Tuesday September 2nd – Gnocchi

I have been trying this week to be more cooktacular and not rely on old favourites that require no brain, or even worse, to slope off to the takeaway down the road.  Last night we had freshly shelled peas in a chicken stock with bacon and leeks over papardelle, which was very nice indeed.

Tonight I thought we would try gnocchi.  I’ve never really gone in for gnocchi.  When I lived in Germany we used to eat a dish called spetzle, which I understand is rather similar to gnocchi, which is basically small, squidgy dumplings which you cook like pasta and serve with sauce.  Compared to many other German delicacies such as entire dead pigs and four trillion types of sausage, or even worstest, sauerkraut, spetzle was manna from heaven.  We ate quite a lot of it.  It is bland.  In Germany this is no bad thing.  In England, where there are so many other things to eat, bland never really made the cut.  Hence my aversion to experimenting with gnocchi.

Anyway, yesterday I bought some of the fresh stuff from the deli in Sainsbury’s and thought: ‘It might be quite nice really.’  We had Waitrose free range, hand made pork burgers (which were rather small, but extremely tasty).  I grilled them and cooked a spicy tomato sauce. This had courgettes in it.  Everything I cook at the moment has courgettes in it, as we have successfully grown them in our garden and I am using them up.  We also had the gnocchi.

I opened the bag and the smell was frankly, rank.  They smelled cheesey and slightly curdled.  Jason doesn’t eat cheese.  It makes him sick.  I had to check the ingredients on the bag to make sure, as I thought that they were made of potato flour and not actually some weird cheese derivative.  They had no cheese.  I cooked them in rapidly boiling salted water for two minutes as per the instructions.  I drained and served immediately.  They all clung together in the bottom of the colander looking sticky, smelling foul and being wildly unappetising.

I separated everything on the plates so that people could, if they so desired, desert the gnocchi but save the rest of dinner.  Everyone deserted the gnocchi except me.  It wasn’t that I liked it.  I was indifferent to it, and buried under tons of fresh, good tasting, spicy tomato sauce they offered bulk to the meal and you couldn’t really taste them.  I did try one in the raw.  It didn’t taste as vile as they smelled.  It didn’t taste of much really except mushy substance.  It seemed a lot of effort to go to for something so stodgy and bland.

I wonder if it was because they were pre made by a supermarket? I often look at gnocchi on offer in Italian restaurants and think I ought to try it.  Then I think; ‘What if I don’t like it?’ I would be gutted to go to a restaurant and pay fifteen or sixteen quid for something that tastes of ‘hmmmmmm’ I might cry.  So unless someone can guarantee me that they shouldn’t and indeed don’t taste of damp blotting paper and if I had them the way ‘x’ makes them I’d be a convert, I’m going to avoid them like the plague from now on.

Gnocchi? No thanks…

21st August – Stem Ginger Cookies

Sorry that this blog is so infrequent. I started it because I was going to do Slimming World.  Then I realised life was too short.  Then I had another blog on my hands and I am already fully committed to my other blog in which I write about absolutely everything anyway.  Then I felt that I couldn’t abandon this blog all lonely and sad to become prey to auto insurance scams, porn rings and mad Canadians sellling Viagra.  So it is my blog of guilt, my burden to carry.

I will be happily writing my other blog and then I will worry about this blog, that I haven’t commented on anything foody recently and what will happen to me.  Then I ignore the voices and get on with it.  Then I think: ‘Will people think I don’t actually eat anything?’  when I know fully well that one of my life’s hobbies is stuffing things down my gullet with a rapidity that alarms most people and can produce epileptic fits in the already frail.

So.  Today, despite having blogged my little heart out across the way, I am blogging about the delights of stem ginger biscuits.  I know they are delightful because today has been rather a hard day at the mill and every time I have thought about running up the garden path screaming and making a break for the hills I have eaten a stem ginger biscuit instead.  I am probably about fifty percent stem ginger right at this very moment.  I take comfort in the fact that ginger is very good for the digestive tract and extremely efficacious against all forms of nausea.  They are healthy biscuits, they really are.

