My Last on the Card for February on my phone was a quick pic of our cheesy sausage pasta dinner before we devoured it! The last pic on my camera was actually my Flower of the Day from yesterday… 🙂
Pasta for Dinner
Category: food
Treasures and Pleasures
My favourite treasures are the fond memories stored in everyday things, often in the most innocuous of things.
For example, in my kitchen I have three old cut glass jugs. The largest is a beautiful water jug (for serving drinking water at the dining table) that once belonged to my grandmother, and the two small jugs I remember my mum using for serving pouring cream (or often just evaporated milk) to have with tinned fruit for ‘afters’. Even now the childhood memory of eating tinned sliced peaches with evaporated milk makes me smile from the heart.
Everyone seemed to use serving jugs for everything in my childhood, whereas nowadays I suppose we tend to serve cold liquids straight from the fridge in whatever container they come in. I only use mine on special occasions, when people come round or for a specific celebration – not to keep them for ‘best’ but simply to save on the washing up! But I do enjoy the memories they bring, and take great pleasure in handling the cool chunky glass I know so well.
In my cutlery drawer I have a selection of small silver spoons given to me by my mum – the dinky salt spoon that was sometimes used for mixing up powdered mustard in an egg cup, the short and stubby rounded caddy spoon for loose-leaf tea, and the squared-off sugar shovel that always lived in the sugar bowl. I have the old sugar tongs, too, used for sugar cubes when we were being posh, although I’ve never taken sugar in either my tea or coffee so both are a bit redundant in my house, but I love them nonetheless.
I also have some old spoons that once belonged to my grandmother before being passed on to my dad, and now to me, and these spoons have also been part of my life for nearly sixty years. There are four very used and abused dessert spoons with four matching teaspoons and one huge tablespoon. The tablespoon is the very one she used when she taught me to measure out the flour for making pancakes, and is the same spoon I used this afternoon when making pancakes myself, using her basic recipe from all those years ago. I really love the familiar worn, smooth feel of it in my hand, measuring out the correct weight of the flour ounce by ounce.
So I’m sitting here tonight eating freshly-made fluffy pancakes with my cup of tea, having used my grandmother’s old spoon to measure out the main ingredients of my grandmother’s old recipe, just the way she taught me all those years ago… I can almost hear her voice, smiling and satisfied. And to be honest I’m making sure I treasure my memories while I still can, because I know from my dad that the time may come when those precious memories may disintegrate into the depths of dementia, lost in limbo forever…
Pancakes
I made some lemon and raisin pancakes this afternoon – it’s been quite a while since I made pancakes so I was a bit flummoxed when it came to remembering the recipe, so it was a case of trial and error in getting the batter consistency right, then the pan temperature right, but I got there in the end and even though they don’t look the best they taste absolutely fine… 🙂
Weekly Smile: 16 Jan 2023
I haven’t participated in Trent’s Weekly Smile for ages, but here goes…
Since having Covid two years ago this month, my sense of taste has never fully returned – it comes and goes to a greater or lesser extent, but even on good days is never as fully vibrant or nuanced as it was pre-Covid. Luckily I’ve been cooking for so long I can usually manage to season things reasonably accurately just through experience, and when eating these days I generally ‘remember’ how things taste rather than properly taste them.
I’ve had a cold recently so my sense of taste has (as usual) pretty much disappeared again for the duration. However yesterday I made a chicken and vegetable stew for dinner, which we had with creamy, buttery mashed potatoes, and for the first time in ages I could taste something of the flavour rather than just be aware of the texture of the food in my mouth – so that’s my smile for this week, I could actually slightly taste my food again! 🙂
JusJoJan: Sweet
Ooh, but I have a wicked sweet tooth! I try hard not to eat too many sweet things, but I do struggle with it…
I really love decent milk chocolate, or decent white chocolate, but not dark chocolate – it’s just too bitter for me. And caramel – oh, thick, sticky caramel, gooey or chewy, is never far from the top of my list of favourites. Not surprisingly, the combination of milk chocolate and caramel together generally hits the spot.
