t like it, but I put that down to the texture as we couldn’t get it to puree smoothly. Last year I made a Beetroot cake which was gorgeous (apart from the linseed’s, but apparently I should have soaked them first).

Two last points about beetroot, it smells horrid when its cooking and even raw it stains everything…my kitchen (white shiny units) looks like a scene from psycho as it somehow has managed to get everywhere.

Verdict: Turned out a little soggy which I put down to having boiled the beetroot instead of roasting it but were basically ok. Taste slightly less sweet than most of the others, occasionally there was the woody taste of beetroot but not often.

I can’t get this man out of my kitchen…(cookbook clearance)

I am not planning on doing any recipe cooking for awhile.  On the cake front I’ve just made the Brownies which may take some time to shift as I’m taking a break from sugar laden foodstuffs for a short time. On the savoury front we are still clearing the fridge of leftovers, last night was refrigerator rice (or refrigerator velcro as I’ve heard it called) and today I made 2 soups, one of which is known as “End of Life” soup and as you might expect has a variable ingredients list.

This year I am also cutting down on my reliance on recipes and returning to how I used to cook (what have we got, what needs using etc). Over the years I built up a collection of probably some 50 recipe books. In the last year this has been slashed dramatically due to lack of space (yes, I still lack enough space) and cash… periodically I list the surplus books on Amazon and on the intranet at work.

There is one cook book that I will never use, but I will never sell. Not because I’m particularly attached to it but because Husband would probably divorce me if I tried to get rid of the book.

The book in question is White Heat: Marco Pierre White.

I will never cook from this book because, MPW’s food, nice though it probably is, is just not the sort of food I want to cook or can afford to for that matter, even his pasta dough is OTT on the egg count as far as I am concerned – I’m sure if I had a really discerning palette then I would notice the difference, and if I’m paying those prices then I’d expect something above average.

So why will Husband divorce me if the book leaves the house ? Am I perhaps a very lucky girl and has a husband who cooks to Michelin star standard ? No, I have a husband (and whole family for that matter) who is heavily into photography and the photos in this book were done by Bob Carlos Clarke…I still have the text message my husband sent me in March 2006 which says simply “Bob’s Dead” and yes I knew who he meant.

ps. Husband has just been reading over my shoulder and has relocated Marco from the kitchen to the living room where the other photography books live – yay !

Delia, Diets and Dilemmas

OK I know its a cliche going on a diet for the new year but it seemed timely in view of the government’s latest healthy living campaign besides I’ve also taken a break from alcohol – thought it was time to give my liver a wee rest following the extensive use I’ve made recently of the 2 bottles of gin I had for Christmas.

Also it fits in with my attempt this year to change the way I cook, meals being dictated more by what I have in than by cookbooks (finished my kitchen stock take, was pleasantly surprised by some of the things I found lurking in the freezer, threw a few frozen kitchen experiments away). I’ve also started Fitday again as I found that useful for keeping an eye on calories and exercise…and will be taking up the Bento challenge on the 13th. I don’t intend to mention this again in the next 6 months but Islay if you are reading the starting weight is 11st 11lb…

The cookbook cull continues and I have a dilemma over Delia. I do not read Delia for pleasure ( I prefer cooks with passion for food, the only passion I’ve ever seen Delia demonstrate was her infamous shouting at the crowd when Norwich were losing) , I wasn’t even taught

how to cook from watching her programmes ( I learned from watching Mum and trying to pass an o level in Home Economics – allegedly I even know what those symbols are on clothes labels…allegedly). However there is a generation and a half out there, about 30-65 which keeps a copy of Delia’s cookery course in their kitchen as a sort of lifebelt…It’s like that game “What would Madonna do” (or perhaps that only happens in India Knight novels) instead when you don’t know what to do in a cooking crisis you ask “what would Delia do”. Me I phone Mum and she consults her copy of Delia’s Complete Cookery Course. ..I only have her How to Cook Books 1 and 2.

There are things I would like to do properly, for example I can’t make rice but Husband can. One day after grimacing his way through my latest offering he took control, went into the kitchen for the How to Cook and next time we had rice he cooked it – and sickeningly it was perfect.

So do I stick it on Amazon as secondhand or do I bite the bullet and as a new years resolution work my way through it…we do have an abundance of eggs in the fridge at the moment…and cheese…and Husband did enter my life some years ago complete with his own omelette pan…

Egg-spert in the kitchen

I know, that is an appallingly bad pun but its “difficult to get excited about a hard boiled egg” (digression – when I was 18 I travelled round europe. In Amsterdam I met some americans, and for want of anything else to talk about I asked them what they thought about their new president (George Bush sr) to which one of them replied “he’s a hard boiled egg” and then explained “its hard to get excited about a boiled egg”).

Anyway, for want of any other plan for the year I decided I may was well cook my way through Delia, especially as we appeared to have all the ingredients for her Egg and Lentil Curry with coconut and pickled lime (except the pickled lime and half the spices are with FG) and the Chorizo Hash with peppers (chorizo is one of my kitchen stand bys).

I was all set to do the Chorizio this evening (Husband doesn’t really do curry) and asked Husband to pick up some potatoes to which he replied by volunteering to do baked potatoes with an idea he’d had involving pate (which needs using).

Anyway, since the potatoes would take 1.5-2 hours (how to cook volume 1 page 174) in the oven I volunteered to do a rice pudding also (page 212)…the potatoes I have done as per the recipe and the rice pudding I have amended a little. With the rice pudding I have upped the temperature a bit (and lowered the potatoes) and shortened the time. I didn’t have any evaporated milk so I watered down some condensed milk…I also halved the quantities as there would only be 2 of us eating it.

Anyway, that’s all doing its stuff with no interference from me and I have just stated hard boiling some eggs (page 17)…only with a slight difference. I can get excited about hard boiled eggs, a good egg sandwich for me is a little bit of heaven. Spider can’t stand them ( a texture thing possibly) but lunch club starts again this week and I need something to perk up his lunch box…so when they have boiled I will be sticking them in ice cream biscuit moulds and plunging them in cold water – for moulded hard boiled eggs please check out Lunch in a Box.

Picture when they are done…at the moment I’m waiting for the eggs to warm up…Delia doesn’t approve of keeping eggs in the fridge…well tough, I may be following your recipes but I refuse to toe the line !

The Fairy Goth Mother and the freezer magic

We are not a particularly religious family but Spider does have some adults who are encouraged to give him a different view on life to his parents. In addition to the previously mentioned Not Quite Godfather (NQG) he has his Fairy Gothmother (FGM) and KT Cupcake.

FGM is an amazing person, she is my real life Food Hero, but then she seems to have grown up cooking (her mum taught domestic science). She’s always saying things like “we didn’t have anything special for dinner, just this whole salmon I picked up sometime ago and froze just in case”.

Apart from the fact that she always seems to get “just the right thing” as a present for her “gothson” and made our wedding cake (if our PC hadn’t blown up I would post the photo here I’m that proud) she also found a most remarkable book and then found a second copy as a present to me. It was a guide, an A to Z of what you can freeze and tips on freezing – and now when I want to use it (thinking of freezing leftover rice pudding) can I find it ?

I am a big fan of the freezer and I long to be a proper freezer girl, the sort of person who has planned and frozen meals in advance (other friends I know are ready for unexpected guests as they can whip out a 3 course meal and have it defrosted and on the table before guests have even removed coats). I am working on it. At the moment our freezer is used for leftovers and frozen veg…but I am trying to perfect my version of the instant frozen party in time for Spider’s 4th birthday as there is no way I can whip up birthday party on a Friday evening after a whole week at work – watch this space !

Request for cake…

Yay ! I just got my first email asking me to recommend a cake to go after a particular meal.

I would as a knee jerk reaction to any meal recommend Sticky Toffee Pudding (Gary Rhodes). Yes I know its now a restaurant cliche like the 70’s Black Forest Gateau but it is just heavenly if done well.

Anyway there were some restrictions to the cake. It needed to be made in advance, not require warming up and be suitable for handing round with a cup of tea just before guests leave. For which I recommend ginger cake. Either the Nigel Slater one I recommended earlier or the Nigella Lawson version of the same thing [here] (without the preserved ginger) either way I think the lemon icing is a must !

Is it possible to be addicted to ginger ?

Dinosaur left to keep an eye on Mummy and make sure she doesn't eat the biscuits

I know that chillis are supposed to be addictive, there is some chemical which not only makes them hot but does something to your brain to make you feel happy – but does ginger have the same properties?

I just wonder as I appear to have used ginger an awful lot in the last 4 months if my past postings are anything to go by…

If I do a quick stocktake in my cupboards I have at least 5 sorts of ginger: root ginger, powdered ginger, crystallised ginger (covered in chocolate), preserved ginger and this mystery bottle labelled “ginger essence” which is the same size as a food colouring bottle and is as yet unopened – I have no idea where it came from. I also have in my bathroom a bottle of ginger bubble bath…and the only time I go to Starbucks is at Christmas when they go their gingerbread latte…

I think I may have a problem!

