Sticky toffee pudding...

It’s been quite a long time since I cooked anything by Jamie Oliver apart from using his pizza dough recipe from Jamie’s Italy. Jamie was probably the first TV chef that really got me going – I didn’t care much for Gary Rhodes who I remember as being one of the first chefs that I watched on TV, and Rick Stein was a bit sophisticated for me. I’ve got the first few Jamie books – The Naked chef etc – and I so wanted to live in that cool apartment with the constant Britpop accompaniment to my life. Anyway, as I got older, I got a bit bored with the whole Jamie thing, and his perfect family, and although I was really in to his campaign to improve school dinners, I was a bit ambivalent about what he did to the old surf cafe at Watergate Bay. Nigella came along, and Hugh, and Jamie got relegated to the study shelf, rather than the kitchen.

However, I’ve been watching Jamie’s Great Britain and I’ve been really quite liking it, so perhaps I was feeling some kind of nostalgic pull to days before children when I reached for Jamie’s Dinners in search of a pudding for today. And I am sooo glad that I did. Page 305 – Sticky Toffee Pudding. Need I say more? Usually, if I make a pudding (and to be honest I usually do to go with Sunday roast) it’s a means of getting more fruit into the children, so we’re usually having crumble of some sort, but I was getting a bit sick of that and fancying something a bit more substantial. Allotment Junkie and (self-styled) Grumpy are here in advance of Blue’s birthday on Thursday and FiL was coming for the day to deliver presents so big Sunday dinner called for.

In fact, at one point while I was in the middle of doing many things at once, I did wish I hadn’t embarked on something that required quite a lot of steps – pureeing dates in the food processor, creaming butter and sugar etc. The husband and I were in London last night celebrating ‘the first of the 40ths’ – with my old school friends, and we’d had a lovely evening of delicious cocktails http://www.thearchlondon.com/?cid=5 and food www.theportmanmarylebone.com/ but got to bed far too late and then had to be off and heading back to darkest Hampshire fairly early. Fortunately I had remembered to get the pork out of the freezer – we got half a pig from a local smallholder a few weeks back and this was the first of the joints – a lovely bit of leg – before we left yesterday – and Allotment Junkie had sorted out most of the veg but somehow there still seemed to be too much to do in my sleep-deprived state. However, it all came good, and the fiddling around with the sticky toffee pud was well worth it – a lovely light but rich sponge with a dreamy toffee sauce to pour on top when serving. I could feel my hips expanding with every mouthful, but sometimes, you just have to go with the calories.