Making my cookbooks work for their place on the shelf (Tana Ramsay’s Home Made)

My cookbooks take up three shelves, I also have an extra shelf of baking books, now as I use my two and a half * bookshelves to store more than just books and as, um . . . I currently have no more shelf space, I have decided to slowly work my way through my old recipe books to see if I really do need to keep them. So for the next few months I’m menu planning from old recipe books and if I can’t see myself using lots of recipes out of them or the recipes are just too unreliable, the book’s gotta go (and this is considering I already got rid of a fair few when we moved).

First up was Tana Ramsay’s Home Made, now I adored and still adore her first book, Family Kitchen and on that alone I bought several of her later books when they came out but none ever really matched the first book and I already had a feeling as I opened this book to do the food order, what the outcome of this week of ‘testing’ would be.

First problem and to be honest the only problem was that when looking for recipes to cook this week, there really wasn’t many I wanted to either revisit or try for the first time, I ended up picking five dishes but only cooked two, the ingredients for the other three recipes being used elsewhere in dishes I was much more eager to cook. So what did I cook?

Old fashioned lasagne

Sigh how come lasagne is now considered ‘old fashioned’, I still remember when it was a novel dish (#old), anyway, unsurprisingly considering one of my all time favourite bolognese recipes is in Tana Ramsay’s Family Kitchen, she obviously knows what she’s doing with her Italian mince dishes, as this was gorgeous (completely polished off before I could take a photo, but you know what lasagne looks like).

Sweet potato and carrot soup with a drizzle of chilli oil

Tana also seems to know what she’s doing with soups, my favourite ever butternut squash soup recipe is in one of her other books, this one was very similar, gorgeously thick and tasty and the chilli oil which had been infused with thyme was just perfect with it. I will be making this again and again.

So two recipes, two successes but a book is not worth keeping for two recipes alone, so I’ve copied out the recipes, changing them to include my adaptations because I can never cook a recipe without fiddling with something and I’m afraid the book’s going down the charity shop.

* We have two full size Billy Bookcases plus a half width one which was a recent purchase

Delving into ‘Tana’s Kitchen Secret’s’ – week 2

30th June

Going simpler this week, starting off with a tomato and proscuitto bruschetta and you know what? It was pretty nice and the kids ate it. Reckon with only a thin slice of ham or two plus a tiny sprinkling of parmesan and only a tiny drizzle of olive oil, it’s a relatively healthy way of getting that pizza taste without all the fat. Will be making again.

2nd July

No photo, potato salad is hardly photogenic, at least not the potato salad I make, obviously. It was potato salad with creme fraiche, coriander and spring onion and it was ‘ok’ (the kids didn’t like it) but as I was eating it I couldn’t help thinking that I’d eaten better potato salads from Jamie Oliver recipes and I really must dig those out. However, Mr. Lacer was impressed that I dished up the kids’ tea so quickly after swimming today and that had quite a lot to do with the fact that I’d made the salad in advance.

4th July

The kids’ school is fairly tradition hungry and one of those traditions used to be taking the class teacher out for dinner at Christmas and at the end of the school year. I have no idea how this tradition started but I can easily imagine it, some time, eons ago, one class started doing it and then some other classes noticed them doing it and thought “hey that’s a good idea!”, so they started doing it and then the whole school starts doing it and then before you know it, it’s like “well we have to do it, as everyone else does it,” even though we feel a bit sorry for the poor class teacher being forced to go out to dinner with a bunch of middle aged mums twice a year (the mums who are teachers or who used to be teachers, particularly shudder). So the school has forcibly started a new tradition (I can imagine the scene in the staffroom “oh no, it’s getting to that time of year again, I don’t want to go out for dinner with that lot, quick someone, let’s finally think of an excuse to permanently get out of it!”) of instead of the dinners we have picnics, they’re held just after school and within easy reach of the school so that the teachers can escape quickly, tee hee. Anyway, it was Boy Lacer’s class picnic today, so I made some lunchbox pies (*shock* not from Tana, they were from an old Donna Hay book) and cupcakes (which were a Tana recipe).

