Macaroni Cheese

31 May 2009 21:18

Macaroni Cheese

Macaroni Cheese

This is without doubt the tastiest macaroni cheese recipe which I have tried. It also has the added benefit that my family will actually eat leftovers of it, which they wont do with anything else, this is a real bonus as I often cook too much pasta due to not weighing much in the way of ingredients, when I have done the same recipe a few times.

Serves 4

225g/7oz macaroni
90g/3oz butter
1 onion, finely chopped
3 tablespoons plain flour
2 cups milk
2 teaspoons wholegrain mustard
150g/5 oz mature Cheddar, grated
100g/3oz Cheddar grated

Cook the pasta in a large pan of rapidly boiling salted water until al dente. Drain and return to the pan.

Preheat the oven to 180 C (350 F/Gas 4) and grease a 1.5 litre ovenproof dish.

Melt the butter in a large pan over low heat, add the onion and cook for 5 minutes, or until softened. Stir in the flour and cook for 1 minute, or until pale and foaming. Remove from the heat and gradually stir in the milk. Return to the heat and stir constantly until the sauce boils and thickens. Reduce the heat and simmer for 2 minutes. Stir in the mustard and about three-quarters of the combined cheeses. Add the drained, cooked pasta and stir until coated in the mixture. Spoon into the dish and smooth the surface.

Sprinkle the remaining cheese over the top, then bake in the oven for about 15 minutes.

Don’t miss out the mustard from this recipe, as I reckon it really peps the whole thing up. I don’t add salt as there is plenty of salt in the cheese already, and we are trying to cut down on salt for health reasons.

I got this recipe from a Family Circle book called The Complete Pasta Cookbook.

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Peachy Chocolate Bake

25 May 2009 22:21

Peachy Chocolate Bake

Peachy Chocolate Bake

We had this for our pudding yesterday for the first time, and I’ll definitely be doing it again.

7oz/200g plain dark chocolate, broken into squares
4oz/115g unsalted butter
4 eggs, separated
4oz/115g sugar
15oz/425g tin peach slices, drained
serves 6

Preheat the oven to 160C/325F/Gas 3

Melt the chocolate with the butter in a glass bowl over simmering water. Remove from the heat.

In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the sugar until thick and pale.

Beat the egg yolk mixture into the melted chocolate and butter mixture, until well combined.

In a clean, grease-free bowl, whisk the egg whites until stiff.

Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Fold the drained peach slices into the mixture, then tip into a buttered ovenproof dish.

Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until risen and just firm. Serve hot with cream or ice cream.

This pudding has a serious amount of chocolate in it, and as there were only 3 of us again for Sunday dinner, I halved the quantity of everything except the peaches. It worked out perfect for 3 people who don’t want to end up like elephants. I baked it in the oven for about 20-25 minutes, which gave a nice slightly dried out, crisp texture to the surface.

I got this recipe from a book called Heavenly Chocolate by Christine France.

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Compost Corner

25 May 2009 13:06

I’ve been gardening for a very long time. It was my dad’s hobby and I helped him from a very early age. Over the years I’ve had 5 different gardens, and even although I’ve had my present garden for over 20 years, I’ve never made my own compost.

Well, that has all changed since I became the proud owner of a new compost bin yesterday. I was given the bin by my friend Annella who had ordered it as she thought it was a bargain too good to be missed. However, when she read the instructions she decided that she didn’t have time to wait for the slow process of compost making. She is 83 and thinks that 6 -18 months is too long to wait at her age. Mind you I think she is good for at least another 10 years and I’m sure that I’ll be passing plenty of home-made compost down along the road to her garden over the years.

Well, that is if I’m successful in making it. I am following the instructions to the letter, so it won’t be for want of trying.

It feels to me that I have a big baby in the garden, which is in need of nurture and I can’t tell you how virtuous and green glowish I feel now that I’m feeding all my veggie waste, egg shells, tea bags and coffee grounds into my new toy.

Annella called it her Dalek, but my husband thought it looks more like a Chumbley (in foreground in the picture.)

Mind you, I’m a bit worried about attracting unwanted visitors in the shape of rats. Ants are bad enough. So, at the first sniff of a rat, the experiment will be over, and I’ll be back to putting all the garden waste in the council brown bin and buying my compost ready made.

