Recent life on the pond....
Today my sister came and held my hand while I tried to decide which of my cookery books to donate to the charity shop. Some of them I've had forever. I don't often read them now but they are part of my cooking history.....Elizabeth David, Prue Letith, Jocelyn Dimbleby, Madhur Jaffrey. It wasn't as hard as I'd imagined to let some of them go.
What was hard was taking out all the loose photographs, hand written birthday and thank you cards which I'd slipped between the pages to mark particular recipes...some of them from 25 years ago....little messages and sweet words.
And on the bottom shelf in a box file I find a folder of all the places we visited on our trip to New Zealand in 2014....the itinerary, brochures, maps, entry tickets...I open it and close it and put it back on the shelf. Not ready to de-clutter that memory yet.
We take a break for lunch. I'm using up as much as can out of the freezer this week ...I've discovered all sorts of goodies I'd forgotten were in there - left over lime and coconut cake from Robin's picnic at Haldon Beleverdere last summer....a French apple tart I made from our own apples.... curried vegetable soup... an aloo gobi Clive's pie....and some beetroot and sweetcorn fritters.
The latter we heat up and eat with a green salad, a lemon sesame dressing, my friend's wonderful Indian apricot and apple chutney and a last minute stir-fry of purple sprouting broccoli, grated ginger, carrot and cauliflower, crushed garlic... spritzed with sesame oil, soy sauce and a few spoonfuls of toasted pumpkin seeds stirred in at the end.
Not a recipe I read in a cookery book - but probably inspired by a combination of many that I've absorbed over the years....but also probably not one I could repeat....it just depends what veggies are in the fridge today.
Later I cut the grass even though it's still a bit muddy. The first cut of the year. Just manage to finish it before the rain blows in on the wind.
And I bake a cake. A new recipe from a magazine - actually several recipes which I adapt after an internet trawl and a quick look in my Ottlolenghi recipe book ( one I'm keeping) - for a Butternut Squash, Almond and Lemon cake.
It smells good when I take it out of the oven - not too savoury....a bit like a carrot cake....except I used pistachio nuts instead of walnuts.
I'll know the verdict tomorrow evening when the family cut into it ....although I'm not expecting the little ones to like it. Luckily there will be ice-cream for them.
I identify with the way you cook too - combining recipes, using what you've got instead of what the recipe says. Thank you for articulating it. Bx
ReplyDeleteAh, a fellow breaker of the recipe rules and making it up as you go along cook- lovely! X
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