A poorly boy, a sulking dog, a minor attack of recipe rage - but LOVELY biscuits

It hasn’t been a happy day in the Recipe Junkie household. The beautiful crisp winter weather we had for the last couple of days turned into horrible damp drizzle. Yes, it’s warmer, but the greyness does nothing for my soul. Blue has been off school, which is not in itself a drama, but having felt this morning that I was probably just giving him the benefit of the doubt, by keeping him off, I had to send him to bed this evening with a temperature of 38.7, knowing full well that he won’t be able to go on his school trip tomorrow. He’s supposed to be going to the British Museum to see the Egyptian things, and he has just been dying to go, counting down the days since before Christmas. I feel so sorry for him – he will just be gutted. I think secretly he knew, but I didn’t dwell on it this evening. I’ll leave that joy for the morning.

As a result of Blue being poorly, Fred the dog is barely speaking to me, having only had the shortest of walks, on the lead, to take Pink to school and then to pick her up. I see him lying there – hardly deigning to raise an eyebrow- simmering with the injustice of it all. I took a picture of him – don’t be fooled into thinking that he’s asleep. He’s not – he’s just sulking.

Pink’s got the back to school blues – you know the ones where they’ve been excited to go back to school to see all their friends, the activities have started back up again (ballet, Rainbows), and then the realisation that this is it for however many weeks, with only the brief respite of half term to look forward to – and the Husband hadn’t had a great day at work. Even the planned supper didn’t work out – no one felt like eggs so instead of Chachouka, we had pasta with the pepper & tomato stew as a sauce.

So guess what? I did some baking. It was a necessity really. I’m embarrassed to say that we had finished off the weekend baking (bar 2 slices of the chocolate cake) by lunchtime today, and the empty tins were making me twitchy. Having felt a bit let down by my failure to miraculously produce wonderful wholemeal bread by following Dan Lepard’s recipe, Dan’s back in my good books, despite a little recipe rage, which I will come to later, with his spelt and ginger cookies. With all this cake stuff, it’s easy to forget that biscuits can take no time at all, and be totally scrummy. These are no exception – the dough takes hardly anytime at all and the only slightly tricky thing is separating an egg. I thought I might make meringues with the white, but it’s hardly worth it for just one white so I decided to freeze the white, I have done this many times before – but this time it was different. This time, I remembered to date the plastic tub and also label it with the number of egg whites I’d put in. So that hopefully, when I have another white or 2, I can add them to the tub and either update the number of whites, or be confident in how many I have altogether with which to make some meringues. I can’t tell you the number of times I have ended up having to chuck frozen egg whites out because I have no idea how many are in the tub.

But back to the biscuits. So you make the dough, and he’s very precise about how big each lump of dough should be – he qualifies ‘a teaspoon’ to be about 15g – that you put on the baking sheet. So, as you can probably tell from my revelation about the egg whites, I’m not necessarily a careful cook, but I thought, “Tonight, let’s go that extra mile, and let’s just check how much these bad boys are weighing” (oh yes, it’s rock and roll at our house, I tell you). So rather unusually, I used pretty much the right amount of dough for each biscuit. Some weighed 16 or 17 g, some 13 or 14. So how come, Mr Lepard, I only ended up with 24 biscuits when the recipe states that it will make about 35?? 32 or 33 I could have lived with – but 24?? (and I know what you’re thinking, but no, I did not eat the mixture before I started dividing it up, and no there wasn’t much left for scraping the bowl afterwards). This really irritates me. However, I feel sure I can move on. The biscuits (or cookies are lovely, and look very appetising in my Alessi jar which was looking very empty once I’d moved it from the dresser to pride of place on the new shelf. But now it looks full, and the little man hanging down has something to rest his feet on for a little while – until they all get eaten.

