Tea Time

Now I'm sure after Christmas and New Year everyone promises to start dieting to make up for the Christmas excess, but this week my family failed at that.

On Sunday, for my grandma's birthday, I went with mum, my two sisters and grandma to Fortnum and Masons for tea.

We started with pink champagne and canapes: cheese straws, cheese and anchovy straws, cheese tartlettes and little salmon mousse toasts.

Then it was on to sandwiches: one egg and cress, one chicken, one roast beef, one salmon on black bread, and, of course, one cucumber. All crustless, naturally.

Then we moved onto the sweet stuff - and there was mountains of it!

This tower was just for two people!

We each had a fruit scone, and a plain scone, with clotted cream and jam, lemon sponge cakes, date and walnut loaf, jam biscuits, and then we got to choose from the cake tray. There was a big cube of solid chocolate with layers of chocolate inside, a fondant fancy, a lemon meringue sandwich, chocolate eclairs, a plum tart - all sorts of lovely things.

We couldn't eat it all!

And of course we had gallons, and gallons of tea!

The cake that nearly wasn't

Recent posts suggest that I do a lot of baking (and I haven't even mentioned the mince pies!) but to be honest, I really don't. Most of the baking in my family home is done by my youngest sister, because she believes in eating a lot of chocolate, and at uni I don't really bake. The one exception to this is cheesecake. I make amazing cheesecake!

But yesterday was said little sister's 19th birthday. My parents were in the US and my middle sister was (is) in Morocco, so it was just her and I. That made me chief baker.

She'd requested a plain sponge cake with buttercream icing, which I thought would be really simple. But when I got to it, I couldn't remember the quantities for cake. My mum definitely has the ratios of fat/flour/sugar/egg in her head for cakes, crumbles, pastry etc, but I have been known to get it wrong...

So, I found a recipe (not too complicated, we have a house full of cookery books!) and set about making the cake. However....

The cake specified soft margarine, but I wanted to use butter (it tastes much nicer) and we only had hard butter.

I also didn't have quite enough golden caster sugar so I had to top it up with normal caster sugar.

Then I started putting everything in the Magimix, but that felt wrong, so I transferred it into a bowl to use an electric hand whisk.

But, with butter, flour, sugar and baking powder in, the whisk just made a terrible mess. Then I remembered - we make cakes in the big Kenwood mixer!

Got that out, added cake mix, but it still looked wrong.... Ah yes, no eggs. Oops!

Then I discovered that our cake tins are slightly bigger than the ones the recipe wanted (I reckon they are 8" not 7") so I could have done with some more mixture. Oh well...

But of course that meant that they cooked faster than planned, although the middle of one was very soft....

Anyway, as you can see from the photo above, somehow the cake turned out just fine! I added lots of chocolate buttercream (that's easy to make - icing sugar, butter and coco, and a wooden spoon), and some pink sprinkles which made my sister happy. And it tasted good. Her only complaint was that the 'G' on the top wasn't neat enough!

Christmas Pudding

Look at my Christmas Pudding!!

Normally we buy one (from M & S, so it's dairy free and can be eaten after Turkey) but this year, mum's work Secret Santa bought her a Christmas Pudding making kit. It contained a mixing bowl, a steaming basin and most of the ingredients, bar flour, alcohol and bread crumbs.

So I made it: combined all the ingredients, mainly, adding some extra alcohol, and stirring a lot.

And then we steamed it for 8 hours - with mum feeding it extra rum!

And a few days later we ate it and it was the best pudding we've ever had. Definitely something to repeat. Perhaps next year we will even manage it on Stir-Up Sunday.

Norfolk

Again, I've been neglecting this blog. I've got lots of photos and things to update over the next couple of weeks, but I'm going to start with my holiday in Norfolk. Sorry, no photos this time.

My boyfriend and I went to a cottage in Norfolk for a few days r & r, after a manic term. It was lovely to get away from it all, and have some time out. Luckily, he loves food too, so he was happy to plan lots of nice meals with me. We'd intentionally chosen self-catering so that we could cook and not just eat hotel food every night.

The first night we were using some of the things from an M & S meal deal, which was a meal for 2 for £10. I'd bought two at the weekend, one for Saturday night, before we went, and then another for Monday, our first night there. We had a whole chicken, which I roasted, along with M & S roast potatoes, which I think are pretty good, but ours are better! We bought some parsnips to roast too - I love them - and we had some green beans. We were far too full for dessert after that.

Tuesday lunch was fabulous. We went to a place called The Pigs, and had their 'Norfolk Tapas' to share: mushy peas (one of my favourites, and these were really good), little pork sausages with honey and mustard (pork was evidently a specialty), herrings, and cauliflower fritters. We also shared a portion of mussels and chips, which was just the right amount of food.

After spending the afternoon shopping in Norwich, we went hope, and my boy made a dish he's always talking about: pasta with squash and bacon:
Roast one large/a couple of small squash, then cube when soft enough
Meanwhile, cook pasta
Add to cubed squash a couple of rashers of bacon per person and cubed feta cheese and return to oven
Combine! So simple, but so good!

