Good plain cook

First of all, here is the gingerbread recipe which I promised Blossom:

4 oz butter
5 level tablespoons black treacle
4 level tablespoons golden syrup
3 oz demerara sugar
5 tablespoons milk
1 heaped desertspoon marmalade
4 oz self raising flour
4 oz fine oatmeal
2 heaped teaspoons ground ginger
1 heaped teaspoon mixed spice
1/4 level teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
2 eggs

Put everything down to and including the marmalade into a saucepan and stir over a low heat until it's all melted/dissolved. Allow to cool then beat in the eggs, then beat in all the dry ingredients. Pour into a greased and lined large loaf tin, and bake at mark 3 for 1 1/2 - 1 3/4 hours.

It comes from what is probably my favourite cookery book, the Stork Cookery Service's Art of Home Cooking, published in 1963. Apart from the fact that it introduces margarine into absolutely every recipe (I substitute butter in most of them) it is, it is the perfect basic guide to plain cooking, including such forgotten delights as brown stew, jam roly poly, and a 'curry of cooked meat' featuring 1 large onion, 1 1/2 oz Stork Table Margarine, 1 rounded tablespoon curry powder, 3/4 pint stock or water, 2 oz sultanas (optional), 1 large cooking apple, 1 rounded tablespoon chutney, 2 teaspoons black treacle (optional), 2 teaspoons lemon juice, salt and pepper, and 3/4 lb cooked meat. Exotic or what?

Secondly, this coincides with two pieces in the paper today which have set me off. One is a long article detailing how exercise is not an effective way of tackling obesity (you mean someone actually thought it was? I always knew that was a flim flam put about by the food industry), and a news piece about how Jamie Oliver's 'Ministry of Food' cookery school may have to close owing to funding cuts. Now I don't particularly love Jamie Oliver (although nor do I hate him) but with or without his branding, the idea of teaching people basic cooking skills so that they're less reliant on takeaways and ready meals, has to be a good thing for their health and their finances.

It seems that there is now a whole generation or more who have never learnt enen the simplest cooking techniques, even as we gorge on Nigel (Slater) and Nigella on the screen and on the page. I learnt to cook at school. From the age of eleven, we had weekly lessons in which a recipe was demonstrated, and then we got to do it. This wasn't every term, as the Sex Discrimination Act had just come into force, so I had to do wookwork and metalwork too, but it whetted my apppetite sufficiently that I opted to take Food and Nutrition at 'O' Level, much to my mother's horror at using one one of my precious options on something so apparently trivial. But no prizes for guessing which of my ten 'O' Levels has been most useful to me since I left school. We covered nutrition, food hygiene, purchasing and menu planning, and time planning, and we learnt all the basic skills like making a white sauce, pastry, victoria sponge and so on.

It's all a million miles from what my kids did at school under the name of 'Food Technology' - this seemed to consist largely of designing packaging, and, I recall, making a batch of biscuits every week, testing them on us, and refining the recipe. It was about the food industry, rather than home cooking. And that's where we've gone so wrong. And all the time the government is so in thrall to the food industry that they dare not even come out and say 'eating processed crap makes you fat', we're never going to get it right.

Anyway, enjoy the gingerbread.

On our way to Windmill End

Day 1: Kings Bromley to Great Haywood

I'm writing this on returning from the pub (so what's new?), the pub in question being the Fox and Hounds in Great Haywood, where the new landlord very kindly produced four roast beef dinners for us and Blossom and Dawn, despite not officially doing food on Sunday nights. Not only that but they had London Pride at £2 a pint, and Bass, as well as Bombardier and some northern stuff (Tetleys).

So it was a good ending to the day which was probably rather frustrating for Blossom as Minnow's engine required stripping down. For us there was the excitement of trying to keep up with them this morning (definitely getting faster!), only getting stuck on the bottom a couple of times.

Time for bed now I think.

And toast

And to go with the tea, some toast, made on the Chertsey patent grill. I've done this a couple of times now, and it works a treat. Just take the lid off the stove (see left) once it's going, and place the grill over the top. If the toast is done a bit quick - i.e still a bit soft in the middle and you prefer it crisper - just move it away from the hole to dry out a bit more.

