It turns out that runcible spoons (AKA cake forks) are also perfect for fish’n'chips; fork prongs to stab the chips with, sharper edge to cut into the batter. Who said that they were just for posh people?!
Category Archives for Food
Store Cupboard Hash
Some par-boiled, peeled potatoes (tinned)
Some kidney beans (tinned)
Some sliced peppers (frozen)
Some sweetcorn (frozen)
One dried red chilli (hanging about)
Plenty of salt, pepper, dried parsley and lemon juice, to season
Blue cheese salad dressing
Works for me.
It’s a Cake
… and it’s green, guacamole green. I love food colouring. I like making cake to share too. I’m glad this one is going to be put to good use after all; it’s going off with a friend for her last day at work!
Convenient Food
It was a pretty amazing invention when you think about it, probably the best thing before and since sliced bread. A simple container that took food transportation and preservation to a whole new level: the humble tin.
Tinned food is an asset; it’s ideal for emergencies and for those moments when the rest of the cupboard and fridge is bare. Campers swear by the stuff but caravan-ers shake their head and mutter about towing weights. You can have vegetables in and out of season, vegetables when you haven’t been to the shops all week. You can have a meal in minutes.
Tin food. Great stuff. What a convenience.
But there’s a problem.
The usefulness of a tin is in its seal.
That seal stands between me and my food.
The tin opener and I are mutual enemies.
It hasn’t always been this way, although tin openers always have a bit of a temperamental reputation. In the years of my independence, I’ve had to make sure that I have a soft-grip handled one for the moments that my paws get flimsy. But recently it’s descended into all-out war. It’s not pretty.
I latch the tin opener onto the lip.
This is usually the most successful moment of the entire operation.
It goes downhill from here on in.
The next trick is to turn the wheel.
I need at least two hands to turn the wheel.
Which rather begs the question of who is to hold the handle.
You need more than two hands to operate a tin opener.
Well, I do anyway.
So I jerk into an awkward dance between turning and holding.
You need to hold tight to get the teeth to bite in.
Guess what?
I can’t.
Not anymore.
Occasionally the teeth mush into the metal, I get hopeful.
Then everything grinds to a halt again.
There is a now a minute gap broken in the seal.
I can see the food.
I can smell the food.
I can touch the food.
(Well maybe with a pinkie finger if I really wanted to try and put my uncoordinated fingers anywhere near the chewed-up metal edges).
It’s at about this point that, having spent an inordinate amount of time in this messy, stressful, exhausting business, my attention is caught by some disaster-in-progress on the hob.
I am now divided.
Do I abandon the tin which is now either spewing or spitting liquid in my direction with each painful twist and jerk as I persuade, sweet-talk, curse and manipulate the opener or, left to its own devices, sits crookedly on the worktop, slightly more bashed than when it first left the cupboard, the tin opener jutting out, jammed in the rim at some impossible angle?
Well my reactions aren’t quite what they used to be.
And neither are my decision-making abilities.
The disaster-in-progress risks ceasing to be in-progress and becoming a too-late.
I swerve, mostly mentally, between one contest and the other.
I can’t cope!
I am overwhelmed.
I, the tin and the rest of the food need rescuing. Urgently.
Having gone through this very exhausting and dangerous process several times in recent months, I have a new strategy: I don’t open tins. That’s husband’s job now.
I admit defeat.
I give up.
Although not graciously.
But then there was a glimmer of hope.
Some food tins have ring pulls.
I can open ring pulls.
I am triumphant in my new found talent, a moment of victory and conquest.
I need two thumbs to lever up a ring pull.
This means that I need to clutch the tin, which suddenly has acquired the animate ability to wriggle, between my two wretchedly weak paws and still have enough length and stretch left to manipulate my thumbs under what transpires to be a stubborn, stiff piece of metal.
Sometimes my thumbs win the fight.
Sometimes I have to adopt something that proves that I am indeed a higher being: a tool.
I grab the nearest thing that seems vaguely appropriate, a dinner knife or a teaspoon.
The ring pull is stubborn but so am I.
And I am armed.
With a teaspoon.
The fight is won.
The ring pull is levered up, victory is achieved!
