Ginger, where for art thou?

On the weekend I had somewhat ambitiously bought several kilos of pears. Massive, statuesque buerre boscs. It almost seemed a shame to cut them up. Pear and ginger jam was not going to wait though so on Wednesday night I found myself making jam. I’m slowly getting through the jams, I only have a couple left. The husband is starting to get slightly concerned about the sheer volume of jam we now own – especially when neither of us eat it.

The recipe required preserved ginger which I took to be stem ginger – the type you buy in syrup. Do you think I could find stem ginger anywhere? I went through everywhere I could think of from the classy delis to the dodgy asian shops – no ginger. I ended up buying ginger preserved in honey, at an exorbitant price, which I assumed was going to be close enough!

Pear and ginger jam seems ok. It isn’t entirely set, a little on the syrupy side. Some of my other jams have almost set hard like wine gums so it would be fair to say that the consistency of the consistency of my jams is not great.

While I was waiting around for my jam to set I decided to also turn out a couple of treats for work – Apple cheese tarts and jam tarts. Apple cheese tarts are entirely more tasty than they sound – think lemon curd but with apples. I think it could catch on perhaps?!? There was quite a lot of apple cheese left over so I gave the husband a spoon and the pot - before dinner even– I’ll make a terrible parent one day.
Jam tarts – little flaky pastry shapes cut out, cooked with a little dot of jam placed on the top when they come out of the oven. I used gooseberry because our garden shed is groaning under the weight of gooseberry jam. Reviews were pretty good, they certainly looked quite pretty. More of a left over pastry type affair than making specifically but good all the same!

Oysters again

After Saturday’s fat fest I was left with half a pottle of oysters. Having decided that I did not actually like oysters, this was not, in my eyes at least, a good thing. There were however more oyster recipes which needed to be made. Some times you just have to take one for the team, or the cooking equivalent.

Oysters scalloped were not particularly scalloped, they were mixed into white sauce and poured into a dish, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and grilled. It was oysters masquerading as cauliflower cheese – with no cauliflower and no cheese. They weren’t that bad but after a small taste the entire dish went to the husband. He didn’t complain about it. I can only guess that he either didn’t mind it or has lost the will to complain.

In order to cleanse my pallet and as a foil to the left over brandy sauce I also made a steamed sponge pudding. I wasn’t bad but was unremarkable against the background of so many other steamed puddings. In an attempt to cross off a couple more recipes I also made Jam sauce which it says is specifically for steamed puddings. It was jam, watered down to a sauce consistency. Ground breaking.

The husband was too full of oysters to be able to eat his steamed pudding that night so he had it for breakfast the next day. Beats weet bix!

Detox

Sunday was detox day as we tried to get some of the fat out of our systems. I headed to the invalids section for inspiration

Mutton broth. I had bought half a leg of mutton from the Mad Butcher for making “colonial goose” which had to be tunnel boned. I used the bones to make the mutton broth from the invalids section. It was really lovely – a nice strong meaty flavour but not at all sheepy. Once the stock was fully flavoured I added vegetables and cooked them until tender. The whole lot was then put through a sieve. It was a nice soup. Personally I’m not sure I would have bothered with the sieving business but it was nice.

Pelorus cake. Yet another fruit cake – but like tennis cake it didn’t have many raisins and was more about the cherries and peel. I may have slightly overcooked it but that was rectified by me shaving a layer off the bottom.

Baked apple dumplings. These were really good! Apples peeled and cored sprinkled with sugar and wrapped in something similar to scone dough. Take several of these, put them in a dish, add sugar syrup to cover halfway up the apples, bake. The apples were meltingly soft inside their cakey little cases. Mmmmmmmm.

One has do have something custardy with ones apple dumplings. I managed to find brandy sauce – make white sauce, add sugar and brandy. It wasn’t bad but very strongly brandy flavoured! We took the dumplings and sauce to my stepmother’s place for dinner and it turned out she already had custard prepared so it had to bring it home again – good thing we didn’t get pulled over, the strong brandy fumes in the car would have been highly suspicious!

It's not Belgium - it's Aberdeen

After such a supreme effort, it made sense to take it easy for a while so it was the following Saturday before I cracked into the cooking again. Saturday night to be exact, fish and chip night. This is not to suggest that we eat fish and chips every Saturday of course. We are far more likely to eat them on a Friday when I can’t be bothered cooking and the fish and chip shop is oh so close…

If I’m going to go to the effort of heating up a big pot full of fat then you can be sure that I’m going to get as many deep fried recipes out of the way as practical. So that’s what I did – looking at the menu it is a surprise that the husband and I survived – not that he minded of course…

So the dinner plate was a symphony of golden brown – Fish fried in two kinds of batter, fried oysters and French fries. The two types of batter were Batter and Eggless Batter. I can honestly say I couldn’t really taste a difference. In fact the recipes were the same except – and I hope this doesn’t come as too much of a surprise – one had egg in, and the other didn’t. I know, it’s gripping stuff.

Fried oysters were dredged through the batter and then fried just the same. I thought that perhaps I didn’t actually mind oysters. That was until I opened the pottle of oysters. The smell was just so much stronger than I expected – not fishy but sort of briny and ozony, almost like a cross between the beach after a storm and wet asphalt. They didn’t smell much like food… I did have a bite but let's just say oysters won’t be going on the weekly shopping list.

French fries must be the most accepted food in the world. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone say “no thanks, I just really don’t like chips”. They were pretty good, but then how could they be bad?

I also prepared a little something that didn’t require deep frying, but don’t worry, it wasn’t healthy. Aberdeen sausage. Take mince, sausage meat, bacon and breadcrumbs, mix. Form into a roll. Put in a floured cloth, tie it up and boil for 1.5 hours. Roll in breadcrumbs and eat cold. This is the real 1966 right here people – the days when people mixed up minced meat and then boiled it in a cloth and ate it cold. That’s Authentic.

And do you know what the best bit is? It was really good! Like luncheon sausage (Belgium for those of a southern persuasion) but with less mysterious meat, or like cold meat loaf. We sliced it thinly and ate it for days. The husband had thick wedges of it in his sandwiches all week. So good, so very good.

No nicey nicey, just typey typey

No preliminaries – too much baking for niceties.

It started off with a fruit and nut loaf – naturally the fruit was raisins and the nuts were walnuts. Hardly a surprise. All in all it made quite a nice firm fruit loaf – I would say that a few spices would not go astray though.

To go with soup for lunch we had cheese loaves. There are quite a lot of loaf recipes in the Edmonds – this one had quite a substantial quantity of cheese too and followed the standard “scone method” – rub in the butter etc etc. The only problem was that the recipe called for two small loaf tins.

Now I don’t happen to own two small loaf tins, just one large loaf tin, and that happened to have a fruit and nut loaf in it. I spent a lot of time looking around my kitchen, eyeing up potential receptacles. I ended up cooking it in two bowls, just stock standard soup bowls. It worked fine, apart from the fact that the loaves stuck to the bowls like excrement to a blanket. So I removed the loaves as best I could and then there was really nothing else for it but to eat all the tasty crispy, cheesy bits stuck to the bowl. Damn. Life is hard.

Next were princess fingers. Another naming triumph from Edmonds. Princes fingers were a cake base spread with jam, sprinkled with cherries and walnuts and then topped with a meringue with coconut, orange zest (or rind as the Edmond’s calls it) and cornflakes. That’s a lot going on in one princess finger! I will say though that they were very popular with the punters at work.

Afghans need no introduction. They were fantastic. I made them nice and small – by “I” I mean the husband and chief biscuit roller under my direction. They were quite deeply cocoay and surprisingly adult. As the Sunday magazine product review says – will make again.

You may notice a theme here. Seeing I had to buy cornflakes for the Edmonds I thought I might as well use them up. An added side note was that we had the brother in law staying and there was a race to the bottom of the cornflake packet. I won but then I have always been quite competitive. The last cornflake recipe was chocolate nut bars – a cocoa based slice with cornflakes and walnuts. I know I made it but oddly I can’t remember it at all… This is most unlike me as usually I have an exceptional memory. I now have a fear that there is an ice cream container somewhere with slowly decaying chocolate nut bar in it…

I have a deep deep love of Barkers apple and mint jelly. It’s not stocked by all that many supermarkets but is truly worth the effort it takes to find it. So when I had to make jelly (of the jam rather than gelatine variety) the choice was easy. The Edmonds merely provides a rough outline of what should be done – I will admit I referred to Alison Holst for a recipe for mint jelly. I don’t feel bad about it. I haven’t actually tried the resulting jelly yet but I’m sure it will be good.

Gosh I did a lot of cooking in one day! So much that it has taken me two days of typing to get this far. Might be partially due to the pinball. Damn pinball.

Tennis cake. Has, as far as I could tell, very little to do with tennis. Another fruit cake but one with hardly any raisins in it. Every raisin is a bad raisin though so it doesn’t get extra points for having a low raisin population. It did have quite a lot of cherries and peel as well, I’m fine with both of those so with a little raisin dodging I managed to try some tennis cake. Didn’t taste like tennis.

And to finish off the day I made Oriental Sundae. This was jelly pored over fruit and sponge. A bit like trifle but without custard – so obviously not as good as trifle. Not that I’ve actually had a lot of trifle I my time. Honestly – something about the soggy sponge…

The remarkable thing about the sundae was it made me realise I never wrote up the billy sponge. At least I can’t see it anywhere? Unless I’m going mad? C’est possible! Anyway – in case I didn’t write about the billy sponge it was fantastic – picture this – take a le creuset (or similar) casserole dish. Grease and then coat the inside of the dish with sugar. Pour in the sponge mixture, put the lid on and cook. As I said before it was fantastic. It was so tall and perfectly flat across the top with a really nice sugary crust like a langue de chat. I loved it. A lot.