Storecupboard surprises

In truth, I had a bit of a dilemma about what to cook for supper this evening. The Husband had always intended to make a game pie this weekend, and the plan was to use some venison and pheasant we had in the freezer, courtesy of friends, and I was going to use the rest of the venison to make a casserole for us to eat yesterday evening. However, on Saturday, when I got home from swimming with the children, the Husband admitted that not only had a bought rabbit and bacon from the butcher for the pie, but somehow, accidentally he had also purchased bacon, sausages and black pudding what for having a full English on Sunday morning. So much for eating less meat and embracing veg.

It was totally delicious – really good bacon, and I love black pudding -  but having eaten it at 9 in the morning, I was still completely full at 2 that afternoon when Blue, full of indignation, exclaimed “Mummy! It’s 2 in the afternoon and we haven’t had any lunch”. I was a little irritated, so we had ‘fusion’ soup (fennel & celeriac combined with the leftover dahl and some water – reverting to type) with the multiseed bread (on a totally unrelated matter, I have been typing these posts up in word first to spot any spelling errors – did you know that it will autocorrect multiseed to read multispeed...). The bread was delicious – the soup less so, but edible. By 5 o’clock, the venison casserole I had put in the slow cooker in the morning was done and smelling lovely. The children wolfed it down but still I couldn’t face it. The Husband baked his pie, and made another casserole with the leftover meat, and then ate some of the first casserole at about 9. I had some stilton on the brick bread that I’d baked on Saturday. And a glass of red wine.

And then today, I still couldn’t face the meat. The casserole I’d made was already in the freezer. I wondered about having the Husband’s this evening, but it still felt like too much meat. The planned meal was chachouka (formerly known as egg surprise) but both kids were out for tea and the frozen sauce was supposed to feed all of us, so I decided to leave it in the freezer and so I turned to Hugh for inspiration. I have to say that I don’t think much of his ‘store cupboard suppers’ section. I’m sure they are all delicious, but are they really ‘store cupboard’? I guess it’s subjective, and probably only right that a book called Veg Everday pre-supposes a large amount of ‘veg’ in the store cupboard/fridge/garden, so perhaps we’re just not there yet, but there does seem to be an inordinately large amount of fresh stuff involved. In my book (the one I’d love to write, but, let’s be honest, is never going to happen), you can’t do much better for store cupboard than Nigella’s spaghetti with marmite. I always have spaghetti and marmite in the house. Job done. Most of Hugh’s truly ‘store cupboard’ ingredients are things like artichoke hearts in oil and other such delicacies. Not in my store cupboard, I’m afraid. – Hugh is clearly a man who has never had to resort to egg surprise.
The only truly store cupboard recipe as far as I could see was ‘Quick Chickpea Pasta’. You’re probably thinking what I was secretly thinking, and certainly what the Husband was thinking when I told him what it was called. However, I had pasta, a can of chickpeas, and cheese in the fridge. I had the leftover garlic oil from the Saturday night flatbread extravaganza, so I only needed to add some chilli at that for the dressing. Salt & pepper – done.

It was really, really good. As the Husband said – “If you’d told me what it was before I’d eaten it, I don’t think I’d have been very excited about it.” It just goes to show, really.

Soup and other disasters

When I was growing up, soup was a fact of life, not necessarily a particularly pleasant one, and it never came from a recipe. Soup used to evolve, and I think I may have commented to this effect before. Stock from a Sunday joint would be made into a fresh pot of soup, using up whatever veg was around, and would be eaten and added to throughout the next week – and beyond. As with other things, it is true to say that I absorbed this method of soup by osmosis. Soup made in this way can be delicious and it can be awful, but it was just how it was, and I’ve only recently really discovered that following a recipe can turn soup into something that’s really something to look forward to, rather than a convenient way of using up the sad and limp veg left towards the end of the week.

