Great British Sewing Bee

I was somewhat of a snob when they announced the Great British Sewing Bee, and missed the first episode when it aired live. However, I quickly caught up, thanks to the magic of iPlayer. I am definitely not enough of a seamstress to be able to go on the show, but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute (and am excited for the next series).

I also found two great craft blogs as a result: Guthrie & Ghani and Tilly and the Buttons. Both Lauren and Tilly were contestants on the show and both of them are amazingly creative seamstresses. LOVE!

In the grand scheme of "The BBC Is Awesome," we loved this week's Doctor Who - deliciously creepy and scary, and featuring Jessica Raine from Call the Midwife. Perfect. Television. Thank you, BBC.

One more thing I love: these Boursin Minis that we found in Tesco. YUM. They're about the size of mini-marshmallows and are devilishly good for snacking or putting on salads or in omelettes. Must buy more. Also, the pot they come in is v. cute.

Eric Whitacre Prom

I didn't end up going to the Eric Whitacre Prom this week, but I wish I had. 

I've listened to it on iPlayer - if you get a chance, it's excellent. The link is here, but I'm not sure how long for!

Foodie Fursday

I spotted these long-life lactofree milk single-serving pods in our local Tesco a few weeks ago (I've been on the lookout for them in other stores but haven't seen them yet). It's not the cheapest way to get milk, but it means that if I want a break from black coffee at work, I can have it. Score one for the Dairy Fairy!

Our new favorite meal is from the June BBC Good Food (not posted on their website yet, unfortunately). Harissa roasted vegetables with couscous.

Ingredients:

2 tsp harissa

2 tsp olive oil

a tray-full of veggies: we used an aubergine and 2 courgettes (in chunks), about 8 mushrooms (quartered) and a handful of cherry tomatoes (halved), and some spring onions.

Dressing (just mix all the ingredients together in a bowl):

2 tbs greek yogurt

1 tbs tahini

juice of 1 lemon

large pinch of coriander or mint (fresh/dried are both fine)

Mix the veggies with the harissa and olive oil until they're all coated, then roast at 180C until the veggies are cooked.

Serve with couscous with the dressing on the side. I add the tomatoes about halfway through the 20-or-so minute cooking time, so they don't completely disintegrate. I start the couscous once I've put the tomatoes in and it all arrives together. Ta-da!

Chocolate cake

We made chocolate cake for John's dad's birthday. It was all gone the next day. That's it, really.

Review: Downton Abbey

Well. We loved Downton Abbey. And may even have to brave the commercials on ITV to watch the second season when it comes out, rather than waiting for the DVD. People who live in Suffolk: they have the DVD at the library - it's £2 for a week and you can reserve it online. What are you waiting for!? Americans, it was on PBS. Watch it. Great cast, Dame Maggie Smith is AMAZING and steals every scene she comes within 30 feet of, and the "bad guys" are deliciously bad.

And a little baking yummyness: lemon & blueberry cake (minus blueberries) + raspberries + portrait lens = awesome.

Recipe: Blueberry muffins

I really wanted to make some blueberry muffins. So I asked the internet and found this recipe from the BBC. It says that it makes 12 muffins - we thought it made a scant 9.

As you can see, they were a yummy 9!

Blueberry Muffins, from Paul Hollywood, BBC Saturday Kitchen
makes 12 [we only got 9!]


110g/4oz plain flour
110g/4oz butter
65g/2½oz caster sugar
2 free-range eggs
1½ tsp baking powder
125g/4½oz blueberries, or equivalent in frozen blueberries
pinch nutmeg

Cream the butter and sugar together then slowly add the eggs, mix for three minutes.
Add the flour, baking powder, nutmeg, stir to combine, then refrigerate for at least an hour, preferably overnight.
Place a spoonful of muffin mixture into each muffin case, filling each to just over half way. Stud each muffin with about eight blueberries.
Bake in an oven set at 200C/400F/Gas 6 for 20 minutes, or until golden on top.

The End (of the quilt and of Doctor David Tennant)

Last night we watched the final David Tennant Doctor Who episodes. I'd missed them at Christmas when they originally aired, and the iPlayer download that I had was corrupted. NOOOOOO!

As much as I want D.T. and Catherine Tate to be "The Doctor and Donna" forever, I thought the last episode was really good. A little nostalgia, a lot of running, and some silly jokes. And then a regeneration. 11th Doctor? Not sure how I feel about him yet. The first episode of the newly Tennant-less Doctor Who is tonight...we'll see how it goes.

While we were watching, I finished binding my quilt. I love how it turned out. There are some really gorgeous ones in the Flickr pool - go check them out!

I love how bright it is - and since I finished it midway through the tv-watching last night, I can also vouch for the fact that it's soft and reasonably warm.

We're having a mad weather-day today - it's either pouring or bright sunshine and nothing in between. I don't think I'm brave enough to hang the washing out on the line but I may break out the e-cloth and wash some windows. Spring!!

Chili

We made a delish dinner last night - it's from the most recent BBC Good Food, so it's not on their website. It was a Black Bean Chili from a feature on Mexican food by the American food writer Jennifer Joyce. It's funny - Mexican food is essentially its own food group in the US, and it's really not something that's particularly huge over here. When you think about it geographically, it makes sense, but I still miss my quesadillas.

Anyway, this recipe was SO easy and really tasty. My normal veggie chili recipe involves kidney beans (which I always think are a little dry and mealy) and bell peppers (which I'm not a huge fan of). This is MUCH better (and would be really tasty with some leftover chicken or ground beef, too).

The only thing we did differently was to use smoked paprika with a little chili powder instead of sweet pimenton, which made it rather fiery but very tasty. Oh, and I didn't have ground cumin so I used whole cumin and some ground coriander (and dumped some dried coriander leaf in towards the end). We served it with spring onions and sour cream, and I'm still thinking about how yummy it was.

