Easter. Eggs. Easter eggs.

One of the saddest things which has ever happened to me was the discovery, some time ago, that eating chocolate makes me poorly. In the run-up to Easter I feel bereft what with all the creme, caramel, rolo and aero eggs taunting me from the end of every supermarket aisle. Ok, put the world's smallest violin away, I decided to cook some actual eggs as a nod to the time of year. Which is fine, I love eggs. I think a cooked egg with a liquid yolk is one of my top five things to eat: they turn pizza fiorentina from average to decadent; they're an excellent source of protein; and, higher welfare eggs are well within most people's price range. Although all of the following dishes have such long winded names--whatever happened to economic intriguing titles, such as 'eggs benedict'?

Part one of the eggsperiment appeared on our supper table on Monday. In an attempt to veer away from all the BBC recipes I use, I went to the lion eggs site and took this recipe for 'aubergine and tomato baked eggs'.

I like aubergines, I like eggs, it should have been delicious. But the whites took an age to cook, and were still liquid at the upper end of the cooking time. In the end, the foil had to come off and I had to turn the oven up. The yolks cooked solid, before the whites were edible, and the eggs were rather a low point on what was otherwise a delicious ratatouille-type dish. Perhaps that is why recipes which are not from a company trying to push a specific product are better?

Egg dish number two was a salad, not really an egg salad, but it had an egg in it. This was the cumbersomely entitled 'asparagus, egg and pancetta salad' from the most recent edition of Olive Magazine. I'm not so green as to not know that pancetta, asparagus and an egg combine very nicely, but they do, the mustard dressing is tangy and the croutons make it into a main meal; I did homemade ones, much healthier and nicer AND I still finished making it in 30 minutes. The egg in this dish is an eggstremely (sorry!) welcome component, rather than an odd rubbery topping. Yum, yum.

Lastly, but by no means leastly, I took on Yottem Ottolenghi's recipe for 'braised eggs with tomato spinach and yoghurt', from his healthy breakfasts series. This one was rather special as F and I cooked it together over a video link up, and what we had for our breakfast her and she and her other half had for dinner. The recipe must assume that the majority of readers are pan-shy plonkers, because although it claims there's a bit of work, it's no harder than working out the timings for a regular cooked breakfast. (I'm sure F would verify.)

Although this dish is the sort of thing that you could eat for breakfast or dinner, as we have shown, it did make a lovely warm weekend breakfast. I really don't need to add that eggs and spinach go really well together, and that this dish probably has a quarter of the calories of a full English, do I?

I can now report that the poll tells me you want me to cook 'sticky toffee cupcakes', there'll be a post on Thursday to tell you how they went.

Over to you

To your right as you look at the screen, you'll notice some voting buttons! I'm having a baking day on Sunday and you can pick what I make... Go on, mess with me!

Viva La A!

At the end of a long, fun, and eventful week, A was granted his Phd on Friday. So this week, the food for the blog is celebratory (and French). I left A's party early on Friday, after becoming inexplicably sober in a bar where being merry was essential, so I wanted to put on a meal to restore him and H (who had lasted considerably longer than me) after their jolly-making, and to make up for my early exit. Cooking coq au vin and tarte tatin had a certain 1970s dinner party charm, and I thought they would be good for feeding to over exerted friends.

Our local Sainsburys, to my astonishment, does not sell joined cockerel, but it did have chicken thighs. I would recommend these, they're cheap and tasty. I would always counsel for the use of free-range meat, but if it's the end of the month and the budget won't stretch or you can't get hold of it (our supermarket had been ransacked for barbeque fodder, so choice was limited) this dish's sauce is so robust, you won't notice if the meat's not top of the range.

Having said from the inception of this project that I would not be using James Martin amounts of butter, I have used another of his butter rich recipes, this one for coq au vin is very good, though. It's easy too; you can do it all in one pot and it's just a matter of chucking in one ingredient after another, the only things you need to chop are the shallots (assuming you crush the garlic, although I doubt that chucking it in whole would do any harm beyond delivering a few surprising mouthfuls to your guests). I'm afraid it's not the most photogenic dish, although, believe it or not, I did try to pretty it up for you.

