Freckles & Doubt

I took Pandora to the vet on Friday for a checkup, because I am concerned about her level of what the Splendid Vet calls "vocalisation", which is to say, she yells at me more or less continuously. I have been worried that this might actually be pain, probably from her ongoing arthritis problem, so wanted him to check her out (and incidentally clip her claws, which I can only do one foot at at time in rotation, since she lasts only approximately five nails before trying to bite me). So he prodded her all over and inspected her teeth, handling manfully and with some admiration the choking cloud of fur which results (she has an incredibly thick and beautiful coat, black with a very faint grey tabby, with a very fine and enthusiastic undercoat), and pronounced her, overall, ridiculously healthy for a 17-year-old cat. She's put on a bit of weight, her teeth are great, she is eating well and using the litterbox appropriately, she has slight pain in her spine from the arthritis, but didn't try to bite him when he poked it, so clearly not too bad.

He thinks it's probably age, hence slight senility, hence anxiety, hence the rise in yelling - she forgets where she is for a moment, or where I am, and panics about it. If it gets too bad we can try Prozac, but it isn't at that level yet. She is still spending the nights blissfully curled up against me, so isn't losing me and yelling about it while I'm trying to sleep. And to rule out the pain issue, he gave me a course of five mild kitty painkillers, to try over five days and see if it changes the yelling behaviour any.

So I dutifully pilled her that evening, to her indignation, but I'm actually quite good at it and she didn't spit it out. And we spent Saturday with absolutely no diminishment in the yelling (as expected), but I came dutifully to pill her on Saturday night. And... the little white pill sleeve was not on the kitchen counter where I had left it. Or on the floor. Or outside in the courtyard (because hypothetical random gusts of wind, although I don't think we had any that day). Or in the kitty-stuff drawer with the Laxapet and what have you. Or on any of the other kitchen surfaces. Or drawers. Or in the recycling, in case I'd accidentally thrown it out with something. Or in the rubbish bin, ditto. Or in my study, or next to the tv, or in my bedroom, or any of the other places I might have absent-mindedly put it down on Friday night. Or in any other drawers, cupboards or hideaways where I might have stashed it as a Logical Place. It had softly and silently vanished away, with worrying completeness.

It remained vanished throughout Sunday. And I had resigned myself to not, in fact, doing the pain test, or at least contacting the vet on Monday and somewhat shamefacedly asking for replacement meds. Until I was cooking supper on Sunday night, and cleared away after I'd finished chopping stuff, and realised, with some shock, that a white square of kitty pill sleeve was sitting innocently on the black kitchen counter, as though it had never left. I will swear blind it was not there all Sunday. It was actually mildly freaky, I have clearly been watching too much Stranger Things, because I entertained a moment's wild fear that someone had been coming in through the courtyard door and messing with me by Moving Stuff Around.

But I don't think so. I think I swept it up with Saturday night's cooking endeavours (tiny one-person roast leg of lamb because I randomly felt like it) and tidied it into the vegetable crisper in the fridge, caught up in the packaging for carrots or cauliflower or something. And then swept it back out again with Sunday's supper (lamb shawarma, with leftover roast), caught up with tzatziki ingredients, cucumber or spring onion or whatever. In both sweepings, I remained utterly oblivious to its hitch-hikery activities, hence the Mysterious Reappearance. It had a pleasant day chilling in the 'fridge, and I had a frustrated day wondering if I had, in fact, started gently going mad.

I am relieved that I am not, in fact, gently going mad, or at least not any madder than having to deal with my Cherished Institution's current fuckwitteries is otherwise driving me. So I can finish the pain test, despite being fairly confident that it'll continue to make not one iota of difference to Pandora's yell levels, but remain reassured that I am being a Good Cat Owner and Covering All Bases, although faintly guilty that I have to actually leave the house occasionally, thereby causing her anxiety. But it's weirdly helped, being able to put a cause to it, it's making me less annoyed and more sympathetic to the yelling. She is a poor old slightly demented thing, but actually, at base, very healthy and mostly happy. I'll take it.

