Yesterday I was in need of some seriously therapeutic baking time so I set to in the kitchen and made some iced fairy cakes for starters. Nothing special about them except that I used these pansy icing decorations. I'd like to say I knocked them up in a spare few moments but alas I didn't! They were sent to me recently in a baking swap I participated in on Swap-Bot. I rarely buy this sort of thing but it was fun to use them for a change. My buttercream was meant to be a nice coordinating bluey purple but it went a bit awry! They've gone down well though despite my lackadaisical icing attempt! ;o)
Then I made some Builder's Tea Bread from Mary Berry's book, One Step Ahead. This is a nice simple recipe (albeit involving overnight soaking of dried fruit so not one for spontaneous baking urges!) and I had some Earl Grey leaf tea to use up from the pantry so my fruit was all plumptious from it's overnight sojourn in the brew. This makes a huge loaf and always takes longer to bake than the hour mentioned in the recipe. I think it would probably fare better in two smaller loaf tins or a larger rectangular tin. It freezes like a dream and I always bung half in the freezer to prevent us gobbling it down in a flash! It's fatless too so is quite kindly in the calorie stakes as well.
Earlier this week I came across a blog called A Year of Inconvenience. Blogger, Pam Mehnert, is giving up convenience food for a year and cooking everything from scratch. How inspiring is that? I think it's a fantastic project and I will be following Pam's progress with interest. I decided several years ago to reduce the amount of processed food we eat and have had a goodly amount of success I would say, although it is very easy to slide back into the convenience food trap sometimes! Reading some of the posts on Pam's blog has made me question what I term basics foods when cooking from scratch. She mentioned making pizza sauce using fresh tomatoes and I realised that I think of tinned tomatoes as a basic ingredient when in fact they are, of course, processed! And, frozen peas! I love frozen peas and never considered them a processed food! I'm sounding a bit odd methinks! lol Anyway, rambling aside, the blog (along with something of a fincancial doldrums episode) has prompted me into one of my periodical "use it up" missions! This entails using the ingredients I already have in my fridge, pantry and freezer as much as possible and only buying essentials when I need to. I've had a Quorn Roast in the freezer for a while (I have to admit that I quite like Quorn even though it's processed!) so I hauled it out for dinner this evening. I wanted to have sage & onion stuffing with it but had none of the packet variety in the pantry so I found a recipe for it in one of my favourite vintage cookbooks. As you would suspect it involved onion, breadcrumbs, sage, salt and butter. With my usual disregard for recipes, I didn't follow the method entirely as written but it was jolly tasty! Even my daughter, who loves the packet variety of stuffing, ate it all up and enjoyed it! ;o) While I was waiting for dinner to cook I had a rummage about in the pantry seeing what I had available and decided to make some muesli as we're quite low on breakfast cereal (husband's daily breakfast is always cereal). I used millet flakes, oats, plain puffed rice, pumpkin & sunflower seeds, mixed nuts, raisins, currants and dates. I was busking it with no recipe so I will await husband's verdict in the morning! I have to say that cooking from scratch and improvising with available ingredients is a real blast for me, I love the challenge and culinary creativity. Let's do it! ;o)
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