Issy's Food Blog

As I've said before, one of the fantastic things about the internet generally and blogging particularly is that it gives a voice to anyone who wants to have one. I don't always agree with all the voices I 'hear', but I can choose those I want to listen to. (Even though much of the internet is written, I think you can often hear the voices that are speaking, not in a weird, spooky way, but through the tone and the words that are chosen, you can imagine a voice speaking the words...maybe it's just me). 

One of the voices I choose to listen to is Issy. I'll declare my interest now, Issy is the daughter of one of my oldest and very dear friends, and as such, I've known her since she was a twinkle in her parents' eye. 

For her summer project this year she could choose anything she wanted to do - I'm not quite sure of the parameters, but I remember her mum telling me that they could pretty much take their pick - and Issy decided to write a food blog. 

What I love about Issy's Food Blog is that I can really hear Issy's voice. This is no pretentious pre-teen blog, just a lovely girl enjoying the kind of cooking that you'd expect a nearly 11 year old to be cooking at home. I also love the little stories that she conjours up reflecting the food in its context - Grandpa's Breakfast cooked for a much loved grandparent who'd been in hospital, Really Easy Pasta inspired by a Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall recipe but in true good cook fashion, adapted to suit what she found at home, and of course Wonderful Welshcakes - yes, they came to visit in the summer!

Of course I'm biased, but I think it's brilliant that the internet has given Issy and her exploits in the kitchen a voice - why not check out her blog and leave her a comment?

Welsh Mussels cooked in English Cider

It's a strange thing, living abroad. Before we moved, I never really considered that I was moving to another country - I mean I knew Wales was distinct and had a border - hell, you even have to pay if you cross it at the Severn - but a different COUNTRY? Really?

Well, yes, it most definitely is. My own ignorance has had more than a couple of sharp metaphorical slaps administered over the last 18 months, particularly here, out on the West Wales coast, where you hear Welsh spoken all the time, where most primary education is in Welsh and the best thing on TV at the moment (Y Gwyll) comes with English subtitles. Yes, it's very clear that we are living in a distinct and separate country.

And if you ever make the mistake of thinking Wales is just a small part of Britain, think again. Just come here when Wales are playing England at the rugby, and you can be in no doubt that you are most definitely in another country. 

There are of course, great swathes of rugby playing in England, but here it is religion; and it is national and all encompassing. No moaning rugby widows here, oh no. Rugby seems to define the mood of the nation far more than any other part of Welsh life. Wales is, of course, as diverse as England - areas of wealth and poverty, cities, and villages, mountains and coast - and so naturally there are divisions. People have different politics, different attitudes to Europe, to the issues of the day, but mention the R word, and you will have utter unity.

I find the Welsh love of country fascinating and something to be immensely inspired by. It seems to come from a deep and abiding pride in and love of Wales, rather than hatred of others. The only English people I have seen express similar love of their own country seem to be motivated by hate, and this is not the case in Wales - except, perhaps where the rugby is concerned. Of course, there is still the national passion and pride supporting the Welsh rugby team - but if ever there was a time when a love inspired by hate might become apparent, it is when the boys are playing England at rugby. For days, my Facebook has been full of posts like "I'm supporting Wales in the #RugbyWorldCup - and anyone playing the English". And really, Saturday night, it was just as much about hiding chariots where the sun doesn't shine, about crushing the English as it was about the great game that the Welsh rugby team played. And really, it seemed like the whole of Wales (as evidenced by my Facebook) was watching.  A whole country united behind their team.

It's all water off a duck's back to me - born in England and lived there all my life (apart from various sojourns in France) until now, and not particularly interested in the outcome of any sporting competition, I know I have enough Welsh and Scottish blood in me that I don't feel that this hatred of the English is really about ME - although I probably wouldn't argue the toss with one of my Welsh friends. The fact is, that whatever I feel, I'll probably always be 'English' in the eyes of my Welsh friends here. The Husband, well, I think he'd have preferred not to have to go into work this morning, but he took a deep breath and manned up, practising saying "Well, we've got to let you win sometimes" in the least bitter tone he could muster...

Of course, we watched the game. And (don't tell the Husband) I'm glad Wales won. I love the support the team has, the unfettered pride in watching a good team play brilliantly, and of course, the way the victory is celebrated - by the way, have you seen the video of Ioan Gruffudd dancing around in his pants? If anything is worth a Welsh victory, that is...

Welsh mussels cooked in English Cider

We spent the morning on Saturday before the match foraging for mussels. We're in the grip of the most gorgeous weather at the moment, so we took the opportunity to collect a couple of kilos from a local beach. 

