Poppalina

Watermelon Ice

Today I started making sweet pickled watermelon rind, to give as a Christmas present to a few people. It's so pretty, and pretty yum, too. The recipe is from Stephanie Alexander's first book, Menus for Food Lovers. I was then faced with the prospect of eating all the flesh of an entire watermelon.

Hmm. What to do? My husband doesn't like watermelon very much, and I can only eat so much of it myself. But he says he does like watermelon granita on a very hot day. (Which today isn't.) So I decided to make a watermelon ice, which we can keep in the freezer for any time we want it.

I whizzed the flesh of one (seedless) watermelon in a food processor, and added a scant teaspoon of rose water and a capful of dark rum (we didn't have any white rum, which I would have used if we had).

I put 250 g of castor sugar in a pan with 1/2 cup of water, and brought it to the boil, stirring so it would dissolve. I let it boil for a few minutes, then turned off the heat and let it cool.

Then I stirred the sugar syrup into the watermelon juice, and churned the mixture in an ice-cream maker. (You could do it by semi-freezing, flaking with a fork and re-freezing, if you don't have one of those).

Holy moly! It was fabulous!

Just Checking In

Hey.

 

 

I made gnocchi. 

A Difficult Decision

The blue....

or the pink?

The blue?

or the...

Oh, fuck it.

 

What Goes Around...

Creative Genius has a new baking passion...

The pineapple upside-down cake.

 

not least because

she gets to eat the leftover cherries,

and we all know how good they are...

Meat and three veg, without the meat, does not a dinner make.

Slowly, slowly, 

I am learning,

 

to cook meatless dinners

   

without tears.

And without having to spend ALL DAY in the kitchen.

Quiet Joys of Parenthood

I washed three loads of dishes.

I cleaned down the outside of the stove, the fridge door and the front of the cupboards.

   

I scrubbed the kitchen benches, and scraped dried cake mix from the food jars.

Finally, I mopped sticky sugar from the floors, the same floors that I had cleaned only yesterday.

 

If it wasn't for the fact that Mym's baked creations are disarming in their deliciousness and so very beautiful,

(her talent for cleaning, sadly, is inversely proportional),

 

I wouldn't let her

or any other teenager anywhere near my kitchen,

not even if you paid me

(little finger moves to side of chin)

one million dollars.

Blue Cake

I have to show you this

 

Because it's just too pretty not to.

In Heaven, the Pavs are Chocolate

And so, as I graciously accept my CWA Blue Ribbon Award,

 

Culinary Diva (Western Region),

 

for Freakishly Spectacular First Attempt at Pavlova (Amateur Division),

 

and, having wowed the Voting Public into a chocolate coma of medical-interventionary proportions,

the evening is declared, unanimously, a Resounding Success.

But really, I owe it all to Ramona's mum

for her inspiration,

and for pointing me in the right direction.

And a big Happy Birthday to my Creative Genius, who turned (WTF?!) fourteen, yesterday.

The Story of Egg

Egg sleeps peacefully...

 

Until SUDDENLY, she is woken by a NASTY SHOCK...

 

Which turns out to be DOG, jumping on Egg's head.

Egg is Very Annoyed.

 

Egg gets medieval on Dog...

 

Which makes Egg feel a bit better. 

 

And so, satisfied that Dog will think twice before he wakes her again like that, EVER...

Egg reassumes The Position.

 

Egg Art by Mym.

Any resemblance to events occurring this morning, as The Author slept, is purely coincidental.

The Subtle Art of Egg Divination

I was worried.

We've never had Sad Eggs at our house, before.

Neither do we do Emo Eggs,

- 

And never, ever Crying Eggs. Bloody Hell...

My Troubleometer starting blinking rapidly on Yellow Alert.

Until I spied the one remaining dude, sitting in the corner, laughing his silly head off.

I breathed a sigh of relief,

And let it ride.

 

Cake-baking sure can be an Intense Business, at Chez Poppalina. It's one of those Artistic Things.