Tomorrow

We are now on the eve of quiz night again, isn’t it amazing how time flies? I only hope that the questions are a little more reasonable than last week. Bahumbug.

In other breaking news our football team won this week. The other team defaulted but we are taking it as a victory. The other side were obviously intimidated by the fact that we had lost every game so far this season.

The long weekend gave us some much need time to catch up on things non-baking related. Yes, there is a life outside baking. Admittedly, sometimes it’s not much of a life but we take what we can get. I paid Rogers a visit and the garden is now a fully planted visual symphony. I also finished the sock Zebra. People have mocked my sock zebra but I think the finished result speaks for itself. And not to worry, the eyes are coming.

Anyway this is supposed to be less about the Debbie and more about the Edmonds. I forgot to mention in the last post that I had made a fantastic Pineapple dessert the exactly name of which I cannot remember and the Edmonds is in the other room. I am a special kind of lazy that is happy to spend all day in the kitchen but can’t be bothered getting up from the computer to retrieve a book from the next room. Sad. Anyway the dessert was vanilla instant pudding made up with half the liquid portion as milk and half as whipped cream then poured over crushed pineapple. As I consider instant pudding to be a close relative of custard there was no way that this was going to be bad – it did not disappoint.

So, back to more recent cooking. Thursday night was simple food – Steak - and I was not feeling up to doing any baking so I thought the steak could do with a little dressing up from the relatively untouched sauce section. Béarnaise – it worked fine but didn’t taste that great, perhaps the eggs or the butter was a little old, unlikely given the turnover of ingredients in the house.

Due to the efforts of gardening and sock-zebra-making there was no baking until Sunday. I started with Turkish Delight. Not hard to make if you had all the ingredients, which I didn’t. A quick trip to the supermarket for citric acid, some further boiling and a good result. Not a terribly strong rose flavour, just a hint.

Sultana cake was next up as I was planning to visit the Grandparents. They like fruit cake (They liked the last fruit cake – I had forgotten to mention the feedback). Sultana cake was good – I was making it while the nice man from the police came around to interview us about the Husband renewing his gun license – The best bit was when the nice man asked the Husband what he hunted, to which he replied “rabbits”. At this moment our decidedly large house rabbit made an entrance. I think the nice man though she was a cat – easy mistake to make, she is about the right size and colour – until a few minutes later, mid sentence discussing the joys of rabbit shooting - he comes out with “Holy god – that’s a rabbit!”. The ghost of rabbits past perhaps?

Hokey pokey – always brings back 5th form science. Was not to bad although I wonder whether ingredient concentrations have changed as 7 minutes of boiling seemed to be heading in the direction of burnt. No complaints from my adoring crowd however – they know better by now.

Lunch was lentil soup. Very thick and I am not a big fan of pressing things through a sieve but it wasn’t bad and was a nice juxtapose to the Japanese salad I served with it.

Stuffed marrow – I’ve been waiting a long time to stuff a marrow – or large courgette as they are called at the Sliver Bell. I stuffed it with a bacon and onion stuffing – wasn’t bad actually, the husband went back for seconds.

Chicken Maryland was ok, turns out it takes a really really long time to cook chicken pieces in a pan. The husband liked it but he is getting increasingly tolerant. By necessity rather than choice I think.

Yesterday

So this week has not been so fantastically productive. I’ve been out and about every night which is not conducive to baking – there is however a long weekend almost here which should help with the statistics. Even better it is a long weekend with bad weather which means minimal outdoors work which means more kitchen time.

We have been to the quiz this week. Now I’m not a poor loser. There was a new team this week. We came second. I am still slightly infuriated about one of the questions - -it was what they call “the ponderous puzzle” – you get clues and decreasing points as rounds go on so the idea is to answer early for maximum points.

In short the question was what song was voted the number 1 song of the last century by BBC Radio2 and is the most widely covered song in existence. The answer was “Yesterday” by the Beatles. Ok, not a bad song, but the most widely covered of all time? I’ve never heard a cover of it and in a very limited poll of my work mates no one else had either. I’m not bitter, I just don’t believe it. At any rate even if we’d got full marks for it we would have come second.

Sunday was Football. True to form we lost again but in our defence we were much smaller than the competition. I was named our man of the match – or as our Coach put it “there were several people who had reasonable games and Debbie had the best of the reasonable games”. I’ll take that.