I am currently munching through Waitrose stem ginger cookies.  They are nice and crumbly on the outside, moist on the inside and with nicely gooey lumps of stem ginger and a faint taste of brown sugar.  Yum!  They are not hard and lemony like ginger nuts, although don’t get me wrong, I am happy to eat ginger nuts.  Ginger nuts in distress would never be turned away from my door, but as I grow older and more world weary I find the soothing effect of a lightly baked stem ginger cookie is just what one needs to restore shattered nerves.  It’s cheaper than heroin and you’re less likely to get arrested for storing them in your biscuit jar.

Wednesday 13th August – Indoor Picnic

It has been quite a fraught week on the food front.  Because I thought I was going to be in Norfolk I failed to put in my Ocado order, which meant that we ate very oddly for a couple of days until I got my head sort of sorted. Then my mother invited me out for the day with the children and said: ‘We’ll take a picnic.’  She also mentioned the word Morrisons, for the purposes of catering for said picnic.  This filled my heart with woe.  I don’t care if Lulu shops at Morrisons and Take That sans Robbie serenade you on the deli counter, I think they are shit and their food is dross.  To be fair to my mother, she doesn’t shop at Morrisons either, it’s just that where she suggested that we go for our picnic is rather handy for a large Morrisons superstore.

I decided that this option must be avoided at all costs and immediately put in an Ocado order. They are doing a new line at the moment which is a selection of Meze style stuff that can be taken on picnics if it ever stops pissing it down with rain long enough to even get out of the car.  I am a huge fan of Meze and such foodstuffs that are involved in the creating of Meze and decided to order some, along with some Dickinson and Morris, or Morrison and Dickins or whatever they’re called Pork Pies.  I loathe pork pies, but my dad loves them, and he loves this particular make of them, and they came in a cute mini six pack, so I bought them for him.  Plus, he hates picnics and he was coming along with us, mainly I think because my mother made him.  I thought this would cheer him up.

I placed my order.  I was very pleased with myself.  It was only when it had all gone through that I realised that there were no delivery slots available until after the great soggy picnic of 08 was due to happen.  By then I couldn’t be bothered to go back into my shopping list and delete all my items of glorious picnic joy so I bought them.  They arrived five hours after our picnic had finished.  As it was wet we ended up eating in a National Trust cafe and not going anywhere near Morrisons.  The food at the cafe was rather nice, but £4.50 for a tuna roll, no matter how artisanally made is a bit steep in my humble opinion, even if it is going to pay for lime render on a Tudor wall.

I unpacked my picnic things that night, in the gloom, but thought: ‘Never mind. It might be lovely tomorrow and I can take the kids to the park and we can picnic there.’  Cue hours of lashing rain and waking up to a small inland typhoon.  No picnic.  I then gave up any thoughts that the picnic would happen before all the sell by dates on my lovely goodies had well and truly expired.  We rang granny and grandad and invited them round for a pork pie and meze picnic in our kitchen.  It was quite nice.  We had a thing that tasted a lot like quiche but was made with flaky pastry, gruyere and parma ham.  We had a risotto cake made with gorgonzola and wild mushrooms, which was a bit dense and chewy, but very tasty.  My dad ate a lot of pork pie while we all looked on in horrified admiration.  We ate chocolate cup cakes for pudding and we didn’t get wet or get ants in our pants or anything.  Not bad for a British picnic.  Specially when you turn the heating up and put all the lights on to pretend it’s really sunny.

Sunday 10th August – The Perils of Travelling

We have just been on a disastrous trip to Norfolk.  I have blogged about this extensively in my regular blog, so will not go into the boring details again here.  One of the worst things about going to Norfolk is the food.  Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that there isn’t nice food in Norfolk, I’m sure there is.  The problem is my family and Norfolk don’t really mix. We all hate going.  The drive is long and complex from our house.  Once you cross over the border into Norfolk, what was a perfectly respectable, fast flowing A road turns into a farm track with a billion caravans on it and progress is slow.

This frustrates my husband, who is a man who likes to get where he is going. He hates stopping anywhere when we go to Norfolk in case we pull off the road and eat only to get back on the road and be stuck behind even more caravans and pensioners driving at twenty five miles an hour the wrong way up the map.  He thinks that if he just grits his teeth and bears it, all will be well.  The problem is that the journey rarely takes less than four hours.  This is a long time for me to go without food.  It is even longer for the children to go without food.