My desk chair arrived! choosing, of course, the one single stretch in the 8 hours of the working day when I was actually on a video call, which I suppose is the Cosmic Wossnames for you, but on the upside it wasn't actually a work call, I was catching up illegally with jo&stv on the grounds of, fuck, I worked one 12-hour Friday and one 7-hour Saturday weekend before last, the faculty owes me this.

So, desk chair. Not, in fact, eaten by eels en route, although I spent most of Monday and Tuesday darkly suspecting that eels had at least nibbled it, as it was new and spanky and adjustable and, despite frequent fiddling with multiple levers, bloody uncomfortable. Which turned out to simply be my butt and limbs adjusting to a different chair than the one I've sat in for a decade, who knew, because it's fine today. Possibly I'm just getting old. Sigh.

It occurs to me that the 12-hour Friday and 7-hour Saturday in fact handily explained my absence from Teh Intarwebs for ten days or so, we had a curriculum change deadline and the Dear Little Students, despite careful announcements and desperate pleas to the contrary, all piled up their submissions on the last day, concentrated in the last two hours before the deadline, leaving me with a hundred or so to process before Monday. I was really quite exhausted for most of last week. I enjoy working with students, really I do, they are bright and interesting and frequently lovely, but just-post-adolescent narcissism and the concomitant lack of development in the organs of perspective make them a little wearing at times. Yes, in the abstract getting the form in twenty minutes before deadline is "in on time", but consider that this faculty contains over five thousand of you, if you all do it at once the system collapses. Sigh.

On the upside, @GinevraCat posted on Twitter this recipe for quick chocolate lava cakes, which I have just made myself for lunch, and bugger health food, anyway. Pro tip: it helps to actually include the egg, which I accidentally overlooked, first time round, leaving me with the interesting problem of how to extract the solidified chocolate tar from the bottom of the ramekins, it appears to have fused. I haven't achieved that kind of rookie baking fail since I was approximately a teenager, I have been cackling derisively at myself all afternoon. Good chocolate lava, though. Eventually.

Recipe time! because I want to keep in the blogging flow, and can't think of anything else offhand. Also, because these are stv's favourite candidate for occupancy of the Endless Cookie Tin, a birthday present I gave him a few years back, constituting a fancy tin + undertaking to fill same with home-made cookies on demand, which gives me a lovely excuse to undertake wild baking experiments without entirely submerging my house in baked goods I'll never eat. Also, I have been tinkering with these for umpteen iterations and now diverge fairly wildly from the recipe and should probably write it down before age and chronic fatigue gently erase it from my memory.

This recipe relies, ironically enough, on the health food lunatic fringe's market clout having made various pure nut butters freely available in supermarkets over the last few years. It makes a very rich, short biscuit that spits in the general direction of healthy eating in any sense. You can actually make it with any nut butter and relevant nuts (cashews, almonds, the choc almond butter version is good), but the macadamia are best by a fairly long way, probably because of the richness of macadamia nuts.

This is based on Joy of Cooking's peanut butter cookie recipe, but basically I open the book to the right page and then cordially ignore it.

MACADAMIA CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

120g butter (at room temperature is easier)
125ml soft brown sugar
125ml brown sugar
1 egg
sploosh of vanilla to taste (I like lots)
260g macadamia butter
360ml flour
2 tsp ground ginger, dash of nutmeg (if you're feeling fancy, substitute a couple of teaspoons of grated orange zest)
1 tsp bicarb
1/2 tsp salt
15ml buttermilk (because there clearly isn't enough fat up in here already)
at least 100g dark chocolate chips
at least 100g coarsely chopped macadamia nuts (150g is good for reasonable levels of decadence)

• Preheat oven to 180^oC (350^o F) and line two baking sheets with baking paper.
  
• Soften butter a bit by beating with an electric mixer or whizzing in a food processor; add both types of sugar and beat for a few minutes, as long as you would to achieve the traditional "light and fluffy", which it won't achieve because this is coarse sugar, so it ends up looking sandy and a bit clumpy.
  
• Beat in egg. Beat in nut butter and vanilla.
  
