To do...

I have a confession to make. Sometimes I just can’t be bothered baking. I do tend to soldier on anyway but my heart isn’t in it. Times like these I tend to try and find something very very simple which I can cross off with a minimal effort. I find great joy in crossing things off.

I have been known to write items on to do lists purely so that I can cross them off. I suppose that is a very unproductive use of a productivity tool a bit like people who barter down their weight watchers points – oh well it wasn’t really a very big piece of cheesecake, and I did walk up a flight of stairs today after all, lets call it 8 instead of 18... – and then are dismayed that they fail to lose weight.

So I got home and made walnut filling. It was apricot jam and walnuts mixed together. I really had no need for filling but it was so easy that I could not resist. Cross that one off.

Swiss cream – now this was pretty. I’m not entirely sure whether I have mentioned the Husband’s love of pink food before? Well this was definitely in his preferred style. Strawberry jelly crystals and evaporated milk, an unusual combination but not entirely stomach turning.

Walnut layer cake – because you can never have too many walnuts in one night. This was actually quite good, not overly walnutty. I served it with caramel filling which was pretty much fudge. I had expected something more like caramel square but it’s fair to say that everyone loves fudge.

It seems ironic that I start the night with the easiest thing I can find and end it with a layer cake with fudge icing. I guess sometimes you don’t feel like baking but once you start it’s not so bad…

Compulsive Edmondsing

I had done enough Edmonds for the week. I swore I would do no more. It turned out that I just couldn’t help myself.

Chicken fricassee sounds better than it is. That’s not to say that it’s bad merely that I think fricassee sounds fantastic and in reality it was just average. I’ve never been much of a fan of chicken casserole type things – of which this was one. Something about all the little bones unnerves me a little.

What completely unnerved me however was Beef tea. The instructions said to shred a piece of gravy beef with two forks. Have you ever tried to shred a piece of raw meat with two forks? This is not easy! Whats more this is supposed to be food for invalids – presumably made by well people for invalids. The possibility of a fatal fork injury could leave the carer exsanguinated on the kitchen floor while the patient withers away from lack of nourishment. Still they may have chosen this option over actually having the beef tea – actually that is unduly harsh, it wasn’t too bad.

Pancake nostalgia

Our battered (as in lovingly mistreated as opposed to coated with batter) version of the Edmonds was our staple for a couple of recipes when I was little. Pancakes was one of these, most Saturday mornings my Dad and I would make pancakes together – well he would make them and I would attempt to turn them over without burning myself or setting the kitchen on fire.

To this day I cannot understand why people buy readymade pancake mixes rather than just making them from scratch. I don’t think it’s necessary to add that the pancakes were good. Very good.

Thou shalt not partake of meat on fridays...

We rarely eat fish. Fish seems to be a fairly high maintenance protein source – this coming from someone who quite happily has eggs and tofu for dinner a couple of times a week because they will live in the fridge in appropriate portion sizes just waiting for me to use them. Fish is the opposite of this. When I buy fish I need to buy it from somewhere other than a supermarket and it has to be used that night. I’ve never had bad tofu (and I’m sure there are those of you out there who will strongly disagree with this!) but I’ve definitely had bad fish.

Friday was fish night. There were a number of recipes here that could be knocked of easily and I’m all for low hanging fruit. I went and made my fish related purchases – Gurnard fillets – very cheap - and hapuka steaks – not very cheap. I also had some sealord freeflow frozen hoki in the freezer and I saw no reason why it should escape.

Fish in milk. The title alone is almost enough to turn my stomach! Basically the fish – I used the frozen hoki for this – is cooked in a dish of milk at a low heat in the oven. When the fish is cooked you thicken the milk with a little flour and serve as a sauce. It was ok, I survived it at least. I’m not sure I’d cook my fish in milk again…

Savoury fish steaks – aka how to ruin perfectly good hapuka. Put your fish steak in a bakesafe dish, cover with sliced skinned tomato, cover with breadcrumbs, bake. I struggle to understand why you would want to do this to an innocent piece of fish. Fair to say it didn’t inspire me.

Grilled fish. My good sense stops me from listing a method here - suffice to say that it’s fish – Gurnard in this case – and you grill it. I like a nice bit of grilled fish – not milk or breadcrumbs or tomatoes. Just fish. It was good.

Now when I say it was just fish I mean it was just fish and the five sauces I made to go with the fish. Yes five. The more cooking I do on a Friday night, the less cooking I have to do on a Saturday and Sunday.

