Becca Jane St Clair

Two posts in one day! Go me!

My husband is fantastic. And I’m not just saying that because today marks three months of being married and two weeks of me officially living in the UK. When we knew we wouldn’t get to spend Christmas together, we decided to hold it after I arrived complete with all the proper Christmas trimmings…which included a turkey, a Christmas pudding, Christmas crackers, and cranberry sauce. I made Tim a shopping list, and he set out to get everything we needed. I thought he was only going to get me 1 or 2 bags of cranberries….so imagine my surprise when I opened the freezer to find SIX BAGS OF CRANBERRIES!

So this morning I decided I wanted to make cranberry muffins. I have a really yummy recipe from Vegetarian Times I found several years ago, but that recipe was in US measurements and requires stuff like ricotta cheese and orange juice (the recipe is no longer on their website, sadly). I wanted to make simple, easy cranberry muffins, so I went to my favourite British Chef – Jamie Oliver. Sure enough, he had a simple recipe, which I’ve copied below to make it easier for you:

Cranberry muffins

Method
1)Put the butter and sugar in a medium sized mixing bowl and mix them together until completely blended. Add two eggs, one at a time, beating them into the mixture.
2)Put your flour in another mixing bowl. Add two teaspoons of baking powder and a pinch of salt. Measure out 125 millilitres of milk. Then add small amounts of the flour mixture and milk alternately to your original mixture giving it a good stir each time, until all the milk and flour has been added and the mixture is smooth.
3)Finally, add the cranberries to the mixture. Spoon your mixture into a paper-lined cake tray. Fill the cases 3/4 full. There should be enough mixture for 12 muffins.
4)Pop them in a pre-heated oven at 180 degrees Celsius or gas mark 4 and bake them for 25 – 30 minutes until they are golden brown. Leave your muffins to cool for about 20 minutes and then enjoy!

I didn’t have any stick butter, and the village shop only had lard in a stick, so I used butter out of the Lurpak (which has the bonus of already being soft). I also increased the amount of berries to 300g, as the bag I had was 300g and I sprinkled some sugar over the tops of the muffins before they went into the oven.

And here’s my finished muffins, all 11 of them (I had to taste one, you see!):

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Tim and I got a bread machine as a wedding gift from parents of a childhood friend of mine…and we LOVE it. It was the first thing to come out of it’s box when I arrived, and I was immediately making bread in it. We even scored organic locally milled (at a real windmill) wheat flour for our first loaf, and it was delicious. For our second loaf, I picked up a Hovel bread mix for white bread, and that went quickly!

While we were doing our weekly shopping at Tesco, we saw that there were several types of bread machine mixes, so we picked up one of each to have a go and see what we liked. Yesterday, I decided to make the Ciabatta. And the photo above is how it turned out. I followed the instructions exactly – 250g of mix, 175ml water, 2tsp olive oil. The only “difference” was that the machine was moved to the end of the counter (it’s the sticking out bit not supported by cabinets) and I was also doing a load of wash at the same time.

Do you think the vibrations from the washer (particularly that spin cycle!) could have caused the bread to not rise (or mix!) properly? I tried it a second time with another Hovel Mix, and while that bread turned out edible, the top isn’t smooth the way the first two loaves turned out, it’s all bumpy. Edible, but kind of ugly looking.

I can’t put the bread machine where it had been for the first two loaves, as that was on top of the old dryer we’ve gotten rid of (well, it’s as far as the front garden, we’re waiting for pick up).

Any ideas?

PS – we also determined that making our own bread will cost much less than buying a loaf. The mixes cost from 30-75p/loaf, but if we make it from scratch, we’re spending less than 30p/loaf. It does take 3 hours, but the machine also has a timer, so we can set it at night to wake up to fresh bread or even have bread waiting when we come home from a day out!

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I have a LOT of posts in the pipe, including the rest of London (2 days), Newark (one day), and the trip North (4 days), but for now, I thought I’d share a recipe I created yesterday:

Sadly, I don’t have a photo of the finished dish because the day I decided to make this we happened to suffer a power outage…FORTUNATELY, the crock pot managed to stay hot for about an hour after the power went out, and the ribs were fully cooked!

I completely winged it on this recipe, adding things I thought would work, and the result is a sweet rib, which is a nice alternative from spicy bbq!

