Omygoodness, you HAVE to see this

Readers, prepare yourselves. Prepare yourselves for a post filled with horror and awfulness. For we are going to take journey into the world of….

1970S COOKBOOKS!

I came across this in a box of old cookbooks a friend was giving away and boy, was I glad I picked this one up! It is called Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook. And let me tell you this, it is all colour. It is proud and gregarious in it’s all-colour horror. It would have done better to leave the photographs off, for I shall show you the pictures of what the 1970s considered haute cuisine. Are you ready?!

Mmm, I just love a mysterious lumpy white mass for my dinner.

Wowzers. More lumpy white nonsense, this time surrounded by green leafy stuff. Can we have that for dinner today, Mum? Can we?!

Ah, some white nonsense on top of salmon steaks, again the obligatory green leafy nonsense. This is actually a jellified mayonnaise layer, in case you were wondering.

And again, jellified mayonnaise, this time on top of chicken. LOVING the decorative anchovies… Kind of.

Talking of things being jellied, check out this turkey-slices-set-in-jelly type of thing.

Next up, a small roasted chicken, sitting on a bed of jelly stuff squares. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH US? Why, Britain, why did we do this to ourselves? Mary Berry has a lot to answer for.

More chicken related nonsense. A cake type thing, made of chicken. Vomit. And the asparagus on the top. That’s quite fresh and lovely, you think, at least that bit’s ok. Well, no, no it isn’t. Because it is FROM A CAN! In fact, I am instructed to use many things from cans.

This ‘peach tart’ requires 1 can of creamed rice for the filling. Ridiculous. On another recipe I am actually told to get frozen chips! Honestly now, frozen chips. If I have frozen chips at home and I choose to eat them, that is different. But to actually include it as an ingredient for a meal in a cookbook?! Has the world gone crazy?! I think probably the worst sentence I have ever seen written down in a book anywhere is the line, ‘Fry the frozen chips in the lard.’ What. On. Earth.

Fry.

The frozen chips.

In the lard.

Honestly. I’m not making it up. Look.

This book has a continental section though. We’re aware of the fine cuisine offered in other countries. Let’s get fancy in our kitchens. Ok, check out the next recipe. I’m sure it will be delicious. Mmm, continental food. Italian pasta… French fancies… There’s bound to be something good here.

Frankfurter salad. I have no words.

This one’s good. It’s cheesy buttered noodles. The ingredients? Cheese, butter and noodles. Brilliant.

Last up, some lovely desserts. Don’t let me down here. The British have contributed some well-loved cakes to the world of food. Come on. What will it be? A Christmas pudding? An eccles cake? An apple crumble? A rhubarb crumble? Something cakey and warm. A hearty cake to heat one up on a cold winter’s evening.

That’s right. We’ve gone with a dish of pasta shells in chocolate sauce with lines of cream for ‘decoration.’

And now, the award for the most attractive sounding dish in the history of the world ever, goes to….

Woop woop! Can I get a round of applause for the LARDY CAKE! Mm mm. Don’t you think? Yes, a peice of lardy cake for me please! Am I allowed seconds? Oo, hold me back, hold me back! I can’t get enough of good lardy cake, me.

Well, after that romp through the annals of British food history, I feel thoroughly disheartened and can only apologise in earnest to the world for our below-par cuisine ramblings. We have failed ourselves as a nation.

I understand if you would like to un-follow me, fellow bloggers.

On chocolate

More Nanny Rhino today…

 

I’m not one of those girls who’s mad on chocolate. I like it, don’t get me wrong. But whenever I think of chocolate lovers, I think of a girl I went to secondary school with, Gwen, who would go around the common room in sixth form, asking if anyone had chocolate with them and could she buy it from them. She’d be brandishing a fifty pence piece to back up her request and asking around desperately. At the time, I was a bit young to wonder why she had such a thing for chocolate. I just thought it was a little strange.

 

Alternately, a girl I went to junior school with, Louise, was allergic to chocolate! Allergic! It’d be a pretty sad existence if you couldn’t give in to the odd chocolate moment.

 

When my brother and I were younger, I distinctly remember being a massive fan of Yorkie bars. It was always my favourite. If we got given 50p by a generous relative, we would scuttle off to the sweet shop around the corner and giggle excitedly, while we looked at all the sherbet sticks and flying saucer sweets and fried egg sweets and Mr Freezy flavoured ice sticks. A lot of the time, though, I’d get a Yorkie. Now I think about it, I fear I may have been wasting a fantastic opportunity for potential sweetie-induced happiness. I just wanted a big bar of solid chocolate. Then Yorkie brought out these adverts on TV which said, “Yorkie! Not for girls!” So I had a little-girl-tiff and stopped buying them. I switched my allegiance to Dime bars, which were about half the price anyway, and shook my proverbial fist at the the Yorkie makers, knowing they’d notice my missing custom and regret their silly no-girls advert.

