• 16Feb

    I picked up recipy card in Morrisons for Pastry Hearts and though we didn’t actually have the right ingredients my husband cooked us a version of the recipy for our valentines meal. So here is his version:

    meal Meal served

    Chopped up two shallots, half a yellow pepper, and a few cherry tomatoes

    Put them in a shallow dish

    Added a splash of oil infused with sun dried tomatoes and a splash of balsamic vinegar

    Roasted in the oven at… 200C? for… 15 minutes?

    Roasted veg

    Meanwhile, roll puff pastry to ~3mm thick

    Cut out two heart shapes

    Scored a smaller heart 0.5cm in

    Smeared milk around the resulting 0.5cm border

    Put it in the oven for a bit to make it rise… 10 minutes or so?

    in the oven

    Took it out, pushed the middle down

    puff hearts

    Spooned in the roasted stuff

    adding the roasted veg

    Add chunks of feta

    feta added

    Back in the oven until it looked good

    Baked

    He boiled some new potatoes up and added ground pepper to them, and served it with a mixed leaf winter salad. We also cracked out the purple champainge flutes from our wedding meal and had fizzy flavoured water in them!

    I personally would have used two sizes of heart cooky cutter and made a boarder that had more pastry on it. Al had to cut a heart shape out of paper mainly due to the fact that our little girl had bitten the bottom of the template I had been using for the heart decorations!

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  • 09Feb

    I know this is probably not that relivant and I really do need to dig out the photos I took of the cheese and bacon, cheeses and chicken, cheese and onion and sweet pancakes I make but I just wanted to show how I find my craft and cooking activities tend to over lap.

    I needed to send a card around shrove Tuesday and so I made a flipping pancake card which can be seen on Salaric craft! Complete with how I did it 🙂

    Enjoy pancake day – I love to put tangerine segments in warm pancakes with a smear of nutella and then wrap it up and eat it whilst burning my fingers – I promise I’ll try and sort those recipies out soon 🙂

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  • 02Feb

    There is a big drive at the moment to try and get people to eat seasonally so I thought I’d have a little look at what Mrs Beaton thought on the subject.

    Her book is not my cup of tea but it does have lots of useful information in it.

    FISH.–Barbel, brill, carp, cod may be bought, but is not so good as in January, crabs, crayfish, dace, eels, flounders, haddocks, herrings, lampreys, lobsters, mussels, oysters, perch, pike, plaice, prawns, shrimps, skate, smelts, soles, sprats, sturgeon, tench, thornback, turbot, whiting.

    I haven’t even heard of some of these fish so I think I’ll have to do some investigating!

    MEAT.–Beef, house lamb, mutton, pork, veal.

    Veal is an iffy one morally these days though this is apparently only white veal, pink veal is ok – again I will endervour to find out more!

    POULTRY.–Capons, chickens, ducklings, tame and wild pigeons, pullets with eggs, turkeys, wild-fowl, though now not in full season.

    Again a few things here I have never heard of such as Capons and pullets.

    GAME.–Grouse, hares, partridges, pheasants, snipes, woodcock.

    Same for this section hence making all I can into links!

    VEGETABLES.–Beetroot, broccoli (purple and white), Brussels sprouts, cabbages, carrots, celery, chervil, cresses, cucumbers (forced), endive, kidney-beans, lettuces, parsnips, potatoes, savoys, spinach, turnips,–various herbs.

    Interesting I wonder if they have them stored as I thought some of this definatly would be affected by winter frosts such as lettuce. Again more investigation – if anyone has any light to shed let me know.

    FRUIT.–Apples (golden and Dutch pippins), grapes, medlars, nuts, oranges, pears (Bon Chrétien), walnuts, dried fruits (foreign), such as almonds and raisins; French and Spanish plums; prunes, figs, dates, crystallized preserves.

    Interesting that she adds the ‘forgien’ food into the seasonal like this. I feel that buying seasonal is probably going to be coupled with local in todays scheme of things. Especially as we are supposed to be reducing waste and the carbon footprint of what we eat in this country and our local economy could do with the boost of local buying. Some of the things like snipes didn’t even have a wikipedia page – unless Mrs Beeton ment a computer game which I somehow doubt as computers didn’t actually exist back then!

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  • 12Jan

    For my birthday this year my husband made me a butterfly cake with left overs from Christmas – ie the swiss roll and chocolate that never got turned into my classic christmas log I’ve been making since I was thirteen!

    Swiss Roll Butterfly

    He started by making a butterfly shape out of the large swiss roll – he says this involved cake maths as he had to work out how to make a whole butterfly out of one roll. He cut four equal slices off for the wings and then cut the remainder of the log up so that it could form the base of the body.

    Chocolate in the pan melting the chocolate!

    He then broke the chocolate up into squares and placed into our old milk pan which is tall an narrow. He then held this in a suacepan of water which was actually on the heat – this is really important as chocolate burns if in direct contact with the heat and is easily spoilt.

    pouring the chocolate on covered in chocolaty goodness

    Once melted he drizzeled it over the cake using spoons to pick up the chocolate that run off of the cake and drizzling it in the gaps. This produced a messy look and chocolate icing would have produced a better finish but then he did not know this and we didn’t have any chocolate icing anyway!

