If you're still reading this blog ...

Eggs molee with vegetable biryani

If you're still reading this blog then you'll know that my posts have become quite infrequent compared to when I was still enthusiastically engaged in my soup-making project. That started about ten years ago. I was gung-ho to work my way through the 200 recipes. Still, 170 wasn't bad going. Yesterday I made curried parsnip soup, which I first made in May 2012. It was very tasty and well received by the spouse and younger offspring. 

So much has happened in the last ten years and even in the seven years since I first made the parsnip soup. The older offspring is now married. The younger offspring is at university. The spouse has become prodigiously creative in the last eighteen months and blogs prolifically about his accomplishments. I have dabbled in various things - poetry, calligraphy, comedy improv, knitting - but baking and cooking remain my favourite pastimes and creative outlets. So far this year I've tried about eighty different recipes, some new to me but from old favourite cookbooks in our kitchen, but some firm old favourites have also been in the mix. 

Since returning from our summer holiday in August I have been inspired firstly by Indian cookery: vegetable biryani from Madhur Jaffrey (Vegetarian Curry Easy) and egg molee (eggs in coconut masala) from Rick Stein (India).  Then there was broccoli and cheese flan adapted from a recipe in Norfolk's Own Cookbook, cheese and herb cobbler from Pamela Westland's High-Fibre Vegetarian Cookery (1983), and Hungarian chicken smitane, brewer's chicken and chicken and onion bake from Anne Mason's The Chicken Cookbook (1980). 

On the sweet front, I made coconut flapjacks from Mary Norwak's 500 Recipes: Breads, Cakes and Biscuits. I used to make these regularly at work over thirty years ago. 
Recipes from magazines included Levi Roots' ginger, pecan and rum brownies (wow!), Mary Berry's coffee and walnut traybake (Good Housekeeping, October 2009) and fig and apple cake (Good Housekeeping, September 2008). Other recipes that I've used before included Daim cookies and banana cake (both from Bronte Aurell's Fika and Hygge), uncooked cherry chocolate biscuit cake (Gill MacLennan's Chocolate) and banana muffins (Martha Day's Baking). 

Blueberry crumble muffins

Diverging from the old recipe theme, I made peanut butter and strawberry jam cornflake cookies from a recipe on the back of cornflake packet, peanut butter biscuits (Irish Times, October 2019), blueberry crumble muffins (Ottolenghi's The Cookbook), and nutty chocolate, rum and fig cake with chocolate rum frosting (Helen Donovan's The Big Book of Chocolate). I post photos of my produce on FB and people ask me who eats all this stuff? Well, the sweet things are always very well received at work and my nextdoor neighbour is always pleased when I leave a sample on his doorstep. 

I still look out for bee references when I'm reading. Here are some lines from A Gilded Lapse of Time by Gjertrud Schnackenberg: 

.../ I had broken

The reliquary of the bee, where she had sifted 

Her yellow powder through melismatic generations, 

Worlds, numberless lifetimes, seeking to finish 

Her combs, to mix a flower-dust paste and fix 

One drop to the blank mask of her catacomb, 

To the brink of a miniature chasm - we are meant 

To open a hive with reverence, but instead 

I had broken the hive apart, and worse, 

I had left the honeycomb dripping on the ground  

In the wood's heart, a profanity 

Of waste, and the bees whirled into my ears 

Their endless sequences, their burning rhymes 

I groped among for what I meant to say. 

(Supernatural Poems: Poems 1976-2000; extract in Staying Alive edited by Neil Astley). 



That's it for now. Until the next time. 

Minnie