I’ve made the lunchbox pies before, quite a lot of times actually, but years ago, back in the time when cooking was a ‘hobby’ and not a ‘necessity’ (i.e. before I had kids), I don’t know, have I ever blogged about Donna Hay’s Food Fast? (Goes and has a quick check – found a brief mention here, in a very old list of cookbooks I owned back in 2007, quite shocked about how different (and bigger) a similar list would be today). So anyway, I’ve never really talked about Food Fast before, does another quick check to see if it’s still in print – doesn’t look like it, as it’s only sold second hand on Amazon, which is pretty much the equivalent of not being in print these days even if it is, it is a shame it is out of print (presuming it is) because it is a lovely book (and as it seems with me and a lot of food writers, Donna Hay is another writer where I much prefer her earlier work). Food Fast is, well, food fast and it does what it says on the tin (unlike a lot of other books I could mention that purport to be the same thing, *ahem* Jamie), the recipes are largely healthy and fresh, as an advertisement for their speed, they manage to successfully fit four recipes onto each page (ok, the page is quite big), some pages fit more (which includes the page I got the lunchbox pies from). It is divided into chapters by time, plus a chapter on quick sides. If you can get your hands on this book, do so, it’s brilliant (I really do need to start cooking from this more, you wouldn’t believe the life and limb I risked this morning getting this book from the cobwebbed and dusty top shelf of my cookbook bookcase). If you already own this book, cherish it and start cooking from it again, because I bet you don’t, it’s so easy to neglect old cookbooks.  Anyway, back to the lunchbox pies, although I made them a lot in the past (they’re just simply rounds of puff pastry with a filling), I’d never actually made them with the recommended filling from the book, roasted sweet potato and cooked chicken, so I did that today and then remembered why I didn’t do it before, although I think sweet potatoes smell fantastic when cooking, I just don’t like them, they’re too sweet for me, whereas the kids gobbled them up. Sigh, I think I would have liked them more with maybe a bit of chilli or a splash of lime to counteract the sweetness but that’s the problem I’m finding with cooking at the moment, I’m cooking for the majority and the majority don’t appreciate a bit of chilli and a splash of lime, I was pushing the boat out possibly a bit too much by also including coriander. And as for the cupcakes (the actual Tana recipe), not the best cupcakes I’ve ever made in my life, partly my fault, as after Tana stating that the recipe was enough for 20 cupcakes and I could only get 12 cupcakes out of it, when it came to doing the icing I wasn’t particularly trustful of her measurements, so I made it up as I went along and my icing was too runny. And (and this is even before I got to the icing part), the oven timings and temperature seemed out again, I had to whack the oven up 20C and keep them in for another 8 minutes. Still, end result, not as many as I was expecting and not as pretty as I was hoping, but still pretty edible, although the cupcakes I made the other day from Cake Days were far moister and delish.

6th July

Today was Girl Lacer’s class picnic, it was also her class assembly, so I had to get to school early, laden with whatever I was bringing to the picnic, which in this case was a raspberry and lemon torta from Kitchen Secrets and some sandwiches. Unfortunately (and as usual), I was cutting it close to the wire again and the cake came out of the oven about ten minutes before I had to dash out to the assembly, so I had to bung a steaming hot cake in my bag. ‘Luckily’ according to Tana, the cake is at its best still a little warm.

Amazingly, considering it’d been raining all day, the picnic was actually held outside, but this time actually in school grounds, so that if it started raining again we could dash back inside. There were six different class groups in the playground this time  having picnics (as it was two year groups) and it was a really lovely, buzzy atmosphere. Girl Lacer took the cake (and a knife) and went round the whole playground offering slices and she managed to come back with the plate clean, she even got the year 4 teachers to have a slice each, so getting in there early with that one (she’ll be in year 4 next year). The cake was actually really nice (I did manage to get one slice), it was torture when we got home again and I could still smell it, as I wanted more!

Well, this has been on my dashboard in draft form for over a week since I last cooked from Tana’s Kitchen Secrets and I have absolutely not had the urge to make anything else from the book, I had planned on a few more things but after my luke warm reaction to most of the recipes I’ve made from the book, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. There may be a few more recipes to attempt from the book in the future but not right now, right now I need a book of recipes that make me literally dance round the kitchen and make me devoting my limited time to it, worth it. This is not that book.