Take a picnic I hear you cry.  All well and good except that husband hates people eating in the car because he loves his car.  He is proud of his car, but he hates cleaning it.  Since living with me and having the children he has relented slightly on the total no food ban.  He now allows certain substances that he considers not too messy, in the car, but not others.  This limits our picnic options slightly.

The other problem is that if we do stop it is usually hideous.  Jason doesn’t like eating in restaurants unless he knows what they are going to serve.  He has a troublesome digestion, and it takes me months of hard bargaining to get him to try something new.  He also hates spending lots of money on food for the children when they are so fussy and rarely eat what is put in front of them.  The children are also really fussy and rarely eat what is in front of them.

If I were going to Norfolk I would be happy to meander off the beaten track a bit, or chance my arm on an interesting looking pub or village.  This is not allowed due to our restrictive road rules. If we stick to the fastest route to our Norfolk based destination we pass either Little Chefs, most of which are now closed up and abandoned, or McDonalds, which I loathe, or pubs which Jason won’t stop at.  I get very depressed and start to pick my feathers out.

Yesterday we ate breakfast at a McDonalds.  I hate McDonalds.  I hate their breakfasts more than anything else except their McRib, which I believe is no longer available because everyone on the planet hates it.  We ate pancakes which tasted of plastic.  They ate sausages which looked like burgers and tasted like shit.  I drank coffee that tasted like plastic and which gave me indigestion.  It was vile.

Jason’s mother is ill at the moment. To save her the trouble of creating lunch for five people (we were going to visit her) I packed some basic provisions.  We ate sandwiches and crisps in the garden.  It was ok.  I was not really thrilled by it to be honest.  I still had indigestion.  I don’t really like crisps.

We then went on to what was supposed to be our holiday home.  It was crap and hideous.  We got a refund and drove home in a pelting rainstorm.  We stopped at a Little Chef outside Bury St Edmunds.  I had an Olympic Breakfast.  It was edible.  It was the best food I had eaten all day and the best thing I can find to say about it was that it was edible.  The coffee on the other hand was execrable.

It was, apart from the times I have had the misfortune to be in hospital, the worst day of food I have ever had in my whole life.  The most delicious thing I ate all day was a fun sized bag of Maltesers, which I had to share with the children.  How terrible is that?

Saturday 2nd August – The Lure of Shreddies

The wonderful thing about shreddies, is that shreddies are wonderful things.  I’m sitting here in my pjyamas, multi tasking away before I hit the road, or train track, for a weekend in London with two of my best friends.  Whilst printing off my e-mails and staring at my blog I am crunching away on a large mound of Shreddies.  I am slightly obsessed with them at the moment.  I find this a bit weird because I never used to like them at all when I was a kid. 

I used to love cereal, particularly when I was a teenager.  It sustained me through three years of culinary despair at university where I once even embarked on the famous Alpen and chocolate diet in order to fit into a ball gown.  Needless to say, it didn’t really work.  Alpen is full of sugar, and I would eat three large bowls a day, plus my chocolate bar of choice at the time, a Biscuit Boost, one of the most calorific bars on the market.  I would then graze on everything else throughout the day, but eat it standing up or something so I would lose weight.  Miraculously I did fit into the gown, but I don’t think it had anything to do with my patented diet, so I really don’t recommend it, if you have a ball gown you want to get into.

My best friend, Rachel and I did a lot of experimentation with cereal and we found that some were best wet, i.e. with milk, although we once tried some with orange juice on the recommendation of a friend, who it turns out was sadly deluded.  We also tried various brands of yogurt, none of which proved satisfactory.  Some cereal were definitely best dry, and we would have them in bowls rather like other people have packets of peanuts at a wine and nibbles party.

The best ones with milk are Alpen, cornflakes, rice krispies, bran flakes and raisin bran flakes.  The best ones dry were sugar puffs, cinnamon grahams and in fact any highly flavoured or glazed cereal.

I always hated cocoa pops and will take that hatred with me to the grave.  No matter what you do to them they still taste shit, and I don’t care if they turn the milk brown.  That’s the worst bit.

