Tonight I’m making baked Thai red curry, from this book my friend Pat gave to me. Happy Birthday to Pat today by the way! Still young at heart I’m sure xx
I’ve made the red curry paste and smeared it all over two chicken breasts and left it to marinate a bit. All that remains is to bake this in the oven for 30 minutes while I cook some basmati rice and maybe some green beans. I was planning on making this tonight, then shelved the idea as I was going out to book club and needed something quick to feed David before I went out, so defrosted some sausages. But now book club is off so it’s back to the curried chicken plan.. ! and I’ll cook the sausages too to have cold for lunch tomorrow. Cold sausages never last very long in our fridge…who can resist a cold sausage? I sometimes can, but David never!
140 recipes… that should keep me going for the rest of the summer, and I still have lots of other cookbooks I’m currently dipping in to as well.
My friend Erica kindly gave me some figs from her garden to try, as I couldn’t remember what they tasted like or if I liked them. So far I’ve tried them raw with crème fraîche and honey… quite nice, baked with brown sugar, cinnamon, honey and orange juice.. really good, and tomorrow I have some blue cheese arriving from Ocado to try with my remaining fig, as recommended by Emily. Figs have been in Britain for a really long time, probably since the Romans. The last time anyone tried to grow them commercially in Britain was a visionary farmer called Justin Brooke in the 1950s in Suffolk. Apparently the figgy pudding mentioned in our traditional Christmas carols never usually contained figs, and plum pudding originally meant some kind of weird soup with meat and dried fruit, sounds disgusting. I’ve never been keen on fruit and meat combos. I love meat and I love fruit. I don’t mind a bit of apple sauce with pork, not so keen on cranberry sauce with turkey, not keen at all on such recipes as pork with prunes or lamb with apricots, or duck a l’orange or with plum sauce, just not my thing. How do you feel about such combinations?
I’ve recently reinstated my lunchtime walk in Windsor. Today I sat in a little park called Bachelor’s Acre to eat my sandwiches. This was the view.
This little park is popular with Mums and children. In the summer there are usually fountains going, but not this year. A few years ago they put in this sculpture of The Queen and her corgis. Although I quite like the way the corgis are spread about, I personally don’t find it a very flattering likeness of The Queen.
The older I get, the more I stop to ponder inscriptions and to wonder about the history around us. I read this plaque the other day in Bachelor’s Acre for the first time, even though I must have walked past it hundreds of times.
The roast ox sounds good. And the plum puddings, provided they were of a sweet variety. I like the expression “Old English Fare”. Not a description I can apply to my baked Thai red curry chicken tonight. I do, however, have a really interesting book of old English recipes. I spotted it in a museum shop once and then put it on my Christmas gift list. It’s called “Good things in England” by Florence White.
It’s described as “A Practical Cookery Book for Everyday Use.. Containing Traditional and Regional Recipes suited to Modern Tastes contributed by English Men and Women between 1399 and 1932 and edited by Florence White”. I’ve made a couple of old recipes from this book but not delved into it that much. The recipes can be a bit vague, and the measurements and ingredients are sometimes different from today, so that’s a bit of a challenge. I made some baked cheesy rice once from it which was like a savoury baked rice pudding with cheese in. My Mum says she remembers my grandmother making something similar when she was a child and she loved it. David and I really enjoyed it too, proper comfort food. I should make it again, start a trend and not let these delicious old recipes fade away forever into the mists of time. I’ll tell you more about this book another time as I’m sure it holds many more interesting secrets within its pages. It encompasses my love of cooking, history and books, with my homeland of England all in one. How wonderful!! 🙂
The Windsor Waffle 