However, to be not all gloomy about this book, the pasta with bacon and veg sauce was nice, as was the bruschetta. The torta was nice as well and extremely popular, one of those sort of cakes that looks more impressive than the actual amount of effort it took to make, so that makes it a good cake to feed a crowd. The pastry parcels will also be a useful and adaptable recipe to remember. Sooo, I’m not about to go and donate this book to the charity shop or anything but I suspect it’s not going to get used that often.

 

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• Delving into ‘Tana’s Kitchen Secrets’ – Week 1 (lacer.wordpress.com)

Delving into ‘Tana’s Kitchen Secrets’ – Week 1

Nothing like suddenly not being able to do something very well, to make you appreciate it, even if you weren’t doing much of that something for a while anyway, in this case I’d let my cooking slip, then I got my wrist done and then suddenly all I wanted to do was cook and yet even opening a jar was tricky. So, I’m easing myself back in with Tana’s Kitchen Secrets; I was a massive fan of her earlier books but I then began to find that her later books weren’t so family friendly, so I’d stopped slavishly buying every single one of her books and hadn’t thought much else of her until I spotted the aforementioned Kitchen Secrets for a fiver, piled up near the queue in WH Smiths, I folded.

So, I got it home, admittedly didn’t cook from it for a while (but I wasn’t cooking from anything) but the recipes did look interesting and it was the first book I thought of when I started thinking about doing ‘proper’ cooking again. So, how did I get on?

Monday 25th June

I seem to be having a day devoted to food today, what with allotment gardening in the morning, then home to make this, so that and a spot of the obligatory housework has meant that I’m already looking at the clock thinking “christ, not long before I have to be back at school”. The recipe is ‘simple pork stir fry’ but I substituted pork for bacon (as using this book to menu plan has already meant that I’ve bought far more meat than normal this week) and I left out the button mushrooms that seem to be in every other recipe in this book, bleurgh. Anyway, I have a tendency to think that any cook book with a recipe entitled ‘simple stir fry’ is a little like (to anyone but the most kitchen phobic newbie) trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs, however considering the only stir fry I’ve been eating recently are ones from a packet *blush*, maybe I needed a spot of reminding / a kick up the bum.

The recipe certainly didn’t suffer from the pork / bacon substitution and it certainly didn’t suffer from the lack of button mushrooms, however with just a simple fish sauce, soy sauce and lemon juice flavouring, it didn’t really taste of anything special (certainly couldn’t taste the lemon juice). However, it did taste nicer than one of those limp packet stir fry things.

To ‘celebrate’ my return to cooking (however long it may last), I bought a new wok for this, we’d got rid of our old wok a few months ago, as it had got rusty and had decided, due to space restrictions in our tiny kitchen, that if we wanted to stir fry anything, we’d just use a frying pan and although the frying pan did the job, boy, going back to a wok, a good wok this time (unlike our previous horrible flimsy thing), it’s a world of difference. The new wok will take some getting used to though, it wasn’t an expensive one (£12 from John Lewis, boy, some woks are up to 7 – 8x that much) but it’s a lot heavier than our old one and the spiel on the wok label about it’s superior heat distribution, not kidding! Hence me overcooking the veg a little bit. Will have to do lots of stir frying to get my feel in.

Now steering way off topic, although sticking to the subject of stir fries, eating the stir fry this lunch time made me remember a book I read as a child that I really liked. I can’t remember what the book was called but it was a sci-fi / fantasy children’s book about domed cities in the future. The people who live on the surface under the domes, live a pampered, luxurious lifestyle, I remember one scene in the book where the children go to a vending machine which can serve up food from any era, they choose 20th century and they get served up pizza. But it wasn’t the vending machines I liked the most about the book, you see below the city there was an underground population, the workers who supported the city, toiling unseen and living quite the opposite lifestyle and I remember the author going into detail about what the main child character down there ate, how she queued to eat hot, fried vegetable scraps. Now when I read that as a kid, I was not good at eating my veg (I argue now because most of the veg was soggy, bland and overcooked, I still don’t like boiled veg) but there was something, even then, about the hot, fried vegetable scraps, that made my mouth water. Now back then stir frying wasn’t ‘in’, so I didn’t know what a stir fry was but ever since I did learn about stir fries, I always think of that book. (It’s funny isn’t it, how in so many bleak, sci-fi future worlds, they’re all eating Asian cuisine, I hope it comes true, although obviously not the bleak bit).

