On picnics

Fairly early on in this project I did part of a post on picnic food, to be eaten at a sporting event. I'm afraid that this is more of the same on that score. But I make no apologies for that, I love picnics, and I particularly like swerving the expensive and usually disappointing food vans at sporting venues. We were outdoors this time though (last time I was at the velodrome in Manchester) and the sporting event, which I attended with HR, was rather more up my street: Bramham horse trials. I'm afraid that I was one of those 'Mummy I want a horse; Mummy I need a horse; Mummy I'll DIE if I don't have a horse' children, and I still love a day outdoors watching horses go over fences. ANYWAY, this is distracting from the cooking-it-for-the-first-time theme of the blog.

I seem to have entrapped myself in a subscription for Olive Magazine, so expect lots of recipes from it. I selected the courgette and goat's cheese tart, from a handy feature on picnic recipes. I'm afraid I can't find a link, so I'll describe it as best I can. It has a filo pastry base (and so lots of layering pastry painting on butter). Then a layer of goats cheese with creme fraiche and lemon, which I substituted for ricotta (as suggested in the recipe) as I thought goat's cheese had the potential to go quite smelly when left for half a day in a backpack. And a layer of ribboned courgettes on top of the creme fraiche middle layer. It was very nice, very fresh, very light, very summery.

For afters, I made ginger loaf with butter icing, also from the picnic section in this month's Olive. The recipe produces enough for two large loaves, although they apparently keep rather well, so I'm sure they'll get eaten! This was easy peasy to make, especially with a food mixer to do all the hard work. The recipe produces flavoursome moist cake, shop bought ginger cakes tend to lack the punch which the stem ginger brought to the loaves I made. HR and I demolished rather a lot of it whilst watching John Whittaker do his stuff in some show jumping.

I think that food always tastes better outside (not, obviously, if it's tipping it down, but there is something celebratory about a picnic) and HR and I did feel smug about not being stung by the expensive food vans. And what can be better than watching a favourite sport with an old friend and some nice food? It was a lovely way to spend Sunday, and I've thus far suppressed the urge to ring my Mum and demand a horse. And I am halfway through my recipe count.