I’ve mentioned before how I like to cook and bake. As Garfield said “If I couldn’t eat, I’d just die1.”
Coming out of hibernation, I’ve decided to have a trawl of my cookery books. If I can’t find at least one recipe I might try, it’s going to a charity shop. Having said that, I’ve photocopied a couple from the Delia Smith books so I’ve already broken my rule. I am, though, now quite good at Cottage Pie. I’m even getting better at making mash – which is a real faff, as you only need one medium spud per pie. Smash is so much easier.
I freely admit I like ‘comfort food’ – I am built for comfort not for speed, after all. I’m always on the lookout for a good steak pie or meat & potato pie recipe (‘good’ here normally means ‘easy’). And, one day, I shall make my own pastry; the pork pie recipe I found needs hot water pastry, so I’d have to make that myself.
The recipe book
The problem is where to store all these recipes. The easiest way, of course, is in a book.
When I was a pupil at St Benedict’s School in the late 1970s, things like sewing and home economics were compulsory for the boys (and the girls had to do metalwork and woodwork classes). We were taught by Sister Augustine, the living embodiment of Dave Allen’s description of nuns as “God’s stormtroopers” (when she taught us, anyway – she was lovely outside of that).
It’s quite likely that, somewhere in my mum’s house, in a box or behind a panel, is my copy of the notebook we all had to keep detailing the recipes of whatever it was we were baking. I remember that the first one was about scones (or was it scones?) but the rest is a mystery.
My mum used to have her mum’s handwritten cookery books until husband number two that we don’t talk about threw them out. Still, Karma.
The recipe web
These days you can go in the Internet and look at recipes from various food bloggers. And here’s a thing: there’s a way to tag recipes so that they show up as such in Google searches. Never knew that until I started looking for WordPress plugins to handle recipes. Because, I had this strange notion that I might want to share what I’ve learned, and then I’d need a way of presenting the recipe, ingredients list, etc.
Then I look at my cookery efforts, compare them to the photos and decide it might not be worth the effort. Not to mention the state of my cramped, rented kitchen in any photos.
Then again: what’s the use in acquiring knowledge if you don’t pass it on? A new tag might be appearing sooner rather than later.
- I was going to include a link to the Garfield web site, but it insists I hand over my date of birth before even looking at the strips. Poor show [↩]