guilty pleasures and conscious objections

Guilty pleasures: things that I thoroughly enjoy (but, for one reason or another, probably shouldn't). Orange-flavour Revels, pre-bagged salad, Strictly Come Dancing. You know the kind of thing.

So what's the opposite of a guilty pleasure? What do you call something that you should really like, but for whatever reason, you just don't? The closest phrase I could come up with is a conscious objection. My personal conscious objections include: anything done to me in a salon, all seafood, carnations, scented candles, cafes that serve Illy coffee (because of the cups with the handle too small for your finger, gah), Paul Hollywood (a wonderful baker but ick, the bitten fingernails! can hardly watch). I could go on and on and on.

But here's one that I'm nervous to share with you.

I consciously object to baking bread by hand.

I love homemade bread. But for various reasons, I do not bake my own bread by hand. Firstly, we live in an INCREDIBLY small house. In our kitchen there are two linear metres of usable worktop, and by 8am every single morning, those two metres look like this:

This tableau is frantically cleared and lovingly recreated at least five times every day. Add the fact that our house is as cold as a grave for nine months of the year, and any recipe that says "leave dough in a warm place to prove for two hours" becomes absurd in terms of both space and ambient temperature.

The second reason I don't make bread by hand falls into the guilty pleasure category. It's my breadmaker. Which I KNOW will make all the purists wring their floury hands, but honestly, I don't understand why. A twerp I used to know once scoffed at my regular use of a breadmaker, guffing on about "all the pleasure one derives from the kneading and the connection with the living dough blah blah blurg". I asked him how often he actually made loaves from scratch, and he proudly said he did it at least every fortnight (so let's assume the reality was once a month or so). To which I could honestly reply that, by virtue of using a breadmaking machine, we hadn't bought a single sliced loaf for well over a year.

You see, I adore homemade bread, but my intention has never been to connect with my primal whatnots via the medium of dough. My intention is simply to feed my family with bread containing no preservatives and the bare minimum salt and sugar. And using a breadmaker, I can do that in two minutes flat every other day. I can experiment with any sort of seedy, fruity, nutty, sweet, oily and floury additions, get a great loaf every single time, and even set the timer to get that amazing fresh-baked smell when I wake up in the morning. What is not to like?

The third and final reason that I think it's best I don't make handmade bread is that a friend (quite innocently) described me last week as "a lovely girl who grows her own vegetables and tie-dyes her baby's clothes". The only thing that could possibly make that description sound more insufferably worthy is if she had added "oh, and she makes all her own bread too." Smug bloody hippie...

So, while I admire the craft involved in beautiful handmade bread, it's just not something I tend to do very often. Have I defended my conscious objection/guilty Panasonic pleasure enough? Right then, let's move onto this month's random recipe.

Which had to be from a bread recipe book.

Which, of course, I don't have. (Except the one that came with the machine, and that didn't feel quite appropriate.)

So, with quite some trepidation, I asked my lovely friend Lou (who has a wonderful human breadmaker in the form of her husband) to choose me a page from one of her bread books. I texted her a random number, and the result pinged back; Soda bread from Dan Lepard's Short & Sweet. What a relief. No kneading or proving required, and the recipe is online here. Phew!

I tweaked the recipe quite a lot, almost to the point that it's not the same recipe (but I've seen way too many instances of Dan Lepard's people getting well eggy about his material being duplicated on blogs to risk claiming it as a new recipe). Instead, I'll just summarise my modifications; I used wholemeal spelt instead of the normal flour, creme fraiche instead of yoghurt, a bit more sugar, a handful each of poppy seeds and flax seeds, one tablespoon each of cinnamon and finely crushed chocolate (because I'd just read this cinnamon and chocolate nut bread post by our Random Recipe host Dom, and thought it looked rather yum!). I meant to put flaked almonds on the top but I forgot.

Lou also mentioned that she had heard Dan Lepard bake these soda breads on a radio show (you can listen to it here). And if you listen very carefully, he almost justifies the use of breadmaking machines right at the end of the interview.

And that, bread purists, is good enough for me! Check in with Dom over at Belleau Kitchen at the end of the month for all the other bread-y contributions.

Cinnamon chocolate and seed soda breads; breakfasts for the next few days sorted!

sweet potato, sour cherry and pecan brownies :: a great random red nose day bake

Well, after questioning the omnipotent Twitter the other day, it only went and proved its worth in the comments section of the very same post, with the actual s'labrity baker answering a query I had about his recipe. I suppose that's me told.

I still don't understand Twitter, but at least I know a man who does, and that man is our Random Recipe host Dom. Who challenged us this month to pick from our bulging folders, toppling towers and sliding stacks of cuttings and clippings for this month's random recipe. This is my favourite kind of Random Recipe, because if you cut something out or jotted something down, you must have thought it sounded delicious - no risk of frog congee or sherry trifle here.

Well, I used a number generator to select page number 9/52 from my laminated book of dreams (no, not the Bill Bailey Argos catalogue, but my kikki.K baking folder).

Why the baking file rather than the recipe file? Because it was our local baking night in aid of Comic Relief of course!

And so, Dan Lepard's Sweet potato, sour cherry and pecan brownies were made. And I'm pleased to say every single one was eaten at the bake night (or tucked away in a tupperware for later).

They were everything a chocolate brownie should be. And a little bit more besides because:
a) sweet potato is a health food
b) the sour cherries symbolised red noses
c) they were gobbled in aid of Comic Relief!

Despite heavy snow and a modest turn out, we raised £70 on the night, and I understand there's more to come with a blind auction of some goodies.

So, what are you waiting for? Hashtag dosomethingyummyformoney, hashtag don'tevenknowwhathashtagmeans, hashtag don'tevenhaveahashtagsymbolonmycomputer

Hop on over to Belleau Kitchen at the end of the month to see Dom's wonderful RR roundup. Actually, it's only half way through the month - why don't you join in too? You must have a stash of clippings and cuttings kicking around somewhere, don't you...

Happy red nose day. Give all you can to a wonderful cause.

random recipe fail

You know when there's a trend, a consensus, dare I call it a "movement", that you're just not part of for some reason? Well, here's my guilty secret, I'm just not as in love with Nigel Slater as is expected of me. The blether-sphere is ram-packed full of people raving about his Kitchen Diaries, literally RAVING, but I haven't made time to read it. I have it on good authority that it's magical, but I find him so thoroughly unwatchable on tv that I haven't made much effort.