But at other times I also love chewy fruity sweets like wine gums and fruit pastilles – yum, my mouth is watering even thinking about it! OK, enough thinking about sweets, time to think about something else now…
Comfort Foods
I don’t always understand why comfort foods bring me such comfort, or why it is often the simplest and most bland flavours that hit the mark rather than the tastiest and most complex of confections… For me I love the creamy softness of macaroni cheese, the creamy buttery texture of beautifully smooth mashed potato, or the simplicity of a good vanilla dairy ice cream… Mmmm…!
Scottish Soup: A Sonnet
My Scottish senses love the cooking smell
Of soup that starts with deeply smoked ham hock
Boiled up with split red lentils, seasoned well
Traditional good food from fresh-made stockOr leek and tatties make the perfect base
With chicken bouillon, carrots, onions too
Add herbs and salt and pepper judged to taste
A little milk to finish – that’ll do!Pearl barley thickens broth like fattened rice
With cheap-cut beef and root veg simmered low
Soup fills you up at such a decent price
Well-blended flavours make your tastebuds glowA bowl of love with thick-sliced bread to eat
Now that’s a hearty dinner hard to beat ❤
I know I never seem able to get the hang of writing really Terrible Poetry, but I’m joining in anyway cos I really love this week’s prompt of a sonnet written about soup – what fun! 🙂
Just A Trifle
I like ready-made custard – no skin
Eaten cold with a spoon from the tin
Or with jelly in trifle
Fresh whipped cream in each mouthful
Fruits and sherry-soaked sponge set within…
April A-Z: S is for Sweet Tooth
I have a sweet tooth, but not necessarily for anything and everything sugar-rush-inducing. Sweet is good, but overly-sickly-sweet is not, and I tend to find the current tendency towards an over-the-top overkill of elaborate confectionary concoctions to be just too much for me.
For example I prefer my chocolate and my ice-cream unadulterated with affectation – no additional sauces or sprinkles or extra distractions to spoil my enjoyment, I like both to be creamy and smooth and blissfully comforting just as they are. I’m not a great cake-lover in general but if I do indulge I prefer to keep any adornment sparingly simple – moist sponge with minimal decoration.
And freshly-baked home-made cakes always taste so much better to me. I really love plain flapjacks, too, there’s just something about that particular buttery, syrupy, oat-flake-y combination that just hits the perfect sweet-spot for me… Mmmm… 🙂
Life events have conspired to pull me away from blogging over the last couple of months, and the idea of taking part in this year’s April Blogging from A-Z Challenge seems like a good way to try to get back into the habit of reading and posting regularly. Originally I thought of just using any old random words to go with the particular letter of the day, but realistically without a clear theme to work towards I’m not sure I’d be able to keep my focus for a full month… So instead I’ve opted for a relatively simple, if slightly self-indulgent work-around: This year I’ll be posting 26 things about me, nothing too taxing to write about yet still fulfilling the brief!
April A-Z: F is for Food
Food has never been just fuel for me; over the years my love of eating has been both a blessing and a curse. We all need to eat to produce energy, and enjoying something so fundamental to human survival may be fine in moderation, but not so good in excess.
Historically I am one of life’s emotional eaters; I eat not only to comfort myself but also to punish myself, to soothe my sorrows and to swallow down my disappointments. I eat to find solace in the texture and taste of food, which has inevitably led to a lifetime’s failed struggle to maintain a healthy weight. I feel bad because I’m too heavy, so I habitually eat to comfort myself, and – yeah, yeah, you get the picture…
Sadly for me since I caught Covid 15 months ago I’ve never quite fully regained my precious sense of taste and smell, so I’ve effectively lost some of the deeply-engrained satisfaction of any nuanced savouring of comfort food. Yet still I search in vain for that elusive hit of old, trying this previous favourite and that previous favourite to no avail… sigh!
Life events have conspired to pull me away from blogging over the last couple of months, and the idea of taking part in this year’s April Blogging from A-Z Challenge seems like a good way to try to get back into the habit of reading and posting regularly. Originally I thought of just using any old random words to go with the particular letter of the day, but realistically without a clear theme to work towards I’m not sure I’d be able to keep my focus for a full month… So instead I’ve opted for a relatively simple, if slightly self-indulgent work-around: This year I’ll be posting 26 things about me, nothing too taxing to write about yet still fulfilling the brief!
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