Tag: recipe

Dessert du Jour: Strawberry Cheesecake

A delicious and extremely filling pudding which we enjoyed with both our morning coffee and our evening meal of macaroni cheese, cheesy biscuits and salad, accompanied by delicious Swedish gin (tak Lena) We had two quizzes to catch up on and scored 8 on one and 9 on the other, dragging our average back below 10.
A1 is reading The Hanging Wood by Martin Edwards, an unlikely and confusingly overpopulated crime novel. A2 is reading House of Silence* by Patricia Marques; a disappointingly dull story about a telepathic Portuguese detective.

Damn Fine Cherry Pie and Damn Fine Coffee

A pre-birthday cake for the incomparable Chris.
Recipe: line a pie tin with shop-bought shortcrust pastry. Beat 100g of butter with 100g sugar, beat in 2 eggs, stir in 100g ground almonds and a dollop of Amaretto. Fill pastry case with this mixture, poke in 200g of stoned cherries, bake at 160 degrees for half an hour or until done.
We served this after our family dinner of spaghetti and sauces but sadly did not do the quiz because Dave was indisposed. Next time then.
Later, 23:00:
We were a bit dubious about these possible noctilucent clouds, but Space Weather seemed to think they were:

Manchester Pudding

To celebrate our return from Manchester, A2 looked for a regional dish and found this pudding. Recipe adapted to our gadgets: warm milk, sugar butter and breadcrumbs in microwave, beat in egg yolks, air fry on bake setting for 15 mins, stir, give it a couple more minutes, slather on the jam, dollop on the egg whites beaten with sugar, nuke it at 200° for 4 minutes. Done and yum!
A2 is reading Undoctored by Adam Kay.

Fried Alaska

Our attempt at making individual baked Alaskas in the air fryer as a coda to our family lunch of porky veg and rice. It worked very well so here is the recipe:
Cut a shop-bought Swiss roll into 6 pieces and put each piece in an empty Gü pot.
Fill pots to top with shop-bought ice cream.
Beat 2 egg whites with 40g of caster sugar until stiff and spoon on top of each pot.
Put pots in freezer until after dinner, then air fry at 200° for 3 minutes.
Caramba!
We did 2 weeks’ worth of quizzes and scored 12 in one and 10.5 in the other so still in double figures.
A1 is reading Strindberg’s Star* by Jan Wallentin, a kind of halfhearted attempt at a Swedish version of Katherine Neville’s The Eight: a conspiracy involving ancient artefacts with many real-life characters and events dragged in (the titular Strindberg and his brother, Himmler, Fritz Haber, Nobel, Swedenborg, etc etc). But unlike KN’s splendidly enjoyable effort, JW gives us an incoherent plot and a useless and uninvolving protagonist, and poor writing (not helped by a US translation). Rubbish — but not entertaining rubbish, sadly.
A2 is reading Hazards of Time Travel* by Joyce Carol Oates; a boring and pointless novel in which a bolshy teenager from an ultra-authoritarian USA is punished by being transported to the 1950s.
What We Missed
Last night was one of the best aurora displays of the past 500 years, easily visible from here. But we slept through it.

Nagar Kirtan

A2 went to the Gurdwara to watch the Vaisakhi parade, which included a posse of orange-clad blokes on motorbikes, a couple of men beating a giant car-towed drum with sheathed swords (seen on right of photo), a detail of women sweeping the road with brooms, an orange flower-topped wheeled cage filled with young men (seen on left of photo) and, bringing up the rear, a lorryload of old ladies. A sunny morning and a happy occasion. Makes you want to be Sikh.
A2 is reading Exhalation by Ted Chiang.
For our dinner and to celebrate Record Shop Day, A1 cooked this delicious recipe from his current book (The Vinyl Detective: Noise Floor):

Vinyl Detective Macaroni Cheese

“Six hundred millilitres of milk,” I said, “three hundred of water, three hundred grams of macaroni, sixty-five of butter…”
“You understand that all of these ingredients have to be of the highest quality?” said Nevada.
“Of course,” said Lambert.
[…]
“Anyway, so you put it all in the same pot…”
“Right,” I said. “Milk, water, butter, macaroni. Cook gently, stirring so it doesn’t stick, until it begins to simmer. Then lower the heat and cook for ten minutes. Add three hundred and fifty grams of cheddar, grated.”
[…]
“And seventy-five millilitres of double cream,” I said.
“Then turn off the heat, cover the pan and leave it for a while to set. And then eat it at any time.”

We only had 150gm of macaroni, so we halved the quantities and it was ample for two.

A Very Merry (Coptic) Christmas

The family came round for the first time this year so we treated them to stew with lots of wine and Christmas Pudding Ice Cream Bombe with lots of brandy, followed by cheese and biscuits. We absolutely applied our brains and scored 11 on the GSQ.
A1 is reading The Night Man by Jorn Lier Horst (thanks A2) in a disturbingly bloodstained copy. It’s a grim tale of refugees being abused and forced into criminal behaviour, with distressing results.
A2 is reading The Murder Box* by Olivia Kiernan which was implausible but an easy read.

Eyes Down

Our Boxing Day family meal featured a reprise of yesterday’s spread plus mushroom wellington for the meat-refusers and a delicious walnut panettone tiramisu assembled by A1. We played bingo for our presents and scored 9.5 on the GSQ.
A2 is reading Airside by Christopher Priest (thx A1): descriptions of real airports interspersed with reviews of real films featuring airports, loosely linked with the disappearance of a fictional Hollywood actress. Not bad though.

Feed Us All!

Here’s our attempt at the Platinum Jubilee Pudding which we consumed after a very filling and delicious meal of roast lamb,new potatoes, yorkshire puddings, gravy and veg. [The pudding itself was OK in its citrussy way, but not a patch on our usual fruity cakey trifles and we’ll probably never make one again but we had most of the ingredients already and didn’t have to use the recipe which would have taken hours, cost a fortune and left us with a bucketful of superfluous egg whites.] We were too full to think and scored only 7 on the GSQ. Shame!

Storm Franklin

Oh no, not another one!
It was a dark and stormy night and the morning saw broken branches everywhere and two trees up the road felled. Our sheltered weather station recorded a gust of 34 mph (there might have been worse ones — it is only working intermittently) and we are well on track for our rainiest month ever.
The wind died away and Orion shone down on us. Our family meal was a magnificent cheese pithivier and we scored a sad 8.5 on the GSQ.
Admin2 is reading Snap by Belinda Bauer, a light read about a thieving orphan searching for his mother’s murderer.

Eggsposed!


Tea eggs for our family meal complaining about our plan to cut them up and eat them.
Admin2 is reading On by Adam Roberts, a tale of war, slavery and intrigue in a postapocalyptic society trapped on a vertiginous wall, which went on and on and on and then suddenly off. We are watching The Bridge Season 4 and scored 11.5 on the GWQ.