I am looking for something to do with the ginger essence, I may try a sponge cake…open to suggestions as I honestly have no idea how you are meant to use it.

Yesterday I tried some cooking with Spider, proper cooking, not decorating a pre-bought item or using a packet mix…it was not exactly a success but for different reasons than before, mainly lack of planning by me.

Decided to make gingerbread men, mainly because I’m trying to run down my spice cupboard (some of the bottles in there are vintage). We followed a recipe in Apples for Jam: Tessa Kiros and having been prewarned by Lacers Life that it may be a bit runny I added some more flour – at least I think I did, I’m not sure…you see the battery has run out on my scales so I tried to convert the gram measurement into a cup measurement when I noticed that the recipe in the book gave a cup measurement of 2 cups which was twice the amount I’d just worked it out as being.

Second problem was I didn’t have enough butter (so added a small bit of soft margarine) and then I discovered I was running out of plain flour so made the difference up with buckwheat. Then I discovered I’d thrown away my baking sheets and had yet to buy replacements…not that it mattered as by that stage I’d reached the bit in the recipe that says “refrigerate for 3 hours”.

At this point Spider got bored and went back into the living room to play “knights and castles” – informing our guests later (luscious Lulabelle and her daughter Lulabud) that “We haven’t got any biscuits because Mummy can’t cook”.

Food Hero: Hugh Fernley Whittingstall

I get a lot of hits on these pages from people looking for Hugh, and presumably his recipes. Guess they are disappointed to find that there’s only a brief mention of the food award he won last year from Radio 4’s Food Programme – oh and a link to his brownie recipe.

 

Hugh is actually one of my food heroes but I don’t own any of his books. I have been an admirer since back in his “Cook on the wild side” days as I love the idea of food for free.

 

When the River Cottage programmes started I became a full time groupie, I couldn’t get enough of his programmes – but oddly enough it was actually the ideas that he was promoting rather than what he was cooking which was getting me. In fact aside from the Beetroot Brownies I can’t think of a single recipe of his that I have actually been tempted to cook.

 

I am however deeply hooked on the idea of growing my own food and sourcing things more locally…I would love to keep a pig, but I think the neighbour might complain (although historically most of the back gardens down this road would have had a pig from time to time). The highlight for me of this year was the guys in Sheffield who collect unwanted fruit from trees planted by companies, the council or just in forgotten orchards.

 

As a presenter and a journalist I find him fascinating, his words both written and spoken sizzle with passion and enthusiasm but I really don’t know what happens when he puts pen to paper to produce a cook book. Hugh seems to loose all his zing and zip when bound between the hard covers of a cookbook – they really are dull dull dull. But then I am probably in a minority as I do actually read cookbooks from cover to cover rather than use them to cook from…I am reserving judgement though as I’ve only read 3 so far, maybe one of the others  will change my mind, not that it matters as if I need my fix there is always the web site.

A certain lack of planning

I have a yearning on cold days such as we have seen this week for warm comforting food such as irish stew but due to a serious lack of planning on my part I’m having to make do with liver and bacon casserole (as the only meat in the freezer are the aforementioned liver and bacon, some duck legs, 2 packs of sausages and some mince).

 

This is not pressing the buttons for me – and won’t give me a chance to road test the slow cooker function (and timer) on my Tefal 4 in 1.

 

I am not giving up on the irish stew as my personal meteorologist says the cold weather will be back next week when I should be a bit better prepared for testing the timer function.  However to make sure I am more organised I am heading down the  meal planner route using this. I don’t use a recipe for irish stew I just cut it all up chunky and bung it in a pot.

 

Ps “I” is a really difficult letter to do in a food related alphabet challenge – unless it’s the weather for ice cream

Just Bento’s bento box challenge

Just Bento and Just Hungry are two of my favourite sites. I stumbled across them last year when I started taking a packed lunch to work again…something I should have been doing anyway but rarely remembered except on occasions when my Mum hands me sandwiches when I dropped Spider off.

The spur to being more organised was Spider’s pre-school starting a lunch club. As it was on mondays it was an incentive to think about packed lunches over the weekend for the rest of the week (admittedly perhaps FQ and I did spend slightly too much thinking about it and from time to time wasted hours discussing what to put in our childrens lunch bags). Anyway, it worked, for the space of a term I remebered to take lunch with me everyday.

I should point out that when I don’t take food with me, I don’t buy lunch elsewhere – I just don’t eat. Which is a bad thing for many reasons and can contribute to a weight problem as your body gets used to storing calories when it gets them !

I used the internet to get ideas for lunches as I have a limited interest in sandwiches and quickly discovered Lunch in  Box which reminded me about bento boxes, and searching for that brought up Just Bento. Both these sites are jammed packed with ideas not just for lunches but for speeding up preperation of lunches and greater use of the freezer for staple items (I am as you may realise from early posts totally dedicated to my freezer).

I have treated myself to a genuine Bento Box from the Japan Centre but I haven’t used it much – mainly because there was no lunch club last term and as a result I stopped taking lunch – besides  I  found  a cheap partitioned plastic box from a supermarket much more versatile (and its dishwasher safe !).

Anyway, not only is lunch club back this term but Just Bento is running a bento box challenge, starting on the 11th January – it has 3 stages to it Basic, Going Deeper and Weight Loss (in theory the size of your box can be related to the amount of calories it can hold – but that I guess depends on the type of food you are putting in it).

So this is my new years resolution, make lunch for work daily and to keep me on track I am taking the Just Bento challenge…cooking my way through Delia How to Cook 1 & 2 is a personal challenge and not a resolution and I’m giving myself a year for that one due to financial constraints…

The knights who say “knit”

Here at Bunn towers we have gone all knights and castles since Christmas. Well really its since October when we acquired free tickets for Warwick castle. Spider has been mad for horses knights castles falcons and anything medieval. He made some armour over the holidays with grandma out of baco foil and cardboard and just as this was falling apart some kind friend gave him a sword and a shield for Christmas.

Cheese and tomato shield

I don’t do cute food for children as a rule. You won’t often see me turning cupcakes into teddybears or burgers into people with pasta hair, but yesterday I just caught part of Big Cook Little Cook where they were just taking out of the oven a pizza shield, so I thought, as we were having our home made pizzas again this evening I would give it a go – but only for Spider, much as Teenager and Husband might have enjoyed it, I usually leave them to make their own pizza. Anyway, I wouldn’t say it was a roaring success, it’s easier to get a pizza to keep its shape if you use a scone dough which I think they did on the TV. Anyway it served its purpose namely helped with the cheese mountain we are still working are way through since Christmas.

Tiger Hat, no feet

I mentioned just before Christmas that I’d been trying to finish some knitted presents I’d been making for Flapjack Queens children. This morning when I tidied the top of the house I finally managed to undo the spiders web that the cat had made of my knitting bag.

After we put Spider to bed I hoped to settle down to a couple of hours noodling around on the internet, only to discover that Husband had nicked my laptop – so I thought I’d better get cracking on trying to finish 1 of the 3 presents I have on the go at the moment before the cat rediscovers the knitting bag and undoes all my hard work.

This hat is for FQ’s youngest (wheatflake ?) I’ve made it before for Spider, for his 2nd birthday when he was going through a tiger phase…unfortunately 3 hours after he first put it on it got left behind in a cafe in Banbury and was never seen again

Even a Tart has a lemon in her fridge…

as Nigel Slater memorably said in one of his books (think it was Real Food) and then went on to explain that amongst other things it was indispensable for G&T’s. For me admittedly the lemon in a G&T makes the drink simply “summer in a glass”, the very sight of it just cheers me up , although bizarrely our family always drinks its gin with limes…today I could do with one as I desperately need cheering up, but I have to wait until Saturday (I’m on a once a week alcohol regime)…

I knew the economy was going wrong when the price of lemons went up – for as long as I can remember they have been about 18-20p as have limes – when they went up to 30p it was obvious something was wrong – and I object even to  paying the lower price as Dad used to grow them…but that was a long time ago “and in another country…”

When we returned to the UK, lemons most usually appeared in our kitchen in the form of Jiffy lemon – confusingly the same name as the lemon scented  sink cleaner (now CIF)…but towards the end of the 80’s they became more common in shops and I think I would find it hard to cook without them. They are one of the ingredients that I let myself off the “buy local, buy seasonal” hook for.

