Just like buses, my baking sprees come all at once! Friends over for dinner today so a very good excuse to try new and old recipes. Both courses and the cakes for tea have been hideously cribbed from others - the one particular Domestic Goddess to whom I offer HUGE apologies for making her chocolate cheesecake (Feast, page 298) with white chocolate instead as one of the guests does NOT "do" dark chocolate. The main course was a delicious Italian baked fish dish (Waitrose, December 2005) with home grown potatoes lightly cooked in white wine, tomatoes and onion and then baked in the oven - the haddock (in this case) being added 10 minutes before the end. Great with green beans and fresh bread.
Yesterday was spent baking the cheesecake, making millionaire's shortbread (in my brand-spanking-new Pampered Chef baking tray) and, for some reason that completely fails me right now, making a batch of Raspberry and Crabapple Jelly! Stew fruit, sieve fruit, add same weight of jam sugar, boil and do saucer test, stuff in a sterile jar. Very nice, but a little tart. Luckily our crabapples are edible and a lovely red colour.
Jerry and Leo got down to the allotment and brought home the last of the potatoes - Leo's from his very own patch were by far the largest with the biggest weighing in at 450g!! (Those were used for the fish dish!)
I also made guacamole and houmous from scratch - they tasted lovely, but when I tried to photograph them they just looked like rather disgusting porridge!! The guacamole had a defitnite kick with a green chilli finely chopped into it, though I felt the houmous was a little bland. Some time ago I made one with roasted pepper added to it and it tasted divine!!!
It was great being able to serve up a meal that was partly a result of our own hard graft and partly from local shops only. (I get an Ocado delivery once a week, but that's mostly the really big, heavy stuff.) Maybe one day we'll be able to serve up a meal wholly from the allotment!
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