In a Vase on Monday - Good enough to Eat

Its with apologies that I post yet again a simple vase.  The garden is not quite planted up with the permanent shrubs and perennials which no doubt will find their rightful place in the next few years.  The vase was made up in a rush on Friday evening minutes before friends arrived for supper.

It was a supper for 'new' dancing friends Peter and David, and as Peter's wife is vegetarian I decided to make everything suitable for the entire company.  I even wanted the flowers to be edible hence the nasturtiums.  I had sown the seed collected from my previous garden rather late in the year and these are just starting to flower, and they could be cut down any day by frosts.  In the meantime lazy slow bumblebees are collecting nectar from these.

After a celeriac and cider soup, the main dish was a quinoa 'rissotto' if there can be such a thing, maybe it should be called a quinotto, with quinoa grown just a few miles away, with pumpkin and smoked chestnuts from Madeira, pumpkin seeds, etc....with a side dish of braised swiss chard from the garden, with whole orange sicilian almond cake to finish.

  I had been in a quandry as to what to make until I was inspired by another Friend and blogger's post about her pumpkin rissotto.

I wonder whether Cathy would like a dish like this?  I can't remember what I made for lunch when she and the golfer visited my garden in Kenilworth?  Cathy is the person who each weeks leads us gardeners and In a Vase on Monday posters to join together.  This week her arrangement is based on Persicarias.  I hope that like me you will visit her page too, and that of other friends to see what they have posted.

Cake in Moderation

Usually Friday is bun day!  Ever since I baked nearly all the recipes in Jane Mason's Book of Buns, this has been the rule.  Either fresh or from my stash of frozen buns, two are served on lovely white china with a pot of tea on Friday afternoons, and if friends can pop in then, they are of course included.

We missed out on buns last Friday, and we were to have cake on Sunday at the pump rooms in Bath, but the queue was unbearably long.  We planned to pick up a cake or bun somewhere on our way back...but we were turned away at 4:02 because Morrison's close at 4 on a Sunday and were just letting people leave, not enter.

Mr S requested very nicely  cake and tea instead of buns and tea this Friday.  He wanted a cake like the granny cake we used to buy from the COOP on Fridays on the way home from work from the COOP.  I'm not talking about the large birthday cakes or sticky confections that are available these days.  The cake was a rather plain, lightly fruited affair with bits of sugar on the top. This was over 20 years ago!  The cakes were rather small, but quite tasty and came in a square box that made them look bigger than they were.

I wanted to make a cake as close as possible to the one we had years ago.  I looked for a 'frugal' type of cake recipe, but ended up devising my own.  The next problem was size, all my cake tins are 'ample sized', and making a frugal fruit cake in a small 1 lb fruit tin would not have looked like the one we used to buy.

I just could not get out of my head my 'contretemps' with Kenco in August, which I posted about on facebook, and recently copied here for my friends that are not on facebook.  If people are having smaller cups of coffee, then 'moderation must be 'en vogue'!  So I bought a small round baking tin....Here is the small 6 "cake tin which is still not as small as the standard 5" cake currently being sold in Sainsbury's!  If we cut the same number of slices from a 15 cm cake rather than 20 cm cake and had that with the 'smaller' cup of coffee, we can still have cake and coffee despite the recent hike in prices in the shops!!!!!!  Both are much smaller!!!

With this smaller cake tin...and thanks to Kitchen Craft the manufacturers they have printed the size in inches and centimeters on the outside, such a brilliant idea, I baked the following....

6 Inch Frugal Fruit Cake to be enjoyed in Moderation

200g self raising flour sifted
1/2 tsp mixed spice sifted with the flour
100g butter
100g caster sugar
150g mixed dried fruit
1 egg
75g milk or thereabouts
Coarse Sugar to sprinkle

Rub the butter into the flour and spice, add the caster sugar and mixed dried fruit, stir well to distribute the fruit.  Crack open the egg into a small bowl and mix with 50g milk, stir this into the main mixture, then gradually add the remainder of the milk to a stiff but not dry constituency.
The fruit was a mixture of raisins, currants and my home made crystallized orange and lemon peel.

Bake at Fan Oven Temp 160/ Gss Mark 3 for about forty minutes.  It may take less but watch, and cover after about 25 minutes to avoid scorching, and test with a skewer to check that it is fully baked, before removing.  Leave in the tin for a few minutes then turn out onto a cooling rack.  Eat only when completely cold!

Friday afternoon tea and cake time, with a neighbour invited over so that we could plan our joint order for autumn mulches for the garden.

Coffee in Moderation? Kenco decide that people are having coffee in smaller cups

This was what I posted on facebook for my friends to read...its strange this has got me thinking, go to my next post!

I can't believe it!!! Old jar of same Kenco Coffee Instant Rich: 100g 55cups; refill pouch 150g 93 cups, bought only within four weeks or so.

Instantly, excuse the pun, I realised someone got the maths wrong. Should have been 82.5 cups on the pouch. The difference of 10.5 cups is a 12.72%increase.

So I rang the free phone number 0808 100 8787...their explanation is that Kenco has decided people prefer smaller cups!!!

Have you reduced the size of your cups/mugs or decided you would like your cup of coffee signifanctly weaker? Have Jacobs Douwe Egberts replaced all your mugs with smaller versions? At what stage will they bring out a 'smaller jar' with the logo: 'Still the same number of cups'???? But we would not like to give those marketing people another way of increasing profits, would we?

If you have a couple of minutes to spare why not phone them, and ask them this same question? Aren't we all fed up, as consumers, of being taken for mugs?

Please share this, and see if we can put some pressure on firms like this. Wouln't this make a funny comedy number...share with any comedians you know, or cartoonists and if you like send this to a consumer loby group, or even the BBC.

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Rock Pool Socks complete

Another pair of socks knitted from yarn in my stash.  The pattern is called Rock Pool was was published in the Knitter Magazine recently.  Now stowed away in my stash of new socks...my 'being used sock drawer' is full.

Caraway Spelt

The Caraway Spelt Loaf based on the rye sourdough starter is from Jane Mason's Book: Perfecting Sourdough.  I scaled up the ingredients so that I could shape the dough into 2 loaves in my 500g proving baskets.  The loaves turned out beautifully and one of them came with us to Bath.

Here is Millie...I am sure she could smell the delicious aroma as I was cutting the loaf to go with our soup.  I am sure that she would not have objected to the caraway seed has she been offered a piece.  Mr S has quite firmly suggested that I use another seed and he said that fennel would do!