Oaty chocolate chip cookies: not a diet option, admittedly
Ah, the Easter hols. Don’t you just love them? Being a total heathen, I’m not particularly interested in the religious stuff, but hey, copious amounts of chocolate, fluffy bunnies and not having to get up to take the kids to school? Bring it on. This morning, then, found me pottering in the kitchen and doing some severe damage to my chocolate chip cookie recipe. I know, I love a fiddle. I just can’t help myself. Actually I think this one’s much better than my original - posted back in 2006 (can you believe that?), but see what you think:
125g butter
150g brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
150g flour
50g oats
100g chocolate, chopped
So cream the butter, then add the sugar and beat together until it’s really light. Add the egg and vanilla and beat again until pale and fluffy. Stir in the flour until it’s just combined, then add the oats and chopped chocolate:
Dollop the mixture in spoonfuls onto a baking tray. I used an ice cream scoop to make really massive cookies, but if you’re not such a disgustingly greedy pig, you could make smaller ones.
Bake at 180/gas 4 for about 10-12 minutes. Don’t overcook them as you want them really lovely and soft in the middle. Serve while still warm with a nice cup of tea.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of yummy stuff, pop over to the Daily Spud’s gaff, and check out her amazing sticky toffee pudding recipe - try it and die of happiness. Here’s my attempt, which was happily scoffed on Sunday:
There. If I haven’t succeeded in gumming up your arteries completely by now, I must be damned close. Enjoy!
Apple pies: Northern Ireland’s finest.
Ah, Northern Ireland. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I have several equally random reasons; one: we’re only about an hour away and it’s rather nice to be able to pop to the shops in a different country. Two: the shopping’s much cheaper than here – and it’s an extra thrill to shop in my native sterling too (and until Southern Irish shops stop ripping off their customers I’ll feel no shame in doing so). Three, there’s the fact that whenever we go up there, the people are really nice, ooh, and four: the shopping is fab, oh and five: our lovely friend Tom happens to hark from that neck of the woods, and six: their accent is just lovely to listen to… I could ramble on, but another fantastically good reason is that their Bramley apples are just amazing. And here’s a completely useless fact: did you know that annually, Northern Ireland produces over 35000 tonnes of the big, fat, gorgeous beauties? Most of these go to make cider (why doesn’t that surprise you?) but a few of them make it back to English Towers, where their lovely, fluffy tartness make for rather nice pies. First you need to make some ridiculously fattening, buttery pastry:
200g plain flour
pinch of salt
150g cold butter
2 tbsp caster sugar
So add the pinch of salt into the flour, then cut the cold butter into little squares and gently rub them in until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar and then add about 2 tbsp cold water. Just enough to make the pastry come together. It will seem dry, but crumbly dough will make for lighter pastry. Trust your Aunty EM here. Wrap up your pastry and leave it to rest somewhere cool while you tackle your Bramleys.
2 large Bramley apples
2 tbsp caster sugar
1 egg (or just some milk)
1 tsp cinnamon/extra sugar
Preheat the oven to 180/gas 4 before you forget, then take a couple of large apples, peel, core and dice them and pop them into a saucepan. Add a couple of tbsp of caster sugar (depending on how tart you like your filling) and a whoosh of water from the tap. Gently cook the apples until they’re just tender, but not complete mush, and set aside to cool slightly.
Now, retrieve the pastry, roll it out and cut out 12 large circles and 12 smaller ones with a pastry cutter. Don’t worry if you’re as cack handed as I am with pastry – they’re supposed to look home-made. Gently pop the larger circles into the holes of a 12-hole muffin tin. Next, bung a tbsp of your lovely apple purée into each case:
…and top with a smaller circle. Beat the egg with a fork and brush a little onto each pie (or just use a dab of milk), then sprinkle with a little extra sugar and perhaps some cinnamon (to add a pleasing smell to your kitchen, if nothing else).
Now it would do you well to remember here that pie filling fresh from the oven is possibly the hottest substance known to man so try to prevent your offspring getting third degree mouth burns until the molten apple lava has calmed down a bit, then serve immediately with a big blob of mascarpone, or some lovely vanilla ice cream. Yum yum pig’s bum, as Auntie L would say.
Bulbs, shoots, antlers and lazy buggers
Ah, springtime. I love it. Not least because my birthday really sets the whole thing off, but also because of all the little things: waking up to sunshine (however weak, watery and Cavan-like), new shoots in the garden (and memories of how my back ached after a very mucky winter’s day spent digging holes in the lawn and planting bulbs):
…and if this tulip survives after being regularly stomped on by Bert it’ll be a miracle:
And then there are the sheep, who greet us first thing in the morning with a chorus of ‘bleurggghhh’, which always makes me smile. Yesterday, one of them had got stuck in the brambles and given himself a rather fetching pair of antlers:
…but there are always some of us that would much prefer to stay indoors:
C’est la vie, eh?
In which English Towers suffers a stinky situation
Following on nicely, then, from all our chat about self sufficiency/knitting your own yoghurt/composting toilets, etc, I think I’ve mentioned before that here at English Towers we’re a teeny, tiny bit eco-friendly. Firstly we’ve got those very thick, specially insulated walls that mean you can forget trying to hang a picture, because one tap with the hammer sees you elbow deep in your plasterboard, however it does make it incredibly warm upstairs, which flows nicely downstairs and saves on the costs of the heating system, which, coincidentally, runs separately upstairs to down. Good eh?
Secondly, and yes, I’m getting to the point now, we have one of those ‘bio-flow’ systems for our..er…waste. Here’s the rub, as understood by my peanut-sized brain, and with no technical terms thrown in: the toilets and sinks are linked up to a drainage system which take all our household ick to a big green tank which is buried in the garden. Here, a small constantly running motor injects a supply of air into the ick which bubbles through, aerates the ick and encourages bacteria to break it down to a liquid which is then fed into the garden by a system of tentacles planted all under the lawn, where it harmlessly, odourlessly seeps away. This system doesn’t create any harmful gases (apparently – they haven’t met my children) and leaves a very small amount of ‘sludge’ which collects in the bottom and only needs ‘de-sludging’ (I know, it’s a fantastic phrase) every 5 years. Here it is with the lid off (and yes, I took the photo from inside – it was very bloody smelly):
Trouble is, ours broke. We noticed first of all that weird things were happening: if you flushed a toilet, water bubbled up in the shower. We got worried. And then we looked outside in the drains and we were even more worried:
Hubby: ‘oh look, there’s one of yours’
Me: ‘I think you’ll find that’s not mine’
Hubby: ‘oh right of course not, yours don’t smell, do they’
Me: ‘nope. And mine are pink and sparkly’
Cue several days’ worth of quality poo jokes and lots of worried conversations with the water treatment company. Turns out, when we finally got the bloody lid off, that the air hose had popped off and had been happily aerating half of Cavan instead of our poo for the last goodness knows how long. One look into the main tank and we knew we had one giant, stinky problem. The system had completely broken down and we needed help fast.
Long story short, then, we had to had to be ‘de-sludged’ and have our pipes cleaned before the whole process was ever going to start working again. To add insult to injury it turns out that our gates aren’t wide enough to allow one man, his tractor and his de-sludging equipment through, so we had to do a bit of long-distance desludging, which doesn’t exactly help matters.
The whole thing cost a packet and was extremely stinky. See what happens when you try and go eco-friendly? Next up is a visit from the bio-flow company who are, unfortunately, based in Cork.
And no, sadly, this was no April Fool’s joke. Still, as I pointed out to Hubby, we may be cash poor, but we’re poo rich.
