April's Cookery Book

Well, this book was a trip down memory lane. Published in 2008, when Bella was a toddler and before Angus was born, I completely associate this book with being a stay at home mum with very young children. Just one flick through it, and I was back in our kitchen in Leeds in the world of play groups and coffee mornings and nappies. One recipe in particular in this book, the cheese and ham muffins, was my go-to lunch recipe when my friend and her children would come for lunch. We had a standing Tuesday lunchtime date and would take it in turns to host, meeting with all our children before taking them home to be put down for naps. The muffins, I remember, were easy to prepare, delicious warm, and enjoyed by babies, toddlers and adults so a win. I cherish those memories and those weekly lunches, coffees, and play dates with my friends back then which, frankly, kept me sane. 

Tana Ramsay's Family Kitchen is a solid, practical cookery book, arranged into useful chapters like "cooking from the cupboard" and "trying new tastes", along with the usual breakfast, lunch, dinner and pudding. The only reason it's still on my shelf is that there are a couple or recipes in it which I use all the time which mean I haven't yet donated it to the charity shop. One of those is baked pumpkin, pancetta and pea risotto, although I use butternut squash instead or pumpkin and bacon instead of pancetta. It was a revelation to me that you could bake a risotto, instead of standing over the hob stirring for half an hour, and I use that recipe a lot.

But, looking through this book with fresh eyes last month, I really struggled to find things I wanted to cook. The tone felt patronising at times, the desserts seemed babyish, and there are so few imaginative meat free recipes. I realised that I, and my family, had perhaps outgrown this book. However, I persevered and found some little gems within those pages which we had fun trying out.

The first was "lime and ginger salmon fillets with noodles".

The fish is marinated in honey, mustard, ginger and lime juice before being pan fried and then put to one side. 

While the fish is cooking, you boil noodles and broccoli and then, while the salmon is resting on a plate, use the remaining marinade to make a sauce in the pan with some melted butter. 

It's a simple recipe which all comes together very quickly and everyone liked it. I would have preferred a little more sauce to mix in with the noodles and broccoli, but I guess the need to keep things plain goes back to catering for young children and their need for things to not be "mixed in" but easily separated and identified. (Actually, Bella and Angus can still be a bit like that now....)

Next we have "chicken in a pot", or pot roast chicken. This was ideal for a Sunday night dinner when I want to feed everyone something hearty and a bit more special than weeknight fare, and have time to spend a bit longer in the kitchen, but can't be bothered to cook a full on roast dinner. 

You begin by browning bacon and onions, before removing them and then browning the chicken in the same pan. Now, browning a whole chicken is no mean feat, let me tell you. It's like wrestling with two forks. Then you add carrots and leeks, the onions and bacon, plus stock, chopped tomatoes and herbs before bringing the whole lot to the boil and then putting it in the oven for an hour. 

Half way through the cooking time you remove the lid, letting some of the liquid evaporate and the breast of the chicken brown a little. At the very end, you remove all the meat and vegetables with a slotted spoon and put them on a serving plate, before thickening the liquid left in the casserole dish into a gravy.

It's wonderful, as you would expect. The chicken is moist, the vegetables tender, and the gravy full of the flavour of bay and thyme. We ate it with roasted new potatoes. There was a lot more left over then I'd expected, quite a lot of meat, vegetables and gravy, and so we turned them into a leftovers risotto later that week.

I felt uninspired by the puddings chapter in this book but the "tea time treats" section was full of good ideas for cakes, lunchbox treats and the like. The "almond and apricot yoghurt-coated bites" caught my eye - little homemade cereal bars, topped with a yogurt icing.

Omitting the almonds (nut free school) I mixed rice crispies, chopped dried apricots and dessicated coconut in a large bowl.

Next, melt together syrup, sugar and butter and let them boil a little to become more syrupy, then mix into the dried ingredients. 

Then these sticky morsels are baked until they form round biscuity, chewy bites onto which you are supposed to drizzle a little icing when they have cooled. 

Except mine didn't work. They came out of the oven as crumbly and sticky as they went in, and could only be eaten with a spoon. I must not have let the syrup boil for long enough, so I baked them again, but still there was no way on earth I could call these lunchbox treats.

