a country mouse cocoons

The weather here has been atrocious over the last few days so we've been cocooning as much as possible except for the mad dashes to nursery through pouring rain. Little R goes into nursery dressed in waterproofs from head to toe and I am wearing the gear I used to wear to struggle over windswept heaths and hills in a previous job. Work paid for it so I bought the best and it's being severely tested at the moment. At least it dries quickly. All this cocooning is giving me a chance to catch up with the housework and also to do wee extras like hanging these Christmassy Ikea wooden birds and paper stars on the triffid (above). Mistletoe and wine...

We had a friend and her two daughters over to play this afternoon so Little R and I got out the baking book and had a go at Date and Ginger Slice. It was really easy to make, was baked for the time stated in the recipe, unlike my last cake, and tasted delicious. If only it was healthy too. You need: 125g block margarine, 125g light soft brown sugar, 125g black treacle, 175g packet of dates finely chopped, 150ml water, 225g plain white flour sifted, 1tsp bicarbonate of soda, 1 medium egg beaten, 1 heaped tsp finely chopped preserved ginger and half a tsp ground ginger.

In traditional country mouse style, I made a mistake with the recipe. How I will ever return to the world of work I do not know, when I can't even follow a recipe for ginger cake. It was supposed to be one heaped tsp of finely chopped preserved ginger but I just took one piece of ginger from the jar, chopped it up and put it in. That was quite a lot of ginger. Luckily I noticed in time and didn't add the ground ginger. I'm planning to use the rest of the preserved ginger for a Fay Ripley sticky ginger chicken recipe and will blog that when I do it. Anyway, you gently melt the margarine, sugar, treacle, dates and water in a large pot. Stir in the sifted flour, bicarb of soda, egg, preserved ginger and ground ginger. Mix well and spoon into a 28x18cm greased and lined swiss roll tin and bake at 180deg fan for 30-35 mins. Let it cool in the tin for 15 mins then put on a wire rack and peel off the baking paper. Serve on pretty china plates while the rain lashes against the window.
Another good thing about cocooning is that with the housework done, a state of affairs which lasts an hour max, I can pick up a needle with a fairly clear conscience. The tapestry above has been gathering dust for a good while and it only took an hour to finish it off before the house began to resemble a war zone again, so that was fine. Having meticulously stitched the border, I took it to a craft night a few months ago to work on the leaves and really messed them up because I was too busy chatting. It's meant to be oak leaves and acorns, believe it or not. Never mind. I will frame it and hang it in a dark corner and just not look at it too closely.

And this is my latest project, a garland of gingerbread men, from the Tone Finnanger Christmas book (see Shelfari bookcase on right hand margin of blog, below blogroll). The half-stitched gingerbread man in the photo above looks a bit wonky but that's because the page it's on is curved. I felt like Noel Edmonds the other day with his "ask the universe and the universe will provide" patter. I was searching online for brown linen and cream linen, as per the illustration in the book, but was having no luck, so posted a message on Facebook to my craft group friends to ask if anyone knew somewhere to try. I then popped into the charity shop on my way to pick up Little R from nursery and what should I see but a big basket of fabric, including brown and cream linen. Thanks, universe. Let me leave you with this happy thought - Moet £14 at Morrisons: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/deals/cheap-champagne-sparkling-wine.

a country mouse makes fish popcorn (really) and gets a gadget

This was not country mouse's finest hour. Perhaps the clue was in the name: fish popcorn. Henceforth I will speak of it in the tones used by Peter Kay's father upon learning there was such a thing as garlic bread. Little R chose it from the recipe book, encouraged by the photo of a small girl in pink holding a paper cone of popcorn (below), and I, being so desperate to find dinners she will eat these days, agreed to have a go. It's a Fay Ripley recipe (p.176).


Things were going great, with Little R whisking the eggs and having a fine old time dipping the fish chunks into the plain flour, then into the beaten eggs then rolling them in crushed cornflakes and laying them out on the baking tray. It made a hell of a mess of the place but hey, it was all in a good cause so I wasn't getting (too) stressed.

We even put them in a paper cone (baking paper) just like the girl in the photo.