• If you were a higher, nobler human being than I am, you'd sift the flour, spices, bicarb and salt together before adding them, but I never do, I bung them all into the measuring jug together and stir vaguely with a butter knife. Add the dry ingredients in approximately thirds, beating for the first two thirds while adding the buttermilk between them, then mixing in the last third with a butter knife, it gets a bit stiff and will burn out your mixer if you give it half a chance.
  
• Stir in the nuts and chocolate chips.
  
• You should end up with a stiff, moist drop cookie consistency rather than the usual rollable peanut butter cookie dough. Wodge dollops of mix onto the cookie sheets, leaving them room to spread a bit, and squidge them down a bit flat as they don't actually spread that much.
  
• Bake for 10-15 minutes depending on the personal proclivities of your oven, they should just be starting to brown at the edges. They are very crumbly when hot, and particularly delectable while still warm. Watch out for the molten chocolate bits.
  
• Inhale.

I do not at all wish to think about the campus situation, given that library and lab access was, in fact, disrupted by protests all week, and that clashes with police and security have become violent. My inbox is filled with panicked and plaintive queries, I am exhausted and despairing, and I am forced to contemplate the need to produce four weeks of teaching in virtual form by the end of this weekend. I am therefore going to distract myself with cooking, mostly because I have recently discovered American-style cornbread, and both Jo and Claire are badgering me for the recipe.

I have wanted to make American-style cornbread for years, because it sounds cool, but we don't actually produce cornmeal of the requisite grade in this country, so I've never pulled it together before. However, a couple of months back one of the Tumblr bloggers I read posted a recipe for skillet cornbread with caramelised onions, which looked so good I was moved to do five minutes of internet research, which revealed that you can substitute the cornmeal in cornbread with polenta, which is, in fact, apparently identical to coarse-ground cornmeal. As I retain my pathological inability to follow a recipe with any degree of fidelity, I am posting below my version, rather than simply linking to his, although you can have the original link as well, here. My version doesn't caramelise the onions with actual caramel, but compensates by upping the butterfat quotient of the cornbread itself to more civilised levels, i.e. decadent ones. I will have no truck with skimmed milk. It also reduces the amount of maple syrup, because I think this is better if it's not too sweet. It doesn't seem to make much difference if you use real maple syrup or maple-flavoured golden syrup, you just need that touch of sweetness and flavour.

SKILLET CORNBREAD WITH CARAMELISED ONIONS

Onion Topping:
1 tsp brown sugar
3 tbsp butter
1 medium-sized red onion, diced (or sweet white onion if you can find them)

Cornbread:
1 egg
250ml full cream Greek yoghurt (you could use low fat if you prefer, but why?)
125ml buttermilk (or normal milk if you must be health-conscious)
3 Tbsp melted butter
3 tblsp maple syrup
250ml polenta
60ml flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 a tin of whole kernel sweetcorn (this is optional, but works very well).

I make this in a weird but magical handle-less stainless steel pan thingy I inherited from Jo(ty) when she and Phleep fled the country - it has a nice heavy base, which I think is the important bit, and you can bung it in the oven owing to the lack of handle. I've also made this in a Dutch oven, i.e. my heavy cast-iron Le Creuset knockoff. You don't need anything with a lid.

• Preheat oven to 425^oF
  
• Caramelise the onions: on medium to low heat, melt the 3 tblsp butter and add the chopped onions. Allow to sweat gently and soften for about 20 mins, stirring occasionally, until they start caramelising properly. Cheat and add 1 tsp brown sugar and a little water. Cook another 5 mins or so.
  
• Mix dry ingredients (polenta, flour, backing powder, baking soda, salt) in a mixing bowl. Mix yoghurt, milk, melted butter and syrup with the egg in a measuring jug. Fling wet and sinfully fatty ingredients into dry ingredients and mix.
  
• Mix in the sweetcorn. You can also fling in things like bits of chilli, chopped peppadews, crispy bacon bits, grated cheese or chopped spring onion, although I wouldn't put them all in at once. I like the spring onion/peppadew version, although the whole corn one is my favourite.
  
• Tilt the onion pan to run the butter up the sides, for greasing purposes, and spread the onions vaguely evenly over the bottom.
  