I think we were pretty good, waste management-wise even before this as we only have our wheely bin emptied once a fortnight. Sometimes there are 3 adults in the household and other times there are 5 of us but we have never been anywhere near having a full bin.

I know of some households of only 2 adults who have rubbish spilling out of the top of their bins come collection day. I don’t understand how they can generate so much garbage. We live really close to one of the many recycling centres in Fife so we don’t have any excuses for having full bins.

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Recipe books

24 May 2009 23:04

Recipe books

Recipe books

I’ve inherited family recipe books which belonged to my mother and my granny. Over the years they collected recipes from magazines and friends and kept the most successful ones for their books. I started doing the same thing myself years ago and only recently began adding recipes to this blog, partly because I’m pretty sure that my family will be flying the nest fairly soon and if they want to know how mum made something, then it will eventually end up here for them.

It is all very handy having things printed on the computer, and no doubt for their generation it is the way to go, but I can’t help thinking that you miss out on such a lot of the charm of a home made recipe book. I am the older generation now as mum and gran have both shuffled off this mortal coil – that makes me seem ancient and I hope this doesn’t sound morbid, but it struck me that their handwritten recipes are really the only examples of their handwriting that I have, along with some cards.

So I think it is a great idea to keep up a tradition of handwritten stuff as it is so much more personal than printing on a computer and it gives the next generations something to leaf through in years to come. Especially as people seem to be getting into family histories so much now.

I know from personal experience that whenever someone close to you pops their clogs there is a general search amongst family members to gather up the best photographs taken over the years as reminders, and sometimes they are so bad and old that the person is hardly recognisable but somehow a person’s handwriting is usually so individual it is still very familiar to you, long after they are gone.

When my dad was seriously ill in hospital and I was stuck 500 miles away from him and unable to visit, I did the only thing that I could do at that time and sent a card. I was lucky to be working at that time with a woman who had spent quite a long time in hospitals over the years, and she told me to put a stamped addressed envelope and writing paper in with the Get Well card as she had often wished for that when she was marrooned in various hospital wards over the years. I would never have thought of doing that before, and I am grateful that she mentioned it, because my dad was able to write to me and 29 years later I still have his letter. He died later on that year and we don’t have any other examples of his handwriting.

Honestly I’m not being morbid. It’s just that I know how interesting these things can be to later generations.

We found a letter written to Jack’s great grandmother from his great grandfather when we were clearing out a family home. It is over 130 years old and he addressed her as “dear wife.” I wonder if he ever called her by her name.

Anyway, this post came about because I noticed a post by Susan Beal at West Coast Crafty where she shows a Mother’s Day gift which she compiled for the family including handwritten recipes and notes and I was really glad to see that someone else is keeping up the tradition of creating family heirlooms.

My recipe book is just a simple hardback notebook which was very cheap, but it was very easy to make a cloth cover to fit it with some material from my stash and instantly turn it into something altogether classier and unique. Fabric covered notebooks are so expensive in the shops.

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Chocolate Mousse

19 May 2009 12:04

cropped-choc-cream-cloud-good
This is a real favourite with my family. I can’t remember where I got the recipe from but I do recall that it was called Chocolate Cream Cloud but it is really just a lovely easy mousse.

6oz or 150g of dark chocolate
4 large eggs (separated)
4 tsp. sugar
1/2 pint of whipping or double cream
alcohol of choice (optional)

Melt the chocolate in a glass bowl over a pan of hot water. Separate the eggs and whip the whites until stiff. Remove the bowl of melted chocolate from above the pan and stir with a wooden spoon until it is smooth and a bit cooler. Add the sugar to the egg yolks and stir until smooth.
Then add the egg mixture to the melted chocolate. Mix together well with the wooden spoon.
Using the metal spoon fold a small amount of the beaten egg whites into the chocolate mixture to loosen it, then add the rest of the beaten egg whites. Now whip the cream until stiff.
If you are going for the wickedly adult version – add a dessertspoon or more of your choice of booze to your dessert glasses (Tia Maria, Baileys or Grand Marnier are all good.)
Now spoon a quantity of the chocolate mixture into the glasses.
Fold about half of the whipped cream into the remaining chocolate mixture. Spoon some of this into your glasses. Then spoon in some cream and keep layering it all until your glasses are full.
Decorate with grated chocolate. The easiest way of doing this is to use a potato peeler on the edge of the chocolate. Not nearly such hard work or messy as a grater.
For a mocha version add a heaped teaspoon of instant coffee granules to the cream before whipping it. Yum.
Obviously you should use fresh eggs for this but in over thirty years of making this dessert with raw eggs I’ve never had any problems – even with toddlers eating it.

