Bill Granger’s Cheat’s Chips and Caramel Popcorn

A picture of Bill Granger’s Cheat’s Chips is on the back of his book, Holiday and that picture has been calling to me since I brought it. So, as I’m still working my way through my Bill Granger collection, tonight I gave it ago.

Unusually for Bill’s recipes, I wasn’t totally thrilled with this recipe. He recommends (for two people) too many large potatoes (3), two would have been more than enough. I did reduce the amount of chips when I couldn’t get them all into my steamer first (you pre-steam them to cut down cooking time). Even so, when placed on my large baking sheet, they were still a little too piled up on each other, so the ones in the middle didn’t cook properly. So if I were to make this again (I might), I would use less potatoes and two large baking sheets. Still, they were nice and the addition of parmesan and parsley was a nice touch, although to quote Mr. Lacer “they’re not like proper chips are they?”. Anyway if you’re interested the recipe is here.

And then it was Bills Caramel Popcorn for dessert (eating oh so healthily tonight, not). A really easy recipe, with a delicious caramel sauce, which you coat the popcorn with before baking them in the oven, so the popcorn goes all chewy and sticks together a bit. Downside is that it is incredibly sweet (if that’s a downside) but I think I’ve found my first dish for Girl Lacer’s birthday party in October. You’ll find the recipe here (scroll down).

 

Bomb – primed and loaded

Boy Lacer is currently walking round without a nappy on, it’s like watching a bomb, primed and loaded walking round your living room. We haven’t had much success potty training Boy Lacer, suggesting he sits on a potty is like suggesting he sits on a pot full of cobras but he wanted to take his nappy off, so we’re following his lead.

A rather boring Sunday today, culminating in yet another weekend when I haven’t done the much needed gardening. I read in the morning, cooked lunch and then took Boy Lacer into town to get some bread and milk. We walked along the river and Boy Lacer was ‘tidying up’, picking up all the leaves and broken twigs from the current strong winds. Then back home, more food preparation and just waiting for bedtime now.

I had a good day yesterday though, more book selling, however this time I actually sold some (thank goodness, I was getting an alarming run of bad luck). One more event (planned for anyway) this summer season, that’s next Saturday, if I do as well as I did yesterday I will have shifted a significant portion of the stock that’s been clogging up my bedroom for the last few months.

The Sunday Salon – My favourite place to read is . . .

. . . in the bath and I had prime time to enjoy it this morning as Mr. Lacer had taken the kids to the playground and his tolerance for playgrounds always lasts a lot longer than mine. I finished reading Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors last week, my review is here but in summary, although I raved about it last week in the Salon, I wasn’t as impressed with it in the end.

So, I’m back to reading Imprimatur, which sadly I’m not having much fun with either, set in a 1600s hostelry in Rome, I have come to the conclusion (so far) that it would have been far better if it had been written in the style of Dan Brown. It has all the Dan Brown components; the Italian setting, the conspiracies and the secret catacombs, but it has been written in the style of someone speaking from the seventeenth century, so it’s not a very fluid read. It has also in my opinion been over researched, one of the great dilemmas of a writer when writing stuff like this; too little research and the book does not seem authentic whereas if you cram every single bit of your research in, you risk boring your readers as one of the characters, to use Imprimatur as an example, goes over yet again, in great detail, all the seventeenth century options to cure the plague.