I also hold a grudge against any kind of muesli which is good for you.  I liked Alpen because it wasn’t good for you.  It was hideously bad for you.  Less hideously bad since they brought out the no sugar variety I agree, but still the crack cocaine of whole food stores up and down the land.  My dad buys really expensive hand ground muesli with entire brazil nuts and twigs in.  It looks fabulous, the packaging is gorgeous and I agree that it’s probably doing him the world of good, but I just can’t sit round of a morning eating something that reminds me of the rain forest canopy and which takes teeth like a cement mixer to ingest.  I also have a problem with people who insist on referring to this breakfast cereal as ‘moosley’  I don’t care if that’s the correct pronunciation.  It’s bad and wrong, wrong and bad.

Rachel and I were categorically agreed on the fact that the worst of all worst cereals were anything that claimed to be ‘Tropical’.  This would invariably mean bits of dried banana.  Dried banana is one of the most repellent foodstuffs in the history of food and in some cultures is served to prisoners as a punishment.

Over the years, since my sinuses have become such a nuisance I tended to avoid cereal because the milk made me snotty.  My children still eat them however, and the other day when I was making the obligatory Shreddies for one of them I absentmindedly picked one up and ate it.  It was very moreish.  I ate another.  I stood, staring into space, hoofing Shreddies into my gob until whichever child I was depriving of their breakfast got rather huffy and demanded that I feed them.

Now I have taken to having a large bowl of dried Shreddies for breakfast, and I just can’t get enough of them.  They’re lovely.  I don’t really understand why, because they are rather dull and ordinary and yet, like the demon twiglet, once I’ve started eating, I just can’t stop.

I still tend to be rather childish in the way I eat some foods, i.e. I will decide that this is THE food and eat it pretty much to the exclusion of everything else until that particular fad wears off. So I have the feeling that I will probably be hooked on Shreddies for some small time to come until the need to eat something else overwhelms me.  It’s rather like pregnancy cravings, but I hope I’m not going to produce a child at the end of it.  If I do, I expect he will look just like a Shreddie.

Co-op Ginger Cake

The Co-op if you don’t have the extreme good fortune to live near one, is a mine of weird foodstuffs and even weirder consumer durables.  Ours, for example, which is the thriving hub of Glenfield and a place in which Amy Winehouse and Celine Dion croon in Barbershop style harmonies with paranoid aliens and transvestites (It’s all on google apparently), has a Dorothy Perkins slap bang in the middle of the fruit and veg and slightly to one side of the  dairy.  Why this should be nobody has ever told me, but there it sits.

The Co-op do their own posh brand of stuff in dark brown boxes with fancy writing, rather along the lines of Tesco Finest.  Sometimes it can work, sometimes it doesn’t.  I have to blog briefly about the brilliance of their Co-op spectacular ginger loaf however.  It is truly fabulous.  Now I have always had a sneaking fondness for the weird McVities Jamaica Ginger Cake.  Like many heavily processed foods, nothing else in the world tastes quite like it, but it is strangely moreish.  It is soggy (something which often works very well in cakes), dense (ditto), and very gingery.  It is also incredibly sticky and more disturbingly, quite boingy.  Nevertheless, it is easy to let one accidentally fall into your gullet smothered by a ton of dairy custard, leaving you feeling rather bilious, yet curiously replete.

I love ginger cake, but there are a lot of duds out there.  They can often be too dry.  I also don’t like them too dark.  Too much treacle absolutely ruins them.  At the same time they can’t be too sweet, and they must always be very gingery.  Being virulent orange colour does not count at all.  It’s a tough call.  The Co-op however, have excelled at every level.  It is moist, it is crumbly and dense. It is not too dark and treacly, but it is definitely gingery.  It is not too sweet and it has lumps of real ginger in it.  It’s a winner of a cake.  It also has a few crunchy brown sugar crystals embedded in it which give it an extra piquancy.  For a shop bought cake I give it five out of five.

I am very tired.  The children are being very childreny and I am about to go and sit down for a cup of tea and a slice of said cake, and a chat to my husband, who came home from work several hours ago, and whom I have passed on the stairs several times, like a ship in the night.  Hopefully we will flick crumbs at each other, watch rubbish television and commune gently like two fireflies before sleep overtakes us.  I just wanted to share my top gingery tip with you before I go.

Sunday 27th July – Quel Fromage

Cooking in the heat is really difficult.  I want to eat lovely food, but when the thermometer is registering thirty degrees in the kitchen before you turn on the oven it’s quite hard to get excited about broiling to death before lunch is even done.