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MPs' corruption

18 May 2009 23:59

On Thursday 16 August 1660 Samuel Pepys wrote

“This morning my Lord (all things being ready) carried me by coach to Mr. Crew’s, (in the way talking how good he did hope my place would be to me, and in general speaking that it was not the salary of any place that did make a man rich, but the opportunity of getting money while he is in the place.)”

Samuel Pepys was being congratulated on getting a new job. I think it was in Naval procurement, and although the pay was not fantastic, there was ample scope for enrichment by way of back-handers and greasing of palms. According to his diary he took every chance he could to enhance his fortune.

It is quite depressing to think that even although we are 449 years beyond his times, we don’t seem to have been able to improve matters. There will always be people who are disgustingly greedy and they really just can’t help it. Unfortunately, the rest of us are guilty of being too trusting. I reckon that most of us have always known that there are plenty of MPs who are in it for what they can get out of it. However we liked to think that it was at the expense of companies who wanted to have them as directors and such like. I certainly didn’t think that anybody would be so blatant about it, as some of them have been.

I know that MPs say that being at Westminster is like being in a wonderful club, so it wont be long before they see themselves as being something above the rest of us. Instead of what they actually are, which is employees of the electorate. So, I can understand that it must be easy to get out of touch with the real world.

But plenty of them do manage to keep their integrity. If I were them, I would be apoplectic with rage at the performance of Speaker Michael Martin today. He lumped them all together proclaiming them all guilty as if that would make matters better. The tactics from day 1 have been to deflect any allegations away from the perpetrators by quickly apologising for a ‘mistake’ and then to quickly say that the really bad guys must be hunted down. I watched Tony McNulty in disbelief when he came out with such a response.

Watching Newsnight Scotland tonight, I discovered that if Michael Martin did resign as Speaker, he would have to forego a £100,000 golden handshake. Well, he isn’t likely to do that but surely if the man had any brains at all he would have announced that he was going to stand down before the next election.

His speech today was a disgrace. It was obvious that he hadn’t even written it as surely he wouldn’t have stumbled over the words so badly if they were his. I don’t think he had even looked at them prior to the speech.

I know that there have always been plenty of people opposed to him being the Speaker and others have always ridden to his defense. They claim that MPs of a certain type couldn’t stand it that he had the job. Well, I think that Michael Martin has had a very easy time of it because of those allegations of snobbery against anyone who dared to complain about him.

He has been an appalling Speaker and an absolute embarrassment. I was born in a tenement in the east end of Glasgow and over the years I’ve often been mortified by his behaviour. I hate to think that he might be seen as – one of our best – because honestly he couldn’t be much worse.

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Lemon Posset

17 May 2009 21:22

I got this recipe out of The Guardian newspaper’s Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall column just the other week, and as we are all keen on citrus things I thought I would have a go at it . So, I did it for Sunday pudding today and I’ll definitely be doing it again. It was really scrummy.

I’ve just noticed that the recipe says that it serves 6, so we must be really greedy devils because this week there were only 3 of us for Sunday dinner, and we scoffed the lot.

Lemon Posset

Lemon Posset

600 ml double cream
150g caster sugar or vanilla sugar
juice of 3 medium-sized lemons

Pour the cream into a large saucepan and add the sugar. Warm gently, stirring to dissolve the sugar,then bring to the boil and boil for exactly 3 minutes, without stirring.
Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice. Give it a good stir and then strain into a jug. Pour into 6 ramekins or small glasses. Cool, and refrigerate for 3 hours before serving.

I used vanilla sugar in this recipe, just because I always have some which I make using ordinary sugar. I never bother with caster sugar, but if you are pernickety that way, the cheapest way to do it is to whizz it up in a food processor.

Next time, I think I will do a lime version of this posset, or maybe lemon and lime layers. That would certainly look more interesting.

If you are trying to gain weight, then this would obviously be right up your street. I used to be a real skinnymalinky, and I know that it is much more difficult to put on weight than to take it off.

