Oops!!

With the spring, the snow has returned. Once more flurries of snow are blowing around outside. It seems to be quite heavy, with big flakes, but the ground is so wet, it melts as soon as it lands. Whether it will continue to do this we will find out as the day goes on. I just hope this since some augury of the summer to come – cold & wet – we had enough of that last year.

We seem to have been having a few days of culinary mishaps. It started on Tuesday, when the Fox misread the recipe. He read 1oz of pearl barley as 10oz. As the stew plopped away in Big Ears, our slow cooker, he got increasingly worried, adding more and more beer & stock as it dried out. Fortunately we both enjoy the taste of pearl barley, so we enjoyed the resultant stew regardless. We were relieved that I had suggested we abandoned the peeled potatoes for another day when I realised what had happened. All that barley certainly made the stew very heavy & filling – and surprisingly creamy too. A slice or two of bread was quite sufficient accompaniment.

Then yesterday was my turn to boob. I made some ham pasties. While I was putting the filling together I was put out to discover the recipe called for Worcestershire sauce & the Fox had used the bottle up in the stew the day before. I decided to improvise by adding some mushroom ketchup instead. I hastily made up the pasties & put them in the hot oven. I then realised I’d forgotten to put in the sliced mushrooms. This was particularly galling as I’d bought the mushrooms specifically for these pasties. I hastily got the pasties out. They’d only been in the oven for a minute. However that minute was sufficient for the pastry to start to harden & for the seam to seal firmly together. I gently tried to open a hole in the softer pastry to the side of the seam, inserted the mushrooms & covered the holes as best I could. The pasties went back in the oven to cook on. The result looked as though it had been under a steam roller, rather flattened as all the steam had escaped. However, the pasty did taste extra tasty when you found the pieces of mushroom so I felt the effort at rectifying the situation had been worthwhile.

I keep remembering Pierre, the cook at a Chambre d’Hôte (French B&B) we stayed in once. He presented us all with a fabulous smoked chicken and mushroom dish for dinner. His wife duly told us the recipe was the outcome of an accident, a mistake made in the kitchen. The meal was delicious so they’d kept the recipe ever since. I can’t say our mishaps resulted in meals quite so good, but at least our efforts redeemed them to make them edible, even reasonably enjoyable.

I wonder what will happen when I get out Big Ears & tackle the Beef Biryani I’ve planned for this evening. We’ll see.