• Pour the batter over the onions and bung into the pre-heated oven for 20-25 minutes, or until firm to the touch and starting to brown. Let it cool for five minutes or so before loosening the sides and inverting onto a plate. You'll end up with a flat round loaf with caramelised onion topping, like a savoury upside down cake.
  
• This is damned good with chili, or soup, or in chunks all on its own, and would make a superb and wildly cross-cultural accompaniment to braai. It's also, I warn you, absurdly moreish, I can flatten a whole loaf unaided in 24 hours. If eating it over a couple of days, it works to microwave slices for 20 seconds or so on Day 2, it freshens them and it's better warm.

My grandmother (maternal, for the use of) was generally a dreadful cook, firmly in the lesser British tradition of stodge, overcooked vegetables and the general, fixed conviction that being terribly serious about the quality of the food you produce is some sort of decadent European vice and not to be indulged at any cost. (I identify this in sharp contradistinction to the greater British tradition of gloriously hearty fare, which has given us apple pie, superlative pork products and infinite varieties of pudding and cake, and should be celebrated in legend, song and heaped second helpings). I remember with some vividness the particular stodge-bent which led Gran to offer any serious meal with both rice and potatoes in the main course, and with both cream and custard for the dessert. Also, her scones used to be over-baking-powdered to the point where they squeaked on your teeth, and she made pastry which has been an inspiration to me my entire life mostly because I'm damned determined never to reproduce anything resembling hers. It was always a bit leathery, and she used to sugar the hell out of it. Eek. I was greatly fond of my Gran, but not of her food. It's a source of both amazement and pride to me that my mother is a good cook in the teeth of the odds.

One thing that Gran did do well, though, was a cheese scone thing - more of a savoury muffin, really - which originated, I believe, with a great-aunt, and which I have both adopted and adapted to the point where Gran probably wouldn't recognise it and would regard with suspicion and disdain its culinary exuberances. (I have regarded with suspicion and disdain its baking powder excesses and have reduced them forthwith). This is quick and easy and really rather good in its overall effect, a marvellous recipe for making at the drop of a hat when you have guests for tea - I inflict it frequently on the unsuspecting, mostly recently egadfly and his Nice Lady in one of their characteristically flying Cape Town jaunts. Since I promised Iza, herewith the recipe.

Gran's Improved Randomised Cheese Scones

• 360ml flour
  
• 3 tsp baking powder
  
• 1 tsp salt
  
• Cayenne pepper to taste
  
• Whatever other spices grab your fancy – I like a tsp. of smoked paprika, you could try cumin, coriander, dried mustard, etc. Cheese does need a bit of underlining with something that delivers bite.
  
• Approx. 1 packed cup grated cheddar or other sharp cheese (you can actually vary this fairly safely, I like them more cheesy than this, and a Parmesan/cheddar mix is a particularly good effect)
  
• 1 egg
  
• 3 tblsp oil (olive oil is preferable for flavour)
  
• 180ml milk (buttermilk or sour cream is even better, you could probably also try yoghurt)
  
• Bits! Optional, but I like to add any combination of chopped chives, other chopped herbs, chopped spring onions, fried bacon bits, fried red onion bits, toasted pine nuts, chopped peppadews, etc. You could add cooked vegetable bits (e.g. pumpkin or grated baby marrow) for a muffin-like effect. These are also quite good with small chunks of feta or chevin crumbled into them, or, more accurately in the case of chevin, glodged.

1. Preheat oven to 400^oF.
   
2. Sift dry ingredients together.
   
3. Beat egg, oil and milk together and chuck into dry ingredients. (All the best quick-and-easy recipes don't mind if you chuck stuff in together more or less wholesale - my banana bread recipe, courtesy of Michelle, actually specifies "sift dry ingredients and chuck in.")
   
4. Mix (not too savagely, this requires a few goes with a wooden spoon, not a food processor) to make a stiff batter, and stir in cheese and whatever bits you’re flinging in. I usually add a bit more milk if it’s too stiff.
   
5. Drop into greased muffin tins in generous dollops, these are better if they’re a bit larger - at least two-thirds fill the tins.
   