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Ants

12 May 2009 23:00

Yesterday I discovered that ants had invaded my greenhouse. A real nightmare for me as I have become quite phobic about them over the past few years. I’ve spared you the horror of a photograph of them. Why do they exist? For me they look every bit as evil as Polaris submarines – something else that I like to think we could well do without.

Anyway, I boiled up a couple of kettles of water and exterminated loads of them instantly, but they were still coming in to the greenhouse. Luckily I had one of those ant stop bait stations, unused from last summer, which seems to have dealt with the problem overnight. There was hardly any movement this morning. Fingers crossed that they never become immune to the stuff.

Mind you, the ants were just about the only living things in my greenhouse. Like last year it has been too cold for things to germinate before now so my tomato plants are really hardly more than seedlings at the moment. I’m optimistic though. We’ve had almost no warm weather for the past 2 summers. Surely we can’t have 3 years in a row like that

I dread to think what the ant situation would be like if we did have any decent weather. Freezing cold and bucket loads of rain certainly haven’t killed them off.

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Categories: Gardening

Dumbarton Castle

11 May 2009 22:03

In celebration of Dumbarton Football Club being promoted to the Second Division, I thought I would photograph some of my collection of prints and postcards of Dumbarton.

Pictures and postcards of Dumbarton Rock etc.

Pictures and postcards of Dumbarton Rock etc.

Note the mediaeval instrument of torture on the left. (Only joking; but it is a Lochgelly tawse [strap or belt] used for generations in Scotland to punish pupils who misbehaved in school. The practice was only abolished 25 years or so ago.)

The Rock was a big part of my life, although I didn’t realise that until I moved away from Dumbarton and suddenly I didn’t have the wonderful west coast scenery as a backdrop any more.

More pictures of Dumbarton Rock

More pictures of Dumbarton Rock

When I was a wee girl I played at the bottom of the castle and the model of James Watt’s first steam engine was our climbing frame. I believe that it has been in various different positions in the town but I think it now lives at the Denny Ship Museum.

Old colour print of Dumbarton, plus Dumbartonshire Rifle Volunteers' badge.

Old colour print of Dumbarton, plus Dumbartonshire Rifle Volunteers' badge.

More postcards, prints or photos of Dumbarton.

More postcards, prints or photos of Dumbarton.

I have also lived at various locations around Britain. The last 20 years or so I have lived very close to the North Sea and believe me you have to be hardy to put up with that. It’s beyond me why anyone would want a sea view, especially when it is mainly grey sea and grey sky accompanied by a wind which usually feels like it has shards of glass in it, which cut right through your bones.

But – each to their own – and there are people in the Kirkcaldy area who can’t stand not being close to the sea. I suppose for them it’s like the hills of home.

Anyway, my Dumbarton collection cheers me up and I bet that there are plenty of people living there who can hardly believe that.

Division 2 here we come. It has really cheered up my husband Jack, my personal Son of the Rock, who has been a supporter of The Sons, as they are nicknamed, since before I knew him. In the daft days of my teenage years, I was even mad enough to go to Boghead with him.
Thirty-five years on from then, I spend my time visiting the Castle when he manages to see a home game.

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Pear Upside-down Pudding

10 May 2009 22:59

This is a nice chocolatey variation of the pineapple pudding I featured in an earlier post. Chocolate and pears are a great classic combination.

Pear upside down pudding

Pear upside down pudding

1 large tablespoon golden syrup
1x410g can pear halves,drained
8-10 glace cherries
125g (4oz) margarine
125g (4oz) sugar
2 eggs
125g (4oz) self-raising flour
1 heaped tablespoon cocoa powder

Cover the base of a 18 cm (7inch) deep cake tin with the golden syrup.
Arrange the pears rounded side up, on the base of the tin. Place the glace cherries into the spaces between the pears.
Cream the margarine and sugar. Add the cocoa powder and stir the mixture until it is well combined.
Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then mix in the flour. Beat well then spread the mixture evenly over the pears and cherries.
Bake in a pre-heated oven, 180C (350F,) gas mark 4 for about 50 to 60 minutes, depending on your oven. Carefully run a knife around the edge of the pudding and invert the tin onto your serving plate. Serve hot with cream or ice cream.
This pudding serves 6 people. If you want a larger one, use a 10 inch tin. Arrange pear halves over the whole of the base of the tin. Spread the sponge mixture on top and bake in the oven for about 35 minutes.

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