twice pie

What could possibly be better in life than a tasty home-made pie for dinner? Why, two pies of course! I have long had a strong affinity for traditional blue and white enamel pie dishes, and in fact most things enamel, but have never owned any myself. So I rectified things at Christmas by buying not one but two such pie dishes for D. I would like to point out that it honestly wasn’t out of pure greed that I bought two – it was just that the dishes were quite small, as pies go, and I figured there was a lot more potential for two dishes than one (twice as much, no less!). Armed with these, I thought, we could make a savoury pie and a sweet pie, or two dinners’ worth of savoury pie, or a meat pie and a vegetarian pie… the pie possibilities are endless.

To accompany the tins, I also bought a copy of Paul Hollywood’s new Pies and Puds book. Not because I like Paul Hollywood (quite the opposite – in spite of never having seen him on TV, he seems quite the shiny, preened antithesis of my personal cookery hero Nigel Slater), but because I like pies. A lot. But so as not to seem presumptive, I also added a free pie voucher into the mix, promising to christen the tins with whichever pie the recipient desired most. He requested a pork, cider and apple pie for our second dinner of the year – a very good choice – so this is what you see in the picture above. As there was plenty of filling I made two, and numbered them, so we ended up with two nights of tasty pie dinner for just one night’s pie-making. For anyone contemplating the same pie, I heartily recommend the filling, it was delicious. But I probably wouldn’t bother making the special cider pastry again, as it was quite dry, and normal shortcrust pastry would certainly taste better. Plus that would allow you to drink more of the cider during the cooking process, which has to be a good thing. As Weebl and Bob would say, mmmmm pie.

how to survive a glut of bananas

When everyone in the house goes out independently and buys bananas, and a large quantity of bananas at that (just to be on the safe side), then the household finds itself in a sticky situation (quite literally, if they’re not careful!). So what on earth’s a girl to do with such an excess of bananas?

The answer: banana blondies. (Or ‘blondings’, if you follow the logic of the Greek man who used to excitedly tell us about his delicious ‘brownings’.) Thanks to Mr Lepard and his super new baking book, Short & Sweet, what I got for Christmas, I knew exactly what to do with a surfeit of bananas. Although actually, it wasn’t all that easy, as I still had to choose between the blondies and a butterscotch banana cake, which was pretty tough.

So earlier on this evening, I found myself faced with a tray of sticky caramelised walnuts, and a bowl full of melted butter and white chocolate. What a tasty scene! So much for the gold-stars-for-good-behaviour (i.e. no extravagant cakes or second helpings) routine; today’s gold star went out the window long ago.

And since I already knew there was no hope, why stop at mere banana blondies on their own? We ate them with clotted cream ice cream, and they were marvellous. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the same thing to anyone else facing a devastating banana glut.

coming over all domestic

I don’t know what it is about the spring sun, but it’s making me terribly domestically-inclined. Every time it moves a little, so that the light shifts in the house and plays on the walls in a different way, it makes me reach for my camera with the desire to capture something of its brilliance and optimism. I had been innocently sitting at the kitchen table, working at my laptop, when all of a sudden I noticed how awesome my knitting looked, heaped up in its chunky pink felt basket, bathed in all that sunlight. It was due to the increased sunshine, I think, that I emerged, a few weeks back, from my wintery slumber of low knitting levels, and began to pick up projects that I’d started before it got cold and subsequently abandoned.

Last weekend I even got as far as venturing out to the still-fairly-new wool shop, just down the road from our house in Cambridge, The Sheep Shop. I’d managed to stay away until then – an attempt at saving my pennies – but having made the trip, naturally I had to bring back something as a souvenir. Hence that luscious looking skein of Malabrigo lace yarn in sunset shades, peeping out of my wool basket. Now I’m faced with that terrible affliction that troubles all fickle types like myself, where my natural inclination is to ignore whatever project I was working on until I obtained New Exciting Wool, and start knitting with that instead. So far so good: all I’ve done so far is stroke and fondle the new wool, and imagine what it will one day become.

