NaBloWriMo (Recipe)

Write and report on your favorite fall recipe

A subject near and dear to my heart.  Food.

I don't really have a favourite recipe.  I tend to be seasonal with food if I can - that's one of the points behind getting the garden cleared and starting to grow our own stuff - but it doesn't always work out like that.  I get too tired and grumpy to plan more often than not.  Once around the fridge and hurl it in a pan has been working for us for years.

Although ... now I come to think about it, I do have a sort of mental point in the year when I feel that hot puddings are essential.  About now, in fact, so there you are.  Hot puddings.  This is partly to do with having a freezer packed with fruit with which things must be done.  Since there is no bad about either crumble or danish pastry, both get made a lot.  Even easier if (as I do) you make bulk blocks of the danish dough.  It's no harder to make lots.  Well, it's not hard anyway, just a bit faffy, but it makes me feel vaguely efficient. 

I do have a bit of a guilt factor over danish pastry dough (I'm a Catholic Jew, I am really good at guilt).  It requires a really scary amount of butter.  If I'm going to feel bad about two pats of butter, I might just as well feel bad about four and get it over with. 

Birthday success

I'm proud of myself this morning.  Mr Rev is happy with his presents.  I love him to bits and have done for a long, long time now, but I have to admit he's not the easiest person to buy for.  I do find that odd.  This is the man I know better than practically anyone, so present-buying should be a snap.  Right?  Wrong.  I love making and buying gifts for people.  It's something I take quite a bit of pride in and it feeds the smug earth mother lurking very close to the surface of my soul.  Oh, I do like being right.

That's the problem of course.  Mr Rev's has to be really right.  I did all the usual things.  Casual questioning, full frontal demands for lists and furtive squirrelling away of half-remembered conversations.  The results of this process were the following.


Woolly jumpers.  Well he got those early because I spotted a sale and it seemed silly to let the man freeze.  More to the point, he might have just gone out and got them himself, and I'd have felt a twit offering up gift wrapped jumpers when he was wearing one already.

iTunes vouchers.  These are duller than ditchwater in terms of imagination, but are never a bad thing to give a music nut.

Aga oven mitt.  Just one.  They turned out to be vastly expensive.  For those not in the know, an Aga is a heavenly piece of kitchen kit.  We'd craved one for years and when we bought the house here, it had one.  The trick with an Aga is that it needs special oven gloves as the ovens are huge and go back a long way.  You need not gloves, but gauntlets.

Witness the aweome power of the +3 Aga Oven Gauntlet.  Protection from fire and careless application of fingers to cake tins.  +2 to saving throws from random application of pan handles to flesh.

Ipad keyboard.  This is the bit I'm really proud of.  I asked around some technologically minded male friends and they all came up with "get a keyboard for that ipad".  So I did.  And it works.   And Mr Rev is a happy penguin today.

Not a book in sight.  That's almost unheard of.

And now to make the toffee apple spice cake in vast quantities.

The gamers are coming around this evening and we'll eat a lot, chat a lot and roll more than a few dice.  It should be a good day.