Mer-in-goos

Sunday rolled around and again and again I had left it until now to do all the Edmondsing. Typical. I really need to work on my time management skills.

I decided to start with meringues. I have remembered how to spell meringues but always pronouncing them "Mer-in-goos". In my head at least – as if I need to become more of a social outcast after all. I know it's this sort of vitally important information that keeps you coming back.

These were "meringues with baking powder" as opposed to the first lot I did which were just meringues. I probably don't need to tell you the difference between the two recipes. What I do need to tell you is don't make the ones with baking powder in, make the others. These seemed to brown up too much. I had made them in a nice delicate shade of pink and the effect was totally lost, very disappointing.

While the meringues (see, perfect spelling every time) were overly browning in the oven I knocked off a couple more recipes. It’s all about speed, not enjoyment you understand. Orange jelly fell into this category.

I imagine people either got well quickly or died in 1966. Such is the motivating factor of the invalids section. Actually that may be a little unduly harsh in terms of orange jelly, after all it was just orange juice and gelatine.

I actually fed it to the husband while he was giving trade me his full and undivided attention, I gave it to him – I had poured it into a goblet to set as the Edmonds had advised – and got the pleasure of watching him try to drink the “orange juice” tipping the glass back further and further until he came to the realisation that nothing was going to come out. It’s the small things that bring us the most joy, like laughter at a loved ones expense.

Moonshine biffs do not contain moonshine. Consumer guarantees act was obviously not around in 1966. It’s actually a very easy to make and immensely popular marshmallow recipe. Who would have thought? The name is almost better than the product and the product was so good that I had a constant trail of people around my desk, tracking desiccated coconut into the floors. I like to think I’m providing the cleaners with overtime in this challenging economic climate.

As if one sugar high was not enough I also made toffee. Guaranteed sky high GI levels to give you an appropriate buzz followed by a dire comedown. I also had to advise the patrons not to try to chew – with the price of butter the way it is I can’t afford to be subsidising dental work out of the tip jar.

As we were meeting up for a family dinner with drinks before heading out to a restaurant I thought I might be able to product something useful. I went for sausage rolls and savoury tartlets.

I’ve never made sausage rolls before although I’ve defrosted a few in my time. Unsurprisingly the recipe was to take sausage meat and roll it in pastry. I may have accidentally used short rather than flaky. Either that or my pastry making skills have gone downhill in a big way. They were fine though the only problem was the husband saw them coming out of the oven and assumed they were lunch. I couldn’t say no.

So I already had the ingredients out and defrosting for the savoury tartlets – little tarts with bacon and onion in an egg base. So I had to make them. Unfortunately though I felt that it would have been improper for me to turn up to a group of 9 people with an offering of 8 tartlets so the husband ended up getting them for lunch the next day. It appears that his strategy paid dividends!

Just killing time...

Please excuse my substandard blogging tonight. I am trying to keep myself awake in order to take my best friend to the airport. The flight leaves at 3.15am. No wonder it was a bargain.

This might appear beyond the call of duty but it isn’t. The full story involves me telling her the wrong day to pick us up from the airport post-Japan and her circling for 90 minutes or so. This is payback. What’s a little sleep deprivation between friends.

Quiz last night and we annihilated the opposition – even with my boyfriend from 10 years ago turning up as the surprise quiz master. If we don’t lose in that situation be must almost be invincible.

So I have a few hours to kill, I figured I should really do some baking.

Cinnamon sponge finger would have been fingers if I’d had finger tins but I only had Madeline tins. I’m sure it’ll be ok, I don’t think it’s bad baking karma. They are good, I’ve unintentionally eaten a couple though which is not good. They are supposed to be served with cream but that won’t be happening so people will have to enjoy the cinnamony goodness unembellished.

Orange cake. It’s a cake, it’s orange. There really is very little else to say I’m afraid.