There is a minute gap broken in the seal.
I can see the food.
I can smell the food.
I can touch the food.
Like me, do you get a feeling of having been here before?
And that is as far as I can get.
The pride and jubilation of a battle won is quickly swept aside as the tin wins the war. Again.
I am stubborn but I know when I am defeated.
I am defeated.
If I want to eat tonight, I will have to surrender; I will have to give the tin over to more capable hands.
Bitterness is not something that I easily succumb to. Fortunately. But there’s not much fun in being beaten by a tin of food. And sometimes I’d just really like some baked beans.
Tinned food, hey? What a convenience!
A Shot of the Good Stuff
There are downsides to blogging. You meet lots of new ideas. It’s happened before, I get led astray or someone makes me do something. This time it’s How Sweet It is‘ fault. She made me do it! Well, perhaps more accurately, there are some things that you have just got to try. I like experiments. I particularly like experiments that work. This was an experiment that worked and tasted absolutely scrummy. Win-win. The negative was finding out just how not-good-for-you Irish Cream probably is, the ingredients list includes condensed milk, evaporated milk and double cream! No wonder it’s so yummy!
It’s a lot thicker than the branded product, and stronger. We reckon that they must dilute it for commercial purposes! It pours like mud, goes down a treat and can and should only be consumed in small quantities. Fortunately, it keeps for weeks in the fridge.
Homemade Irish Cream. Isn’t blogging a wonderful thing?
(Or is a little learning a dangerous thing after all?)
A Domestic Month
It’s hard to believe that we’re half way through February, the second month of the year. I am still trying to come to terms with the fact that it’s January 2013. The weeks have flown past and I have been busy but again I’m bursting my own bubbles and believing that I haven’t really accomplished anything.
It’s funny how I always do that to myself. I’m the biggest cheerleader going (minus ridiculously tiny clothes and gymnastic ability) for everyone else but I always knock myself down. It’s never enough. I always expect more, better from myself. Why?
I still don’t know.
I set myself from goals for January and I didn’t really make them. When I have been busy with other commitments then I’ve mostly been busy being Tired. It’s been a month where honesty with myself has been challenging, in lots of ways, especially when I comes to owning up and being entirely realistic about my health. My health isn’t good. It isn’t good when I ignore it but when I choose to be aware, conscious and self-sympathetic, it can be a somewhat tough reality check. For someone who has never understood the idea of doing just one thing at a time, being able to sit (and even lie down) with nothing doing is a little worrying, disturbing.
I have been too tired to knit.
That makes me miserable.
Knitting is how I express myself.
Knitting is how I enjoy myself.
Knitting is where I get material for blog posts.
No knitting.
Just too tired to work the needles, lift the yarn, never mind attempting to follow patterns.
I can count even worse when I am tired.
So I’m behind on the first goals of the year.
Have I failed?
I really don’t know.
I’ve done other things.
Made progress in other areas.
Does that compensate?
And I’ve been baking.
And in some ways, I’ve been find ‘me’ in that area too.
Or instead?
One of the first things that I tried this year was a friend’s coconut cake.
She made it for a day out a couple of months back and I was smitten.
Or smote?
Anyway, I should perhaps declare here that I don’t like coconut.
Or coconut doesn’t like me.
As coconut-loving husband didn’t come with us, he missed out. So I decided I’d make one for us at home.
It was also covered in buttercream.
I need to say something about buttercream too.
I hate buttercream.
Always have.
I only occasionally met buttercream when I was a child and the whole not-mixed connection of lumpy, greasy butter and coarse, gritty sugar never did anything for me.
Husband has never met a bad buttercream in his life.
He can’t understand my surprise that buttercream can actually be quite good.
I now have a ‘thing’ for buttercream.
The recipe was sent through by email and I started making it up.
I got to nearly the end when I met the direction to ‘add the milk’.
No was there no milk in the ingredients.
Hmm.
I added a guestimated amount of milk, bearing vague memories of lemon drizzle cake in mind.
It didn’t turn out badly after all.
Possibly I added too much milk, but I only found out when friend kindly, and very eventually, sent through the correct measurement. It didn’t come out too badly or soggy.