Tonight I need cheering up, if the finances ever recover then I’m taking the family off to Italy, to Sorrento where the lemons grow (and near Versuvius as they all have volcano obsessions) but only if we have enough airmiles…I’m not holding my breath though as just when you think you are drawing ahead of the game someone knocks you back down again…

In the meantime I appear to have lemon grass, a lemon, lemon squash, lemon essence and lemon oil in the cupboard and a recipe for cake involving SR flour (as that is all I have left in the cupboard apart from wholewheat bread flour) in mind….

If you google “nigel slater” and lemon you get a wonderful recipe for lemon polenta cake. I recommend the article itself purely as a spirit cheering exercise, it really makes you smile and feel better – but I have no limoncello and no polenta so it’s lemon muffins for me (recipe to follow when I have time to type it in).

Are Muffins the ultimate budget cake ?

You may have spotted that my posts so far this year have been alphabetical. I needed to keep posting but I knew that it was unlikely that I would be cooking anything worth talking about for awhile due to lack of time and lack of money…so thought I’d challenge myself.

As it is the black dog has taken up residence in the house and I have run out of plain flour…hence 2 posts in a row about muffins. The great thing about muffins is you can use almost any flour, any type of fat (although you might not get quite so nice a flavour with lard), and put anything in it. You can also tart them up into something a bit special with icing.

They are the ultimate baked goody for the credit crunch, and you can freeze them ! I am surprised that I have managed to restrict myself to only 2 books dedicated to these lovely little morsels of heaven (mind you there are enough recipes elsewhere anyway) . These are Perfectly Simple Muffins: Steven Stellingwerf and Muffins Fast and Fantastic: Susan Reimer. Of the 2 I would say that Muffins Fast and Fantastic is the most useful as it has a great section at the beginning giving advice as to how to tweak the given recipes to work best for alternative types of flour or fat. Also there is a great section about freezing and the best methods for defrosting.

Savoury muffins are a revelation. I had never considered these until I came across the Welsh Rarebit Muffins in Nigella’s Nigella Bites but since then they have become a regular addition to my freezer stash for emergency packed lunches. I tend to make some standard size muffins and some fairy cake size especially for Spider as I’m not sure he could manage a full size one as yet

Unfortunately I am finding it hard at the moment to have sufficient PMA (what management books call “positive mental attitude”) to drag myself into the kitchen to try and bake myself happy…but when I do I shall be making some cheese and herb muffins for next weeks lunches.

Home Baked thought for the week. Management would get more out of their staff if they actually talked to them and then listened to what they said in return… unfortunately some seem to think that stressing you out is the best way to make you perform !

Roll on pay day, its always easier to feel positive when the bank account is not so empty…

RECIPE: Lemon Muffins ( Susan Reimer)

I made these using SR flour as its all I have in at the moment which means same quantities just reduce the baking powder to 1tsp. I was also being too lazy to sift the icing sugar so the glaze came out a bit bumpy…

Ingredients

225g plain flour

3 tsp baking powder

0.5 tsp salt

85-110g caster or granulated sugar

1 egg

240ml milk

1tsp finely grated lemon rind

90ml veg oil or 85g melted butter

0.5ml lemon flavouring (optional)

optional glaze

85g sifted icing sugar

3tsp fresh lemon juice

0.25 tsp grated lemon rind

1. Line muffin tin with paper cases. Preheat oven to 190-200 deg c

2. In a large bowl place all dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, sugar, salt)

3. In a seperate jug beat egg with a fork, stir in milk followed by grated lemon and oil or butter

4. Add all wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir until combined roughly, all flour should be mixed.

5. Divide the mixture into the 12 muffin cases. Bake in oven for approx 20-25 minutes

6. If using the glaze, mix all ingredients together in a bowl. When the muffins come out of the oven, place them on a cooling rack and then add the glaze to the top of the muffins immediately

New Zealand and Niggles

My boss is off on holiday tomorrow to New Zealand for a month and leaving me in charge. He has spent the last 2 weeks worrying me about his job and worrying himself about leaving me in charge and as a result we have been niggling away at each other and mildly getting on each other’s nerves.

Part of this is jealousy on my part as I haven’t been away since last May (all of 2 days as we came home the afternoon of the second day when I discovered we had gone over the overdraft !), and especially so since New Zealand is where I spent my honeymoon – 9 happy days going round NZ in a camper van. Oddly enough it was also the first place that Husband and I shopped together for food because despite having been together for over 3 years at that stage, we had never really shopped together having kept 2 separate homes in 2 separate towns some 30 miles distance.

Due to the storage facilities in the van our meals had to be relatively simple and its something that we are coming back to whilst we are paying back the debt. So far this week we have had stew with dumplings (twice), jacket potato with left over bolognaise and sausage, mash and brussel sprouts – tomorrow is bubble and squeak…and no recipe books were harmed or even used in the making of the meals !

I am dreaming however of some memorable meals from our honeymoon

• a byo place in Auckland called Mama’s where I had venison and Husband had lamb shank and where we liked the look of each others dinner so much that we went back the next night and reversed the order
• Tea and cheese and bread in a layby just outside of Christchurch – it was a great view
• wine and a simple snack lunch at the Babich winery outside of Auckland whilst playing boule
• a very strange steak and pepper sauce in Queensland and a conversation that went like this “is there actually any pepper in this sauce”  “no sir, its pumpkin, its the chef’s speciality…”

We’ve never really celebrated valentine’s day but I think I may, if I have any Amazon sales this month try and save enough money for 2 lamb shanks and a bottle of Babich and try and recreate the memories – failing that I can always do bread and cheese and buy a packet of Dilmah tea bags which they now sell in Sainsbury’s.  I think we need something to put smiles back on our faces.

I know nothing about the cuisine of NZ except that it appears to be the home of the muffin and somehow, much as I love muffins I feel that a 3rd posting about them would be overkill…

Orange Coloured Day

This is a temporary post but I had to shout it out loud

WE NOW HAVE AN ALLOTMENT

Its only taken a about a year of chasing the owners and then a further 9 or 10 months hassling the land agents…but yes Flapjack Queen and I are about to share the joys and torments of an allotment, starting with having to clear it as the land has been disused for almost 10 years…but then that’s what god invented Husbands for…

O is for onions and alliums in general

I had been planning on missing out “O” until I’d written the post for “P” as “O” was going to be all about Onigiri but since these would be for my lunch over the week it seemed pretty pointless making them and writing about them on a Friday…but then this weekend has been so busy that I haven’t had chance to cook (except for a long thin sponge) or write until now.

As it is the news about the allotment has perked me up enough to start thinking about what to grow and first on the list is onions/garlic/shallots/spring onions as most of my non baking cookery tends to start with “take 1 onion, chop” – certainly if I don’t know what to cook for dinner I’ll usually start chopping and onion and waiting for inspiration to strike.

The other thing onions have going for them is they are the only thing the slugs in my garden don’t seem to touch. Last year I lost the tops of the onions, garlic and shallots to the slugs but the bulbs themselves were ok – got a bumper crop of shallots but the onions I think may have been too closer together in their container…

I had vague plans to either make french onion soup (my mum’s recipe) or an upside down onion tart which I have vague memories of from a Nigella recipe.

As it was we spent Sunday morning pottering around the wet wasteland at the end of our houses trying to work out what size the allotment should be and where…and now here we are at sunday evening when I have to think about packed lunches for the week and and could both make and write about about rice balls, but I find myself with a fridge of leftovers and no need to make something specifically for lunches. My parents celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary this weekend…looks like we are in for another week of creative cooking.

I may make the Leon lentil soup in the next few days…it got a good write up on Lacer’s Life…and once again my stomach is in turmoil from anxiety and I need something gentle to calm it down…thank god its payday this week !

ps been a bit of a week for people passing away, John Mortimer on thursday and Tony Hart this morning…

Something to look forward to…

I have been suffering from “the time of the month”  which is a euphemism for “it’s almost pay day”. As a result I’ve been experiencing that constricted feeling again…my insides have felt all twisted and tight and I’ve been finding it hard to think straight…part of the problem it seems is I’ve been overdosing on Radio 4 news programmes who are almost wall to wall banking crisis with a bit of Obama and Gaza thrown in for variety…

As an experiment I tried silence…I tried turning silence up loud…doesn’t work…must remember to put some CD’s in the car.

What has worked however is forward thinking about parties. Spider has a lot of friends with birthdays in February and March so we are busy most weekends it would seem…trying to find presents within budget now that Woolies has gone is proving a challenge.

But the thing that really cheers me up is planning Spider’s birthday. He is having a shared party with Flapjack Princess (they have a lot of the same friends in the village and quite a large circle of non pre-school friends) and for purely practical and economic reasons it is going to be a Pirate and Princess party. Practical because most girls have a princess or fairy type outfit, economic because our local supermarket was selling chocolate coins off cheap and we have bought in bulk  (yes I know I’m a cheapskate…I prefer the word “thrifty”)!