Ingredients:
Pork ribs bone-in or boneless (thawed)
ground ginger
black pepper
1 cup cider ( I used a cranberry apple version) (can probably substitute beer)
1 cup white vinegar
1 cup tomato sauce (canned or jarred, plain)
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
2 tablespoons ketchup
2 tablespoons golden syrup (can probably substitute honey) (optional)

Cut rack of ribs into separate pieces (I cut mine into 2-rib sections). If using boneless, cut into strips about an inch wide if not already cut
Rub ribs with pepper and ginger. I don’t have actual measurements for this, I just sprinkled some on and rubbed it in. (probably no more than a few teaspoons of each).
Spray crock pot with cooking spray and place ribs in crock pot. I made a layer on the bottom, and then placed the second layer cross-wise on top.
Combine cider, vinegar, and brown sugar. Stir until sugar has dissolved. Add tomato sauce, ketchup, and syrup.
Pour sauce mixture over ribs. If there isn’t enough sauce to cover the ribs, add water one cup at a time until ribs are covered.
Turn crock pot on low and cook for 4-6 hours (depending on how hot your low is).

I found this recipe for Chicken a la King in toast cups on one of the food blogs I read regularly and had decided it was something I might want to try to make for Tim someday…but the toast cups looked like they’d be something I’d fail at. My friend Falnfenix IMed me one day and told me she had made the recipe with success and the toast cups weren’t that hard to make, so I decided to try my hand at it…of course, I needed to use ingredients we had on hand and my end result while similar to the Culinary in the Desert post, really only shares the toast cups in common!

So – start with her toast cup directions. I used a silicone muffin tray though and discovered I needed to toast them for twice as long before they started to look toasty…and even then, they didn’t get that golden brown toast colour.

Then, I took a look at her recipe and at what I had in the kitchen and did the following:

*Melt 2 Tbsp butter in a saucepan
*add 1/4 cup flour after butter has melted, stir.
*add 2 cups chicken broth
*add 1 cup diced carrots, 1 cup diced celary, and 2 cups peas
*add 1 tsp white wine and 2 tsp white vinegar
*sprinkle with parsley, sage, pepper (from a 4-colour grinder), paprika, and salt
*add 1 Tbsp corn starch if it’s not thick
*add 4 cooked chicken breasts, cubed

Then it was simply pour into the toast cups. Tim said this was delicious, and he had the leftovers at work the following day without the toast cups.

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This reminds me of snow days and lazy Saturday’s….

1 can condensed tomato soup
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons of butter
1 tablespoon of flour
4 slices of bread

1. Melt butter on stove, add flour and stir
2. Add soup
3. Heat over medium heat. Add Parmesan cheese and heat until it bubbles
4. Serve over toast

Note to UK cooks: You can make this with a can of uncondensed soup, just double the butter, flour, and cheese. (and you’ll also get enough for 6-7 slices of bread!)

This recipe originally came from my mom’s 1950s Girl Scout Handbook!

One of my favourite foods is homemade mac & cheese served with stewed tomatoes. I’m not sure if this is a regional thing (my family is from central PA) or just a family thing, but we always tend to serve them together. We generally buy a can of stewed tomatoes and just open it up and heat the tomatoes to put on top, but around here I haven’t been able to find any. So….I had to make my own.

Because I love the crock pot, and because it’s hard to coordinate cooking on Tim’s two-burner stove (that only can use one burner if you have the oven on), I decided to figure out how to make these in the crock pot. I looked at a few recipes online for both crock pot versions and stove-top versions and created my own.

Crock Pot Stewed Tomatoes

Ingredients:
14 small tomatoes
basil
oregano
bay leaves
salt
sugar

1. Peel tomatoes. I read on a few websites in order to peel tomatoes you put them in boiling water and immediately put them into cold water. That didn’t work for me. What did work was cutting a small slit in the tomato, then putting it into the boiling water for about 5 minutes or until the split started to grow. The skin should at that point just peel right off, but watch out because it will be super hot after being in boiling water!
2. Cut tomatoes into quarters and cut out the seeds/membrane. I didn’t remove all the seeds, just the ones that were attached to the core.
3. Place tomatoes in crock pot, and cover with about 1 cup water. Sprinkle with oregano, basil, and pepper. Add 1 tsp sugar and 3 bay leaves.
4. cook on HIGH for 3-4 hours, or LOW for 6-8.

My tomatoes aren’t as tomato-y as they are out of the can, so I think if I make them again I’ll be adding some tomato juice to flavor them. Either that, or the tomatoes I had weren’t ripe enough and didn’t have that full tomato flavour I was looking for.

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I wanted to bake banana bread today, and I invited Tim’s sister over to “watch the American fail” at converting from US measurements to UK ones. Fortunately, I didn’t have to fail, as there are loads of websites out there willing to convert for you. We used a website offered by French at a Touch, and found it converted everything we needed to know, including temperature.

