Home Grown

This may not look very exciting but it really, really is. This is a lovely big bunch of spinach, which happens to be the first thing that we're eating out of our garden! It turns out that in addition to being quite strict with the plants, Rocco is also a bit sneaky and secretly planted spinach in one of our flower beds. I noticed the similarity to the spinach in his garden, so I didn't weed it out and the whole story came out today when I asked his opinion on whether our leafy things were edible.

And they are ever so edible when put into Turkish style baked eggs, which is what I had for dinner. The original recipe used rocket instead of spinach, but I like spinach better. Also, we now have a bunch of it growing for free in our back yard, so we're going to be eating a lot more of it. That said, I think you could probably make this with any cookable leafy green.

Baked Eggs with Yogurt and Chilli

300g spinach (or one bag of pre-washed)
4 eggs
150g plain yogurt
1 garlic clove, peeled and crushed
50g unsalted butter
1/2 tsp kirmizi biber (or chilli flakes mixed with paprika)
6 sage leaves, shredded (or a good shake of dried sage)

Pre-heat oven to 300F/150F. Wash the spinach and cook in pan over medium heat for 5-10 minutes - the water from rinsing should be enough to cook it in.

Transfer the spinach to a small, ovenproof dish and make four indentations in it. Carefully break an egg into each crater, taking care not to break the yolk. Place in the oven for 10-15 minutes, or until the egg whites set.

While the eggs are in the oven, mix together the yogurt and garlic along with a pinch of salt. Set aside - but do not chill.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan, add the kirmizi biber and fry for a minute or two or until the butter foams and turns a nice golden-red. Add the sage and cook for a few more seconds, then remove from the heat.

Once the eggs are done, take the dish out of the oven. Spoon the yogurt mix over the centre and pour the hot chilli butter over the yogurt and eggs. Serve piping hot.

This makes a nice brunch item but I feel it isn't quite enough to go it alone. It needs accompaniment, by big mugs of tea or hot chocolate(!), fat slabs of toasted granary bread, a big bowl of oatmeal or muesli, and maybe some nice sausages. Or whatever you have for breakfast. That sounds really good to me and now I want to have breakfast for dinner - except that I've already had dinner. Oh well. A big mug of hot chocolate will be a pretty good dessert.

Baby Velvet

Two weekends ago, I went to a baby shower for our friend Mia. (Matthew went to Nashville last year with her husband Paul to co-produce his album. He described it as the best holiday of his life and returned with a Western shirt, a cowboy hat and a mustache. He'd obviously had a good time.) Anyway, for Mia's tea party shower, I made scones and customised a set of onesies (or baby-grows, as they are called here).

I made one batch of strawberry scones and one strawberry and kiwi. They were well received and two people asked me for the recipe – just the sort of reaction I like.

Strawberry Yogurt Scones

2 C flour
3 T sugar
2 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp baking soda
4 T butter, cold, cut into ½ cubes
¾ C chopped strawberries
¾ C plain yogurt

Preheat oven to 425F/220C. Stir together dry ingredients. With a pastry cutter or two knives (or, if you can’t quite coordinate two knives, a potato masher) cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in strawberries. Stir in enough yogurt to form dough into a ball (up to ¾ C, but I used less). Turn dough onto a floured surface and with floured hands knead a few times. Press into a 9 inch round, cut into 8 triangles. Place onto cookie sheet lined with parchment. Bake until golden, about 12 - 15 minutes. Remove to rack to cool.

Note: For the strawberry-kiwi scones, I used just under a half cup of each fruit and added an additional tablespoon of sugar. The dough is very sticky and was hard to deal with when I used all the yogurt; it was much easier when drier.

The onesies elicited oohs and ahhs, especially the one with Paul’s album cover. That one was Matthew’s idea and it was genuinely adorable. The images on the shirts were straighter than it looks in the photos, by the way.

Mia looked like she was ready to pop the day of the shower, but she didn’t actually have the baby until last week. She is a very pretty little girl named…Velvet Giselle. Well, they are rock-n-rollers.