I scraped the lot into a tuppaware container where is was absolutely lovely scattered on top of Greek yogurt for dessert all week, sort of a DIY Muller Crunch Corner.

So, I am wondering now whether to hang on to this book or not. On balance I think it's earned its place on the shelf, certainly for a few stand-out recipes, although I would certainly substitute a lot of the meat for vegetarian options now. But our children, at almost-ten and twelve and a half, are no longer the small people wanting easily-identifiable food served on their yellow plastic Miffy plates. However, they are not quite old enough yet to embrace the kinds of food that John and I want to eat - they still remain suspicious of lentils, wary of chilli and flat-out refuse to eat aubergine. It's tricky, finding meals that everyone likes, that are easy to prepare, healthy and also budget friendly, isn't it? Thank goodness for pasta pesto. 

Bank Holiday Weekend

Thank you so much for your nice comments on my shawl, I am glad you liked it. Sadly I haven't worn it yet, as it's felt too cold and I've chosen thicker scarves. Thicker scarves needed in May, honestly! It's not been the best of bank holiday weekends, all things considered. John has been at work the last three days, Angus has been unwell with an ear infection (which is now thankfully clearing up), so neither he or I have had much sleep, and there is that lingering anxiety that falls over the house when a child is unwell, making going anywhere or doing anything difficult, especially when one parent is working. The days felt long. While dry, it's still unseasonably cold and I'm kind of fed up with it now. I almost felt like I wanted a hat on when we were at the beach at on Saturday. 

But I don't want to whinge at you, because actually everything is fine really and we did do some nice stuff over the weekend, in amongst the appointments and chores and administration of painkillers. May is a good month, with two bank holidays and everything starting to bloom around you and the trees in full leaf in the brightest green.

I pottered in the garden a bit, pulling up the daffodils and tulips I should have dealt with last month and planting some sweet peas. I do love a sweet pea.

It was, if you sat in the sun and wore a coat, just warm enough for a coffee outside too. Just.

I pottered indoors too, moving around pictures and making changes here and there.

This little barometer, which belonged to my late Grandfather, has been hiding in Angus's  bedroom for the last year. 

I decided it was wasted up there and have moved it to the hall where we can all look at it every day and see if it's correct, which it is.

I made cheese scones for the first time and they rose. I feel like this alone deserves a mention here. I used this recipe.

The best thing about cheese scones is when they are still warm and the butter melts in. 

We had a really nice walk on the beach on Saturday afternoon. So much seemed to be in bloom, there were wild flowers everywhere you looked. 

The weather was all over the place, sunny then cloudy and windy too. We still got ice creams from the kiosk even though it was cold and the wind blew my hair into my Mr Whippy, and a chocolate cone proved more effective than Calpol in improving Angus's mood. 

We seemed to watch a band of rain move around us while we walked (I do love a dramatic sky) but amazingly didn't get rained on.

Today we visited Portsmouth Historic Dockyard which was a really nice day out with family, even if I did get a bit lost on HMS Victory, and bang my head a few times on the low ceilings. And now I am looking forward to collapsing on the sofa and watching the final episode of Line of Duty, which aired last night, so I've been avoiding all radio and TV today because I don't want to find out who, or what, the mysterious "H" is too soon, and I'm really hoping it's not a big let down.

I hope you had a nice bank holiday weekend, whatever you were doing. We've got another one to look forward to at the end of the month too, how lovely is that? 

Ombre Swirl Shawl

Hello there! I am very excited to have a finished crochet shawl to show you tonight. I often find I binge on a TV programme while working on a particular crochet project, especially if it's one that demands a lot of time. So I feel like this is my "Line of Duty" shawl, as I now totally associate it with the excellent BBC TV drama of the same name, since John and I watched the first four seasons back to back throughout April, and I can honestly say it's some of the best crime TV I've ever watched with such excellent writing, characterisation and acting  - just excellent, and if you get a chance to watch any of it on iplayer, do. We haven't started watching Season 5 yet because we can't cope with waiting a full week between each episode, so we'll binge on it in a few weeks. I have had to unravel quite a few rows of this shawl, not because the pattern's difficult (it really isn't) but because I was too engrossed in the drama on TV.