Which is also why I rarely choose to use the one Nigel Slater recipe book we own: Real Food. But you can't cheat on the Random Recipe Challenge, so when my husband picked some numbers at random, Real Food it was, and a recipe for grilled mustard and herb chicken.

It's very simple: a store-cupboard marinade of delicious things, chicken thighs, and a griddle pan.

When you're mixing oil, tarragon, mustard and parsley together, you kind of know that good things are in store. I was willing to accept that my reluctance to join Cult Slater might have been a bit baseless. Especially when he writes things like "They will probably take about eight minutes total cooking time, depending on the size of your thighs (or, rather, the size of the chicken's)."

That did make me chuckle. But it was at that point things started to go a little wrong. My instinct was to flatten the chicken thighs a bit with a rolling pin, or even chop and thread them onto skewers satay-style. But Nigel didn't instruct me to do that, so I did as I was told and just flung them on the griddle. It turns out that lovely organic chicken thighs (unflattened) are too plump to cook through on a griddle in eight minutes.

Mine (or, rather, my chickens') needed more like twelve. And while the recipe states that "There will be much smoke and sizzling", after twelve minutes the outsides were burnt to buggery.

Which is fine. I mean, they were largely inedible, but we had a bigger problem. We live in one moderately small room, by which I mean that our kitchen, sitting room, dining room, and study all occupy a single 8m x 3m space. And Nige was not wrong about the smoke.

After leaving all the doors and windows open for three hours (on a freezing February evening in the North of Scotland) every fibre and pore of our lives is still thick with the smell of burning. Every surface within a metre radius of the cooker is coated with a fine layer of fat, and I've lost the cat. I occasionally hear her miewing in the middle distance, but my streaming eyes can barely focus as I claw my way through the haze.

The verdict from the panel?

"Mummy, I don't really like the chicken."
"No sweetie, neither do I."

tartiflette :: a random recipe paradox on a plate

In Scotland, a staple of the national diet is called Irn Bru. It's pretty rare for the best-selling carbonated drink in a country to be anything other than Coca Cola, and even rarer in a country where you are actually allowed to sell Coca Cola. But we manage it, thanks to the national weakness for Irn Bru.

It tastes like nothing else, it looks like nothing else, and it smells like nothing else. It's truly... unique.

A particular speciality in the West of the country, babies are sometimes practically weaned on to the Bru, weepily slurping it from their sippy cups as they recover from the general anaesthetic required to pull their milk teeth out.* S'alright though, they were going to fall out anyway, right?

School kids, who know only too well the importance of keeping hydrated, frequently achieve their daily fluid intake in Irn Bru alone.* High Five! It does make it a wee bit harder to keep the complex orthodontic work clean (adult teeth grow in like a pile of tangled knitting if you've had a full clearance at the age of two) but hey, at least they're not thirsty.

In our late teens and twenties we discover that it makes a great mixer for vodka. And a few wee drinks helps take our minds off the raging toothache.* Thankfully, it's no biggie if the first set of wallies is fitted long before middle age, loads of people have them. Then we can forget all about tooth decay and erosion, supping the "ginger" for the rest of our days, while cursing those mysterious modern plagues of type II diabetes and morbid obesity.

Sadly, for once, I am not exaggerating. It was into this culture that, as an over-sensitive, naive seventeen year old, I started to train as a dental surgeon. I graduated six years later, and nine months after that I quit. It's not that it was a thankless task; after all, people in Scotland really need dentists. It was just incredibly demoralising. I'm in awe of my friends who continue to practice, successfully and sympathetically, a decade later - I was ready to throw myself under a bus by third year.

I couldn't imagine a more disheartening job, and then something made me think again...

I happened to be at my friend Louise's house the day that this month's Random Recipe challenge was set: to cook a recipe from someone else's kitchen. She produced a beautiful book for me called Roast Figs, Sugar Snow by Diana Henry, all about Winter cooking. I came home (after a lovely lunch!) and used a random number generator to pick a recipe. It chose page 16: tartiflette.

For the uninitiated, tartiflette is a dish from the French Alps, comprising sliced boiled potatoes, sauted in butter, with lardons, onion and garlic. Then the whole lot is chucked in an oven dish, covered in creme fraiche and reblochon, and baked. Butter, bacon, cream, cheese and carb-loading, what's not to like?

My primary reaction was "this is bloody delicious!"

My secondary reaction was "it could've been worse, I could've wasted my youth training to be an Alpine cardiologist."

But then the French have their pesky paradox. Lucky blighters. If only the Scots had one of those, maybe I'd be driving round in a sports car like all my old classmates...

I couldn't get reblochon, so I used a good stinky brie, for which all purists/French
people will now demand immediate beheading by guillotine, apparently.

The addition of some French beans, to stick with the Gallic theme, and
because I didn't want my arteries to clog before the kids went to bed.

Louise also cooked a recipe from my cook book shelf this month, and sticking with the seasonal theme, she chose something from the January section of Tessa Kiros' lovely book, Twelve. Head over to Please Do Not Feed the Animals at the end of the month to see how she got on. And to read all the other randomness, please visit Belleau Kitchen - Dom does a brilliant round up every month without fail, and the list of dishes submitted is always mouthwateringly inspirational.

* Just to be clear, I'm sure the manufacturers of Irn Bru are perfectly honourable and wouldn't condone using their product in any of these ways, but I can assure you, it happens.

reject the expert :: embrace the geek

So 2012 didn't turn out too shabby. During one short year I created a whole small person from a single cell. Perhaps I ought to say "we" created, but we all know who did the lion's share. And by the time the bells rang 2013 in, that single cell from one year before could giggle when he trumped like a carthorse. An important milestone I'm sure you'll agree.

So, despite not achieving any of my goals last year (largely - though not entirely - because of the small person) I do have a few for the next 12 months.

First up, I'm not going to live the way anyone else tells me (unless I actually know them, and then I might consider it). Because if you add all the advice up, all the layers of rules and checklists and intentions and schedules, you will spontaneously implode.

Fact.

A quick example; here's how an (edited) two-hour segment of Christmas day might have looked had I paid heed to Nigella Lawson's turkey dinner schedule and Gina Ford's Contented Little Baby regime. Let's call it the expert mash-up of doom-laiden stress.

10am

- Peel and cut potatoes, then leave in cold water. Take bacon-wrapped chipolatas out of the fridge.
- Baby must be fully awake regardless of how long he has slept. Encourage him to have a good kick under his playgym or take him on an outing. (Who wrapped the chipolatas? Do we have chipolatas? Bugger it. Take the baby for an outing - I don't CARE if you're still in your pyjamas, IT'S WHAT THE BOOK SAYS.)

