One Woman Goes To ....

Squish, Squash

I don't know when squash started not to mean a glass of something orange accompanied by a colour clashing red Penguin but apart from carving pumpkins there are now Acorn, Spagetti and Butternut to choose from. So time for a bit of seasonal cooking ( although I note that my squash came from Greece where surely it is never Autumn but always glorious sunshine and singing Piers ) and make something to eat out of one. Treat or tricky ?

From the library, Gary Rhodes, 365. A huge book with a recipe for every day of the year. I think 365 is a tad unnecessary. Surely there are days when the most committed cook feels like toast and marmite ? Or in Gary's case a lovely plate of buttery crumpets. But great pictures, easy to read and follow and because I am the first person to have borrowed it no splashes or splodges.

( I am going to digress for a moment. For anyone who likes new things but is belt tightening or horn pulling I have two words - The Library. It's a bit like Primark etc in that you have to get a feel for when new stuff comes in but for no outlay you can take out lots of books and for a small amount, DVDs etc and if the book is not on reserve then you seem to be able to renew for up to 12 weeks and what with the romance going out of marriage after 2 years, 6 months and 25 days then 3 months of having a book by your bedside seems a fair ratio. )

Anyway on Page 72. Butternut squash soup. Seems to do exactly what it says on the ambitiously missing tin. First peel your squash. As I get to work this strikes me as what it must be like to peel the base of a table lamp. Peeled, cleaved in half and seeds removed I am left with something that has probably surpassed the potato as printing vegetable of choice in Orla Kiely style households. An onion and garlic follow. ( Could Mother Nature do a little bit of innovating on the packaging front ? If we are reconciled to the loss of the foil and wrapper on the KitKat then surely no tears need be shed over the loss of onion skins or the fiddly bits of garlic paper than will never come off properly).

So chopped, sauteed, simmered and blended , I have my soup. It's OK. It's a bit samey. It's very orange.

So no tricks. In fact exactly as you would expect a soup made and named after a very orange vegetable to be I guess.

Something Fishy

A long day and a long journey home. 2 tubes, 1 train, 2 buses and none of them counting to my 5 a day. The final bus stops just past the fish and chip shop. One day I will write a smug entry on how it takes less time to make a delicious supper than it takes to wait till the pizza moped has mounted the pavement umpteen times before working out which house to deliver to and decoding helmet speak to work out how much I owe.

But tonight is not that night. Tonight will be a brown bagged meal that will be on a plate, ketchup on the chip side and HP on the sausage and fishcake side, my fork feeling its way to spearing a chip before even the eco bulb has warmed up. I am a fishcake fancier. It doesn't matter whose they are. I've done high end tucking in at Le Caprice and Langans, middle market at a glut of gastro pubs and plenty of entry level eating at the Fish Bar at the very reasonable price point of 80p a pop. I like them all.

However one thing I am firm on. Fishcakes should come in pairs, maybe it's the same principle which dictates that one goldfish in a bowl looks lonely where as two look companionable. And I don't like one large cake - to me that's the deep fat fryer equivalent of one bowl resident gobbling the other. Fishy cannibalisation is not prettier on bone china than in a glass bowl. But when it comes to fishcakes my local fish and chip shop doesn't go in for shoals. One warming cabinet, one cake is their policy. This doesn't stop me from peering,hoping maybe one has gone astray, hightailing unnoticed to network with the saveloy. Unfruitful peering is followed by asking how long another will take. The answer always - 5 to 6 minutes.

At this point I have to wrestle with the dilemma I know will now follow. As surely, as to quote one of the fishier philosophers of modern times, the gulls will follow the trawler. It is at this moment that Gillian Mckeith will appear to me. To be visited by Cantona and Mckeith simultaneously in a surburban chippie is surely only going to lead to being asked wrapped or open by Elvis.

But it's because I now don't want to wait for a fishy twin and I want to substitute a battered sausage as a companion to my lone cake. Gillian appears standing amongst a lot of piggy pieces that she has thrown on the floor, most disturbing of which is one with its eye still intact, complete with very long eyelashes that look as it it spent its last minutes on this earth busy with its Shu Uemura eyelash curlers. If I really wanted to throw the party wide open HFW would appear and talk to me about the cruelty of intensive pig farming but Gillian is too shouty and has by far the better props to allow for this so he will have to wait until I am next shopping in Waitrose and then it will be free range all the way.

I did once make something out of Quinoa and it was inedible so I know the blonde shouty one not always to be right so I stand my ground ignoring the winking pig at my feet and before I know it the sausage is nestling alongside the cake on a bed of big fat chips, being simultaneously annointed with salt and vinegar.