Orange filling. I was going to put this in the orange cake but I thought it might be orange overload. Quite an odd recipe this – make up a really thick paste with cornflour, sugar, orange zest and water, cook until it’s a big glossy mass. Add butter. Beat into an egg. Cook again. Add orange and lemon juice. I’m unsure just how it’s going to end up but I guess we’ll see. I’m going to put it into the caroline cake…

Caroline cake. An odd name I’m hoping that perhaps it’s a place rather than a person. Another opportunity to use my fantastic 6” sandwich tins. It is two gingery layers at the moment. Soon to be two gingery layers with an orangy bit in between. Odd but possibly survivable.
I think it’s time to hit the road jack…

Nun's Eggs...

I feel I am sort of going beyond the call here. I have written up a fair part of this before but may have simply left it open on the computer. It is possibly, or even likely that the husband may have deleted it. I will try my hardest not to say anything but I suspect that it will pop out when I’m not paying attention.

So, Sunday. I appear to have lost my burst of promptness by the way. For a while I was even writing things up on the same day that I cooked them. Must have been the calming, soothing effect of the holiday. Thankfully everything is back to normal and I’m almost a week behind.

The husband was silly enough to hang around the house on Sunday morning. As a result I made him breakfast. Actually he had already made himself breakfast but it wasn’t substantial enough that eating another 4 eggs, 4 slices of toast, half an onion and a fair amount of floury goo was going to be a problem. He is a growing man, if just concerned which direction the growth is going…

I do question whether there is something wrong with feeding your husband a dish called nun’s toast. It just doesn’t sound right. Also it’s not the sort of thing that I imagine a nun tucking into after chapel and before sorting out the weeds in the convent garden. My knowledge of Nuns however is particularly sparse.

Nun’s Toast – hard boiled egg, quartered and mixed into onion spiked white sauce. Throw on hot buttered toast. It was ok, I’m not sure about the onions though. Perhaps served for lunch rather than breakfast would have been better?

Eggs a la Goldenrod – more white sauce – this time chop the egg whites and add to the white sauce, throw on toast, serve garnished with parsley and sieved egg yolks. I actually had to finish one of these – apparently at three eggs and three pieces of toast the Husband hit a wall. No commitment. It was ok but I can think of other dishes that would pay tribute better to the effort of the chicken.

I was a little desperate for things to cook so I made caramel sauce. This was the old dulce de leche recipe – boil a can of condensed milk for 3 hours. I had heard that you were no longer supposed to do this because of the ring pull cans. I ignored that piece of advice and still came to no harm. I have not as yet opened the tin.

Chocolate fudge. In earlier years I had minimal luck with fudge, I’m not sure why. The recipes I’ve had out of the Edmonds have all been faultless. And in general they give a time rather than a temperature. Just boil it for 4 minutes and then beat it. I’m definitely not complaining – it worked for me!

Tea Cake – I was going to visit the Grandparents so I needed to produce something sultana-y. Tea cake – like a very very large scone that you cut up into little scones. It wasn’t too bad, or at least the bits without sultanas were ok. It was a big fruit scone; I’m lost for further descriptives!

Health loaves were somewhat optimistically labelled I felt. Bran, yes healthy. Sugar, butter, etc not so healthy. This was basically a wholemeal date and walnut loaf. It was pretty good, especially with lashings of butter. Not so health loaf in that case.

After the big baking effort I had a little time left over. I thought “what can I make?” I scanned the pages. I came up with chocolate date cream. Bad decision. I am a relatively recent convert to Dates. The Dates were fine. The chocolate cream - not so good. It may have had something to do with the fact that I burn it initially and so had to transfer it to another pot. There was certainly a smoky aroma going on but there was so much more that was wrong. The texture for a start. I continue to have my low expectations defied by the cold sweets section.

A Tale of Toothpicks and Oranges

I survived the liver by the way – I can hear the collective sigh of relief. I didn’t think it made sense however to tempt fate and get too stuck in to the offal just yet.

