Eat, drink and be merry!

Hey kids, how's tricks?  Astonishingly, it's been about six weeks since I last blogged, life has somehow run away with me, but I have been doing lots of fun things with friends which in turn have led me to the subject of this post - FEASTING.

I don't know about you, but I get pretty excited about this time of year - not just Christmas, but winter in general (and I do hope that you have noticed my lovely seasonal banner, courtesy of the very clever Mr Jon Monkhouse, whose website I would put a link to if I knew how) as it means big bowls of hot, comforting soup, clouds of mashed potato that you want to bury your face in and second helpings of cinnamon-y apple crumble and custard.  Ah, winter, you're always welcome in my kitchen.

It also seems to be the time of year when I feed people more.  Not just more helpings, but more frequently, which suits me down to the ground, as cooking for more than one means I get to try all those recipes that just suit larger quantities of people.  I had my friends Laida, Lynsey and Ferg over for dinner a couple of weeks ago, which meant that I got to try out this bad boy:

Peeping out from under a cheddar cobbler topping is a glorious beef stoo, which I served just with some buttered leeks - seasonal veg, dahling, it's all about the seasonal veg.  I would post the picture of the stew served up on the plate, but to be honest the flash on the phone and my below-par food photography skills made it look rather uncannily like sicked up dog food, which is not really the idea.  Suffice to say, it tasted really quite scrummy and it was the perfect thing for a freezing winter evening.  Also, I feel proud to say that Ferg, a former professional athlete, judo player and a 6 foot something man seemingly made entirely of muscle, declared himself full after eating this.  Apparently he only usually says this once a year.

Now, this next dish was made when my friend Caroline came over from Dublin to stay for a weekend - not for a crazy weekend in London, oh no, none of that, but for a weekend to be spent, and I quote, "sitting down".  So sit down we did, but always with a cup of something or a plate of something, such as this:

This is the rare occasion where the picture of the food on the plate looks nicer than the food in the dish (in this instance, like sausages surrounded by shrunken testicles, not ideal, I think you will agree).  Ladies and gentlemen, if you look to your right you will see an aforementioned cloud of mashed potato and to your left, fat, succulent sausages bought as a special treat from Borough Market cooked in onion and grapes.  Yes, grapes.  No, I wouldn't have thought of it either.  That's why I buy recipe books.

I am very lucky with my friends as I have yet to have a single one of them refuse pudding, which is a blessing as I don't feel that I have fed people properly without giving them pudding as well.  Am I secretly a feeder?  Am I a 1950s housewife reincarnated?  I wouldn't be surprised as this next photo was taken less to portray the crumble and more to show off my newly acquired VINTAGE 1950s BLUE PYRITE (quite rare according to the man on the stall but then he would say that) DISH THAT I'M REALLY EXCITED ABOUT WHICH IS A BIT WEIRD AS IT'S BASICALLY A DISH BUT NEVER MIND BECAUSE I LIKE IT:

Ahhh.  Just looking at it makes me smile.  I'll go into the kitchen in a minute and have a look at it too.  Ahhh.

I think that this will be my last post before Christmas, but, dear reader, I hope that you have a lovely time feasting with all your loved ones.  I leave you with a picture of, in my humble opinion, the ultimate Christmas food, made this year with the mincemeat made from the apples of my last post.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you....The Mince Pie.

Merry Christmas!

"Do something with these apples or my mum will cry..."

...was roughly what my flatmate's girlfriend said to me upon returning from Somerset with these beauties from her mum's apple trees:

I don't think that you can really appreciate from this photo the sheer volume of apple that is sitting on that plate.  Each apple weighed about half a kilo, which is really quite a lot for a fruit that we usually view as a snack.

Needless to say, these are not snacking apples, these are cooking apples, so you really have to do something exciting with them with a fair amount of sugar to make them edible rather than mouth-puckeringly sour.  I like a challenge though and so I did what I always do when given half a chance - make myself a cup of tea, get into bed and leaf through these:

This picture makes me very happy.  Just look at all the exciting edible possibilities sitting there, in book form, just waiting to be uncovered and played with.  And it has a cup of tea in it.  Yum.

Anyway, enough looking at food porn, let's get amateur and make some.

The first thing that I made was something rather festive.  Brace yourself, dear reader, I'm going to mention Christmas.  Usually I try to avoid talking about Christmas plans and Christmassy things until December, but when one has a batch of apples about to go mouldy and make a woman in Somerset cry, the nettle/holly must be grasped and wrapped in tinsel.  Or something.  So I made a pan of this gorgeous stuff:

Mmm, mincemeat.  I cannot even begin to tell you how many people are confused by the word 'mincemeat'.  I honestly thought that everyone knew that in no way, shape or form does this include meat.  To be fair though, it used to, but way back in Tudor times when they added spices and so forth to finely chopped meat to try and disguise the fact that it was going a bit gross.  They were still doing it in Victorian times, but they were also still sending children up chimneys, being shocked by a flash of ankle and using leeches and I think it's fair to say that we've all moved on from that.

