Category: Cooking

  • Persian Feast

    Persian lamb shanks, saffron rice (tachin), and cucumber tomato salad

    While I was at the Show, Mr. Snook was whipping up a Persian feast! He made RecipeTinEats’ slow-cooked lamb shanks, saffron rice (Tachin), and cucumber tomato salad. He thinks the lamb came out a little salty, but it pairs well with the rice. And how good is that crunchy crust? 😍

    Persian saffron rice (Tachin)

  • Dinner tonight

    Dinner tonight

    Butternut squash soup with ginger prawns and Lebanese bread. (Recipe here.) As soon as we go off Daylight Savings, I always get a craving for hearty soups and stews!

  • Dinner tonight

    A plate with a Lebanese bread, a big pile of salad, and chicken with yogurt sauce

    Lebanese Lemon Garlic Chicken and Fattoush Salad from RecipeTinEats. The salad was a lot of chopping, and I had to specially seek out sumac for the dressing. (We already had pomegranate molasses since we’re annoying foodies.) Worth it though! 😋

  • Links that interested me today

    • ‘Writing a Freer World’: An Appreciation of Tove Jansson at 92NY – My sister sent me that, surprised to learn that Tove Jansson was a woman! Yes, indeed. Relatedly, my friend Sohan is in Helsinki and texted me yesterday from the Jansson exhibition at the Helsinki Art Museum. It’s nice when your friends and family know your hobbies well enough to share things with you. 🩷
    • The Greatest Two-Hit Wonders – I disagree with a lot of these on the basis that they are “album bands” rather than singles bands. I mean, the Cure? Crowded House? Jimmy Buffett? No way. (Blues Traveler = 100% though.)
    • My Dinners With Harold: How a shy Ph.D. in English literature revolutionized the science of cooking and became revered in the most famous kitchens in the world – Lovely little profile. I really should get Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking for the Snook sometime.
    • Hot ball in aloe gel – I laughed so hard at that Mastodon post that I cried. Juvenile, I know, but so funny. 😭
  • Typewriter Cake

    Typewriter Cake

    Every year I think he can’t possibly top himself, and then he does! This, of course, is the Typewriter Cake from the Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Book. He experimented with two new recipes for this one: Golden Vanilla Cake and Ermine Icing. It’s STUNNING.

    And I think we can all agree: plus 100 Husband Points for the deployment of the Pride and Prejudice quote! 🩷

    How it started:

    The beginning

    Carving:

    Carving

    The end result:

    Me typing on a cake

    Kitchen’s a wreck though. 😂 Still worth it!

    Rodd in our messy kitchen

  • Birthday prezzies

    Birthday prezzies

    It was a lovely surprise to receive some birthday gifts today from friends! Do they really know me or what?! ❤️

  • Venison Madras Curry

    Venison Madras Curry

    The Snook was slow-roasting venison for this recipe all day yesterday. It smelled amazing. You’re meant to leave it in the fridge overnight for all the flavours to meld. So good! Quite spicy.

  • Sunset Pudding – CWA 1965 Cookbook

    Sunset Pudding – CWA 1965 Cookbook

    It’s really hard to make a recipe when you have no idea what the finished product is meant to look like. I think it’s safe to call my latest vintage cooking experiment a FAIL.

    *record scratch* So how did I get here?

    I started by picking the recipe for March 2: Sunset Pudding. Doesn’t that sound evocative? Here’s the recipe:

    The recipe for Sunset Pudding

    This is actually quite a long recipe for this book! It reads:

    Grate the peel of 1 orange and put it into a saucepan with 1 quart milk and 1/2 cup sugar, bring to boil, add 5 tablespoons cornflour mixed to a smooth paste with a little cold milk. Let it boil until it thickens, then remove from the fire and fold in a beaten egg. Divide into three parts, colour one part chocolate with 2 tablespoons cocoa, 1 part pink with red current jelly, or a little cochineal, and colour the third portion with grated orange peel. Drop into a wetted mould some of the chocolate, then the yellow, then the pink; drop it so that the pudding is well streaked through. Let it stand until it is well set, turn out and serve with cream.

    Okay, so basically it’s a traditional cornstarch pudding in three different colours. I figured I could do that. (Also – remove “from the fire”? How old is this recipe?!)

    Ingredients for Sunset Pudding

    I didn’t have redcurrant jelly, but I figured lingonberry jam must be pretty close? Otherwise I had everything required.

    Boiling milk and orange peel

    Here’s the milk, sugar, and orange peel heating up on the stove.

    Adding cornstarch

    Once it hit boiling, I added in my 5 tablespoons of cornstarch, which I’d thinned by whisking in some milk.

    Adding the egg

    Once it had thickened, I took it off the heat. I used a bit of the hot milk to temper my beaten egg, before pouring the mixture in and whisking.

    Separated into three

    Then I separated the pudding mixture into three parts….

    Chocolate pudding

    …and turned one into chocolate pudding by mixing in a couple tablespoons of cocoa powder.

    Adding jam

    With the second, I added jam and mixed until it turned a pinkish colour.

    Three colours

    And here’s where I started to get stumped. The recipe said, “colour the third portion with grated orange peel.” But I already put the grated orange peel in at the start. Did they mean with more orange peel? I don’t really see how that would affect the colour at this point, and besides, I didn’t have another orange anyway. Plus I tasted it and it was plenty orange-flavoured; it definitely didn’t need to be more orange. And I somehow didn’t have any food colouring in the house either. But it was fairly yellowish anyway, so I decided to just leave it.

    So I prepped my mould, which was just a large round bowl. Having flashbacks to the “Mysterious Pudding,” I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to “turn out” the pudding once it was set, so I decided to line it with clingfilm. I knew that might wrinkle, but I was willing to deal with that. So I wetted the bowl a bit, spread out my clingfilm, and sprinkled in a few more drops of water as well. And then… well… “Drop into a wetted mould some of the chocolate, then the yellow, then the pink; drop it so that the pudding is well streaked through.” What in the world does that mean? When I originally read it I thought of it as LAYERS, but now it occurred to me that it was saying something else. I reached out to my friends Amy and Jody, as well as my sister:

    Chat message - layers or blobs?

    Everyone voted for blobs. Blobs it is!

    Adding the pudding in blobs

    So I started dutifully dropping in blobs of pudding, trying to get a good mix of the three colours.

    I think we can all agree this looks NOTHING like a sunset at this point. But remember the recipe: “so that the pudding is well streaked through.” WTF DOES THAT EVEN MEAN.

    Dragging a knife through

    I decided it meant dragging through a knife to marble the three colours together. SO SUNSET, RIGHT?

    Then I put it in the fridge overnight to set up.

    Guess what? Even after 18 hrs, there was no possibility of turning this thing out of the bowl. It was way way too wobbling in the middle; it would have just splatted everywhere. So I settled on just scooping some out for myself and my guests.

    A bowl of chocolate, berry, and orange pudding

    Folks, this was Not Good. Look, I happen to like basic chocolate pudding. I’m not a snob. But I am not a big fan of the chocolate-and-orange combo, of which this is very strong. The texture was also pretty lumpy, despite me whisking the heck out of it and doing my best not to scramble the egg. (I’ve looked at other cornstarch recipes, and the proportions and method here seem in line with them. I think it’s just hard to avoid with this type of pudding unless you’re prepared to put it through a sieve.) And I still don’t get how chocolate pudding, pink pudding, and yellow pudding are meant to look anything like a SUNSET. If you saw a sunset that looked like this, you’d think you were dying.

    I have searched online to see if there are any photos of this dessert, but there are none that I could find. Instead I found a version of my cookbook that dates back to 1930, and in it – on March 4th, in fact – is the very same recipe for Sunset Pudding, credited to one Mrs. E. S. Darby of the Condobolin Branch. That explains the reference to cooking over a fire, I guess! And I guess only Mrs. Darby knows for sure what it’s meant to look like. Maybe it isn’t meant to resemble a sunset at all, but instead is a nice pudding to eat while you’re LOOKING AT a sunset? 🤔 But if I make it again, I’m gonna leave out the orange peel…

  • Taco Monday

    Taco Monday

    I’m doing pretty well in the sweep so far! 🌮 🏆

  • Weisswurst Frühstück

    A man sits at a table outside. In front of him is a stainless steel lidded pot, a bowl of baked Bavarian pretzels, a jar of mustard, beers, and the plate of his companion.

    There’s still a lot to do in the garden – getting the proper outdoor furniture, painting the downpipes, covering the AC unit, hooking up the water feature, actually planting PLANTS – but we still managed our first outdoor Weisswurst Frühstück in a very long time today. ❤️🍻🥨