welsh hills again

Last night younger daughter arrived with her best friends and their fourteen  month old little girl.  Today Karen from An Artist's Garden was coming for lunch so this morning I set to work in the kitchen. Yesterday I had produced two lemon drizzle cakes, one perfect, the other with a surprising hole in the middle.  However we agreed that this was fine as you could persuade yourself you were not eating yet another slice of cake but a bit more hole, with cake surround. Today has been a day for making Somerset Apple Cake, carrot and coriander soup and now a beef casserole with a cheesy scone topping. There was a small break there for going away and eating. I love being able to produce good food from the contents of my fridge and store cupboard.   I love the fact that there is always enough in stock to know that I can turn out something good.  I would hate not to be able to cook.  Of all the skills I have acquired as an adult I think cooking and dr...

Have you heard of the mass observation project? At the end of the Second World War and for some years after thousands of ordinary people throughout Britain kept diaries about their daily lives. While we were in Newfoundland I read a book called Our Hidden Lives in which five of the diary keepers' stories were told. It sounds as though it might be dull but it was oddly compelling and you became fond of them all as you followed them through rationing and failing to win prizes in the allotment competition and buying new hats and riding London buses. The most vivid and most shocking thing in reading the book was the sense of how little they had and how careful and constrained their lives were: an amount of butter to last a week no more than I put on two slices of toast in the morning; recipes without eggs, without butter, without sugar; terrible food of the sort which sent Elizabeth David stomping off fuming to France and the Mediterranean; no waste, no packaging, no consumerism. And y...