Wednesday we headed off to Sheringham and Cromer for the beach, but it was miserable weather! We found fish and chips in Cromer - it was recommended by the tourist information board, and was good, although we were the youngest people in there by about 20 years! I had haddock and chips, with mushy peas, and he had scampi.

We didn't last long at the beach, but we did take two dressed crabs home for our starters that evening. We had those first, with some champagne (we each had been given a bottle as a present and we decided to take them with), then we had left over baked salmon and potato salad (from home) and a green salad.

Thursdays lunch was all left-overs, with some bread and some M & S cheese from our meal deal.
Thursday dinner was a Thai beef and aubergine curry with rice.

So it was a pretty good eating week, all in all. We managed to drink two bottles of champagne, and two large Tiger beers, but we only got 3/4 of a bottle of red in the whole week!

Theatre Eating

Wow, everyone's blogs are full of lovely Thanksgiving recipes. I'm currently craving things related to cranberry and turkey! Thankfully, Olives, my favourite deli in Oxford, had a Thanksgiving special yesterday: turkey, cranberry, brie, stuffing and rocket. It was quite good, but I wasn't convinced about the stuffing. Or the turkey. Next time, I may just get brie and cranberry, which I think is an awesome combination (see M & S brie and cranberry parcels for further details!).

Last week was a week full of sandwiches and eating out, in fact, as I was stage managing West Side Story at the Oxford Playhouse. It was a great show, but as usual, left me completely exhausted, and with zero chance for cooking. In fact, pretty much every meal last week was in a restaurant, or some kind of take away.

I had at least three different baguettes, the winner probably being tuna with sundried tomatoes, tomato chutney, rocket and roasted vegetables. I had soup, I had pizza, I had bad pub food, I had meals that weren't really meals but snacks when I could fit them in, or were purely made up of biscuits and sweets (cookies and candy if you prefer!) and I had meals that I can't even remember.

I had great Chinese food at Sojo which Giles Coren adores. The boy and I shared a beef and aubergine dish, a spicy prawn dish, some duck and egg fried rice. It was good - but not cheap.

I had a great sag paneer at Chutneys where we all ordered more food than we needed to make sure we got free poppadoms!

On Friday night I went home for part one of mum's 50th birthday, and had more Chinese food. But this was Chinese for 25 members of my family - including lots of very hungry teenage (or grown up) boys. There was more food than you can imagine, a whole table groaning with it. And I loved being able to sit down and relax during a meal! Plus, the boy survived the introduction.

On Sunday I went back for part 2, a catered brunch, entirely made up of canapes. The food was amazing:
Shots of fresh orange juice
Shots of smoothie
Tiny expresso cups of porridge
Tiny cocktail glasses of granola and yogurt
Welsh rarebit
Blintzes
Fritatta
Bagels
Quails eggs on toast
Kedgeree
Croissants
Lemon cake
Muffins

Lovely. But this week I've been cooking finally. More on that to come...

Oxford madness - and some pasta

In the holidays I forget how crazy term time is here in Oxford. I think I'm going to have tons of time to do all these fun things, like cooking and blogging, and then term just runs away with me. This week I met my thesis supervisor and he reminded me how much work I still have to do my thesis (30000 words at the end of April!), and he set me some much more urgent deadlines to get me going. Plus, West Side Story is about to start. I'm the Stage Manager and the past week and the one to come are just filled with theatre time. Oh, and I have another class that requires lots of reading, I have college things to do, I have friends to see, and a boyfriend who I want to spend all my time with. So, it's busy.

But, I still have to eat. Occasionally, I still have time to cook. Even more ocassionally, I remember to take photos - with my iPhone these days, as my camera has died :( and on Thursday night, I did.

In my freezer I had some salmon baked with pesto on the top. I love this when mum makes it at home, but often by the time I get it back here and heat it up again, it's fairly dry. So, in preparation for this, I opted to turn it into a pasta sauce.

I roasted a red onion, whole cloves of garlic, a courgette and some broccoli. It's amazing how much vegetables shrink down when you roast them (especially when you over-cook them slightly because you are not paying attention).

I combined all those veggies with some pasta - I'm currently on tubes - and the pesto salmon. I then added lots of Parmesan cheese and black pepper, as both of those make (almost) anything taste better! And it really was pretty good.

I ate it curled up on my sofa watching TV and drinking wine with my housemate, which was the perfect way really, even if it meant I failed to do any of the job applications I had been intending to work on that evening. Never mind...

I'm going to send this to this week's Presto Pasta Nights which is being hosted by Kait of Pots and Plots. It's one of my favourite blogging events - there are just so many things you can do with pasta!

Repetition

One of my housemates eats the same thing every day, pretty much. Same breakfast, same lunch, and one of about three dinners. I couldn't do that - I'd just get bored. I love thinking up new things to cook all the time.

But when I look at the things that I've cooked recently, there doesn't seem to be much that's new. I frequently return to things that I know I've mentioned on here before. So my aim for the second half of term (we are half way through now!) is to cook different things, and to blog about them. So watch this space!

Meanwhile, here are some photos of some old favourites that I've made recently:

Couscous with spicy harissa dressing, roasted veg, chicken, apricots and pine nuts - yum!

Thai green veg curry
Cheesecake - decorated with witches hats for our Halloween Party