Our intention was to make something called 'eclade' which we've seen Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall prepare - you cook the mussels by burning pine needles over the top of them and then stir the pine infused mussels into a concoction of shallots and spinach. So while the mussels soaked in sea water, we spent the afternoon trying to find pine needles. 

Easier said than done. We were thwarted, so instead, we cooked the mussels in cider. And very good they were too. We ate them in front of the TV watching the rugby. Welsh mussels cooked in English cider - culinary harmony, if not mirrored on the pitch.

About 2.5 kg mussels - cleaned and debearded
good knob of butter and a splash of olive oil
2 echalion shallots, finely chopped
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
1 500ml bottle of cider
about 50 ml double cream
freshly ground pepper

You also need a large heavy pan with a lid

Melt the butter in the oil, and gently sweat the shallot and garlic until soft.

Tip in the cider and bring up to the boil before tipping in the cleaned, de-bearded mussels and putting on the lid tightly.

Cook for 3-4 minutes, shaking the pan a couple of times.

Once the mussels have all opened, stir in the cream, and then leave to sit for a couple of minutes (if you can wait) - apparently this allows any residual grit to sink to the bottom of your pan.

Ladle mussels and the cooking liquid into bowls and serve - they are exceptionally good with skinny fries and decent mayo on the side, belgian style, or if you prefer, crusty bread.

Lobster

Meet Larry... Larry the Lobster

As birthdays go, I'm not one to get that worked up about them, or presents. There's not much I want and I certainly don't hope for or expect lavish gifts that seem to be de rigueur these days. I'll always remember being asked if I knew I was getting the eternity ring the Husband gave me for Christmas several years ago - as if it was somehow something I'd asked for and was expecting or felt I had some kind of right to. I was completely gobsmacked by the question to be honest - I mean, it was a lovely, gorgeous present, but I would never have expected anything like it. And now that I'm on the right side of 40, honestly, what I enjoy about birthdays is the little things, time with family & friends, an excuse to have a little trip out - to a gin distillery perhaps.... I mean if people want to give me awesome things like a ghillie kettle, then that's all well and good, but presents don't matter to me in the same way that they seem to to some people (and I exclude children here - children are perfectly entitled to get excited about presents - I'm not such a miserable humbug...).

A ghillie kettle - the best 43rd brthday present agirl could get.

I wouldn't normally talk about birthday presents except that 10 days before my birthday, I received an early present, and a very surprising one at that. Imagine, if you will, the scene: I am taking 5 minutes out on a Sunday morning. My mother in law and her new husband who are visiting for the weekend have taken themselves off for a little excursion, and the Husband and the children are engaged in various bad weather day activities. I am crocheting (rock & roll).

My mother in law and husband return and I hear them asking where I am. "Are you sitting down Sally? You'd better put that crochet down" 

And the next thing I know, there's a plastic carrier bag being placed on my knee it feels heavy. Something shifts. I peer into the bag, and see dark shell. At first I think it's mussels, and then, a more vigorous shift - vigorous enough to make me jump and utter a most un-RecipeJunkie-like shriek: for I pride myself on my ability to deal with spiders, slugs and all many of creatures normally assigned the 'fear factor'....

in my defence, I defy anyone who wasn't expecting it not to react in a similar way to having a live, and rather angry, lobster dropped in their lap...

Fortunately, I didn't drop the bag, for if I had, the rather magnificent and indignant (justifiably so) Larry would have been allowed to get loose in our sitting room. His claws were rubber banded together, but he was fluttering the curious flaps he has on his belly in a rather aggressive manner, so I put him back safely in the bag on the kitchen work surface, and went to consult Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (well, his Fish book - our hotline isn't working at the moment...).

Angry and magnificent - could I really bring myself to plunge him into boiling water? Well, depending on your point of view, I'm sorry to disappoint you/pleased to say that I rose to the challenge. Based on Hugh's advice, I popped Larry into the freezer for a couple of hours, and then found the biggest cooking receptacle I could find, which turned out to be the jam pan. 

The theory about putting them in the freezer is that the lobster will drift off into a chilly coma and, when you plunge him into the boiling water, won't have time to come to and realise what's happening before it's all too late and you've got a beautifully pink ready to eat lobster ready for nothing more than some lemon juice and a slather of mayonnaise.

Water appropriately salinated, then, I applied the gas and waited for the water to boil - my VEGETARIAN mother in law looking on all the while. And reader when the time came, I did it. Larry went into the water.

