Pasta for Dinner

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… 🙂

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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…

Weekly Prompt: Treasure

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! 🙂

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…!

Ragtag Daily Prompt: Understand

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 stock

Or 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 glow

A 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…

Word of the Day: Custard

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!

Maw-Maw T’s Cornbread Recipe

• 1 block oleo (here in UK that’s 4oz baking margarine)
• 3 eggs
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup cornmeal
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1 cup milk

Combine oleo, eggs and sugar until fluffy (about 5 mins), sift dry ingredients and add alternately with milk. Pour into a greased pan and bake at 350 degrees F until done (approx 45 mins)

After posting about my mother-in-law’s hand-written recipe cards for this week’s Weekly Prompt, a couple of people have asked me for her mother’s recipe for cornbread, a family favourite from my husband’s childhood and one he still uses today – so here it is, definitely cake-y rather than bread-y despite the name but lovely in its rich yellowy sweetness… Enjoy! 🙂

Firm Family Favourites

Tucked safely inside a small old cardboard box on our book-shelf sits a stack of well-used hand-written recipe cards passed on to my husband from his mother, detailing some of his favourite family recipes from childhood. Included are his grandmother’s recipe for cornbread – a firm favourite with our grandchildren – one for Mrs Simmon’s pecan pie (whoever she was), one for a luscious lemon meringue pie copied from a tin of condensed milk in the late 1950s, and one for sweet potato souffle which I just adore.

To be honest the whole concept of sweet potato as a dessert seemed a bit strange to me to begin with until I thought about carrot cake, which I also love.

If you’ve never tried it there’s absolutely nothing vegetable-y tasting about it at all, if anything it’s a bit caramelised over-sweet for some tastes. It’s basically cooked mashed sweet potato mixed with egg yolks, brown sugar, cinnamon and cream, then whipped egg whites are folded-in before it’s all put into an oven-proof dish and topped with dots of butter and mini marshmallows. Bake it for about 20-25 minutes until the marshmallows are all melted and browned and you have a gooey, scrummy sweet potato souffle to enjoy – yum! 🙂

Weekly Prompts: Recipe Cards