Bad Biscuits from a previous Nightmare
Today I woke up with plans. The morning passed in a bit of a blur, with not much done. We had a nice cooked breakfast, because I’ve been struggling to get grocery levels down to something reasonable. With my tendency to over-order, and Julia being away last week, the fridge has filled up and the cupboards are beginning to bulge.
This called for a breakfast of toast, beans, mushrooms, scrambled egg and sausages. It started off as toast, beans and scrambled egg, which the internet tells me is a nutritious breakfast that will keep you full for ages. Then I realised I had a pack of mushrooms in the cupboard, and most of one in the fridge. Then I found the short-dated sausages . . .
Baked Eggs imitating a mixed omlette
Having bought a Large Cauliflower last week, which turned out to be an accurate description for once, we have a lot of cauliflower, despite making it the main part of a meal last week. Most times when you order the large one it turns out to be either Adequate or Disappointingly Small. I made cauliflower cheese for three on Friday night and still have a chunk of cauliflower the size of Julia’s head. I would make soup, but we are still going through the broccoli and bits soup I made on Friday. It consisted of wilted broccoli and the core of the cauliflower plus the tender leaves, with onions, garlic and the green bits of some leeks. It’s made a broccoli-flavoured soup and is quite decent. We were able to redress the calorific debacle of breakfast by having soup in the evening.
Meanwhile, I had been planning on amazing you with photographs of scones. You may have noticed there are no photos of scones. The plan did noy go well.
First I made cheese scones using a recipe I had taken from the internet. It was a recipe for ordinary scones but I left out the fruit and sugar and added cheese and mustard powder. It seemed to go OK. The next batch, where I used the original fruit recipe, did not go so well, nd left me with a very wet dough. The cheese ones didn’t rise and the fruit ones oozed a bit, and also failed to rise. They taste fine, but they are not photogenic. They are also difficult to cut in half to butter.
Summer pudding after the first slice
I then did Bread Pudding. Julia likes Bread Pudding but dislikes Bread and Butter pudding. They are two different things according to her and the internet. One consists of bread, butter, milk, eggs, sugar and dried fruit. The other consists of bread, butter, milk, eggs, sugar and dried fruit. They are not, as I pointed out, that far apart. Bread Pudding uses cubes of bread which are scrunched up, and the butter is melted and poured in to the mix. In Bread and Butter Pudding the bread is sliced and buttered. It also, to me, tastes the same. Do you remember the story in Gulliver’s Travels where two groups fell out over whether to eat their boiled eggs from the pointy end or the blunt end? Exactly.
And now I am going to put the day of culinary disappointment behind me and go to bed. It’s very depressing when you start baking again after a break and find your former skills have deserted you.
Meanwhile, we are still ripening our tomatoes indoors. These, of course, are from a previous year.
I am amazed at the amount of baking you managed to do! I haven’t baked anything at all since last Christmas when I made a few mince pies. I love pies and cakes and scones but (a) I find baking very stressful and (b) if there are no pies and cakes and scones in the house we can’t put on weight by eating them. My mother used to make bread pudding fairly regularly when I was a child. She had collected all the stale bread over a few days, cubed it and mixed it with the usual fruit, spices etc and then baked it until it was very dark. It was fairly solid and moist and wonderfully filling. She never made bread and butter pudding which I love and is much lighter in colour and density to my mind.
Bread/Bread and Butter pudding seem to cause a divide in some people, me I just eat it. You are right about the density, but there is a lot more bread in a bread pudding. I reckon there was about twice as much in the bread pudding but it was still the same size when I’d finished it. 🙂
It’s not too bad once I get going. I have all the ingredients for peppermint creams, but I’m not sure I can do the kneading required to bind so much sugar with so little liquid.
You are right about not putting weight on, but Julia or my sister always seem to be buying biscuits, so I may as well bake.
You never fail to give a chuckle, Simon. The scones story and the bread pudding rant were especially good.
Thank you Jodie. Now that I’m a grandparent I have a responsibility to make stodgy puddings and and to teach the child a proper appreciation of sugar, carbs and disappointment – all hazards of baking, and all part of life. 🙂
I think all this cooking is very impressive. Especially the scones.
I agree! Homemade soup! Scones! Puddings! And that breakfast!
How are you keeping? Long time no see. We are currently eating Baked Potato and Leek Soup for lunches. The weather has helped with this – there seems to be an invisible line in the air where soup takes over from salad, and we passed it last week.
Yes, I have been working on my business the past few years and then my daughter had a baby! They live 2 hours away and we are up there every couple of weeks for a day or two. What a joy he is!
I’m cautiously in favour of grandchildren. With him being 3,000 miles away it isn’t quite so easy to visit, particularly as I stopped flying years ago. However, Number 2 Son is best man at Number 1 Son’s wedding next year and they are coming over so I will see him then. It all makes me feel very mature. 🙂
I’m hoping the next lot will actually look like scones. 🙂 It’s actually taken me nearly 12 months to start baking again (I said I would start again when I was retired) so not quite so impressive in perspective.
I don’t think I ever had bread pudding growing up. The only pudding we ever had was some sort of premixed chocolate pudding from Jello I think was mixed with milk and stirred until dissolved, probably boiled. I learned to make tapioca pudding when I got older, but don’t eat desserts these days.
My dad couldn’t even boil and egg. I love bread and butter pudding, and you may have inspired me to make some, which I have never done before. (It is much better than bread pudding.)
When my mother had an operation in the late 60s my father sprung into action, bought a selection of frozen food and gave my sister food poisoning. It was a long time before we let him forget it.
I would say you had a lot of successes. Can’t go wrong with soup, as far as I’m concerned, and taste is far more important than looks. You know the saying: handsome is as handsome does.
That’s what I kept telling myself whilst eating the khaki sludge I’d made from the offcuts. Fortunately, it did taste fine and I feel better as a result of having it – bursting with vitamins and a sense of economy. 🙂
My Dad made bread pudding. We never knew what had given it its colour each time. We once thought it might have been boot polish
The latest one has gone brown. I hope it’s from the spices. You should never let dads cook. The few who did in that generation usually learnt in the forces and it could well have been boot polish.