I suspect that I will probably enjoy Spider’s party more than he will…he will enjoy it because it’s a party, he will enjoy his party as much as he enjoys the other parties…I will enjoy it because it will make him smile…

I have a rather ambitious plan to do a skull and cross bones cake…it’s ambitious for me as I don’t really do icing, not the rolled out type…I may need a back up plan…I may be about to test drive Susan Austin’s Freezer party (see Frostbite) which even includes a frozen birthday cake amongst it’s recipes.

I don’t know whether it was the phonecall confirming our reservation of the village hall or whether it was my payslip dropping through the letter box but for the first time in a week I can feel my internal organs uncurling and relaxing…and I am beginning to be able to think straight…but to stay this way I might try weaning myself off Radio 4 or at least try not to listen to quite so much news !

Quesadillas

I used to have, as part of my cooker a griddle plate – it was as Husband would describe it,  a “great bit of kit”. It was really useful when knocking up a cooked breakfast for “men” (I am outnumbered at the weekends) or, if you are in “yummy mummy” mode breakfast pancakes. It had 2 flaws however, the first was it was really difficult to clean if cooking something a bit fatty (bacon) and being electric it was very slow to heat up and very slow to cool down again…

When we moved we found we missed it, but not enough to buy the same cooker for yet a third time (we used to have separate houses before we married)…however for christmas this year treated ourselves to a double sided griddle “sheet” which you place over the burners of a gas hob  .

I’ve not had chance to play with it as yet as Husband has been doing almost all the cooking since christmas (lovely lovely sausage and mash this evening).

Anyway I was looking in the fridge last night, looking for inspiration for Spider’s Lunch Club when I discovered amongst the leftovers almost all the ingredients for Quesadillas as per Nigella Express – unfortunately however Husband had already earmarked the ham and bacony bits for a variation on carbonara…

Besides I try not to have the main bit of Spiders packed lunch something he hasn’t had before – and at the moment he eats wraps but insists on unrolling them and removing the filling.

So the next day I was nosing round the fridge again and these wraps were still looking back at me, as was quite a lot of blue cheese.

So this is my version filled with hummus, grated blue cheese, left over roast chicken and sliced spring onion. Nigella’s version can be found here and this is what wikepedia has to say about them.

Quesadilla ? panini ? things have moved on so much since the 80’s when I used to envy the frequent appearance of a Breville toasted sarnie in my friend Wilf’s lunchbox… and the griddle is so much easier to clean.

If I had had a better day and not spent yet another 5 hours stranded on the M40 I might have been tempted to pass on the recipe for making  flatbread/wraps in case you felt desperate to make quesadillas and didn’t have spare ones floating around the fridge…which I guess is a very strange place to keep wraps and to tell you the truth I cannot remember putting them there in the first place…I guess it’s early senility setting in…

Never say never

Spider, like a lot of pre school children can be unreasonable, stubborn and strong willed. It really used to upset me when I went to the trouble of making a healthy meal from scratch only for him to completely refuse to touch it…

I’ve stopped getting upset, now I just insist that he at least tries 1 spoonful of it, whatever it is, whether its something new or something that he has eaten in the past and has decided he doesn’t want any more. It all comes down to control freakery – food is the one area of his life that he can control, because short of forcing the food down his throat I cannot actually make him eat…where as with most of the rest of his life he is having to do as he is told by people bigger than him.

By insisting he has 1 spoonfull honour is satisfied on both sides. Spider keeps trying new things and as far as he is concerned eating 1 spoonfull is not giving in, as he hasn’t eaten it all.

I will get my own way in the end as he will end up liking a wide range of food eventually. It worked with me…I even ended up eating olives, although it did take until I was 28, but I kept trying them every 2 years or so, just to see if my tastes had changed…it has even worked eventually with radishes (although they do need to be cut thinly) which is a good thing as I’ve just discovered 2 packets of radish seeds in my seed box (think I got them because I wanted something easy to grow to get Spider interested in plants)…and somehow I think its going to be a long time before Spiders taste buds make that leap…

Rick Stein’s Food Heroes

I spent most of saturday morning feeling anxious and I don’t know why, Payday has come and gone for both of us, the bills are paid and there is food in the cupboard, no one is ill, work is quiet, in fact everything is going swimmingly and I’ve even started planting a few things for the garden – but still I had this nervous, worried feeling chewing up my insides…

We tried a cheap distraction technique that all 3 of us would enjoy. We went to the local library. Husband and I floated around the shelves and Spider made a den under the table in the children’s section. I don’t know why, but having been an avid reader from the age of 4.5 until 33 (drivers in Crowthorne frequently used to stare on their way to work at the scruffy teenager walking along with her nose in a book !) I appear to have stopped reading fiction since my son was born…anyway Spider’s ticket was at his Grandma’s so he stole most of my allocation.

I came out with Minus 9-1:Jools Oliver - now don’t get the idea that I take my interest in cookery so seriously that I’m even reading books by the wives of chef’s, its just this book came out the year Spider was born when I was going through a lot of what the book is about, and I’d put it on the mental tick list, and since it was in a prominent place I took it out…it’s pretty light and fluffy so I’d managed to demolish it by bedtime anyway.

Currently ploughing through Wife in the North:Judith O’Reilly recommended by Husband as he’d heard it on Radio 4…I think he secretly harbours thoughts that someone will offer me a book deal because I’m doing a blog – think not, she was a trained journalist before she started her blog, I’m a lawyer. Nobody is interested in what lawyers think as they are too scared it might cost them !

The other book I’m reading at the moment is Rick Stein’s Food Heroes…now Rick is a slightly strange addition to my Food Heroes list. You see I do not own any of his books and I doubt whether I will ever cook any of his recipes as they are far too cheffy for me…and I’m the only person in the house that eats fish, but he has had an influence in my life and I like what he’s doing now.

In a previous life, I used to go to Padstow every new year. There was a lovely tradition that on new years day the boys would cook and the girls would go to the pub. One year we were sent out to get some last minute ingredients and came back, via a couple of pubs and in the last one we went in there was a right old sing song going on and I swear that right in the thick of it was Mr Stein – the boys scoffed at this saying “don’t be silly, he goes to australia every christmas”. Anyway as a result of our frequent Padstow visits and the fact I liked fish, my boyfriend at the time, realising that a man who can cook is by my standards impressive virtually cooked his way through 2 of Rick’s books.

After the relationship ended, I sort of regarded Rick Stein as the boyfriend’s territory and steered clear…and then some time ago I accidently came across the food heroes series on TV, and was impressed – I liked what he was doing, and having grown up in Worcestershire, home of PYO fruit thought it was about time that someone started celebrating what we have to offer, especially if its local…

So yes Rick Stein is one of my food heroes, but not for his cooking or his recipe books or for the fact he grows his own whatever, but that he’s out there, quietly singing the praises of the producers – and it is quiet and so very very english, but he keeps on plugging away at it…yay, go Rick !

The devil lurks in the smoke…

London today for a meeting near the curiously (and historically) named Strutton Ground and Perkin Rents… I always love going through Strutton Ground it’s just so busy and wall to wall sandwich and cake shops, the market, people coming towards you from all directions…and unfortunately for me the Oxfam Bookshop and the discount bookshop.

I was almost lead astray in the discount bookshop, I was seduced in by a book on “slow cookers”, felt myself weakening when I saw The New Kitchen:Rose Prince for £3.99 and then I heard the sirens call from the top shelf…I almost gave into the temptation of Falling Cloudberries:Tessa Kiros in brand new hardback reduced to £12.99 but no the money in my pocket was for a purpose, lunch and a gossip with my colleagues.

I have been good all month taking a packed lunch to work, not that it saves me much money as whenever I’ve forgotten to bring lunch in the past I’ve usually just gone without. Normally at meetings lunch is provided, but once a year we go for a late christmas lunch which we pay for ourselves – nothing flash we just go for the 2 for £8 meals in the closest pub – it’s the chat that matters, the none work chat with people I see 4 times a year and email the rest.

My actual treat was going to be some fresh coriander for the second to last of the 4 Leon Slaw’s I have been working my way through…it started with the beetroot I had left over from Hugh FW’s brownie’s – I couldn’t face cooking them again and I wasn’t in a mood for getting the juicer out.

Autumn Slaw - not bad ditched the celeriac as no one was selling any, and changed the red cabbage to white, which I then used in the other slaw’s. The beetroot has quite a strong woody taste which doesn’t really do much for me, but didn’t put me off

Sumptuous Slaw – this was actually my favourite and lasted quite well. A bit heavy on the aniseed taste as it has both dill and fennel in it, although mine was both fennel seeds and fresh fennel (still alive in the garden). Any roughness in the dressing is down to the fact that my wine vinegars are the cheapest I could lay my hands on a few years ago…

Open Sesame Slaw – just tried a taste of this one, this evening. A dairy free mayonnaise type dressing, made with soya milk (borrowed from Dad), left out the parsley and replaced the broad beans with french beans (in the freezer), discovered half way through that I’d run out of peas so made the weight up with sweetcorn.