Anyway, the shawl. It's the Ombre Shawl by Sarah Shrimpton of Annaboo's House, using a 5 mm hook and one ball/cake of Scheepjes Whril in Raspberry Rocky Road. 

I found it really hard to choose a colour way for this project. I really struggled to see how the colour changes would look worked up into a finished garment, and still don't really like the hot pink in this choice. 

Luckily, the hot pink section, which is at the centre of the triangle, the start of the project, can be hidden around the neck with a bit of rearranging.

But I like it best when the pink is a little softer, like below. With hindsight, I probably would have preferred the Watermelon Hellraiser colourway.

But I do like it very much. It's large, drapes beautifully and required very little blocking. I especially like the way the simplicity of the pattern shows of the colour gradients, without being too dull.

I haven't worn it yet, but I think it's going to be the perfect spring to summer scarf, something that I can easily wear with a white t-shirt and jeans. It's quite feminine I think, so I will wear it with something plain or striped, and I think it will work really well with denim. 

Every last drop

The bank holiday weekend feels like longer than three days ago. A few days back at work and school, back into the rush of after school activities, combined with a sudden drop in temperature, and it's like I imagined that gorgeous, sunny, relaxed few days we had last weekend. It's always the way when you jump straight into summer temperatures - it's a horrible shock when the wind and rain remind you that yes, it is still April.

It's unusual for John to have the full four days off work so we were determined to make the most of the Easter long weekend by doing absolutely nothing useful or productive. No decorating, no DIY, no sorting out cupboards - who even are we?!

Food always features heavily in our Easter celebrations. Bella and Angus aren't as interested in making Easter nests as they used to be, which is fine with me as they aren't my number one choice. New traditions are being formed in the making of chocolate bark: white and dark chocolate melted, swirled together and sprinkled with bashed up mini eggs and some mini marshmallows.

I would have liked to have made a Simnel cake, but it's only me that likes it so that seemed a bit of a waste. Instead I made a chocolate malt cake from this book, something I knew everyone would like. We cut into it on Monday after a barbecue and there's only one piece left now so I think we can assume it was popular.

We had a big family meal at my parents' house on Sunday with an egg hunt for the kids (with cryptic clues to solve - they aren't toddlers pottering around the flower beds with their baskets anymore...) and since my mum cooked the roast lamb, we all brought dessert, and my contribution was lemon meringue roulade.

I used this recipe which I've made before and it works really well, except that last time I was disappointed by the lack of lemon flavour, so this time I upped the amount of lemon curd from two tablespoons to almost a full jar, and it was much improved for it. 

There was also a lovely cream tea on Saturday afternoon, a late Mother's Day gift for my mum from my sisters and I, and also a fabulous brunch on Bank Holiday Monday. It was just the four of us and I was feeling virtuous and hungry after a morning run and, after two weeks of eight hours unbroken sleep each night, full of a strange feeling of both energy and calm which I think is what it's like to be rested. It's a unfamiliar feeling and I liked it. I ordered toasted sourdough topped with pesto, avocado and poached eggs, served with roasted tomatoes on the vine and a side of bubble and squeak. I could eat food like that all day every day.

I enjoyed having an Easter tree this year. Rather than hunt for tree branches I found some old sprigs of pussy willow I had knocking around and used stones to weight them into place in the bottom of the vase. 

We made time on Easter Sunday afternoon to go for a walk in the woods to one of my favourite places for spotting bluebells. 

I try to go every spring because I think it's worth the effort. This patch of woodland is hidden from the path and it's only when you turn into the wood and scramble up the path that you suddenly see all this spread out in front of you. 

It makes me glad to be alive.

I think this one was enjoyed it too, even if he was a bit hot.

I spent a pleasant hour in the garden on Monday creating a little succulent garden for our outdoor table which was looking a little bare.

I found a large bowl that I bought in IKEA a while ago, but which I never use as it's huge and doesn't fit in any of my cupboards in the kitchen. I store it in the garage where of course I forget all about it. I filled the bottom with pieces of broken pottery for drainage then a half sand/half compost mix, before adding four succulents I bought for £10 in B&Q.

My track record with succulents in the house is not good (I am certain I have been over watering) but I'm told they thrive on neglect and sunshine, so I'm hoping this little collection does okay over the summer months.

I'm glad we made the most of doing nothing productive, it's a very good plan.