Decade-ance.

Ten years ago today, several years before this blog was conceived, I made a New Year's Resolution to  make one new recipe a week.  My daughter was eight years old then and my son was one. Motherhood took up so much of my time that I didn't have time for a hobby, but I really needed to be creative somehow.  I had always loved food and cooking, and my family had to eat anyway so this seemed like the obvious solution.

I noted down what each recipe was in a notebook, and asked my family to score them out of 5, though I always take the final decision on scoring my own food. A 5 is only deserved if a recipe has some kind of "Wow!" factor and you can't think of a way to improve it. As the weeks went by and I got more and more inspired, one new recipe wasn't enough. That first year, I made 114. Sometimes they were full-on and complex but sometimes only a dip, a sauce or a cocktail. Here's the first page:

I tried to write legibly, though neat handwriting isn't something I'm gifted with, maybe that's why typing was one of the few things I got an A for at school. Since then, more than 50 pages of the notebook have been filled.  Some years have been more full on than others, life events sometimes got  in the way, but I never stopped wanting to try new recipes.  And I never did it because I felt I had to.

This year I've made 72. To date, the grand total stands at 1040. Dividing by ten years and fifty-two weeks per year, that makes it exactly two a week over the ten years! Since 2014 the total for each year has been less than 100, partly due to the car crash and single parenthood, but I'm not stopping.

The percentage of five out of five recipes has varied quite a lot.  The first five-scorer, and the only one in the first year was lamb karahi. In 2009 there were 25 five-scorers out of a total of 126 recipes that year. By 2011 there were 52 five-scorers out of 141. In 2013 I started doing meat-free Monday and made 25 new meat-free main courses;  that year there were 61 five-scorers out of 120. My personal top five have been lobster soup (a labour of love and took forever but was so worth it), red Thai prawn curry using a friend's homemade curry paste made with her own home grown chillies, pink champagne cupcakes - of which a second batch was made for another friend's wedding, sticky Vietnamese pork meatballs with rice noodles and pickled vegetables, and iced berry and eggnog trifle cake. It was so difficult to choose though, my choices would probably be different tomorrow.

There have been triumphs, disasters and injuries that have scarred me for life along the way (I don't store baking trays on top of the fridge freezer anymore!) but it has been and continues to be a way of life rather than the hobby it was originally intended to be.  It will be interesting to see what the next ten years will bring.

Thank you for your support readers, and Happy New Year.

Caroline.

Comfort, joy and Pavlovian conditioning.

It has been a good Christmas, to the point where today I found myself Googling what to do with leftover caviar (answer: have it on scrambled eggs).  Even though I didn't cook Christmas dinner - for the second year in a row - I still managed to fill the festive season with a good few new recipes, so here is a flavour.

I started Christmas Eve with a visit to my sister's memorial bench, with my children, my friend and some insulated mugs of mulled wine for the older three out of the four of us. Christmas Eve was the day my sister moved into her house and to mark this she always used to have a party on Christmas Eve and I'll always remember them.  A few weeks ago I'd seen Gordon Ramsay do a twist on mulled wine which sounded really good so I gave it a go.  You have to use reasonable wine, bad wine doesn't get disguised just by mulling it, so a half decent bottle of Shiraz went into a pan with a muslin bundle containing cloves, green cardamom pods, cinnamon stick from the Happy Rooster, star anise and a stick of lemongrass, the end of which was squashed and the rest cut up with scissors.  Other additions were demerara sugar, an orange and lemon (pieces of peel gleaned with a potato peeler, plus the whole fruit cut into chunks), 2 balls of stem ginger cut into quarters and a splosh of ginger syrup from the jar. Heated gently it was delicious and the lemongrass gave it an extra dimension. She'd have liked it.

In the evening, the children and I took a buffet to my parents' house. My daughter had made sausage rolls (having been handed the baton by Mum last year), snowflake-topped mince pies and roasted a gammon.  I did macarons, there was an air-dried ham, cheeseboard and more including a Christmas cake made using nearly the same recipe as the wedding cake earlier in the year and using up the marzipan and icing leftover from it; but we started the proceedings with champagne and canapes.  These were made with the sloe gin and blackberry cured salmon I referred to in my gin post in the summer.  I cured the salmon in a mix of blackberries, juniper berries, clementines, sugar, salt and sloe gin (whizzed to a paste in the food processor) for a few days, then gently rinsed that off and added chopped dill and more sloe gin for the next few days.  Sliced thinly on Ritz crackers with soft cheese and the aforementioned caviar, Dad said they stole the show.

And it begins...

 Spot the salmon!

The cure part two.

I didn't get a photo of the finished canapes but you get the idea.

On Christmas Day, I went to my partner's sister's house for dinner.  It was actually quite a nice change not to be doing the main course and enjoy a delicious feast that I hadn't had to cook, but I had volunteered to do desserts, so I felt I had made a worthy contribution.  I decided on a trifle and a pavlova.  Regular readers may remember that several years ago I attempted to revive the "designer trifle" having been given a very deluxe trifle dish - which incidentally is no longer available in the  UK so it had better not get broken! I've done several Christmassy trifles in the past, including a black forest one but I wanted this year's to be different.  My daughter and I invented this one, very loosely based on a BBC recipe for an eggnog trifle. I started with some leftover cupcakes that I happened to have in the freezer, and drizzled them with cinnamon (and gold leaf) vodka.  Next a layer of lemon jelly.  Then a layer of orange jelly, clementines, and pineapple, with clementine slices around the edge. The next layer was a home made brandy and vanilla custard.  The custard looked a bit brown and unappetising (due to the brandy and vanilla bean paste) but the flavour made up for it.  Then came whipped cream containing icing sugar and clementine zest, topped with gold crunch, gold pearls and 23 carat edible gold leaf.  The final flourish was going to be a sprig of three holly leaves from the holly tree in my garden.  I found the perfect photogenic sprig, washed it (pricking my fingers in the process) and... left it on the kitchen window sill!  At least nobody ate it by mistake.  In fact nobody ate the trifle for a while anyway because they all went for the pavlova, but in the end nearly half of it went on Christmas Day and it WAS well received with favourable comments.

The other dessert was another tweaked recipe, a chocolate pavlova with melted white chocolate mixed into the cream and decorated with maltesers.  I added strawberries in a circle and some mint leaves to make it look a bit Christmas wreath-like. The pav won the dessert popularity contest hands down and almost disappeared in no time.

Watch out for my next post which will be an update on the new recipes resolution, a whole ten years after I made it.  I'm not stopping, and there will be more new recipes to come in the future, after all, I did get a new cookery book for Christmas...

Until next time.  Thank you for reading,

Caroline. 

PS Special thanks to the aforementioned partner for dessert photography, help with the title of this post, and just for being his lovely self really x