Tag: food

Weekly Smile: 16 Jan 2023

~ Ruth ~ 7 Comments

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! 🙂

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Comfort Foods

~ Ruth ~ 5 Comments

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

~ Ruth ~ 6 Comments

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! 🙂

April A-Z: S is for Sweet Tooth

~ Ruth ~ 11 Comments

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

~ Ruth ~ 9 Comments

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

~ Ruth ~ 1 Comment
  • 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

~ Ruth ~ 6 Comments

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

Rock Buns

~ Ruth ~ 5 Comments

I decided to make some traditional rock buns this afternoon – I used to make them often when I was younger, but haven’t made any for years. Rock buns are a favourite family tea-time treat that have sadly gone out of fashion with today’s more sophisticated tastes. Proper childhood comfort food to cheer me up – a real blast from my baking past.

They’re so easy to make, and thankfully their rough-and-ready appearance (rock-like, hence the name) means neatness is never a requirement. I love the crumbly, crusty exterior and the spicy, fruity interior that together creates such a satisfyingly perfect accompaniment to a lovely cup of tea. If you’ve never had rock buns, they’re not quite as sweet and rich as cake, not quite as light and airy as bread, and in spite of their strange name are not quite as solidly slice-able in texture as a scone, either.

Happily it seems I’ve not lost my touch and these have turned out a treat – I’ve already had one (OK maybe two, just to make sure!) with my afternoon cuppa, and hopefully they’ll be a nice surprise for my husband when he gets home from work later tonight – yum! 🙂