The only one left to make now is Happy Carrot but that will have to wait until I have found some coriander as both the co op and Budgen’s had sold out…and may not happen at all if the mint in the garden is dead !

I’m all lost in the supermarket…can no longer shop happily

Apart from the slaw for this weeks lunch I haven’t managed much cooking this evening as have been sat on my bottom watching Hugh and his chickens – I missed this last time round.

I was trying to salve my conscience as I turned to Husband to say “well, at least we don’t eat much chicken, and what we do tends to come from the Co op” when he pointed out that there is usually a bag of chicken dipper type things lurking not too deep in the freezer.

One of my friends, Supermum has a new years resolution that she will not use a supermarket again, except for the local Co op as they are a) a bit more ethical and b) supporting local shops is a “good thing” – I want so much to be a better person but until my herb garden starts growing I shall have to rely on the big pushers to get my drugs of choice (coriander and basil mainly, occasionally mint and parsley – fortunately even I can’t kill off a thyme plant).

What goes with Jam and Bread ?

Tea. Apparently. It also goes very well with cake, and in cake… I read somewhere the other day that “afternoon tea” is making a comeback. That lovely ritual of small sarnies, little cakes or scones or best of all a toasted teacake. It would appear that in times of crisis, despite the rise of coffee in the last 10 years, the Brits, especially the English reach for their cuppas.

My day is punctuated, almost timetabled by important cups of tea which help me get through the day. The gasper, the first cup on waking, drunk in the dark as I slowly collect my thoughts together to tackle the day. The catch up cuppa with my parent when I drop Spider off. The procrastinator, the one I drink when I reach my desk as I sort the inbox into urgent and delete…

The Teenager is itching to cook with it, or correction he wants to try smoking food in a biscuit tin, having watched Jamie Oliver at the Food Show I think, woodshavings however make me think far too much of the bottom of a gerbils cage, so come summer (as I don’t fancy a kitchen thick with smoke) I may let him experiment with a biscuit tin and some loose tea…

I spent my lunch hour cruising the 4 floors of this building trying to cadge an Earl Grey teabag as I’m planning some budget cooking not involving a muffin…I have some not particularly good dates, some sultanas and some prunes to use up. The plan is Bara Brith…a real “tea” cake.

oops, didn’t read the recipe

No Bara Brith as I didn’t read the recipe properly last night, the fruit needed soaking overnight – and now its soaked for the required time I am really not in the mood for doing it…the day started so well watching the lambs frisking in the fields whilst their mum’s looked on, I even saw snowdrops…

And then I get home to discover that Derek the Dirty Diesel has gone pop…and Husband is making phonecalls to find a cheap replacement – so if anyone has a cheap run about going for about £500 max then please email !

Sometimes even cake can’t stave off the blues for me…

ps  ignore the bit about the run about – Husband has just come in to say he’s bought one…now we have to find £500 to pay for it…I guess Derek will have some scrap value !

Stuck ?

No, not stuck, I have a post for both U and V, although I may not necessarily do them in the right order as one involves clearing out the veg drawer and the other involves letting some dough rise… besides I’ve only just cooked the Bara Brith (using a sainsbury’s teabag and a rosehip teabag)…it has been a very tough and tiring week.

tea and a slice of tea cake

What I am struggling with is finishing off the alphabet posts before the end of the month as I’m not sure I can manage cooking 6 things before I run out of day tomorrow.

I am so so tired…

Ursula’s (wholemeal) Pizza

I challenged myself at the beginning of January to post in alphabetical order. There were some rules, I was allowed to bend the subject matter of the letter a little, I would not buy lots of ingredients in specially for the recipe and I would cook things that we would normally eat. On days where I didn’t have the time to cook or the inclination I could write about something related to food, like a chef.

So I was so pleased to discover this recipe under “U” in Leon:Allegra McEvedy and then to realised that the only strong flour left in cupboard was wholemeal, I have all the ingredients in the cupboard for the sauce and I can tailor the toppings to something the family will eat.

But wholemeal ? Do I eat wholemeal pizza ? Yes, in  fact a slice of wholemeal pizza, topped with pumpkin seeds from the health food shop in Llangfni (Anglesey) used to be my treat in the summer I left university…there weren’t a lot of jobs around that year and even less when you were living away from the main stream on a welsh island. Not a lot of jobs around now, and homemade pizza is cheap if you have the time.

And time is something I don’t have a lot of which is why its taken until saturday for me to make the dough. Its in the fridge now having a long long slow rise (a la Nigella Lawson) ready for movie night tonight – I’m off now to clear out the veg drawer in the fridge – fun (not!).

Oh almost forgot, can’t find recipe for this out on the web and I’m not posting it here as there is a mistake in the book (you add the yeast twice in 2 different ways, I did what I thought made sense but I won’t know until tonight whether it’s worked). Recipe for a  similar wholemeal pizza is here.

Spring cleaning the fridge

When I was younger spring for me started when the bluebells came out (it also meant it was almost my birthday). At university spring arrived on the 1st March with the daffodils and St David’s Day. Just before Spider was born  I discovered snowdrops and ever since then the appearance of snowdrops heralds a mad session of cleaning and organising for me (the nesting instinct !).

So here we are, almost february and I’m in organising, cleaning and filling the freezer mode. Last night I roasted some sweet potatoes  which were bought short dated at the co op 2 weeks ago (eek). On skinning them this morning I discovered that they were purple fleshed ones…suspect I’m going to be the only one eating the falafel if they are purple not orange. Recipe here.

Most of the veg has ended its life in a leek and potato soup – normally I serve this with soda bread (a great standby on days you have run out of bread, buttermilk can be substituted by milk and s teaspoon of white wine vinegar) – but today it will be the remains of the 2 loaves in the kitchen (1 white, 1 brown – don’t ask, I’ve been an indulgent Mummy). I don’t use a recipe for the soup, I simply slice an onion up and fry it in butter until its soft, add whatever leeks I have available (sliced), and a couple of finely diced potatoes. Put the lid on and sort of fry and steam it for about 5 minutes (keeping an eye on the pan to make sure it doesn’t stick). Then add a pint of stock (vegetable or chicken) and simmer gently for about 30 minutes. Puree the vegetables and then add some milk.

Today’s version has the addition of a stick of celery and some spring onions added at the same time as the leeks.

If you want a proper recipe then try this one

Oh and if you serve it cold then it’s vichyssoise.

The midget fidget and the bacon and apple pie

The midget fidget is Spider, he just does not know how to be still. Shropshire Fidget Pie on the other hand is a potato and bacon mixture covered in suet pastry as demonstrated on the Victorian Farm (BBC 2) the other night.

I am getting addicted to this programme. I started watching it initially as background for family history as some of Husband’s ancestors we were surprised to discover came from Shropshire…obviously hiked down the A5 when times were bad, but before that were miners and agricultural workers from some of the nice little villages that are now buried by Telford.

I must admit that I am having to fight the strong desire to turn the back garden into a smallholding a la Tom And Barbara Good – those piglets look so cute…fortunately they don’t stay cute otherwise I could see problems ahead when having to er, make use of them when they are older !

Anyway this Fidget Pie looks like a good budget recipe. They made it with a suet pastry but since our suet is a bit suspect I’ve just made a simple short crust pastry. I had to buy some more bacon as we only had 2 rashes which I suspect would not be enough but I did have a cooking apple in the fridge and some cider we brought in for the Fairy Goth Mother at Christmas which didn’t get used. I had to search the internet though for cooking times for a conventional oven. A recipe for Shropshire Fidget Pie is here

Pie sitting on the side waiting to be cooked either on sunday or on monday depending on what we are doing tomorrow.

Hayley’s Gran

Hayley’s Gran was a glorious set of coincidences of going to university in a particular city, choosing a particular course, a particular set of Hall’s and then the randomness of university accommodation allocation. I was very lucky in my neighbours in the first year of university and ended up living with them for the following 2 years. We are all still in touch some 20 years later, but with children there’s not really the time to keep up.

Hayley was (and still is) a Valkyrie of a welsh girl, 5ft 11 with long auburn hair, amazing blue eyes and a stunning sense of style. She came from a small town about 30 miles away from Cardiff and as a result of such relative closeness she tended to see her parents about every 2 weeks. In the first year I too saw my parents quite often as they only lived a train journey away in Reading…unfortunately they moved to Anglesey half way through my second year !

I lived for sunday evenings, if Hayley had been with her parents as she always came back with food and often within the various bags and packages she came back with there was a batch of Hayley’s Gran’s Welsh cakes.