And then we tasted them. YUCK. They tasted exactly as you would expect haddock in cornflakes to taste. Fay, how could you.

Last night's dinner was more of a success. I made a sausage stew with pork sausages, quorn sausages, carrots, onions, leeks, flageolet beans, tinned tomatoes and vegetable stock and served it with mashed potatoes and broccoli. This was country mouse's own made-up recipe, concocted out of what the local co-op could provide at short notice, but it was tasty and it all got eaten.

I used a new gadget I'd bought a while ago in the charity shop for £1. It's a brabantia chopper-thingy. I remember that the Pampered Chef party I went to was selling one for some crazy sum like £20 so I was certainly willing to part with a quid to try this one.

I thought at first that it was going to be no good for carrots (see first attempt, above) but soon worked out that cutting the carrots into smaller pieces first and banging harder on the gadget would do the trick, and it did. The same applied to onions (below). If you keep bashing away the bits just get smaller and smaller so it is probably easier than grating carrots but it's not easier than chopping onions as you still have to cut the onions into pieces before putting them into the contraption so you don't even avoid the onion tears. And all the bashing is a lot noisier, if quite cathartic. Verdict: worth £1 plus perhaps a wee bit more for therapeutic value.

a country mouse cooks chicken stew

Tonight's tea was a Sophie Dahl recipe called Chicken Stew with Green Olives, with a Fay Ripley recipe, Chinese Roast Broccoli, served with redcurrant jelly that Little R and I made earlier in the summer after picking basketsfull at the local fruit farm. There were a lot of strong flavours and DH and I thought it was a success. Little R was less keen but that could have been due to the glace cherries she scoffed (illicitly) beforehand. I have made the chicken stew a few times now and am a big fan of Sophie Dahl's cookery book (Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights). The recipes use ingredients that I like and it is very easy to find something delicious to cook. Another thing I like about the book is that it has a core of ingredients which she uses in different ways, so once you have bought the more unusual ingredients you are all set to make lots of things with just the addition of the fresh stuff. Definitely a high scorer in helping country mouse achieve an organised life.

One thing I have found to be really important in making dishes which require tins of tomatoes is to use a really good make. The best I have found so far, and I've been consciously looking, is Sainsbury's Taste the Difference San Marzano tinned tomatoes. They are 75p a tin but so are the Tesco organic tinned tomatoes and the San Marzano ones are noticeably nicer. I also add some sugar even if it doesn't say it in the recipe as that seems to take away any bitterness. If only that worked in life.

This recipe uses fennel instead of onions in the tomato sauce, which makes it very summery and fresh tasting, and just before you serve it you stir in green olives (got to be really good quality, either fresh or in oil, not the nasty ones in brine) and big handfuls of fresh basil. I served it with crusty bread tonight and that was the only bit Little R ate. I am not doing too well in my quest to find dinners we can all eat. She keeps asking for bangers and mash.

The Fay Ripley broccoli recipe was very easy and effective. You put the broccoli florets on a baking tray and scatter with ground-up coriander seeds then drizzle liberally with olive oil. You then bake it in a hot oven for 20 mins so you get black bits on it. Really yummy.

The only thing I changed about the Sophie Dahl recipe was that I did not pour in a glass of white wine before adding the tomatoes. I just CANNOT bear to pour a glass of wine into a pot.

a country mouse bakes lemon fairy cakes

Now that Little R is 4 it is so much easier for me to get a run at making things and with all this rainy weather, cooking and baking in the warm kitchen with Radio 4 in the background is becoming quite addictive. This is the second time I have made these fairy cakes and I plan to make them again tomorrow to take along to my sister's house as she is hosting a joint Pampered Chef/Jamie Oliver cookware party (she is an inveterate multi-tasker) and is expecting a crowd.

The recipe is from this month's Country Homes and Interiors, which I bought by mistake thinking it was Country Living. That will teach me to pay attention as at £3 plus each I can't now justify buying Country Living this month. Oh it's hard being a country mouse.

