My friend Jean gave me a (subtle, of course) nudge last week, about the dearth of recipes bursting forth (or failing to burst forth in this case) from aviewfrommykitchen. Hmmm, must do better.
I have no excuse for this, other than terminal inertia, brought on by having no fixed timetable for anything at all. Not to mention that our meals of late have not exactly been inspiring – there are only so many recipes you need for cheese on toast or bangers & mash.
I haven’t been entirely idle – I signed up for sourdough-baking school and my sourdough starters have never been so well-tended, or so well-used. Our kitchen is permanently coated with a light dusting of flour, and I seem to endlessly have chewing-gum-style dough stuck in my hair. We have home-baked bread almost all of the time, and our next door neighbour also gets to share – she is a key worker and deserves treats; a girl’s got to keep body and soul together in these difficult times. I also feel guilty every morning when, from the safety of my duvet, I hear the sounds of her de-icing her car, something I admit that I have never done in my 57 years until last week (even then I managed to re-ice the windscreen by very foolishly using the screen washer when we were part way down the drive to the main road – the water froze on contact with the screen, completely obscuring my view, and I nearly smacked straight into the guy from two doors down – ooops).
Continue reading “‘Dal’ soup with spinach”
I’ve been planning to make potato bread ever since the Honey & Co cookbook landed in my Christmas stocking back when we were still living full time in Turkey. I’ve just checked and that was Christmas 2014. Ooops. A lot of loaves have been baked in both of our kitchens since then, but only this week have I finally managed a potato version.
I am fully stocked with flour again – a box containing five large bags of organic plain flour from the 
I have set myself a challenge of going to the supermarket an absolute maximum of once a week (though I do allow myself a quick dash into the village store to get fresh milk and fresh fruit in between). Robin is staying at home apart from our daily walk on the Bissoe Trail, owing to his advancing years and marginally dodgy ticker, so I figure that the fewer times I expose myself (and ergo him) to our new friend Corona, the better for everyone.
I promise I am not on a mission to simplify other people’s recipes, but I saw a recipe in this weekend’s Guardian newspaper that I was keen to try, but didn’t actually have all the ingredients to hand. However, I couldn’t see anything in the list of ingredients that couldn’t be replaced with something I already had lurking in my pantry, so threw caution to the wind and gave it a go. And the result was excellent, even though I say so myself.
I’m going to utter the ‘D’ word. Here it comes: DIET. Ugh. Must do better next Christmas and remember, as I fall face down into Batch 28 of the homemade mince pies, that they will, without question, make my bottom big. Along with other bits of me. Their consumption will apparently make my rain jacket so tight that when I bend over to pick something up from the floor, it will unzip itself – unprompted by human hand – from the bottom upwards. Ooops.
Happy new year to everyone. Rather late in the day, being half way through January, but the year already seems to be racing past at speed.
Despite the mostly inclement weather, we’re enjoying being back in Cornwall, and it is especially novel not sharing our house with the plumbers, carpenters and electricians. We quite miss them though – they are a happy and helpful bunch – though we don’t miss the early morning start time. They were here last week finishing off a few bits and pieces, but I think that is everything now until the summer. Robin is muttering about ‘getting up the floor of the conservatory’ to install underfloor heating, as that is our only dining space and it can be parky at this time of year. Personally, I favour a large rug. The thought of having the floor up fills me with horror. I am hoping he will have forgotten about it by the summer. 
Raining. Again. And I’ve been in the country less than a week and I’ve got a cold. How did that happen?
‘Greetings from snowy Cornwall’ is not a phrase that is uttered very often – we don’t get a great deal of snow around these parts, what with our southerly latitude and the Gulf Stream being just slightly to the west of our garden. Unfortunately the warming influences of the North Atlantic Drift are being ever so slightly outdone by Storm Emma at the moment, and we are stranded at the top of a lethal sheet-ice hill, surrounded by several inches of snow.
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