Despite many attempts over the years I have just never managed to match the splendor of these little sultana dotted cake biscuits and this evening has been no different…if only I’d asked for the recipe and the method when I was at university.

This evening’s attempt was using a recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess on the new griddle – they burnt…they were at least drier and less “fried” than usual, but it wasn’t Hayley’s Gran’s standard. Didn’t bother with a photo as they were disappointing – am still eating them though as I need some sort of consolation for the fact that Spider has refused everything I have made today, that really makes me feel worthless and no good at my “job”

Larousse Gastronomique

X is difficult. Larousse Gastronomique only has one entry, and quite frankly if that’s all they can come up with then I think I can get away without having anything else.

Ximenia – Type of small plant found in hot countries, of which there are a number of species, among them the ximenia of Gabon which is widespread in Africa. The fruits known as mountain plums or wild limes, are edible…

Food Hero: My Husband

For many reasons I would place my husband under Y. Partly because he probably the inspiration for the last few recipes, in an abstract way…or least his family history is.

It has not gone unnoticed that there has been a run of welsh recipes (Bara Brith, Leek Soup and welsh cakes). I am not welsh, despite spells in Cardiff and on Anglesey, but Husband is, avowedly so (despite being born in Wolverhampton) and in the run up to the 6 nations even more so…I even note that the Student (who 12 days ago started a blog) is also remembering (in the context of rugby) that he is 1/4 welsh.

His cooking however is not reminiscent of his welsh blood – I don’t think his grandma cooked. From everything I’ve heard from other relatives I think she considered herself to good to cook. He has a small repertoire of dishes that he cooks very well and without looking at a recipe. He has no pretensions towards posh cookery and doesn’t claim to be anything he isn’t and quite frankly what he does put on the table is very good. I would love to put up here the recipe for Manchester Cheese on Toast but he keeps this secret close and won’t even let me in the kitchen when he makes it.

My husband also makes a pretty mean yorkshire pud but won’t share his method. All I know is that it uses 250ml of bitter and takes 40 minutes to cook and that he never gets around to cooking it until I’m advising the family that dinner will be on the table in 20 minutes.

Husband I love you. And thank you for doing all the cooking in January I will try and get home earlier in February – promise !

ZZzzzzzzz….zzzz!

I have run out of energy and enthusiasm and am longing for my bed. Spider has been a complete brat all day.

Z is for zabaglione – which is a wonderful indulgent italian dessert, which can be done in the microwave, but it is a fine line between liquor flavoured egg custard and scrambled egg with alcohol… the way I feel at the moment I know that I would serve up the latter whereas I long for the former.

Husband set off for the co op 5 minutes ago and has returned with some fairtrade chocolate…so I am logging off for some guilt free (calories what calories at least it doesn’t  exploit anyone except the one eating it).

The Queen of coloured goo

My fridge has been full of suspicious looking bowls of coloured goo for the last week or so. The family has been remarkably tolerant and have even eaten some of it.

The first was the sweet potato I mentioned last week. Purple as the ones I picked up turned out not to be orange fleshed. They were turned into falafel, which are ok, but not a patch on chickpea ones.

The second bowl was orange pulp…I mentioned to Husband that the last lot of clementines were going mouldy before getting ripe enough to peel. He immediately put in a request for Bitter Orange Muffins as he likes the smell of them boiling away on the stove – shame neither of us were able to smell it due to our colds.

The final bowl was another attempt at gnocchi.

I am worried that this blog may be turning into Appetite for Beetroot as, discovering a final forgotten beetroot in the veg drawer, I decided to attempt the Beetroot Gnocchi from Apples for Jam: Tessa Kiros.

I found 2 things out tonight, adding vegetables to gnocchi is not a talent of mine, they always turn out a bit suspect. The second thing is that although the idea of beetroot gnocchi is quite intriguing the reality of eating something quite so pink that is savory rather than sweet is really not to be recommended. It reminded Husband so much of uncooked meatballs that he just wasn’t able to finish them. If anyone fancies trying them then a very similar (identical ?) recipe can be found here - you do need to use more flour if you want to avoid a sticky mess, despite what she Tessa K says in the book.

No idea what they tasted like – I’ve lost my sense of taste as well as smell…

The only green eyed baseball playing snowman in warwickshire

Well we finally got a substantial fall of snow that stayed for more than half a day. I woke up this morning to a properly white world AND the primary school was shut, which meant the pre-school was too. I phoned in to take a day off and got in touch with my inner child…

As an adult, I hate snow. Snow is stuff for looking at through a double pane of glass with a glass of mulled wine in your hand. Fortunately, having had a brief career as the outdoor type before Spider was born I have kit designed to cope with all weathers – so Spider and I got water and windproofed to the hilt and then set out to join the rest of the village (yes the rest of the village) enjoying the winter wonderland in the farmers field over the road from our house.  It really was a lovely little communal scene, you can almost imagine what it used to be round here when the village was the centre of life and not just where you sleep.

We made a snowman, and pelted each other with snowballs and made snow angels and snow castles and then ran home laughing and giggling like 2 4 year olds (instead of 1) for a nice warm bath, muffins and hot chocolate…and then pretended we were chameleons in the living room seeing who had the longest tongue.  Spider had fun. I joined in without complaint and made sure that he had, ok not the best snowman in the village but certainly the only one with dried lime slices as eyes (the end slice you never put in your gin).

Anyway whilst I was getting all sentimental about how great it was that a village can still bond and be communal, Husband had dragged himself off his sick bed to get some milk and other essentials – he was not experiencing communal village life at its best but more the “siege mentality” and everyman from himself.  Apparently the shelves in the co op had been emptied of milk and bread within the first hour of being open and rumour has it,  it was “all the people that don’t normally come in”. Hey no problem guys, at least you are using it – now make sure you use them more often otherwise they won’t be there next time we get snowed in.

Me, admittedly I am making bread this evening, not from fear of shortage but more I actually had the time and half an open packet of yeast to use up.  We keep the freezer stocked up with short dated bread anyway ( a full freezer is more efficient) and have 2 litres of semi skimmed UHT in the cupboard at all times.

The “bread” is actually “half moon rolls” from Apples for Jam:Tessa Kiros, I have a craving for some soft white rolls…but I think there may be something wrong with my yeast…so I am not too hopeful…half moon rolls are a basic white dough recipe rolled in a particular way.

Swivel rolls

Was too lazy (or cheap) to brush the bread rolls with egg and as a result they came to pieces in the oven…they are er, somewhat er, erect.

Burning down the house…

otherwise known as “don’t try this at home”…

I have 2 burnt saucepans, the assorted boys in this house decided to usurp my movie night role of chief corn popper and go through 2 saucepans before I caught them and explained that this batch of popcorn is useless and they’d be better off doing it in the microwave.

Normal scrubbing just wasn’t shifting the debris. Driving home on wednesday night I suddenly remembered reading in The Cleaning Bible that you can sometimes shift the rubble in burnt pans with biological washing powder. On checking, sure enough a small scoop of bio powder, gently heated in a bit of water and then left should deal with the problem.

I tried it out as soon as I got home. As usual however just before bedtime (Spider’s not mine) I was trying to do 5 things at once.

I am pleased to advise that it works. I am also pleased to advise that my smoke alarm works, in fact all 3 of them do…and they are very loud. I can also report that a pan of biological washing powder dissolved in water when left to boil dry on the hob stinks the house out !

Reasons to be cheerful, part 3

1.   On Wednesday morning as I was sitting on the floor of my parent’s kitchen and tying my shoe laces, Spider came in and sat on the floor between my legs, put his head on my chest and looked up at me and into my eyes. As I looked down into his eyes, I saw all trace of “mischievous imp” was gone and his hazel eyes were as soft as “a pleading spaniel puppy”. He spoke “I miss you when you go”.

2. Driving into Reading I noticed the red brick of Reading Gaol stark in the morning sunshine against a crisp blue sky (that tiny patch of blue that prisoners call the sky”). It reminded me of a similar march morning some 7 years ago when a chance encounter with a stranger in a shop sent my life spinning into a new direction. Indirectly this meeting lead to me meeting my Husband, its direct effect however was to pick me up from the bruised aftermath of a very bad relationship…in case you are wondering, I bought a pair of walking boots.

The quirks of fate meant that on the 3rd anniversary of that March day Spider was born. In 2002 I discovered how nice it was to be selfish and to follow your own dream for awhile. Thanks to Spider I have discovered how nice it is to follow someone elses…at least until Bedtime.

3.  I have a clean house. It’s taken awhile but I think I’m straight again and what’s more I want to make cake…a lot of cake !

Life of Pie

Feeling at a loss. The wonderful Victorian Farm (BBC2) finished on Thursday. I started watching it purely to get some background on family history (some of Husband’s family came from shropshire) but ended up really enjoying it. Haven’t had the urge to cook anything else from the programme  since the Fidget Pie although I was vaguely toying with the idea of brewing beer !