So, to be clear, no meat.  None.  Zero.  Not even suet.  That's what the apples are for, to create the moistness that suet usually gives to mincemeat.

That used up quite a lot of the apples, which was pretty good.  I took a picture of the jars, but to be honest, it just looks like jars of brown gunk, it's really not particularly thrilling.  I'll show you a picture of the pies in December, that will be much more exciting, but for now, just forget this ever happened.  Christmas?  What Christmas?

I have been craving a baked apple since September and as I have a rule that if I have a craving for something for more than an hour, I should probably eat it, I reckon two months is definitely long enough to warrant making a baked apple.  This was rather an odd craving, as I don't think that I had had a baked apple in at least ten years, so it was perfectly possible that I had just made up what I thought they tasted like.  I kind of had, to be honest, but I was not disappointed.  I adapted a Diana Henry recipe from 'Cook Simple', which is an awesome book - most of the recipes involve a bit of chopping, chucking stuff in a dish and shoving it in the oven, resulting in absolutely delicious yumminess.  More from her in other posts, I reckon...

Anyway, it was supposed to have raisins, dried cranberries, fresh cranberries, pecans, maple syrup and apple juice in it, but I didn't have most of that, so I just cored the apples (without a corer, how retro) and stuffed them with raisins, dried cranberries, almonds and maple syrup:

I put the 'lids' back on the apples, whacked them in the oven and when they were cooked, poured double cream on them:

These were then eaten sitting up in bed watching a film.  Can you think of a better way to spend a cold Wednesday night?  Cosiness, thy name is apple.

Don't sweat the sweet stuff

People seem to have one of two reactions to baking.  Either they freak out, get flour everywhere, drop eggs on the floor, keep opening the oven to check to see whether the cake is rising and then burst into tears when it doesn't; or they come over all evangelical and try to tell you that baking is better than sex.

If you are either one of these types, you're doing something wrong.

I can't advise you if you are the second type, as I am not that good a baker (mercifully), but if you are the first type, dear reader, I have just one word for you: chillax.  Honestly, it'll be fine.

Baking is one of my favourite things to do.  I find it relaxing, soothing and rewarding, from settling down with a cup of tea and a cookbook to decide what to make (a permanent favourite of mine is How to Be a Domestic Goddess, signed by both my aunt and the Goddess herself), to licking the bowl once the cakey thing is in the oven.  I'm not going to be all smug and say that everything goes perfectly every time - I regularly curdle cake mixture when I put the eggs in, but to be honest, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference - and if I'm in a bad mood, horrendous things happen.  Seriously, if you're feeling grumpy or rushed, don't even bother.  You'll just end up resenting the cake, the cake will get offended, sulk and just not rise.  I had to make a birthday cake once, not out of choice, but out of 'oh, Jinni, you've got loads of essays to do, but I can't bake and X is out tonight, so can you just whip something up for Y's birthday tomorrow?'.  Note the lack of 'please' or 'thank you'.  So I made this chocolate monstrosity that just sat in the cake tin, didn't do anything and tasted of sludge.

However, if I am baking out of desire rather than duty, then the cake looks and tastes a hell of a lot nicer.  Just look at these blueberry muffins:

Don't they look pretty?  I made these for a super cool road trip to Derbyshire, to do some impro at the Methodists annual conference - rock and freakin' roll - and they seemed to go down pretty well with my three fellow road trippers.  (Yep, that's three muffins each.  No point in being stingy.)

A few months later, I took a train to Cornwall, again to do some impro, and I thought that I would make some biccies for the journey.  There were ten of us this time, which meant there would have to be quite a lot of said biccies, so I enlisted some help in the form of my friends Nicky, Maria and Rhiannon.  Now, I like making biscuit dough, I don't mind cutting it out, but I find decorating them rather tedious.  I end up doing things like this:

This is all very well and good, but very fiddly and requires a level of detail that I just cannot sustain for fifty biscuits.  Luckily, the others were a lot keener on the decorating than I was and produced such gems as these:

Sorry, it's upside down and I have no idea how to reverse it, but if you care to crane your neck, you will notice that the giraffe has been modified into a unicorn, the boxing kangaroo has a black eye and the dragon has been shot.  Now, that's proper decorating.