So the only baking that got done was on Sunday night becaue I have my conditioned my workmates to expect baking on a Monday. Not quite a pavlovian response – yet.

Shortbread – Wasn’t too bad, I even cut it out in pretty heart shapes with decorative fork marks. Fantastic. Unfortunately I overcooked both trays - one was salvageable, the other was beyond redemption as shortbread really does need to be white and this was heading towards charcoal. Must pay more attention.

Now you might think I would learn. I made rock cakes. I also overcooked the rock cakes. My excuse is that I use the microwave timer for the baking, and then if I need to use the microwave the system collapses. I’m standing by that excuse, it sounds better than general incompetence.

I also made a sponge – a sponge! It was a truly inspirational thing – each layer almost 3 inches high and perfectly 6 inches in diameter thanks to the lovely Jenna and her tins. And isn't my cake carrier fantastic, I am in love with it.

I may have got a little ambitious and tried to fill it with jelly. The Edmonds instructs you to set the jelly in a tin the same size, it doesn’t however tell you that you should make the jelly up stronger than usual. It was not quite structurally up to the rigorous demands of cake decorating. It was very very tasty though and has provided some good learnings for future sponge displays.

Life with the baking has become so hectic that I have had to turn to doing other"projects" at work. I'll admit it. I have a craft problem. My name is Debbie and I'm a crocheter. Not that I do it very often, I don't really have time, but one of the girls at work was picking up two Kittens over the weekend which was an unmissable crochet excuse. Unfortunately having absolutely no spare time meant that I had to take my ball of orange wool and crochet hook to work. I even had to take it to a restuarant for lunch on Thursday. The shame. Mine and my companions. You should hear what they all said about my sock zebra - but that perhaps is for a different post...

Ginga Nutties

Yes we won the quiz. Yes we are highly intelligent life forms. Apparently my spelling hasn’t improved but no one can be bother with digital feedback. I can kind of understand that.

Some days a girl just needs to make yankie doodle cake. Monday was that day for me. There aren’t nearly enough oddly named recipes anymore, I’m thinking of starting a campaign. Yankie doodle cake contains minced raisins. After telling the third or fourth person this I switched to saying finely chopped raisins which sounds infinitely preferable. Now you may have heard that I don’t like raisins but this was not bad cake, not bad at all.

Yankee doodle cake also required specifically to be filled with mock cream. I picked the mock cream (1) which is made with cornflour goo - as seen on the left of the photo. It came out surprisingly well, in fact I probably would repeat which is a shock even to me. It also required fruit icing. I went with lemon. All in all it was a lovely lovely cake.

On a cake related note the lovely Jenna has sourced for me, from the U S of A, 6” sandwich tins – let the baking begin!

Now I couldn’t turn up after a baking night with only one offering, no matter how spectacular. I also turned out a batch of nutties which are like peanut brownies but not brown. More like peanut gingas I suppose – now there is a name that is sure to catch on. They were very very tasty.

I also made Meringues because I felt like eating meringue mixture. Sometimes it is just that simple! I had to alter the cooking time and temperature slightly as I felt like going to bed rather than sitting up to watch my meringues cook. They turned out well though.

I have had some suggestion from my work mates that they would like to see a little savoury cuisine introduced into my regime. I did spy the cocktail sandwich section – marmite and cress anyone? Date and lemon juice?

On the mend

Thank you to all who have expressed concern about my jaw. It appears things are on the improve – I can now close my mouth properly and chew again – I will leave off sneezing for another time. I do still feel a little like I have a mouth full of someone else’s teeth – I have only just realised as I type, what a truly concerning concept that is. Anyway, I’m almost back onto solids, or at least I will be when I can wean myself off the custard.

On Sunday night I didn’t feel the seed to put in such a huge effort but there was a definite need to have something to bring to work on Monday. Such is the difficulty of building up expectations. To fill the tins I made Ginger cake and Date Rock cakes.

Ginger cake is like a very light ginger bread with walnuts, chopped preserved ginger and sultanas. Now I am NOT a fan of sultanas and I will admit to sitting at my desk pulling them out of the cake. Otherwise though it was good. Walnuts seem to have been very highly utilised in the 60’s. I think we should have more crystallised ginger in food, I really do.

Date rock cakes – the name is not inspirational but the recipe was not bad at all. Anything which uses an equal weight of dates and flour has to be good. I am definitely a date convert.