Cup cake

As promised, Simon has sent me the recipe for the lovely (vegan) banana cake that Carrie brought to Little Venice last week. Here it is:

2 cups plain flour (I guess it could be wholemeal but I used white)
1 1/2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar (I used dark brown)
1/4 cup oil (I used sunflower)
1/4 cup water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 ripe bananas
(and my variation - 1 teaspoon of cinnamon)

Making it couldn't be easier. You can mash the bananas, mix in the oil, sugar and water, and then fold in the dry ingredients, or you can do what I did and throw all the wet stuff in the trusty Magimix, followed by the dry stuff. Put it in a lined tin (the recipe says 9", mine was about 7"; it took longer but was nice and tall) and cook it at mark 4 til it's done (mine actually took about an hour; it would be less in a bigger tin). It got Baz's seal of approval too; he said 'it's even nicer than ordinary banana cake'. So if you fancy being vegan, or need to cater for someone who eschews dairy, or just want a really easy, lovely cake, this is it.

I must admit I balked a bit when I first saw that the measurements were given in American cups. The first thing I did was look up a conversion (1 cup = 240ml, by the way), but then I thought I would have a look and see if I still had the cup measures I acquired years ago, though I was pretty sure I'd got rid of them. Sure enough I had, but I was delighted to find that this little aluminium cup which I bought at the last jumble sale I went to was in fact a measuring cup.

It will now take its place on Chertsey, in case the oven is ever the right temperature for making cake.

Bright as new paint (and wet too)

We had a lovely day yesterday in Little Venice, at the Cavalcade. Among other delights we saw three boats - two of them former working boats - in their magnificent new paint schemes, and how many photos did I take? A grand total of one. Pathetic isn't it, so overwhelmed was I by the sight of Baldock resplendent in Willow Wren livery, and Victoria - finished only last week - absolutely glorious in Associated Canal Carriers colours that I just stood and gawped rather than getting the camera out. Sorry. But here's the one:

Aside from that failing on my part, and a rather unpleasant lunch (of which more later) it was a splendid day out, up to and including the final downpour that accompanied us on our way back to Paddington.

We were delighted to meet and spend much of the day with Carrie (Blackbird), Simon (Tortoise) and Neil and Kath (Herbie), fellow bloggers and all lovely people. We found the beer tent (and somehow seemed to have trouble shaking it off...) and sat for a long while watching the world go by, including waving to Mike as he steered Prince Regent past us.

Then I went off to collect Chertsey's new (indeed, only) stove chimney, very handsome and handmade, which I proceeded to carry around like a (rather shiny and cylindrical) baby for the rest of the afternoon. We went back for a tour of Tortoise, then back down to the visitor moorings to see Herbie's fantastic new paintwork and have a cup of tea, and then, as we were on the verge of leaving, were persuaded to return to Tortoise for a curry cooked by Simon, which was really lovely.

Now, Simon and Carrie are both vegans, as I used (briefly) to be and know in my heart that I really should be. Having been moved from being (lacto-)vegetarian to being vegan, and then having lapsed from that, I never really went back to being veggie; as far as I'm concerned there's no real moral or practical difference between using animals for meat, milk or eggs - in the latter cases the exploitation and environmental damage is probably actually more protracted. A work friend of mine has a friend who rears organic pigs; she says, 'the way I look at it, they have one bad day in their entire lives' - whereas for an intensively reared chicken or an industrialised dairy cow, every day is pretty miserable. So while I mainly ate a veggie diet, I didn't define myself by it, and didn't feel too bad about consuming the odd bit of meat. It was, however, always something of a disappointment (except for the very expensive organic dry cured bacon, mmmm). So it was pretty bad luck, or bad judgement, on my part that they should find me in the queue for the 'hog roast', having briefly quelled my conscience and an even stronger sense of self-preservation. However, the £5 bap filled with a few bits of stringy meat and a large quantity of very soggy flavourless 'stuffing' was punishment enough, and it wasn't held against me. I am however inspired to get back on the vegan path again (after all, it does make not having a fridge so much less of a pain) and make a bit more of an effort. Especially if Carrie will give me the recipe for that absolutely lovely banana cake.....

Delicious dinner

I must say (again) how wonderfully impressed I am with the Epping stove. One thing I certainly didn't expect was to be able to light it, and be cooking on the hotplate within half an hour. I've now successfully cooked sausages, as well as bacon - the one thing I haven't yet tried is a casserole.

Anyway, on the final evening of our last visit I collected together all the food we had left to use up and came up with this recipe, which turned out to be rather delicious.

a packet of bacon, chopped into small pieces
two red peppers, chopped
six tomatoes, cut into 8ths
tin of baked beans

Fry the bacon and peppers. When they're soft add the tomatoes and cook til they're soft too. Add the beans and heat through. Serve with buttered crusty bread.

You could do it with all sorts of other leftovers too, and some Worcester sauce or something in it would be nice too.