Tag Archives: bread pudding

Culinary Armageddon

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At lunchtime I stopped work at the computer, had lunch (just a trio of crumpets) and started to bake. I had soaked the fruit for the tea loaf overnight, so that was OK, and I decided to make use of the oven by making a small bread pudding. The tea loaf went well. I used chopped dried apricots to replace some of the dried fruit. It made a moist loaf that was very sweet despite me reducing the quantity of sugar. The bread pudding tasted good, but I used the wrong dish and it was spread a bit thin. However, it did let me use the last of the loaf of cheap white bread I had left.

My sister came round for tea and we had vegetarian sausages with Toad in the Hole, roasted vegetables (carrots, parsnip, cauliflower and leek) with tea loaf and coffee after.

In plant terms we had:

Mixed dried fruit
Apricots
Coffee
Carrots
Parsnips
Leeks
Cauliflower
We also had spices – Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Mixed Spice not really enough to count.

I’m not sure if the vegetarian stuff in the sausages counts as a plant-based portion. It’s some sort of laboratory grown fungus as I understand it, so it should.

Rolling total for Day 1 is about 12. Not bad.

It would have been more, but distracted by a major loss of internet, odd jobs, cookery (Julia was forcing me to make Toad in the Hole – first time in 15 years I’ve made it, bound to be a disaster, it didn’t occur o me that the occasional rich aromas I was getting (spice and apple) signified the destruction of a pot of red cabbage with apples and onions. Despite using the tiniest of flames my loss of memory/lack of awareness resulted in a pan of red cabbage that was mainly welded to the bottom of the pan.  Such a shame, and a worrying step along the road to mental decline.

Then we ate a lot of the cake before I remembered the photos, and the camera battery ran out. Plus the kitchen lights turned the photos yellow. Not my greatest  day.

I Have Had Worst days

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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.