Author Archives: bev

Pancake Day

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pancakes

Shrove Tuesday is Pancake Day, it falls the day before Ash Wednesday and can be between the beginning of February and mid March depending on when Easter falls.

Pancake Day’s proper name is Shrove Tuesday and this is the night before the beginning of Lent. Traditionally an evening when families used up flour and eggs to mark the beginning of the fasting period before Easter.  This year Shrove Tuesday falls on 21 February.

Pancakes are a flat, thin batter cake cooked in a hot frying pan – hence the name ‘pan-cake’.  They are cooked on one side then flipped (or tossed if you’re feeling brave) to cook the other side.  They can be sweet or savoury and can be eaten at any time of day and not just on Shrove Tuesday.

I associate Pancake Day with longer days, more sunshine and spring flowers breaking through.  My childhood memories are of spending two weeks persuading my Mum to cook pancakes for Pancake Day, helping her mix up the batter and seeing if I could eat the pancakes faster than she could make them.  In the winter months pancakes are a standard Sunday breakfast in our house – what do you like on yours?  Lemon and sugar?  Maple syrup?  Freshly squeezed orange juice? Nutella?  Grand Marnier? Ham and cheese?  My vote is for lemon and sugar.

Pancake races take place all over Britain, this is one those classic British traditions like the Pantomime, Boxing Day Dips and Morris Men, slightly mad but lots of fun (I know Morris Men aren’t mad and there are amazing traditions to their dances, I love them so please no letters!).

The pancake race originates in a place called Olney in Buckinghamshire; the story goes that a housewife was cooking when she heard the shriven bell at church calling for the start of the service.  Not wanting to be late she dashed out of the house still holding her frying pan.  Olney has held a Pancake Day race since 1445.  In other parts of Britain men dress up in aprons and bonnets and run whilst tossing a pancake in a frying pan.  They have to toss the pancake at least once at the beginning and end of the race and the first across the line wins.

for inspiration please try some of my pancake recipes:

Basic Pancake mix

Blueberry Pancakes

Chocolate Banana Pancakes

Orange and Fig Pancakes

Drop Scones

Chinese New Year

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This year is the year of the Dragon, a very auspicious year in the Chinese calendar.  New Year starts on 23 January and the celebrations continue for the next 15 days.  We’re celebrating tomorrow evening with a Chinese Banquet and if you’d like some ideas then check out some of my recipes here or listen again to my Feeding the Family show

Chinese Dumplings
on BBC Oxford today when my fabulous guests Kwong Lin from Noodle Nation (@noodle_nation), my children’s absolute favourite Chinese Restaurant with branches in Oxford, High Wycombe, Aylesbury and Maidenhead talked about how his family celebrates.  Also on the show was the lovely Caroline MiLi Artiss, who has a huge following on her YouTube show and is currently writing her first cook book on South East Asian food, can’t wait for that to come out.

500 Baby and Toddler Foods – review by Liz at Rhoda Reviews

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I’ve been awaiting a review from Rhoda and Liz nervously.  Rhoda was the winner of a KitchenAid competition to win a KitchenAid Liquidiser and a copy of my book 500 Baby and Toddler Foods so she was totally unbiased, check out her amazing review blog to see for yourself.

The books was more suitable for Liz so Liz took it away to play with it and you read her review here, it’s fabulous, so thank you lovely ladies, I’m very proud and ever so thrilled that you like it and have found it useful.

I’m working on putting some more recipes up on the site so check back in a day or so and you’ll be able to try some out to tempt you to buy the book.

raspberry biscuits-2

500 Baby and Toddler Foods

Rum Ganache for Breakfast

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Feeding the Family aired today at 1pm so at 9am I was busily prepping rum truffle mixture with David Greenwood-Haigh’s wonderful Haitian Rum.  It’s not actually David’s rum but David, who is the chocolatier at Divine Chocolate, does a lot to raise money for Haiti and he kindly brought me back this fabulous rum.  As David was coming on my show today I thought it only polite that I’d make up his Rum Truffles so we could try them on air.

To make sure I had the right quantity of rum I had to try the mixture (well, it would be rude not to) and it took me back to skiing, days before children, when we’d stop mid morning for a hot chocolate and rum. Actually rum ganache goes really well with porridge, with porridge in one hand and the spoon to lick out the bowl of ganache in the other it went down a treat.  A little dubious about rum at 9am but the sun is past the yard arm somewhere in the world and as long as I pretend I’m there it’s OK.

David was a fabulous guest as always, and give us insight in the invention of truffles and ganache by the world’s first celebrity chef, Augustus Escoffier, if you’d like the hear the show and the wonderful story of truffle invention and where the word ‘ganache’ came from you can listen again to the show on BBC Oxford

My edible Christmas recipes are up on the site too to download, I’ll be making some more of the savoury spicy nuts for a do tomorrow night, they’re yummy.

