Beating the scales - or not. And a Lemon Tart that didn't work out quite how I planned

No I don't mean beating the scales in the weight loss sense, I mean that little game we all play trying to work out exactly where to cut the butter to give the weight that's specified in the recipe? You know what I mean, don't be coy. I bet you're really good at it.

Oh. You don't? So it's just me? It is? Oh dear.
 

 Well, it's out there now, so best get on with the confession.

It started with those butter packs that have 'approximate' 50g sections marked out on the edge of the butter paper. I'd cut as straight and as accurately as I could to see if I could indeed cut 50g. Then I started doing it by eye. And not just 50g, but 100g. Or 75g. How about 40g...

I realise that this says alot more about me than I'd like, but to be fair, this doesn't extend to weighing out anything else. I still wouldn't have a clue how much 50 or 100g of sugar or flour would look like. Well - I suppose I would a little bit, but not with the confidence that I like to think I have to cut butter up into appropriate portions. 

I would never try to beat the scales when it came to weighing out, say, blackcurrants, and, without scales, or the handy measuring mug I have from Love Food Hate Waste, I always cook too much rice. So it's not an all-pervading affliction.

I don't think I've ever been absolutely spot on with the butter, doing it by eye, but I'm getting better, and sometimes I can be just a gram or 2 out.

The days just fly by, I tell you.

So when I set to, the other afternoon, to make a lemon tart for some friends who were coming for dinner that evening, I needed to weigh out 140g of butter. The excitement! There's so much more skill required when you're not aiming for multiples of 50g.

From my 250g pack of butter, it didn't take a genius to work out (as I did) that I needed to cut a bit beyond half. I eyed up the block, made a mark, then cut. I was reasonably confident, but the scales - my new, stripy for Christmas, scales, said no. 97g.

97g??? Was the Co-Op cheating me? I'd definitely cut more than half a block of butter that professed to be 250g. I looked again. Then I weighed another block of butter I had in the fridge which was also supposed to be 250g, from the same store. 192g.

Before I stomped up the road, receipt in hand, outrage on my lips, to accuse the Co-Op of swindling its customers out of butter, I decided I'd better weigh something else. I got out a full pack of paella rice. Different product, different supermarket 'own brand'. 500g on the packet, 177g on the scales. Or 233g depending on which way up I put the box on the scales. Yeah. Not good.

I'd put a new battery in the scales already, so it appears that I had a calibration issue.

Not just a calibration issue, but a problem with my dessert.

I'd already had an issue with the pastry case - I bought the pastry, and committed the fundamental error of using the left over to make jam tarts BEFORE the 'baked blind' case had come out of the oven shrunken and wonky in parts, so I had nothing to patch it with. 

I was working on a recipe I haven't used before, which is never a good thing with a couple of hours before your guests are due. And as if that wasn't enough, I'd already weighed out the sugar, believing in my scales, before my trust was destroyed with the butter. Not only that, but I'd grated the lemon zest into the sugar as required, leaving me with the options of (1) picking out all the bits of lemon zest before working out how to re-weigh some more sugar, (2) going to the Co-Op (I still wasn't utterly convinced) to get more lemons, or (3) winging it.

Unlike the week before, I didn't have the necessary to knock up an alternative. Visions of lumpy, lemon-flavoured scrambled eggs leaking all over the oven from my patchy pastry case filled my head.  

But, you know, life is too short to pick the grated zest of 3 lemons out of a bowl of caster sugar that might or might not have weighed 225g, and it felt ridiculous to just start again, so I decided that the sugar would have to be the right weight, added butter that looked to me as if it was around 140g, did what I needed with the eggs (no weighing required, thankfully), and held my breath.

Well, you'll be relieved to know that all was pretty much well that ended well - or that ended in a few glasses of wine with some lovely friends who I am going to miss so much when we move. They were very kind about the tart, and, wonky pastry case and guesstimated ingredients aside, it tasted pretty good. Lemon tart is pretty much one of my most favourite things to eat, and for all that every stage was tinged with disaster (even the actual baking - which despite my vigilance ended up with it catching slightly on the top) this particular specimen was, in my humble opinion, definitely in the general lemon tart ball park, if not exactly right between the goal posts.

What? You want the recipe now? Well, I feel that I owe it to you all to make it again and check it works using the measurements I was supposed to be using. Because I know I'm a bit "some of this and some of that" but I really can't guarantee how much sugar and butter I actually used. And as there's always going to be room for another post about lemon tart on this blog, you'll just have to wait till I get this one right...

News

I've been up early.

Today, as many in the last few weeks - there's a lot on my mind.

We have news, and today's the day we tell the children.