On that same domestic note, I recently became the proud owner of a little pot of sourdough! It was a gift from my mother, who packed me off home with it when last I visited. It was only a very small pot, and so I immediately re-housed it when I got home, into an old Bonne Maman jam jar, in which it could be merry and grow. Then I made bread with it, not terribly successfully (it didn’t rise satisfactorily, and it came out a bit doughy in the middle), and realised that the jam jar wasn’t big enough, as it didn’t allow for enough sourdough to bake with and still have some left over for next time. So I re-housed it again, this time into an ex-gherkin jar (which at the time was not yet ex, which meant we had to rapidly eat the remaining gherkins on Saturday morning before breakfast), and that seems to suit it just fine. So we fed it up with lots of tasty flour and water, and left it to bubble, and went back to our reading and knitting, and forgot all about it… until late in the afternoon, when the deputy bread baker went to check on it. The lid SPRANG off at his touch, and before we knew it there was sourdough all over the kitchen. On the bright side though, sourdough bread round two was vastly more successful, and not doughy at all. Most delicious in fact. So at least we know what to do for next time. Minus the dough explosion…

Sadly, though, it would seem that my (haphazard) domestic touch doesn’t extend quite as far as I’d like. Here is my poor sad bay tree, a pitiable thing. Having left it in the weedy little plastic pot it arrived in last September for months, first it flourished, excitedly sprouting new shiny green leaves before Christmas. And then the actual winter hit, and rather took it by surprise. All its new leaves turned orangey-yellow, and suddenly it looked a far sadder bay tree altogether. I tried to coax it back from its depression, by buying it a brand new spacious pot to live in, with plenty of yummy new compost, but I fear I got there too late, as now its remaining green leaves are turning brownish, and starting to point downwards. The poor dear. Clearly my pink, duck-shaped watering can is not enough to make it smile. What can I do? Is this the end for little bay? We’ll have to wait for the next breathtaking instalment of Gardening with Agnes to find out!

a fishy, on a little dishy

To fill what has become something of a large void around these parts of late, I present to you exactly what it says on the sardine tin. A fishy, on a little dishy. Fortunately (and unlike in the song) I didn’t have to wait for the boat to come in for this little fishy. I may have been left waiting a long time for a fishing boat on the River Cam. Or, even worse, I may have had to resort to eating fen eels. Eugh.

Anyhow, this pastry beauty was brought to you (or rather, to me) by none other than my lovely assistant and partner in crime. I can’t even claim a fingersworth of creative genius. All I did was make empty promises of fish-shaped fish for dinner, and then make mushroom risotto instead.

Feast your eyes on this, my lovelies. And go forth and make pastry fish yourselves.

a trio of eastern finds

In recent weeks, I’ve made several interesting discoveries around East Anglia (no, I wasn’t really talking about the Orient). Beginning with a brief trip to the North Norfolk coast, where I discovered Sheringham. Or to be more precise (as I had been to Sheringham before), I discovered the old steam train station at Sheringham, and isn’t it lovely? Someone clearly puts an awful lot of love and care into looking after this place. I find myself longing for the good old days whenever I come across a nice steam train or a well-preserved old station. Apparently you can have dinner on a steam train from Sheringham now, though the line is so short these days that you have to go up and down it repeatedly to last the duration of a meal. And talking of having meals on trains, on Friday night I saw the Torbay Express, just chilling out alongside a platform at Kings Cross. It looked like it would be the finest train dining experience I’ve ever encountered (not that I’ve ever actually had dinner on a train – I’ve just dreamt about it).