The Husband and I decided to have everyone around and bore them to tears with holiday snaps. As if that wasn’t bad enough I decided to use the congregated masses to gain some ground on the Edmonds. Break out the party savouries section - AKA how to lose friends and repulse people. I couldn’t bring myself to wheel out the sardine savoury or the potted steak. I even steered away from the stuffed celery and the chopped oyster sandwiches. Even just typing that is bad enough! Chopped oyster sandwiches!?! Can you imagine the state the bread would be in!

Seeing that I actually liked the people who were coming around and that we had also had a few drop outs after I joked that I’d cook up some offal for them, I tried to make nice normal food.

Asparagus rolls – who doesn’t like asparagus rolls! Well I don’t. It would appear though that I’m in the minority. Canned asparagus seems to be a very odd thing – I made the mistake of dropping a spear while I was in the production process. I dropped it head down and on impact it collapsed in on itself to produce a little puddle of asparagus mush. The Husband however is quite keen on them – in fact he polished off another 6 the following day. Just goes to show how you never really know a person.

Confetti dip. I knew there had to be a recipe in here that utilised a pack of maggi soup. Confetti dip – onion soup and sour cream with a little chopped capsicum and cucumber – except there was no cucumber in mine because cucumbers were $4.99 each and that’s obscene. Fortunately I still had capsicums ripening on the plants outside so they were free. Thank goodness for a temperate climate! Dip seemed to be pretty good, it certainly disappeared fairly quickly.

Cocktail savouries- otherwise known as things on toothpicks stuck into an orange. I hadn’t seen these for years but I thought I would give it a go. I tried three combinations – pineapple and cheese, cheerio, gherkin and cheese and lastly lightly steamed prune stuffed with cream cheese. The only problem I had was that my cheese kept breaking when I pushed it onto the toothpick – probably not too much I can do about that apart from buy new cheese and then what would I do with the industrial sized block of mild volumetric.

So all in all everyone went away fed. As for the slideshow, I had a look around and everyone appeared to be awake. That’s probably as good a measure as any.

The Offal Has Landed

Ok so I’d bought some lambs fry. I wish I hadn’t. I had gone to the mad butchers, it seems to be the kind of place where people who buy offal shop and I’m hoping for the freshest variety meats available so high stock turnover is a distinct advantage. I did go in to look for Kidneys – there are far more Kidney dishes in the offal category than any other organs, unfortunately however the kidneys came in trays of 8. There was no way I was going to cook 8 kidneys over a weekend and for some reason I feel offal, a bit like fish, shouldn’t be frozen.

The lambs fry however was in a nice small serve. $1.87 of pure torture.

I’m sure the mental workout and anticipation made it far worse than it needed to be. I had to cut it up – this was the first time I had dealt with liver. It was surprisingly tough to cut. Sort of fibery like old stewing steak. It was also full of little pipey bits. I’m not a fan of pipes – I forgo Mussels and many other shellfish for just that reason. I tried to cut it into small slices with relatively few pipes, I planned on justifying to myself that I had done ok based on the number of pieces consumed so they might as well be as small as possible.

I soaked the slivers in cold water. The blood seeped out and formed a red layer in the bottom of the bowl. I attempted to procrastinate.

I coated the drained slivers in seasoned flour. Once coated they actually looked quite tasty, unfortunately I then cooked them which undid all my good work. They smelt. They smelt like liver. They smelt bad.

Of course I had built this up to a stage where I was never going to enjoy it. Why had I done this? I don’t know. When you think about the actual process of eating it makes little sense why we can be physically repulsed by food. It’s food, there is nothing wrong with it, all you have to do it put it in your mouth, chew and swallow. How hard can it be? Unfortunately food seems to be a lot more emotional than logical. And liver is gross.

Ok so I fried it, I then added water and allowed it to thicken and form a gravy. Liver gravy. And I thought gravy was my friend. Thank goodness there are no offal related custard dishes or I could feel completely abandoned. I served it up with bacon – like the sweets you get after the medicine.