Valentine's Day

Love is all around, etc. and we’re celebrating in our own way. We aren’t having a traditional date night with dinner and dressing up, as Matthew is working tonight. Last night we exchanged cards, had a lovely dinner of lasagna, champagne and chocolate truffles while watching not one, but two episodes of Torchwood, the Dr Who spin-off series. This afternoon we went to a matinee of Cloverfield, which is not a traditionally romantic movie, but we did clutch at each other several times in terror. Matthew gave me a sweet little bouquet of roses. Tonight I am sending him to work with a dinner of leftover lasagna and heart-shaped brownies, while I’ll stay home and watch TV.

Here are pictures of the cards we exchanged. Obviously, we went in different directions for expressing our feelings:

I made the brownies from another Hershey's recipe. Super easy and quick, and I think they turned out to be quite cute. I ate the off-cuts, so I already know they're very tasty.

Salmon Croquettes

We used to have salmon croquettes fairly often when I was a kid. I think the original recipe came from my Grandmother Mark. This version is from Real Simple. I have a distinct impression of making it in my apartment in Denton, so it probably appeared between 2000 and 2002.

2 cans salmon
1 egg
¼ C mayonnaise
tarragon
capers to taste
cracker crumbs

Mix salmon, egg, mayo, tarragon and capers. Form into cakes, coat with cracker crumbs, and fry until golden brown.

These are great with wild rice and asparagus, or as you can see I have had tonight, brown rice and broccoli. Essentially, something starchy and something green.

Speaking of Real Simple: there are many things about that magazine that irritate me, but the biggest annoyance has to be the title. I get that it is supposed to be “Real” life made “Simple,” but it’s also supposed to imply that it’s real(ly) simple. The grammatical contortion is giving me hives!

Matthew's birthday

26th January was Matthew’s birthday and, as is our custom, we indulged in prolonged celebrations:

- Thursday: In a low key start to the weekend, we had fish and chips from Michael’s High Class Fish Bar (which is so much more fun to call by its full name than just saying “the chippy”) and watched the Dr Who Christmas special, which we’d missed due to being in Texas over Christmas. We both agreed with conventional wisdom that special guest star Kylie Minogue is indeed very, very tiny, but noted that her teeth are actually quite large. It creates a weird spatial tension on her head.

- Friday: fish ‘n chips and Dr Who might have been enough for some people, but not for party animals like us. We had a party on Friday night with a proper birthday cake (made from Hershey’s Perfectly Chocolate Cake recipe) with candles and everything. It looked something like this lovely cake by Amy Sedaris, except made of cake instead of plaster of paris.

I decided not to embarrass anyone by actually putting a candle for every year (and the cost of that many tiny candles would have been prohibitive anyway), but used some very cute ones spelling out “Happy Birthday” from Gill Wing. I was disappointed that they melted really quickly, considering that they came from a fancy gift shop, and dripped before I’d even got them all lit. Fortunately, Matthew didn’t wait for the end of the Birthday Song to blow them out, so wax drip damage was minimal. It did not deter the greedy pigs, I mean, our dear friends from digging in with abandon.

Since the party was on 25th January, otherwise known as Burns Night, I made Scottish-themed nibbles. I baked pearl potatoes in the oven, then stuffed them with haggis (regular and "vegetarian," which actually just looked like all other veggie fake foods - lentils, shredded carrot and some onion), and served chunks of brown bread with smoked salmon and mackerel . At the last minute I freaked out that there wouldn't be enough food, so Matthew was dispatched to the shop across the street for pita, hummus, taramasalata , olives, etc. The foods aren't indigenous to Scotland, but I'm sure they would not feel out of place at a party in Scotland. My friend Adrienne brought chips and more dips, so there was enough - though apparently just barely, since there were almost no leftovers for us to snack on during the tidy-up.

- Saturday: Matthew’s mate Steve came to visit from Plymouth and we all dressed up and went dancing at Set the Tone, a ska/reggae/60’s soul night. We looked so good and had such a good time that we’ve decided to another ska night in a couple of weeks; we’re considering making it our new “thing.” I had several outfits planned out by the time we got home. The only real problem is that I cannot dance to ska music. Matthew explained that the emphasis in ska music is on the 2 and 4 beats, while I am dancing on the 1 and 3. So it's not that I don't have rhythm; I've just got the wrong one.