I have often thought of broaching the idea with my fryer of upping his cooked stock to two cakes at a time and so eliminating the invisible queue of Beautiful Mind extras building behind me but I am too fearful that my idea might be greeted with the same incredulity that the rest of us might greet a billionaire type story of eccentric extravagance.

Watch this space for that smug, store cupboard standby supper.

Crumbs !

The last time I made a cake was under sufferance and supervision. I don't remember if the class was Domestic Science or Home Economics but the book that we cooked from looked dreary enough to fit either. The cover was black gloss with a couple of loose apricots, a pile of flour and a Pyrex jug for inspiration. More Ready, Steady, Skive than Cook.

However last week I was given a cake tin. For baking. 23cm, brushed metal with a loose bottom. It was use it or inevitably loose it at the back of a kitchen cupboard. So I pulled 'How To Be A Domestic Goddess' off the shelf and 8 years after buying the book thought I might make something from it. The tin dimensions dictated the recipe. 'Rhubarb and Cornmeal' or 'Damp Lemon and Almond '. I found the word damp off putting in a cake but not as much as the word cornmeal. Decision made.

I fall at the 1st line. 'Cream together the butter and sugar until almost white'. I tried to make something pale and interesting out of a packet of butter and sugar mountain, using only a wooden spoon but had a pinny flashback - of cutting the butter into cubes first. Chastised I realised I didn't belong in the cool, back seat of the bus Nigella gang so swung my satchel and shuffled forward to cosy up to Delia on the swat seats.

In the Complete Cookery Course under instructions for a Classic Victoria Sponge I see the words 'pale, fluffy mixture that drops off the spoon easily'. Sounds like my school report. Followed by the more encouraging 'an electic hand whisk speeds this up considerably'. A bit of rummaging and humming 'are cakes electric'and thanks to my Kenwood Handmixer ( bought as recommended by Delia for mash making) I soon have a mix resembling an anaemic Sharpei.

I now need to beat in the eggs. Delia's tip for a beginner is to add just a teaspoonful at a time. However with 4 large eggs, Duffy who I am listening to as I mix and bake, is going to have gone from debut to Caesars Palace Farewell Tour in the time this will take so I compromise on 2 dessertspoons. Finally everything is added and the mixture is in the tin, in the oven.

30 minutes later when I go back into the kitchen to put some washing on I can't work out what it smells of. It takes me a few olfactory seconds to work out that the answer is home baking.

After 50 minutes I need to check if it's ready. It is if an inserted skewer 'comes out cleanish: you want dampness but no battery goo'. It takes me ages to work out what this means. I am thinking lemon/acid/battery !! (must be a throwback to the word science). So whilst I am working it out I put the cake back in the oven for a little longer. Eventually it is on a wire tray, cooling off and looking a bit sorry for itself. Apparently it will be even better for sitting wrapped in lots of foil for a few days. I am hopeful this is to cake what peeling bandages is to facelifts. Total transformation.

The whole episode having taken much longer than I'm sure it should means it is now quite late. However in a silver foil lining moment I realise that whilst I may have a sub WI cake I do now have a preheated oven. 10 minutes later and I am sitting down to eat my ready meal pizza.

Wanna be in my gang ?

What's in a name ?

A big fan of tomatoes, I still might not have discovered Bruschetta if it had been tagged as 'tomatoes on toast'. To me the image that conjures up is of a lone tinned tomato on a piece of fried bread, soggy and greasy in equal measure.(What you ate when you went round to a friend's house in the 70's was always a bit random but clearly memorable, if not always fondly).

So whilst I was working out the food left on plate to polite guest ratio,Italian mamas were serving up their delicious variation. Luckily we all caught on eventually. So much so, that you can now buy ready prepared bruschetta bread. Forget frozen mash, this is top of the class cheating.

Slices of bread toasted,the upperside rubbed with a peeled and halved clove of garlic and as many chopped fresh tomatoes as you can fit, piled high onto the toasted bread. Olive oil drizzled (in the tomatoes on fried bread era this word applied only to rain) and a sprinkling of Maldon sea salt.

The perfect antidote to 70's home cooking and the one sandwich you never want to be short of on a Transylvanian picnic.

Green shoots

The farmshop has generous asparagus bundles. 2 for £5. Picked from the neighbouring field, yesterday. Seasonal and local, they tick the add to basket box and join the new potatoes with their papery skin and box of eggs .

Whilst growing, asparagus is not the most companionable of veg so it seems mean to make it share the limelight for what is its brief star turn.

The ways to make it centre stage seem to be to simply serve with one of the following:

• Butter
• Hollandaise sauce
• Soft boiled eggs as green soldiers
• Shaved Parmesan

Whichever you choose you also have to decide which mast to stick your prepping colours to. Chop or Snap. To chop is to get a bit more spear to eat. To snap is to enjoy a veggie sound sensation that has been much missed since Patsy Kensit stopped making pea-popping sounds in exchange for saying 'I do'.