 

 

 

 

 

Foodie Advent Calendar

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Splat Cooking have just launched a Foodie Advent Calendar, from 1 December they’re going to be putting up a different recipe a day for the 24 days running up to Christmas. The recipes will be related to Christmas and could fall into the following categories:

  • Edible Christmas presents
  • Christmas tree decorations
  • Nibbles and canapes for Christmas entertaining
  • Edible table centrepieces
  • Lovely Christmas food
Splat Cooking are looking for people to send in their favourite recipes for adults and for children to make and are running a competition to award a bag of Splat Cooking goodies to their favourite adult and children’s recipe so please start sending, you can either tweet to @splatcooking using the hash tag #foodieadventcalendar or email to info@splatcooking.com or post on Splat Cooking’s facebook page http://www.facebook.com/splatcooking.

Croque en Bouche

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My big girl (15 years old) has just made croque en bouche as part of her Food Tech GCSE practical.  First time attempting spun sugar and she’s done a marvellous job, in fact, her little brother thinks she’s an absolute star as he’s got to eat the left overs – I hope his dentist isn’t reading this (!).

The photos tell the story and she did say that her profiteroles have never turned out as well as they did tonight – that’s an AGA for you.  She’s now realised that spun sugar isn’t difficult, it’s not even that fiddly but you do have to work quickly and you need to keep it company but at the end you have a real show off dish.  Wonder if I can get her to do pudding for New Year.

The profiteroles are filled with a blackcurrant cream and drizzled with blackcurrant coulis and chocolate shavings.  It tasted heavenly too.

Stir Up Sunday – Traditions

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The term Stir-up Sunday comes from the opening words for the day in the Book of Common Prayer of 1549.  The collect is the prayer of the day that ‘collects’ up the themes of the readings during a church service.  The original prayer used to start:

‘Stir up, we beseech thee’, - hence the term Stir Up Sunday.

‘Stir-up Sunday’  is the Sunday before Advent – the end of November – and everyone in the family takes a turn to stir the pudding with a wooden spoon from East to West (clockwise) in honor of the three Kings making their journey, with their eyes closed whilst making a secret wish.  The sprig of holly is a reminder of Jesus’ ‘Crown of Thorns’.  Holly also was supposed to bring good luck and is said to have special healing powers.

Another custom is to put silver or gold items into the pudding; each has a special significance:

-    Silver coins are supposed to bring luck to whoever finds them in their slice of pudding on Christmas Day.

-     A gold ring signifies that the finder will be married before the year is out.

-     A silver thimble or button signifies that the finder will never marry and remain a spinster or bachelor forever, or if people didn’t want to upset whoever pulled out the thimble the meaning was changed to ‘having a lucky life’.

There should be 13 ingredients in the pudding to signify Jesus and his 13 disciples; my recipe has more ingredients because I think it tastes better.

Legends surround holly go back much further into human history.  It’s one of the few evergreen trees abundant in England in the winter and as such was considered magical as remained green and bore fruit throughout the darkest, coldest season.  The Druids believed that it kept it’s leaves and shiny red berries to help keep the beautiful throughout winter when the sacred oak lost it’s leaves.

It’s Stir Up Sunday today so gather the family together and make your Christmas Puddings and Mincemeat, I have some lovely recipes on my recipes pages, so check out

Chocolate and Ginger Christmas Pudding

 

 

Classic Christmas Pudding

Cranberry and Orange Mincemeat

Traditional Mincemeat

 

 

 

 

 

Pumpkins, gingerbread and book signings

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Pumpkin roasting in the oven to make soup for lunch, shedloads of gingerbread made in the fridge.

I’m doing book signings at Waterstones, the Eden Centre, High Wycombe for my new book 500 Baby and Toddler Foods from 2pm tomorrow, Saturday 5 November.  Just about to start making lots of gingerbread biscuits for little ones to decorate while their parents are buying the book (I hope) and about to roll out lots of gingerbread to make the biscuits.

Only problem is that now the kitchen will start to smell heavenly and I’ll be in Christmas mode wanting to put the tree up and the fairy lights on and I’ll have a very grumpy husband as he doesn’t think Christmas should even be mentioned until 24 December. Once the smell of gingerbread permeates the kitchen I’ll find myself emptying the cupboards digging out cloves and resisting the urge to stick them in oranges.

So if you’re around in High Wycombe tomorrow please do come and see me, I’ll be in Waterstones with lots of books and gingerbread from 2pm, if not I’ll be in Oxford next Saturday 12 November from 12 noon-2pm doing the same.  It would be great to meet you so come along have a chat, buy the book and eat delicious gingerbread.

 

Savoury Muffins in 11 minutes – Philips Airfryer

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I’ve been testing out the Philips Airfryer, this fabulous kitchen applicance produces my healthy, amazing muffins in super quick time.  My Small Boy was off on a school trip and as usual I hadn’t got my act together to sort him out a packed lunch.  He hates sandwiches so it’s always a challenge, anyway, cheese and sun-dried tomato muffins it was.  It was 7.10am, he was leaving at 7.30am – stress city.

