sulkyblueblog | Entries tagged with food

Now that we have a beautiful shiny new kitchen I'm determined to use it more! I also have a very convenient office upon whom to inflict my baking, so I will hopefully not have to eat it all myself and get increasingly spherical.

This week started off well with basic, but tasty cinnamon toast, the first batch had way too much sugar, but I added a bit more butter in the second batch and it wasn't quite so horrendously sugary. It also seems to keep well, so there's a tupperware of it in the fridge.

Things then took a bit of a turn for the worse, and dinner turned into a bit of a palaver. I was supposed to be doing a risotto with leftover turkey one evening, but at the last minute discovered that the risotto rice was nowhere to be found. I changed tack and made a dinner-pie instead, a pie that contains the entire meal and doesn't need anything cooked separately. I made it in my big lasagne dish constructed it from turkey (some of the defrosted leftovers from the xmas party) and parboiled potatoes, carrots and parsnips. It was also supposed to have leftover stuffing but I forgot it, much to my annoyance. It was a *proper* pie with shortcrust lid and sides, but there wasn't quite enough pastry so it was a bit patchy. The defrosted stock I was using looked deeply unpleasant as well, so I was stingy and it ended up a bit dry...now I think about it, I should have put cranberry sauce in as well. It wasn't bad, just not really worth the effort.

The big excitement of the weekend though was baking flapjacks to take to work (recipe cut below). I thought I'd try something vaguely healthy rather than run the risk of people being sick of cake and chocolate (as it turned out, instead they were having difficulty going cold-turkey and complained about needing chocolate). The first batch was ok, even though I forgot to put the sultanas in. The second batch however were amazing, swapping in some cranberries for some of the apricots was a good call. Using apple sauce to hold them together makes them feel a lot healthier than adding 1/2 a jar of golden syrup, and I am also not nearly as ashamed as I apparently should be about the fact that I bought a jar of apple sauce instead of making it from scratch. They lasted really well in tupperware, easily 5 days and probably longer, but I ran out.

Didn't manage anything more exciting than eggy bread yesteday, and am now pondering what to bake this afternoon.

( Chewy Flapjack Bars )

I don't often post to LJ these days. To be honest, I usually have more interesting things to do. This morning however, the morning of my christmas party I find myself sitting in the eye of the storm with nothing much to do. So I thought I'd give you a little snap-shot of the finely honed dance that is our Christmas dinner.

This is our twelfth party I think, and a lot of things are still pretty familiar. We still do turkey with all the trimmings plus a whole random collection of other stuff. The pigs in blankets are still popular and at the darkest moments I always wonder if we could just serve those and booze and everyone would be happy. We're slimmer in numbers now (I think we had over 30 one year) thanks to friends departing London or losing touch, but there'll still be a good number of people who were there for (or helped host) the first one. With grown-up-ness comes the benefit of a car to do the shopping, but the irritation of having to work during the week, so we moved the party to Sunday to give us Saturday to prepare.

Bits and pieces were started during the week including testing new recipes and the main supermarket shop but the real prep starts on Saturday. I was up bright and early to start with the baking. As it turned out, I was actually up bright and early to clean the floor following a slightly enthusiastic and poorly contained turkey defrost. That dealt with, I breakfasted on "for the love of god eat it and get it out of the fridge" cheesecake and stared at the snow coming down. Back to baking. For some reason which I cannot explain, against considerable advice, I had decided to make a chocolate yule log. Never have I attempted a recipe with so many components or so many bowls. Spread out over several hours were mutterings of "well that doesn't look like it does in the book" and "this isn't going to spread" and outright hysteria when it came to the actual rolling process (there was much oozing). But now it's done it actually looks like a chocolate log (god knows what it tastes like or if it's even possible to slice it) and I don't have to go with emergency backup plan of mixing it all in a bowl and re-labling it a christmas eton mess.

Saturday lunchtime saw we three housemates bearing rucksacks, travelling afar (well to Ealing) when it became clear driving to Sainsburys to get the vegetables wasn't really an option. The snow really was very pretty and lovely to crunch through on the way there, although less lovely trudging back with laden bags and snow down your back from an obnoxious housemate (no bonus points for guessing which one). There was a minor red cabbage and mincemeat crisis, but the overpriced organic shop eventually came to the rescue.