I’ve got a recipe for quick tomato soup which the children love, but soup hasn’t really featured highly on their list of favourite things to eat – possibly because of the approach I have previously taken to soup making. I recently discovered Sarah Raven’s mushroom soup as a means of cooking the results of one of the Husband’s foraging expeditions. I’ve also used it just for shop bought mushrooms, and very good it is too. Being that it’s winter, and cold, and soup is a great weekend lunch, I have decided to engage my quest for Veg (nearly Everyday), as a means to campaign for more soup eating, particularly as far as Blue and Pink are concerned. It also occurred to me that if I make a big pot of soup on a Friday night, it means that lunch is ready for Saturday, and I can freeze some in convenient plastic containers for the Husband to take to work with him for lunch. Anything that reduces the need for faffing around with packed lunches on a weekday morning has to be good in my book.

So first off, this weekend, Fennel & Celeriac soup with Orange Zest. There’s no magic in how it’s made – 3 fennel bulbs and some celeriac, plus the grated zest of an orange. Unfortunately, when I was making the shopping list, I forgot about the oranges, so it was just Fennel & Celeriac soup, but it was very good indeed. We had it for lunch on Saturday. Blue loved it and Pink ate what I’d given her. It’s a bit strange that she is my veg eater (as opposed to Blue who is less keen on veg but will eat fruit till it comes out of his ears) but isn’t great with veg in soup. Anyway, the rule is that they have to try, and it’s working well. This approach has meant that Blue in particular has eaten much more variety in the way of veg than I would have expected previously.

Saturday was a big veg day. The Husband and Pink went into Town on Saturday afternoon leaving Blue and I to prepare a curry feast, using Veg Everyday. In the end we did the cauliflower and chickpea curry and dahl along with more flatbreads. The curry was dead easy as was the dhal and the results were really delicious. The dahl in particular was really tasty and both kids scoffed it down. I have to say that I didn’t put any chilli in the curry, to cater for the kids, but it was fine without it. Perhaps this counts as wimping out, but I’d rather they got used to the flavours without being put off by something that was too hot. Blue made the flatbread dough pretty much on his own, but despite my intentions, in the end I did all the rolling out – by the time it was dinner time, I just wanted to get it on the table. We did the garlic oil to be drizzled over the flatbreads too and this was a great addition, although we would have floored any number of vampires by the end of it.

Spurred on by my success with Dab Lepard’s white bread earlier last week, I decided to make some of his wholemeal. I’ve long since given up making wholemeal bread – at most I’ll do half and half – because it’s just not great bread. But I was feeling confident, sure that if I followed Dan, all would be well. I’m afraid that my first attempt has not been a success. Just as brick like as ever. I’m sure I did everything as the recipe stated, but perhaps not. I was feeling slightly downhearted, (particularly as the alchemists chocolate cake I made on Friday turned out rather dense in the end – lovely but dense. Perhaps 2 large eggs does not equal 3 medium... Still, nothing a melted slab of green and blacks drizzled over the top can’t fix), and had to leave the rising loaf of honey and multiseed bread in the anxious hands of the Husband while I went out to babysit for a friend. It uses the half sponge method and also uses a kind of porridge of oats, seeds and honey. While I was out, the Husband texted me: “I’m worried about the bread”. “Just follow the instructions in the recipe” “But there are options” he said. “Feel the fear” I texted back – with hindsight, rather cruelly. The boy did good, though. The wholemeal may have been a disaster, but my faith is restored by the honey and multiseed loaf, and as I type, Pink and I are waiting for our ‘Toll House YoYos’  (a Dan biscuit) to bake – to be sandwiched together with a vanilla icing. Smelling good, and perhaps even better than custard creams...

****STOP PRESS****
the yoyos are ready...

what a week!

I can’t believe how quickly this week has gone. There I was getting right back into the swing of the blog and before I know it, it’s Friday again. So here I am, G&T in hand, wondering what to blog about.

