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Come cook with me; Strawberry Shortbread
04 Sunday Mar 2012
Posted Food & Drink
in04 Sunday Mar 2012
Posted Food & Drink
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13 Monday Feb 2012
Posted Food & Drink
inI love to cook and bake, and one of the delights of my cooking was this, which is a French pastry case called Pate Sucree, filled with strawberries Chantilly cream, and then adorned with more strawberries, passion fruit and a sprig of mint. All hand made by me, the strawberries and mint from the garden, the cream made by me too, but the passion fruit was shop bought.
24 Tuesday Jan 2012
Posted Food & Drink
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23 Monday Jan 2012
Posted Food & Drink
inSecond recipe in the lavender range.
Ingredients
Self-raising flour, for dusting
2 teaspoons dried lavender buds
375g self-raising flour
1 tablespoon caster sugar
80g butter
250ml milk
Method
Prep: 20 mins | Cook: 15 mins | Makes 12
Although not the best photo (used my iPhone) I can truly say they are totally delicious, and I will be making more.
19 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted Food & Drink
inI said in a previous post that I was going to do some cooking with Lavender. Well my 50g bag arrived yesterday, as it was a sealed bag, there was no fragrance off it at all. I opened it, and it was intoxicating to say the least. I put it in an air tight storage jar till today.
Today I made a net bag so that I cold have the lavender in the caster sugar without it distributing itself throughout. This will make it easier to control the fragrance of the sugar to a strength I require. This sugar will be used as toppings for biscuits like shortbread.
Once the bag was sewn up properly, I just added it to half a kilo of sugar, shook it up so that the bag was at the bottom, and now I will leave it for a week, then test the strength of the sugar. This really should take between one and three weeks to get to the perfect strength, checking every few days after the first initial week.
I wish I could share the fragrance from it with you all, it is a fantastic smell.
15 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted Food & Drink
inTags
I love ginger, in stir-fry, cakes, chocolate, tea, and roasted with chicken, or in a rib recipe, however, sometimes I need to use stem ginger, which is ginger preserved in syrup, and it is really easy to make, so here is a little wisdom.
1 lb fresh gingerroot, peeled and scrubbed and cut into 2 inch pieces
12 fl’oz water
1 lb sugar
Easy, and great in biscuits, shortbread, cakes, and my favourite; Rocky Road Crunch Bars.
12 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted Food & Drink
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I LOVE lavender, and this year, I am going to cook with it. My first will be to do Lavender Shortbread. Last year I decided to harvest the French lavender buds I had in the garden, however, there just was not enough to use in anything substantial, like cake or shortbread. So, with that I am willing to cheat, but this did not come as easily as I thought. We live not too far from “The Lavender Farm”, which does all things, you guessed it, lavender. But, with all the will in the world, the farm had gone into liquidation, so it was back to the drawing board. None of the shops that I use, including John Lewis have such things either, so I had a choice to either grow lots in the garden, or troll the internet. Growing would mean little harvest at the end of summer, so the internet it was.
I will be posting details of what I cook, and what I think of it, and will include recipes and photographs of the finished items.
11 Sunday Dec 2011
Posted Food & Drink
inI usually roast my chicken like everyone else does to be honest, in the oven, basted in butter and seasoned with salt and pepper. However, today I decided to do it differently, and also because I was ready for my dinner at 10:30am.
I took a very large chicken, and cut it in half down the spine. put the two halves in a roasting tin, rubbed them with extra olive oil & lemon juice, seasoned with sea salt, then added 5 crushed cloves of garlic to them, just thrown on really, and the same with a good thick finger of ginger, then chopped some fresh sage on top and roasted at 220˚c for about 40 minutes.
What you have is a delicious roast chicken without the 2-3 hour cooking time.
04 Sunday Dec 2011
Posted Food & Drink
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I love to cook, but for the last week my Oven has been out of limits as there is a fault with a gas cut off so cannot use it. However, all was not lost as I finally made Chocolate fudge, and it is very easy to make, and you don’t even need a sugar thermometer.
Ingredients
vegetable oil, for greasing
70g/2½oz butter
300g/10½oz soft light brown sugar
125g/4½oz evaporated milk
225g/8oz marshmallows
300g/10½oz milk chocolate, chopped
75g/3oz dark chocolate (at least 60% cocoa solids), chopped
Once the fudge has set, lift out using the grease proof paper and cut into your desired size squares, you can usually get 25 squares out of it, and enjoy.
03 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted Food & Drink, Photograph
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