When I was searching for a similar recipe to Fidget Pie to get oven temp and timings (not owning a range as they do on Victorian Farm) I come across another pie (not surprising when you are searching through a book called Pie: Angela Boggiano) which made Husband say “wow, that sounds good”. So I made it last night as a “we don’t celebrate valentine’s day, but” meal. (Cheshire Cheese and Onion Pie)

No, we don’t celebrate Valentine’s day here. Husband claims he doesn’t do it because it’s just a feast for card makers and he doesn’t need 1 day in the year to show he loves me. Personally I think it’s more to do with his fear of being told off if he forgets it ! Me, I am relieved not to have to be creative anymore. I used to make an effort to come up with something different and unusual but by and large was disappointed by other’s lack of originality – although the year I was treated to “Egg and Chips and Champagne” was quite fun !

nice as pie

Anyway I came home last night to discover 2 bunches of flowers “because a house needs flowers” and thought I should do something a little different for tea – unfortunately this pie does take over an hour in the oven plus about 30 minutes to make the pastry and prep the filling, so it was gone 9pm by the time it hit the table – or our knees as by that time we were watching Almost Human (BBC2).

Anyway I am pleased to say that the pie was a success. Husband is in love with the pastry which is a cheese shortcrust and…wait for it, WANT’S TO LEARN HOW TO MAKE PASTRY !!!

This morning I am enjoying a gentle morning of CBeebies with my “young man” who does I am pleased to say celebrate Valentine’s Day, so much so that he has given me 2 Card’s. One which he made and coloured in himself, the other he bought but included 2 packets of seeds – coriander and rocket, something I haven’t seen before “Suttons Groweasy Seed Mats”.

RECIPE: CHESHIRE CHEESE AND ONION PIE (ANGELA BOGGIANO)

Cheese Shortcrust Pastry

150g Plain flour

pinch salt

110g butter

38g hard cheese (red leicester recommended)

1-2 tbs water.

1. Mix flour and salt in the bowl and then rub the butter in until it resembles breadcrumbs

2, Add the cheese. Add the water slowly and mix with a knife. When dough starts to stick together knead it into a ball

3. Wrap with clingfilm and leave in fridge for at least 15 minutes

4.  Preheat oven to 180 deg C

Filling

1 bunch of spring onions, roughly chopped

125g cheshire cheese, crumbled

4tbs creme fraiche

1 bunch chives, snipped (I used the tops of the spring onions as I had no chives)

500g floury potatoes, peeled and sliced very thinly

salt and ground black pepper

1. Roll out about 175g of the pastry. Line a  23cm shallow pie dish

2. Mix together the spring onions, cheshire cheese, creme fraiche and snipped chives in a bowl. Season with a little salt and lots of pepper.

3. Arrange potatoes in layers on the pastry with a few tablespoons of the cheese mixture between each layer. Keep going until all are used up.

4. Brush the edge of pastry with milk. Roll out the remaining pastry (so that its a little larger than the dish) and then lay this over the top of the pie

5. Crimp edges to seal, brush with milk to glaze -DO NOT MAKE HOLES IN THE PASTRY, YOU WANT THE STEAM TO STAY IN THE PIE as this helps the potatoes cook

6. Place in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes. Reduce the heat to 160 deg c and cook for about a  further 40 minutes until the pastry is golden and the potatoes seem cooked when a skewer is placed in the pie

Leave to cool a bit before cutting so that the filling melds together a bit more

If this doesn’t make you want to buy the book then nothing will !

In season now: Pears, believe it or not but only just

I’ve mentioned before that I am am trying to firstly eat seasonally and if possibly eat locally. Eating locally currently is restricted to this country  rather than this county, partly because I’m not yet organised enough,but mainly ‘cos I’ve delegated the shopping to Husband for budgetary reasons (he’s better at getting bargains).

[When we had more money I did try an organic box via River Nene which was good from a seasonal and localish point, but  bad as you didn't get much choice in the contents of the box (think they may have changed the system now) and since my guys are picky about their vegetables I ended up eating a lot of weird soups to use the veg up...there was also the period when I got Kale 3 boxes in a row - not good !]

Anyway I was floating around the net this morning and came across the Pink Fairy cake blog (their actual website is a good resource for cooking with children). I  discovered that Pears are in season now.  Having grown up in Worcestershire the home of apples and pears I was very surprised to learn this as I’d always assumed they were ready the same time as the Apples (Sept-Dec) but no, on checking the BBC website (you can tell I’m British, I always head for the BBC for the low down !) it would seem that they are in season January.

I love pears. They are not something, pre Spider I bought very often (except perhaps in tins) as usually when you buy them they are rock hard, take so long to get ripe and by the time they are ripe they go over and get mushy so quickly – and don’t ever ever consider putting a ripe pear in your lunchbox ! But when it came to weaning Spider they were one of the first things I gave him (apparently they are gentle on small people’s tummies) and it was then I discovered that cold pear puree is probably one of the closest things to “food from heaven” you can get !

I am also very fond of pear juice and have happy memories of hot days travelling round europe by train with lunches of bread and cheese and glass bottles of pear juice…don’t ever try putting a ripe pear through a juice extractor – as Nigel Slater points out in Thirst, all you get is a few pathetic dribbles of juice !

So I am on the look out for some pears to kick start my interest in cooking – I suffer quite badly from lack of motivation in the winter months and all I want to do is hide under the duvet, as you may have gathered from the lack of activity here recently (that’s also partly due to lack of cash)…if nothing else there is a tin of pears in the cupboard !

Dinosaur Eggs

I am not the creative type. I am a willing assistant at “make and do” when Spider’s in that sort of mood but you don’t usually get me sitting down with scissors and glue and card for fun. This morning however the boys kicked me out of the kitchen as they wanted to get creative with the crepe pan…they’ve also used up the last of my flour so that’s put the mockers on doing any baking until Friday (unless the child benefit payment had been paid).

So I have spent the morning with bits of paper, a balloon and some wallpaper paste making 2 dinosaur eggs for the dinosaur puppet I started knitting just after christmas. I have found it quiet therapeutic actually, just sticking bit after bit of paper to the balloon – had hoped Spider would want to do it too, but he’s too busy creating treasure island with Playmobile figures (the obituary for the inventor of it was in the Guardian the other day) in the living room…Teenager did help with the second one, but he got bored when he discovered I was insisting on 6 layers. “We only had to do 2 layers at school, and it was strong enough”, I pointed out that whatever it was he did at school it wasn’t then played with by his half brother…

The puppet itself is made but needs sewing together – it is at this point that I usually get bored – fortunately I’m on a deadline so it may get finished by thursday (Flapjack Princess’ birthday)…photos to follow another time, I have to go and investigate the strange banging noises coming from upstairs…I think the bedrooms may have become infested with saurapodlets…

Recipe: Radio Times Pear Tart

When I was younger and with a lot less on my mind, I was more organised (cue hollow laughter from my Mum and Islay (sister in law)). I used to keep a recipe book where I would write down or more often stick down recipes that I’d found in magazines – the rule was that it didn’t go in the book unless I’d cooked it and liked it…as I got older the number of recipes around increased at a much faster rate than my cooking and then I also discovered recipe books.

Anyway this recipe is right at the front of the book and has been made on numerous occasions but won’t be this month as it would appear I am right at the end of the Pear season – never mind plenty of other things I can make, come friday when there is flour in the house again – think I’d better start buying in bulk.

Ingredients

10oz Shortcrust Pastry

1.5lb Pears

Juice of a lemon

8oz carton whipping cream

2 eggs plus 1 egg yolk

3oz caster sugar

1. Preheat oven to 200 deg c(400 deg F or Gas 6)

2. Roll pastry out and line a 9-10 inch flan tin with it. Prick the base and bake blind in the oven  for about 12 minutes

3. Peel, core, slice pears.  Layer pears neatly on the pastry. Sprinkle with lemon juice

4. Mix cream with the eggs and sugar. Pourthe mixture over the pears in the flan tin

5. Turn the oven down to 190 deg c (375F or gas mark 5). Put tart back in the oven for 20-25 minutes until cream is just set.

6. Cool for 10 minutes and serve…or allow to cool completly and serve…

If I ever put a photo up with this post you can assume that I finally found some pears in season… I have done it with tinned pears before but I suspect this is cheating…

Flourless Fairycakes

Not really. Am afraid I don’t have a good recipe for flourless fairycakes, unless of course you don’t mind nuts. But even this recipe defeated me as I not only had I, in the run up to pay day run out of flour but I also seemed to have finally used up the packets and packets of cashew nuts that were clogging up my cupboard.