It took 3 minutes to heat up during which time I made the muffins, I admit that most people would probably take longer to mix up the muffins but I know the recipe off by heart as I wrote it and it’s in my new book 500 Baby and Toddler Foods. By the time the Airfryer was ready the muffins were in their cases and took only 8 minutes to cook, you can only cook 4 at a time but that meant total cooking time of 24 minutes plus 3 minutes to warm up so much quicker than heating up your oven.  Small boy left the house munching on one savoury muffin as second breakfast (it’s 7.30am) with two in his lunchbox for his school trip – day saved, massive points scored on the Perfect Mum scale.

I was quoted in the Daily Mail on Saturday talking about this great piece of kit, check it out.

Daisy the Tandem – uncovered

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It’s October 2nd, 28 degrees outside, I have a bikini on – this is amazing for October in England, it’s pretty amazing for anytime in England.

We’ve decided to have a clear out, our lovely shed from those fabulous shed people over at Ted’s Sheds has moved from the allotment to our garden and is about to become the bike shed.  Haven’t yet decided it will be painted as a ‘tree’ house, ie pale green with trees all over it or as a contrasting surf shack to go with the ex playhouse which is now the main surf shack.

We needed somewhere to put all the bikes as the children can’t get into the surf shack and it’s been getting a bit silly.

Daisy the tandem has been residing in the barn/warehouse much to the warehouse team’s annoyance for the past few years.  This morning Pete and I brought her out into the sunshine for the first time in ages.  Let me give you some background.

Days before Children, Pete and I used to compete in a mountain bike orienteering 2 day race called the Polaris Challenge, big girl is now 15 years old so it’s going back a while. Pete took part in this with some mates initially and I wimped out and did the summer challenge which involved staying in a lovely hotel overnight between the sessions, the serious challenges take place in October and March usually the same weekends the clocks change and involve locations such as Scotland, Exmoor, North Yorkshire Moors, The Peak District – anywhere high, remote and very cold.

After a few years of this I decided I wanted to have a go and prove that I could be as good as the boys – stupid girl! We decided to buy a tandem as the power to weight ratio was greater and it was probably fairer than me having to wait for Pete on the hills and him having to wait for me on the straight – yes, seriously.

We traipsed over to Lambourn to rent a tandem for the day with a view to buying one, while cycling past a pub on a lovely warm summer’s day someone was playing a piano, saw us on the tandem and started up with ‘Daisy, Daisy’ – the whole pub joined in so we bought the tandem and she was named Daisy.

In July we competed in the summer challenge in the North Yorks Moors, staying at my Mum’s in Guisborough.  This was around 20th July and it snowed and hailstoned on us, we ended up covered head to toe in mud and gave up early deciding that this wasn’t fun, stripped off to our underwear – we were that muddy – and drove back to Mums calling ahead to ask her to put the hot water on, her neighbours still remind her of the day the two of us ran up her drive with muddy hair in our underwear.

In the October we drove to Llanwyrtd Wells in deepest, darkest Wales to do the proper Polaris, with Daisy, our friends Pat and Lisa and all the camping gear that we had to carry on our backs.

Pete and I were doing fabulous time when hurtling down a mountain doing around 40 mph he saw a rock in the middle of the track and had the choice of hitting it or attempting to bunny jump – you can’t jump on  a tandem especially when there’s a sheer drop on one side.  We hit it, I came off the back of daisy, crushed my helmet on a rock (I always wear a helmet, it’s not worth the risk) and broke my right arm.

Pete took the skin of most of his left hand side, I didn’t realise I’d broken my arm – actually fractured it just below the elbow, it hurt so I tucked my arm inside my t-shirt, got back on the bike and cycled one handed another 4 hours to get back to the hotel.  I ran a bath for Pete, bathed his wounds, got him a curry and the next day drove him to the nearest hospital in Bluith Wells to get checked out (remember – I have a broken arm!).  Pete had to change gear for me as I couldn’t hold the steering wheel with my right hand, but he couldn’t put any pressure on his right leg so couldn’t use the brake.

Doctors examined him, he’d strained the ligaments in his right knee and had lots of cuts and bruises.  They asked me if I was OK, explained about the helmet being a right off and my right arm hurt.  Immediate panics, mobile xray unit called out, broken arm detected, concerns about concussion and I’ve been running around sorting Pete out with a bruised knee and cuts and bruises.  Yes, I am still dining out on this story around 17 years later.

Well, the point of this is that we got Daisy out of the barn, pumped up her tyres and I did have a few tears, it was like welcoming a very old, dear friend back into the family.  I feel awful that she’s been neglected for so long.  We had a child seat for big girl on her and used to go all over, but once medium sized girl came along we couldn’t get them both on so she hasn’t really been used for a long time.  She will be soon.  Medium sized girl can actually fit on the back so I think we ought to get her back into the swing of things again. It’s amazing how many memories are captured in one inanimate object, even Pete got a little teary.

Daisy and Medium Sized Girl