Brrrrrrrrrr

Don’t worry – I’m still alive! I can hear the nation’s collective sigh of relief.

It is really cold today. So cold that I’m sitting hugging the heater as I type. It is a fan heater so it's possible that this is not the best course of action to ensure a long and full life. At least through the medium of text you won’t be able to hear the screams…

The bunnies, who live in the same room as the computer, would also like to get nearer to the heater. They are very subtle about it though; this is my view as I type.

So anyway – where was I? I feel it necessary to reiterate that I have been slack on the blogging not the cooking. The cooking has been going fine. The problem with that, however, is that it creates more blogging – a vicious cycle some might say…

With visitors on the weekend I had not brought in any Monday morning baking. Fortunately my colleagues were understanding and I wasn’t punished in any way. The number of visitors however who came opened up the empty tin, looked at me with sad eyes and left was punishment enough. So I got home from work on Monday night and got baking.

Nutty joys – Possibly a snapshot of the evolution of cupcakes? Small cakes which, because it’s Edmonds, contain raisins and walnuts. Nutty joys also contain something that was a rarity in the Edmonds – Cinnamon. I am surprised at how rarely spices are used in baking, most recipes have no spice, no essence, no nothing. Apart from raisins of course. And walnuts.

Ginger biscuits. These were fantastic. The husband rolled them into little balls – I think he may have found his Edmonds related calling. They were small and quite round and I made sure not to overcook them so that they were not too crispy. Unfortunately, as the baking sits next to my desk, I may have eaten more than one or two of these.

No news on the football team because we haven’t played in over a month. Not even training. That would be due to the stunning Auckland weather. Oddly I don’t mind as long as it’s not cold. But of course now it is cold, but I have my fan heater and neither of us has exploded. Yet. Cross fingers.

Through a head full of cotton wool

Some weeks are more productive than others. The week before last was less productive than usual but with good reason. Well almost. Looking back my excuse for not cooking much was that we had the brother in law, his wife and their almost newly born child stay with us. How newly born? Still at an age that is referred to in weeks not months.

This was much to the amusement of my colleagues at work – I am not renowned as the most maternal of people. In reality the guests were really no problem, least of all the shiny new niece who never once woke her aunty and uncle up in the middle of the night. Good work!

And coming to the point of this excerpt, I was planning to blame the lack of cooking on the visitors but in reality I did all of the weeks cooking while they were there and none of it during the week.

In a round up of the week that was – we went to quiz night. No we didn’t win, in fact we came 3rd – but – BUT – we only had four team members. And one of those was the husband, who by his own admission is not the quiz guru as such. And the two teams who came in 1st and 2nd hand over 10 people each. And we only lost second by three points. And –this is the really good bit – the team who had beaten us into second for so many weeks were there, and they only had four people too, and we got over double their score. Come on, that’s good.

So back to the cooking. On Saturday night I figured I would make a roast with all the trimmings – roast beef with Yorkshire pud and horseradish sauce. I had been warned that making horseradish sauce is not for the faint hearted, that the grating of horseradish roots requires gloves, a nose peg and ski goggles. Perhaps I’m made of sterner stuff because I had no problems.

I finally managed to acquire some horseradish at Farro – my friendly local – gosh they’re good to me. Here’s a little plug – I buy all my eggs at faro, cheapest place I’ve found to get non tortured eggs and they are nice and big. Fair enough, I do buy them 20 at a time though.

The horseradish sauce made a larger quantity than I could ever imagine someone requiring but the Yorkshire pudding was a different story. Don’t get me wrong, the yield of Yorkshires was probably sufficient for a normal person but I love Yorkshire pud. I might feel the same way as I do about custard if they weren’t so unhealthy, meal specific and fiddly to make. Nothing will overthrow custard’s place in my affections.

Naturally, being the exemplary housewife that I am, I also made dessert. I made lemon meringue pudding – like the pie but with no crust. I encountered the same issue I have had multiple times now with cornflour based desserts not setting properly. It has happened too many times to be a coincidence – in the future I will take advanced action and add extra cornflour.

And on Sunday I whipped up a batch of madelines. No one ever seems to be able to write about madelines without mentioning Proust, yet I always wonder how many people have actually read the book and how much of it has become food writing convention? Convention it would appear that I am adhering to! I have madelines before but had never seen them Edmonds style – dunked in almost set jelly and rolled in coconut like a lamington. They weren’t bad actually.

Now I feel the need to mention that I am typing almost from my sick bed. I have come down with another cold. Such is my dedication to Edmonds that I am sitting here in my fluffy yellow bathrobe with running nose and eyes and pounding head typing away. That and the husband is insisting on catching up with last nights shorters in the lounge and I hate to watch a program twice. Men! He’s done the dishes though so I really shouldn’t grumble!