I love fungi and have always found the way that they pop up, perfectly, fully formed overnight quite wondrous. Every year I photograph them and put them on my blog to be ignored by everyone. This year is no exception. I took these pictures this week at dog training in Edenbridge, shortly before they were trampled by various dogs and gone as quickly as they had arrived. There will no doubt be more as the mushroom season gets into full swing.
Things I have liked this week:
I am smug and glib and very pleased with myself at completing my Christmas supermarket delivery order within 5 minutes of it reaching me instead of ignoring it to be lost forever in the depths of my inbox, as is usually the case. Even as I ticked, some festive fare offerings had already sold out. I’m determined that this year I won’t be scrabbling around any available retail outlet on December 23rd for the last remaining chestnuts or cranberry sauce. Not this year. This year, I’m going to be the Queen of Serene.
Christmas jumper:
The Queen of Serene has finally taken possession of a reasonable Christmas jumper, not one of those acrylic confections with googly-eyed reindeer and tinsel bobbles that’s put in a bin bag for the charity shop come January but something more discreet from NavyGrey. I think this makes the festive point and yet I love it so much that I’ll definitely be bringing down the cost per wear between now and Christmas and for many winters to come. Isn’t it great? I’m tempted to buy another for redundancy, just in case, in the same way I bought two copies of the Sinatra At The Sands CD, though now we stream music, of course.
In this picture I’ve taken India Knight’s tip about red lipstick having the same effect as kind lighting on an (almost) bare face. A red lip draws the eye away from everything else, which is a blessing.
I think I’ve grown out of proper dense lipstick applied like a grown-up, but I’m currently loving these Hourglass Unlocked Satin Creme lipsticks. On the balmy end of the pigmenting spectrum, they aren’t really polished enough for the office but rather more forgiving and with a soft and gentle lipfeel. This one is Hourglass’s Red 0, containing a vegan replacement for the carmine pigment that takes the lives of 70,000 female Dactylopius coccus cochineal beetles for each pound of carmine dye.
Pie:
I made an apple pie with Ms N’s latest Bramleys. It’s the first time in over forty years that I’ve made pastry without using some sort of processing machine, believing that my hands are too warm for pastry - warm hands, cold heart? - , but I’m really pleased with how it turned out.
Apple pie and I have a bit of a history: as a student on my year abroad in Beijing in the early 1980s I lived on little else for almost a year. The “westerners’ canteen” food was almost uniformly disgusting - or it seemed so at the time to teenage me - but, oddly, apple pie was available daily so I ate that. The experience taught me a life lesson about resilience.
I’d recommend making pastry by hand: rubbing in the butter ( don’t really want to use transfats or lard) gives a more intimate connection to food, I think, and it really doesn’t take long. I am emboldened by this pastry success to make more pies. You can call me Mrs Lovett if you like.
Naughty Fergus
I was involved in a Zoom meeting on Thursday evening so decided to do the ingredient prep to whip up Beef stroganoff quickly afterwards. Hungry, I fried the mushrooms and garlic and added the pre-caramelized onions then looked around for the 310g of best, dry-aged sirloin that I’d cut into strips an hour earlier and LEFT ON THE COUNTER. They had been disappeared in our absence into the eager tummy of this rogue. His flatcoat predecessor, Great Uncle Mr Oscar would never have contemplated such theft, though Raffles the late beagle was aptly-named and would definitely have tried.
I’ll be here again next week. In the meantime, have fun
G x
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