in the kitchen

It rained again this morning, bringing our total rainfall in the past thirty six hours to over 15mm, or more than half an inch in old money.  That's useful, but still not nearly enough.  When I dug out the non-doing Choisya from the long bed a couple of weeks ago, I was turning up lumps of bone dry earth, once I got more than 15-20 cm below the soil surface.

I amused myself by making a bird crumble, using up a packet of butter bought before Christmas and never eaten in the overwhelming tide of food, that was beyond its sell-by date and gone rather cheesey, and some wholemeal flour bought in one of my periodic delusions that I was going to start making my own bread.  Left-over pastry is recommended for the bird table, so by extension birds ought to like a fat-rich mixture of butter and brown flour.  I didn't bother cooking it, just rubbed flour into the butter until it went into crumbs.  The bird table this afternoon has been visited by dunnocks, great tits, long tailed tits, chaffinches, robins, and a blackbird, and the bird crumble seems to be a success.  That's just as well, as there's still a whole pudding basin of the stuff in the fridge.

The cats were all in favour of spending the morning in the kitchen with me.  Wet day outside, warm Aga inside, human company and Schubert's Death and the Maiden on the radio, and the sneaky chance to try and lick out the mixing bowl.  What could be nicer?  I evicted them before starting on the human food.  There is a music society concert this evening, and although nobody has specifically asked me to make anything, I presume that there'll be wine and nibbles afterwards, so I made some cheese stars.  I only finally discovered how to do these last year, after getting embroiled in the music club.  A friend gives us beautiful cheese straws when we visit her, and I'd asked a few times how they were done, and only ever been told that they were very easy.  I thought this must be her way of preserving her culinary secret, until I had to make them myself, and discovered that they were pretty easy.  I found recipes in various books, some of which seemed to include a quite ridiculous amount of cheese, to the point of being practically pure baked cheese, and settled on the Good Housekeeping version.  It is simply shortcrust pastry, made in the ratio of two parts flour to one part of fat, with half of the butter replaced by grated cheddar, and enriched with egg yolk at the rate of one egg for every 100g of flour.  I roll the pastry thin, and as it was raining and I had plenty of time I cut them out in stars with a pastry cutter instead of just slicing the pastry into oblongs.  They puff up as they cook, though not as much as flaky pastry, and are done in no more than seven minutes in a fairly hot oven.  If they were fatter they would presumably take longer.

It seemed a pity to throw the egg whites down the sink, so I made some meringues (it was still raining).  Meringues are very, very easy, so long as you can get your oven cool enough and are not in a hurry.  When I was a child, my mother would drop the temperature of our coal fired Aga below its normal range, I think by stuffing a sock in a vent (but maybe she left the door open to cool it, and the sock was for something else), and cook meringues in the lower oven, which was the cooler of the two.  The baking tray was lined with rice paper, which stuck in places to the meringues, but was edible and didn't taste of anything.  It fascinated me that you could get edible paper.  I use baking parchment, not the fancy reusable silicon sort sold by the likes of Lakeland, but the stuff like non-stick greaseproof paper, available in supermarkets.  Two egg whites need 100g of caster sugar, and make you about ten normal sized meringues.  Whisk the egg whites until they are stiff but not gone into lumps, then add the sugar one dessert spoon at a time, leaving 30 seconds between spoonfuls.  You end up with a shiny, frothy mixture like deluxe shaving foam.  Spoon it out.  Cook it slowly until they are as crunchy as you want.  When dried through they sound hollow when tapped.  Today's lot got two and a half hours because I went out while they were cooking.  If I'd wanted them sticky in the middle I'd have given them less.  Our simmer oven sits at just below boiling point, which seems ideal.

And that was the morning gone, apart from firming up the arrangements to meet some friends following a quick chat at last night's lecture on beekeeping research.  Its amazing how long you can keep busy with a couple of packets of butter, the tail end of a lump of cheddar, some sugar, some flour, and a couple of eggs.