It was then smothered in buttercream.
Mmm.
Husband doesn’t think it tastes of coconut.
I don’t how he could come to that conclusion.
You can even see the decimated coconut in the photo!
Ah well.
Because I don’t get on with coconut, I rarely use any in baking.
I seem to have had a little bit of a coconut spree this month.
Because next up was Australian Crunch.
Another friend gave me the recipe.
It is much coveted as it something of a local culinary institution.
(I don’t think the Australians know anything about it, actually).
It’s a schooldays delicacy.
A frugal recipe that probably was adopted simply because you just chuck everything in a bowl and mix, because it uses up all sorts of odds and ends and as I said, it only requires cheap, basic store cupboard ingredients. (Apart from coconut. It’s getting hard to find decimated coconut in the supermarkets now that I actually want some!)
My middle school made it.
My husband’s school in this town didn’t. He had never heard of it and really couldn’t get what the fuss was about.
However one of the other secondary schools in town did do it and several friends who attended that school, about the same time, are complete fans/addicts of the stuff. Another friend who went to the third secondary school in town, about twenty years before, also remembers it very fondly, served with mint custard. I know of another school, not too far away, that also made Australian Crunch.
To give you an idea of how desirable a foodstuff this is, I’ll tell you a story, a true story.
Some of the local bakeries have cottoned on to the fact that making and selling Australian Crunch would make them extremely popular with their customers. I have friend who knows exactly which bakeries do it and what she thinks of them.
The other day, we were out together and stopped for her to buy a snack. Faced with an entire panoply of freshly baked goodies, she chose Australian Crunch. And before eating it, she photographed it with her mobile phone (isn’t technology great?!) and sent the photo to another Australian Crunch fan/addict. I believe that the accompanying message was something along the lines of: Naha, I have Australian Crunch and you don’t.
(We’re all highly mature adults round here).
My friend who gave me the recipe didn’t grow up round here so was oblivious to the status of the recipe she’d acquired. She couldn’t quite understand why I was so excited to be given a copy!
Making Australian Crunch makes you very, very popular.
One of my other friends, a cake-hater and who thinks that my brownies are ridiculously rich and inedible actually ended up having three pieces of it. We couldn’t believe it.
Like some of the best things in life, it isn’t entirely photogenic.
But it’s good stuff. Really good stuff.
Oh, and husband is now a fan/addict.
I made a second (double-sized!) batch shortly afterwards to fulfill demand.
There have been other culinary highlights.
These strawberries:
They were the best we’ve had all year. It wasn’t a good summer for soft fruit. And these were reduced too.
There is something unbelievable gorgeous about a sun-ripened, firm-fleshed, fruity, meaty strawberry.
I made red velvet cake.
From a packet, admittedly.
But, hey, honesty and realism do allow for ‘cheating’ now and then.
I honestly have tried to make it from scratch before but English food colouring and beetroots (even combined) failed utterly.
(If anyone has a decent recipe for an English version, please let me know!)
And made cream cheese frosting to put on the top.
And thus started another ‘thing’.
(Baking Tip: Always straighten up the edges of your cake, this will give you morsels to ‘test’ your frosting or icing with).
Because I’d made quite a big batch of frosting, I had to make a chocolate cake to use it up.
And discovered that my friends also have a ‘thing’ for cream cheese frosting, quite a serious ‘thing’.
(Oh and if you want to have a whale of an evening out, have one of those occasions where everything doesn’t go to plan, end up going out for impromptu meal then finish up by eating chocolate cake (with cream cheese frosting, naturally) in the car in a dark car park, cutting it up with a penknife. (No guesses who has a penknife on them!) To add to the entertainment stakes, the frosted cake needs to have be turned upside at some point so it looks something like a crash now).
This is the second chocolate cake:
We wisely put two layers of frosting inside the cake and put a thin layer of melted chocolate on top.
(I hate it when there’s like an inch of chocolate on the top of a cake, it’s nearly impossible to cut through and then completely shatters when you finally force the knife blade through).
Oh, and some tinned cherries and cherry jam in the middle too.
