my turn to cook

I have been unleashing my inner domestic goddess, and cooking.  This evening I blind baked a shortcrust pastry case that will form the basis of a flan for tomorrow's lunch.  I meant to make it last night for today's lunch, but ran out of time and energy, and since I was out all of this morning I couldn't have made a quiche for lunch anyway.  While the pastry was cooking I dissolved a can of caramelised condensed milk plus additional brown sugar in some ordinary milk, a task so mundane I'm not sure it counts as cooking.  This will form the basis of Dulche du Leche ice cream, once it is chilled, and frozen down with even more cream.  And I made a bread and butter pudding for breakfast.  Mine, not the Systems Administrator's, who does not share my enthusiasm for bread puddings.  It has all the right ingredients of breakfast (bread + butter = toast), eggs, milk and raisins (components of muesli), but not necessarily in the right order.

Last night's supper was a one-pot exercise in Mitteleuropean nostalgia from Gretel Beer, erdaepfelgulash, or potato goulash.  You peel and slice your potatoes, she suggests to about the thickness of a pencil, chop an onion, snip up a slice of bacon, fry the bacon lightly, add the onions and fry the mixture some more, then add the potatoes, salt and pepper, paprika, a pinch of marjoram, and caraway seeds.  I didn't bother with the salt, because I don't, except for bread, and substituted a little smoked paprika for the caraway seeds because the SA doesn't like them.  Stir it around, add enough water to cover, and some frankfurters chopped up.

I used Waitrose's best Bavarian ones, which were not as alarmingly pink as some.  Years ago, I tried her recipe for beef stuck through with frankfurters, and the pink dye from the sausages spread out through the meat like an O level chemistry chromograph.  It was vaguely off-putting.  On the basis that the Germans are very strict about what goes into their beer, I hoped that the best Bavarian frankfurters would be similarly pure.  It was a good stew, for very little effort, and I recommend it.

Tonight's stuffed green peppers, except that they are red because that was what needed using up in the fridge, created altogether more washing up, since they are cooked in a home made tomato sauce which involves rubbing a cooked tomato and fried onion mixture through a sieve.  I always feel that anything that requires ingredients to be pushed through a sieve really calls for the services of a thirteen year old scullery maid, but we don't have one of those.  The minced pork is mixed with more fried onion, and par-boiled rice, but not cooked before being stuffed into the peppers, and I am now nervous (a) that the resulting dish will be fatty and (b) that it won't be cooked through, and I'll give us food poisoning.  You can see why people resort to ready meals.

Addendum  There is an entertaining online English vocabulary quiz, which I came to via a link from an article in the Telegraph.  The Telegraph presents it as research into gender differences in vocabulary, but whatever it is investigating I'm pretty sure it's not that.  You have to identify a series of genuine and made-up words as genuine or made-up, with heavy but unspecified penalties for false positives.  The spellings are American, and some of the words are tricky not because you can't recognise their component parts and hazard a guess at what they might mean, but because you aren't sure whether the root word declines or conjugates or whatever the term is like that.  My score jumped from 73 per cent at the first go to 87 per cent on the second.  I don't know how one amalgamates scores from multiple tests when giving subjects just one practice run can change their performance so much.  When second time around I went for feedback on the true words I hadn't known (no false positive either time) I discovered that they were measuring response times.  Which still doesn't let me work out what the experimenters are actually testing for.