10.30am

- Take turkey out of brine, sit it on a rack in the sink and leave to drip, drain and come to room temperature. Preheat 1st oven to 200*C. Trim Brussels sprouts and leave in colander. Take prepared stuffing out of the fridge. (On the day everyone's most scared of food poisoning, I can't wash my hands because there's a turkey in the sink. Hmm.)

10.40am

- Put chipolatas in oven, Infuse milk for bread sauce. Measure out ingredients for chocolate pudding and set aside. (Bread sauce? Chocolate pudding? I think not.)

11am

- He should be given a full breast-feed or full bottle-feed.
- Put prepared potatoes in pan on heat to parboil. (Hang on, I'm breastfeeding.)

11.10am

- Take chipolatas out of oven and leave wrapped in foil (still breastfeeding...)

11.20am

- Melt basting liquid for turkey (yup, still breastfeeding...)

11.30am

- Baste turkey with half the liquid and put in first oven. Potatoes should be parboiling so keep an eye on them, then drain, dredge and leave in pan. (Sod the tatties, I've fed him now so I'm allowed a glass of something dry and fizzy aren't I? Geez.)

11.50am

- Change his nappy, close curtains and settle drowsy baby, half swaddled in the dark with the door shut no later than 12 noon. (Chance would be a fine thing. Put him in a pram and pass me the cooking sherry.)

You see? I suggest paying scant attention to them, for that way madness lies. Even if you have two ovens and pre-prepared stuffing.

So, good on you Cami Walker you generous soul, glad you're teaching the world to grin Gretchen Rubin, and Kim John Payne I agree with all your parenting ideas. But this year I'm going to shuffle through under my own steam if it's all the same to you. Advice is good. But you can have too much of a good thing, and "shuffling through" worked for me on Christmas day.

There's another change afoot in 2013: I'm gently embracing my inner geek. I've realised that no simple or wholesome creative activity is complete without an app or a preparatory session in front of the computer screen.

Not that I'm complaining, it's totally brilliant. I've planned the veg patch for this year, proven that I'm making progress with the post-baby weight loss, lost hours to Ravelry, and completed the first week of an Illustrator course (which I hope will lead to my being able to design things pretty enough to sell...).

Happy New Year one and all. Here's to a geeky one.

growVeg is a very cool tool to draw and plan your veg garden.
you tell it your location and it tells you when to do what
based on your frost dates.

my random recipe for January, chosen by random number generator,
was totally delicious. update coming soon.

pregnancy: plotted.
the NHS BMI Tracker app is so simple, and thoroughly motivational.
I'm getting there... gradually.

the fabulous Nicole's Classes (they of the dotty freebie pattern
you see in my background!) are going to keep me very
busy the first half of 2013, kicking off with a month of
Adobe Illustrator. Here's my first week's homework.

a new blanket idea is hatching - maybe I could use Illustrator to design a
gorgeous pattern sheet to sell on Ravelry? That's my resolution...

the award for 'dinner least attractive to children' goes to...

Embarking on my random recipe at 5pm on a weekday night, with The Boss bouncing off the walls and The Dragon Baby babbling on his mat, was not a recipe for domestic harmony.

The rules for this month's challenge found me randomly selecting page 117 of Nigella Lawson's How To Eat, and a recipe for aubergine moussaka. But, as she points out "This is a Lebanese version, very different from the traditional Greek". It's basically aubergine stew.

While I use it now and again, I'm not a huge fan of How To Eat. This might have something to do with the complete lack of photography (which in this case is probably just as well, because a photo of aubergine stew isn't bonny). I'm not wild about the prose style either, because sometimes you have to work quite hard to find the actual recipe. But, gripes aside...

I couldn't buy baby aubergines or pomegranate molasses, and I couldn't be arsed soaking pulses. So I used big aubergines and canned chickpeas. Oh, and since we do actually still seem to be griping, I didn't peel the aubergines "to look like like Edwardian circus tents". (Really Nigella? Really? Give me strength.)

Bugger it, ground-level babbling has turned to wimpering, but we're too far in to stop now. Dance my love, dance to amuse your brother, dance like a dervish!

She says the aubergines smell like a grocery shop. I know what she means.

Bugger it again. Nigella wants the tomatoes rinsed, peeled, seeded and quartered. Not. on. your. life. They'll be roughly chopped if you're lucky. (And isn't all the flavour in the seed jelly and skin anyway? Why on earth would you chuck them?)

The wimpering has turned into wailing. Sing sweetie, sing to him like our lives depend on it!

It's all getting a bit fraught, and rather noisy, but here's the bit I was looking forward to: adding the cinnamon and allspice. Nice festive smells will make it all better.

But hang about, the combination of vegetal grocer aroma and Christmassy spices equals... what is it? It's very familiar... YES! It's that gag-worthy section just before the checkout at the garden centre where houseplants and artificially scented candles combine to form a collective speech bubble above everyone's heads saying "why the hell is all this odourous tat in a garden centre when all I wanted was a bag of compost?".

I don't really want to eat the stew-formerly-known-as-moussaka. And very forcefully, neither does The Boss. She says it's too brown (pronounced 'braaaaan' invoking her cockney sparrow heritage) and it's hard to disagree. I end up having to make a more child-friendly alternative. While the poor Dragon Baby cries himself hoarse.

It tastes absolutely fine, with couscous and yoghurt, but I'm too scarred by the whole experience to ever consider it again. And there are many, many better things to do with cinnamon and allspice at this time of year. Just please don't put them in a frakking candle.

liebkuchen, my contribution for my first visit to a local baking club last night, and a much better way to use cinnamon

crumbling resolve :: a random recipe

It's not often that Dom, our Random Recipe Host with the Most, allows us to positively select a recipe (normally our methods must err towards random selection). But this month it is a store cupboard ingredient that must be randomly selected - how we cook with it is up to us.

Dom's plan is for us to unearth a back-of-the-cupboard gem. But the combination of my new kitchen and this week's primary school harvest thanksgiving collection (Hurrah! Palm off all our old cans of random tat to the local elderly so that they can stuff them, cursing, to the back of their larders.) means that my cupboard is unusually bare of geriatric dried goods and crusty out-of-date jars.

So instead I closed my eyes and ran my finger over my "spice rack": more accurately described as a narrow shelf filled with a decade's worth of Bonne Maman jam jars. Their contents are varied (birthdays candles, baking beans, toothpicks, star anise, cupcake sprinkles - you name it) and, when I've failed to write on the lid, frequently a mystery.