However, because this could only happen in my world, our world, the chocolate was setting faster than we could spread it. (It didn’t feel that cold but apparently the chocolate did). So what do us little geniuses do to remedy the problem? Hairdryer. Hairdryer, my friends, is the baker’s best friend.
Enough said.
Anyway, in case you come to the unhealthy (and inaccurate) conclusion that we only ate cake in January (there was a lemon drizzle too, at another point), I’d like to share with you another first.
My first homemade soup!
(I know, it’s utterly shocking and scandalous that I could have got to this old age without ever having made soup).
Do you remember those chillies we grew?
The ones that were never jalapeño after all and so didn’t grow quite as big as expected?
Well, they pack quite a punch.
We’re having to use them carefully and sparingly.
I garlic-pressed two wee chillies into my giant (I’ve been living on it for the last week!) soup batch. Most of the skin was left behind. And it didn’t taste too spicy.
Not then anyway.
It’s definitely ‘infused’ since.
It sneaks up on you.
And then kicks.
But what else can a girl do when life hands her a humongous butternut squash?
(By the way, husband is refusing to eat it. Why? Because sweet-toothed husband thinks it’s too sweet. No, I don’t get that either).
Ah well.
That’s life.
Would You Like to Come to Tea?
Once a month, me and my friends (I’m sorry but ‘my friends and I’ just sounds way too pretentious!) meet up to knit and crochet together. We each take turns hosting it and the original idea was that we’d of course have a drink alongside (tea or coffee being somewhat obligatory in this country at least) and maybe a slice of cake. Maybe.
The maybe cake has turned into a full-blown tea (of the afternoon tea variety and not the meal which may also be called dinner or supper). I’m sure that you can believe that we are very conscientious in our sampling of all the wares! Whilst the hostess is technically responsible for producing the eats, most bring ‘a little something’ too, resulting in quite an abundance and variety of delicious treats.
Last month it was my turn to host. We don’t have an official rota but we’re running out of places that are big enough to take us all, our little group does seem to have expanded over the last year. I have quite a big sitting room which is presentable but is in a rather derelict rest-of-house situation, especially when it comes to the bathroom.
It turns out that good friends are completely nonplussed by such issues. They can also relate plenty of their own tales of DIY woe, although mine does seem to be on a particularly epic and enduring scale. They genuinely believe that they’re just here to visit, knit (or crochet), chatter, preferably nibble/scoff and not to judge.
And I believe them because I trust them.
So I invited them all over.
But then of course started panicking.
I do that.
Tiling means that my house is experiencing a particularly bad episode of dustiness and there’s something heavy and imperturbable about any kind of building dust. This is also a lovely terracotta colour which guaranteed to show on everything. (I mean, it’s bad enough that we have black shelves in the sitting room, they advertise their dustiness very brazenly).
And I would have to cook.
I love baking.
But I get Tired.
And I have been Tired anyway.
Maybe I had bitten off more than I could chew?
I have had everyone over before, which was where the real embarrassment lay. It doesn’t seem like we’ve made much progress! Or maybe enough. I shared some photos then of what I made so I wonder if you would like to come to tea again?
My sponge cake was requested again so I really couldn’t not make that. It’s a fairly straightforward although beating the egg whites to firm peak does require a chair and some television-distraction.
This was all that was left afterwards:
Not bad for a 26 cm diameter sponge do you think?!
(Well, several did take pieces home for spouses and children. We don’t want them to miss out entirely!)
I think I’d like to invest in a square cake tin for the future, I use my round one all the time but for bigger occasions, it would be a lot easier to slice a smaller cake into squares then try to do wedges. Wedges are fiddly things and tend to collapse. You can more squares out then wedges. You can see from the above photo that we ended up with rectangles after a while, we’re not quite sure how that happened from a round cake, but hey! I just hand over the knife and tell someone else to brave it. I don’t like cutting cakes.
But I did cut this one horizontally all by myself this time. (I bake it as one cake and then it needs sawing in half with a very good knife). It was a little wobbly and uneven but cream and jam hide a multitude of sins. (Although they possibly produce others too!)
I also made some mini omelettes in bun tins, they weren’t particularly photogenic as I think I put too much spinach in.