Tuesday 26th June

(Excuse the bad lighting)

Now I had planned to make pasta with bacon and veg sauce for both me and the kids but it turned out that Girl Lacer had already hadpasta for lunch (I really need to make a note of what they order for school lunch, if I’m going to menu plan properly), so I made it just for me and froze the rest of the sauce. I used to be so good at making stuff in batches and freezing stuff when the kids were a lot younger, I have no idea why I stopped. With my life right now I need to start freezing stuff again, as it’s all well and good having the intention to eat more healthy, properly home cooked food but if you haven’t got the time to prepare it, you haven’t got the time. Anyway, the sauce was really nice, possibly a bit too ‘chunky’ for my kids anyway, it was a definite ‘sit on top of the pasta’ sauce, instead of a stir in one. It was so chunky enough that I think it would make a good jacket potato filling to, a mixture of bacon, aubergine, courgette, tomato, red onion, garlic and basil (once again I missed out the horrible button mushrooms). It was topped with fried breadcrumbs mixed with parmesan and basil (obviously didn’t freeze that bit). Once I get through my stash in the freezer, I will definitely aim on making this one again.

Wednesday 27th June

Phew! All day in the kitchen or what? (Actually it was all afternoon, but I’m quibbling now). After a spot of shopping in the morning I came home to make chicken, rocket and lemon risotto for lunch.

It wasn’t the prettiest risotto I’ve ever seen (personally, I would have added the rocket a lot later than 5 minutes before the end of cooking time, so that the rocket still looked more like, ummm, rocket but I was being a good girl and following the instructions). It also wasn’t the nicest risotto I’ve ever had, I found it too rich and too salty and personally my ideal risotto does not require having to cook something separately first in a separate pan (in this case the chicken), I much prefer everything in one pan (I’m a lazy cook). I probably won’t be making this again, although the lemon was a nice touch (and I’ve learnt to trust my instincts about how much stock to put in and when to add the rocket i.e. I think the risottos where I make it up as I go along, are a lot nicer (I make a wicked tomato and pancetta one)).

After lunch I had to get the stock pot on, I had some chicken drumsticks left over from a buy two for X price deal, from when I had bought chicken drumsticks for Boy Lacer’s cooking efforts and they were about to go out of date. So I made the chicken broth recipe from Tana’s Kitchen Secrets. Once I’d got all that on the stove simmering away, it was then time to make tea (in advance), which was bacon and cheese pastry parcels. I adapted the parcels recipe a bit (actually I adapted the broth recipe a bit to, just bunging in what I had, the ingredient list was long), the parcels were, surprise, surprise, meant to have mushroom in, instead I used leek (frying it with the bacon) and swapped the herb from basil to thyme.

These were eaten in between pick up from after school clubs and before ballet, sitting sheltering under a tree by the river in the drizzle. They were nice (they beat what I normally feed the kids on Wednesdays) and I will probably make them again, the recipe is very adaptable and I already quite fancy trying these with roasted veg but I did find them rich, but that may be because I still hadn’t recovered from that lunchtime’s risotto.

As for the broth, I was by this time so knackered, by the end of the 2 hour simmer, I hadn’t been keeping as close an eye on the water level, so I didn’t get as much broth as I would have liked. But it was enough for a soup base for the next day, so in the fridge it went.

But, ah, that wasn’t the end of my cooking for the day. I still had breadcrumbs left over from yesterday’s pasta and I didn’t want them to go to waste, so when I came back from ballet, had put the kids to bed, it saw me in the kitchen making the start of a treacle tart and moaning to Mr. Lacer that it’s impossible to eat nice, home cooked, healthy food and have a life away from the kitchen, no matter what Jamie Oliver says.

Thursday 28th June

No photos today, not an overly successful day. Where shall I start? Well, the soup I made using the broth I made yesterday? Bland and at the same time overpowered by the flavour of star anise (one of the spices I did have, that was on Tana’s list). It was ok (and when I got the broth out of the fridge it was jellified, sign of a good stock apparently) but it so was not worth yesterday’s effort.