The recipe is very easy if you have an electric beater. You put 150g of softened lightly salted butter (I used unsalted), 150g caster sugar, 175g self raising flour, 3 medium eggs, 1 tsp vanilla extract and the zest of an unwaxed lemon into a bowl and beat it all up until smooth. Then spoon into paper cases and bake at 180deg (fan) for 20 mins. I found less than 15 minutes was enough. I misread the recipe and added 3 tbsps of lemon juice to the batter when it was meant to go into the icing sugar for the icing at the end but the cakes were really nice with it so I will keep it that way for the future. The lemon icing is 150g icing sugar plus enough lemon juice to make the right consistency. I found that was too much icing as the recipe only made 12 cakes but perhaps I should have spun out the mixture to make 16 cakes as they rose high in the oven and now look like mini iced volcanoes.

I see the photos are in the wrong order again. Next time I will upload in reverse order and hope that works.

The first photo (which obviously should be the last one in the sequence) shows the best bit of the afternoon's activities and my current obsession - hot soapy water with fairy liquid and lots of cloths, sponges and dishwashing brushes. I have stacks of folded knitted cloths. The next exciting instalment of a country mouse writes may even reveal them to the public gaze....

a country mouse cooks sausages

Continuing my quest to find wholesome dinners that the family will actually eat and that I can cook, I made Made-Up Tuscan Sausage Stew from Fay's Family Food (p.64). I was a fish-eating veggie for nearly twenty years but in recent years I have been eating high-welfare/organic meat on occasion. I feel that cooking for the family would be a lot easier if I just gave in and ate more of it but I am struggling. I keep seeing little animal faces - baaaaaad. Making this sausage stew is an experiment for me in meat-eating as it is made with pork sausages, not my usual Quorn. They are called Debbie and Andrew's sausages and the packet makes a big deal about how well treated the piggies are and how the sausages are made from lean pork shoulder and nothing else, so I am assuming that means no piggy eyelids will be discovered on the plate. We will see at tea time how it goes - it's in the oven cooking as I write.

I modified the recipe slightly in that I put in a bouquet garni instead of a bay leaf and oregano, and I cut up the pepper, onion, carrot and celery very small so that it would go un-noticed. I also added a leek. And, as before, I cooked it all in the big silver frying pan then transferred it at great personal risk to the rectangular casserole dish and covered that with foil as I am not a well-paid actress who writes cookery books (regrettably).

Mmmm, just ate it. Delicioso, as Dora the Explorer would say. I ate the beans and sauce and left the sausages. They were delicioso too but in the end just too porky for a veggie coming slowly down from her high horse. Little R has not touched hers but perhaps today was not a good day to make it as we were at a friend's house today and that friend is a great baker and Little R paid tribute to her skills by scoffing several muffins and gingerbread men. Still, there is plenty left and she will be getting another chance at it tomorrow. The recipe says to add pesto at the end I would say that really makes the dish. I think DH will like it.

a country mouse cooks dinner

I bought yet another new cookbook the other day: Fay's Family Food http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=fay%27s+family+food
by Fay Ripley, who used to be in Cold Feet. I justified it to myself because it was reduced to £5 and really after all it's an INVESTMENT in my search for an organised life.

Last night I made Creamy Boursin Salmon Penne (P.183) from the "Don't Panic" section. I ate it and loved it, DH ate it but didn't love it and Little R didn't eat it at all. "Yuck," was her verdict. It involved mixing Greek yoghurt, tomato puree and garlicky soft cheese into a sauce and pouring that over pasta with steamed, flaked salmon and steamed broccoli. My verdict was "Yum" so we'll be having that again and Little R can have a banana.

Tonight I made One Pot Lemon Chicken With Thyme Rice (P.90). I was very attracted by the one-pot notion - Fay advises that you "use your favourite casserole dish"- until I realised that Fay is using one of those fabulous and scarily expensive casserole dishes that can be used on the hob then transferred to the oven and which also look very Jamie Oliverish on your table afterwards. I don't have such a thing. So I cooked it all in my huge silver frying pan then nearly put myself in A&E pouring it into a le Creuset rectangular casserole dish (splash splash OWWW) and covering it with tinfoil. Worked out fine. No need for vast expenditure to be made on kitchenware on http://www.johnlewis.com/, although I did enjoy contemplating that. I loved it, DH ate it without comment and Little R said yuck and ate a banana.