The first person who walked through my door that afternoon was accosted to try an omelette before I put them out. I needed a taster, I’m allergic to egg! They passed muster and out they went. They did go down rather well, except for one poor friend who seemed to have all the chilli powder in hers. Whoops. We can laugh, fortunately.
If you want to have a go, use your normal omelette recipe but pour into bun tins and bake for something like twenty minutes. Make sure you use a good quality bun tin because they will stick otherwise. Even when greased. (Ask me how I know!) They’d be great for lunchboxes and picnics not just parties.
Then I moved onto a recipe that I first tried back in the summer but that didn’t turn out brilliantly at the time. I decided to risk it again but use proper marshmallow puff for the insides. I remember having the stuff when I was very wee (I’m not sure how or why because we were on a tight sugar-free diet at the time!) and I saw it again in America, the land of all sorts of amazing (and probably not entirely healthy) concoctions and confectionaries. Friends send me a jar every so often. But it’s now appearing in the supermarkets! And the really good things is that it’s suitable for vegetarians whilst marshmallows aren’t. Time for a marshmallow-fix!
I made whoopie pies:
There was a recipe ages ago in the Sainsburys magazine and I never got to make it then. There was a brief episode when ‘they’ were trying to make whoopie pies be the next big thing after the cupcake invention/discovery here. It never quite took off in the same way. Although I can now get a box of ‘whoopie pie’ mix in one of the local supermarkets. I use inverted commas because they are made of sponge with icing the middle. Not batter, not marshmallow, not really a whoopie pie.
Apparently, whoopie pies started with thrifty Amish housewives using up leftover batter (well, America is the land where they eat pancakes and waffles for breakfast) by baking it into little pies to put in the husband’s and children’s lunchboxes. They also spread them with marshmallow puff, something that seems pretty ubiquitous to an American childhood. The name is said to have come from the reaction when they were discovered.
Cute, no?
So I dared and I risked and I made them again.
The trick is not to use too much filling in the middle. I thought that they would need loads to not be dry and bland but they just slip apart, disintegrate. You only really need a smear. Honestly.
And whilst making them (having had a realistic moment and starting with the plain straightforward vanilla recipe), I decided that I wanted to ‘liven’ them up a little. I had food colourings and hundreds and thousands at my disposal. Hm. Primary school artistic science came back to me, if I add both blue and red food colourings, I would have purple icing! Yes, small things do really please. And purple icing rocks. I like purple. (I blame having a deprived sugar-free childhood, colouring is making its way into my baking all the time now). And in any case, pink always looks so twee and girly and predictable, no pastels for me, thank you!
Well, the purple icing rocked but it kind of ended up looking a little too blue on the actual whoopie pies, it looked better on the tray. Yes, I did make that much mess with the icing. That’s why I had sensibly got a tray out. And yes, I have told myself to refine my technique sometime.
But everyone loved them.
They are fun. I’m looking forward to making some more.
Oh, and don’t use tons of colouring but it actually starts becoming taste-able in the icing and it’s not a good taste.
I also made some madeleines because I haven’t made any for literally years. I flavour them as the Spanish do for their magdalenas, with lemon and almond but make them in the French-style. It’s the best of both worlds.
And amongst the treats that everyone else brought (and some had to take home again because we simply had more food than people or space!), was a cake that one friend had brought back from Hungary. It’s a walnut cake and it’s more like a bread dough than cake per se and although it does look very dry, it’s yummy. A little bit like baklava but not ickily sticky.
I have no idea what it’s actually called, Hungarian Walnut Cake but a little bit Bread-ish was working for us.
It was a lovely afternoon and it just shows that sometime it’s worth taking risks. Real friends can be real friends. And the sweetest thing? One of our friends who came over later said to husband (who is even more paranoid and distressed at the idea of people coming over than I am and therefore was not told until after and evicted, hey, it was a strategy that worked) that she really liked our ‘posh’ flat. Posh! She takes things for what they really are, it is a lovely well-lit spacious flat, and not for what they might not be. That really made my day when I overheard that a week or so later.
Yes, sometimes it is worth taking the risks.
Some Recent Developments
Life has its ups and downs.
There are good times and bad times.
There is pizza, for example. Always a good thing. I don’t ever understand why people classify pizza as ‘junk food’, I suppose if you’re talking about some deep-fried plastic cheese monstrosity or one of those amazing Chicago pie-style ones. I think culturally we have developed a suspicion of dairy goods, they’re fine for children but for adults, well they’re just ‘fat’ and cheese is top of that sin list. I never got the memo, I love cheese. And in all truth, we actually do need some fat in our diets. Did you know that most of the nutrients in salad vegetables are fat-soluble not water? This means if you go ‘hold the dressing’, you’re actually not doing yourself any favours. You need some fat to be able to get the good stuff out of the rabbit food. This modern world has lost all sense of balance. You need fat. Dairy products are good. (If you’re not allergic or vegan, admittedly). So is pizza. You can cram a whole heap of vegetables on the top, add just a little cheese and you’ve got a yummy, quick meal that is part of balanced diet. You can even get vegetables passed suspicious radars when their on a pizza, although not as effectively as mincing them into pasta sauce.
However, there are some things that I’m just going to get past the husband’s radar. Figs are one of them. Especially figs on pizzas. He thinks that it’s just plain wrong. Figs and blue cheese? Well, the yellow stickers were definitely having a good week.
We also made a pizza together. A reduced stuffed crust was purchased but as vegetarian friendly toppings tend to be extremely boring (cheese and tomato or cheese and tomato, anyone?), we doctored it.
Being vegetarian, I can’t remember the last time I had a ham and pineapple pizza. I love pineapple on my pizza though, I add with my vegetables and chillies all the time. We did find some vegetarian pepperoni which was pretty cool. (It’s the salamis and things that I miss most and which are hardest to find ‘pretend’ versions of). I don’t think I’ve ever had a chicken pizza before, they seem to be really common at the moment.
Talking of which, I heard on the telly (where else?) that chicken is the most popular meat in the UK. I thought that was a little strange but then I realised why. Pizzas are covered in chicken, the majority of supermarket sandwiches are filled with chicken. There’s chicken everywhere! I don’ know if it’s actually the most popular but it’s definitely the most available.
And whilst finding a tasty vegetarian sandwich can be difficult (not keen on bland, boring English traditional cheese only types, can’t eat onion, can’t eat egg, fortunately can now tolerate mayonnaise), I have to have a little rant about pizza at parties. There is always cold, sliced pizza at parties. Always. (It has fortunately replaced quiche in popularity, see above comment about egg). However, trying to work out whether the pizza is vegetarian under that cold, congealed melted cheese requires a vigorous autopsy, plenty of patience and a little too much juggling of paper plate and plastic fork (there are never knives for some reason). All the meat eaters will tell you about the lovely vegetable-y pizza that they’ve just devoured. And of which there is not a single slice left. The meat pizza slices stay there, hanging on throughout the evening, unloved, neglected. Why is that? The vegetarian-friendly is always hoovered up (despite most people insisting that they can only bring/eat one with meat on it). How about we just bring vegetarian-friendly ones next time? Seeing as everybody is going to eat them. And then at least the vegetarians don’t have to go to all that trouble and stress. Thank you.
OK, next up ‘chicken’ pizza. There’s plenty of sweetcorn too because I discovered three bags of the stuff in my freezer which is more than I’m sure we usually eat in an entire year (sadly). I’m going to blame burns for that or else my stock control went seriously pear-shaped at some point.
A pizza in the making:
As you can see, frozen spinach is not on husband’s ‘safe’ list of acceptable foods either. I do try though!
I’ve also made cake, a recipe from another blog called Frugal Feeding. (His idea of frugal and my idea of poverty rations seem to be quite different though!) It’s a Raspberry, Orange and Almond Traybake. Mine was going to be lemon until I grabbed the bottle of lime juice by accident. It’s really yummy so I recommend that you try it! I think I got about thirty or so squares out of it so it’s really economical for a party or some other ‘do’.
