The Offal is Lurking

Sunday. Outside the sun was shining. Inside I was cooking. Don’t worry. I feel no sympathy for myself either. Now that we are 2/3 of the way through I have allowed myself little day dreaming fantasies of life after – lounging around the house. Sitting on the couch, perhaps watching TV or even reading a book. Possibly even a recipe book…

The husband and the father in law went off to conquer the great outdoors. Or even possibly just find the great outdoors – we are in Auckland after all. I stayed in. I made pastry. First I made flaky pastry because my stocks were low. I’m now the kind of person who has stocks of frozen pastry – now that is domestic goddess territory, no?

Next I made cheese pastry and then used my cute little animal cutters to cut it into little animal shapes. Very cute. I won’t be able to eat them though as they have eyes. It’s an affliction I’m afraid – rules out whitebait, Easter bunnies and gingerbread people (not just the men I’m being inclusive here).

Last of all – in the pastry making stakes anyway, I made puff pastry. I didn’t bake it though, I’m waiting for inspiration. Puff pastry is like flaky pastry but with even more butter. I guess it seemed necessary to someone. There is also a lot of rolling and folding – didn’t there used to be a Sara Lee ad about that?

The day before I had bought mutton for my Scotch broth – the only Mutton I could get at a reasonable price was loin chops. So then I spent hours – well tens of minutes anyway – separating the meat from the bone and the fat. I even made stock with the bone. It was great stock. The husband then came through and did the dishes and through out the dirty cooking water (aka strained stock). Arghhhhhhhh. God love him for doing the dishes though. Perhaps it was a small price to pay?

So the Scotch broth – soup with mutton, root veg and barley. Actually very similar to one of our standard recipes - Reestit Mutton soup – which requires a salted, air dried leg of lamb. We usually have one of those hanging around the house. Oddly though the Scotch Broth recipe told me to boil the meat, skim and the vegetables and strain – which sounded like throwing out all the meat and vegetables I’d just cooked. So I didn’t do that because it sounded very silly. It was quite tasty but I think I’ll stick to my Reestit Mutton.

So I’d made flaky pasty for a reason. Custard squares. Now naturally I love custard squares because I love custard but custard squares have a somewhat bad rep as being little germ havens. As someone once said to me - a custard square isn’t all that far away from the agar growth matter they use in petrie dishes. That was probably a slightly odd conversation now that I think about it. I have suffered no ill consequences from my custard squares yet (crossed fingers). One point though – relatively easy to assemble, almost impossible to cut. There must be a technique; I ended up stabbing then with the knife like a dotted line and then tearing.

I had had a request for a birthday cake for Monday – Madeira cake was it. I love the Madeira cake that Ernest Adams makes, almost as much as I love custard but not as frequently consumed. I have tried to make Madeira cake at home on several occasions and it is just never the same, I love that wonderful soft crust which is probably the result of a million additives and a couple of weeks sealed in plastic.

This Madeira cake didn’t live up to my wildest dreams but it was a lofty goal. I felt like it need a bit of a lift – I thought I would make lemon cheese to fill it with. The lemon cheese however never fully set. This was a problem.

I also make 7 minute frosting. This was quite odd, I thought it might harden overnight but the finished consistency was quite marshmallowy. I figured I could mix some of the not set lemon honey with the frosting to fill the cake. It worked ok but by this morning most of it had been absorbed into the cake.

I also had a bit of left over custard from the custard squares. What happened was that to make custard squares you need to cook two sheets of pastry rolled out and then put the custard between them. This doesn’t work so well when you burn one of the pastry sheets beyond recognition. Then you cut the other pastry sheet in half and only need half the original amount of custard…

As tempted as I was to just eat the remaining custard I showed incredible restraint. I watered it down with milk (milked it down doesn’t sound right) and used it to make Melrose cream – a 50:50 mixture of custard and jelly. Tonight we will see how it is.
And we might need it. You may have noticed that I have cooked the 20 required recipes. Small pat on the back. You may also notice that I have not cooked the liver that I bought. I still have the liver. As I type it is soaking in salted water – awaiting flouring and frying. I am not keen. Even cutting it was a challenge. It was much tougher than I expected, quite sort of fibrey and with pipey holey bits. I want to describe it further as a form of procrastination but I must go and meet my fate…