How do I feel about this? I did feel slightly queasy about the whole thing, I must admit, but I'm not a vegetarian, and really, I should be prepared to kill something if I'm going to eat it. I felt there was a lesson to teach the children too - something about putting your money where your mouth is...

I have no such qualms about mussels - but they don't look like living things in the same way as Larry the lobster did, all his indignation intact before his swift consignment to the freezer. There was an element of 'face' going on too - I mean, presented with a lobster by your mother in law, what would you do? Wimp out, or rise to the challenge? I'll say no more.

We ate him, Larry. And he was delicious. Caught that morning, my mother in law & hubbie had acquired him from the fisherman who operates off Aberporth beach as he came in from his morning's work. Apparently, as the boat came in, a number of people appeared to select goodies. I've never seen this, and I'm pleased that it happens, because did you know that most of the fine and delicious sea food caught in these beautiful waters around Wales and the rest of the British Isles is all shipped to Europe? It's criminal, but apparently there's no market for it over here. They paid £10 for Larry - which makes me think, I need to get to know the fishing schedules a little more intimately...

Slow roast pork (possibly again)

Thank you all of you who read my last post. I know this is normally a place for me to share my fairly inane, and fairly unoriginal drivellings about food, but occasionally, you know, an issue arises which is more important than what we ate for dinner. Actually, most things are more important than what we ate for dinner, but I can't always articulate what I feel about those things. My friend's situation, the chronic category 5 endometriosis and the fact that she has borne it  without complaining for all these years, I feel deeply about that, and as we live so far apart, writing the post was the only thing I felt I could do. The good news is that it's had huge page viewings and even made it to the front page of the Mumsnet Bloggers Network yesterday which I was incredibly chuffed about.

But today, my friend is still in hospital, and nothing has stirred me to action, so it's back to the food. Although if you haven't read my last post, please do...

There's a bit in one of the Wind in the Willows stories which talks about it being a 'golden afternoon' - late summer is the season, and if memory serves me correctly, it's when Toad has encouraged Ratty and Mole to join him in a gypsy caravan, before the onset of the motor car. Well, it's only March, but the weather has been golden over the last few days here on the West Wales coast. The tide has been low in the mornings, so my day has started with a good dose of beach, and the kids even braved the sea after school a couple of days ago.

After my jaunt to Aberporth with Fred this morning, I stopped off at the farm shop which is just off the main A487 coast road at Tanygroes (if you were interested). Down a little lane is the Golwg y Mor Farm Fresh Meats shop, and if you are in the area for any reason, like a holiday, or because you live here, it's well worth a visit. The meat is fabulous, and the company friendly and chatty. It's one of the things I really love about living here. People have the time to chat, to pass the time of day. On the downside, it makes work avoidance far too easy - I was struggling to leave the beach in the first place, and I ended up delaying the inevitable enforced time in front of the lap top by at least another 20 minutes chatting about this and that...

The conversation this morning turned to the fact that people have been slow cooking pork for years - the Rayburn being a perfect medium to bung in the joint and forget about it all day - but that all of a sudden it's 'the new thing'. He was saying he gets people coming in asking for meat to make 'pulled pork' as if it's the latest thing. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall et al have a lot to answer for - but in a good way, because if they have opened up the eyes of the cooking public to the beauty that is slow roast meat, that can only be a good thing.

I was, myself, in there for something to slow roast. A piece of pork to whack in the oven when I got home, and leave all day, delicious smells permeating the house, and meaning that when dinner time came, I simply had to knock up some veggies and do some gravy. Veg box day yesterday produced lovely chard, carrots and celeriac, amongst other things. Simply steamed the first two, and made mash with the third - perfect accompaniments. 

Speaking of unoriginal drivel about food, I know there are a million recipes for slow roast pork on the internet, and there may even be a version of this somewhere on this blog, but it's so good, and so easy that I thought it was worth posting again.

Slow roast Pork Shoulder (or whatever, it doesn't have to be shoulder)

! piece of pork - about 2 kg
a little oil to grease your roasting tin, plus 1 tbsp
1 medium onion
some sprigs of thyme
2 tbsp fennel seed
zest of a lemon
2 cloves of garlic, peeled & roughly chopped
a good pinch of sea salt
A large wine glass of white wine & water (or all water if you don't have any white wine left over from the previous night)

Pre-heat the oven to 220C

Grease a smallish roasting tin - it needs to be big enough to take the pork, but not so big that the liquid evaporates during the long cooking . Peel the onion, slice it and lay slices over the base of the tin, and chuck on a couple of the thyme stalks.

Pick off the leaves of the rest of the thyme stalks and add to a pestle & mortar (or whatever you use) with the fennel seed, lemon zest and garlic. 

Bash all this together with some sea salt and mix in the tbsp of oil, then lay the pork on the onions and smear all over with this rub/paste.

Put the whole lot in the oven and cook at the high temperature for 20-30 minutes, then remove from the oven and turn the heat down to around 110C. Tip the wine/water into the tin and cover the roasting tin snugly with foil. Return the tin to the oven and cook for as long as you need - I left mine in for about 7 hours before doing anything to it.

About 1 hr before you want to eat, remove the pork from the oven and turn the heat back up. Remove the foil and retun the pork to the oven to crisp up the crackling. Keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't burn - and cook for about 45 minutes.

Once the crackling is done, leave the meat to rest for 15 minutes or so, then remove the crackling and divide it into equal sized pieces (once you've checked that it's properly crispy and delicious of course), and pull the meat apart to serve. 

A Loaf of Fresh White Bread - a Random Recipe

I'll tell you the truth - there hasn't been much cooking going on around here - certainly not of the kind that I could in all conscience post up here. I mean, I have been cooking, but repetitive stuff, stuff I've made before, easy crowd pleasers.

Why?

Well, because if there was one thing Blue being ill taught me it was to live for the moment. Now that he's had the all clear, there seems to be even more reason to do so, and given that we've had lots and lots of this

which has led to lots more of this

you'll understand that a gal's thoughts haven't turned to the kitchen that often.

But still. It's been ages since I did a random recipe, and this is the 40th challenge set by Dom at Belleau Kitchen: take the 40th book on the shelf, turn to the 40th page and cook it.

Since the move, my cookery books have been even more dispersed than they were before, and of course, I no longer have my lovely shelf. I started counting in the kitchen and ended up at number 40 in the study with The River Cottage Family Cook Book by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Fizz Carr.

This is not so much a recipe book of family food, as cooking and kitchen related projects for children to undertake. I like it, and it's good for back to basics stuff as well as more challenging projects, including things like making your own sausages, which we have done with the kids. It's got some good stuff about food politics, about reducing waste all that good stuff you'd expect from a book of this provenance, but it's not patronising or preachy.

I pretty much knew where page 40 was going to take me before I'd opened the book - somewhere in the 'Flour' section which includes gems such as home made pasta, sourdough and pastry. And what do you know, page 40 - plain and simple "A Loaf of Fresh White Bread". Actually, page 40 was the pictures, the recipe was on page 41.

I've never used this recipe, and to be honest, it includes both oil and sugar (or honey) which I've long since ommitted from my own bread making. But rules is rules, so I made up the dough using the ingredients specified.

Where I did deviate, though, was in the kneading (or not). I've become more and more aware of the 'no knead' method of bread making, and having had massive success with this to-die-for Cardigan Bay Buns temptation (which I urge you to try) using the no knead technique, I decided to try a Dan Lepard 'hardly any knead' version on this bread recipe.

It's a revelation: with barely any kneading - just a brief flurry of folds and turns every 10 minutes for half an hour, followed by a 45 minute rise, you get awesome bread. Every brief knead the dough take on more structure, the resulting loaf is light, the crust crusty, the crumb, well, crumby. Just right.

And just because I am a complete pig when it comes to fresh bread and couldn't contain myself in the interests of giving you the whole story, I had to sample the results of the almost no knead method in a scientific manner, I can attest to the fact that it tastes great...

The Hunger Games - and Chocolate Digestives

One of my favourite things to do is to curl up with a good book, a cup of tea, and a packet of biscuit. I'm a sucker for a book and a biscuit, but the combination rarely arises. For a start, I'm not a fan of eating biscuits in bed (sorry, I just can't do crumbs in bed. Too itchy.) and bed is where I tend to do most of my reading, cramming as many pages in before unconsciousness engulfs me.

I'm happy to read pretty much anything apart from proper horror, although I tend to the modern fiction (apparently - that's what someone told me once, faced with my 'books I had read recently list' that I was asked to provide on a job application form - although I had to explain that the way I chose books was pretty much on cover alone) and I've usually got a few books on the go. At the moment, I'm reading John Sargeant's autobiography, The Tent the Bucket and Me by Emma Kennedy (again - in preparation for the camping season - it's hilarious) The Red House by Mark Haddon, and 'The Welsh Learner's Dictionary' (!) but there's always room for more books in my life - just never enough time.