So, all good stuff there. Of course there have been the downs too. It’s not so much fun to share those though! I’ve been Tired, run out of medicine, usual stuff. I’ve been hoping to get some work done on the bathroom but have now found out that the shower is leaking (wet plasterboard is not going to be a good game ever) and we only have one and a half tiles left to finish the floor. We need at least five. And we haven’t even got to working out if we’ve got enough of the wall ones either. That’s all been good fun. Oh and it SNOWED this morning! I know, it’s only the start of November too. I wasn’t impressed.
But I better leave you with something to make you smile. Husband decided to wash the padding in his cycle helmet so he hung it on the line. It was then that we noticed that it bears a striking resemblance to a moustache! So I took a photo.
Oh and someone gifted me some cheese this morning. Mm, cheese. Life is good.
Flapjacks for Al and Sunshine
The other day I made pink porridge. That probably didn’t surprise any of you. Strange things happen on this blog.
Al made a suggestion.
I thought ‘ooh’.
So I made pink flapjacks.
(They are not photogenic. My husband won’t touch them. They’re too soft. (Normally he complains that mine aren’t soft enough). I think they’re addictive. Everyone else ate them. Cheerfully. No one died. (Except Husband for rude comments)).
Again this is just oats and frozen fruits. Chuck them both in a pan and add a splash of juice. (I used orange because that’s what I had). I also added some vanilla sugar for flavour rather than sweetness. Heat until the fruit defrosts and it all blends together. Dollop in a generous quantity of honey. Mix. Pour onto a lined baking tray (or roasting tin)and spread out fairly evenly. I put it in a fan oven for twenty minutes at 180. After thirty minutes, I took them out. Simple!
It’s supposed to be a white chocolate drizzle on top but unfortunately in my uncoordinated hands, it became a white chocolate splodge. I would have blended it with a little yoghurt to make it smoother and easier to squeeze out (good quality food bag with a corner snipped off) but I didn’t have any.
It’s been a scorching hot weekend here. (I had to put the flapjacks in the fridge to set the drizzle!)
So that leads me to the next subject: sunshine.
Somehow The Sweaty Knitter (go there if you want to investigate the name) decided that little ole rambling me should be awarded the Sunshine Blogger Award.
‘The Sunshine Award is awarded to bloggers whose positivity and creativity inspire others in the blogging world’.
I’m a rambling pessimist who blogs on a variety of ‘cheerful’ subjects such as chronic illness and mental health.
Are you as confused as me?!
Anyway, a huge thank you to The Sweaty Knitter. Because however sad you may claim it to be, oh you boring mature types, I rather like getting blog awards. There’s something nice about recognition. There’s a feeling of belonging too.
These are the questions:
- What is your favourite colour?
- What is your favourite animal?
- What is your favourite non-alcoholic drink?
- Do you prefer Facebook or Twitter?
- What’s your passion?
- What’s your favourite pattern?
- Do you prefer giving or receiving presents?
- What’s your favourite number?
- What is your favourite day of the week?
- What is your favourite flower?
These are my answers:
- Purple
- Manky
- Iced tea or ginger and lemongrass cordial but I am happy with water
- I may twitter all day but I don’t think my face is worthy of a book
- Fairness
- You’ll have to check on Ravelry! But I love symmetry and simple things.
- Giving
- Sixty Six
- The one that goes best
- Daisies and gerberas
Now I have to negotiate the minefield that is nominating (awarding) other blogs and I will give you a quick list:
Thanks for reading again. I hope that there’s sunshine and flapjacks in your lives too.
It’s Pink!
I’ve just had a kind of rough twenty four hours for a lovely mix of reasons and I wasn’t really feeling up to much. I was reading a few blog posts, catching up with email, you know the kind of thing. Then I read something. A little while later the something had wormed into my consciousness. I remembered something. Then I had an idea.
You probably know my views on food. It’s good stuff. It cures.
So, yes, I went and cooked a little something restorative.
It’s pink!
Doesn’t that just lift your spirits?
And it’s healthy. Of course. It’s porridge. Porridge is healthy. Fruit is extremely healthy. Honey is medicinal. Chocolate chips, well they’re good for the mind.
I’ve never been so happy to see a plate of strange coloured food and I’m already feeling better.
You need to try this.
Related Articles
- Chocolate Chip Blueberry Breakfast Quinoa (external link)
- Been Poorly
- The Cure