Then the treacle tart I started yesterday? Well the filling was lovely but Tana’s instructions for the cooking the pastry case were next to useless. Now I haven’t made many tarts but I know about blind baking the case first but when the instructions didn’t say to do that, I thought fair enough, she knows what she’s doing, hmmmm. And then I did wonder about the very low oven temperature . . . And I was right to wonder, no way was the tart ready by the time the cooking time was up, I ended up having to up the temperature and leave it in the oven for an extra half an hour but even then (and because of the lack of blind baking) the pastry was not cooked properly.

And then there was tea, a beef and aubergine rigatoni bake, where I turned out not to have enough sauce or aubergine to cover the pasta properly and the cheese sauce was cottage cheese, cottage cheese, that should stay in the 80s, bleurgh. The kids did like it but I didn’t.

Friday 29th June

Mr. Lacer’s birthday today, I went to have lunch with him in his lunch hour (so odd, time alone with no kids in the next room or anything, odd but nice). I made the Victoria Sponge from Tana’s Kitchen Secrets for his birthday cake at tea time. Victoria Sponge is Mr. Lacer’s favourite type of cake and I used to be rubbish at making them but I think I cracked it one or two Victoria Sponge’s ago and Tana’s recipe didn’t throw any spanners in the works, so result, it was quite nice (probably the nicest thing I’ve made this week, although that’s not saying that much). Mr. Lacer and Girl Lacer thought there was too much jam in it though, but isn’t that the point?

Verdict so far

I need to eat better, I know I do, but a week of home cooking from Tana’s Kitchen Secrets has not left me feeling bouncing with health, instead quite the opposite, it’s left me knackered. However, the fridge is pretty much empty, so far less food wastage.

I don’t think I’d begrudge the time spent cooking if the results were more consistently nice, I think the big reward with home cooking is that moment when you take the first bite and it tastes so nice you do a little dance of joy around the kitchen. If what you just made doesn’t taste as nice as an equivalent you could go and buy from a shop, then there really isn’t that much point.

I also think that there are less labour intensive recipes out there.

Bolognese

I love proper homemade bolognese but rarely eat it, as although most of the time it takes to make it is just cooking time, where you just have to stir it every now and then, the length of time a good bolognese needs to be on the stove (a good hour or two) means that I’m rarely organised enough to make it in time for whatever meal I want it for. But I was just about organised to make the bolognese from Bill’s Basics tonight, ok not that organised, I had hoped to make it for the kids tea, but I didn’t get the mince out of the freezer in time, so it got delayed till after the kids were in bed.

I normally make (when I do make it) the bolognese from Tana Ramsay, which is deeply delicious, Bill Granger’s bolognese was similar, although slightly less veg and a new one for me when making bolognese, the addition of milk with the wine. I have to say I don’t think the addition of milk made much difference and Tana Ramsay’s bolognese is a bit more savoury (probably the extra veg) which is what I crave with bolognese, so I haven’t switched my favourite bolognese recipe, but still, it was nice.

Happy Birthday Mr. Lacer!

Excuse my absence for the last few days, been busy plus, as this blog is pretty much a record of things I’m enthusiastic about, it’s been too hot to be enthusiastic about anything other than the air conditioning in Sainsburys.

Friday was cake selling at school, where ‘shame’ on me, I turned up with shop brought cakes.

Saturday, was a massive family shopping expedition, you know the sort of shopping expedition where you’ve been waiting for weeks for payday, me and the kids had to get birthday presents for Mr. Lacer and we wanted to get an iphone for me, plus the kids had a Charlie and Lola thing at a bookshop to attend. The iphone proved to be out of stock (back in stock next weekend hopefully) but the kids were hilarious whilst we were waiting in the queue in O2, they spotted a couple of iphones on display in the corner, now Boy Lacer’s had plenty of opportunity to play with one when we’ve been in the Apple store “Here small child, play with expensive gadget whilst I try and sell one to your mother” , but Girl Lacer has only (and very willingly) sat through the 15 minute ad on Youtube with the good looking apple sales guy “Ooh, it’s got touch screen. Ooh, it’s got maps. Oooooooh, you can play games on it!”. So they both squeal in delight, but instead of rushing over to the two display phones, Boy Lacer just stands and stares, at a very respectful distance, takes a few tentative steps closer and then (honestly) drops to his knees in awe. Girl Lacer then rushes over to the display but even she’s too nervous to take them off their stands whilst Boy Lacer finally approaches his technological god and stands tiptoed against the table, fingers clinging on the edge, peering up at them.