The news must wait till after Remembrance Day parade, though. Perhaps, somehow, the message of what others have been though, and continue to go through, in the name of their country, of freedom, of stabilisation and humanitarian aid, will help them put the news, when it comes, and as they digest it over the next few days, in perspective. 

I suspect not.

I peel shallots, dice vegetables, brown meat. I take extra care to make sure the flavours are right: rosemary and bay, a couple of anchovies, wiped of oil and snipped up, hopefully to melt in to the gravy. The slow cooker is on, and there's a crumble to prepare. 

Nothing fancy:  comfort food, familiar food. 

Food that will tell them that they are loved.

Uncomplicated food that we can sit down and eat without really thinking, so we can concentrate on telling them the news.

Wish us luck.

My Dream Kitchen...

We live in an old cottage. The oldest part of the house dates to the 1750s, there are beams, inconveniently thick (and occasionally damp) walls, not enough insulation, and spiders so big they make a noise when they hit the ground after you've chucked them out of the window. I love it - although the spiders can be quite surprising sometimes...

The kitchen lives in what we think was once a separate outhouse/washhouse/beer cellar. It stretches out of the back of the house on one side, edging a decking area that fills in the square-ish space at the back of the house. The house was once a pub - The Old House at Home. There is now a new 'Old House at Home' over the road which replaced it in the 1920s. We are too close to the river to have a proper cellar - underground, the water table is not too many feet below us - and we understand that this is where the beer was stored at one time. Since then, we know that the room that is now our kitchen has also been the bedroom/music room of a young teenager. We know this because when we had the kitchen done up a few years ago, the same teenager (now in his 40s) did the tiling for us. Village life...

So the kitchen has not been the kitchen of the house for that long, relatively speaking, and certainly before we moved in, the house hadn't had small children living in it for some time. With 2 big dressers at either end, an enormous and impressive French range cooker (can one admit to wanting to buy a house solely for the cooker that is currently in it?) and a big 'breakfast bar' which provided worktop and pan storage down the centre of it, dividing the space between the cooker and the sink, it was not a family friendly kitchen. The room is not all that big, and all this big furniture reduced the space quite dramatically. Chuck in 2 small windows, some dingy yellow paint and navy blue tiling, and you can imagine it was quite dark and dingy. 




We immediately got rid of the breakfast bar (Ebay is a marvellous thing), and installed the 'family' table. The beautiful range cooker eventually had to go too - beautiful and French it may have been but trying to get parts for it as it started to breakdown was a nightmare. We put in a roof light to increase the natural light and a few years ago we put proper units in and moved where the cooker was (installing a newer and less complicated range cooker which I do love for all that it's not French and steel) to give a long run of worktop, perfect for me to make as much mess as I want (when it's not cluttered up with the kids' detritus). 

We kept one of the dressers, painted the walls light blue, and I finally got to install a set of tiles that I was given for my 21st birthday and have been carrying round waiting for the 'forever' house.

I love the kitchen, but at the risk of making the Husband hold his head in his hands with despair, if money had been no object, here's what I would have loved to have done:

I would have extended over where is now the decking, filling in the space at the back of the house. It may not even be architecturally possible, given the pecularities of how the exisiting house is built, but I don't let things like that get in the way of a good kitchen fantasy. There would be sliding glass doors which would open up the entire extended back of the house to the garden in the event of sunshine. The roof might even be insulated glass using something sourced probably from Germany, or even Denmark involving a perilous cross-Europe delivery and much teeth sucking to install (yes, I love Grand Designs...)

I would keep long worktop where it now is, and reinstate an 'island' unit to delineate the end of the 'kitchen' area. There would be loads of storage and more glorious worktop. Beyond the island unit there would be an area for the table. Given the layout of other areas of the back of the house, the table would stretch across the back of the house, an old refectory style, possibly with benches to sit on. There would be a cosy seating area with a wood burner at the end.

Back to the kitchen though. So yes, there's worktop. Acres of it. I love the wooden worktops we have now (the Husband hates them) but some cool granite would be high on my list if we changed things - easy to keep clean and perfect for pastry, although after my River Cottage bread course, I'd need some wood somewhere for bread kneading - it's better on wood, apparently! I'd also make sure I got back the 'triangle' between sink, fridge and cooking area. We have it now, the holy triangle, except the table sits in the middle of it so when the Husband and I are both in there, we end up chasing each other round it trying not to get in each other's way.

