Yesterday afternoon's light scattering of snow was still sitting on the lawn when I wound the bathroom blind up this morning, making the garden look singularly uninviting. Fortunately gardening was not top of the agenda, since I needed to make cheese straws for this evening's music society annual non-musical event. With any luck, by the time I'd finished them the snow would have melted. When I went down to the kitchen I saw the snow in the front garden already had.
I am quite proud of my cheese straws. I follow a recipe out of my late 1970s copy of the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book, and the proportion of cheese is modest compared to some modern recipes, but it works. When I joined the committee they warned me that one of the duties was to provide nibbles for the after-concert drinks, and I needed something that I could take easily in the car and didn't need last minute reheating. Relatively cheap ingredients seemed a bonus, and anyway I wasn't convinced that some of the ultra high cheese recipes would be very nice, since overcooked hard cheese can easily go bitter. The Good Housekeeping cheese straws are nothing but ordinary shortcrust pastry enriched with an egg yolk and some grated cheddar, plus a smidgin of cayenne pepper, but they puff up slightly and become agreeably flaky.
By mid morning the nibbles were safely out of the oven and cooling on two racks behind a closed door, with a note to the Systems Administrator saying that the door was shut on purpose to keep the cats out. I wouldn't trust Our Ginger anywhere near a tray of cheese straws. If he didn't eat them he's quite capable of breathing all over them, and I'm not sure he wouldn't eat them. I found him trying to eat a home made chip the other day, though with a martyred expression as though the point of the exercise were not so much to actually eat potato cooked in olive oil as to lobby for more cat food.
After that I weeded the herb bed for a while, though I had to pack up for the day after the film review programme because it was simply too cold. The saying goes, one year's seeding, seven year's weeding, and at some point in the last seven years (probably as recently as last year) I have allowed weed grasses to go to seed in the herb bed, so now their progeny are springing up all over. If I could make 2015 the year when that didn't happen again then things would start to improve. Weed control in a garden can fall into in a virtuous or a vicious spiral. Let them run riot for whatever reason, and there'll be more weeds the following season, so that weeding takes longer, and you are even more likely to end up with some borders where the weeds run to seed. Bang them on the head for the whole season, and next year while there will still be some, your work will be less and your chances of preventing them from seeding improved. Perennial weeds are a whole other story, though even there persistent and diligent rooting out of what you can reach limits their growth.
Tonight's lecture is on What Matters in Jane Austen, by UCL's Professor of English, and I am looking forward to it. I invited the SA to come with me, but an apologetic mumble that it wasn't the SA's sort of thing turned to enthusiasm at realising the lecture was this Friday. The SA, you see, wants to watch the England -Wales opener to the Six Nations live on the telly, and if I'm going out to a lecture that saves the embarrassment of leaving me alone in the kitchen on a Friday night while the SA is glued to the sport. The SA will be cheering for England, despite being half Welsh.
No comments:
Post a Comment