So how was it. You can hardly expect me to say it as good after all of the build up. It was more manageable in cooked form than in raw though. Texture wise it was a lot tougher than I expected and slightly grainy. Flavour wise it everything I -sort of almost oddly sweet, or possibly just not quite salty enough, and intensely livery.

I didn’t expose the husband to my inner turmoil over the lambs fry and bacon. I told him what it was, I handed over the plate, he covered it in HP sauce and ate the lot. I managed a piece.

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…

Stealth Cooking 101

Some people go outside in the weekends, they ride bicycles and walk dogs. They fly kites and weed their gardens. I stay in my kitchen, chained to my Edmonds. Woe is me.

It’s not actually that bad. The balancing act can be difficult, trying to pretend I’m helping the husband on the latest DIY project while secretly cooking in the kitchen. I am superbly skilled in the art of stealth cooking and I rarely get caught. Or possibly the Husband takes pity on me and just pretends not to notice.

Under the guise of lunch I made Cream of Tomato soup and baked potatoes. Now baked potatoes is hardly even a recipe but I am happy to cross off whatever I can. Cream of Tomato soup turned out to be white sauce with tomato puree in it. Edmonds, really? Sometimes I truly wonder what you are thinking. The Husband actually quite liked it though and two recipes out of the way before lunch, that has to be some kind of a triumph.

While the potatoes were in the oven I had made a trip out to the shops, the butchers to be more precise, the Mad Butcher’s to be exact. I love a bargain although the gigantic trays of meat are sometimes a little hard to convince the Husband on, I also seem to spend the whole afternoon bagging things off into more appropriate sizes. Ahhh the things we do for a bargain.

While we I was there I bought some lambs fry. Offal. I figured if I bought it I might actually cook it. We’ll see.

Stock – I bought a big tray of soup bones so I thought I would make stock – from the recipe of course. It is just the same way I’d normally make stock, no browning of the bones though. The end result was stock, which I imagine I will have to find some time to turn into soup…

I also slipped into Countdown to buy some bunny litter seeing that it the only place where one can buy bunny litter. I also picked up a French stick – the Father in Law was in town and staying with us – I felt it was my duty to feed him. Garlic bread, despite the fact that it is one of the Husband’s favourites, had not yet been crossed off. I did have some slight issues with “Softening” the butter. I did my favourite trick of putting it in the microwave for too long, then putting it in the fridge until it is completely hard, then microwaving it again… an almost endless cycle. I left the spreading up to the husband, he did an exemplary job.

Three people can not eat Garlic bread alone – I made Spanish Sausages. Now I’ve been to Spain and I never saw anything like this. Not even close. I wonder where the inspiration for the name came from. Anyway – Sausages, wrapped in bacon, fried until crisp and then cooked in a casserole with sliced carrots and onions and tomato sauce (Heinz’s finest) and a small amount of water – cooked for an hour. It was actually pretty good, if you tarted it up with some interesting sausages and possibly revised the vegetable choice it would almost be fit for public consumption.

And for afters, because when there are guests there are usually afters, we had roly poly pudding. Suet dough, spread with jam, rolled up, wrapped in a cloth and boiled for two hours. When I took it out of the water the Father in Law said – “that looks like Roly Poly Pudding”. I said “it is…” Something in his tone possibly hinted at misadventures with english school dinners in early life but I chose to ignore it and he ate his portion without complaint.
So that’s 12 recipes so far this week which is pretty good. I set myself the somewhat ambitious target of 20 which may be pushing things a little. We shall have to see. Stay tuned…

A Eulogy for Curried Eggs

So seeing that I had decided to swan off, abandoning all things Edmonds, there was work to do. In order to finish this thing within a year I am required to average 10 recipes a week. Now I know there have been weeks where I have done less than 10 and last week and the week before that, well I didn’t do any. So now I need to get cooking.

Thursday night I got in the door and started Edmondsing. Looking through for something I could pass off as dinner to the poor husband I stumbled across the eggs section – curried eggs and stuffed eggs to be precise. We had some eggs that were purchased preholiday so it was a necessary exercise anyway to use them up.