Actually, I was a good girl at lunch time and cooked spicy pasta with peas for all.  I had become a wilted flower by dinner time, with an afternoon of gardening under my belt.  We ate sandwiches on the deck.  Nobody was really that hungry and what we were drinking was infinitely more appealing than what we were eating.  I was very naughty.  I had a cheese and pickle sandwich.

I love cheese, but I can’t eat it much any more.  It makes me snotty and I get sinusitis to the point where I cry with pain.  As a result I try to avoid most dairy and bananas, both of which, in Chinese medicine at least, are said to promote phlegm.  Promoting phlegm is just not a good thing, whichever way up you slice it.  It is a great sadness to me that this has happened.  It never used to bother me, and for about three years when I was a child, I subsisted on cheese sandwiches, banana milkshake and as much icecream as I could hoof into my gaping maw.  Those days are now long gone.

I do not believe in total abstinence except with things like crack or arsenic.  I think my grandad’s phrase: ‘All things in moderation’ is a good maxim.  Apart from in the world of cake, shoes and books, I have managed to pretty much stick to it religiously.  I don’t want to stick to it with regard to cake, shoes and books and have never felt guilty buying any of them, so no harm done.

I will eat dairy when I really can’t resist the siren call any longer, in the knowledge that I will pay for it later.  Today I have had a smoothie lolly, which had quite a lot of banana in, and a cheese and pickle sandwich and am sitting here, typing away with a face full of snot.  It was worth it.  Particularly the sandwich.  It was bog standard cheddar, branston and two slices of boring, white sliced rubbish which passes for bread and is the only thing my children will eat in the bread line, apart from Matilda who is a bread adventurer.  I am scraping the bottom of the food barrel and if I don’t go shopping soon I will be grilling our shoes and smearing them with ketchup.  As it was, it seemed like an uninspiring sandwich, but after an afternoon of hard labour, it tasted divine.

I am not a cheese snob.  I don’t wax lyrical about the world of cheese, and hunt down pernicious smelling cheeses from the four corners of the earth.  Nor will I ever pick the cheese board over the dessert trolley in a restaurant, no matter how wondrous it claims to be.  I hate blue cheese in any way, shape or form and I am not really drawn to soft cheeses particularly.  My mother used to have a love affair with brie, and would buy it in the supermarket, then sit in the car park, unwrap the brie and eat it before she drove home.  I can eat it, I don’t mind it, but I wouldn’t choose it as my best cheese, or my only choice of cheese to eat on a desert island.

My favourites are hard cheeses, particularly cheddar.  I love strong, piquant cheddars.  They are just lovely.  I also like those creamy, crumbly cheeses like Wensleydale and Caerphilly.  They manage to be creamy and salty all at the same time and have a real tang to them.  I liked smoked cheeses too, particularly smoked applewood, which is tart and smokey and sweet all at the same time.  I adore buffalo mozzarella, but it has to be good.  None of that cheap, boingy crap they sell in most supermarkets.  I always spend good money on mozzarella.  It’s worth the effort.  In Italy I’ve tasted it as an almost hard cheese which comes in little strings like sausages.  That was really good too, although I’ve never seen it here to eat.

I like Feta cheese too.  Like mozzarella, I’m quite picky about it.  If it’s too cheap it can be quite waxy tasting.  I like mine to be very crumbly and a bit holey and really, really salty.  I like it with a green salad, fresh plum tomatoes and baby new potatoes.  Drizzle over some olive oil, maybe a hint of garlic and a big twist of black pepper and it’s divine.  Goats cheese can be good too, but a little goes a long way, and they are so varied I try to avoid ordering goats cheese in a restaurant unless I’m absolutely sure I’m going to like it.  Goats cheese salad with spinach and bacon is good.  Pine nuts can add a certain frisson to this, particularly if they’re toasted.  Mmmm!

I lived in Germany for a while and I really missed good, tart, English cheese.  I did acquire a fondness for the sweet, Dutch, German and Swiss hard cheeses that they all eat with such gusto over there.  It was a breakfast thing with boiled eggs.  My favourite is gruyere.  Nigel Slater does an excellent recipe for a kind of potato and melted cheese bake that you do on top of the oven.  It’s awesome, but very, very bad for you.  I make it about once a year and eat it all to myself (because I’m the only one who likes it).  I always use Gruyere in that.  He recommends pecorino, but when I first made it I was living in the sticks and couldn’t get pecorino for love nor money.  Gruyere works just as well and is really, really delicious.