6. Bake for 10-15 minutes. Serve hot if at all possible, with butter. They respond quite well to being bunged into a hot oven for a few minutes to refresh them if you're eating them a day or so later. Warning: seriously moreish. They make a damned good accompaniment to soup, too.

Hooray, Friday! and, after a four-hour meeting yesterday (I exaggerate only slightly, it started at 12.00 and finished at 3.45pm) I have absolutely no brain at all and will quiver slightly and show the whites of my eyes if you mention the phrase "teaching and learning" in any context other than that of hearty cussing. Fortunately there are memes for that. Given the high concentration of maddened cooks and foodies in my immediate vicinity, I thought this one particularly appropriate - please adopt it if the mood takes you, in the comments or elsewhere. Also, food gadget pr0n! And, possibly, culinary one-upmanship, and/or fiercely chauvinistic gadget-hatred.

This is the Kitchen Cupboard Meme, wot I nicked off matociquala, in that way that seems a bit rude when it's an author-blogger you read but who doesn't know you from a bar of soap. Bold the gadgets you have and use at least once a year, italicize the ones you have and don't use, strike through the ones you had but got rid of. I have also underlined the ones I don't have and would like to own, and urge you to do likewise in the spirit of future birthday lists and general wishful thinking.

"I wonder how many pasta machines, breadmakers, juicers, blenders, deep fat fryers, egg boilers, melon ballers, sandwich makers, pastry brushes, cheese boards, cheese knives, electric woks, salad spinners, griddle pans, jam funnels, meat thermometers, filleting knives, egg poachers, cake stands, garlic crushers, martini glasses, tea strainers, bamboo steamers, pizza stones, coffee grinders, milk frothers, piping bags, banana stands, fluted pastry wheels, tagine dishes, conical strainers, rice cookers, steam cookers, pressure cookers, slow cookers, spaetzle makers, cookie presses, gravy strainers, double boilers, sukiyaki stoves, ice cream makers, fondue sets, healthy-grills, home smokers, tempura sets, tortilla presses, electric whisks, cherry stoners, sugar thermometers, food processors,bacon presses, bacon slicers, mouli mills, cake testers, pestle-and-mortars, and sets of kebab skewers languish dustily at the back of the nation's cupboards."

I add to this, in the spirit of joyous and highly specialised excess, mezzalunas, egg separators, nutmeg graters, egg timers, pizza slicers, cookbook holders, onion graters, fat separators, potato mashers and mandolins.

Caveat: I've counted the things in our kitchen rather than the things that I actually own: the fondue sets, kebab skewers and pizza stone are property of the Evil Landlord. Further caveat: I have interpreted "juicers" as the non-electrical variety, ymmv. I also record for posterity my unnatural fondness for a sort of mandolin thingy my mother used to own, which had a set of harp-like cheese-wire thingies in a row, and a depression you lowered them onto: it was for slicing eggs, and was probably categorisable as some sort of mandolin. She never used it, but I loved playing the wires like a harp.

Also, what the hell is a bacon press? Confused.

You know I make those oven-baked baby potato thingies for braais? Where you halve the baby potatoes and sling them into a pan with garlic and olive oil and whatever other seasonings occur to you at the time (herbs, lemon, spices, the flesh of the living), and bake them until crispy? Well, this evening Jo & I, via the essentially random processes outlined above, accidentally created the best ever version of this. The One True Crispy Potato. The Platonic Ideal. I undertook to blog it quickly before we both forgot what we did. Herewith.

Excessive Potatoes

So, you need:

• 1kg baby potatoes. (This serves 4 of us. Don't mock). I like the Woolies yellow-fleshed Mediterranean ones, but any will do.
  
• A generous splodge of peanut oil.
  
• A couple of fairly heaped tablespoons of crushed garlic/ginger mix.
  
• Two mediumly ferocious chillis, chopped, seeds included.
  
• A mad sprinkling of Thai seven spice, to taste, but I tend to sprinkle a bit wildly.
  
• Half a pack of uncooked bacon bits.
  
• A couple of tablespoons of honey.
  
• A couple of tablespoons of soy sauce.
  
• A dash of fish sauce.
  
• A generous couple of handfuls of chopped spring onion.