Admittedly four of the five were white sauce with additions and the fifth was white sauce by another name. I had suspicions that these weren’t going to be great.

Parsley sauce, caper sauce and onion sauce were all just while sauce with the named ingredient added. I’d love to say that the combinations had blown my mind and I’d found the culinary promised land. That didn’t happen.

Whoever called the awful abomination in the 66 Edmonds “hollandaise sauce” should be shot. Possibly shooting is to good. Perhaps they should be smeared in pate and thrown into a coral of Chihuahuas. Either way no one should ever take white sauce, add in some egg yolks and a bit of lemon juice and call it hollandaise. Very bad, very very bad.

Melted butter sauce was basically white sauce with a slightly higher proportion of melted butter. It actually was my favourite of the lot – not so much because of the extra butter, although that is always good, but because it had a little nutmeg in it. Nutmeg and fish, who would have known? It was actually surprisingly good and with all this “brain food” it is going to be significantly harder to surprise me from now on.

It's not what it looks like

Tomato savoury – scrambled eggs with tomato in. I used to have a cat. Sometimes for no known reason he used to be sick, generally on the carpet rather than on a hard surface where it would have been easy to remove.

In looks alone Tomato Savoury is not dissimilar to cat vomit. I didn’t relay this observation to the husband until after he had finished his Sunday breakfast.

Meat pastes and puddings

Another Saturday night and I’m cooking Edmonds. Not for much longer though – 9 weeks to go! I think I am on track now – fingers crossed.

Overnight pudding – naturally I started this on Friday. The Edmonds seems to assume you have enough time to do things that it is ok to leave things overnight and do them the next day. What a telling change in our lifestyles.

I had expected that this would just be doing something with the fruit and leaving it overnight. Oh no. The whole thing gets made up and left overnight. Very odd. It did seem to work ok however, it was quite light in fruit content and with masses of finely sliced lemon peel. Not bad really, possibly a little heavy texture wise for my liking but we can’t all be perfect.

Steak and kidney pud. The defining icon of culinary times gone by. It actually wasn’t too bad, a little stodgy in terms of the pastry – in fact there seemed to be a little too much pastry for the quantity of meat. I passed some off to my Stepmother and the husband ate the majority of the remainder. Turns out he actually doesn’t mind steak and kidney, something I would never have known without Edmonds.

Savoury steak paste. Meat, onions and Worcester sauce cooked in a double boiler for a couple of hours and then minced (put through the food processor). Again the Husband likes this also. There was a time when he hated everything Edmonds related that I fed him. That time seems to have been a long time ago. Admittedly I did tell him it was something like Pate – it sounds better than steak paste.

And lastly, I’m ashamed to admit it but it turned out that I didn’t manage to have any of the cooking ready in time for dinner so I made a bet with the husband that I could make the tartare sauce before he got back with the fish and chips. Chopped capers + Mayo meant that I had actually made the Tartare sauce in the time he was on the phone to the chip shop. I’m the very model of efficiency.

Here's one I prepared earlier

Friday night – time to use some of the prepared chicken meat. I managed to hold back from saying “here’s one I prepared earlier”. Only just.

As a small child I was very fussy. There were lots of things I would not eat. I blame this on poor parenting – no not really Mum! I wouldn’t eat – cooked fruit – stuff in tins included, jam, onions, tomatoes – in any form including sauce, peas, pizza (it had a funny smell which I have now figured out was the capsicums), hamburgers (because of the tomato sauce), pumpkin, poached and fried eggs, raisins and so on. I’m sure there is more, I was very fussy. Of course now I don’t eat Pork, tomatoes, capsicum, peas (although I will if forced), raisins, most shellfish and so on, so I am still comparatively fussy.

As a fussy child, sleepovers were fraught affairs. I generally had to manage my way through dinner and breakfast. Pineapple chicken would have been one of those meals that I would have been concerned about facing. It strikes me as something quite New Zealand – Pineapple cooked in a gooey cornflour sauce with chicken – and just one of those things that my Mum fed me. Perhaps it’s because she was a scottish immigrant? Not too many pineapples, tinned or otherwise, in the Shetland Isles perhaps? I’ll ask her why she never subjected me to fruit and meat combinations.

So several years down the track how am I coping? Not so bad. Better than I imagined anyway. It’s not all that bad, I certainly wouldn’t have made it by choice and I wouldn’t go back for seconds but I survived. The Husband thought it was fantastic fair to say he won’t be getting used to pineapple chicken while I’m around!