Yesterday and today were a whirlwind of activity!
Yesterday morning I woke up determined to add to my contingent of blazers, and hit the charity shop trail. As usual on such occasions, I found all sorts of other things instead.
First I went to Headington and found two Windsor chairs for £15, small and unobtrusive, just what I needed to accommodate dinner guests. I only have four really comfortable chairs, as well as two sort of comfortable chairs, one residing in the attic, and two ancient Oxford University Chemistry Department lab stools which can be wound up and down but have no backs and are probably not conducive to leisurely dining. Together with the chairs came a little Tudor style oak stool cum table for £10.
Bringing it home was a problem, and I briefly considered going back and forth three times and taking my purchases home by bus one at a time. But then I thought, life is too short, and hailed an accommodating taxi driver who helped me repatriate the lot within the hour.
Thus encouraged, I set out again and hit the Summertown conurbation. I was again lucky, and picked up a large fork for lifting meat (25p), a slotted spoon (25p), 9 large cotton handkerchiefs initialed with an H - my father's initial, so I can claim I inherited them! - 50 years old and still in the original wrapping for 50p each.
I love finding these old things, from a time when England still made stuff and was the work shop of the world. Why in tunket we have to buy things from half-way around the world, which are badly made, and prop up a foreign country's economy, while people closer to home have to subsist on zero hour contracts etc, is a mystery to me.
In that spirit I purchased a wooden spoon from a local whittling woman who was selling her home made implements in Cornmarket Street. Dreadfully expensive, but what excellent quality! I may buy a few as Christmas presents.
At the organic butchers I purchased a pork roast (with skin for crackling!) and ducks legs, for I had big plans in the kitchen. I made an excellent pork roast with lovely crackling and a very nice gravy for Sunday lunch. Well, I say 'lunch' - as a matter of fact I succumbed to my lust for crackling, and just ate that and nothing else. I reasoned that crackling wasn't much good after having been frozen, so I ate the lot and froze the meat and gravy. I tend to do the same with roast chicken - I eat the skin fresh from the oven and freeze the meat. I have a pretty full freezer right now, maybe I should stop cooking and start eating .....
I also made confit of duck out of the two duck legs. If you don't know what that is, it means cooking the ducks legs in goosefat for a long time over slow heat, and then putting them in a jar and covering them in fat. The fat preserves the meat. I rarely do this, given the price of goosefat, but I plan to make cassoulet in a few weeks and need some confit of duck, which is a main ingredient.
In case you ask, no I haven't already eaten all the Boston Baked Beans, and you are totally right, I have no business making yet another baked bean dish, in massive quantities as is my wont. However, I have a good excuse! I was lucky enough to discover and buy a Le Creuset Cassoulet pot on-line, the cast iron one with a lid, and I am very very excited about it. Of course I can also use the pot for cobblers and such like, but the first dish to be cooked in it, its inauguration dish, must be a cassoulet - anything else would be blasphemy. I expect the pot to arrive sometime next week! Yeehaw!
I also baked a seed cake, using a basic pound cake recipe. Unfortunately I took the advice from some internet dingbat who said if you heated the cast iron form up enough and made sure it was properly oiled with hot fat nothing would stick - ha ha ha!!!!! It stuck. Next time I'll use breadcrumbs again.
But I am not all that bothered, I still got half a perfectly decent cake out of it, and the rest shall be used as a base for making Hand-Grenades - my own version of Granade-Splinters, a German cakeish creation consisting of leftover cake and butter-cream. Delicious, I tell you, absolutely delicious. A calorie bomb, of course. Thus the name. I may do a blog post on it one day. Basically, you crumble up the cake, add some alcohol and perhaps melted chocolate, then you mix it up with butter-cream, and heap the sticky mess onto flat biscuits. Lastly you cover them with melted chocolate. They freeze well. Combined with ice-cream and some fruit and whipped cream they are simply the most decadent dessert imaginable!
My problem is that I combine a massive interest in cooking - always huge portions - with a small appetite, so the freezer, and hungry friends, are absolutely essential to my culinary life style. My ideal family would consist of three husbands and a dozen children, who would live in the-cupboard-underneath-the-stairs and only come out half an hour before mealtimes. They would emerge sniffing delightedly, lay the table, and eat up everything I put in front of them while loudly praising my culinary prowess. Then they'd wash all the dishes and go back to their cupboard, or wherever else they needed to go - I wouldn't care as long as they kept away from my living space. Come to think of it, it might be handy if one or two of the husbands had some sort of job, and helped to pay for all my cooking ingredients ....
Unfortunately the-cupboard-underneath-the-stairs in my house is absolutely tiny - like the rest of the house - so I can't put my ideal family scheme into practice. Oh well, it's nice to have a dream!
The rest of the weekend was taking up with polishing my new chairs and stool - don't you just love cleaning and waxing old furniture?, waterproofing my handbag - it's got to be done periodically - doing laundry - which is now hanging all over the house, courtesy of a rainy afternoon - and cleaning the house.
Can't wait to get back to work tomorrow!
Hey-Ho-Hoppdiquax and all that sort of thing!
Life is good. I bid you peace.