Perhaps, most importantly, I should say that the Husband has made me 2 lovely shelves in the kitchen so now my recipe books are where they should be and not in the study, to be carted back and forth. One shelf has my favourite books on it and the other, I couldn’t resist, has the remains of my Granny (she of the lovely biscuit tin)’s old coffee set and some nice jugs that I have collected. The ‘display’ shelf is lovely – secretly, and very occasionally, I fantasise about having one of those kitchens where the home owner’s ‘lovely things’ are out on display, apparently full time, and there is never any clutter. When we had the kitchen ‘done’ a couple of years ago, I did promise faithfully that the top of the dresser, which is something we inherited with the house – would be clear of clutter and everything would be put away, but inevitably, it was not to be. I once had a (male) friend whose parents kept such a kitchen – clear worktops apart from a beautiful dualit kettle, and some minimalist white crockery artfully placed.  I remember him taking me home later on one evening to my parents’ house, and remarking how he was glad to see someone else’s kitchen was a mess – I didn’t spoil the illusion, but in fact the kitchen was, at that precise moment probably as tidy as I had ever seen . But I digress. I am now the proud owner of some lovely shelves, and it gives me a little thrill of satisfaction to see Hugh, Nigella and friends all nestled up together, casting their collective watchful eye over proceedings.

Maybe it’s their presence in the kitchen that has inspired me this week, but it does seem to have been one where I have particularly enjoyed cooking.

Last Saturday, looking for something to cook for a Sunday lunch, I retrieved a cut of lamb from the freezer. We got a jointed lamb last year – jointed but unlabeled. Having slowly worked our way through the more identifiable pieces of meat, there are now 3 or 4 pot luck lumps, so feeling brave, I decided to go for it. Given that I wasn’t quite sure what joint it was, the Husband and I decided that the best approach would be the slow roast, so when I got up on Sunday morning I did the HFW merguez spice mix that’s in River Cottage Everyday, slapped it on the meat, sizzled it in a hot oven for 30 mins then turned it right down and left to do its thang. We headed off to the allotment for a morning of digging and came back for lunch, by which time the meat was really lovely, with loads of juice (you chuck in a couple of glasses of water during the cooking time). It really is a fantastic way to cook lamb.

There wasn’t much left over of the lamb, so the kids had to have fish fingers and chips for tea on Monday – in the interests of eating out of the freezer, which was one of my stated aims for January (“Are they chips from the shop, mummy, or your ones?” “From the shop” “Hooray!! Shop bought chips!!” – the children are easily pleased) – and the Husband and I had a variation on my favourite leftover chicken recipe which is basically couscous baked in the oven with cold cooked chicken, couscous, tomatoes and peas and a spicy stock. In the absence of any of those ingredients, apart from couscous, I managed to use up the left over lamb along with the olives and artichoke heart (tinned I’m afraid) we’d used on Saturday night’s pizza, and some feta that had been languishing at the back of the fridge. I used the left over juice from the joint mixed in with some lamb stock to make the cooking liquor and bingo. There was even enough left for the Husband to have for his lunch on Tuesday, although I’m not sure he was as thrilled about that as I was.

On Monday, I also decided that I needed to see if Dan’s ‘farmhouse tin’ would stand up to the double batch treatment. It did. Need I say more.

On Tuesday, in the interests of eating less meat, and having found a jar of korma sauce in the cupboard, left over from the camper van last summer and needing eating up, I bit the bullet and made cauliflower korma and flatbreads for supper. Blue doesn’t like cauli much but does like curry, Pink vice versa, and the result was a surprising success. I literally fried an onion, and steamed the cauli before adding it along with the jar of sauce and cooking it. I used HFW’s magic bread dough – the one with plain flour in from Veg... that I used for pizza on Saturday, and blow me down, if it doesn’t make fab flatbread too. I got a bit enthusiastic and started off letting the kids roll out the individual flatbreads before I cooked them, but that was a mistake – it was late and I was tired. Tempers were frayed (mostly mine) so I decided that in the interest of their life expectancy, I had better finish it off myself, but the results were great.

We’ve eaten meat the rest of the week (although only a little chicken in fajitas – mostly red pepper, and yes, we used bought wraps – on Wednesday) but tomorrow, spurred on by the success of Tuesday’s curry, we are going to have a curry feast out of Veg. We will have flatbreads, and I will be good mummy and let the kids roll out as many flatbreads as they wish. I will not get grouchy and mean when they cover themselves and the kitchen in flour. We will be the very image of domestic bliss.