I used to get my groceries from a fabulous organic place when I lived out in the sticks.  The man who ran it sourced a lot of his stuff locally and one of the things I fell in love with was a cream cheese he had found that was full of cracked, black peppercorns.  It was divine.  It was very, very creamy and the pepper just gave it that extra oomph that stopped it tasting like a dessert cheese, like mascarpone.  It was gorgeous.  I really miss that cheese, and look back on it with great fondness.

I never used to have sinus pain.  I really hope that this is a passing thing related to middle age, and that over the coming years I will regain control over my wayward sinuses and be able to hoof down as much cheeese as I like.  It would be lovely.  I am depending on it.

Coffee – It’s great

I love coffee.  Always have.  I love the smell better than the taste, and I really love the taste, even though it is strong and bitter and strange.  I can’t help it.  It was love at first sniff.  I have also never liked tea.  My gran used to give me hot, sweet tea with lashings of milk when I was poorly or angry, or miserable.  It was supposed to make me feel better.  It didn’t.  It mostly made me feel rather sick.  Even the thought of drinking a cup of tea makes me feel all heavesome and nauseous now.  I love the smell of Earl Grey tea.  My ex husband used to drink pots of Earl Grey as a cure for a hangover.  I don’t know whether it worked, but it used to smell divine.  I believe it has bergamot in it.  Bergamot smells faintly of oranges and spices.  It’s lovely.  I always associate the smell with Sunday afternoons sprawled on the sofa watching films and being very quiet.  I wouldn’t want to drink it though.  It looks like cat wee.

Coffee on the other hand has always been a huge pleasure. When we were kids my mum used to make us milky coffee as a bed time treat.  I know this sounds ludicrous now, but this was the seventies.  The time of Angel Delight and Findus Crispy Pancakes.  The time when your parents would let you go to parties with a two litre bottle of Woodpecker Cider, because after all, it’s just like fizzy fruit juice isn’t it? The time when my mum still used to eat bread and dripping as a treat, rather than to bring on an early heart attack.

She would make the coffee with lots of sugar and lots of hot milk.  The only thing I didn’t like about it was the thick and gruesome milky skin that used to form on the top of the mug, which I would take off with a spoon and leave draped on a plate looking like a melting puddle of American Tan tights.  Urgh! The worst thing was if you thought it hadn’t cooled enough yet for the skin to form and you took a swig only to find that the skin was just lurking in an evil manner in the middle of the mug.  It would assault your top lip and dry immediately in a kind of wrinkly horrible cocoon of vileness.  That always made me feel a bit sick.

As I got older my coffee tastes became more sophisticated and I discovered the joys of capuccinos.  I also went to France and discovered real coffee.  My parents had a coffee machine, one of those kinds that they still use in America, with the big glass jugs underneath, but it didn’t taste anything like as good as the fabulous coffee you would get served in a French cafe in one of those little neat cups with the creamy head of coffee foam on the top and that gorgeous, rich smell.  It was coffee that had texture as well as taste.  I loved it.  As long as I could ask for a ‘cafe creme s’il vous plait’ and ‘ou est les toilettes?’ I was set for French holiday heaven.

I moved away from milky, sweet coffee right through the scale to a time when I would drink espressos and double espressos with no sugar.  I drew the line at Greek and Turkish coffee because it was too gritty and too sweet, but a double espresso was the epitome of coffee perfection at one time of my life.  A time when it didn’t matter if my guts dissolved and I had no sleep.

Now I have three children to look after and spending the day with the jitters from too much caffeine and the nights more awake than normal, is not an attractive option.  Sometimes when I’m feeling frivolous I will have a single espresso, but never in the afternoon, no matter how tired I am.  I am now a fan of the rather boring Americano with room for milk.  I like milk in my coffee, not much.  Hardly any in fact.  My dream coffee looks like a mud pie when the milk has been added, but I find that just a tiny drop of milk takes any bitterness away and makes the coffee slip down that bit more smoothly.  If it’s good coffee and I’m having a second cup I might well have it black, just to be daring.