The lovely Mrs Lacer over on Lacer’s Life has been knitting this month which reminded me that I have a set of needles under the bed and am halfway through 2 knitted “things” for Flapjack Queen’s children and having made the egg last week I really should get on and finish the dinosaur puppet to go with it, especially as it was Flapjack Princess’ birthday on Thursday.

Thursday came and went and the dinosaur although knitted was still in pieces (I am allergic to “making up”) and I had no money for a card. Fortunately however there are some card blanks in the office and I then  I found Little Cotton Rabbits had this as a free pattern at this point I’ve tried to inseft a photograph but the system doesn’t seem to want to let me at the moment.

Unfortunately in a misplaced attempt before christmas at being an organised tidy individual I had finally got rid of my stash (wool and material) vis freecycle and all I had in were a few bits of white orange and black wool – however my Stepson mentioned that his Mum knitted so a quick phonecall netted me a ball of pink wool and one of brown.

Anyway, result was one card and one bemused Flapjack Princess…hopefully I’ll get the present finished this weekend.

Note: I promise this isn’t going to become a knitting blog. I realised whilst making the dinosaur the reasons why I gave up knitting – kittens playing with your wool whilst your knitting…

Good enough to eat ?

Cooking with children

My son has a Fairy Gothmother (FGM), he also has a Not Quite Godfather (the NQG) and a VIP (very important person in life aka KT Cupcake). People who know this about me and about Spider are therefore quite surprised to discover that I have a goddaughter.

Yes, I am a godmother, possibly not a very good one because as KT Cupcake sometimes likes to recall at the time of my goddaughter’s (Cookie) christening I was actually on the other side of the world and 18 metres under water – actually because of the time difference I was probably tucked up in a hotel room somewhere snoring my head off, but that’s not quite so good a story. The idea behind me being a godmother was that Cookie’s parents wanted her to have an adult influence in her life of someone with a different attitude towards life than her parents.

Her mother is a talented artistic person. I am not. I like making cakes to make people smile, KT Cupcake spreads happiness in other ways. Anyway, for Cookie’s  last birthday I gave her a voucher for a mornings cooking together and since her 7th birthday is now approaching at speed, we thought it was probably about time that she cashed it in.

Now, since I am feeling guilty about the fact that I have been a bit of an absentee godmother since Spider was born, I was planning on making it a special occasion, perhaps buying in some fancy cooking bits from the Pink Fairy Cake website, but as usual in my life things were very last minute “are you free tomorrow ?” “why ?” “Cookie’s ballet has been cancelled, can she come and cook with you saturday morning ?”

So had to make do with a container of 4 different sprinkles from Budgens, food colouring and some gold and silver foil cake cases dug out from the back of the cupboard (dating from when I got married I think)…I also managed to find a little whisk shaped like a chick in an egg which I bought as something for Cookie to take away with her as memento.

The house was also a mess and needed an early start saturday morning to ensure that the house could receive visitors and the kitchen declared fit enough to cook in and no longer a health hazzard.

The jury is out on whether I have provided her with a different approach to life after one morning together but I have at least introduced her to a few new things. She had never cracked an egg before and thought that you needed a bread maker to make pizza…

We made:

• pizza (standard dough recipe from Delia Smith)
• Nigella Lawson’s love buns, but coloured the Mr Whippy icing
• Caramelised apple flapjack

Since Saturday I have been in and out of bed with a stress related problem…I don’t think it was related to cooking with Cookie, who it would appear had a fantastic time and wants to do it again – soon. We had fun, but I don’t think teaching cooking to children is going to be my route out of debt, not unless I want to spend all my spare time chipping icing off the sink… I actually had fun too and am planning to make more of an effort to cook with Spider and to live up to my godmotherly duties…currently trying to overcome my make and do phobia and make a little scrapbook for Cookie of our morning together plus the recipes.

Photos to follow – I have technical gremlins at the moment

 

Pancake Day

Despite what I said about wanting to cook more with Spider I have ducked out of the question of whether he’s old enough to make pancakes by being ill. Fortunately his Grandma is a champion pancake maker and kept him occupied for most of the afternoon watching her make the batter and flipping pancakes.

I was more than happy to submit to a bit of mothering myself and wolfed down 4 pancakes with traditional jiff lemon and caster sugar.  A blog I like a lot was discussing the merits of toffee sauce versus lemon and sugar and although I agree that lemon and sugar is the best, I have been longing to try a recipe I saw in the observer several years ago. Hugh Fernley Whittingstall made pancakes with a banana and toffee sauce for Lyn Barber. All you needed for the sauce was some milk and half a packet of chewy toffees…unfortunately the packet of wherthers original that was in the fridge appears to have been slowly disappearing…

Definately NOT waving

I am drowning in a sea of playmobile and boxes and boxes of photographs that need sorting… then add in paperwork waiting to be shredded and 2 weeks of ironing and I am so so tired.

Just had to do a mercy dash across the village to sort out a baking powder crisis (Flapjack Queen half way through birthday cake making dropped it on the floor – I only had half a teaspoon – thank heaven for Mums !) having just decided that I am not in a good state for trying to make birthday cakes – fortunately have an hour before work in which time to make 4 sponge cakes and cook them… wish me luck and think of me tomorrow trying to prove that I can, for at least an hour pretend I’m a domestic goddess.

Off to bed

postscript: Cakes were not made friday morning as someone had put the butter back in the fridge – could have melted it in the microwave but I think I was glad of the excuse. Still got an eveningand a morning left…

The on again off again birthday cake

The birthday party cookery for various reasons has not been going as planned, but I’ll write about that another time possibly. The main thing I wanted to do this week was to make a basic sponge cake and to then ice it in the shape as a skull and cross bones – really simple and easy, the only difficult bit is trying to turn the white fondant icing the right shade of black.

Anyway this week has not been good for me, I wake up tired, I am tired all day at work, I go to bed tired and I fail to sleep as there are far too many things floating around in my head. So last night when I was meant to be making the sponge cake I was instead trying to have an early night, which didn’t work out for various reasons (see yesterday’s post)…I left the butter out intending to make the cake in the morning, but as I mentioned previously someone tried to be helpful and tidied it away back into the fridge for me – and my hand held mixer can’t cope with fridge cold butter (how I miss my kenwood mixer).

At lunchtime Flapjack Queen phoned up to say that the party bags we had bought ready filled cos its cheaper are actually quite small and 2 slices of cake probably won’t fit in the bag…I agreed with her that instead we would break with small people’s party tradition and serve the cake up after the rest of the food for eating then and there. I also decided that I would copy her idea and turn Spider’s birthday cake into a pile of cup cakes instead a la Nigella.

7.30pm there was a further change of plan back to the original skull and cross bones cake due to the difficulty of persuading a certain small boy that it would be better to have the big cake on his actual birthday when he has his second party “family only”…

So spent the next 30 minutes trying to make 12oz of victoria sponge cake mixture in a too small bowl with a hand held mixer and then fitting 4 cake tins in the oven…there was more mixture on me and the walls of the kitchen by the time I had finished.

Anyway, early start again tomorrow…may be an even earlier trip to Saino’s or Tescbury if the fondant icing I’ve had in the cupboard for over a year turns out to be off…or anything else goes wrong between now and 2.30pm…

Yo ho ho me hearties, I’m off to bed to dream of pieces of eight and making people who cut you up in traffic walk the plank…

“You’re the best mummy in the world !!!”

Princess and Pirates Party 2009

Possibly not the words he will be using again in a hurry, but for now I’m going to hang on to these words and the look on Spider’s face and hug them close to me  in my memory to get me through the dark blue days.

I have been in bed for the last 5 hours after coming back from the party, 28 children and adults, we had no refusals…perhaps not something I’ll do again in a hurry…maybe I’ll wait 12 months…

The Oscar speech

I have not been very well of late. I have had cold after cold and instead of taking a reasonable time off work to recover I’ve just tried to push on with things.  As a result I have been feeling very run down and tired and not achieving much outside of work hours.

Originally, when we first decided to have a party for Spider and Flapjack Princess I was going to work my way through various bits of Frostbite: Susan Austin, cook in advance and freeze until needed. But as a result partly of my lack of energy and partly due to a severe lack of cash this didn’t happen. With a week to go until the party my freezer was empty and I was down with yet another cold.

However a quick rewrite of the intended menu and some furious baking by my Mum meant that catering by me was cut down to an evenings cake making and a morning cake decorating (see previous post) and bulk sandwich making.

So for the record, because I know that from time to time they do drift into this small corner of the internet some times I would just like to say, “Thanks Mum ! You’re Fab…” and Spider thinks so too… I would also like to say thank you thank you thank you to my sister in law Islay and also to my brother who not only came up for the party but when it was over just pitched right in with the tidying up…so thank you to my family, to Husband, to Flapjack Queen and of course to Spider for being, just wonderful…thank you to