Finally, I made Dan’s alchemist chocolate cake this evening, the one with no butter, and only a little oil, and which uses a kind of pear/cocoa emulsion to bind it all together. So far so good – the mixture tasted scrummy, but I’m thinking that perhaps substitution 2 large eggs for the stated 3 medium eggs might have been an error as it’s looking rather flat. Still, I’m sure once I’ve drizzled some melted chocolate over it, flatness will be last thing on my mind...

Living on the Edge...

It’s been a long time since I have made bread using any other recipe than one of St Hugh’s, or made pizza base without consulting Lord Jamie, but never let it be said that I don’t live on the edge. I made not one but 2 dramatic departures from the Recipe Junkie repertoire today, prompted by baking withdrawal. I haven’t had to bake anything for weeks because the Christmas cake lasted, as it should, until the early part of this week, and I had baked and frozen quite a lot of bread before Christmas to see us through (you’d think we were being blockaded or something), and that alone had my fingers itching to do something with dough. Secondly, despite, the arrival of Short and Sweet by Dan Lepard, and Veg Everyday, HF-W’s latest over the festive period, I was somewhat delayed in my reading of both tomes – Dan’s because I got absorbed in Emma Kennedy’s ‘I Left my Tent in San Francisco’ – which I would thoroughly recommend, but the reasons are probably the subject of a different blog altogether – and HF-W’s because the Husband acquired it by swapping some of the other, duplicate, books he’d been given over Christmas (I mean, how many copies of ‘Fifty Ways to Kill a Slug’ does a man need to own...) Anyway, quite sensibly, he wanted to have a perv – I mean read – before I started to use it and covered it in the same light coating of olive oil, cumin and cocoa powder that all my cook books seem to acquire just from being present in the kitchen. As a result I have only just got stuck into both books in the last couple of days.
Anyway, Dan – what a man. The book is fab and I’ve only read about bread and cakes so far. I am planning much cakeage next weekend (watch out for ‘the alchemists chocolate cake’ – only 220 calories per slice and appears to use a can of pears instead of butter. This I have to try). The Husband is currently dentally challenged, and has requested a postponement of further sourdough activity on the grounds that the bread is more chewy, so in the interests of trying something new rather than reverting to my old standard recipe for bread with quick yeast (loosely, the old HF-W recipe that’s in the Family Cookbook but I haven’t read a bread recipe for ages), I decided it was only fair to give Dan’s bread (and besides I didn’t have any tinned pears in the cupboard and the chickens aren’t laying so well so I didn’t have enough eggs). I went for his farmhouse white tin loaf. It uses a ‘half sponge’ method so you mix flour warm water and yeast together and leave for a few hours then add the rest of the flour and salt to that. But first you rub butter in to the flour. Bizarre. I felt like I was making crumble, not bread. I guess my previous method involved olive oil, so using butter is just an alternative to that. He’s got lots of top tips for bread making. I haven’t kneaded a loaf myself for a long time, preferring to take the easy route and chuck it all in the Kenwood, but I thought I’d do it as instructed, which involved kneading the bread 3 times, each time only for a short time, and with a break of 15 or 30 minutes, and then leaving it rise in the tin for a long rise, which is kind of the opposite of how I’ve done it before (without the multiple kneading). The other thing that was different was the cooking time – much longer – but dare I say it, the end result looks and smells totally fabulous. I am desperately trying to resist the urge to cut off a slice, smother it in butter and marmalade and devour. But I fear that once I start, I won’t stop...
But what would a day be without Hugh? Nigella featured at lunchtime with her Sunshine soup (out of Kitchen – basically cook frozen sweetcorn in stock and roast 2 yellow peppers in a hot oven then blitz together. A big hit indeed). I couldn’t leave him out of the party, so I decided to use his ‘magic bread dough’ out of Veg Everyday to make the pizza bases. I was a bit surprised because it uses half plain flour which I’ve never come across before, but it made very good pizza base. The pizzas were great too – I mixed together a tub of frozen homemade tomato pizza topping with a portion of frozen red pepper pasta sauce that I must have squirreled away at some point in the past, and combined they made a lovely tomato sauce to top with the rest. I confess that meat did make an appearance – the Husband’s pepperoni and some anchovies – along with the usual. I flung them in the oven, and set the timer.
“Why did you put someone else’s pizza on top of mine, Mummy?” asked Pink. “Well, to fit them all in” I said. “But you put it RIGHT ON TOP of my one” she persisted. “No, no, the shelves are just quite close together”.

