must. pay. attention.

I prepped a big pot of goulash last evening, and left it in the oven on very low to cook overnight. This plan is fine, except you wake up tormented by ghoulash dreams, due to the smell wafting up the stairs. When I fetched it out of the oven, I had put not enough salt…

pastry …

Pastry and I … we don’t get on. At all. I can barely manage with bought pastry, and if I try to make it myself it’s a disaster. I’ve tried everything – food processor, mixer, by hand. It all goes grey and shrinks, and is as unappetising as you might imagine. I’ve been hunting for…

dude! where's the cheese?

Bought some nice fresh basil at the weekend. This week is busy, busy, busy with deadlines, and we’re both tired. So we decided to have a simple supper last night – pasta with mozarella, olive oil, and the aforementioned basil. The discussion was had about what sort of pasta – we plumped for standard spaghetti…

victoria sponge redux

Well, I tried it again. I used the right size tins, I checked that the oven was the right temperature with a thermometer, I even softened the butter Just In Case. And still, my cake was more like a biscuit. An uncooked biscuit at that. My sponge making days are over. Gloom.

I've never been much cop at baking

But for some reason, in the past week or so I’ve been making some cakey things. I started with carrot and cinnamon muffins (delicious), then did some espresso flavoured cup cakes (also delicious). Then, fired up with confidence, I decided to make a sponge. A SPONGE. How hard can it be?, I asked myself. I…

how to make an omelette

I like this 🙂 “Here is the recipe for the omelette: I break some good eggs into a bowl, I beat them well, I put a good piece of butter in the pan, I throw the eggs into it and I shake constantly. I am happy, monsieur, if the recipe pleases you”. — Annette Poulard,…

outdated

Being tired and hungry, we thought we’d have some porridge this morning, so I found the box with the oats in, and bunged the requisite amounts of them, the milk and the water into a bowl, and placed it in the microwave. And only then noticed that the bag said “best before April 03”. How…

yes, but is it *enough* ?

Browsing through some photographs today, I found this one – taken on 20 January this year. I uploaded it to my Flickr account, and captioned it thus: I needed to make a chocolate mooooooose, so I thought I’d better make sure we had enough chocolate in the store cupboard. I think we did … bigger…

alas, poor spoon

Some years ago, we had a lovely wooden spoon – it had a thin head and a long handle, and when I wanted that spoon, it was exactly the right spoon. One day the handle split; Pete mended it with sticky stuff, but it was never the same, and it broke again – with great…

last week's meals

Somehow, there was a pleasing flow to last week’s menus, and I thought I’d note it as it happens so rarely. We started off on Sunday with a lovely organic leg of lamb from the food market, roasted as per my recipe here. Monday: Moroccan fish tagine, although I left out the tomato – I…