Blue recently started to ask me if he could read 'The Hunger Games'. Now, this hasn't been completely off my radar, but with both children at primary school, and my understanding that this was 'teen fiction', it hasn't been anything I've paid much attention to - I've paid so little attention to it that initially I assumed it was some kind of Sweet Valley High (anyone else remember them?) teen trash about Valley girls and their competitive eating disorders. How wrong can you be?

By the time he asked if he could read them, I was aware that there was a little bit more to it than that - the posters for the films suggested that if nothing else, and just before we moved, I had a conversation with a couple of other mums whose kids are the same age as Blue, and who were reading them. I'm all for the children reading as much and as widely as possible, but in the same way that I want to know what they are watching on TV, when a book comes along that I'm not too sure about, I want to make sure I'm not setting off to read something that's completely unsuitable. My mum helps a lot - she seems to spend hours rooting out good books for him: most recently she introduced him to the Alex Rider books by Anthony Horowitz. Totally fantastic. Blue has devoured them, both on his own and with us reading them to him, and I've been hooked too.

The Hunger Games hasn't cropped up on Mum's reading list yet, so I was on my own. Fortune found us the trilogy very cheaply in The Works (I meant to get it from the library, but we haven't sorted out library membership yet) and I started reading the first book in the trilogy - the eponymous 'Hunger Games') on Friday night.

Well I was utterly gripped from the start. If you haven't read it, it is certainly not teen valley trash. It's a very gripping adventure novel, and although an adult version might include more complexity, as far as I'm concerned,  it was pretty much perfect. I knew I was going to have to give in and read, hang the ironing and everything else that needed doing yesterday afternoon - I'd already walked the dog and made a chilli for dinner and we had no other plans.

The fire was blazing, and I was all set, but then, disaster! No biscuits!! In our old life, I might have just popped up to the Co-Op, 2 minutes round the corner on foot, but popping to the shops here involves a 6 mile round trip.

Still, with nothing more pressing to do than read my book, a bit of light baking was perfectly acceptable. The original recipe was a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall one in River Cottage Everyday, but although I had oats, I had no oatmeal, and only muscovado sugar - but even if I'd made the round trip to the shops, I wasn't convinced I'd find what I needed, so I improvised (although in writing this post, I see that Hugh also improvises the same way when he repeats his recipe 5 years later...)

I've made these digestives once before - I mean who doesn't like a digestive biscuit? Especially a chocolate one. What I had forgotten though is that I've only made them once because the dough is of the crumbly and tricky type, so clear the area if you have a propensity for bad language when baking doesn't go your way...


The last time I made them, I didn't add the chocolate - the recipe I used didn't even suggest it. I was idly wondering how to achieve the chocolatey-ness, then I found this fantastic idea on another blog called I'd Much Rather Bake than... . Well, exactly. 

Chocolate Digestives

250g wholemeal self raising flour
250g unsalted butter, cut into cubes and at room temperature
250g rolled oats, whizzed up in a food processor to resemble oatmeal
100g light muscovado sugar
2 tsp fine salt
1 tsp baking powder
1-2 tbsp milk
squares of dark chocolate - this makes about 25-30 biscuits depending on the size of cutter you use, so you need one per biscuit. 

Process the flour and butter together (or rub together as you would for a crumble) till they look like fine breadcrumbs. 

Mix in the oats, sugar, salt and baking powder taking care that there are no lumps of the sugar, and add the milk a little at a time till you have a slightly sticky dough.

Form the dough into a flat disc, wrap in clingfilm, and leave in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Depending on how long the dough has been in the fridge you may want to get it out for a little before you attempt to roll it out (to reduce the likelihood of language). It's also a good idea to roll this out between 2 sheets of greaseproof or clingfilm. Am I putting you off yet?

Anyway, pre-heat the oven to 180C, line some baking trays with greaseproof, roll out the dough however which way you want, and cut out with an appropriate cutter. I used the open end of a pint glass which was about 8 cm, so I got fewer, bigger biscuits.

Pop the biscuits on the lined baking sheets and bake for around 10 minutes, then whip out the tray, pop a square of chocolate on each biscuit and pop back in the oven for 30 seconds or so till the choc starts to melt.

Get the trays back out of the oven then use a knife to spread the chocolate round. Leave the biscuits to cool on the tray for a few minutes before using a palette knife to put them on to a cooling rack.

You'll see that mine aren't the most beautifully chocolated biscuits ever - that's because I didn't have enough chocolate, so I used half a square on each biscuit rather than a whole one. Also, I had a book to read. You can take more time making them beautiful.
  
Make a cup of tea, get your book, a plate of biscuits and settle down for a good read.

Dahl

When I was an Army wife, those heady days of early marriage (after the 6 month operational tour, during which, I stayed put in London while the Husband hung out on the Croatian coast), we lived on the edge of Salisbury Plain, the very epicentre of Army land. It was another world, a world where it was normal to panic, having been woken in the middle of the night by attack helicopters flying overhead, only to realise that it was OK and you weren't living in Beirut after all, to be held up on the road by endless lines of tracked vehicles (you don't want to argue with a Warrior, believe me) or to stumble across an ambush party during a Sunday afternoon walk...

One of the valuable lessons I thought I learned during that period was how I would be once I had children and was around people who did not.

I did not initially make many friends in Army land because, in an almost comic role reversal, I was commuting up to London, leaving the house before 7 and back after 8, while the Husband had a leisurely bike ride, or a 10 minute walk to the office. Eventually, someone noticed I was there, and I was invited to join 'the bookclub'.

I had made it!!

"Have you just moved in?"

"No, actually we've been here 8 months"

"I haven't seen you at school"

"No, I work. In London."

"......." [silence]

"Oh you WORK?"

I had many conversations like this throughout our time on 'the patch'. I regaled them with stories of sitting in the same seat on the same train with the same people every morning, and the turmoil a new person sitting in the wrong seat would cause, sushi, bought from an upmarket purveyor of lunch (the glamour of it) , and earning the same (or - GASP- more) than your husband. They regaled me with tales of childbirth, the adhesive properties of weetabix, and the politics of the school gate.

I had no idea what they were talking about, and in that blissful childfree state, found myself thinking "I have no idea what you are talking about, It can't possibly look like that/smell like that/ be as bad as all that."

I would feel excluded from a club that at that time I had no particular wish to belong to - the parent club. It wasn't that I didn't want children, just not then. And after feeling excluded from the club, I would promptly forget it, what ever horror I'd been party to, only for it to reappear, distorted and anxiety-inducing - when my time for babies came.

Of course, we all do it, we who have children. I have 2 emergency caesarians and a child who had cancer at the time of the second one, under my belt, so I'm afraid I'm not going to give up the opportunity to take part in the occasional competitive birth story exchange with other parents. But after spending time on the patch with all these women, I did vow to try not to tell people who don't have children what it's like (mainly the giving birth bit, because frankly, while not the worst, my stories are quite bad), or offer 'advice'. It's basically the same as your parents telling you that you don't know how lucky you are when you're being an ungrateful teenager. You just cannot comprehend how much a child is going to change your life, so as someone who knows, you might just as well not bother..

I'd forgotten this in the early weeks of our first born. Friends who were expecting a baby a couple of months later visited us, and even then, with a few weeks to go, they were talking about their relaxed approach to doing up their house and how they would carry on once the baby was born. They were trying to source some very specific light fittings, as I recall. And I remember the Husband or I saying, heartfelt, "Get it finished before the baby arrives, you WON'T HAVE TIME" and they looked at us like we were deranged. How much time could a baby take? (Blue didn't help by sleeping through the whole encounter as if that was his natural state.)

Since then, I've tried to be more mindful when talking to people who don't have kids; tried not to give them advice, or do that whole knowing "You just wait" thing, but sometimes, it just comes out.

Like now. (I know you were waiting to see how tenuous this link could be). Dahl is one of my favourite things to eat, but I don't think I've ever properly blogged it, and the reason is that it's pretty hard to take a good photo of it. It just looks like baby poo. And before we go any further, any of my non-parent readers, baby poo really is that yellow. There's no getting away from it. Yellow and quite sticky.

The dahl is yellow, but also quite delicious. It's delicious hot and then cold, leftover. It tastes like it should be far more complicated than it is - it is very straightforward and has hardly any ingredients. It's nutritious and the kids, may be surprisingly? I don't know, love it too.





So here it is. Dahl. It's based on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's version in Veg Everyday, but I nearly always cook enough for 6 so that there will be leftovers to eat for lunch for the next couple of days with a blob of mango chutney. Delicious, despite looking like baby poo.

375g red lentils
11/2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp fine salt
1 tbsp sunflower oil
2 tsp cumin seeds
1 onion, peeled & finely sliced
bunch of coriander, finely chopped

Put the red lentils in a large pan with 1.2 litres of cold water. Bring this to the boil and skim off any scum that forms. 

Add in the turmeric and salt, whisk the mixture, then turn down the heat and simmer for about 15 minutes till the lentils are broken down and cooked. Whisk the  mixture up every now and again to help reak the lentils down. Do take care not to cook them over too high a heat because as the lentils break down, they become almost volcanic - almost like a baby's bottom, one might say...

You may need to add a little more water to keep the dahl from getting too thick, but you should end up with something of a porridgey kind of consistency.

I quite often make it to this stage earlier in the day, then heat up later for the final flourish (when you may need to add a little more water).

Heat the oil in a small frying pan, add the cumin seeds and cook for 5 minutes, before adding in the finely sliced onion and frying over a relatively high heat for 10 minutes of so, then stir into the lentils.

Add in the chopped coriander, stir through and serve.

Great as part of a larger curry feast, or frankly, cold with a big blob of mango chutney

Ceredigion Calling - Carrot, apple & coconut cake with ginger syrup

So there I was all happy and skipping about the kitchen with a working Kenwood, and could I decide what to bake? Reader, I could not.

The thing is that in all the excitement of the big move, alot of other stuff has pretty much fallen by the wayside. I'm not saying I'm feeding the kids fishfingers EVERY night, but, you know, needs must and all that. Pasta and sauce is featuring very regularly.

Whereas before life was just normal, mad, family life busy, now it's KERAZEE busy. 

Blue is 10 at the weekend, and it's the Husband's actual 40th in a couple of weeks' time, and, oh yes, we're moving house.

There is an ever increasing list of jobs that need to get done.

Where the kids will go to school has been my main concern so far. From that flows everything else, subject only to the Husband's requirement to be within 20 minutes of his new place of work, and both of our insistence that we should live as close to the sea as possible.

I have tracked down most of the Mumsnetters based in Ceredigion (there aren't that many) and quizzed them endlessly for any information they have about primary schools in the area we will be living in. 

I have familiarised myself with a number of place names, short on vowels, long on great beaches and made a nuisance of myself on the phone to a number of long suffering headteachers. 

I have engaged in a very interesting debate with a very nice and helpful man at the responsible County Council over the existence or not of an intensive Welsh language course that the children may or may not be able to attend. 

I have worried that once I have found the perfect school, we won't be able to rent a house in the area.

As a result of my efforts, I have a spreadsheet and a series of appointments for a couple of weeks hence, when the children and I will visit these schools. Just call me Mrs Efficient.

When I am not pondering how the kids will handle being in a 'Welsh Medium' school (where the business of the school is conducted in Welsh, all of it, apart from the English lessons. As Blue's initial reaction to the whole enterprise was: "Well, I am NOT learning Welsh", you'll be pleased to hear that I have taken the coward's way out and for now have not explicitly informed either of them that this is likely to be a necessity. It will become only too apparent once we have visited the schools), I am tackling the cupboards.

The cupboards - and (to the Husband's unending irritation) the tops of the cupboards - containing the junk that I we have accumulated over the last nearly 15 years of marriage, and a few before that. In fact, not only am I Mrs Efficient, I have become Mrs Ruthless.  Mrs Ruthlessly-Efficient, perhaps? We have lived in our present house for 8 years, during which time the suggestion, nay the mere thought of getting rid of some of 'the stuff' would almost reduce me to tears. Yet here I am, chucking out the crap without a second thought.

You see for all the upheaval, the change has energised me. Not only are we lucky enough to have the opportunity to go and live in a beautiful part of the world, by the sea, with the security (as much as it is) of the Husband's job being in the same place, but the idea of starting afresh gives me a sense of purpose. Not that I won't miss our friends and the life we have here terribly. We are very blessed with the village where we are at the moment - we have some true friends, and life has been good to us while we've lived here. But ultimately, I think we're both slightly nomadic, and there is something appealing about putting down new roots somewhere else. I moved a number of times as a child, and then shuttled from Leeds to Newcastle, to France and back, then to York, to London, to Wiltshire and then to Hampshire, where we have lived in 3 different houses. I remember hitting the point 3 years back when I only had one address to put on any of those official forms where you have to state all the addresses you've lived in for the past however many years. I felt a little cheated...

