Welcome!

Welcome to my first attempt at a blog!  Several friends (they know who they are) have suggested I write one so here goes. 

I'm a forty-one year old married mother of two children, a girl of twelve and a boy of six, living in rural Northamptonshire, England.  In addition to a 30 hours a week job (four days) and looking after my family my main hobby is cooking and trying new recipes.  After I had my son in 2006 I felt I had lost my identity somewhat (as you do) and I really needed a hobby - however I didn't have time for one.  So cooking became my hobby as we needed to eat anyway....

My new year's resolution in 2008 was to make one new recipe a week.  As I began trying new stuff, gleaned from various recipe books, magazines in the tea room at work, friends... I realised that my resolution was going to be very easy to keep.  In fact that year I made one hundred and fourteen new recipes, the family giving each one a star rating out of five.  I recorded them in a hardback notebook and the rest is history. The list in the notebook continues and from the beginning of 2008 to the time of writing I have made five hundred and eighty one new recipes, mostly successful, some amazing, some terrible.  There have been moments when recipes have been screwed up and hurled into the bin with amazing velocity.  My husband no longer has a favourite dinner, he has a top twenty, although I think if he had to choose it would be lamb tagine.  My favourite food is the humble potato, in all its many delicious incarnations.

The 'cut-out-of-magazines' recipes are filed in two files, under twenty six different headings (the fattest one being puddings), my cookery book collection has outgrown the extra bookcase I bought for it - there are more than a hundred (I had to count them for a survey once!) and I have almost given up watching TV apart from cooking programmes.  And I'm a very happy bunny.  Sometimes I follow the recipe to the letter, sometimes I adapt it and occasionally I totally make it up, I'm getting more confident as days go by but there is lots left to learn.

Some background: I grew up with my Mum, Dad and younger sister in a family where we grew most of our own fruit and veg, baked bread, brewed beer, my Dad even kept bees, and at times chickens and turkeys. From a young age I was interested in food and ingredients.  Mum was a good cook and as I grew up in the 1970s and 80s we enjoyed lots of home grown produce and hardly ever ate convenience foods.  We used to go the the Italian shop in a nearby town for mortadella and olives, and my sister and I were always encouraged to try new things and get involved with the food preparation. My Grandma was "in service" as a cook in her younger days and I used to go round to her house at the weekend when I was a teenager and she would show me how to make doughnuts, coconut tart, "caramel custard" and other treats.

When I did my A levels I took food and nutrition along with biology and chemistry with a view to a career in food science (which didn't happen, but I did still end up being a scientist) and learned lots of useful stuff including how to bone out a chicken and time plan meals. In my twenties I was busy with day release college courses and cooking took a bit of a back seat but underneath I was always going to be a foodie! My husband and children are great eaters and not fussy, my son has helped in the kitchen since the age of two when he pushed a chair up to the worktop with the words "I help too!"

My aim with this blog is to post interesting snippets and photos about what I am cooking, to share successes and failures and discuss lots of food related issues that I'm interested in.

I'm inspired by (in no particular order and not an exhaustive list) Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Nigella Lawson, Nigel Slater, Jamie Oliver, Lorraine Pascale, Jo Pratt, Ching-He Huang, and good old Delia Smith - who taught me how to make omelettes.  My favourite book of the moment is Gok Cooks Chinese, I've made loads of things from it.  I subscribe to delicious. magazine which has so many brilliant ideas; I also get more than you might think out of the free magazines from Asda and Morrisons.  The Sainsburys magazine is good too, though I don't shop there much becasuse it's so expensive!  I'm also a member of the chocolate tasting club.

Today - we had a new recipe for breakfast.  I had portobello mushrooms from the fortnightly vegbox to use up, and my husband had suggested having them on toast, there was a great idea in the new delicious. magazine which had plopped through the letterbox yesterday - slice and fry the mushrooms in butter and rapeseed oil, add thyme and a splash of cider and reduce.  Serve on toasted bread rubbed with a garlic clove and top with a poached egg.  Husband and daughter loved it, son doesn't like mushrooms so he had an alternative.  It was strange opening cider at 9am!  It kept in the fridge with a stopper in and was still fizzy later.

I had promised my son we'd make peanut butter squares (from the new Lorraine Pascale book) this weekend, so we did.  We made double quantity as I wanted to take lots to work on Tuesday to welcome some new members of staff.  It was very easy and fun with lots of chocolate chops going on!  Melt butter, blitz digestive biscuits.  Mix butter, biscuits, light brown soft sugar and peanut butter with vanilla extract and press into tin.  Top with melted chocolate and freeze for half an hour.  We made one batch topped with milk chocloate and one with dark.

Dinner is cooking as I type.  I've roasted beetroot (from the vegbox again) with garlic, thyme, rapeseed oil and seasoning to be made into a salad with goat's cheese and a simple dressing (from River Cottage Everyday book, originally has redcurrants too but no redcurrants were forthcoming today).  This will accompany roast lamb from a local farmer we know and new potatoes.

I may have pink fingers from peeling the beetroot but life is good.

More soon, thank you for reading :-)

Caroline x