Would I swap my range cooker? I still struggle with this. I don't know. We currently have 5 gas rings and 2 electric ovens, and they are great - even if the non-fan oven is now called 'the Christmas oven'. I wonder about induction hobs - I haven't come across them much, but they are very impressive. And what hardship to have to choose a whole new set of pans too? I quite fancy the idea of a hob in the island unit - but induction or not, it would need to have at least 5 rings. One thing we would defintiely include would be a cooker hood. At the moment, in time of toast burning, and over-zealous grilling/griddling, we run around closing the kitchen door to prevent smoke getting to the smoke alarm in the hall, and open the roof light, then sit surrounded by acrid fumes waiting for the breeze to do its job. Given the nature of old houses, when I'm boiling something for a long time in the winter, we get a huge amount of condensation. A cooker hood to extract steam and fumes would be wonderful.

Beyond that, well, I haven't thought much - this is a fantasy you know. I'd keep a 'rustic' look - despite my desire for state of the art glass doors, I couldn't go completely modern with the look of the room, and the dresser would definitely have a home somewhere. It would be cool in the summer, warm and cosy in the winter, and I'd definitely keep my hanging pan rack - although with all the storage around instead of having the pans hanging from it, perhaps it could hang some hops, and some more strings of chillies instead. That and a trophy copper milk pan. Most definitely!!

And you - if money was no object, and wishes came free, what would you have in your dream kitchen?

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This is a sponsored post for electrolux

Why Katie Piper made me cry

Ever since Saturday morning, when I blubbed shamelessly as Katie Piper talked frankly to a packed, and silent, Britmums Live audience, and then even more so, talking to her mum and Katie Hill (teary, tissue-less and overwrought, never have I felt less glamorous, let me tell you), I have been pondering why exactly she made me cry.

It's not just her story - the beautiful good time girl, going places (possibly - she is refreshingly candid about the career opportunities available presenting casino programmes on channel 999 at 2 a.m.) raped and then burned horrifically with acid thrown over her at the behest of a man who couldn't have her.


It's not just the fact that she can - and clearly throughout her recovery, did, laugh at her situation. Not at all of it, but at the comical moments that can often - and almost totally inappropriately -  come in times of great trauma and distress, She tells a cracking story about squirting blackberry juice out of the feeding tube attached to her stomach while wearing a flesh coloured 'morph suit' (her 'earthworm Jim suit' - to stop the burns contracting) - but I guess you had to be there.


It's not just the fact that she has taken what has happened to her and survived in the most inspiring way, turning her experiences into a charity to support others who have been burned, filling gaps in the NHS provision, which, with the best will in the world, public money cannot currently cover.

It's not just that she is so disarmingly honest about the support she received from her family, about how dark the really dark times were, about how cruel people were to her, and about her agoraphobia.

All these things make her a truly remarkable survivor. It puts my life and the things that have happened to me sharply into perspective. But here's the thing. She gets annoyed when people start talking about something bad that happened to them and then they say "Oh but it's nothing like what you have been through". Why does she get annoyed? Well, you see as she puts it - it doesn't matter what 'it' is - if it's your worst thing, then yes it is bad, it is worth getting upset about.

What trauma have I suffered. Well let me tell you - if you didn't know already - my son had leukaemia. My lively 2 year old withered before my eyes, almost overnight. 9 months into treatment, he had no hair, was on the 2nd centile (from 98th when born) and the doctors were talking about feeding tubes. We spent endless hours in hospital. The drugs made him sick. He had blood and platelet transfusions. He had a terrifying allergic reaction to one of his drugs. I thought he might die. My son.

He had the disease. The Husband and I - we dealt with the fall out. And a new baby.

People say similar to me when talking about their children. People who have had what I consider to be equally traumatic experiences, or even people talking about a broken arm. They say "Oh but it's nothing like what you went through". Or they say "I don't think I could have got through what you did". To that I say, firstly, as Katie Piper says, it doesn't matter what it is - if it's the worst that you have had to deal with, then it's bad. It's not a question of degree. It is valid to feel distraught, lost, confused - even if you're dealing with chicken pox. 

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, you do have a choice. You can drown in the injustice of it all, or you can try and work out how to cope and get through it. I know someone whose son was at a similar age, living in the same village who died of a brain tumour when Blue was being treated. She and I were pregnant at the same time and gave birth to our second children within days of each other. She told me once that she thought she was lucky because I still had the uncertainty of whether Blue would survive hanging over me. She knew, so sadly, how her son's story ended, and she thought she was in a better position than me. I have never spoken to her about it, but I suspect this was one of her ways of coping. 

I consider us to be lucky. Not that Blue became ill - I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But he's still here. We just passed the 4 years "off-treatment" point - one more to go before we'll get as much of an 'all clear' as they will give us. I haven't lost a child, been physically attacked or suffered any of the other terrible things that can happen, although if you want dark hours, I can give them to you in buckets. The important thing is that he has survived.