So yes, where, before, the idea of sorting through the cupboards, endowing the charity shop with most of my worldy goods and (gasp!) giving away most of my back copies of the Good Food magazine (well, it's all online now, isn't it) to a good friend (although not the classic September 2009 issue), would have been something I would never have entertained in a million years, now, I'm relishing it. I actually  think the Husband is a little concerned - after I posted on Facebook a picture of my stash of currently empty jam jars* and offered them up to anyone who wanted them, I caught him eyeing me nervously, as if I wasn't actually his wife at all, but some strange alien being in possession of his wife's body. I still haven't made it to the "unalbumed photographs" cupboard - I need a couple of days and a bottle of gin for that one - but, you know, I'm making progress.

One of my other projects is eating up the produce in the freezers and all the tins of stuff that I have hoarded away in case of a nuclear winter. Otherwise, I will cry when we don't take it with us.

All the half used jars of this and that. We won't be moving till February, but I reckon I can reduce our foodbills quite significantly by actually feeding us as much as possible out of the cupboards. OK, so I guess as time goes by, the idea of chick pea and sprinkles soup may pall, but I bet I can get them to eat it at least once.

Which brings me (at last! I hear you cry) to the cake. A carrot cake, but I didn't have enough carrot, so some apple went in it. Mindful of my need to use up stuff in the kitchen, I added some dessicated coconut to the original recipe, and some syrup from a jar of opened stem ginger to flavour the syrup that I poured over the cake at the end. The original recipe is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's in River Cottage Everyday, but this is my version.

Carrot, apple & coconut cake - with ginger syrup

3 large eggs
150g caster sugar
just over 250ml sunflower oil
300g self raising flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
50g dessicated coconut
Approximately 300g carrots, peeled and grated
1 large-ish apple (approx 50g) grated
100g golden syrup
50g syrup from a jar of opened stem ginger

Lightly grease a 23cm cake tin (loose bottomed if possible) and line the base. Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

In your newly repaired, and isn't it wonderful, mixer (or using a hand held electric whisker thing or other contraption - including perhaps a wooden spoon) beat together the eggs and the sugar till light, foamy and slightly thickened

Pour in the oil and carry on beating for a couple of minutes

Sift together the flour, salt and bicarb and fold this into the mixture along with the coconut.

Fold in the grated carrot and apple, then scrape everything into the prepared tin and bake for around 50 minutes till a skewer comes out clean.

Stand the tin on a wire rack over a plate, and then gently heat up the 2 syrups in a pan. Use a skewer to make holes all over the top of the cake, and slowly pour the hot syrup over it, allowing the syrup to soak into the cake.

Leave to cool.

 

This is lovely while still warm as a pud, with creme fraiche, but has also been going down a storm in the lunch boxes this week.





*don't worry, there are still plenty of full jam jars that will be coming with us...

Courgettes - a Retrospective

I was going to call this post "Courgettes - I've had a few" then realised that I'd already used that post title last year.
 
That's the thing about blogging, isn't it? Trying to make things new and different, when the inevitability of having a veg patch means that if it's August, there will be courgettes - and pretty much nothing else. I've been burbling away here for over 2 years now, which means that this is the third year I've moaned about the courgette situation.

This week has been a quiet chez RJ. The kids have been at my mum's, and the Husband and I have been working away and doing exciting things like cleaning the carpets. 

We've also been eating lots of courgettes.

A griddled courgette salad on Sunday to take to a post-camp BBQ - based on this recipe from Veg Everyday, the courgettes are griddled and spiked with a dressing of chilli and lemon juice. There's some mint in there, and spot the crafty (skinned) broad beans that I snuck in. Very tasty indeed. Not like eating courgette at all really.

On Monday, thanks to some frozen crab meat I found lurking in the freezer, we had courgette, crab and chilli pasta. No picture, I'm afraid, other than of grated courgettes in the pan, which I am sure you can do without, but the idea came from this blog among other.

On Tuesday, we had a Spanish style omelette with potatoes & shallots from the garden as well as courgette.

On Wedesday, we had courgette (well, marrow, really) and chorizo tart - you know the score: smear some puff pastry with pesto, layer on some thinly sliced courgette and some pieces of chorizo and bake. Or over bake, as I managed to. Still. It was quite tasty.

And Thursday. What courgette-y delight to Thursday bring? Well, my friends, mindful of the fact that the Husband's eyes had well and truly rolled heavenwards when the courgette tart appeared on Wednesday (I mean, he grows them - what does he expect??), I cast caution to the wind, and visited Kev the butcher for some steak.

We ate it rare, with chips, garlic and parsely mushrooms and grilled tomatoes. And no courgette whatsoever. Bloody lovely it was too.

And what did I do with the rest of the courgette? Chutney. That's what.