We had a few apples in the fridge that were threatening to go brown, so I made this recipe for apple streusel bars again. Double the apples, halve the icing, leave everything else the same. Tastes somewhere between apple pie, Bakewell tart, and a meltaway. It can be used extremely effectively as a bribe.

Because we had leftover spring onions from last night's chili, John's breakfast consisted of fried eggs with sauteed mushrooms, green chillies, and spring onions. (James and I ate up some stale bread by making french toast). As much as I love french toast, I was jealous. He was nice enough to give me a bite, and it tasted fabulous.

I finished another book last night: Janice Y.K. Lee's The Piano Teacher. I don't remember where my recommendation came from - it might have been on one of my Waterstones Evernote binges. (I go to Waterstones, decide which books in the bestsellers look good, write them down on Evernote, and order them from the library. Before you howl in horror at not supporting bookstores, we buy lots of books for James and John there and I do occasionally cave and BUY a book. We don't have any good independents near us, so I don't feel bad for not supporting them.)

In any event, I should have been more wary. It was not only a "Richard and Judy Summer Read" (Run away! Far, far away!), but it was billed as "This year's Atonement" on the cover. I HATED Atonement. In fairness, I didn't hate The Piano Teacher as much as I hated Atonement. It's set in colonial Hong Kong in the 1950s, with flashbacks to the 1940s. I thought the setting was very interesting, and the interactions between the various colonial powers and the native population were well-described, but I didn't think that the book really went anywhere. Then, at the back, there was an interview with Lee, where she said that she didn't really know where the book was going to go when she was writing it. Really? Couldn't have guessed.

I'll just have to do some more reading, since it's snowing again!

I'm a Junior Foodie

First foodie credential: Sylvia Schur, who died last week (the link is to her obit in the NYT), lived across the street and gave my parents a high chair when I was born. Her second husband (before they were married) gave me and my brother a set of wind-up sushi toys.

Second foodie credential: I've been 'putting up' food in the last few weeks. Plum jam a few weeks ago and oven-dried tomatoes last week (which we're going to finish eating long before winter). The tomatoes were from the garden and were quite tasty before they were roasted. But after? With some salt and olive oil in the oven at 80 degrees C for 3 1/2 hours? Really awesome.

Third foodie credential: John and I have been watching the Hairy Bikers quite a bit lately, and in one of the recent recipes they made a meat pie. It looked REALLY tasty, and John has been demanding Pork Pie since then. So we asked the Good Food website what to do, and it told us to make Gordon Ramsay's Pork & Ham Pie. From scratch. With pork mince, sausagemeat, ham, sage, eggs, and pastry made with lard. Yes, lard. Gordon's picture:

And our picture:

 

We don't know what it looks like inside yet (or how it tastes), but it sure smells good. We will be taking it to the choir picnic today and thoroughly tasting it. From this angle, you can't see the decorations on the top very well, but they are an "H", and a pig, made out of pastry. Swoon.

Junior Foodie credentials: complete. Please proceed to next level. Involving foams.

Dr Who TrailerMaker

James found a gizmo where you can create your own Doctor Who trailers on the BBC Website:

Here's the trailer that James made - check it out!

I LOVE the BBC (almost as much as I love David Tennant). ::swoon::

Radio 4: "Today" advent calendar

I was minding my own business, driving to work this morning, when the chaps on the Today program mentioned that as it was December 1, they were starting in on their annual Advent Calendar. I don't know how I missed it last year, but it's hilarious!  Each day they're giving us one more nugget of mirth. I almost went off the road with the one this morning.

I love the BBC

Not only does the BBC have Michael Palin, Dr. Who, and BBC Good Food, iPlayer is now in beta for Linux.

What more could anyone want?

Well, maybe ringing plain hunt for the first time on the treble bell at Stowmarket. Wait, I did that yesterday. Woohoo!

Happy (smelly) Halloween!

Happy Halloween! In case you're wondering what I'm up to tonight, check out the article in today's NYT about Halloween in the UK (or the lack thereof). Yeah. Since we don't have the stepson, either, it was a night in for us. However, we did have an orange dinner, in tribute. I roasted butternut squash chunks in olive oil with garlic and herbs and then poured the squash and garlicky herby oil over pasta. YUM!! It only took about half an hour to roast (at 200C, granted), which kind of surprised me. BTW, Lizzie, my Halloween socks are in NY...sad times.

Speaking of which, I've now officially been here for a year. Time flies when you're having fun. :)

In case I'd forgotten that I live in the country, however, there have been new and interesting smells permeating Bury and our office. You know how there are lots of fields in rural areas? And how they grow stuff on the fields? Well, as a refresher to all you NewYawkers out there, in order to make the stuff on the fields grow, they put poop on the fields. LOTS AND LOTS OF POOP. And it's smelly poop. And the smell gets everywhere, and then once it's there, it clings. Yummy.

It almost makes me miss summer subway smells. Almost, I said.

Oh, and then on my travels I found this article on the New York Times. And it tickled me to the point where I had to send it to News Quiz, my favorite BBC radio program. It's on Friday night's and it's a funny roundup of the week's big stories with some random funny things thrown in. I was noodling around on the website after submitting the article, and read that they get a staggering 15 emails (along with 20 letters) per day. I was expecting it to be more in the 200 per day range. Shows what I know. At least it means that there's a human bean somewhere at the BBC tomorrow who's going to READ the email I sent...along with a little Westchestah shoutout to Sandi Toksvig - she's the host of the show and she's a hysterically funny Danish lesbian who grew up in Mamamaroneck (!?) but is a v. famous Brit now.