Aren’t these gorgeous? Mark brought me a little present home last week – a set of Alessi coffee/tea spoons.
I collect coffee cups, usually espresso cups, and I’m always on the lookout for unusual cups and spoons to go with them. This little selection are just the sort of thing I love.
I think I like the second spoon from the right the most – which is your favourite?
This one is strictly for the adults!
Back in December, you may remember that I took part in Belleau Kitchen’s Random Recipes – where bloggers are challenged to pick a recipe at random and then follow the recipe, no matter how bizarre it may be. I managed to select Blackberry Vodka from Nigella Lawson’s ‘Kitchen’* for my recipe (completely at random, I hasten to add!) and you can read about how incredibly easy it was to make in this post.
The jar of vodka soaked blackberries have been hidden away at the back of my pantry ever since, only surfacing occasionally for me to give the jar a quick shake. I have to admit that I even forgot about it for a couple of weeks when life got even more hectic than usual.
Yesterday I decided that it was time to bottle my vodka. [Read more...]
Roadworks sign – work in progress
Ideally I’d do this kind of thing ‘out of hours’ but on the Internet there isn’t really such a thing as ‘out of hours’ any more. I’ll obviously try to keep disruption to a minimum, and hopefully it won’t all take too long.
Thanks for your patience!
Normally when a new cookbook arrives, I look through and pick out which recipes I would like to cook, but discount some immediately as they are not to my taste. This is a book that I want to work my way through from start to finish.
Baking is big news right now, and if you’re in the UK you must surely have caught the buzz about the Great British Bake-off over the last couple of years. For those readers who haven’t seen the show, it’s basically a TV competition between a group of ‘amateur’ bakers. I say ‘amateur’ because the standards are very high – the showstopping cakes are definitely closer to professional standards than anything you might see in my kitchen!
One of the judges on the show, baker Paul Hollywood (he of the twinkly blue eyes), has just released a new cookbook entitled ‘Bread’* and my copy dropped through the letterbox this morning. Straight away, I could see that this is going to be a book I return to again and again. It would be an ideal gift for someone who wants to start baking their own bread – it is written with passion, and it makes you want to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in right away. [Read more...]
The tree has been taken down, the decorations packed away. The house seems bigger, almost too empty. It’s the same feeling that I get every year when we pack away the Christmas decorations – I know it won’t last more than a few days, but it still feels gloomy. After the hustle and bustle of December, January can feel a bit of a letdown and it’s easy to feel that the only thing we have to look forward to is bills, bills and more bills.
But to try and prolong the Christmas feeling for just a little longer, I decided to make a Galette des Rois. It’s something that I have been meaning to do every Christmas for the last few years, but somehow the 6th January seems to creep up on me too quickly. Finally I have managed to get one made in time!
The Galette des Rois (Kings’ Cake) is a French pastry with an almond filling which is eaten to mark Epiphany, the day when the three Kings arrived at Bethlehem. Actually, one of the French readers of my Facebook page tells me that in France the Galette is eaten until the end of January, so there is still time for you to try out the recipe this year. [Read more...]
I’m always a little nervous around pastry – my hands are usually quite hot, so I find it hard to keep the dough nice and cool. Because I used pre-rolled puff pastry sheets, this recipe is even easy enough for me to make without throwing the dough across the kitchen in frustration! If you’re making a larger Galette you could buy the blocks of pastry so that you can cut larger circles. Do buy the all-butter puff pastry though, rather than the kind made with margarine, the flavour will be much better.
It’s difficult to say how many it serves, but I think that if you need to cut more than 6 slices then you could increase the size of the Galette and make more filling, or alternatively make 2 of them and have 2 Kings or Queens.
Hopefully you had a good New Year’s Eve whether you went out to celebrate or stayed in to see the New Year in.
Mark and I went out for dinner with the boys at our local pub, and then opened a bottle of champagne at home to toast the start of 2013. The champagne coupes you see above used to belong to my Mother-in-law, she gave them to me a few years ago and I love drinking from them – it makes me feel like a 1950′s film star, even if I’m just sitting in front of the TV watching the fireworks.
March 2013 Update – you can read the second part of this recipe in this post
Recently I was talking with a friend about the grey days of January and February: those days when the Christmas tree has been taken down and the house feels too big and bare. It always seems like there is nothing in the immediate future except for bills, wind and rain, and the long summer evenings are still too far away to imagine. I like to try and organise a couple of treats to get me through the long weeks of winter and this weekend, Fate intervened to help me do this.
This month, I decided to take part in Belleau Kitchen’s Random Recipes for the very first time. For this month’s challenge, we were asked to randomly select a book that we received for Christmas last year, and then select a recipe at random from that book. My mind went entirely blank when I tried to think which books I received last Christmas, even though I am always given at least one. We were burgled three weeks before Christmas last year, and when I think back to that time, it is pretty much a blur of insurance paperwork, phonecalls and general confusion.
So as the last book that I remember receiving as a Christmas gift is Nigella’s ‘Kitchen’* (although I am not sure when I actually received it), that would have to do. I flicked through the pages and stopped at random. It’s not in season, hardly a recipe at all, and I can’t even show you the finished result in this post. Fate has decided that I should make Blackberry Vodka to share with you all!
Sometimes food is about more than just satisfying your physical hunger: it’s also about comfort and tradition, building memories which will last a lifetime.
Every year for the last 6 years or so, I have cooked a ham on Christmas Eve. It’s as much a part of our family Christmas now as the traditional Christmas turkey, Doctor Who and the Terry’s Chocolate Orange in the toe of the Christmas stockings. We eat it with creamy mashed potatoes and veg or with macaroni cheese, depending on what the family requests. I’ve even been known to cook both potatoes and pasta, when they haven’t been able to decide which they’d prefer.
This year’s ham is a beautiful 3.5kg piece of pig, and I decided that maybe it was time for a change. I have been cooking the same recipe for the last few years, and surely it will start to get a little tedious if I cook the same food at Christmas time, year after year? I asked Mark and the boys what they thought, and was met by wrinkled noses, furrowed brows and a general air of confusion.
When I heard that Jamie Oliver’s new book was going to be called ‘15 Minute Meals’, I admit that I was a little bit sceptical. There had already been quite a few comments about whether his ‘30 Minute Meals’ book was realistic – can a non-professional cook with a domestic kitchen really complete those recipes in 30 minutes?
Trimming a further 15 minutes off the cooking time seemed to be a bit optimistic, so I was intrigued to see how the book would turn out. Is the idea of ‘15 Minute Meals’, just a marketing gimmick?
First of all, let me say that I love the way that this book looks – it’s fresh, well laid out and has attractive photographs. As usual for a Jamie Oliver book, it starts with a section of suggested equipment for your kitchen, and a list of staples to keep in your cupboards and fridge. Although I don’t really refer to these lists any more myself, I do think that it’s a great idea for anyone who is just getting into cooking.
Happy New Year!
Find me on…