8 minutes later, tea towel to the ready, I confidently took out the first pizza. A crash as Pink’s pizza and baking sheet fell off the bottom of Blue’s, olives scattering onto the floor, and a howl from Pink “My PIIIIZZZZZZZZAAAAAAA!”. I really had put them on the same shelf, one on top of the other. Forget recipes – I need a basic oven driving book...

A little bit of Veg Everyday

When the Husband and I had no money, and lived on the edge of Salisbury Plain miles from any shops (well, it seemed like miles at the back end of a long commute into London) one of our regular meals was ‘Egg Surprise’. Egg Surprise consisted of whatever we had, cooked up with a can of tomatoes. The surprise was whether there was an egg or not, cooked in the tomato sauce. I was talking to a neighbour about this not so long ago and she told me about ‘Ifits’ which turned up at least once every couple of weeks in her household. ‘If it’s in the cupboard, I’ll cook it’ is what her mum would say. Same thing really.

Well it turns out that there is a recipe for Egg Surprise, although according to HF-W, it’s called ‘Chachouka’ if it’s got eggs in it and ‘Pepperonata’ without. This is very gratifying. The fact that a mainstay of our early married life features in Veg Everyday pleases me greatly. To be fair, Chachouka in the HF-W sense does involve specific ingredients (finely sliced onions and red/yellow peppers) to be cooked with the can of tomatoes, and also includes saffron, smoked paprika and cumin which I don’t ever recall being integral to Egg Surprise, although when the Husband was in charge it usually had a fair amount of chilli in it.

Anyway, as part of our current bid to embrace HF-W’s philosophy of eating a bit more veg instead of meat, Chachouka was supper this evening. I read the introduction of Veg Everyday the other evening and he is quite persuasive. It’s not about replacing meat in a meal, more leaving it out altogether and cooking something so delicious without it that you don’t feel cheated.

I thought Chachouka would be a good place to start, partly for reasons of nostalgia and also because I thought it would be relatively easy to sell to the kids. Pink adores eggs and Blue is a fan of anything tomatoey sauce, but I wasn’t 100% certain that they’d eat it: The sauce isn’t whizzed up – it’s more of a stew, and if the eggs weren’t runny enough, that might have been a show stopper. However, I was more convinced they’d eat that as compared with kale and mushroom lasagne.

It helped that by the time I’d finished cooking it, it was quite a bit later than they would normally have had tea and they were both starving. I’d read the recipe but failed to notice quite how long it needs to be cooked – onions for 10 mins then the peppers for another 20 mins followed by another 15 mins with the tomatoes and then a final blast in the oven with the eggs. I should also ‘fess up and admit to giving them garlic bread with it. Bought from the shop. Bound to make them feel well disposed towards their tea. However, notwithstanding the garlic bread and hunger pangs, they both ate it up and Blue (who I was least convinced about because he can be funny about eggs) said it was delicious. Good job I made a double quantity of the stew so we can have it again without waiting for hours for it to cook.