But by the time we were hunting for birthday presents for Mr. Lacer, Boy Lacer was a nightmare, partly because I’m still lacking my ‘safe zone’, i.e. a pushchair I can comfortably contain Boy Lacer in if it gets too much for him, we’re still borrowing a friend’s old Maclaren and it’s way too small for him. I’d been bidding all week on a special needs buggy on ebay but I was competitively bidding against someone probably just as desperate as me and the amount was getting just stupid, so in the end I let myself get outbid. I’m now watching another special needs buggy on ebay but this time I’m not going to get into a bidding war with someone and I’ll wait until the last few hours of the auction to show my hand. But that does mean the small Maclaren for at least another week, don’t think we’ll be going very far. ‘Unsurprisingly’ the occupational therapist (whoever she is now) never got back to me.

Saturday afternoon my dad was over and completely laid into my gardening skills, hmph. Put it this way, my idea of when to water my plants is a tad greener than my dad’s and on the long list of things I need to do in my life, weeding the patio, way down at the bottom.

Sunday, Girl Lacer had a mock ballet exam, unfortunately one of the things we’d planned to get in town on the Saturday was some replacement ballet kit, but Boy Lacer was so exhausting, the ballet kit slipped my mind, so me and Girl Lacer had to go into town first to get the ballet kit.

And then that leaves today, Happy Big Four-oh Mr. Lacer, having a husband in a different decade to me always makes me feel considerably younger (I have another 5 1/2 years of my 30s to go). Girl Lacer woke predictable early today, she’d got Mr. Lacer some chocolate turtles from ‘the chocolate shop’ (Montezumas), Boy Lacer got Mr. Lacer a wallet and I got Mr. Lacer a presentation pack of the mythology stamps with little stories by Neil Gaiman as a clue to what his real present will be when it’s released in August. As we were up early I got a chance to make blueberry muffins (my trusted recipe from the Friends cookbook, they’re delicious) for breakfast, as they’re Mr. Lacer’s favourites. I’ve made a birthday cake today as well, the ‘girl’s birthday cake’ from Tana Ramsay’s Family Kitchen (without the girly bits), I love that recipe, just as I love any recipe that says ‘put all ingredients in a bowl, mix, put in tin’ plus it always tastes gorgeous. Unfortunately today though, when I was removing the second sponge from the tin, it literally fell apart in my hands, so once again Mr. Lacer had a flat birthday cake (see the bottom of this post).

I also made today (and only because I was concerned about my rhubarb getting too stringy if I left it any longer) rhubarb and strawberry compote, based on a rhubarb compote recipe in the Leon book (and I say based, more like looked at the book, thought no way have I got 900g of rhubarb growing in my garden and then proceeded to make it up as I went along). I had about three very long stalks (I’m leaving on my smaller stalks for later), so I thought I’d better throw in some of my minuscule but powerful strawberries at the same time (some of my strawberries are tiny, but oh they taste good). I made about enough for two healthy sized dollops on a portion of something like say porridge or if you’re more pleasurably inclined, rice pudding (guess who had two portions of Rachel’s Dairy Rice Pudding in the fridge?), so I stuck half the compote in the fridge and half on a shop brought rice pudding (yes, I know home made rice pudding is far nicer, but I never have the forward planning to make it and Rachel’s Dairy Rice Pudding is, whilst still being nice, considerably lower in fat I think). And ooh it was good! Will probably making it again, although with the aid of the supermarket this time, I’m rapidly discovering this year (after my adventures in spinach soup  as well), that as nice as my little vegetable patch is, to grow enough fruit and veg to make certain dishes, with any frequency and put it this way, family sized, I need more space.

