Igenlode Wordsmith

The elderflower jam was a pretty much complete failure. You are supposed to boil it cautiously for five minutes until it 'thickens': http://www.jam-making.com/jam_elderflower.html
I boiled mine with increasing alarm for forty minutes until I had to go out, returning several hours later (which meant I had to sterilise the jars all over *again*) to boil it furiously for another twenty minutes of frustration, at which point it did finally start to wrinkle when pushed on a chilled saucer, so I thought I'd better pot it up in order to avoid a repeat of the crab-apple boiled sweet episode. However the half-full jar even when stone cold is still not set; it has thickened into a caramel-coloured gloopy liquid but is nowhere near being jelly. So what I basically have is four sealed jars of what amounts to runny and very expensive golden syrup; I can only conclude that my attempts at extracting the pectin from the lemon pips were entirely ineffectual, and that the amount of pectin in the jam sugar (over 1000g out of the 1,300g in total) was insufficient to set that volume of liquid, so that it only started to thicken at all after a significant quantity had been boiled off...

The same thing happened to my mother once with a batch of bramble jelly that simply failed to 'gel', but that was at least strongly blackberry-flavoured and we were able to use it as a topping for yoghurt etc. This is pretty much home-made golden syrup with a slight surviving floral tang -- but probably too liquid to even function as a golden syrup replacement in baking.

I went to the supermarket to buy another month's worth of groceries (red and green lentils, evaporated milk, lard, brown rice, etc.) and came away with a pound of very heavily discounted minced lamb that was being reduced because it was (a) date expiring that evening and (b) "20% fat" (evil!evil!evil!)
So I had a quick change of cooking plans and used half of it to make a 'dry curry' from a successful recipe in my scrapbook: https://101things.wordpress.com/2006/06/17/kheema-matar-minced-lamb-curry-with-peas/
(it's very handy to have a non-tomato-based curry, though I don't have lamb mince available very often :-)

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( Piquant Beef )

(I froze the rest of the minced lamb; I can use it in meatballs, or I believe I do have some Caucasian recipes in the Russian cookbook that call for fat lamb... or possibly 'fat-tailed lamb', which is not necessarily the same thing!)

This pie is always a luxury -- the meat must have cost me about £16 overall, although I only used about a third of what I bought and the rest will go in other meals eventually -- but it was a success when I first made it in my teens and I have continued doing it as an occasional treat ever since. It never fails to succeed; I think the magic ingredient is the black pudding.
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I found myself yet again consulting Mrs Molokhovets in an attempt to work out how to make dough for pirozhki when you don't have any butter (due to having used almost all of it up on Peach & White Chocolate Failure -- I'm still eating the crunchy little greasy twice-cooked portions, although two of the remaining last three appear to have welded themselves together in the freezer and may have to be eaten as a single large lump). What had not dawned on me, of course, is that the butter-free Lenten recipes are also egg-free, so not really what I was hoping for in terms of proportions of oil to flour and egg!( Read more... )

Anyway, I gave up on Mrs Molokhovets, which I couldn't really read and which didn't seem likely to have anything along the lines that I was looking for, and resorted to the Internet instead and a query for "Russian+dough+yeast+oil+egg". Which gave me a recipe for Russian Stuffed Rolls with a dough that seemed to have the right sort of proportions ( Read more... )

I tried Jack Monroe's Peach and White Chocolate Traybake (as I happened to have a tin of peaches sitting in the cupboard), but it was a failure -- and while I know that prices have shifted around quite a bit in the last ten years, and chocolate in particular has gone up a lot, I really can't see how a recipe specifying three eggs and *eight ounces* of butter (not even margarine; she specifically says butter) can ever have been considered a 'budget recipe', let alone priced at 28p per portion if it only makes eight portions.( Read more... )

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"The Four of Us" has now shot up to 118 hits and 19 kudos on AO3, which is more in six days then any of the other five fics I posted in that fandom have achieved in up to nine months.
Chapter 3 of "Little Gentlemen" has received three page views... which is better than the nothing it got on the first day of upload, but probably about as many as it is likely to get in total!

I cycled 24 miles today, and by the time I got back I could barely stand after dismounting from the bike, let alone manage the stairs... I am a sturdy and sanguine city cyclist, unconcerned by heavy traffic (which is often moving more slowly than a bicycle anyhow), but I am *not* a seasoned long-distance rider.

I have put on a syrup and ginger suet pudding to boil, which I feel is what is required to Feed The Inner Man under such circumstances :-p (I have to cycle another twelve miles tomorrow morning...)

However the good news is that I managed to finalise the third verse of my ballad translation during the journey; cycling is hopeless for working on manuscripts but quite good for verse ;-)

Since I now have another batch of real quinces (after making japonica jelly last week) I made a recipe from my Russian cookery book -- technically speaking now a Soviet cookery book, I suppose, since it takes it for granted that you will be interested in recipes from all the now independent parts of the Soviet Union!

Azerbaijani bozbash bears a probably not coincidental resemblance to Persian cookery and to lamb plov, ( Read more... )
(Similar recipe online: https://bestrecipes24.com/recipe/azerbaijani-style-lamb-bozbash-soup-with-chickpeas )

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"Little Gentlemen" is coming along quite nicely, although the style is in danger of becoming stilted and verbose -- not very Dumas!
I have now successfully introduced my young OC Venya (playing the 'Nat Blake' role, with Raoul taking on the role -- and vocabulary -- of the cheerful Tommy Bangs who introduces him to everyone and everything) into Athos's house, which is at least fifty per cent of the material envisaged, and am attempting to finish the scene in which Athos reads the accompanying letter (also establishing AU material). ( Read more... )

I made blueberry sourdough bagels, which were extremely purple inside!

I acquired some more ground-plums (the windfall plums that one picks up from the ground; it beggars belief for me that the general public will happily strip the blackberries from alongside the path before they are properly ready, so that nobody gets to enjoy them properly, and yet is prepared to let ripe plums that fall onto that same path rot, get trodden into the ground, and otherwise go to waste, either because they don't know what they are or because they are terrified of 'dirt') and some windfall apples, and had to spend the evening cooking in order to combat the swarm of fruit-flies that were staggering around the kitchen. (The flies were already there but made a bee-line for any slightly damaged fruit!)

I ended up making a German plum cake (not terribly successful with these small wild plums, as the stones cling to the flesh and they cannot be halved -- in the end I just squeezed most of the stones out of the skins), a plum and apple crumble, and a sponge cake (unrelated), while peeling and chopping the remaining apples to put in the freezer as an emergency measure. It's just as well that I failed to pick any elderberries this year, although rather a shame...


These are the yellow plums from one of the other trees, which may be mirabelles -- but the red plums are the same size. It's because they are so small that they are able to fall from the tree without significant damage; commercial plums would split open after dropping from that height.

I made elderflower cordial; I was planning to make elderflower and rose cordial, but the scented roses from the cemetery were no longer anywhere to be found, and even the specific bush by a specific grave that I had once used on a later occasion was still there, but bizarrely was no longer scented (lack of rain?) So I picked extra heads to make the quantity up to thirty for the non-rose recipe.

Then I subsequently used the citrus slices to make a few jars of sweet orange marmalade, having remembered previous doomed attempts at not wasting them! And I used the final partial jar of marmalade to make some marmalade buns, which are basically rock buns with marmalade stirred into them in place of most of the sugar. I also put some of my last batch of home-made marmalade on them afterwards as a topping, as the open jar has been sitting around taking up space in the fridge for a very long time. I still haven't quite managed to finish it up, as it was cut extremely chunky and I could only balance a few lumps on the top of each bun :-p