So, you halve the potatoes and sling them into a wide roasting pan sort of thingy. Splosh generously with peanut oil; add ginger/garlic and Thai seven spice, and salt liberally. Whizz the potatoes around with a spatula to coat evenly with oil and seasonings. Chop chillis finely and add. Whizz around some more.
Stick the pan into a preheated 200^o oven, uncovered, for 30-45mins. If you remember you could come and mix up the pan a bit halfway through so they brown more or less evenly, but I usually forget.
At a point around 20 mins from the meat coming off the braai, add the bacon bits. Swirl around madly to coat/mix. Sling back into the oven.
Ten minutes later, haul the pan out of the oven and slosh over the potatoes the mixture of honey and soy/fish sauce you have previously prepared by warming the honey very slightly in the microwave before mixing in the soy and fish sauce. Once again, mix madly. Sling back in the oven.
As the meat arrives onto the table off the braai, triumphantly haul the potatoes out of the oven and decant into a serving bowl, making sure to scrape out the somewhat delectable sauce remnants and bits of crispy bacon. Add the chopped spring onions and mix together. (We contemplated adding sesame seeds, but it seemed redundant at this point).
Serve, to universal adulation and overeating.

I have only two things to add, being a bit overwhelmed by too much registration, too much braai, too much braai smoke, and a two-day headache.
(1) The possibilities for Skyrim mods seen in this video are making me drool more than slightly. Also, the editing on that irritatingly catchy tune is sheer genius. (I know that irritatingly catchy tune all too well because my OLs insist on using it every year for their opening presentation thingy. It's a terrible ear-worm even without all the arrow in the knee bits).
(2) I am utterly enjoying Veronica Mars anyway, but the last episode I watched completely made my weekend by developing precisely the 'ship I've been rooting for madly for about half the season. This makes me feel smug, and gratified, and prescient.

I have to note for posterity that my subject line will make absolutely no sense to anyone who doesn't read Pajiba. If you did, you'd know that the site has a running gag where they refer to Channing Tatum solely by the sobriquet of Charming Potato. You have to admit it's terribly apt.

Noxious day, again, continual students. My job is pretty much the pure paradigm of continuous partial attention. In addition, today's particular horrors included a high-level faculty meeting at which I was forced to defend Admin Streamlining Innovation #Umpty-thing against (a) determined and idiosyncratic opposition, (b) determined incomprehension and (c) determined and rather aggressive irrelevance. Academics. I do love them, really. Fortunately reasoned explanation gave me enough support on (a) and (b) that I carried the point. On (c) I was able to bring to bear my new favourite arguing technique, which is to pretend the aggression never actually happened and to calmly, quietly and in a subsequent email forum be sweetly reasonable and explanatory. This made lions into lambs with gratifying swiftness. I'm feeling exhausted, but faintly smug.

first_fallen asked me for my crème caramel recipe earlier today, so I shall continue the cat/cream connection, and incidentally soothe my soul, by posting it here for posterity. Apart from being my Evil Landlord's favourite and one of those perfect comfort foods, crème caramel is actually surprisingly easy to make. No blowtorch required, even. Go on, try!

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EVIL LANDLORD FAVOURITE CRÈME CARAMEL

I should add that my extremely syrup-stained copy of this has an annotation which reads "NB Claire doesn't like" in an anxious scribble. The secret of successful hostessing is to keep a hitlist of guestly preferences. Claire also doesn't eat green pepper. I should also add that I don't remember where this recipe originated, except that I'm fairly sure I got it from my mother extremely back in the day when I raided her personal handwritten cookbook for my first year in digs. Hi, Mum!

You need:

• 250ml cream
  
• 300ml milk
  
• vanilla pod or extract or a squirt of that gorgeous vanilla paste stuff
  
• 4 large eggs
  
• 6 oz sugar, for a value of "oz" which reads "a rounded tablespoon"

Important note: don't stress too dramatically on the quantities, this seems to work within the nearest 20ml or approximate spoon size. Important other note: the Evil Landlord holds that this dessert is better with 550ml cream, rather than half cream half milk. I find it too dense and solid. We argue. YMMV.

So, you need a smallish pot with a fairly solid base, and an ovenproof dish about (gods, now I'm going to have to go and measure it, aren't I? this posting recipes lark is a Huge Responsibility) 22cm across and 5cm deep. Pyrex is nice because you can see the layering. You'll also need an equally deep ovenproof dish or pan which will hold the first one comfortably. You will need to remember to preheat the oven to 150^oC (300^oF) round about now, and put the rack in the middle. (NB yes, this is a very slow oven. If you cook custard too fast it tends to curdle).

Put 4 oz sugar into the pot and place on medium/high heat. Restrain your urge to add water, you are caramelising sugar, which only needs sugar and heat. It is COMPLETELY VITAL that you stand over this like a hawk. A hawk with a wooden spoon. A wooden-spoon-equipped hawk with a sugar fetish. You cannot let your attention waver. The first minute or so is uneventful, I usually give the completely boring and unmoved sugar a couple of stirs just to break up any lumps and persuade myself I have a purpose here. However, as the sugar heats up, which it will do logically enough from the bottom, you will see it start to turn liquid and transparent. Give it a stir, whereupon it will form hard sugary lumps. Ignore this, it's a necessary ugly stage in making beautiful lethal molten syrup. Leave for another ten seconds or so, and stir again as it melts. Keep doing this. You'll have to give the stirs a fair amount of elbow, this stuff sticks to itself and the spoon - I tend to scrape it all off with a knife at intervals. Gradually the syrup will increase and slowly melt the lumps of sugar - towards the end you should be stirring continuously. If the syrup turns too dark a brown or starts to smell as though it's thinking of smelling burnt, turn the heat down and stir like crazy. You should end up with all the sugar a molten caramelised golden syrup. DO NOT splash this on yourself. It's the equivalent of your own organic kitchen napalm, it both sticks and burns like a fiery glue demon.

Pour the molten syrup quickly but carefully into the ovenproof dish. If you scrape the pot fairly quickly you should get most of it before it hardens into toffee, which it will cheerfully do at the first opportunity. While it's still molten, tilt the bowl so that the bottom and as much of the sides as possible are covered while it's still running. Put the pot and spoon immediately into water and leave to soak off the toffee for ten minutes or so. Have a celebratory gin: that was the hard part.

Right. Take a medium sized mixing bowl. Break the four eggs into it and add the remaining two spoons full of sugar. Whisk like mad with one of those balloon whisks. It should be well mixed and slightly frothy, although there's no real point in serious whiskage at this stage, you're making custard, not sponge cake.

Put the milk and cream into the rinsed pot and put back on the stove on medium/high. If you're using a proper vanilla pod, split it and add it to the milk as it heats. You'll get little black vanilla grains in the custard, but I consider this to be a sign of authenticity and absolutely worth it. You don't quite want to boil the milk: you want it to form a skin on top and start to foam a little at the edges. Remove from the heat and take out the vanilla pod if you're using it. If you're using essence or paste, add it at this stage. (Variation: this is surprisingly amazing with 1 tsp orange blossom water in place of vanilla).

Take the whisk in your left hand and the hot milk pot in your right, and steady the egg/sugar mix bowl with your third hand, your foot or a passing cat. Pour the milk in a fairly thin stream onto the egg/sugar mix, whisking like mad as you do so. This is how you avoid Evil Lumping. Once all the milk is in, give it a few more whisks for the hell of it.

Right. Now. Place the ovenproof dish containing the syrup coating into the larger pan. Pour cold water into the larger pan until it comes about halfway up the side of the smaller dish. You get the most amazing patterns in the syrup as it cools and cracks while you're doing this: about half the time mine makes little scallop/scale patterns, for unfathomable but presumably sound reasons having to do with Basic Physics. What you have just created is the fancy French cooking apparatus called a bain marie, a water bath: you are surrounding the custard with water to regulate the temperature and cook it gently rather than quickly. (Works like a dream for cheesecake, too).

Now pour the whisked custard mix into the dish on top of the set caramelised sugar. (If you've had a Lump event or are feeling fancy you can strain it, but I never do). Put the whole bang shoot - pan, dish, custard - carefully into the oven. It will attempt to slop. Restrain it with the statuesque calm of your motions.

Bake at aforementioned slow temperature for 45 minutes. Don't overcook, it goes a bit tough. It'll still wibble gently when you take it out; this is as it should be, it'll set up a bit as it cools. When it's cooled you should technically be fancy and turn it out like a mould, so that the caramel tops it, but I never bother to do this, mostly because I prefer it hot and it falls apart if you try to turn it when it's still warm. It's also very good chilled, though.

It's possible to make this in small ramekins rather than one big dish, but it's far trickier; the caramelised sugar is quite difficult to spread evenly in multiple dishes before it's turned to toffee. The cooking time is also much shorter, obviously - just under half an hour usually does it.

Recipe repeatedly stress-tested under Germanic conditions for slightly over a decade, and guaranteed Evil Landlord-friendly. Contents may settle in stomach. Void where prohibited by law.

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Oh, my, heatwave. It's mercifully clouded and windy today, but it's been ungodly out there. Every time I come home I realise anew why it is that the pagans got into tree-worshipping: I want to fall down at the plane tree's shady feet and adore. Stepping into the shade from the griddle of the road outside is practically a religious experience. The tree shades the whole side of the house, which is blissfully cool as a result; I hate to think what life would be like if supernatural tree-thieves spirited away the plane tree overnight.

As a result, possibly, of all the heat, and the side-effect that it's a positive pleasure to wander around the garden with a hosepipe de-wilting all the vegetation, my vegetables and herbs are going gangbusters. My small but enthusiastic chilli bush, in particular, is dementedly producing a completely unlikely quantity of chillis, far more than I could possibly use even if I cooked insane thai, Indian and Mexican cuisine for the next six weeks.

This is the result of ten minutes of picking: I've had to throw out another twenty or so which I got to too late and which have shrivelled, and I missed a few full-sized ones on the bush. The mad thing will certainly procuce a second crop, it did last year.



Fired with enthusiasm, I pickled them.



It's curiously satisfying. Apart from the fact that I love pickled chillis and find the vinegar fumes all bracing, there's a sort of back-to-the-land self-sufficiency in pickling your own (albeit miniature) crop. Even if it's a tiny, token gesture, it brings me just one step closer to surviving the zombie apocalypse. Although, to be fair, while the South African crime-rate means most of our homes are fairly zombie-proof, the overall defensibility of this house is badly compromised by the dining-room window.

Speaking as a happy atheist and sturdy rationalist, the meaning of Easter to me is a blissful four-day weekend and the excuse to make waffles. (Apparently to stv it's the chance to make horrible jokes about the real hot, cross bunny being the one you set fire to before crucifying it, but that's quite enough symbol mixing right there, thank you). So jo&stv came round on Sunday morning, and we had waffles with cream and ice-cream and berries and pecan nuts and chocolate sauce and maple syrup and bananas and bacon. (Not, as far as I know, all at once, although some of the tottering piles achieved by the Evil Landlord and stv probably came close). Coffee, orange juice and two bottles of champagne were also implicated in the scene. I always see my waffle-making activities as being choreographed by John Woo, on account of how we have two waffle irons and twin-iron mayhem is my signature style. My Seekrit Sorrow with waffles is that I can't toss them, like I can with pancakes two goes out of three. The third one very rarely ends up on the floor.

In the process of the wafflination, a terrible truth was revealed. Jo, owing possibly to some kind of weird Polish genetic predisposition, likes her waffles soggy. As in, not crispy. Not properly cooked. Squishy. Doughy. Eeuw. I did violence to my feelings by providing a couple of batches undercooked as specified, but I think she's odd. However, there's always the chance that in fact my monolithic preference for crispy waffles is the result merely of ignorance and lack of exposure to How The Other Half Lives, so therefore, pollination!

[Poll #1547551]

In other, completely unrelated news, the new musical genre seems to be children's dinosaur heavy metal. This caused me unseemly levels of merriment, the more so because it's not just children's heavy metal performed in dinosaur costumes, it's children's heavy metal performed in dinosaur costumes in Finnish, which raises it to a whole new level of surreal. If they did it in English I'd have to get a copy for my niece.