chesneycat

This is one of my favourite summertime treats - a vaguely Danish recipe.

1 large cucumber, lightly peeled and finely sliced.

Layer slices into a collander, sprinkling salt onto each layer.  Stick a plate on top and weigh it down with something heavy.  This process works some of the water out of the cucumber, and has a fancy culinary name that I don't recall.

Rinse, squeeze, and dump into a bowl.

To the bowl, add equal portions of water and white vinegar (cider vinegar if you can get it), enough to cover the veg.  Add plenty of pepper, and sugar to taste.  Stir well.  Stick it in the fridge to chill, and enjoy at your leisure.


Yum!

[And you can re-use the liquid for a second cucumber if you get through the first too fast - I'll be doing that later.]

I have Sapore chutney and stuffed olives.

*smug look*
That is all.

We had a nice bunch of beetroots in the veggie delivery this week, so I'll be making a couple of beetroot and carrot cakes today.

( Beetroot & Carrot cake recipe )

In the meanwhile, I'll be doing more DIY. Filling holes, sanding doors down prior to glossing, stuff like that. But at least I get a cake out of it.

...is spending an evening over a hot stove baking up some Danish Christmas biscuits. Well, frying in this case, because I was only making the Klejner - Mum and MorMor get to make the Vanilliekranse and Jodekager.

Here's a lovely site with all the recipes. In Danish, naturally! ['hartshorn' is a traditional salt/raising agent: ammonium bicarbonate. You can substitute bicarb of soda or baking powder, or just leave it out completely.] And pictures of the three I was talking about:
( Tasty, tasty pictures! )

Mmmmmmm.... festive!

I'm not going to get much done today.  On thursday, there was a small incident involving the local electricity substation blowing up, and although they've opened the lab again, I can't log in to my desktop until the main server is rebooted...

Anyway... I've read Legolas, by Laura some time ago, but I've never actually listened to it before.

Intro/Prologue/Part1/Part2/Part3/Part4

Possibly NWS if you're listening to it aloud... but oh, so hilarious!!  Especially when the Dark Lord of 'Mondor' says anything...


To cleanse the palate, I'm going to rave about Sapore again, described as "the poshest deli in Sheffield".  Okay.  I know.  The bar is set VERY low in this town.  But Sapore could certainly hold its own against rivals in any city.  Especially when it's just down the road, and the owner lets you, no, encourages you to taste pretty much anything in the shop.  Pop in on a Saturday, and you'll leave with ten quid of groceries (minimum!) and a full belly.  [He seems to particularly like us because we do try the fancy stuff, unlike his other local regulars who just pop in every other day for a couple of breadcakes and a white loaf...] This weekend, we tried some wonderful Bleu de Bresse amongst the other cheeses, and went through his entire new range of jams and chutneys... we'll be doing a fair bit of our Christmas shopping there, I can tell you! 

God, quality food!  Pure heaven.

Ah!  Server's up again... time for me to get started.

Every time I bake this, I keep meaning to share the recipe... and I've finally got round to it.

Jez and I went out for a meal last night to celebrate twelve whole years of togetherness.  The restaurant of choice was a lovely Tapas restaurant on Eccleshall Road, and it was a damn good choice.  The food was delicious, and the wine superb.

Even better, they forgot to bill us for the wine.  We spotted the mistake straight away (the wine cost as much as half the food), but what do you reckon we did about it?

Yesterday, we wandered down into the valley, and went brambling.  We returned scratched from head to toe, but bearing 1.75 kilos of prime blackberries.  Mmmmm....!   And the shop price for these tasty treats?  £15/kilo, according to the Internet.  What a bargain!  Plus, the fruits are still coming along, so we'll be back for more next weekend I reckon.

I'm always surprised not to see more pickers, or even signs that they've been there.  We were trampling through virgin picking ground for most of the time.  Jez reckons that going out to scavenge for free food is a middle class thing, and that's why there's never anyone else doing it - the other half of the valley is mostly council housing.  I guess no-one should be so poor that they need to scavenge for edibles, and if they are, they probably have too much to worry about to spend time roaming the local fields, wood and scrubland.  That's his theory, anyway.

But come on! They're tasty, not too hard to pick (and if I'd been in jeans I wouldn't have a tenth of the scratches), and FREE!  Am I blinded by my liberal Guardian-reading background, or are the non-picking masses plain stupid?

Thoughts?

Jez is officially psychic.

*grin*

I was making breakfast this morning, and had a sudden urge to eat some maple syrup.  I could actually taste it, I wanted some so badly! I didn't mention this at all, but he popped out to the Co-op earlier to buy a few groceries, and returned home with a couple of maple & pecan pastries.

Yummy!

I'm a very lucky woman.

It's a lovely, sun-shiny day, and I've just had lunch on the grass outside.  Delightful. A better excuse for a Bounty ice-cream bar simply doesn't exist.  Mmmmm...

We went to see 300 the other day, and Sunshine was one of the featured films in the trailers.  It does look pretty interesting - and you know what? They actually consulted an astromer about it.  Of course, they are kind of handwaving the whole issue of the spacecraft melting somewhere around the corona, but at least they've made an effort.  I like that, in a film.  As for 300 itself... well, it was fun, ridiculous and had more airbrushed pecs and cosmetically enhanced nipples than you can shake a graphic novel at.  But hey, we'd expect nothing else from a Frank Miller adaption.

I nearly forgot what it was I was going to mention about Sunshine.  They do see to be drawing on a few classic texts, and it'll be interesting to see how much is original, and how much can be traced back to things like Sundiver, The Cold Equations and others.

I'm not fit to travel, and certainly not fit to talk to the public.  Plus, I'll probably be stuck at the Hallamshire so long that I couldn't get down to Cornwall tonight anyway. 

I refuse to miss out.  So... it'll be a Cornish Pasty for lunch, to satisfy that need for a decent bit of red meat and veg.

I also need a good book.  Is Kay's Ysabel out yet?