We are lucky too, to have survived as a family. Lots of people don't. Families break up under pressure, and it's hard, so hard to keep lines of communication open when you've been awake all night worried sick about your child, or had to go to work and leave your child as he goes into an operation because of a meeting you can't afford to miss. It's hard because day to day life becomes more difficult on every level physically and financially - do you know how expensive hospital parking is? You have to make decisions you never thought you would be faced with. It's hard but you choose to make those decisions in order to survive.

We had a choice, and what made me cry was hearing someone else who has survived - and is possibly still surviving - talking so eloquently about her choice. Katie Piper demonstrates so simply and so beautifully that you DO have a choice. Even in the darkest hours of your life, you can choose to be beaten by it all, or to fight. It takes a lot of energy and support, and it's not easy, but you can do it, be your injuries physically or emotional, whether you're the person who's been hurt or someone supporting and caring for that person. 

And the relief of hearing someone else say all that made me cry.

Caramel & sour cherry flapjack - or what M&S don't want you to know

It comes to something, doesn't it, when you're ripping your own recipes out of magazines. 

That makes me sound terribly grand but the truth is, I write a recipe column for our local parish mag (circulation, a whopping 734) and a couple of months ago, I treated them to this flapjack recipe that I made on a whim, having some left over tinned caramel and not wanting to eat it there and then with a teaspoon from the tin. I didn't blog it and then realised that I had thrown away my notes. The relevant issue of the parish mag was the only place it was recorded.

I had to rootle through the various piles around the house to dig the recipe out again (required eating for the weekend's camping trip) - no luck, and then - horrors - as I was emptying out the recycling I realised that my copy of the relevant issue was in there to be chucked out. I ripped out the relevant section, and decided that I'd better blog it and record it, otherwise what had been a happy accident would take me several failed attempts and many tins of caramel to recreate.

The thing that I love so much about these is the similarity to one of my guilty pleasures - those soft flapjacks sold in small bitesize squares in tubs by high end supermarkets. Bitesize, of course means that I always eat far more of them than necessary, and to be honest, I never buy them - but the Husband occasionally produces a half-finished barrel that's been at work. They never last long, and the tubs are great for freezing things in.

For me these are the best flapjacks I have ever made. After many attempts using different methods and ingredients, I may never try another recipe again....

Caramel & Sour Cherry Flapjacks

200g tinned caramel
220g unsalted butter
100g soft brown sugar
320g oats
75g dried sour cherries

Line a 20cm square tin & pre-heat the oven to 180C/160C fan.

Melt together the caramel, butter and sugar over a gentle heat, stirring occasionally. Add in the oats and dried fruit, stir together and press into the tin with a fork.

Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes, till golden brown. Simples.

I have also made this and then melted 65g dark chocolate and drizzled it over the top. 

Just saying.

R&J or M&S?

So how many calories are there in a mushroom?

There's been a lot of cake recently. Red Nose Day brought it all on with it a cake decorating competition at school:

He did it all himself - results out on Monday!

Cakes for the cake sale in return for wearing mufti (so not only do you buy the ingredients and make cakes, you then give your darling children money to buy more cakes. Not that I mind really, but let's just think about the logic of that for a moment...)

Cherry & coconut? or chocolate & blackcurrant?

Cakes for the Rainbows cake sale and family quiz.

And no, I didn't bake them all...

This is all very well, except that I am on a diet. Yup. The time has come, as it inevitably would, to talk about skinny food.

I'm trying really hard to think of skinny food as exciting. You see, I am not a skinny person - never have been, never will be. Generally, though, I am happy (ish) with my size (12-14) and shape (pear). Well, I always was until about 5 years ago when I woke up one morning and realised that I was size 18 pushing a 20 and needed to do something fast. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with being that size if that's the size you are, but for me and my build, it wasn't right.

Of course, I can absolutely attribute the weight gain then to a whole host of factors: 2 pregnancies, spending huge amounts of time in hospital with my poorly Blue and comfort eating like crazy. I sometimes wish I was one of those people who starve when stressed, but no. I did try it, not eating under pressure, but headed back to the Norwegian cinammon bun page in How to be a Domestic Goddess (it's page 322 in my copy - make a note of that) before you could say 'celery stick'. Not only that, but when Blue started to lose weight about 9 months into chemotherapy, looked like some malnourished shadow of the boy he was, and I had to start talking feeding tubes with the doctors treating him, I threw myself wholeheartedly into cooking with cream. And cheese. All full fat. And then, when he didn't fancy it, I threw myself wholeheartedly into eating it. As Billy Connolly once said (and I paraphrase) "I wasn't retaining water, I was retaining chips!" (to be spat out in a strong Glaswegian accent). Not just chips but cheese, and brownies, custard, mash, fishpie all made with double cream in an attempt to get Blue to eat and put on weight. Of course, we managed to avoid feeding tubes, and I will always be thankful for that, as I am for his continued good health, but it didn't do me much good.