The afternoon was when things really kicked off. In no particular order we peeled, parboiled, baked, whatever-one-does-to-a-tiramisu-ed, fried, food processed and wrapped our way through everything and anything we could possibly do in advance. Our new kitchen is getting a thorough work out, I continue to battle with the hob that hates me and lost an argument with the tap that generates boiling water (it's called a quooker, but that's a silly name so we call it the dragling) which added two scorched fingers to the one I burnt the previous day on a very dangerous microwaved curry. The biggest joy of the new kitchen was revealed when we found we could program the oven to come on all by itself, meaning no one had to get up at 5 to put Bert the turkey on! Next step is the robot that we can train to take one turkey out and put the other one in.

But we don't have that robot, so up I get at 8am and start a second day with turkey wrestling: Bert out, Ernie in. Breakfast was once again "seriously, there's no space for it in the fridge" cheesecake and more staring at the snow worried that we'd have to eat all this food by ourselves. I'm also realising I've made a rookie error - while I can make the mince pies and there's space for them in the oven... sharing the space with the turkey is likely to result in odd tasting pastry. I'm going to have to re-evaluate the post-it note plan and re-arrange some stuff (no gantt chart this year, I've moved on to coloured postits stuck to the front of a cupboard, much to the mocking of my housemates).

So, with my tea drunk, it's back into the fray.

( The menu for today: )

A lot of my favourite places are associated with food, this is not just because I like eating (which I obviously do) but because food is a great way to see other people and have nice, stress free chats. A mountain of pasta and something involving chocolate can make even the most painful of conversations more pleasant. I'm particularly fond of lunches, which come without the pressures of needing to get home to sleep. Of the many and varied types of eating establishments out there my favourite by far, are pubs.

Pubs are to restaurants as Starbucks are to cafes. You can sit in a pub for as long as you like and if you have a partially full glass in front of you, no one will bat an eyelid. Unlike restaurants you can dally over the menu as long as you like and if you really haven't been able to decide what to have for lunch, just stay for dinner as well.

Chain pubs may be looked down on by many for their lack of character, but they do have their uses. I can go into any Wetherspoons in the land and know I can get a decent meal for a pretty good price (their breakfasts are particularly good). A Slug and Lettuce on the other hand will get you a really good meal for a not so cheap price. They generally even take orders at the table, unlike most pubs where you have to move. My brother and I have been known to bicker extensively over who has to trek to the bar, even trading paying for both meals in favour of not having to move.

Individual pubs can be slightly more risky. Like independent restaurants you just have to take a chance on them, sometimes it pays out, but other times you can end up with disappointment. My pub of choice at the moment is The Duke of Kent out Ealing way, a beautiful pub with a nice patio area, wonderful food, charming service and the mixed blessing of being fairly inaccessible by public transport.

One of the things I love about pub food is that you don't have to decide what you want to eat until you are actually sitting at the table. With other restaurants you've pretty much had to decide what you want before you've left your house, or even days in advance if you've had to book a table. If you're at an Italian you're having pasta or pizza, curry at an Indian etc. But at most pubs the menu will present you with pasta, burgers, sandwiches, curry, stuff with chips, stuff with potato and a spattering of nibbles as well. Of course with great diversity comes great dilemma and I have been known to flap extensively about meal choices.

The best pub food come with words like "hearty" and "substantial" attached to it, I will put up with pretentious twiddliness on the menu but only as long as it results in a large plate heaped with food. There are two standard dishes that can be used to evaluate pub cuisine – bangers and mash and the burgers. Bangers should not be budget or burnt, mash should have met a potato at some point, gravy should be plentiful and some form of vegetable gets bonus points. For burgers they should be moist without making the bread soggy, some kind of sauce is good, chips are a necessity, the burgers should be customisable and if you're charging a quid extra for cheese, make it a chunky slice. If these staple dishes pass muster then it's a good indicator for the other items on the menu.

Of course with any meal the real decider is the desert. Here's where pubs can really show their stuff. Unlike restaurants you can take a nice break between your main course and your desert, so you don't have to turn it down with excuses of being full, or leave yourself completely stuffed. The Duke of Kent does a particularly fine line of deserts, with a rotation of specials, more fancy tarts and cakes supplementing the solid classics like apple crumble or brownies. A sizable dollop of ice cream or puddle of good custard is a definite requirement, and the option to chose your topping is another easy source for brownie points (pardon the pun).

In good weather there really is nothing quite as lovely as sitting in a beer garden spending the entire afternoon eating, gossiping and laughing with friends. Roll on the sunshine!

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28

Sulkyblue's Blog

Entries tagged with food

Adventures in the kitchen

Twelve dozen pigs-in-blankets... and a salmon a la dishwasher

Heaven on Earth: Pub Lunches

Profile

February 2015

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags