OK I’m not being serious, this is not only just for Shut Ins although sometimes during the cold of Winter, I definitely feel as though I qualify. I am not sure why there is such a stigma to hibernation, the bears do it and you hardly hear cries of “anti social bears” and mutterings that there’s something wrong with them. If you feel like the world is just too cold or cruel a place and that stepping out the door would be as appealing as sawing your own arm off, these recipes are for you. And I don’t want to hear from people who say that they’ve never felt like that and that they love socialising and interacting. Don’t get me wrong I do too. But there are just some days that you just want to barricade yourself indoors. An example of why everyone at some stage has felt this way is the great Australian tradition of a sickie. Sometimes you just cannot be bothered and slobbing around the house is the best you can do.

I like to celebrate my shut-in days by making the most of them. I watch the DVDs I’ve never gotten around to, read or at least start the books I’ve got gathering dust by the side of my bed and read trashy magazines *ahem* … I mean keep up with Current Affairs.

This Tessa Kiros recipe for chicken soup is from her book Apples for Jam, a cookbook/storybook with some gorgeous pictures and home recipes with a comforting edge to them. It interested me as it looked great in the photos. Yes, I am that superficial. I also liked the idea of a thick chicken soup - there’s nothing wrong with a thin broth but I like more sustaining soups, particularly if they are the main and only course at dinner.

As for the Potato Bread, I admit I fiddled with Nigella’s recipe. I actually got the idea from a friend Maria from Foodie Wanderings in which she told me about a bakery that made bread rolls with a whole boiled potato and mayonnaise inside. So I thought what bread recipe would better apply to this than Nigella’s potato bread. Call it potato on potato. And if you’re walking around in your Juicy trackpants, thermals and wooly socks, what better way to celebrate not having to wear your jeans than with an unashamed carb fest.

The soup was lovely on it’s own but like all great partnerships, it becomes so much more moreish when partnered with the spongy yet crunchy crusted bread. And if you think that it’s all too much of a production making the bread along with the soup, the smell of it baking in the oven should convince you otherwise. I’m pretty sure you could fit this in amongst your busy at home schedule. I managed to between appointments with Oprah and Entertainment Tonight.

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When I visited my sister in London a few years ago, she gave a little booklet of recipe excerpts from Jamie’s Italy that came with the paper. I confess I am not a big Jamie Oliver watcher-too much saliva for me. But his recipes are reliably good and they do inspire my husband to give cooking a go which can only be a good thing. I’ve cooked the eggplant parmigiana from this book too and it’s great although eggplant, cheese and tomato can’t go wrong as a combination (unless of course McDonalds fiddled with it). I even bought a copy of this book for a friend of mine who is Italian-perhaps in the hope that she’ll cook some dishes for me!

After having a couple of “sausages and lentils” dishes in Paris, I wanted to try some of my own, albeit these would have an Italian flavour rather than a French one. I didn’t use Italian sausages as specified in the recipe but I had some great coarse grind Lamb, leek, thyme and mint ones. After watching an episode of “The F Word” where they discuss the minimum amount of meat that actually needs to go into a sausage (from a frightening 30% to the highest 66% for a gourmet variety in the UK) I have become a bit of a tray flipper carefully examining the % of meat in the sausages I buy. These are thankfully 76% meat and are by the “Coles finest” brand. Of course the packet doesn’t tell you know how much connective tissue is used but I am hoping not too much, especially if its a coarse grind sausage where the meat needs to be a touch more obvious.

And as you can probably tell I didn’t use green lentils as I only had brown lentils. I boiled them with 6 garlic cloves, 2 bay leaves and 3 teaspoons of balsamic vinegar and a fat pinch of salt and then tossed them in the oil that came out of the sausages.

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Is it possible to have lust at first sight? Of couse, and as a married woman, it seems to only happen nowadays with Chanel bags, sweet and cakes. I first saw these on the Womans Day US site and knew I had to make something similar. There’s something just so retro and sunny about these that I was drawn to.

I know, I know, the petals aren’t that daisy shaped but think of this cupcake as an homage to the daisy or a similarly shaped flower. The coconut makes the cake so moist and do I need to go on about my love for lemon curd and lemon rind? I think not, for fear of being muzzled…

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I came to London armed. Armed with Nigella recipes of things to cook with ingredients that I couldn’t get in Australia. I had recipes such a perfect roasted potatoes made with Goose fat and Roasted Goose. What I didn’t count on was Goose being out of season until December. So distressed at having a dinner party the next night I flung myself on Waitrose’s meat counter (not literally) and picked up two Free range Guinea Fowls, raised for Waitrose in France’s Loire Valley.

Looking at them, they looked like a chicken, with black legs. I used one of Waitrose’s recipes based on the fact that it was simple and it required not too many ingredients. Lower in fat than chicken, they’re tender with slightly drier meat with a gamey taste.

I am always very apprehensive trying to cook new types of food. Especially for dinner parties for people that I haven’t cooked for before. There was a time when we were preparing this when I asked my husband to quarter the Guinea Fowls and when he asked “How?” to which I frantically replied “I don’t know! Just quarter them!”. He did a pretty good job in the end and the recipe is quite ideal for a dinner party as most of the work is in the browning of the pieces and the peeling, coring and slicing the apples. The rest is a cinch and I suggest that you make more of the sauce than specified. It’s downright delicious with any sort of meat. And please know that I’m not suggesting that you try and track down a Free range Guinea Fowl, a good chicken will do.

As for the perfect roast potatoes, I’ve tried these using a butter and oil mix which works but but now that I’ve tried using Goose fat I have to confess that yes indeed, using Goose Fat does produce superior results. And interestingly, I have read that Goose Fat is, despite what one would assume, the most balanced of all animal fats because it has far less saturated fats than butter and lard and has far more ‘heart healthy’ monounsaturated (55g compared to 19.8g in butter) and polyunsaturated fats (10.8g compared to 2.6g in butter), which are essential for good health. In comparison to other animal fats, it is possibly one of the reasons that cardio-vascular disease is not as prevalent in the goose rearing and consuming regions of the South West of France as in some other regions of Europe. So Goose Fat it up!

I didn’t use anything close to the amount of goose fat that Nigella used though, in fact I used less than a can and even then I thought it was too much. I don’t know how I’d go about finding Goose Fat in Australia. It’s readily available here, and in fact, apparently around Christmas, it’s impossible to get a tin due to Nigella and Delia’s raves. Is it crazy to pack tins of it in my luggage?

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I sat on this recipe for months literally, trying to find an opportunity where I would have two whole hours to make breakfast. Not surprisingly, it took a while to get a chance to do this. I have possums to either blame or thank for this. Either a possum or a small serial killer hiding in the ceiling. I was awoken at 4am by a strange scratching sound. Actually I was woken by my husband who loves to do diving triple back flips in his sleep making the bed seem like a waterbed. And whilst I was trying to get back to sleep I heard an strange scratching sound which scared me. It was definitely in the house so I woke him and he went to investigate without a weapon despite me trying to give him one (ok a laundry basket won’t offer you much protection). The alarm was still on and after a lot of investigation, we concluded that the scratching was coming from the ceiling cavity.

I was most definitely awake.

And what I like to do when I am woken at ungodly hours is bake. I feel I should at least get a food reward for being up so early. And so I did, with a bit of a false start where I had difficulty dissolving the yeast in the milk. I ended up needing more milk than the 2 tablespoons specified in the recipe and I threw out the greying lump of yeast that I had managed to make and started again with 1/2 cup of milk. The rest was fairly smooth sailing especially once I starting greasing the egg rings. If you eat them straight away, they’re divinely fluffy and gorgeously although once they cool they become a bit more traditional crumpets although much fresher. And instead of dripping honey on them, I used a chestnut syrup, made when I did my 4 day stint in foodie rehab, making Marron Glaces. My husband happily wolfed down 10 of them before bypassing lunch.

On a related note, we had possums in our previous house, as my father, in a streak of brilliance (not!) stored the bird seed in the ceiling cavity. Yes, seriously.

If you’re interested in a bit of background knowledge on Crumpets, Vogue forum member Pinyata who works at the Tip Top factory that makes crumpets had this to say:

I’m working at Tip Top at the moment. And I do believe that Tip Top is the only company to make crumpets in Australia. I’m not really sure why, but there doesn’t appear to be anyone else that I can think of.

Now here’s a story for you, I’m not sure if it’s 100% true, but I’m prepared to make bet that it is. As I mentioned crumpets are notorious for going mouldy very quickly, and this is because they are only partially cooked. Unlike all other baking processes, the top surface of the crumpet isn’t heated above 60degC, so it doesn’t kill off all the bugs and bacteria that is living in the batter. And to make matters worse, since they are heated, it creates a warm moist environment, which is perfect to harbour the growth of bacteria. So by the time it’s packed it already has elevated bacteria levels, and so it doesn’t take long for there to be an outbreak, which can be seen as the mould.

This means that they have a very high return rate of mouldy product, which costs the business money. So they put their noggins together and tried to come up with a way people could have the taste and texture of crumpets, but also cook them fully so as to alleviate the mould issue. And this is when the crumpet toast was born. They don’t make it on this site, but I think it’s made in the NSW site. One of our engineers commissioned that plant, so I’ll ask her.

Now the reason why the crumpet toast is the solution, is because as you can see, it’s more like a baked loaf of bread. This means that it has been through the ovens and heated to over 60degC and all the bacteria is killed off.
So over the last few years the food technologists would have been scratching their heads and experimenting with a way to come up with a batter that could be baked, and have the same taste and texture as a normal crumpet. I personally think they have done a very good job, since it’s very close.

So that’s my belief as to why the crumpet toast was invented. Purely to extend the shelf life of the product so that it becomes more profitable.

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