Jammy Faces.

I am now risking morbid obesity for this project. This week's main ingredient was jam. Sam (he no longer wishes to be known as S) and I visited Mum last weekend and she had some particularly nice damson jam on the go - - I ate half a jar with breakfast and Mum was eventually moved to give me a teeny tiny jar of it. If I made jam that fruity, sweet enough, but not too cloying, far nicer than anything Bon Maman can turn out, I too would want to hoard it all to myself. This jam was far too nice to just use on the morning's toast...

The weather this week has been murky and damp, and there has generally been the need of a pick-me-up kind of a treat. There is nothing so good at this as the pudding that I can't even name without smiling: roly poly pudding. The dough for the crust is super simple to make (you would actually have to try quite hard to ruin it!). Admittedly mine did need scalping a little bit after my enthusiastic fan oven had overdone it a bit, but it was delicious crispy and had a lovely toasted taste and did the jam justice.

I love homemade rice pudding. It reminds me of feeling warm all the way up to my ears when I was growing up in North Yorkshire in a house with a Baltic climate. The skin is half the fun when it goes all golden and crispy - - flavouring it with jam has to be the only way to enjoy it, it feels as naughty as eating jam from the jar. Again, it's easy to throw together, I used the recipe on the back of the Tesco Pudding Rice packet, as I wanted an uncomplicated recipe like my Mum's. F is staying with us before she heads to foreign shores at the end of the week, and she and I ate it straight from the dish I baked it in with the remains of the jam. I can say little about its flavour other than the synthetic-been-in-a-can taste of Ambrosia couldn't hold a candle to it, and this: F 'cleaned' a dish which had been in the oven for over an hour so well with spoon, fingers and mouth, that it barely needed a wipe.