We have fallen into a habit of needing pudding every night. By we, I mean I. That’s the same We that does the baking dishes but a different We to the one that puts the rubbish out. If you can understand my drift. No custard though – the weaning process has begun

Chocolate Eve’s pudding would have been better had I not forgotten to put the baking powder in. It’s an awful feeling when you realise you haven’t put the baking powder in. It’s similar to, but not as bad, as opening your wallet and not being able to find your eftpos card. Or possibly more akin to locking the car and realising you have locked the keys inside.

So the texture was a little denser and wholly more truffle like than one might have expected. The base of the bowl is decorated with pears which was interesting but did not do much from a visual viewpoint – again the baking powder may have helped on this angle. All in all not bad, but as I have said before I’m not a big fan of fruit and pears with that strange graininess wouldn’t top my list.
I have had issues with getting blogger to put my photos on so if I can make it work there will be a little more visual interest going on. I am off now to brave the weather and put in another appearance at the quiz night. If I am not crowing in the next post you will know we got beaten well and truly. I will admit to being a poor loser, I know my faults.

Not Saturday night fever

I haven’t had any comments about the spelling – surely I haven’t been perfect… Come on people, give me a hand here.

Continuing on with my exciting social life Saturday night was also a good night for baking. I feel the need to point out that I do go out during the week. I do have a life outside of Edmonds. Honestly.

Anyway, since we were going to be hanging out at home I thought we should have some truly exciting cuisine. Cornish pasties! How exciting! These were actually relatively easy to make – especially when you have prepared your pastry earlier. Sliced beef shin, potato and onion into the pastry. Cooked for 30 minutes. Perfect. We had broccoli as well – complete and balanced diet with added lard.

Seeing I had to drag a 650g pack of meat out of the freezer and only used 4oz of it I needed to make something else as well. Beef curry. Curry in that fantastic non-specific way that white people do. It even had apples in which seemed a little odd to me – perhaps someone can fill me in on that one. It also advised me I could add coconut and raisins if I wanted to – I didn’t think I’d take the opportunity.

Well the curry cooked away happily all night but we haven’t actually eaten it, what with being full from all the pasties and broccoli so I think it will have to go into the freezer for one of those nights when the husband “cooks”. That is truly unkind, he makes a damn good spag bol which is well appreciated when I’m over cooking.

Truth is that we were not actually full from our mains – there was still space for a little dessert. Due to my continued shortage of kitchen string and hence lack of ability to steam anything we had apple ginger sponge. Similar to last weeks apple sponge but different – almost gingerbready due to the golden syrup and ginger. Not bad.

I did feel we had been overdoing the custard a little recently and maybe neglecting the other sweet sauces. I managed to find a recipe which looked truly frightening - white sauce (sweet). In reality when I had a little think about it white sauce and custard aren’t all that vastly different. Apart from the deathly pale colour it was not all that different to custard although it was a little thicker.

Also it did get a little brown on the bottom of the pan and I had finished making it a little before the apple sponge was ready and so when I let it stand the brown bottom bits softened up and came off into the sauce. Visually not fantastic but it didn’t seem to affect the flavour (or lack of).
Post dessert I decided to polish off another recipe and made a quick bacon and egg pie – again for the freezer. I love bacon and egg pie and as I am currently on a self enforced regimen of soft foods due to the football injury it will be squirreled away for a time when I am able to make my back teeth meet. The husband is trying to convince me to go to the doctor now that the 1 week mark has passed – I can see his point but what is the doctor going to do about it – they can’t even tape my jaw up, well hopefully that isn’t an option.

A success and a failure

I forgot to mention that we won the quiz. Yes, Reefton was the fist town in NZ to get electricity, the unit of flow standing for a cubic metre a second is a Cumec and there are more than 276 languages in the world (it was 4000 and something). Next Tuesday will prove whether we can defend out title.

Another busy week meant that there was no baking but Friday night’s alright for baking in my books, although a somewhat relaxed night of baking compared to others. I felt that the husband and I needed another pudding – and of course more custard.

Dutch apple pudding was picked because I didn’t have to steam it and I have used up all my kitchen string. This was a batter covered with sliced apples sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. All up not bad but would have been better without the slightly smoky custard…
Now you might have thought that I would have custard under control by now. Also this should have been the easiest custard of the lot. Edmonds custard is just custard powder, sugar and milk. I could not manage to cook this without the milk burning on the bottom. I managed to burn it on to the bottom of two pots. I don’t know what the problem was. In a fit of anger I put it into a jug and microwaved it which managed to get it thickened without any further burning. Sometimes I love my microwave.

Giving the jaw a rest

Sunday saw the first day of the football season and quite naturally following on from that was my first injury of the season. I’m not entirely sure of how it happened but my chin managed to connect with an opposition players forehead. At speed. Well at as much speed as I am capable of. Now I possess quite a substantial jaw, which is probably fortunate for me if not for my opponent. The lack of basic first aid supplies also left me pressing a bag of frozen bread rolls to my jaw on the sideline. It is fortunate I am a big fan of mashed potato and custard (not mixed together) as a week later I am still in pain, especially when chewing or sneezing.

So come Sunday night I was looking for something that required little or no chewing – Enter lemon and orange pudding. This was another jelly and eggs affair – not bad actually although as always my egg whites separated out a little while the pudding was setting in the fridge resulting in a foamy layer on top.

I have now built up expectations to a stage where it is inconceivable that I would turn up to work on a Monday without baking. I whipped up a chocolate meringue shortcake – a shortcake base with raspberry jam and walnuts covered in chocolate flavoured meringue. Not bad but did not manage to top the popularity of the marshmallow shortcake of the previous week.

As Monday was going to be the only night of the week which I was going to be able to devote to baking I decided to go large. I had been neglecting the pasty section of the Edmonds, it was time to make amends. I have made Edmonds pastry using their subscribed method already so I will now revert to using the food processor. I made a bulk lot of flaky pastry – measuring it out into 4 and 6oz lumps and freezing them for future baking.

I felt it necessary to use some of my flaky pastry straight away – Macaroon tarts and bakewell tarts were on the menu. Both require pastry to be cut out and put into muffin tins and jam to be added. Macaroon tarts have a topping of coconut meringue and bakewell tarts a cakey topping. Both were well received.

Given the price of butter these days I found a way of reducing the price of my pastry. The recipe says use either butter or lard so I used a combination of both. Now I was quite careful not to tell anyone about the lard inclusion until after they had eaten and complimented…

Now for dessert I decided to make something quite special – Pineapple Marshmallow Cup. This was crushed pineapple, cold boiled rice, whipped cream and marshmallows. It was surprisingly good. The addition of rice sounds odd but it was necessary to bulk things out, in fact the husband didn’t even notice the inclusion of the rice until he had finished and was highly confused to find a rouge grain of rice still in the glass.

I felt that the two sets of tarts were not necessarily going to be enough so I whipped up a quick batch of walnut brownies. This was a slice, like a softish peanut brownie but with walnuts instead of peanuts. Not bad but not ground breaking.
For some reason I also felt the need to make lamingtons. Before one makes lamingtons one must make sponge. Now I can bake most things but I haven’t had great experiences with sponges in the past. They always seem to be a little flatter than expected and slightly disappointing. So it was with some trepidation that I approached the 3 minute sponge.

My fears were completely unfounded – this sponge is a dream. You basically beat everything apart from the baking powder for 3 minutes (exactly) and then add in the baking powder, put in the tin and bake. I thought this was far to easy to work well but I was wrong – this was fantastic. I am in sponge love.

Now in order to make the lamingtons the sponge has to be left for a while to stale up. So Tuesday night before we headed out pub quizzing I made Lamingtons – this is a 10 minute job thankfully. Dunk the sponge square in watery chocolate icing and then roll in coconut. Slightly messy but still easy. They were stunningly beautiful – just, as they say, like a bought one.

A Symphony in Custard

Since I decided to cook everything in the Edmonds cookbook I have found that I view my free time less as an opportunity to socialise and more as an oportunity to cook. Friday night was going to be just such an occaision until a friend invited herself around. Still I decided not to waste the opportunity and made an apple sponge pudding with boiled custard (1).

I am not a huge fan of cooked fruit, never had been, I think I must have been about 15 before I first managed to politely choke down an apple crumble, well swamped in custard, while visiting a friends house for dinner. Still I enjoyed my apple sponge pudding. The custard was good – it was Edmonds custard powder plus an egg. I’m not sure that the egg added much more than an element of risk.

Sautrday morning was Omelette time. There are two Omelette recipes in the Edmonds.Unfortunately they are identical. I did make them both just to ensure they were identical. Which they were. These were puffy omelettes where the whites are beaten and folded into the yolks. The husband was less than impressed – he has a think about Edmonds feeling the need to make him eat air all the time after the puffy eggs. I can kind of see his point, they were a little light on substance.

We were off on a high seas adventure on Saturday (or motoring up and down the tamaki estuary) and sailing always requires scones. I made cheese scones, they were pretty good although I felt they could have been cheesier – surprising since I used a relatively strong cheese. The also required no butter, which meant no flour under my findernails, which made me happy. It’s the little things.

Post high seas adventure I decided that a pudding was required to go with our distinctly non-Edmonds egplant curry. I decided on steamed pudding, partially because it neccesitates custard and I love custard. Harlequin pudding is like marble cake – half chocolate half plain batter. It was a resounding success, best steamed pudding so far – nice and cakey like I had expected previous versions to be.

Boiled Custard (2) was a slightly less resounding success. Similar to boiled custard (1) but lacking in custard powder and hence relying entirely on egg for its thinkening. My lack of attention led to a slightly scrambled result, fortunately the husband either fails to notice or knows better than to comment.

While we were happily ensconced eating our pudding I thought it would be a shame to have an entire oven unoccipied so I whipped up the no-egg fruit cake from the baking powder section. It turned out to be quite sizeable and take somewhat longer than the suggested cooking time. As for palatability – I dropped it off to my Grandparents the next morning and I haven’t checked in to see how it is. I will let you know when I have feedback.

Four hour power baking and a surprisingly clean kitchen

A miracle happened last week – I was home for a whole night. This caused for a celebration. What says celebration more than me, my kitchen and my Edmonds. A couple of drinks probably would have helped…

I made a four hour assault on my kitchen – and left it clean. I arrived home slightly earlier than usual after having dropped my mother off at the airport for her annual 8 month jaunt in the northern hemisphere. I almost cried – who is going to do my washing and feed my rabbits?!?

I decided it way time to fill the tins. In reality I filled the tin (I only have one), the plastic cake server and two ice cream containers. The plastic cake thing is fantastic. I love it with a passion – it is a thing of beauty.

When planning a major baking expedition there has to be a certain set of steps –
1) bake something simple to prepare which takes about 20 minutes to bake
2) bake something slightly more complicated with a similar baking time
3) bake something slightly more complicated which takes a long time in the oven
this results in continued activity and best use of the most limited resource – the oven.

So step one was kisses – mix, blop spoonfuls onto a baking sheet. Very simple. When baked, allow to cool then sandwich together with home made raspberry jam – preferably made from Raspberries hand picked from skippers canyon.

Step 2 was Marshmallow Shortcake. This was really good – it disappeared quickly which is usually a good sign. The base dough was rolled out on a baking tray to ½” thick then baked. The marshmallow which was prepared later was a packet of jelly crystals boiled for EXACTLY 8 minutes and then beater with icing sugar. This made a good if slightly soft marshmallow – it had slightly more flavour than standard marshmallow. I do think this would have been better cooked in a shallow tray rather than on a baking tray because putting the marshmallow on the top was a very delicate operation – I actually did it with the base on a cooling rack and then put the whole lot in the fridge – some of the mallow ran down and attached itself to my fridge shelves – not so good.

Step 2 was really repeated because I decided to make ginger nuts. Not really like proper ginger nuts in that they left your teeth intact. Oddly the instructions said to brush them with water before baking. I am unsure whether this made any difference but it was challenging to do.

Step 3 – Louise cake. Again this recipe said to roll out base on a baking sheet – again I think it would have been better in a shallow tin. Who am I to argue though! More homemade raspberry jam then covered with meringue with coconut in it. It wasn’t bad, slightly crumbly but not bad.
Not a bad effort really. Will be interesting to watch my colleagues expand.

A call for Editors

My husband is a miracle worker – he fixed the oven! I won’t mention that he put the whole thing back into the kitchen cupboards and then realised that he had left one of the top panels off. Yes Darling, that’s why there was a screw left over.

As of late there have been comments about my spelling. My spelling, unlike myself in general, is not always perfect. There are many reasons for this. I could blame the educational system but the truth is I’m lazy. Lazy in the way that I’m trying to cook 556 recipes in a year and trying to write them up as well. Something has to give. Sometime that something is spelling.

Seeing that I write this thing at 10pm on a Saturday night so that you can read it during work time (make sure you’ve got that spread sheet open so that you can flick it up should anyone walk past your screen) feel free to post or email and notify me of any spelling mistakes. I’ll keep a tally of who manages to pick up the most. There can be a prize. I’ll give you a hint, it’s probably going to be Jam.

