Celebrating International I Love Broccoli Day!!!!

For today's International I Love Broccoli Day I have really pushed the boat out!  A special menu appropriate for the hot weather which celebrates Broccoli.

Broccoli, Parsnip, Chorizo, Leek, and Saint Agur Blue Cheese Soup

Peel and cut parsnips and gently fry in butter until golden brown, then add cut up leeks and fry as well.  Boil broccoli in chicken stock with a bay leaf until nicely done.  Add the parsnips and leeks and cook a little longer.  Liquidise with one of those hand-hold thingies.

Add blue cheese and chorizo, heat up until cheese has melted.  Add salt and nutmeg.  After ladling soup into plate, add chopped nuts (hazelnuts are good) and cilantro or parsley.  Serve with mini-pizzas.

Heart-Shaped Mini Pizzas 

For these I tried out my new Pampered Chef Baking tubes.  I have four - one heart-shaped, one star-shaped, and two flower-shaped (the extra flower one was included as an extra).  These tubes are used to bake baguette-style loaves in fancy shapes, so you can cut them up and use them for canapes.  Great for cocktail parties, sadly I never have any cocktail parties, but I am sure they will come in handy somehow.  

The night before I mixed up some sourdough, I needed to refresh my sourdough starter anyway.  I just used the starter, regular wheat flour, buckwheat flour, and spelt flour, plus salt.  The next morning I kneaded the risen dough and added some butter for smoothness.

Then I sprayed the inside of my baking tube.  I have never used baking spray before, but since these tubes are tricky to get into I thought Better Safe Than Sorry!!! and used the spray (butter flavoured).  After having sprayed the inside of the tube I formed a roll out of my dough and popped it into the tube - it was 3/4 full.  I had heated the oven to 200 C, and put the tube (with lid on) onto a baking sheet Standing Up.  That way the dough filled the tube on all sides, resulting in a proper heart-shaped loaf.  I baked the bread for one hour.

I left the tube outside of the oven for ten minutes, took off the lids, and slid the bread out - it was very easy, nothing stuck.  I waited a bit longer, and then cut the loaf with a Very Sharp Knife into slices.

In the meantime I had prepared the pizza sauce.  I fried cut up peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, and leeks in goose fat, and added some tomato puree.  This I cooked a little, then I added salt and some vinegar to add a bit of tang.

Back to my heart-shaped pizzalings.  I covered each with some fresh basil leaves, added the topping, added some shredded cheddar, and popped them into the still warm oven to melt a little.  They made a delicious accompaniment to the broccoli soup.  I suppose they could also be toasted and covered with butter before one puts on the basil leaves, but I was getting hungry.

Melon With Berries From the Allotment and Whipped Cream

Since this was rather a light lunch, I added a somewhat excessive dessert.  My dear friend C had blessed me with a large number of berries fresh from her allotment, which I soaked in a little amaretto.  These I mixed with fresh honeydew melon pieces and topped the lot off with whipped cream and a dusting of cinnamon.  It was really very delicious!

Have a very happy International I Love Broccoli Day!

Oxford on a sunny Sunday morning

Today I spent a very enjoyable morning reading the papers, drinking coffee, and meeting up with my good friend A who works on Sundays and meets up with me before she starts almost every Sunday. I had a truly glorious day, full of sunshine and laughter, and on the way home I found three coins.  Life is good!

Looking out at the High Street from my breakfast table

 

I saw a Hedgehog!!!!

OK I know this is a lousy photo but I had to be quick, this little guy ran fast!  I was just closing the top floor window for the night at 22:30 when I noticed a fat creature running down the street.  At first I thought it might be a rat, but then I looked more closely and recognised it for what it was - a Hedgehog!

Only Tuesday evening I attended a talk about Hedgehogs at Blackwell ....

Say it with cookies!

Today two of my cast iron cookie molds arrived!  One bakes heart shaped cookies, and the other does all the letters of the alphabet.  This is of course terribly exciting!  If I had tiny children I could teach them reading by using these letters.  Each letter has a little picture inside; for example, the letter H has a heart inside, A has an apple, B has a bird - no doubt this is intended to further aid the cookie eating public to learn their letters.  Much better than alphabet soup, don't you think?

Anyway, I decided to try them out immediately, and used them to make shortbread (I ran out recently), though no doubt they would be equally good with a gingerbread or sugar cookie mix, or even Springerles.  I oiled the forms well, heated them up in the oven, and then pressed the cookie dough into the hot mold.  One has to be careful not to burn oneself, obviously - perhaps heating up the forms isn't really necessary, and one could use a baking spray instead to make sure nothing got stuck.

I was quite lucky, although a few of the hearts stuck a little bit - things often get sticky in matters of the heart, don't you know - the alphabet cookies all came out rather well; the form has some sort of coating I think.

The cookies are very nice to eat, too!

A Little Home Improvement Project

Window opening kitchen side, with Astro-foil in the background

There is a large internal window between my dining room and kitchen, no doubt to allow extra light into the dining room - it is rather a dark room.  But since there is no window glass in the opening, and the kitchen is usually colder than the dining room, the window also allowed a steady gust of cold air to enter the dining room.  To stop this, I closed the window up some years ago by attaching a large mirror over the opening on the dining room side.

Window opening on the dining room side

On the kitchen side I lined the window with Astro-Foil for further insulation, and then used the window ledge to keep some large jars with flour etc.  However, I often thought of adding a few extra shelves, so I could store additional jars - in a tiny kitchen like mine an extra 120cm shelf space is nothing to be sneezed at!

The thing that stopped me was having to haul to the next DIY shop to buy the appropriate supplies and tools.  My electric drill had given up the ghost some time ago, and it seemed such a waste to buy another one, given that I only needed it once or twice a year.

However, last night while laying in bed I remembered that I had stored a wooden DVD container in the attic, which I could take apart and use to make shelves of.  So this morning I climbed up the attic ladder, and discovered - Glory Be! - not just the DVD box but also two planks I had put by for future use.  So I left the DVD box where it was holding up the roof, and set to work on the two planks.

Plank from attic

Tool box and work table in the Mouserleum (lean-to, abode of the late lamented Mouser)

I do my sawing in the garden to minimise indoor mess

Not quite a clean cut, I had to tidy that one up a bit

I only have a small hand-held saw, but it was sufficient to saw a piece off of each plank.  I measured for a tight fit, so that the walls as well as the screws (see below) would hold the shelves.  Now all I had to worry about was fixing the planks into the window opening.

Make small holes with hammer and nail

Insert screws into holes

Insert planks!

Since I didn't have a drill, I used my ancient, very very bad and unprofessional studentish method.  To wit, first I hammer a thin nail where I want the planks to go, creating a small hole.  Then I use a screwdriver to drill a screw into each hole.  If you try to screw without first creating a small hole the screw slips away because you don't get a good grip.  Then I put the planks onto the screws.

Quite good, don't you think?  I am particularly pleased that I can finally display some of my cast iron baking forms!

Lots of new storage space!

Cornbread and muffin molds!