And I know it sounds bizarre, but I really had no insight into the fact that I was getting bigger. I just carried on wearing my maternity clothes after Pink was born and never really got out of them. After all, I was either at home or at hospital - I had a small child with a life threatening illness and a new baby. Did it really matter? And then one day, I saw a picture of myself helping Pink on a slide and I had a crashing reality check. I was fat.

I know 'fat' is a sensitive issue, and when I write this, please know that I make no judgements about anyone else here. I am simply saying that for me, I was too big, and I needed to do something about it. I lost 3 stone following a Slimming World type regime (I borrowed a couple of books from a friend). 3 stone. It was a lot that I'd put on.

To be honest (and this may sound a little bonkers)I probably lost a little too much, and after a brief spell as a size 10, I settled back comfortably into a 12. But the last year or so, it's been creeping ever so slowly back up. Not 3 stone up, but definitely a dress size. Fortunately, the realisation came sooner rather than later, so skinny food it is.

It's not just about what I'm eating, though, it's also about resetting my attitude to food, which is what I had to do the last time. I like my food a lot (you migh thave noticed). I am also incapable of leaving food on my plate. I was brought up to eat every last morsel - and I find it impossible to break this. So portion control is important, and self restraint not to take seconds.

So in the midst of all this cake, I am rocking a combination of what I remember about Slimming World (red days and green days, quite good fun. Really. It is) and also, just to bring in a little bit of a frisson, some 5:2 fasting days. I quite like the challenge of this, although I have never before paid any heed whatsoever to the calorie content of food - I tend to look more for fat & sugar content.

I'm probably the last person in the world to try this. I became aware of the 5:2 diet last year - there are lots of people doing it. the premise is that you eat normally for 5 days a week, and then fast - having only 500 calories (600 for men) on the other 2 days. There appears to be lots of good science behind it, and even Hugh F-W is a fan.

My breakfasts have been looking a lot like this:

Banana, yoghurt, walnuts & honey?

and this

or does madam prefer stewed apple, yoghurt and dates?

and there's been some rather interesting soups going on for lunches.

I must confess to only having done one proper fast day so far - I've been working my way up to it, but it was OK. Banana, 0% fat Greek yoghurt, some chopped walnuts and a teaspoon (sob) of honey, a Thai type soup with peas, broad beans and chilli for lunch, and a mushroom souffle omelette for supper.

get me with my mushroom souffle omelettes

I was madly busy that day anyway.

But consider the irony of restraining myself as I baked a cake for Blue to decorate (the amount of notice we had for the competition meant that I had to bake the cake or we wouldn't have had time, but he decorated it all himself.) No bowl licking for me. In fact, I was so restrained that I did what I mocked Jane Asher for doing once - as soon as I had finished scraping the mixture out, I squirted washing up liquid into the bowl and filled it with water.

All that lovely mixture - unlicked :-(

The following day was cherry & coconut cupcakes and some chocolate/blackcurrant cupcakes. I managed to resist the cherry & coconut, but cracked totally at the chocolate cake mix. Still - it wasn't a fast day...

And is it working? Well, yes it is. I am losing weight and despite the chocolate cupcake bowl licking frenzy on Thursday (and an accident with a pack of oatcakes and the peanut butter and an unfortunate incident with a bar of Green & Blacks Maya Gold - but over the last couple of weeks - so not so bad), I am doing pretty well. I may even let you have some skinny recipes soon. I haven't had much variety yet so as/if (it's early days!) I get more into this, I'll be on the look out for lots of interesting 5:2 recipes - because I think trying to work out how many calories there are in a mushroom for myself may just prove too much like hard work.

Old-fashioned cookbooks, bags of nostalgia and Boeuf a la movie - a random recipe

I have recently inherited a collection of old recipe books from my mum. 