My finger landed on half a jar of something crumbly and beige. Hmmmm. Too soft for sugar, too irregular for flour. Faintly foosty-smelling, but too mild to be a spice, and tastes of nothing. Ground almonds was my best guess. And if that were the case I knew immediately what I was going to do with them, having cut something perfect out of the paper a few weeks ago.

The preamble to the recipe read: "...we're now in the midst of a rather agreeable seasonal crossfire – the waning of summer and the waxing of autumn. This is a time of rich culinary potential, as the tapering off of some fine sunshine crops overlaps with the nascence of many others that come to fruition in the shortening days." Gah, to be able to write like that. I think it's just super lovely. Though, having not experienced Autumn since 2009, my susceptibility to romance is high and my resistance is low.

HFW* was talking there about the lovely few days when the berries overlap with the apples, and I've been waiting for that magical moment in my own garden. Yesterday it arrived, and I got seven James Grieve apples and about 200g of juicy raspberries from my little plot.

And so, while a contented little baby with a full tummy snoozed on his Daddy's chest, and on the radio someone played Tchaikovsky on a Stradavarius from the Usher Hall, I spent a Friday night making pastry. Because the state of the bathroom floor can wait, and the four piles of unwashed laundry will still be there in the morning, and (even though my scales say there's 10kg to lose) the calories simply don't count if you've grown all the fruit yourself... right?

By the way, I still have no idea if they were ground almonds or not, but the tart tastes lovely.

before...

...and after, the apple and raspberry crumble tart

*Now, as an aside, you might be forgiven for thinking that I am being paid by Mr H Fearnley-Whittingstall, because I seem to make so many of his recipes. I only wish that I were. (I want to be his friend. Big time.) Despite living on a small island, he's lucky we genuinely couldn't live further apart without getting wet, or I might become a stalker groupie. But the truth is, when I said a few months ago that I learned how to cook from the Guardian/Observer newspaper columns, I really wasn't kidding, and they remain my main inspiration. Hence his constant presence here.

random recipe :: savoury scones for tea

I had no intention of taking part in the Random Recipe Challenge for September. Because September wasn't supposed to turn out this way. I had predicted days (if not weeks) already of swaddle-wrestling a posset-stained howler monkey, shuffling around as if kicked in the nethers by a Shire horse and leaking copiously into a nursing top full of mysteriously-placed gaping seams. I know, dreaming the glam dream, right?

But it hasn't happened, so I thought I'd try to invoke Lou's labour jinx... again.

This month's challenge is linking with a combination of delightful blogs (which you can read about here via Belleau Kitchen) and focuses on tea time. Something that has become more important than ever since The Boss started school, arriving home after 3pm, ravenous.

I don't have a recipe book specifically on baking, but I do have a plastic file devoted entirely to the subject, stuffed full of clippings and scribbles for recipes both sweet and savoury. With the help of random.org, I was delighted to select a clipping that I haven't made before, that is available for you to read online here, and that opens with the phrase "Irresistible slathered with butter and served for tea". Surely the stars are all aligned for this Random Recipe!

So, while listening to Nigel Slater on the radio, extolling the virtues of savouring even the humblest piece of fruit at the table with a napkin and cutlery, I mixed up a batch of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's Cheddar, Onion and Herb Wholemeal Scones. Very therapeutic it was too. I used up my spelt flour in place of the light brown in his recipe, rosemary from the garden, and included a few chunks of applewood smoked cheddar as well as the regular stuff I had in the fridge.

Looks good right? Tastes good too, beautifully soft, salty and savoury, and crunchy round the edges. I scoffed my slice before even getting round to butter... or tea. Oh, and it's only mid-morning. Certainly there was no napkin, table or cutlery. (It took very few moments to forget Nigel's advice on treating food with the respect it deserves - oops.)

Once again, Lou's labour jinx hasn't worked today, the buzzer went off and I'm still the shape of my gym ball. But never fear, I have more baking on my to-do list. My inherited, hand-written copy of The Queen Mother's Favourite Cake is next up...

random recipes :: money from old rope

There's a talent I admire. It may not be big and it may not be clever, but people who are able to, almost literally, make money from old rope? They deserve the props.

Those designers who charge twice the price for past season jeans with newly incorporated rips? If punters are daft enough to go for it, then why not. The genius who had the idea of putting tiny handfuls of raisins into little matchboxes and flogging them (at a billion times the price of a big bag of raisins + an Ikea tub) to harassed parents labouring under the misapprehension that it's a healthy snack because the box is mostly green? Thoroughly deserving of his or her convertible. It's not that I like the product necessarily* but I admire the gumption. And I really like the word gumption (apparently a Scottish word incidentally).

The recipe book world is full of such examples - cooks and food writers making money out of either a) tweaking recipes so generic that no-one can claim the intellectual property and publishing them between glossy covers for £17.99, or, b) giving you recipes on how to pour boiling water over [a teabag/egg/pasta/rice/insert blithering obvious] and publishing them between glossy covers for £17.99. I'm not criticising it - I just wish I'd thought of it first.

My Random Recipe selection this month is kind of one of those. But in a good way. Having (rather obsessively) numbered all my recipe books last month for Dom's Random Recipe challenge, it was nice and easy to use a random number generator to pick a book for this month. It chose number 6: Jamie's 30 Minute Meals (so we're already getting a meal rather than a recipe for this one) and page 55: spaghetti in tomato sauce, garlic bread, salad and melted chocolate puds (obviously he used fancier words like puttanesca and ganache, but you get the idea).

I had an old friend coming for the weekend, so this would be perfect. We would cook it together on Friday evening. We are both more than capable of making red gloop, garlic bread, salad and melted chocolate without Jamie's assistance, but we followed his instructions anyway (more or less) which naturally meant that it made twice the mess it needed to, took at least three times his estimated 30 minutes, and some vital kitchen equipment perished in the chaos. (My darling friend is a ham-fisted klutz,** but I'm trying to forgive her.)

Like everything I've made from this book, it was very tasty. You simply can't fault him on that. But a plate of quick spaghetti, garlic bread, and homemade version of a Gu pot was never going to exactly set the gastronomic heather on fire. Mind you, the fennel and radish crunchy salad really was a tasty new idea that I wouldn't have had myself.

No wonder JO's a squillionaire though. I own a book in which he tells me how to make garlic bread and melt chocolate. I spent my (husband's) hard-earned on it. I use it. And I tell people how tasty it is. Talk about money for old rope, the man's a genius. Now I'm off to work on my big idea.

To read more random recipes (usually by people who remembered to photograph their plates BEFORE they ate) hop over to Belleau Kitchen at the end of the month.


* Yeh, yeh, naturally I have, in my time, bought both.
** I suppose there is technically no such thing, the ham and the Yiddish and all...

random recipes :: a substitute for strong medication

Despite the date, I'm feeling distinctly un-olympian. I weigh about 25% more than my breathless frame dictates, none of my shirts meet my waistband, and my hair looks a fright... I sincerely hope that's where the similarities between me and BoJo end (and at least I have an excuse for the first two).

(As an aside: seriously Mister Mayor, "the geiger counter of olympomania is going to go zoink..." What? What? I can't even... no I'm speechless. Two words: statesmanship lessons.)

But mostly I've woken up with a fever and a throat, on a beautiful day, which makes me cross. In an effort to do something more productive than crawling back into bed, I thought I'd join in with delicious Dom and his Random Recipe challenge. As something a little different this month, Dom has asked us all to photograph and tell a little story about our cookbooks.

the usual suspects

Since my collection is streamlined to just twenty titles (due to severe cutbacks in April) I thought I'd give you a one or two line review of each. As any tabloid journalist worth their salt knows, brevity is a tough challenge. So, deep breath, here goes (from left to right):
 *N.B. if you have any of these books and can recommend recipes that I may not have tried, please leave in a comment, I've got nothing in for dinner yet...

shelf next to the end of the sofa, where I do the weekly menu planning, sometimes, when I'm organised enough

1. The Big Book of Backyard Cooking
Never used it. No idea why it made the cut. (Oh yes I do, gift from mother-in-law.)

2. New Recipes for your Slo-Cooker 
Annette Yates
Everything tastes the same in my slo-cooker, I call it essence eau d'slo. No idea why it made the cut.

3. Jamie's Ministry of Food
Jamie Oliver
Disappointing. Some of the recipes just aren't tasty enough. Perhaps I'm not the target audience.

4. How to Eat 
Nigella Lawson
Worst design and structure of any cookbook ever, end of. But comes in handy sometimes (though I can't remember the last time).

5. River Cafe Cookbook Easy
Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers
Nice layout, love the broad bean soup, and the chocolate nemesis was intriguing. Should probably use this one more.
 
6. Jamie's 30-Minute Meals
Jamie Oliver
Should really be called 60-minute meals, but that aside I love the food in this book. Off the top of my head highlights include: Pregnant Jools pasta, tomato soup, chicken pie, mango frozen yoghurt, sticky prune puddings - I make these and others all the time. Lowlights: cauliflower macaroni, beef hash

7. Twelve
Tessa Kiros
Classic Italian arranged month-by-month. Lovely, look at it all the time. Never use it.
 
8. The Naked Chef
Jamie Oliver
My husband makes the best risotto thanks to this book. It also gave me the joy of 'The most perfect steamed & roasted duck with honey & oyster sauce' during last October's Random recipe challenge. Carnivores: you need this quacker in your life.
 
9. Kitchen
Nigella Lawson
Epic family cookbook. Love it. Our household highlights: chicken teriyaki, turkey meatballs, tarragon chicken, Vietnamese noodle soup, Mexican lasagne... and many more. Only lowlights so far: BBQ beef mince (I substituted 30ml bourbon for the same quantity of Glenmorangie - BIG mistake!) and the Minetta marrow bones, which this post discusses at length while glossing over the fact that they actually made me puke. Might have been the vino mind you.

10. River Cottage Veg
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Beautiful, never use it.

11. Real Food
Nigel Slater
Highly recommended by everyone, never use it.

12. The Silver Spoon
Italian compendium to end them all, never use it.

13. My childhood kitchen notebook
Has evolved into my plastic files of notes, clippings and deliciousness, where most all of my meals originate. So this one never gets looked at any more which is just as well, my handwriting was feeble and ugly.
 
14. Jones Dairy Annual 2005
Bizarre book, definitely a gift from my mother-in-law. But contains a fabulous recipe for Nanaimo bars (which I should probably just copy out before giving the book to charity).

15. How to Cook, book one
Delia Smith
Useful basics, including a tasty moussaka. Other well-floured pages include a parsnip parmesan bread and a potato cheese bread. Good pastry section too.

16. The food of Singapore
Never used it yet (but only because the Asian food market is the other side of town and I don't have a car).

17. Aussie Women's Weekly: Japanese
Made proper sushi a few times in about 1995.

18. Aussie Women's Weekly: Easy Vietnamese
Gift for my husband on his 21st from a girl he travelled round Vietnam with the summer before we met. Even has a message inscribed in the inside cover. 'nuff said. Never used.

19. Nigella Christmas
Bought in 2009 because I couldn't find her cheaty, speedy, ever-so-slightly chocolatey Christmas cake recipe anywhere on the internet. The Domestic Goddess had the rights to that recipe on lock down that year. But it was worth buying. Beautiful (if slightly irritatingly overstyled) book that really puts you in the Christmas spirit.

20. Cook with Chef Wan
See point 16.

Blimey, and I thought I'd streamlined! Seems I only use 50% of that list with any sort of regularity. I'd love to know what percentage of their shelf inches others honestly reckon they use. Why are cookery books something that we buy, give and hoard in such quantities? With only 20 books, I already have more delicious meal options than there are days in the year, and yet I'm sure I'll be tempted to invest in more at some stage. I bet I'm not alone!

Checkout Belleau Kitchen at the end of the month to delve into the bookshelves of the other RR devotees, I'll be having a good rootle around, for certain!

a right royal (random) knees up

So it’s the Queen’s birthday tomorrow. Her actual birthday, as opposed to her public birthday in June. I’m not a rampant royalist, I’ve never really given the whole thing much thought... my inner little girl thinks that Kate’s awfy pretty and isn’t it a shame she didn’t bag the princess gig, but other than that they’re just elegant people in photos.

But I do like that the monarch is still allowed to do some arbitrary stuff, like having two birthdays. I mean what’s the point in being Queen if you can’t say “I’m tired of the rain on my April birthday, and I do likes me a good picnic, so I’m going to have one in June too – MAKE IT SO toadies!”

If I were Queen I’d enjoy the random powers. Apparently she can actually appoint whoever she likes to be the Prime Minister! I could have some fun with that one. I would definitely proclaim a national cake, and that cake would obviously be a Victoria sponge. Because Victoria sponge has inherently perfect style.

Let me explain…

I had this maths teacher at secondary school, and he was all about solving your quadratic or geometric problems with style. It was no use simply to arrive at the correct answer with lots of squiggly calculations along the way. With him you got the real praise for getting to that answer in a way that made your classmates gasp at the clarity of your solution. Spotting the slick common denominator at the earliest stage, rendering the most complicated of equations effortless, that was the key. I loved maths, and will never in all my days forget him, striving for style amongst the cosine curves.

A proper Victoria sponge has precisely that style.

Choose your eggs according to your sandwich tins (3 eggs for 18cm, 4 for 20cm tins works for me). Before you begin, weigh the eggs in their shells, and then use exactly that same weight of soft butter, caster sugar and self-raising flour. Isn’t it genius? Blend together, adding a splash of vanilla if you like, divide into tins and bake for 25 minutes.

Every time I make a Victoria sponge I relish the pure stylish clarity of the recipe. (For an inspired and seasonal filling, look at this gorgeous variation published today by GoddessonaBudget… now I think that's a Vicky sponge fit for any Queen.)

But I digress, this week I was baking for someone else’s birthday: not royal but no less dignified is Dom from Belleau Kitchen and his 2nd blog birthday. For the occasion he asked his random recipe followers to make him something celebratory and randomly selected from a baking book. Now a baking book I have! Just look at these bad boys…

hurrah! the first things rescued from the unpacking chaos : )

Using a random number generator I selected page 12, which was Apple Cider Pudding Cake printed out from the Joyful Baker last autumn. (Curiously, it seems to have been the last post she wrote since then, I hope it’s not something I said…)

It’s a very American recipe, and I’m afraid we parochial small islanders do tend to struggle with those. Inches? Fahrenheit? Cups? I had to find an actual ruler and an online conversion chart, and rescue my measuring cups from my daughter’s toy kitchen. And I just don't understand two cups of Granny Smith apples, why not just tell me how many apples? I wasn’t feeling any pure stylish clarity by the time I eventually got started, but that’s likely my fault not hers.

It’s a squishy, treacley, appley pudding with a delicious crunchy crumble topping. I served it with a dollop of natural yoghurt, which it definitely needed because it’s quite sweet. If I were to make it again, I’d significantly streamline the ingredients. Less salt, less sugar, and definitely smaller quantities of spices (mine had a distinct aftertaste of both salt and pepper which I'm sure wasn't intended). I’d probably use self-raising flour rather than all the baking powder and soda. And comparing my photos with the Joyful Baker's, my sugar was clearly a grade darker than hers, which probably wasn't ideal.

The crumble topping is inspired, definitely the best bit. But ultimately, if I knew you were coming for tea Dom, I think you’d right royally agree with my conclusion: stick with slick Vic. (or Vik?!)

Happy Birthday Belleau Kitchen, and Gawd bless ya Ma'am.

all cakes taste better with tea and a doily

getting by with unearthed treasures

Most of our belongings are rolling on the high seas. Sitting squarely on the luxurious cushion of insurance, I've been wondering how bad it would really be if the container slipped overboard somewhere in the Bay of Bengal, or was commandeered by actual pirates. (Naturally I mean friendly pirates, rather like those in the Straits of Malacca discovered by esteemed sometime anthropologist Domenica MacDonald, established resident of Scotland Street. But I digress...)

Obviously I'd need a new food processor and new plastic banana leaf curry plates (not kidding) but in the digital age, even photo albums aren't quite as priceless as they once were. I've learned that I wouldn't miss the telly or DVD player at all, and my bookshelves would groan with delight if five of the packing crates were to perish.

Oh but hang about, no, it would be awful. There remain two purely analogue parts of my life that are irreplaceable - I'd even save them from the waves before my (horrendous) wedding album - it's my recipe folders. (The eagle-eyed may notice that the plastic folders are now pluralised - streamlining fail.)

I'm rather lost without them and long to have them back in pride of place. Not because I use them every day, but because they're sort of comforting to have around when you've run out of inspiration half way through an online Sainsburys order. Instead, I'm currently reduced to about 10 recipe books; all the crappy/unused ones that were deemed unnecessary when we abandoned our house two years ago. Or so I thought...

Dom's challenge this month is to choose a recipe from the 17th book on your shelf, and for this I had to count round my diminished shelf twice, hoping against hope to avoid the bossy toddler meal planners and deluded slo-cooker evangelists. Oddly, the random book turned out not to be crap at all, the complete opposite in fact. It was Nigel Slater in an almost unrecognisable incarnation.





Nigel Slater's Real Food is my husband's book and, as far as I can tell, has sat on a shelf unused since 1998. I've never even thought to look at it. I can't justify that, it's just one of those unforgivable things that's happened over the years.

Like plastic footwear.

The random recipe selected was on page 118, Pasta with spicy sausage, basil and mustard. Unfortunately I couldn't get any spicy Italian sausages, so I used the inners of some good pork and leek instead (de-skinned and crumbled into the pan). They weren't quite right, a wee bit too sweet, but it was still really tasty, and probably suited The Boss' palate better. White wine (I used Noilly Prat just because that's what I always have to hand), fresh basil, chilli flakes, mustard, double cream, bronze die penne; you can't really argue with any of it can you? I think it has the makings of a great store-cupboard staple supper for the future. My conscience can't comfortably accept that cholesterol + carbs = a family meal, so I confess to adding a few large handfuls of frozen peas to the pasta water about four minutes before the end of the cooking time. (Sacrilege I know - just don't tell the Italian part of my family - seriously.)

I'm so glad to get back into the Random Recipe project after a few months absence, caused (in part) by the messy chaos of our lives. As well as being a signal that things might be settling down at last, it's prompted me to unearth this treasure of a book. And despite what I really think is a pretty dire cover shot (by the time the 2009 edition came out others clearly concurred) the food photography really is lip-licking.

sorry, no picture of our actual dinner, it was eaten too fast!

Do head over to Belleau Kitchen at the end of the month to see what everyone else has randomly selected!

gong xi fa cai!

I don't know for sure, but I suspect that very few Singaporeans resolve to lose weight on January 1st - the Gregorian New Year. There would be so little point, given that only three or four weeks later, Chinese New Year arrives with all its feasting, fireworks and general merriment.