And, hey, if I write “cock” instead of “cook” and that makes your day – that’s ok too.

So last weekend to make up for another bought of inactivity (solely inactivity in an Edmonds sense – I do have a proper life as well) I did some baking. I was also laid up sick with a cold so this was quite an achievement. I’m afraid I am one of those people for whom the world stops turning when I’m sick. Dragging myself up out of my death bed (or death couch) to bake was quite an achievement but I have conditioned my workmates to expect baking on a Monday morning.

The weekend before I managed to find quinces. Yay quinces! I needed to make quince conserve (and also quince honey, but one jam at a time is enough) It worked ok, except it seemed to boil to have an exceptional amount of water – 6 pints to 4 quinces – and I think as a result took an incredibly long time to go from Elastoplast pink to quince conserve red. Still no harm done – although in saying that no one has tried it yet.

I think I neglected to mention that I made bunny shaped Easter biscuits pre-oven disaster. They had been sitting in the biscuit tin and I needed something to fill the rest of the tin. I decided on gingerbread. I have a bit of a gingerbread fetish started by Ruth Pretty’s gingerbread with kikorangi as served at the first Savour NZ. Still one of my favourite recipes – it used to be on the kapiti website, may still be. This wasn’t as good, but then nothing could be. It was still damn good and widely loved by my panel of tasters.

And finally there was ¾ hour pudding. It did take ¾ of an hour and it was pretty good. It had a mix of water and golden syrup poured over to provided a semi self saucing pudding. Not bad. The Husband enjoyed it which is saying something as he is becoming an increasingly discerning critic.

Disaster Circumvented

So last time I wrote I had just acquired a quantity of yeast through semi-nefarious means. I had decided to get up early and tackle crumpets. I’m quite a big fan of crumpets – in terms of the commonly available supermarket variety. I have discovered that homemade crumpets are a slightly different beast – not dissimilar to yeasty pikelets. In the true tradition of Edmonds the quantities were not entirely as I had expected – we now have a bounty of crumpets in our freezer. They are quite small though and I am concerned that there may be difficulty in removing them from the toaster. Fingers crossed the husband remembers to unplug the toaster before chasing the crumpets with cutlery.

I felt I should really tackle as many yeast recipes as I could – there are 5 - White Bread, Brown Bread, Bread Rolls, Crumpets and Yeast buns. So the plan was to cook white bread on the Sunday and then on Easter Monday cook hot cross buns for a family lunch and then I would be half way through. Not that there are hot cross buns in the Edmonds but there are yeast buns which sound suspiciously like they would fill the role with the white cross piped on the top. At least that was the plan.

In reality what happened was that my oven tripped out – AGAIN. Admittedly I had three pots on the stovetop and the oven on high browning chops. So it was my fault. I admit that. But that does not change the fact that I was standing there with a fully proved bread loaf and no oven to bake in.

Now one of the three pots on the stove was apricot jam. I had bought apricots during apricot season but I was not quite aware of how quickly they deteriorate on the bench – so when I looked at them several days later they were a slimey brown mess with a hint of blue and green. So I had to buy apricots again – surprisingly they were not as excessively priced as I had imagined and I made a very small quantity of jam. Apparently it is quality not quantity that is important and I am willing to bet that it is quality jam.

The other two pots were my sister-in-laws lamb shanks. These are no pampered sheep, the shanks took a full 8 hours cooking. When I get meat from the supermarket it is labeled by what it is, from the sister-in-law’s farm I get “Romney X Merino” From the in-laws lifestyle block the meat sometimes has a pet name.

Back to the bread disaster – I hope this is giving a realistic impression of how many directions I am pulled in on an average Edmonds day – this day was more average than most. Fortunately my mother lives a mere 5 minutes drive down the road so my loaf of bread and I went on an expedition. This was at 7pm at night so the probability of the husband getting a home cooked dinner was becoming increasingly slim. Mum has been impeccably trained and had the oven on and ready to go and I was seated on the couch with cold beer and cuisine magazine while the bread baked – now that is service I could get used to. In fact I did get a little too used to it and slightly overcooked the bread which the electric knife did not appreciate one bit.

So I arrived home and had to cook dinner –only now am I thinking that this sounds slightly off – baked potatoes with tuna and mayonaise and microwaved vegetables – and freshly baked bread with Lurpak butter. Mmmmmm.