A couple are 'fundraising' efforts, with recipes provided by the good people from a variety of parishes. In the case of "My Favourite Recipe" (circa. 1984), in aid of the Merseyside Association for Kidney Research, it includes Ken Dodd's 'Steak Diane', John Inman's Beef Wellington, and my personal favourite, Willy Russell's 'Midnight Madness' - which is essentially how to cook 2 slices of toast when you come home rather worse the wear for drink... reminds me of a story of a friend from law school who was once roundly berated by his wife, the long suffering Barbara (I never knew any more about her, and never met her) for frying ice cream wagon wheels one night, which he mistook for burgers. The mess was apparently something truly terrible to behold.  Willy Russell's method for toast fills just over 2 pages of the book:

"Switch on the kitchen light; you may have just put the world to rights and drunk eight pints of bitter beer but, and I am quite confident of this, YOU CANNOT SEE IN THE DARK, the best chefs of the best kitchens of the world agree with me on this." etc

The Carrier book "Childrens Party Menus" is one I remember flicking through incessantly as childhood birthdays approached.

Mum, why did you NEVER make me the carousel cake? Or hard boiled eggs decorated like mice and rabbits?

Best of all, the pile of books included 2 notebooks from a Great Aunt. Handwritten recipes, cuttings, little comments - I love them.




I was blessed with some great ,Great Aunts, though none of them are still living. I've already mentioned the one who not only worked full time but went home to cook a 2 course lunch every day for her husband - another Random Recipe entry, in fact.

The Great Aunt to whom these notebooks belonged was a cabinet maker and worked with the renowned (and currently in vogue) Edward Barnsley. I am lucky enough to have a stool that she designed and had made in the later years of her life by one of her own apprentices. I believe all her great nieces and nephews have one, elegant and beautiful.

She herself was a fantastic character. All tweed skirts and sensible shoes. She smoked like a chimney (indeed it was the fags what done her in, in the end) and lived with her devoted 'companion' (no other attribution or recognition could be given in those days, even though their relationship was far more devoted than many marriages I have seen). As I recall, they shared their home with a grey African parrot. I always remember how interested she was in anything and everything I was doing; What was going on at school, what I was studying. I was off to France for a year - fantastic! what a great opportunity. She spent hours telling me about her own travels. In fact, she sadly died while I was in France and I missed her funeral, but somehow being in the Languedoc at the time, an area I know she loved, made it more bearable. My memories of her are fading but I have some clear images of her and her partner, their house and beautiful garden, which I know will stay with me.

Having her notebooks has brought many of those images and memories that I do retain back to the forefront of my mind. I can't date the notebooks accurately. One of them includes recipes attributed to "(Delia Smith TV)" in the exquisite handwriting you might expect. In fact all the recipes that have been written out by hand are attributed - names I recognise from my childhood - Jessie (my granny), Mrs Godfrey, Beth - and some I don't. There is an article about aubergine, cut out and kept from a newspaper from the day before my 6th birthday (I am sure the events were unrelated, but it puts things in context for me). I am particularly tickled by the comment accompanying a recipe for Roast Duck: "Very satisfactory." Those 2 words transport me right back in time - the sensibleness and practicality of them. No flowery nonsense. Just "Very satisfactory". I can hear her voice now.

But what of the random recipe? Well, this month the randomness is down to us: Dom's challenge at Belleau Kitchen is to choose a book our own way but to be sure to select a recipe randomly from it.




Alas, the roasted duck was not the random recipe. You'll understand why I had to choose one of these notebooks as my recipe book, tbough, so I very scientifically held them behind my back, swapped them over a couple of times and in my right hand the ringbound, falling apart Sherwood Notebook from Boots Stationery Department. 






And the recipe? Well, the page that I opened included 4 recipes cut from newspapers. 2 veal recipes ('Veal Cutlets - Victoria', and stewed breast of veal), another one  for a 'Standing Pie' (lots of lard) and this one. I couldn't resist. I love the idea that whenever this was written (imperial measurements, oven temp in Gas mark/farenheit only), people were thinking about how best to make sure they had a hot meal on the table - even if they wanted to go out and enjoy themselves in the meantime.

I copy it out directly because I am sure that any copyright has long since passed. If it hasn't and you recognise this as yours, please let me know, and I will offer full attribution.

Boeuf a la movie (for 2)

So called because you throw everything into a casserole, go to the cinema (and come back and eat it)

1lb stewing beef
small tin tomato soup
glass red wine
2 medium carrots, sliced
2 medium onions, sliced
1 medium potato, sliced
bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon of salt, and some screws of pepper

Put everything in a casserole and cover it closely. Put it into the middle of the oven with the heat at mark 1, 275F and leave it for 4 1/2 hours. When you return, serve it with tinned Swedish red cabbage (heated).

And that's it.

I defy anyone to say "Wow, what a beautiful looking dinner" - because frankly it wasn't:

The soup in the sauce made it alarmingly orange, and the fact that you don't brown the meat first meant that there was really quite a lot of fat floating around, but it was all cooked and quite tasty actually. It was completely hassle free - as all slow cooking is - and for a day when I was out at a training course and backwards and forwards on the school run and then delivering children to Rainbows etc, it was super-convenient. The only changes I made were to slightly up the vegetable quantities and I used a large tin of soup to stretch it to 4 of us. I also couldn't bring myself to serve it with tinned red cabbage - indeed I couldn't find any (although I didn't look too hard), but in keeping with the recipe, I did liberate some red cabbage, left over from Christmas, from the freezer.

I'm not sure it's the kind of thing I'd want to come back to from watching a movie, but I can certainly imagine Vera & Freda (you knew they'd have names like that) coming home - more likely from a concert at the Liverpool Philharmonic than the movies (although you never know), kicking off their brogues and sitting down, with their napkins on knees, to a big plateful of this...

Pancakes or cake? Or both? Egg-free Carrot & Pecan cake

I totally missed the Shrove Tuesday boat, didn't I? All day, my blogroll, and Twitter, has been full of variations on the same pancakey theme. American, traditional English, sweet, savoury, all manner of toppings. All the food bloggers touting their best recipes. And where was I?

I'll tell you where. Begging my useless chickens to lay just one egg between them. No time to deliberate and cogitate over which particular variation of pancake would grace our plates - it was touch and go whether there would be any at all. Fortunately, the chickens produced (although they cut it pretty fine). Pancakes saved, but then, another, ahem, issue. The chocolate cake I made the other day lasted an embarrassingly short time, and I have a friend coming round for coffee tomorrow. Cake or pancakes? I could see a bit of a problem.

I know I could have bought some more eggs, but it's Shrove Tuesday - the time to symbolically eat everything up before a fast - or at the very least, the exercise of restraint - over Lent. I have been debating whether, rather than denying myself food of some description, to impose a social media blackout on myself for the next 40 days, but then I think I might shrivel up into a small pile of nothingness and cease to exist altogether. And besides, if I didn't have Twitter, how would I find out that I could make a perfectly delicious cake with - get this - NO EGGS AT ALL.

Well, who would have thought it? Mrs "I eat everything, no allergies here" Recipe Junkie commending, nay applauding, such a thing.

Well, it's mighty fine. The recommendation came from Jen who writes at Blue Kitchen Bake, and although another friend had offered an actual egg, (thanks, Mrs W) I thought it would be more exciting and more in keeping with the whole ethos of Shrove Tuesday to work with what I had and use up rather than acquire more. I fiddled around - less cinammon than Jen's and I added in some nuts and the frosting, but basically it's her idea.

I'll admit I was sceptical, but it's honestly delicious. I should have saved it until tomorrow when my friend is here (and frankly after all the pancakes I met, I could only manage a tiny nibble) but it's lovely cake, and the next time you have no eggs, you could give it a go. As long as you have carrots, of course.


Egg free Carrot & Pecan Cake with Lemony Cream Cheese frosting

120ml sunflower oil
120g honey
120g caster sugar
240g self raising flour
240g coarsely grated carrot - about 2 large carrots
75g chopped pecans
2tsp ground cinnamon
a shake of ground cloves
pinch of salt

And for the frosting:
35g unsalted butter
200g sifted icing sugar
About 3 tsp lemon juice (approx half a lemon's worth)
50g cream cheese
finely grated zest of a lemon

20x20cm loose bottomed cake tin, lined

Pre-heat the oven to 170C.

In a small pan, gently heat the oil, sugar and honey till the sugar dissolves. This ends up making something that looks a little like a brown lava lamp in a pan - especially if you have the heat on too high.

Combine the flour, cinammon, cloves, carrot, nuts and salt in a bowl, then add in the oil/sugar/honey mixture, and mix together.

Scrape into the tin and spread out, then bake for between 45 mins-1hr (or until a skewer comes out clean). Jen made hers in mini loaf tins which took around 30 minutes, and the original recipe is for a large loaf tin which will take between 1hr-1hr20 mins.

While the cake is cooling on a rack, make the frosting  by beating the butter for a minute or so (we're talking Kenwood beating here, not arm and wooden spoon) till it's soft, then add half the icing sugar and beat till it's in crumbs - try not to choke on the fine dust of icing sugar that will inevitably envelop you. Add in the lemon juice, beat to a paste, then add the rest of the icing sugar, the cream cheese and the lemon zest, and beat together till smooth, then spread onto the cold cake.

So given that I'm not going to give up Twitter, what shall I forgo for Lent? Well, perhaps eggs would be a good place to start?
 