At my friend's house last week, our pot of tea was accompanied by a dozen pineapple tarts, a whole box of Nyonya love letters (sweet wafer rolls), and soft sweet brown jelly cakes (kueh) coated with grated fresh coconut. Sublime, and entirely homemade by various friends and relatives. She waved her infuriatingly slender, elegant arm in the air and said "don't even think about holding back, it's New Year, resistance is futile!" Well, I didn't need to be told twice.

To give you a bit of the CNY atmosphere, here are some of our recent photos (do not adjust your screen, unbelievably, these red photos are straight out of camera!) Imagine music blaring at full-throttle, acrid smoke from barrels of roasting chestnuts, the taste of your takeaway siew bao as you amble along, surrounded by traders selling every imaginable food; cartloads of melon seeds, durian pastries, fried chicken feet, bak kwa, frog porridge, rambutan tea, salted preserved ducks... and of course, a multitude of the all-important pineapple tarts.

in case you were wondering, it's the year of the dragon!

Christmas decorations are for amateurs, THIS is decoration!

On the evening we were out taking all these photos, we tried a dish called ah balling - rice balls in peanut soup. I believe that it's actually a traditional mid-autumn festival dish but you seem to be able to get it at this time of year too. In fact a quick wiki search reveals that the spherical balls in the round bowl symbolise family togetherness, so perhaps that's why the stall was doing a roaring trade this week (a big element of lunar New Year is family reunion).

The reason it caught my eye is that, back in November, Dom from Belleau Kitchen challenged all his Random Recipe disciples to share a vegetarian soup recipe. I was convinced that someone in that clever bunch would come up with a sweet soup, but alas, it was not to be. Well, ah balling is a genuine and authentic sweet soup and really easy to make. So after eating it at the nightmarket, I did my usual: search for at least half a dozen recipes on line, and then combine all the most sensible elements to make my own version.

 ah balling
makes enough for about 6-8 people

a big packet of peanuts (NOT salted) about 200g but no need for accuracy
2tsp bicarbonate of soda
250ml soy milk
100g caster sugar
frozen tang yuan or mochi (glutinous rice balls, we like the ones filled with peanut best)

• soak the peanuts in a bowl of water with the bicarb (apparently this helps to soften them) for at least two or three hours
• wash the peanuts a few times in a sieve, chop very roughly (you still want big bits) and put them in a pan of boiling water - about a litre
• simmer for a couple more hours with the lid at a tilt, the peanuts need to be soft and the soup will be cloudy
• stir in the sugar and soy milk and bring back to the boil
• drop your frozen mochi into the soup, when they rise to the surface after a couple of minutes, they're ready (we find two or three per person to be enough - the five per bowl at the night market beached us!) Sprinkle in some crushed peanuts for a bit of crunch.

It's sweet and hot and peanuty, but honestly, I don't think this will become a regular family staple. You never know though, perhaps next CNY in a frosty city far, far away, I'll feel like hanging up my red decorations and hosting a nostalgic Singaporean supper. This would make an authentic and unique dessert and, if served one rice ball per person in tiny porcelain bowls with Chinese spoons, I think it could actually be quite elegant... providing I don't unwittingly buy fluorescent pink rice balls next time!!!

GONG XI FA CAI lovely readers!

it's been Wan week...

For the uninitiated, Chef Wan is the TV food king round our neck of the woods. Always cheerful, exuberant and energetic, Malaysian and other South-East Asian dishes are clearly his defining passion. If you're an eagle-eyed Rick Stein fan, you might remember Chef Wan from a hilarious cooking lesson in the Far Eastern Odyssey series, in which I think I remember Rick Stein describing him as "Malaysia's Delia and Jamie combined", or something to that effect.

I got a set of mini Chef Wan cookbooks for Christmas so when Dom, our gracious Random Recipe host, challenged us to cook something randomly from our newest cookbooks I immediately began salivating over all the exotic possibilities: asam chicken, beef rendang, mutton curry... chickity China the Chinese chicken, have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin' (sorry, can NOT get that song out of my head, and now you won't be able to either).

Alas, it was not to be. We randomly picked Spiced Pumpkin Muffins, and one Wan week into the New Year, me and The Boss whiled away a rainy Singapore afternoon making them. And I must say, they're very delicious and a lot like carrot cake, as you might imagine (but not in the least like a Singaporean carrot cake which is a very different kettle of ill-chosen metaphors altogether). You roast and mash the pumpkin before making something very similar to a basic (Western) carrot cake batter and throw in the pumpkin and half a cup of chopped walnuts at the end. Simples. But perhaps not as simple as an actual carrot cake.

Now I'm off to drool over the photos of curries and fried food on the other pages to decide what to make next.

this was taken on a plain white countertop, but it looks all cool and superimposed!
i'm starting to love the flash on my camera, after giving it a really hard time for ages

small chocolate nemesis

An affirming sort of thing happened this week.

One rainy afternoon, while twiddling about on the computer instead of paying my daughter the undivided attention she deserves, some music started to play. I was wrapped up in woeful confusion at not understanding a word of this blog tutorial, when I realised that The Boss (not normally a spontaneous dancer) was twirling, swirling and pogo-ing around the room to the soundtrack. She asked me to play it again and again and again. Dancing to YouTube was on the agenda the following day, and the next. Pretty soon, we were all at it.

Unable to find the tracks on iTunes, I figured there'd be no harm in emailing the musician to see if he could help me out. And within 48 hours he had replied, attaching ten of his songs to a generous and genuine email. In his words "I share all this in the hopes that (if you dig it, of course), you'll share it with others."

This ranked pretty highly on my random-act-of-kindness scale, higher still because it was a kindness directed towards my progeny, and all parents have a fondness for that. So, in the spirit of spreading the warmth I urge you to go over and check out Allen Cote's website and buy a few of his lovely tracks (some are on iTunes with more to follow I'm sure). His will be the soundtrack to our winter.

And so it was the soundtrack to our latest self-imposed random recipe evening (our official random recipe post for November is here, but we're nerds and try to cook randomly more often than Dom requests, because it's fun). My husband instigated another bizarre and unfathomable system for selecting the recipe. Somehow it involved me choosing lots of numbers (I still don't know how they featured in the selection process) and him hiding recipe books in loads of drawers. Don't ask.

The recipe in question needs a little introduction: years ago, in the halcyon days of lissome youth (aka the early 2000s), when we worked too hard to enjoy life as much as we should have, there was a recipe. A recipe that filled domestic hearts with fear, and newspaper columns with adjectives like unfeasible, infamous and disastrous. It was the River Cafe's Chocolate Nemesis from the River Cafe Cookbook. The stir it caused is described in this article by Julian Barnes much better that I ever could  (hardly surprising, him being the Booker prize winner an' a'thing). And as a (further) aside, if you're looking for a stocking filler for the man in your life, Julian Barnes' The Pedant in the Kitchen is a great little book if you can find it.