    Now to decorate Body done

    He then sprinkeled rainbow hundreds and thousands onto the butterflies body.

    time for the wings wings purpled

    Then mauve sugar crystals from a Barbie cake decorating set onto the wings.

    Now to add the fruit!

    As furthure ornimentation to the wings he added some cake decoration jelly lemon and orange slices to the wings.

    Butterfly cake

    He had to add the candle holders whilst the chocolate was still molten other wise it would have cracked the chocolate.

    He brought it out at the end of a cheese fondue for me. More on the actual celebration can be read about on our personal blog Snell-Pym.

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  • 05Jan

    There are photos of this when I track them down!

    My husband loves fudge and I normally buy him some for Christmas but I didn’t get out in time this year to pick him up some so I thought I’d have ago at making him some – but as always I had slightly the wronge ingredients and decided to sort of make up my own recipy as I went along.

    I used:

    • Condensed milk (the recipie I had found all called for evaporated milk which basically doesn’t have the added sugar but I didn’t have any of that in the cupboard)
    • Sugar
    • Candied mixed peel
    • Finailly chopped hazelnuts
    • Some christmas dry fruit mix
    • One teaspoon full of Allspice

    I placed the condednsed milk and sugar in a pan and then was supposed to stir it untill all the sugar had dissolved but the heat was too much and I feared it would burn so I just poured in the other ingredients and stirred them in.

    I then spooned the mix (it was so thick I had to use a second spoon to push the mix off of the first spoon) into some tin pie cases I had. It filled two of these shallow dishes and was absolutely chock full of the fruit and nuts so that the ‘fudge’ formed just a sort of cement or matrix for it.

    My husband likes this very much and says it tastes like mince pies and fudge and is very christmassy and that the guys at the office have requested more 🙂

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  • 29Dec

    *Mixed spice *Soft Brown sugar *Oats *Oat Bran *chopped nuts *Raisins *Mixed candied peel *Goats milk

    Basically I threw it all into the slow cooker and left it to cook on high heat with the occasional stir. We had it christmas morning with special christmas tea that was all cinnamony.

    The two worked well together, it was also just the sort of start we needed as it was quiet cold and we had a hectic five hours of cooking ahead of us!

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  • 22Dec

    We were rushing about getting those last few Christmas bits out of the way when we happened to visit the new retial/industrial park in Gloucester – mainly I had to pop into Hobbycraft for a few bits which will no doubt appear on Salaric-Craft. We had an hour and a half left before we needed to leave for a tea party with my husbands elderly aunt and we realised that though we had fed Jean we had forgotten to eat anything ourselves and so we decided a nice meal would be a good idea.

    No my favourite food ever is Pizza and there was a Pizza Hut there all shiny and new so we thought we’d go in there.

    They sat us down and told us someone would be over shortly. Jeany had colouring crayons and was asking when the food was coming. And then we sat, and sat and sat and watched everybody around us being served and then people who had come in after us were served and still no one came.

    I then started trying to attract the waitresses attention but they both seemed to be ignoring me and I started to feel most agrieved and angry. To be fair they seemed woefully under staffed but I was famished and I could smell food and Jean kept asking where her food was and she was all excited.

    Then I decided I would go to the counter to order but we checked the time and only had half an hour left – eek! We’d waited for about an hour and now there was not enough time to get the food and eat it before we needed to leave.

    I’m afraid I went up and told the girl who had seated us this and she apologiesed and I apologised for walking out but we just did not have any time left. It would appear each waitress thought the other was serving us but that didn’t help us and I am really quiet angry about this.

    Anyway we still needed to eat so we jogged over to the Burger King that is in the same suite of retial outlets and ordered food to eat on the way home. But they got the order wronge – we were in such a rush we didn’t notice until we were already on the road.

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  • 15Dec

    I thought that with all recipies appearing on here with cloves in them that I had better warn everybody that cloves can be poisonous if consumed in large amounts. We learnt this the hard way last christmas and it is documented in detial on our personal blog if you want to learn more.

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  • 08Dec

    Make up a jug of slighlty neat ribina blackcurrent cordial, add this and a carton of orange juice to a large suacepan or wok on a medium to gental heat. Add a cinnamon stick, a cup of demeria sugar, slices of orange and apple, a teaspoon of cloves, some ginger and nutmeg in a muzlin bag (or you could use those mulled wine teabag things from the super market).

    Stir and once steaming laddle into heat tollerent wine glasses or mugs depending on how elegant you feel like being!

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  • 01Dec

    *1 bottle of red wine *1/2 a carton of orange juice *1 cup of brandy (we’ve been using french brandy) *1 cinnamon stick *1 mug of demara sugar (any sugar will do its just this gives it an extra taste that we like) *1 teaspoon of cloves *1 mixed spices in a muslin bag or a mulled wine sachet from the super markets *1 Apple *1 orange *3 small red chillis

    Basically put everything into a large suacepan and gently heat, the fruit should be cut into slices and float on the top. You probably want to add the sugar and stir it in before you add the fruit. Top up with water.

    You might want to warn your guests first! Unlike my friend Simon who gave me a glass at his New Year party last year:/

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