Trials of Dogs and Husbands - and a light but sophisticated supper ;-)

 

Quite often, we save our big meal for the evening on a Sunday and spend the day doing exciting things like shovelling horse manure into the allotment or moving greenhouses, but the weather was so foul this weekend that we couldn't think of anything to do outside except a particularly unpleasant dog walk for which (surprise surprise) there were no other takers (apart from the dog, of course). The dog couldn't care less whether it's wet or dry, grey, sunny, snowing - whatever. He doesn't do very well when it's very hot and slows down a fraction, but otherwise, well, as long as he's out and free: whoopee - he's a happy spaniel.



Yesterday as I tramped (or rather, sloshed) through the fields, and he frolicked ahead, I had one of those pivotal dog owning moments. The dog runs nose down following smells to wherever they may take him. One day he will run straight into something - a comedy tree, or concrete bollard randomly placed in the middle of a field but yesterday he hit a metaphorical pot of gold: fox sh*t. If you don't have much contact with dogs, this will be lost on you, but dog owners everywhere will sympathise when I tell you that even from 50ft away, I saw the look of ecstasy cross his face and through the gale, heard the sigh of contentment as he flopped, shoulder first, into the pile for a good old roll.

"F-R-E-D-C-O-M-E-H-E-R-E-Y-O-U-H-O-R-R-I-B-B-L-E-D-O-G"
  
It's a measure of how far we've come, Fred and I, since the dogcatcher cake incident that he actually stopped, mid-shoulder rub, pulled himself together and (knock me down with a feather) - came back. Fortunately, that was at the beginning of the walk, and it was so wet that the rain actually rid him of the eau de reynard (sounds so much better in French) before we'd got home.

We ate our lunch and had a fun afternoon (actually, the kids had their mates round and built a better than Hot Wheels car run down the stairs using chopping boards with the aim of shooting the cars into the wellies by the back door rather than through the glass, while the Husband bemoaned the fact that he couldn't finish moving his greenhouse* and watched the rugby instead and I laid low and surfed the internet).
 
By the time the kids were in bed, the Husband was starting to feel hungry again. This is a problem with eating on a Sunday lunchtime rather than in the evening, especially when, like yesterday, the kids get their tea at a 'Messy Church' session that we go to once a month. I tend to forget that we might need to eat in the evening.

At the same time that I was staring into the abyss of the Sunday night fridge, the Husband decided to make like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and prepare some soup to feed us on Monday when we both work at home, using a haybox. If you don't know, the principle of haybox cookery is that you heat your food up to boiling and then transfer the pan to a well insulated box and cover it with an equally insulated lid and it cooks. While he was cluttering up the kitchen with the enormous polystyrene box he has somehow salvaged for this purpose, a great big enormous parsnip from the garden, plus (ridiculous to the sublime) his ipod Touch to access the 'app' which had provided him with the basic recipe for soup he was following, I was also trying to make like Hugh F-W, all be it in a more elegant, 'sophisticated light supper' way. The kind of thing the man himself might serve up in that gorgeous rustic kitchen of his...

I found mushrooms, leeks, some dill and a pot of double cream. Hugh would have been proud.

Sophisticated mushrooms on toast for 2


a little olive oil
250g button chestnut mushrooms (wiped if you can be bothered for that extra sophisticated touch)
2 leeks (thinly sliced)
double cream - perhaps 50 ml?
a tsp dijon mustard
some fronds of dill, finely chopped - to taste (frankly, in my case it was whatever I could salvage that wasn't only good for the compost bin)
salt & pepper 

slices of good sourdough bread (if you have it - and do please smite me for being smug), toasted - and possibly buttered.





Heat the oil gently in a small pan and sweat the leeks for a couple of minutes before adding the mushrooms and cook gently for ten minutes or so, stirring every now and then, till everything is smelling lovely. Add in the cream, the mustard and the dill, and stir together, still on the heat, for a few more minutes. grind in some salt and pepper, taste etc.

Serve on the toast. Feel sophisticated.

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POSTSCRIPT

if you look closely, you can just see that it once held squash soup

*In fact, the Husband did progress the greenhouse project - he is in the process of constructing a heatsink which is something I am completely ignorant about despite him explaining it to me very slowly and clearly a couple of times. It involves pipes and rubble buried in the soil and a fan - and apparently my pseudo-tupperware. I am impervious to engineering, though, unless it's about cake or how to spatchcock a chicken, but so far this has involved him disembowelling a hard drive of an old PC for a fan, and inserting it into one of my valuable plastic tubs (valuable because he used one with a matching lid). The heatsink will somehow act as a heating system for the greenhouse by harnessing the sun's heat, but beyond that well - ask Brian Cox or someone who understands, to explain it to you. The Haybox soup was pretty good too.