This is my second recipe from my friend Kathy’s in law’s recipe book, the Raimo cookbook. For those of you that didn’t read the story on the cookbook, it’s a wonderful collection of Post War recipes, still relevant today, that a Mother collected and gave to her new daughter in law in order for her to keep her son well fed. To me, there were certain recipes that jumped out to me immediately and this was one of them being a French Toast fanatic. I had never heard of combining French Toast with cream cheese but the idea somehow seemed so logical.

The recipe below gives measures but it depends of course on the size and type of bread you are using. I had a round 23cms/9inch diameter roll so the 2 eggs covered 1.5 sandwiches which gave 1.5 servings but of course if you use a smaller loaf you may be able to get 3 or 4 sandwiches out of it. I served it to hubby for a lazy weekend brunch and he loved it. Adored it. In fact he asked for it for dinner too.

As for me, there was one clear partner to this- Smoked Salmon. It’s a natural partner for cream cheese. I’ve given Margaret Raimo’s original recipe as well as written it out, with a couple of hints. Just make sure that you have enough ingredients for the inevitable dinner requests later that day.

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One of the best things about food blogging is meeting fellow bloggers. Case in point is Christie from Fig & Cherry who has proved to be a great blogging friend and a lot of fun to hang out with. We have a lot in common, from obviously loving food,  Dexter, pillow menus, hotels to being bossy chatterboxes.  So when she read about our visit to Dunes, we got to talking and she mentioned that she hadn’t been to Palm Beach before. It seemed a tragedy for a Sydney-Sider so we sought to rectify this as soon as possible. However the weather gods decided to not let us have our picnic in the end. Such is the crazy weather that we’ve been having lately.

I was watching Food Safari’s episode on England and was fascinated by the way they made Pork Pies. I had one whilst in London and it was delicious, particularly the pastry (just don’t look at the nutritional information, you’ll think it’s a misprint but I’m afraid not!). I had heard that the traditional way to make English pastry for things such as Steak and Kidney pie is through using Suet ( the hard fat around the kidneys and loins in beef and sheep) but I had yet to cook with it. Sure it wasn’t in anyway healthy but I figure a few times eating it in your lifetime can’t hurt. But I dipped a trepidatious toe in the Suet pool by buying a Suet mix where I simply added flour, cold water and salt to create the pastry. If it worked, I’d look at ordering some from the butcher’s. Because I was pressed for time as I was making this on a Friday I took some shortcuts with the pastry and frozen spinach.

We woke on the Saturday morning to a light howling of wind and an overcast day. It seemed that today was not going to be the day to go to Palm Beach so we made alternate plans. As for the fate of this pie? It was my husband’s lunch, well received, and eaten picnic style with his hands. Just in front of a computer.

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Sometimes instead of running out to the shops for a new loaf of bread, I find that if I have the time, I prefer to make it. I would never have ordinarily done this a few years ago, pre-KitchenAid and its wonderful dough hook attachment. My arms simply don’t have the stamina for kneading (although carrying shopping bags seems to be an exception to this rule), nor does my mind have the patience so I always bought bread thinking that the rising yeast and kneading was too much of a production. Indeed the feeble attempts that I had made warned me off baking it myself as I’d often give up mid-knead resulting in a cake more than a bread. But now since I have the Dough Hook, bread is no longer my bête noire. I adapted this recipe from Nigella’s How to be a Domestic Goddess, which has to be my favourite ever cookbook, and heeded her comment about how this bread really came into its own with cheese so I thought why not add some cheese throughout the bread?

I’ve often heard real estate agents purport that the smell of baking bread or freshly brewing coffee is a good way to sell a house and whilst I’ve never needed to sell a house, I have been lured by the smell of freshly baking bread. It’s something that even a hardened carb phobic like me finds hard to resist. When this came out of the oven, I took to it with a bread knife and cut myself a couple of slices and slathered them with butter. It was perfection. I then proceeded to cut off some more pieces before I realised that a good third of the loaf was gone. And I enjoyed every minute of being part of its disappearance.

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