4: Door Dash
I'll put the cake down, then run away!
Good morning, friends and foodies! (If you’re foodie, you’re a friend. Promise).
Last Sunday I did something which would not have been noteworthy in the Beforetimes but which is now beyond thrilling: I went further than 2km from my front door, and I got to stand a few metres from a couple of friends and chat for ten minutes!
It was completely on the borderline of what we’re allowed to do under Scottish regulations, I think, but having been alone for two months, my mental health had taken a bit of a battering recently, and I didn’t know quite how much I needed to see some familiar friendly faces. The cycle ride there and back was my daily exercise too - I even got caught in the rain, which was strangely refreshing all that time indoors.
I didn’t just go for a chat, but to hand over some Jammie Dodger blondies and peanut butter biscuits.
Yes.
Recipe: Jammie Dodger Blondies
There are various recipes for these around the internet - the Olive magazine version will be good for those of you who like bits in your brownies (wrong’uns that you are), but I used the Katie Cakes instructions as a starting point.
Ingredients (resized to fit a 10”x8” or 8”x8” tin, I used this IKEA one):
120g unsalted butter
185g white chocolate
185g caster sugar
3/4 tsp vanilla extract
200g plain flour
2 large eggs (I usually buy boxes of medium eggs and then just use the largest two from the box… don’t know why!)
about 3tbsp strawberry jam
12 Jammie Dodger biscuits
Then follow the original recipe - you’ll see I haven’t downscaled the jam or biscuit quantities - because the jam swirl is one of the best bits, the biscuits are what it’s all about, and because putting the biscuits on top like this makes the blondies incredibly easy to cut up later…!
Kitchen Tool: Egg Perfect
I think this is the Marmite of kitchen tools… don’t say I didn’t warn you. But it changed my boiled-egg life.
What the Egg Perfect is, is a little plastic egg with a flat base. You pop it in the pan with your egg and your water, and it gradually changes colour to show you how cooked your egg is.
Some people will say, “Can you not just set a stopwatch?!”
To those people, I point out that there are so many variables in how long it takes to boil an egg, none of which a simple timer will account for: the conductivity of the pan, the size of the burner, the temperature of the water and egg when you start (I use cold water and an egg straight out of the fridge, so that they heat up together), whether you could find the pan lid, the size of the egg, the altitude, whether you’ve salted the water (allegedly), how much water there is…
The only two of these that the Egg Perfect doesn’t take into account are the size of the egg and the egg’s temperature when you start. The least gadgetty kitchen gadget there is, there’s no screen, no batteries, no moving parts - just a colour-changing egg. Before I had this, my boiled eggs would either be not-cooked-enough, and I’d have to gently lower them back into the water after opening them up, or rock hard. Now I can get an egg reliably cooked to the exact degree of done-ness I want. This morning, that was medium-hard with just a slightly jammy centre to spread over buttered toast. Manna from heaven!
If all of this doesn’t convince you, how about this: when I reorganised my kitchen cupboards a couple of weeks into lockdown, I put my imitation Egg Perfect I’ve had since I was a student in a ‘safe’ but unfindable place… and I’ve already bought a new one to replace it. Here’s the link again. You know you want it.
Eating at home: Fife strawberries
It’s strawberry season!
And I’m putting them on everything. Mine come from Blacketyside Farm in Leven, via Margiotta’s. Margi’s is a family-run chain of grocery stores in Edinburgh which has been a life-saver for me during All This. Big supermarkets feel scary and intense, so I’ve done the majority of my grocery shopping in their convenience-sized shops. They have pre-cut chunks of I.J.Mellis’s amazing cheeses, for example, and gelato they make themselves! Margi’s fan for life here (they’re not paying me to say this, promise!).
Kaffeeklatsch: grana paranoid cheese
I do proof-read these before they go out, I promise. And yet in last week’s I somehow managed to tell you all that ‘grana paranoid’ was a great substitute for parmesan cheese. I tell you, though, if I lived in a fridge door and occasionally had my head scraped off and put on pasta or risotto, I’d be paranoid too!
It made me think about menu mis-translations. There’s a great article about them on Atlas Obscura which goes into the reasoning, but I’m sure you’ve seen a few of your own. The canteen at my German uni always had the menu in both German and English, but some of the English translations were either wacky or horizon-broadening. It was there, for instance, that I learned that some English-speaking places call red peppers ‘capsicums.’ There were other times when they would translate the name for a German or Swabian dish that doesn’t really exist elsewhere - spätzle as Swabian pasta or Maultaschen as Swabian ravioli. Yes… but also no…
And that’s before we’ve got onto the fact that the German word Linsen means lentils, but also lenses. Don’t get your optician and your grocer mixed up, that’s all I have to say about that.
Speak to you all next week!
Find me on Instagram: @LilyMCooks
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