 

Speaking of chocolate, actually, there are lots of new weird and wacky things happening with chocolate, which take inspiration from it’s original use as a savoury drink, mixed with chilli, when first discovered and drunk in South America. So chilli chocolate bars abound the shelves of high end delicatessens or your local Whole Foods. I like the idea of liking chilli and chocolate together. I have tried, and failed, to get myself to like it. I just cannot stand the prickly heat in the back of my throat after I have swallowed a lovely mouthful of sweet melty chocolate. My senses scream at me to stop. It is just wrong, I’m sorry for those of you who love this combination.

 

Another thing which doesn’t work for me is chocolate pasta. I had originally thought that it would be great with something savoury. A friend told me he had it with a veal dish. Great, I thought, let me be gourmet and get into this chocolate pasta scene! Then someone told me that I had it all wrong. Chocolate pasta was a dessert and I must warm some cream up, add walnuts, cook my pasta and then add it to my warm cream and walnuts, mix around and then serve up, as my dessert. Ok, I thought, that sounds interesting, I can do that.

 

And I did it.

 

And it tasted like…. pasta with cream and walnuts. Normal regular pasta with cream and walnuts. In all honesty, cream and walnuts are not my usual accompaniment to pasta so I put it aside, disappointed. All that anticipation, all that planning… and it just tasted like regular pasta. Maybe I got it from the wrong company. Maybe I should have looked around for a really great quality one or asked for recommendations. Anyway, that’s the end of the road for my chocolate pasta journey, I think.

 

Now, another chocolate thing that I have reached the end of the road with is chocolate mousse. Not eating it! No, I am of course still eating it. Making it myself at home though, no more! In the early days of cooking in my kitchen, I didn’t have an electric whisk so I whisked my egg whites by hand. I would get severe arm ache and give up before it had quite finished being whisked. I’d just keep on with the recipe, in blind hope that it would be fine. It wasn’t. It would come out to dense and hard, instead of soft and fluffy. I tried it a second time, having convinced myself that the eggs must have been rubbish or something. The same thing happened. So I stopped making chocolate mousse. Maybe that’s silly, because now I have an electric whisk so I could try it again. I think I have a mental block with chocolate mousse now though.

 

I did go through a stage of drinking unsweetened hot chocolate not too long ago. It was an unexpected pleasure which grew on me. I used Bournville cocoa powder, steamed milk and vanilla or almond extract. I occasionally used orange oil but it tended to overwhelm the whole thing. Peppermint did the same and almost tasted toothpaste-ish. So I stuck to vanilla or almond. Because it’s bitter, it takes a few times to get used to it but I started really looking forward to my evening vanilla hot chocolate after a while.

 

Another of my favourite things to do with chocolate when I have guests over is a kind of help-yourself thing. I grate a load of dark chocolate, finely chop some mint, mix them together and put it in a small dish. I grate some more and zest an orange in with it and put that into a dish. Sometimes I do one of plain dark chocolate grated. You can play around with what flavours you want to add. Then I get loads of those mini pots of icecream and tell everyone to pick a pot and top it with whatever they want from the dishes of chocolate. Or you could go even simpler, get a huge bowl, half some strawberries and throw in some cherries, then get some dark chocolate and break it roughly into pieces and throw in aswell and get get nibbling.

 

With Christmas approaching, I am guessing my chocolate intake will increase drastically. Not because there is far better chocolate around at Christmas and I will be unable to control myself. It’s more because it will be there, freely available and right in front of my face (of course, I could choose not to stand directly in front of the Christmas chocolate and sweeties aisle at the supermarket but I like it there, ok?). So I will eat it. Because I can see it. Advent calendars, not a favourite or any special memories but a nice reason to eat chocolate first thing every morning. A selection box, again no amazing memories, just that my grandfather used to get us one every year, without fail. But if I bought all those individual chocolate bars in a shop and ate them all in one day, people would judge me, quite harshly I should think. Wrap it in a plastic packet with a fun Christmas picture on the front and call it a ‘selection box’ and it’s suddenly fine! Eat them all, no problem!

 

In Namibia, my friend Lucy and I, used to get a chocolate bar called Top Deck, if we had any spare money. This was an exciting time for us, when it happened. It was white chocolate on the bottom and milk chocolate on the top. It looked beautiful and we loved it, although I’ve no memory of how it tasted.