I actually like Starbucks’ coffee.  As a confirmed coffee drinker you will have no idea of the agonies a woman goes through in a country of tea drinkers where real coffee is considered too posh and expensive.  Coffee in cafe’s until Starbucks came along was a minefield.  Instant coffee is only bearable if it is a good make and made well, and bearable is about the best word to describe it, even at its best.  Cafes rarely do this in my opinion.  They go for the cheapest option and charge you double because it’s coffee.  Invariably tea drinkers used to get a huge mug full of tea based joy and sometimes even a pot of hot water and more tea to go with it.  A coffee drinker would pay way more and usually get a tiny cup of sub standard crap that tastes like sewage.

My particular hate was those places where they made all coffee with hot milk.  Milky coffee was fabulous when I was eight.  Now I hate boiled milk.  I will drink it every now and again, if I have to, for the sake of politeness, but I just don’t like it.  It smells funny and it coats your tongue in that weird way.  No, no, no.  The places that make coffee with boiled milk nearly always use the worst instant coffee in the world, Mellow Birds, and make it very, very weak indeed.  It has that peculiar metallic taste which reminds me of institutions such as hospitals and bingo halls and is very wrong indeed.

Second to those were the places that thought they were posh.  They would either make real coffee with those glass jug devices.  This would sit, stewing on the side for several hours until the coffee was burnt, bitter and carcinogenic and would peel the enamel from your teeth with the first sip. Or they would have those weird plastic cup devices with filter paper and ‘coffee’ trapped in the bottom.  They would bring it to your table with the plastic cup resting on your real cup and the whole thing awash with boiling water.  It would drip through into your pathetic cup and take about half an hour to brew.  It would always be weak and disgusting and cold.  Rambouts I think this particular coffee based torture was called.

So, when I first visited a Starbucks in Vancouver about twelve years ago I thought I had died and gone to heaven.  This ecstasy was only bettered when they started opening in the UK.  I admit that their coffee isn’t always the finest, but the atmosphere is great.  I love the sofas.  I love the chilled atmosphere.  I love the fact that they’re open in Borders.  All the other ones that sprang up afterwards are o.k. but I still get excited about Starbucks even if they are an evil megabrand bent on mass destruction.  At least I can have a decent coffee while they’re doing it.

At home I drink Illy coffee and use a cafetiere, because it’s convenient.  I have a Gaggia machine which I inherited in my divorce.  It is complicated and seems to be full of sand.  One day, when I have several hours to spare I will work out how to use it and probably never look back.  In the meantime the cafetiere does the trick nicely.  I will also drink Lavazza coffee, which is rather nice. My parents like Lazy Sunday by The Harrogate Coffee people I think.  My friend Andrea swears by Whittards beans.  It’s all a question of personal taste.  I saw some green coffee beans the other day.  I have yet to try them but they look very intriguing.

The world of coffee is rich and fascinating and thankfully getting more tasty and accessible by the day.  The UK is now a place where a decent cup of coffee can be purchased on every high street and they serve mugs instead of piffling little cups and saucers.  A decent brew is within reach of us all.  At last.  This is real progress.  Sod the invention of the microchip when you can have a decent coffee and the dessert of your choice after a hard day at the coal face of consumer therapy.  Hoorah.

The World of Cake

I have well and truly fallen off the slimming world wagon.  I love my Ted Baker dress, but it’s the only thing in my wardrobe that doesn’t fit me and frankly it’s hard to resist the lure of a thousand cakes just because I need to lose half a stone to get into my frock.  I thought it would be enough motivation but it isn’t.  Things that don’t help are the fact that I am nearly always knackered, and you have to plan and think to make Slimming World work, two things which require energy and concentration, both of which I don’t have.  It is also the summer holidays and I don’t see why I should be denied cake whilst trying to entertain three midgets and keep up with the day to day household chores without going mental.  I am just not motivated towards dress.  I am motivated away from boredom toward cake.

I made rock cakes with the kids on Monday.  They’re really easy to do.  I recommend them highly as a method of keeping small children engaged in activity.  The best thing about them is that you don’t need to make them look pretty.  There is no primping and preening involved, which is good because small children loathe and detest neatness and order of any kind.  They like mess, great glooping dollops of mess and destruction.  Rock cakes are meant to look like rocks, which means they’re allowed to look messy.  Neat rock cakes are positively frowned upon.

