Entries Tagged 'Learn from my failures' ↓

Them? They’re called bayla, love. The Aussies buy ‘em for the shell and throw the meat away. The Chinese people bash through the shell to get to the meat.

We were talking about the one in the front at the bottom. I can’t find out anything much about them, other than that it seems to be a gastropod(!) May even have the name wrong - although I made him spell it out for me I didn’t write it down. Anyone ever eaten one?

Do you remember in Bridget Jones’ Diary how her attempt to impress a boy with leek and potato soup failed when the string she’d used to tie the leeks dyed the whole soup a lurid blue? This is how Bridget would make a nice rice custard.

She’d follow the directions for Jill Dupleix’ excellent version down to the letter.* Just a minute or two before it was ready she’d have to rush out to pick up her son from kindy, so she’d put a piece of plastic film over the surface so it didn’t form a nasty skin. Being somewhat of an environmentalist, she’d spurn purchased plastic film and re-use a plastic bag. Because she is an utter nong she’d reuse a bag with lovely pink writing on it.

I have made this a hundred times and I can still stuff it up. Never mind, scrape the pink shit off and top with lots of ground cinnamon.

So what’s the most stupid thing you’ve done in the kitchen lately?
 
 

* I have the hardback Old Food, since reprinted as a softcover called “Favourite Food: New Ways with the World’s Best Recipes“. I liked the old title better myself.

I nearly called this post “I can believe they’re not Nigella’s Breakfast Bars!”

Like the lipsmacking voluptuary, I’m not much of a morning eater. I also like the idea of yummy home-made snacky bars to shove down the throats of starving children. I remembered hearing that Lawson’s recipe was a good one, and a quick googlescout unearthed it here.

It involves mixing a large quantity of relatively healthy sounding muesli-ish things with a whopping great can of sweetened condensed milk. It didn’t say “sweetened” but I that’s the only kind, isn’t it? The dulce de leche kind? I had everything but in the cupboard, so I decided to make it up as I went along.

I had some evaporated (unsweetened, low-fat) milk, but it seemed utterly wrong. What I needed was a certain … an unctuousness, a delectable musky sweetness - as Nigella well might say and indeed probably has ; ) Best I could do was mixing up a bunch of fruity sugary sticky things and hoping like hell that would bind the oats, coconut, seeds, nuts and dried fruit:

Not a can of sweetened condensed milk

3/4 C sliced dried figs
1 T apple juice concentrate
dried orange peel
1/2 C water

Bring all ingredients to the boil in a small saucepan then cover and turn the heat off. (That is if you use proper dried figs that are actually dry, not those odd “soft juicy figs” that have a weird cola aroma and no texture to speak of. If you’re using those ones just carry on and never mind waiting.)

Stabblender the cooled mix with half a cup of apricot jam, and then add water to make it up to 1 1/2 cups and stir it into your dry ingredients. Bake for an hour at 130 C, grateful that you sniffed something awry with the “250 degrees” the recipe stated on Northern hemisphere sites.

btw, THAT PICTURE IS EFFING LIES! The result was horribly crumbly - you could excavate a “bar” from the tin wtih some effort, but they were flaccid and unappetising. Even thought they were a complete failure in textural terms, they did turn out to be very tasty muesli once you’d properly crumbled them up. I’ve just made up a second batch for Owen at his request.

Notes:
I used half (soaked) goji berries and half currants, a mixture of sunflower, pumpkin and sesame seeds and cashews in place of peanuts. To make the recipe again in the hope of making sturdier bars would require increasing the quantity of binding fluid. I’d still use the figgy mix but I’d add the sweetened condensed milk to make up the quantity (and perhaps a bit more) instead of the water I used here.