Best Brunch: Herby mushrooms and tomatoes on toast recipe
Danny likes a few sautéed mushrooms and a grilled tomato with his Saturday midday brunch. Although they sound tempting they never really appeal to me – I prefer the more conventional home smoked bacon, organic eggs and buttered toast from a homemade loaf. A couple of weeks ago I found some mushrooms and a tomato knocking about in the fridge and decided to experiment. If I simmered them together with a little olive oil, butter and herbs would they transform into something that I would like to eat alongside my bacon and eggs? They smelt...
read moreBest recipes for leftovers: Baked Portobello mushrooms with ham, parsley sauce and parmesan recipe
We cured and smoked our own ham this year. It was delicious and a proper old fashioned half leg. We were thrilled that it worked out as I had tweaked our bacon cure, upping the salt by 25%. This is still far less than the HFW cure and every other recipe that I’ve found on my researches. We smoked it for a good 24 hours in the smoke chamber above our wood burner. The latter opens into an old chimney, rather than a flue. I had saved some seasoned apple wood for this very special smoke. I finally roasted the joint for us on Christmas Eve and it...
read moreBest potato cakes with parmesan and smoked paprika recipe
“I’ll cook this evening. We’ll have the pork hock dish from last night. There is loads of mashed potato left over. How about potato cakes?” Mondays are always busy for both of us. A simple meal seemed perfect. But returning home I discovered that we had no eggs. So I pulled out all the stops and made a new potato cake recipe. If you have an egg to coat the cakes before rolling in flour, it would probably be even better as the cakes would retain their shape. Meanwhile our cakes spread a bit in the in the frying pan but they were...
read moreBest quick sandwich recipe
One of the great things about winter is that Jalopy becomes a sort of mobile fridge. Most of the door seals have deteriorated to slivers. This is great for keeping sandwiches chilled. Yesterday’s unfinished sandwich can fill a ‘no time for breakfast’ gap if I am running late the next morning. If you drive a ‘normal’ car, you need a letter from your parents to try this trick as the interior of most modern cars are well insulated against the cold. If you drive a Jalopy, this post may be of interest to you. I’d bought a...
read moreLate morning brunch: Cheesy mushrooms on toast with a dash of spice recipe
To cut our carbon footprint we decided to combine the post run and the weekly shop and travel to Newmarket in the same car. This meant that Danny had to face an experience that he refers to with tight lipped horror. Saturday supermarket queues. In fact he hates any sort of queue. Even the queue for the tote to collect his winnings. I now refer to queues as moving lines. This seems to calm him. As we drove into the Tesco car park we couldn’t find a space. I knew that unusually long moving lines were already threading across his mind as he...
read moreCrisp fried or baked cheese recipe
“Even though we’d been vegetarians for years we sometimes had a yearning for bacon.” Teresa was running a vegetarian restaurant at the time. “What did you do?” I imagined Teresa hot footing down to the local town wearing a large brimmed hat and scoring a wad of bacon from a backstreet butcher. “We fried cheese.” Her face softened with the memory. “How on earth do you fry cheese?” “It’s easy. Grab a non stick frying pan. Heat it to a medium temperature and cut your cheese fine....
read moreOven roasted cheese toasties recipe
“August has been terrible, this year. It seems to have rained every day.” My prospective client stared out of the window into the greyish, damp gloom. I’ve only had outside work for the last few weeks. I know the Met Office site better than our redundant garden table, where we used to eat our supper most summer evenings years ago. This morning I rambled through the blog archives. August was cold and wet last year and 2006 had its low points too. When summer weather turns chilly, an indulgent treat can lift the spirits in just...
read moreEggy Bread recipe
“How much do you love me?” I asked. I was standing under the kitchen table as my mother ironed above on an old folded blanket. “I love you lots.” “More than the others?” The iron thumped and swished above. “I love you all the same.” “If you tell me that you love me more, I won’t tell them.” This was a lie and I knew it. I had a plan. If my mother admitted that she was fonder of me than my older brother and sister I’d creep out of the kitchen and run down the garden,...
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