I quite like baking just for the sake of it though, without a special occasion in mind.  I made these a little while ago, partly because I felt sorry for an open bag of dessiccated coconut in the cupboard that was just sitting there, feeling sorry for itself:

Ta-da!  Raspberry and coconut muffin cake thingummies.  No reason, just there.  Feed on, flatmates.

I am also something of a loser, which is why I decided that baking two Madeira cakes from two different recipes and doing a taste test was a really cool way to spend a weekend.  The first was a James Martin recipe, which was fine, but the crust tasted quite dry.  The second, which was also the winner, was a Nigella recipe, which avoids having a dry crust by sprinkling the cake mixture with demerara sugar before you put it in the oven, so it goes all nice and crunchy:

It looks a bit rubbish there, but I can assure that it wasn't, it was brilliant.  I served it with a side of modesty.

Right, it's nearly time for dinner, so I will leave you with just one last thing, a photo of a product that I really want to find a recipe for, just so I can buy it:

Snigger.

Triumph!

If I was a normal sort of person, I would start this blog with the photos I have taken of food that I have made or eaten in the last couple of days and go from there, a diary starting with the day that you start writing sort of approach.

Not being a normal sort of person, however, and liking things neat and tidy (although you would never believe that if you saw the state of my room sometimes) I would like to tie up loose ends and start from the very beginning, from the very first photo that I took of some food that I made.  And here it is:

This is a very blurry photo of some linguine alle vongole, or linguine with clams if you're not being pretentious. I took it because I was feeling triumphant - this was one of the few meals that I have ever made without using a recipe book.  (Don't get used to that as a theme though, this hardly ever happens.  I freakin' love cookery books.)  I had just been to my local farmers' market and had bought a handful of clams on a whim from the lovely fishmonger there, who told me how to cook them in this way.  Unfortunately, I didn't write it down and I think I took this photo in February - something to do with steaming them in some white wine and garlic and then tossing them with drained, cooked pasta, and chucking over some olive oil and chopped parsley.  Hey, I DO remember it!  

This next photo is another triumphant, no-recipe moment:

This is definitely a morning-after-the-night-before type of brunch, although I was obviously not feeling too dreadful if I managed to whip this up.  Just pretty damn hungry by the looks of things.  Jesus, I've even put it on ciabatta for heavens' sake.  Yep, definitely wasn't hungover.  I think the stuff on the left is a mixture of mushrooms, tomatoes and rosemary and I've put some parsley all over the top again.  Who says you can't garnish when you're cooking for one?!

Just one last picture I think (after all, I don't want you getting bored, dear reader), still illustrating the theme of triumph:

JAM!  Yeah baby, I made jam!  From scratch, no sugar thermometer, it actually set to a good consistency instead of being fruit soup or fruit cement - jam!  You blatantly can't read the label, so I will tell you that it is rhubarb and ginger.  I did make it from a recipe, but I was inspired to make it by my grandmother talking about the jam that her aunt made when she was little - my grandmother being little, not the aunt.  Although maybe she was little, I don't know, I wasn't there.  Anyway, the recipe was for just plain rhubarb jam, but I added chopped stem ginger and some of the syrup from the jar as well.  It wasn't super gingery, but it had a nice warmth to it and it is definitely a recipe that I will be repeating when rhubarb is next in season.  And yes, I did give a jar to my grandmother.

My first confession

My name is Jinni and I have a confession.  I've been watching porn.

Food porn, that is, in the delectably inspiring form of Nigella's Kitchen on iplayer.
This is probably a bit full-on, a bit too much information for my first ever blog post, but I feel that if I am going to do this, I may as well do it properly and be completely honest with you, dear reader.  I am not going to say that I am a foodie, a foodaholic, completely obsessed with food and all those other platitudes that get bandied around, but I do really rather like the stuff.  I do think about it rather a lot, I do have rather too many cookbooks for someone of my tender years and tenderer budget and I do believe that food is the basis of every good social gathering.  That may be a girlie tea, a post-apocalyptic night out fry-up or a romantic meal where you don't even notice the food...all of these things are utter bliss to me.
However, please do not think that I believe that the only way to eat and enjoy good food is in company, good heavens, no.  Most of the time, I cook just for me and I take just as much pleasure in doing that as I do cooking for other people.  I have been getting very over-excited of late and taking pictures of the things that I have created, which has prompted me to start this blog.  What's the point of the pictures if I don't do anything with them?  They will just languish, lonely and unloved, on Facebook or my USB drive thingy, like all those photos in a box that I keep meaning to put into albums and frames.
So, dear reader, if you care to follow me into the next post, please do.  Just so long as I can work out how to upload photos...