I adore Raymond Blanc. I like that he says voila after taking almost every dish out of the oven, I like his die-hard enthusiasm for food, and, unlike some TV chefs, I like that he doesn't patronise by only  presenting only easy recipes. And now, I love his tarte tatin recipe. I love it despite the fact that two kilos of apples is blatantly too many for an 8 inch dish. I probably used just over half that. I also confess that I made a mistake with the apples which exposes my own deep levels of food based ignorance. I assumed dessert apples, as requested in the recipe, were apples that went in desserts, not in fact, eating apples which are sweet enough to eat for a dessert. Also, I do not own a tatin dish, just a deep pie dish. That was fine though, I just made my caramel sauce in a pan and then transferred it to my pie dish. (I shovelled on an extra tablespoon or two of sugar on top of the apples to make up for using the wrong sort.)

I'm always nervous about food which requires turning out, as quite often my dishes seem to have some kind of invisible glue which holds their contents in. But, after a second of holding the dish upside down, thinking that I was just going to have to serve it by shovelling, it slid out gracefully in one piece. This recipe was an unqualified success with its eaters--it brought sheer joy to last night, we ate nearly all of it between three of us and had to use superhuman levels of self control to leave Sam a bit. Did it matter that I used the wrong apples? To use a Yorkshire phrase, did it heck.

There's No-one Like Your Mum

Last year Sam and I hosted a Mothering Sunday extravaganza and threw a dinner for Sam's mum, my mum, and my Grandma. We decided to go for a re-run this year and, naturally, I decided on a menu composed of dishes I'd never tried cooking before. However there was a traditional theme: what is known in my family as a 'Grandma tea'. When my cousins and I were little, we were often treated to a spread put on by our grandmother which would include ham sandwiches (with and without mustard), egg and bacon pie, salad, cheese scones...and then chocolate buns (the wrappers would be scraped clean with fingernails and teeth), tea loaf, fruit scones, and often a hot pudding like apple pie. So as the supper was all about family, and would be graced by Grandma, this was an homage to those meals.

Sam has found himself lumbered with a lot of washing-up of late as, due to this project, I have been doing a lot of cooking. This is not fair, so this weekend we decided to cook together for our mums (and of course my Grandma)--Sam made sausage rolls, a first for him. (See pic. of his huge hands in a tiny bowl.) I didn't make these so I can't count them in this challenge, but the difference made by picking nice sausage meat and constructing your own rolls from it is huge. They are a light-year away from the ones made from entrails and fat that you find in supermarket freezers. 

Grandma makes a mean egg and bacon pie--or, as some would have it, quiche--and, despite the pastry I would have to make, I wanted to cook one. Although I had promised not to use James Martin amounts of fat, I did use an actual recipe of his for the second time. Even though I treated this pastry very nicely (it was well cosseted, got to relax twice, and was blind-baked) it still somehow split, and so the underneath was quite gooey by the time the finished pie was served. (I also dropped a rolling pin on it before serving.) Grandma still reigns as the queen of this dish! However, it tasted good -- most importantly, everyone had seconds.

I turned again to the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook for my next recipe. (If I am boring you with all the recipes that come out of this then fear not, the number of recipes which I haven't tried from it is now very small!) I made spinach and cheese muffins. The only fat in this recipe was cheese, and the mix looked incredibly dry (presumably there isn't much liquid in there because of all the water in the spinach). As I looked at it in the paper cups, I thought 'please, please don't fail me when I'm trying to show off for the grown-ups'. Nothing from this book has ever gone seriously wrong, though, so I shouldn't have worried. They were ace AND for the very first time in my life my efforts looked like the picture in the book. I'm still happy about this.

I'm never very sure how portion sizes in recipe books are worked out. I made a lemon surprise pudding for afters and, because of issues with the size of my dish, I made half quantities, in theory only enough for three portions, sadly, there weren't any leftovers, but I don't think we'd have wanted any more. The result was a surprise to me as well as everyone else, as there was no picture on the webpage. I won't include a photo: if you're not sure what it is, and want to make it, it can be a surprise for you too. This is an easy peasy recipe (even more so with a food mixer) that produced a light citrus desert which went very well with clotted cream.

Family meal times are about much more than feeding people. They are about laughter, teasing, catching up, and showing you care with your cooking, whether it's a special dish made with expensive ingredients or some pasta with sauce out of the jar. And I think that the Sam and Sally tea hit the spot.