I would first like to begin by showing you some things I have made recently. On Saturday I decided to do some baking and cooking, in one evening. Yes, I am a regular 50s housewife (I wish I were, but alas the best I can hope for is perhaps a 2020 housewife, which does not sound as cool and does not invoke colourful images of pretty dresses and female oppression). So I hurried along to Sainsbury’s to buy my ingredients, and I do not mind telling you that I was not in a very good mood when I left Steve’s flat. I was feeling tired and sick and trying to decide whether to brave the two hour train journey sans Victoria line back to New Malden. Like a good 50s housewife, however, I pushed my feelings aside and, shopping list in hand, I ventured out into Saturday afternoon in Walthamstow.
If you have never walked through Walthamstow market, don’t. It is enough to make you want to literally kick a stranger in the arse, especially if they have a pram, ESPECIALLY if it is emtpy. Somewhere, once upon a time, there must have been an advert in the paper saying
“Do you spend your days aimlessly walking up and down the street, occasionally stopping to look at things? Do you have nowhere to go and nothing to do? Have you spent years practicing how to walk unnaturally slowly? Move to Walthamstow! We’re all like that here!
Anyway, I managed to make it to Sainbury’s having only pushed a couple of old ladies into the gutter and knocked one boy off his crutches, and was still in relatively low spirits. I began to throw things into my trolley. They were sold out of parmesan, which was a rather important ingredient in my macaroni cheese, but after around 10 minutes of staring at the shelf willing it to appear, I admitted defeat and moved on. I was also looking for ingredients for gingerbread men. I had already been knocked back in the cookware aisle – they did not stock gingerbread man cutters. What kind of crazy shape was I supposed to cut my biscuits into now? This is when I spotted the Halloween aisle and my eyes lit up. Anybody who knows me knows I LOVE HALLOWEEN, almost as much as Christmas. I admit it is far too early to be selling merchandise but I cannot complain as this aisle solved my dilemma for me. HALLOWEEN COOKIE CUTTERS! Yes! So I threw these into by basket and skipped through the supermarket to the baking section.
This was where I spent around half an hour. I only needed some flour and golden syrup but I got carried away. There were so many wonderful things! I felt like a kid in a sweet shop, except that I’m not a kid and it wasn’t a sweet shop, although it did sell sweets, and I had to pay for everything so really it was like an adult in a shop where they want to buy a lot of things but can’t afford them. Or a child in a sweet shop whose tightfisted mother refuses to buy them anything. What a bitch. I accidentally typed tightfisted moth there. That would be a whole different scenario. The moth would probably not have the money for sweets but I imagine they would have all kinds of tricks for sneaking into people’s homes and eating their sugary goods.
Anyway, it was wonderful and I bought some star shaped sprinkles and all sorts. I eventually dragged myself away from Sainsbury’s and returned to a boyfriend who was ready to file a missing person’s report.
I started by baking gingerbread cats and bats. It was a relatively easy recipe – from the BBC food website here – but, in my excitement, I made the stupid mistake of buying whole cloves rather than, as instructed by an anonymous BBC chef, crushed. I managed to crush them up a bit but there were still a few oversized pieces in the dough which were to cause a problem later.
Another problem I had, not that I should be troubling you with this, was that the dough was too dry. Not to worry, I’m an enterprising chick, I just added some milk! Sorted.
Anyway, long story short, it all worked out fine although one or two of the biscuits had whole cloves left in them which tasted unpleasant, and the oven was hotter than expected so the biscuits were a tiny bit overcooked in places, mostly in the cats’ tails. But all in all, a successful baking adventure. If only it were Halloween already.
Next I moved on to the slightly more ambitious macaroni cheese. I realise it does not sound ambitious, but it involved making a cheese sauce from scratch which I had never done before so I was a little scared. Not to worry, it all went well and ended up looking like this, which as far as I am concerned is how macaroni cheese should look:
Here is the recipe. I added in chili powder and hot pepper sauce which worked quite well and made it a bit more colourful.
I actually really liked it but made the mistake of having around four servings and spent the rest of the evening in a dairy-induced coma. I am now forcing two tupperware boxes full of it on my father for his lunch at work, since we don’t have a microwave and I cannot bare the thought of my hard work going in the bin.
So there you have it, the extent of my past week’s activity. I need a job.
No comments:
Post a Comment