Anyway, the recipe is the Easy Small Nemesis, from the River Cafe Cookbook Easy (emphasis on the easy, see?). If you're not familiar with the River Cafe, it's probably suffice to say that it was the culinary training ground for Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall amongst others. Small Nemesis contains a whole packet of butter, five eggs, four large bars of chocolate and a heap of sugar. It's still not exactly easy (only because at numerous points we felt sure we were headed for a cowpat and that's a bit stressful) but this version of the recipe does actually work.

It's definitely a "grown-up" pudding, so densely rich that the tiniest slice beat me (and I'm blessed with a snout and trotters). And it's certainly a restaurant-y pudding, for reasons that I can't explain in any way other than it doesn't feel like something you'd normally eat at someone's home - certainly not in my home. If you're from a family of fruit-pud haters it would be a seriously impressive alternative at Christmas, especially for nut-/gluten-free households. It ticks all the rich, indulgent, over-the-top boxes that a good Chrissie pud should. And this small version could easily feed twelve. Our neighbours have just moved out, so quite what we're going to do with the remaining ten slices of ours is anyone's guess.

And so, here it is: our nemesis. Because there's nothing like getting a headstart on your Christmas weight gain while dancing to the strains of a distant ukelele.

duffer and cardamom soup(...ish)

Well, our dedication to the randomness of the random recipe challenge slightly backfired this month with a boring recipe.

But do keep reading anyway, you might learn something yet. (So bossy.)

This month, the wonderful Dominic teamed up with a lady called Jac from Tinned Tomatoes, combining their challenges into "Random Recipes does No Croutons Required". Baffled yet? I'm not 100% clear so I'll quote Dom to disguise my ignorance:

Jac has been running the excellent No Crouton's Required challenge with Lisa's Kitchen, since the internet began back in the 1950's... or something like that... and it's a very successful and genius challenge, asking bloggers to create a vegetarian soup or salad with a different theme each month... and so to shake it up a bit, this month she will ask her bloggers to pick their soup or salad randomly... and i'm asking all of you to do the same...

So, Mr Macaroon and I randomly picked a book off the shelf, turned to the index and he picked a number between one and ten (the number of soup recipes it contained). The recipe in question (Spring vegetable and bean since you ask) comprises vegetables, a tin of canned beans, and stock. It's the kind of thing that any of you could make on a camping stove. In a gale. With a blindfold on and your leg in plaster. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just that as recipes go, this one's not very interesting. It's from Jamie's Ministry of Food.

We decided to call it idiot duffer soup.

We pimped it a little by using homemade duck stock from last month's random recipe challenge (defrosted, clarified and strained through a muslin). Oops to the vegetarian part of the challenge, but the stock was too good to ignore! That's about all there was to it. Celery, onions, carrots, tomatoes, spinach, broccoli, beans, garlic. Healthy, hearty and undeniably tasty (although, like the solid northern Europeans that we are, we did debate whether a potato or two would have improved the texture).

Actually I must admit, it was delicious. But the whole experience lacked the general razzmatazz and pizzazz (and other words with lots of zzzzzs) required for the esteemed random recipe challenge, so I couldn't leave it at that.

I'm intrigued as to whether anyone will manage to come up with a bona fide sweet soup for the challenge. Disclaimer: what follows is NOT a bona fide sweet soup, and neither was it picked at random, but it's a dessert that some of you might not have heard of. It's not soup, but it's soup...ish.

Kheer is a sago pudding that comes in a tiny dish as part of an Indian vegetarian thali. Indeed, in my opinion, no thali is complete without kheer. While searching online some time ago for a good kheer recipe, I found lots of basmati rice pudding recipes sweetened with condensed milk. Ignore those. The kheer at our favourite cafe is much lighter than that, and sloppier, more like a gloopy sweet soup. It's so simple that after a few tweaks I think I've managed to come up with my own way of making it. And listen, as a martyr to my art I've eaten many, many bowls of kheer, so while this certainly isn't a genuine Indian recipe I promise you that it tastes pretty close. (And if anyone can give me more authentic instructions I'd be tickled squint. There's nothing I like more than recipes that start with "when my Granny used to make this..."!) 

Kheer
65g pearl sago/tapioca
100ml water
1litre semi skimmed milk
6-8 cardamom pods
6-10 strands of saffron
4tbsp soft brown sugar
2tbsp raisins
2tbsp slivered almonds
ground ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg (a few pinches/to your own taste)

• measure the milk into a jug. Slit the sides of the cardamom pods to expose the seeds, put the whole pods into the milk and back into the fridge for a couple of hours to infuse.
• wash the sago thoroughly in a seive. Put the rinsed sago and 100ml water into a bowl, cover with cling film and leave for a couple of hours at room temp. The pearls should puff up.
• once the wait is up, pour your milk (pods and all) into a pan and bring to the boil. Stir for 10 minutes or so at a rolling boil.
• remove the cardamom pods, and add the softened sago pearls and all the other ingredients. Stir for a couple of minutes to dissolve the sugar. Switch off the heat and leave to stand.

The pearls will become translucent and thicken the milk as it cools, and the saffron will gently colour the mixture. Try to resist eating this hot though, the best temperature is when it has cooled to about the point where you know that it has been hot at some ill-defined time in the past. No? Too obscure? Luke warm isn't specific enough, and who the heck is Luke anyway.

Obviously this recipe is just my own approximation and you can apply your own bucket chemistry to it. If you don't like a starchy rice pudding texture, half the amount of sago. If you want it stronger, tinker with the flavourings and use more cardamom. More colourful? Add more saffron or add it earlier. For the crunchy element you could use pistachios, toasted pumpkin seeds, anything really. I've even seen a version with crystallised rose petals sprinkled over the top!

So that's the closest I could come to inventing a sweet soup. I'm anticipating at least one of the RR group creating something seriously sinful, sweet and soupy before the end of the month, so do check in with Belleau Kitchen around about St Andrew's day to find out. In the meantime I'm rather tempted to see if I can make kheer with less refined ingredients; freshly squeezed coconut milk rather than semi-skimmed cow, and gula melaka rather than sugar. I don't know whether it'll work as I'm sure the coconut milk will behave differently when heated, but I'm interested to give it a try.

Thanks Dom and Jac for another fun challenge - I look forward to finding out what December has in store!