A day in the kitchen, Sunday 8th January 2012

On New Year's Eve I completed a list of things for my 2012 to-do list.  Some would call it resolutions, but seeing as these normally end in failure, I called it my to-do list.  This means that things will usually get done.  However, not always in the time frame that I had planned.  Two things on this list related to food. To be honest, many related to food.  But for the purpose of this blog posting, the one that reminded me that I was going to cook a new recipe every week and the one that said bake a new recipe every week were the ones I was referring to.

The new recipe of the week was last night's dinner.  The sausages were Linda McCartney's, the greens were just cooked in vegetable stock for around 10 minutes and the black eyed peas had been a new recipe on the 1st (but were leftovers I'd got from the freezer).  The macaroni cheese was my new recipe.  Dawn's mum swore that this was the best she'd ever had, so I gave it a go.  It completed the meal and was good.  We have leftovers this evening.

This week's new baking task turned out to be two-fold.  The first was from an EAT IN magazine.  I had asked Dawn to list dishes that she would like to me to try and this Cranberry & Sunflower Nut Muffin was on her list from the January/February 2012 edition.  The cake tray, by the way, was Mum's.  I think it will get plenty of use now.

In rummaging through the fridge, I noticed that I had a carton of buttermilk and asked myself, "How could I use this?"  The response was cornbread.  Usually I bake a cornbread in an iron skillet, but over the weekend I picked up the Hummingbird recipe book and noticed their corn meal muffins.  Hence the above.  I used my own recipe and added some chopped shallots and grated cheese.  Can't wait to try this out later.

In the middle of all this, I also threw lunch together.  Sauteed an onion and sliced red pepper, grated some cheese and we have a quesadilla.  I did also make some guacamole from scratch.  But the chips were Doritos.  Can't take the credit for these.

The afternoon started by baking a loaf of Holly Bell's Walnut Loaf.  This my third attempt in eight days and I can vouch for Holly's claim that this is easy to bake.  I will also confirm that it tastes better than the one we used to get from one of the large retail chains.  Oh yea, that's another food to-do.  Make all bread eaten in our house from scratch.  Buy no prepared bread from the store.  If you're interested in Holly's recipe, you can find it here.

My penultimate stint in the kitchen was to bake some biscuits.  I'd been reading The Great British Book of Baking (from the 1st GBBO series) and came across what I thought was an easy recipe I could fit in with the rest of the baking and cooking I was doing today.  The result was the above plate of Somerset Easter Biscuits. 

So this is what I did today.  I'll be back in the kitchen shortly to dish up last night's leftovers with a corn muffin each.  I don't think I've done too bad considering I'd not really tackled baking until recently.  And like they say, practise makes perfect.  So I'll be doing plenty of practise from now on.