If you use Tana Ramsay’s recipe book for rock cakes (I know she has two books. I think it’s the second one), you also get to mix the cake dough/mix by hand as well.  This is also excellent for small children bent on stickiness.  The only downside of Tana’s recipe for our family is that I’m the only one who likes raisins.  It is easily resolved by the fact that I replace the raisins with chocolate buttons or in fact any form of chocolate.  This way the children will actually eat what they make, which saves my waistline slightly.  Not much, but slightly.  I also do this switch with jam tarts (Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Family Cookbook for jam tart recipe).  I don’t like jam, neither does my middle daughter.  We make some with jam for the jam liking fraternity.  We make the rest with chocolate spread.  It works beautifully.

Anyway.  We made a lot of rock cakes on Monday.  There were three children and we made three entire lots.  The kitchen was brimming with rock cakes.  It smelled delicious.  The children have been away at their dad’s house for twenty four hours, in which time I have eaten quite a lot of their rock cakes.  It was a charitable thing.  I didn’t want them to go off.  That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Frittata is Go

Frittatas are a brilliant invention for those of you in Slimming World, and even for those of you who aren’t.  I cook a lot of frittatas.  They are quick, versatile, easy and filling.  They taste great and people are always very impressed when you whip one up.

I will demonstrate:

Frittatas are a type of omelette, a Spanish type of omelette.  They are not as labour intensive as a regular omelette because they don’t need nourishing and watching in the same way.  I like them because they are enormous and dense and filling as well.

Basic Frittata

I usually do a four egger, this is because I am greedy, and four eggs about fills my large frying pan.  Crack your eggs into a bowl and whisk.  I usually add a pinch of salt and a grind of pepper at this stage.  Now set it aside.

The complex bit is deciding what you want in your frittata.  The traditional spanish version is to have potatoes and onions. 

The amounts you add will depend on how big you want your frittata to be, how big your frying pan is and how much egg you use. I always do it by eye. The key is to make sure that the frittata is full.  It’s not an omelette with just a few little spots of flavour.  It should be packed with ingredients.

I leave my potatoes with the skin on, rinse them and cut them into slices.  This is much easier to do before you cook them as they don’t disintegrate in your hand.  Make sure all the slices are of even width.  I like very thin slices, because it makes the potato more crispy if you leave some poking up out of the top of the frittata, and because they are a lot quicker to cook.  Put your sliced potatoes in a pan of boiling salted water and cook for about five minutes.  With thinly sliced pototoes you know when they’re done when they turn a kind of milky colour and lose their translucent quality. Drain them and leave them to one side.

Slice your onions thinly.  I like rings of onion in my frittata, but you can slice them any way you want.

Take your frying pan and add a little oil or frylight if you’re on Slimming World.  Add the onions with a pinch of salt and cook for a couple of minutes until translucent.  Add the potatoes and stir without breaking them up.

Add your egg mix, making sure it fills the frying pan to the edges.

Stick the grill on.

Watch the frittata.  You don’t want it to burn.  You know it’s ready for the grill when the edges of the egg start to come away from the pan sides.

Whip it off the top of the oven and stick the pan under a hot grill until the top has set.  Make sure the pan handle is out of the grill or you will be sad when you pick it up.

I usually serve it with baked beans.

This potato frittata is free on a green day as long as you use fry light instead of oil.

Variations:

Eggs are free foods on red and green days so as long as you’re careful what you put into the frittata you can have them on both days as free foods.  Here are some variations I like:

Spicy vegetable frittata – This is free on both days and is great for using up all the leftovers in the fridge.  The smaller you dice the veg, the quicker it will cook and the easier it will be to make.  Just remember that what you’re after here is volume, so don’t skimp.  I add either fresh chopped chilli or chilli powder to give it kick.  If I want a really rich version I add tomatoes.  If you’re using passata remember to cook it down, because if the sauce is too sloppy the egg won’t set.

Steak and eggs – The eggs are already there because you’re making a frittata, but cubes of lean steak, as long as you make sure they’re cooked first are lovely.  I like to add sliced mushrooms to mine and with beans this makes a kind of breakfast dish to die for.  I eat it all day though!  Replacing the steak with lean bacon is good too.