Just to reassure you, though, not all of my recent discoveries have been train-related! I promise I am not about to reinvent this site as some kind of geeky, train-lovers’ paradise. No, it is going to remain resolutely a geeky, wool-lovers’ paradise. No question about it. Last weekend’s discovery was the Mill Road Winter Fair. I don’t know how, but this was the first year I remember hearing about it. I suppose every other winter that I’ve lived in Cambridge, I’ve been much further away from Mill Road, so maybe it’s just that news of the fair doesn’t carry across the city?! Unlikely. Anyhow, it’s quite a lively event. I saw mostly the beginning of the day, but there were musical acts going on until late. Someone was missing a trick though, as although I was very tempted to purchase four partridges at the bargain price of £10 (is it a bargain? I admit I’ve never bought partridges before), nowhere could I find a helpful retailer of pear trees to counter this. So I left the partridges where they were.

There was the biggest mountain of fresh bread I’ve seen in a while. It was quite inspiring, as although I’ve been cheerfully baking all my own bread for the last three months and feeling very pleased with myself, this rather put my efforts into perspective. I’ve been musing for some time now how I ought to experiment with different types of bread. Only when my kitchen looks like this, though, will I know I’ve succeeded:

To round off the trio, my most recent find, yesterday, was the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology. Another place I’m not sure how I managed to avoid for so many years. It’s a nice place; though, as with many museums, a bit of a time warp in many respects. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. I like the look of the old displays and labels, most of which don’t appear to have been updated or modified for several decades, at least. A lot of them are very appealingly composed, with artistic arrangements of colours and shapes, like the scallop shells below. They remind me of old botanical illustration plates, which I really love. (On that note, combining my two loves of old scientific plates and woolly crafts, you should really check out this amazing blog – especially note the crocheted tardigrade, it’s fantastic.)

But the downside to this now antiquated series of displays is that there is frequently very little in the way of explanation. Maybe I’ve just got used to always going round museums with scientists these days, who are more than capable of explaining things to me? (It was certainly quite a shift, yesterday, going round this collection with an economist instead of the usual earth scientists – the conversation was a lot more speculative, and more along the lines of ‘ooh, isn’t that a pretty coloured shell?’.) But these sorts of displays strike me as effectively preaching to the converted. They’re aimed at people who already know all the science behind them, and who just want to see examples of what they’ve read about.

Thinking about this, it struck me what a huge amount of work there is to be done around the country, and around the world, to update all the museums everywhere. It’s a bit overwhelming. I’ve probably just gone off on a complete tangent there, when what I was meant to be writing about was interesting places I’ve found. So I’ll stop there – I recommend you make a visit to the Zoology Museum, and take a friendly scientist along with you. Otherwise, just enjoy their collections of pretty shells.

how to be a domestic goddess

Recently whilst out Christmas shopping, I somehow found myself acquiring some highly necessary cake baking and decorating equipment for myself, such as a whole box of squeezy icing tubes with five different shaped nozzles, and these cutesy little heart shaped cake cases:

One night at Sewing Club, since it seemed like the perfect occasion to experiment with a large amount of cake, I made a batch of heart shaped cupcakes and iced them with light pink, orange-blossom-scented mascarpone and ricotta icing. And gave my three-tier mini cake stand its first outing:

Sadly we lost the last three, as the cake stand comes apart, tier by tier, and when picked up from the top, well you can imagine what happens. But since I had so much fun icing these, the inspiration struck me to plan a special Christmas edition of Sewing Club, and make seasonal nibbles for the stitchers to eat while they sewed, and play jolly Christmas music.

So out came the reindeer cookie cutters (and the Christmas sheep, of course…) and I made some spicy dough. Next came a terrible shock when I discovered that we had run out of silver balls, and yet another terrible shock when I found that you can’t seem to buy edible glitter anywhere in this town, for love or money. I have eaten the most beautiful cupcakes, sprinkled with edible glitter, and have lusted after this stuff forever after. But I was reduced to buying Barbie sprinkles this time, in desperation, as it was all I could find that vaguely resembled the glitter of my dreams. (What on earth is edible glitter, anyway?)

And I think the resulting Christmas biscuits did alright.