I’m a bit iffy on eggs sometimes. I have grown more adventurous over the years but I used to be a strictly hardboiled, never poached, never fried kind of girl. Every now and then I venture into scrambled, but I always need to do them myself – always light and fluffy, never creamy. I definitely wouldn’t stray into egg sandwich territory. Not ever.

So boiling eggs and then covering them in curry powder spiked white sauce with onions in seems a bit odd to me. The Edmonds is entirely too white sauce happy at the best of times. White sauce just isn’t that good.

The more I think about it, is it possible that curried eggs is the quintessential Edmonds dish? It definitely has the aire of days gone by without the tradition of say a steamed pudding or lambs fry and bacon. There is something about curried eggs that says 1966 to me, 1966 the way I imagine it anyway.

I’d have to say if this is the sort of thing I was expecting to find as a great triumphal hero of our past to be dragged into the culinary spotlight today then the project might have missed the mark a little! Curried eggs were not the food highlight of the week, not even of the day, I think the can of chicken and corn soup I had for lunch was more satisfying and enjoyable.

I guess though it’s the kind of food that brings back a certain nostalgia – the sort of thing that Mum often made for lunch on a Sunday, and it takes you straight back to the red formica table, the cream patterned vinyl and the orange curtains. But for someone free of this particular nostalgia – I’m a child of the 80’s so it was cream vinyl wallpaper and pink carpet in my day – curried eggs is pretty average.

Fortunately the husband is understanding of the esoteric dinner choices because I served the curried eggs with stuffed eggs. Hard boiled, cut in half with the yolk pulled out and mixed with yet more curry powder before being mushed back in. I have seen these before but never tried them due to my aversion to other peoples eggs. I don’t know that I’d bother in future either – perhaps I’m just not intended to love eggs and curry powder?

There were still another couple of eggs to finish off and I was trying to get as many recipes under my belt as possible. I found snow pudding – as the husband put it – another one of those bloody overbeaten airy desserts. I can’t blame him – it did taste of nothing. I took a couple of mouthfuls and then fed the rest to the sink. I tried to save it by making spiced orange sauce – not a white sauce this time but water and orange juice, sugar and cinnamon thickened with cornflour. It was a nice idea but not quite enough orange juice and possibly too much sugar and water. The whole dish was bland on bland unfortunately.
So that’s 6 down this week so far, I’m hoping I can get 20 out of the way this week to avoid spreading the pain too much. If I’m going to find the time to cook I’m going to have to cut down on my egg related prose.

Where's Debbie?

You might be wondering if I've dropped off the face of the earth. No but I've been on holiday. In Japan. Yes, I could have told you but the purpose of the blog is to tell you what I've been doing, not what I'm going to do - besides I'd hate to make it easier for any e-stalkers out there.

Japan was fantastic - the food was, naturally, fantastic. The people were so incredibly lovely and the weather was just a bit warmer than here!

Unfortunately being in Japan does not help you cook the entire Edmonds cookbook. Sigh. So I had to get straight back into it, jet lag and all, although I did give myself at least a 24 hour break and there was only a 3 hour time difference. I am slightly shocked by how cold it is in Auckland though. Nothing like a bit of warm baking on a cold night.

So I had huddled next to the heater, thumbing through the pages, deciding what to make. It was already 7.30 and I didn't want to spend all night up baking. So I made two reasonably simple recipes - Zoi biscuits and Peanut Shortcake

Zoi biscuits - I'm not exactly sure what a Zoi is. It was one of those recipes where I had to tell everyone what the ingredients were and to be honest the biscuits weren't really interesting enough to warrant the effort! There was a little golden syrup and ginger in there but neither came through particularly strongly. I feel kind of sorry for them, it must be quite to be a boring biscuit.

Peanut shortcake - rather the opposite, not even a little boring. The typical shortcake base and then covered in a chocolate/peanut/egg white topping, it was nice and crisp on top and gooey underneath - a lot like a peanut brownie. Could be happily served at any café I think.