 

Spilling some of my trade secrets

Today, I am taking a big step. I am sharing a closely guarded secret with you all. The recipes for my banana bread and my cranberry, pecans and white chocolate flapjacks. This is not something I share easily but I feel we are at that stage in our relationship now where I can trust you all with it.

These are my most successful recipes in my repertoire and get more requests than the others. So here goes.

Banana bread
150g butter and 80ml of butter milk OR 150ml double cream
225g sugar (soft brown works best)
2 eggs
4 bananas (it’s not an exact science though, it can be as few as 2 or as many as 6)
Vanilla extract
285g plain flour (00 flour will make your bread really soft)
Salt
1.5 tbsp bicarbonate of soda
Drinking chocolate powder

Ok, so I’m setting it down on paper here but it’s not something you should feel restricted by. It’s all quite flexible.

First, turn the oven to 150 degrees.

If you’re using butter, put it in a mixing bowl with sugar and cream it together. If the butter is at room temperature, it will be far easier.

If you are using double cream instead, put it in a mixing bowl and whisk until it is starting to form lumps. This is the point at which it is starting to turn into butter. By staying at this pre-butter stage, your banana bread will take on a totally different texture, much lighter and softer. Add the sugar to this and mix. We’re now at the same stage, whether we’ve used butter or cream.

Next, add the 2 eggs and mix until fully incorporated.

Next put your bananas on top of everything. Take a potato masher and mash the bananas into the mixture. If you prefer to mash the bananas in a separate bowl and add them to your main bowl, you can. But there are more dishes to wash if you do it that way.

If you are using butter instead of double cream, you will need to add your buttermilk here. Add the vanilla extract at this stage as well. I just splash it in. It’s probably 1 tbsp. (Making your own vanilla extract will give it a nicer taste. Just stick some vanilla pods in a bottle of vodka and leave it for 3 months. Simple.)

Next add the flour. This is kind of flexible too. I’ve used every random combination of bits and bobs of flour when I’ve not had the right one in the cupboard and it always works. Last time I used half 00 flour and half wholemeal and I got really good feedback. The only thing I would say is don’t use self raising, as we’re going to add bicarb soon.

If you want to sift your flour through a sieve, you can. I’ve done it sifted and unsifted and I don’t think it makes a difference. Plus, there are more things to wash if you sift it.

Add your salt and bicarb. I just usually grab a pinch of flaky salt and grind between my fingers as I sprinkle it in. When adding the chocolate powder, it’s what you prefer really. It’s not a chocolate flavoured cake. It’s just to add a little something in the background. You want a tablespoon full at the most, I think.

Once it’s all definitely mixed in, grease a loaf tin and line it with greaseproof paper. The paper’s not urgent but if the banana bread decides it wants to stick to the bottom, it will break when you shake it out.

Put the mixture in the tin and put it in the middle of the oven for an hour and a half ish.

Then lick the bowl clean.

Test by putting a knife/skewer into the middle and if it comes out clean, it’s done. Don’t stick too closely to the time. If you see after an hour, it looks done, do the knife/skewer test. Or you might have to leave it longer. If you make it a few times, you’ll learn how it’s supposed to look and go by that.

Leave to cool completely before turning out.

Da dahhh! A banana bread!

Cranberry, pecan and white chocolate flapjacks

150g butter
125g sugar
2 tbsp golden syrup
275g oats
White chocolate
Cranberries
Pecans

Melt the butter in a saucepan with the sugar and golden syrup. Depending on how you like your flapjacks to be, add more or less than the amount I’ve stated for the golden syrup. If you like it stickier, use more golden syrup. If you like it crumbly, add a bit less. I tend to add more as it sticks everything together better and cuts into neater pieces.

When melted, take off the heat and add the oats and a few squares of white chocolate. Mix together. Then add the cranberries and pecans. Again, it’s about personal preference. Add loads or a few, it’s up to you.

Mix well and put the whole mixture into a greased baking tray.

Bake on about 160 degrees for 30-40 minutes, depending on how well done you like your flapjacks.

When you take it out, put it somewhere to cool and grate the rest of your white chocolate over the flapjack. It will melt very quickly. Take a spoon or a palette knife and spread it around evenly. Wait until completely cool before cutting into bars.

Done!

This recipe works with pretty much any flavour combination. You could add different nuts, different fruit, different chocolate. Lightly roasting loads of different nuts and adding them for a plain nutty flapjack is also amazing.

Ok, people. Go into your kitchens and bring forth cakes and flapjacks fit for royalty! (Obviously crediting me while you’re at it.)

And remember, always lick the bowl afterward. And always make sure there is little washing up afterward. You don’t have time for washing dishes, you need to be eating your creations.