The Husband and I ate later. “This looks remarkably like egg surprise” he said. Funny, that...

nearly finished the cheese

So there it was, Merry Christmas, I had lots of fun. It’s been a while, but frankly the end of term descended into madness, and I’d managed to cook so much in advance that there wasn’t much to blog about (I mean – “went to freezer, defrosted cinnamon buns, ate them, groaned for 20 minutes”– hardly merits much webspace). I should also confess to watching far too much Kirstie Allsopp in the pre-Christmas period, and was temporarily diverted from baking onto homemade Christmas cards. It’s amazing how compelling cutting and sticking can be... 

The Christmas food all went to plan. We had coffee and cinnamon buns for breakfast, smoked salmon with sour cream and dill on blinis late morning, then Doris (the bird) early afternoon. I don’t know why we gave her a name. It was Pink’s idea really, but it does go against the grain a bit as we’ve always said about the chickens that we wouldn’t eat chickens that we knew – so French, Saunders, Hornby, Barbie and Pepper are safe, and naming the Turkey seemed to imply to me a certain intimacy, but it didn’t seem to bother the kids. Doris was a Copas bird – free range, and 4.5 kilos fed 4 of us for a week plus a pie (about which more later) and about 3 litres of stock. I didn’t do anything fancy with it but followed a combination of Hugh FW and Nigella’s suggestions re: cooking times and stuffing – so I covered the breast with salt and pepper, pancetta and some olive oil, put a halved orange and a couple of sprigs of rosemary inside the bird, and only stuffed the neck, and for cooking did a sizzle in a hot oven for 20 mins before turning it down for the rest of the cooking time. I managed to remember to baste every 30-40 mins and I also ‘rested’ her breast side down. Whether it was one thing in particular or a combination, she was cooked to perfection (if I do say so myself) – not a stringy dry thigh in sight, and was very delicious.

I hadn’t bothered with a ham partly because our after- Christmas guest is vegetarian – so I was very pleased to trade some of the leftover turkey for some gammon from one of the neighbours who hadn’t done a turkey. There are many, many things to do with leftover Turkey, but there’s a turkey and ham pie in Nigella’s Feast that is really scrummy. You basically make a sauce from butter, flour and turkey stock plus some cream (I didn’t say it was slimming) , throw in the cooked turkey and ham plus some sweetcorn, top with pastry and bake. I’ve made it a couple of times now and if anyone’s interested, the sauce is better with a dollop of wholegrain mustard. I made it this weekend for a New Year’s day lunch at my father in law’s and it went down very well. Actually I’ve done pretty well with pastry this festive season. I made many, many mince pies using Nigella’s pastry (Domestic Goddess) for a Christmas Eve drinks thing, and the pastry I made for the turkey pie worked fine, although that may be because my father in law doesn’t own a rolling pin so I rolled it our using a (full) wine bottle wrapped in cling film which is probably heavier and colder than my usual implement.

We really enjoyed having people round for drinks on Christmas Eve. Somehow instead of making Christmas more stressful, it all worked fine, but that may be because of the huge amount of mulling that went on. The Husband spent most of the afternoon tending a couple of large pans, one of the 2011 vintage cider, the other with a wine and sloe gin concoction, and probably doubled his alcohol intake by the inhalation of the vapours. While he was in charge of the content of the cider pan, I’d googled mulled wine and come up with a hybrid recipe taken from about 7 different suggestions I’d found. I can thoroughly recommend the addition of sloe (or damson) gin. T’was very drinkable, as was the ‘sloegasm’ that I enjoyed on Christmas Day – sloe gin and champagne – a kind of shabby chic kir royale, but no less drinkable and possibly more potent. I did however resist the suggestion to have multiple sloegasms – after all, I was in charge of Doris, and she deserved better than that. 

We’ve now eaten our way through most of the Christmas provisions, although there is still some cheese left over. Despite my best intentions, I got ‘Short and Sweet’ by Dan Leppard and ‘Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache’ by Harry Eastman for Christmas from Allotment Junkie and I am very much looking forward to some more baking. However, to counter the cake, we also got the River Cottage Veg Everyday book, so on a healthier note I am resolved to cook at least one meal a week from that, plus one other veggie meal, so watch this space for progress.