Girl Lacer had more ballet after school today (groan) and then the kids had a token birthday tea and some flat cake (me and Mr. Lacer are having some nice delivered pizza tonight, in the company of Van Diesel, hmmmm). Sports Day tomorrow, so it’s not allowed to rain until after then, but some soon after would be good!

More Fay Ripley

I think the key theme emerging with Fay Ripley’s Family Food book is that the recipes are easy, very, and although I think I can count myself as a fairly accomplished cook, there’s nothing wrong with easy (as long as it still tastes nice) because easy normally means minimal time involved and I like that!

I made her quick chicken kiev on Friday night, in lieu of getting a Dominos Pizza (me and Mr. Lacer are a pizza advertisers wet dream, we just have to get sent a discount voucher for Dominos through our inbox and we’re always, guaranteed, “Oooh pizza!”, we did actually make the use of the voucher on Saturday night and it was the greasiest pizza I’ve ever had (and I’ve had a few), I couldn’t eat all of it and what I did eat made me feel ill, so there you go, Fay Ripley beats Dominos hands down (and cheaper)). Anyway, the chicken kiev was lovely, using a method I recognise from Jamie Oliver (although I’m sure he didn’t invent it), it’s basically chicken and veg, little bit of liquid, wrapped in foil, bunged in oven. To classify this as ‘chicken kiev’, it involved squidging in some butter mashed with garlic and parsley, into the chicken breast. I bunged in some sliced courgette (Ripley advised cherry tomatoes as well, bleurgh) as well and instead of the few tablespoons of chicken stock she recommeded, I did my few sloshes of soy sauce again and it all worked out very well. Mr. Lacer really liked it and he was scarred for life by his mother’s bad chicken.

The courgette by the way, although way more over cooked than I normally like it, was also delicious.

Then this lunch time I made her idiot-pro0f roast butternut squash soup and not only is it idiot proof, it’s completely and utterly minimal attention worthy, which is perfect if I’m trying to make something and it’s just me and Boy Lacer in the flat. It takes a while but that time is mostly spent in the oven, so it’s not like you’re involved there. You basically chop a butternut squash in half, scoop out the seeds, drizzle with olive oil and a few sprigs of rosemary and bung in the oven for an hour and a quarter, then scoop out the resulting softened flesh, whizz up, heat up together with some chicken stock and there’s your soup.

I have to admit it’s not the nicest butternut squash I’ve ever tasted (Tana Ramsay gets that award) but it still tastes lovely and the ease of making it counts for a lot. I tend to like my butternut squash at an almost baby food like consistency and this one is a lot thinner, it’s more of a mug soup rather than a bowl soup but as I’ve been thinking about mug soup recipes (for when Boy Lacer starts afternoon nursery, I am not going back to eating my lunch at 11.30am again, so I was thinking if I could have soup for lunch in a mug when I got back from taking him to nursery, it wouldn’t interrupt my writing time too much), so I will be making this again, probably start a production line in the kitchen with multiple butternut squashes roasting in the oven at the same time and then freezing the soup.

Muffins masquerading as healthy and um muffins

I made apricot and bran muffins from Tana Ramsay’s Family Kitchen this afternoon. At first glance they sound really healthy with the dried apricot and the bran but they’ve got a whole packet of butter in. They also, despite my best efforts at ignoring the instructions, required the use of my electric whisk and I much prefer mixing muffins by hand as they’re far lighter and fluffier as there’s less risk of over mixing.

Anyway I put them in the oven and an extra five minutes over cooking time later, they came out literally swimming in butter at the bottom of the muffin tins. It had leached out of the muffin cases. So I think I could have safely cut the butter by about a third. They also weren’t as risen as normal muffins, which I think was over mixing by my electric whisk. However, they’re rather nice, very moist (obviously, with all that butter), slightly chewy and with a sweet almost toffee-ish taste. Mr. Lacer wasn’t too keen on them, he said they were missing something, probably blueberries, as he’s a one track muffin man. The kids aren’t having any until after tea and I’ve eaten two.

The recipe is here, about half way down the page. I’ve noticed Ramsay’s recipe for cheese and ham muffins is on that page to (just below the apricot muffins), now those can be recommended whilst they’re still warm but they get a bit dense and greasy when cold.