Here’s the original recipe:

Banana Bread
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup softened margarine
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
3 ripe mashed bananas
2 cups flour
2 eggs
Mix everything together. Pour into loaf pans and bake @ 350; large loaves take about 1 hr 15 min,
minis should be checked after 40 minutes.

And, converted to being used in the UK:

Banana Bread
227g sugar
113g softened margarine
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
3 ripe mashed bananas
454g flour
2 eggs
Mix everything together. Pour into loaf pans and bake @ 175; large loaves take about 1 hr 15 min,
minis should be checked after 40 minutes.

Our measurements were approximate – 113g was more like 125 (half of the stick), 227 was probably closer to 225, and 454 probably only 450. We figured those were probably the amounts intended anyway if it had been a UK recipe. We also used 4 bananas instead of three. The result? Three delicious loaves of banana bread.

Does this mean I’m ready to convert myself to cooking/baking in the UK? Perhaps, but if anyone reading this blog has my address here at Tim’s and wants to send me a US measuring cup or set of cups, I’d love you forever.

I’m trying to plan my meals for my last week and a few days, and also trying to use up the food I have already before it spoils (like the eggs and milk), so I decided to make French Toast Casserole…a dish mom and I had been wanting to try since I found the recipe. I figured this will work as a lunch for me for at least 3 or 4 days, possibly longer as the small bit I ate today for breakfast was really filling.

I modified this recipe a lot to make the smaller version, mostly because I didn’t have an entire loaf of bread to use or 8 eggs left. I used about 6 slices of bread, a half a tub of fat-free spreadable cream cheese, 4 eggs, 2 cups of milk, and I omitted the sugar because I feel fat free cream cheese is sweet, so I figured I’d omit it, but below is the original. I have to admit, the fat free cream cheese is still gross even in baked form…so I don’t recommend it.

French Toast Casserole

1 loaf bread, cubed
1 package cream cheese, cubed
8 eggs, whipped
2/3 cup syrup
2 cups milk
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1. Layer bottom of 9 X 13 casserole dish with 1/2 loaf of cubed bread. Arrange cubed cream cheese
over bread. Mix sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle half of the mixture over the cream cheese. Layer on
remaining bread. Mix eggs, syrup and milk together and pour over bread. Sprinkle with remaining
sugar and cinnamon.
2. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Bake at 350 for 40-45 minutes, or until bread does not jiggle in the
center.

Mom was talking about making potato soup over the weekend, and it got me wanting it, so I had her email me the recipe.  I had to go over to the grocery store to get bread and potatos, and I didn’t feel like walking all the way down to Extra Foods, so I just went to Safeway.  Since I was over at the mall, I also stopped in at A&W for, you guessed it, a Root Beer Float.  While I was sitting there enjoying my treat, I noticed a few funny people I just had to share.

The first group were three older adults, the youngest-looking of the three using a walker.  They all came into the restaurant and sat down near the door and just stared at the front counter and the menu board.  After about five minutes, the one man said something to the other about “bad service”.  I honestly think they expected the girl behind the register to walk over to them and take their order!  The man with the walker made a big deal about getting up and then walked without his walker up to the counter to place an order.  Weird.

Across the mall from the A&W is a clothing store.  I watched a customer undress the window mannequin because the mannequin was apparently wearing her size.  I also watched while she just left the poor half naked mannequin with a purse slung over it’s bare chest so she could buy her sweater!

In addition to the potato soup, I decided to make some instant pudding for dessert….only, I had forgotten until yesterday that I had put half my milk in the freezer while I was camping so it would last longer when I got back…..and it’s still frozen.  I managed to squeeze out the 2 cups I needed by scraping the milk-ice..kind of like a milky snowcone, and then waiting for that to melt in the measuring cup until I had 2 cups.  Whoops.  Hope enough is thawed by the morning for my cereal!

It’s going to get down to 4C tonight, so I hope my pajama pants are dry soon!  (I’m also doing laundry today)

If you want my mom’s potato soup recipe, here it is:

Potatoes  diced   – about  8 cups
2 or 3 hard boiled eggs (depends on the size of eggs)
parsley (optional)
1 pint half and half or light cream
butter

After dicing potatoes, cook in large pan with water until slightly soft, Meantime
cook eggs.  Add milk, eggs, and parsley, don’t let it boil but bring
just to boiling point add small bits of butter (also optional) I
usually pepper and salt to give a little flavor.

I served mine up with some pillsbury breadsticks I brushed with egg and topped with poppy seeds.  Yum!  (although, mom’s is better….)

And because no post is complete without cat photos: