Or not, depending on my mood
These little cakes fresh from the oven probably couldn’t look any more beige-brown boring if they tried, but oh, the warm and comforting sweet smell of cinnamon and vanilla fills the kitchen with the most wonderful aroma. As soon as they cool enough to eat, I’m going to have one with a steaming hot cup of coffee – and that’s another lovely smell to add to my day at home! 🙂
Today I want soup for lunch, so here it is in the making.
Being an old-fashioned sort, I always have a bag of chicken bones squirreled away in the freezer, added to bit by bit as I go along until I have enough of a collection to boil up for a big pot of stock. And in turn the resulting chicken stock makes whatever I fancy at the time. Usually the base for soup, but sometimes a hearty stew or a risotto.
But as today I want soup, I’ve added a handful of oatmeal for thickening, a handful of pearl barley because I love the creamy conststency it makes, chopped garlic, onion, carrot and sweet potato, and seasoning to taste. For me today that means black pepper, a shake of chilli powder, and a good dose of mixed dried herbs, parsely, and of course bayleaf.
My soup needs to simmer gently for a couple of hours, and then about half an hour before I want to eat it, I’ll add a decent portion of frozen sweetcorn kernels to cook through – and then after warming through some crusty bread to go with it, we’ll enjoy some yummy soup for lunch! 🙂
I’m generally quite a confident cook, so am always happy to play around and experiment with different ideas and just wait and see how things turn out. Luckily for me, whatever new concoction of ingredients I experiment with, my husband is always happy to give it a go and I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the absolute culinary disasters I’ve had over the last 20 years we’ve been together.
But it’s easy to tell my mind’s a bit preoccupied just now, because recently we almost had a foodie FUBAR incident with a normal everyday decidedly non-experimental basic sponge mixture for a quick-and-easy Eve’s pudding. (NB Eve’s pudding is like apple crumble but with a soft sponge on top rather than a dense and crunchy crumble.)
What happened was I was thinking about tons of other stuff while I was preparing everything. I peeled, cored and sliced the apples on autopilot, placed them in an oven-proof dish, sprinkled lemon juice and a little brown sugar and some cinnamon, and microwaved them for a minute or so to start to soften a little.
And while the apples were in the microwave, I got on with making the sponge mix – equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs, flour all beaten up together to a smooth thick batter consistency. Then I added some cinnamon powder and vanilla extract to flavour the mix and reached up to my spice rack to grab some ginger powder, giving it a good heaped-teaspoon-worth shake over the bowl to give the cake a little kick.
At this point, with the smell of cinammony apples coming from the microwave, my husband came through to see what I was making, and asked to taste the cake batter before I poured it over the apples and put it into the oven to bake. He took a taste on the tip of his finger, and pulled a puzzled face. He took another taste just to be sure…
Um… That tastes funny… Have you used curry powder instead of cinnamon, he asked? I picked up the tub in question – nope, definitely cinnamon. So I tasted it myself… yuk! That wasn’t ginger I was tasting… It was garlic! In my pre-occupied mind-state it seems I’d picked up the powdered garlic instead of the powdered ginger off the spice rack and had applied it liberally to the sweet cake mix without even noticing… Duh!
So the dodgy garlic-infused cake batter went in the bin and I started again, using ginger powder this time, and thankfully the resulting Eve’s pudding was as yummy as usual, eaten hot with cold vanilla ice-cream…Mmmm…!
However, the epilogue to this story is that my husband was doing something DIY-ish the other day and I reminded him to be careful. He looked at me with a grin and said – You know I’ve been doing stuff like this for years, I do know what to do… I mean, I don’t tell you how much garlic to put in a cake, do I?
Ha ha ha ha OMG will I ever live it down! 😀
Fandango’s One Word Challenge prompt today is dinner, so I’ve taken it literally and am sharing a pic of my dinner with you tonight. We’ve got oven-baked scampi, petit pois, and cheese-and-onion-stuffed baked potato. And after a busy day out in the garden again we’re eating on a tray in front of the TV.
Last night I baked four potatoes and we ate two fresh from the oven with chilli salmon, tomatoes and coleslaw – yum!
So tonight I took the two leftover cold baked potatoes and halved them lengthways. I then took a dessert spoon and carefully scooped out most of the flesh, keeping a very small layer of potato over the skins to create a perfect potato skin bowl. I mashed the cold potato with grated cheese, pre-fried onions and seasoning to taste before heaping the well-mixed filling back into the potato skins and sticking them in the oven again to heat through and crisp up.
It’s a great way to use leftover baked potato, and I make it with cheese and onion, with cheese and mushroom, or with cheese and bacon – I really love it done this way so will often bake extra beforehand just so I have leftovers! PS The scampi and peas came straight from freezer to oven and microwave respectively 🙂
No dried pasta or rice to be had
On the shelves of our shops – it’s too bad
Panic buying all stock
Trolleys running amok
Selfish people make others so sad
What’s definitely made me smile today is a big pot of soup simmering away on the stove – the pink bit at the front is a smoked gammon joint, and the rest is diced onion, leek, carrot, and swede with seasoning to taste (including a bayleaf). It’s pouring with rain outside, and I can hear the wind buffeting the swaying branches of the trees in the garden, but I’m warm and dry in my cosy kitchen with the wonderful wholesome smell of soup cooking for dinner tonight – yum! 🙂
I haven’t written any poetry for ages, but Chelsea Owens is holding a Weekly Terrible Poetry Contest, and this week’s topic is ‘Love’… So I thought I’d have a bash, just for fun – here goes… Ahem…
Sweet Ambivalence…
I love milk chocolate, smooth and creamy thick
Could eat a houseful, yummy brick by brick
Till gorged by cocoa, melty-warm and slick
Pure liquefied indulgence makes me sick…
Thank you for joining me on my inaugural journey into bad taste poetry 🙂