My favourite is to snap, chargrill,anoint with butter and adorn with Parmesan.

Simply Summer.

Magical Places

Petersham Nurseries for a Birthday lunch. It's on the celebrant's list of 'places I have always wanted to go'. The taxi takes us down a pot holed lane,bumping our way alongside lush buttercup meadows. To complete the 'we just took a turn off the main road and found ourselves in a completely different world feeling' cattle wade knee deep in the verdant grass and as the taxi drives away and we stop to admire the view, the calves start gamboling.

Before we succumb to bucolic plague we hopscotch through the puddles and take shelter in a large glasshouse, at the back of which tables are laid for lunch. The scent is not yet of cooking but of the rich loamy smell of a greenhouse and instead of rows of clay pots and tomato seedlings the propogation is of starched linen napkins,glinting long stemmed glasses and polished cutlery.

We are the first to arrive and it's a bit chilly but we are assured that the heaters are on and it will soon warm up. It does. It's not long before our perfect round butter pats start to glossily run away with themselves. So it's heaters off,later followed by jackets back on, then hand rubbing to keep warm between sips of wine. A patriotic experience of the temperature never being quite right for the occassion but the determination to sit it out and enjoy, regardless.

The chef has a personal philosophy and although the prices reflect this, the food is beautiful and not a crumb left on the plate, delicious. Lunch in this generously proportioned potting shed is a real treat. When it's time to go we put on our coats and dust off our handbags where they have been sat on the bare earth floor. Our waitress puts down her teatowel and takes a break from drying up the glasses to come and say goodbye and adds we are very welcome to take our table decorations home with us.

Delighted we stuff our booty into our bags and pick our way back down the lane to the bus stop to wait for the No.65 back to humdrum. It's only when we get on the bus and need to forage for our passes and in doing so pull out fresh garlic bulbs complete with long green stalks followed by oversized lemons with rustling leaves attached and the driver is obliged to give us a 'I thought I had seen it all but...'look that we feel a bit like Mr.Benn must have done when he came across a momento in his pocket that made him think that perhaps he hadn't just imagined his latest adventure.

Vent on Vend

Someone at work is absent. Our department is vending machine backup. This is an undertaking that has none of the horror but all of the tedium of a Celebrity Jungle task.

Filling the spirals gives a whole new take on confectionery characteristics. Coke cans are a breeze. Solid chocolate like Mars or Snickers, as long as you remember to lay them gently backward, are easily handled. They have no aspirations to be the Eddie Eagles of the vend world.

Trickier products are those where bag acts as both packaging and protective cushion , a ready inflated airbag for the knocks life inflicts on the likes of crisps and Maltesers. The bags for Maltersers do not contain as much air as those for crisps but the store cupboard must be slightly warmer than their ideal ambient temperature so they melt a little and then clump, so that when you need to slide them nicely into their spiral,they all sit, stuck stubbornly together at one end of the bag, like little chicks huddled under an infrared lamp and only the firmest of shakes will sort them out. However in the chocolate covered stakes their popularity remains undimmed, up there with KitKats and Snickers. Shortbread fingers on the other hand remain like nervous divers, always peering over the edge but destined never to jump. Perhaps we have become too accustomed to having them as free accompaniments in B&B hospitality sets to contemplate parting with money for them.

Crisps are the fastest selling and most irritating refill item. Whilst some can be eaten as crumbs rescued from the corners of the bag by a wetted finger you don't want your whole bag to look as it it's a dust buster demo prop. Some you want to pick up between finger and thumb and crunch as loud as crisp accoustics allow. This means a lot of air and an unwieldy bag to manoeuvre into position.

So next time you curse the filler upper who allowed an empty spiral to appear at the head of the orderly Twix queue, resulting in a forward shuffle but no drop in return for your 50p, remember they may have had more to contend with than you might realise.

Italian Finale

Chocolate meringues. A thoughtful supper gift. Four, wrapped in scrunchy cellophane and tied with blue ribbon from Carluccios, www.carluccios.com. These are not snowy white Snowdonian peaks . These owe their character to their Italian heritage. Marbled with chocolate, like the finest end pages of a Florentine notebook and with a rugged Dolomite structure ,they demand more than a hulled strawberry and whipped cream to keep them company. We put them in wide shallow bowls and around one side drizzle rich raspberry coulis, the colour reminiscent of Nancy Dell 'Olio's Downing Street catsuit and on the other,double cream . Deliciously crisp and chewy at the same time we keep adding polite spoonfuls of cream to our bowls until we give in and pour straight from the carton. It would seem that what a stack is to Swedish heels , cream is to Italian meringues.