A (long) trip to the Hairdresser...

I went to the hairdresser on Friday.....




....yes, I know what you're thinking......that's news???
Well, not exactly, but my hairdresser is located exactly one hour and forty five minutes drive from my house....and no, it's not some swanky salon in Mayfair, it's a little village three man band in deepest Hampshire.
Where is she going with this I can hear you asking.....the truth is I think that slowly but surely I'm turning into my mother (happy birthday Mum by the way, I wish so much you were still around to join me for a celebration lunch or raise a glass with & I miss you every day)....When I was somewhat younger my mother had some habitual things she did which to me, seemed a bit 'odd' (I don't think she ever drove nearly two hours to the hairdresser though). I do recall now as I replace, one by one, every cup or mug I have in the house with others of the finest bone china, her telling me that she couldn't possibly drink tea from anything other than fine china as it didn't taste the same....
I remember chiding her in the same voice I now hear in my G.G's e-mails, text messages or on the other end of a phone.....
Do we eventually all develop at least some of our mother's habits which drove us crazy when we were growing up? Or am I just too mean to pay London prices to get my hair done? Have a happy week everyone........s

Paolo Nutini...another great Scottish export...

A little ragtime fun frippery for a wet Tuesday - I have a number of Scottish favourites in my music collection and the tousled Paolo is the latest addition....

The Object of My Affection...

Before we moved to the U.K we were aware that the AGA symbolises and epitomises the heart of the home in a lot of English country houses.





When we came over for extended visits and stayed in houses where one was installed, we marvelled at the flexibility of these cumbersome objects - not only cooker but hot water heater, clothes drier, plate warmer, take the edge off cold shoes and boots gadget, cat, dog and human bottom warmer & a myriad other things besides!

This is the shiny fire engine red one in our current kitchen (complete with old fashioned drying rack above)....AGA have recently re-introduced this colour after dropping it from their range for a while...When we were looking for somewhere in the U.K one of the pre-requisites on our list was that architecturally, the house should be as far removed as possible from the homes in Sydney & preferably with character and an AGA. All very fine ideas until the day we moved in and I realised there was no other oven and all my cooking would henceforth be done without access to knobs, dials or temperature controls! I hastily made my way to the nearest bookshop and read up on what Mary Berry and other AGA fans had to say...For the first few days, it looked like this rather a lot - lots of washing drying over it but no pans actually ON it!

This is a stylised version of what it usually looks like (the pile of ironing is usually quite a bit bigger!) Quite a lot of stuff can actually be taken off the drying rack and folded, put on the 'cool side' as below and doesn't need any ironing at all...don't make the same mistake as I did & try to double up the amount of airing space - the left side is the 'hot side'....if anyone has a remedy for very bad scorch marks on white sheets, please let me know.....

OK - I don't want to bore you all to death with the technology but just briefly, this is a summary of the way it all works: (I'm only talking about the version I'm familiar with but there are other options available such as additional hobs/ovens & they can be adapted to suit whatever fuel you have available. We don't have gas at this house so the AGA runs on oil).

Looking at the AGA from the front, the left side hob is the 'hot' one and the right side hob is the 'cool' one (or boiling/simmering whichever you prefer!) The oven at the top is the roasting oven (at a constant temp of about 240 - 260C) and the bottom oven is the simmering oven (constant temp of about 115 - 135C). (No temperature control apart from a little gauge which you can see below the chrome bar - this should be at the optimum point always and can be adjusted with a switch in the control box - bottom left). The AGA principle is that you move the food from hob to hot oven or hob to cool oven (or both in tandem) - thereby controlling the speed at which you are cooking rather than the temperature of the oven (does that make sense?) If you know you are catering for a crowd the following day and will need the oven hot for roasting or 'grilling' you can hike up the temperature in preparation....you just have to then be careful not to open the hobs before you need the oven as if you do, the heat escapes and your oven is rendered too cool - not a happy situation when you have eight people seated at the table expecting roast lunch with all the trimmings (I am speaking from experience here!) The general rule is that (opposite to a conventional cooker) you should be cooking only 20% on the hobs and 80% using the always hot ovens thus retaining the maximum amount of heat.

Now I should tell you at this point that I absolutely love the AGA and wouldn't want to be without one....ever....it's like any other new relationship - it just takes a bit of getting to know each other and being aware of maybe a few little foibles and quirks...Once you've got that all under your belt, it's plain sailing.....until baking day anyway.....If I were putting in a new AGA I would definitely opt for the version which has a dedicated baking oven. Alternatively, you can have a conventional oven for baking only and do everything else in the AGA. The AGA shines when it comes to roasting & simmering - the bottom 'slow' oven is just terrific for cooking casseroles (brought to a simmer first on the hot hob) and rice is a doddle - bring to a simmer, put into the simmering oven and leave until needed (within reason)! Ah, that brings me to another point...because of the way the AGA is constructed, there is no smell emanating when you are cooking...AGA actually maufacture a magnet which reads 'I'm Cooking' - you stick it on whichever oven is in use and (apparently!) it reminds you! I've lost track of the number of times LAB has gone to put something in the roasting/grilling oven and found some pieces of charcoal left from the night before....luckily, nothing seems to combust, it just turns black (though I'd better not speak too soon)....

There are now all sorts of jazzy colours to choose from as well as the usual range of suspects:

How about this from Emma Bridgewater?

And finally, some wonderful kitchens built around the heart of the whole house, the AGA....

I just put this pic in to show you - if you don't have a rack above it, you can buy an airer which sits across and does the job wonderfully (no scorch marks!!!)

This is a large four oven version with extra gas hob to the side:

This one a completely different look - large four oven version again and with additional hob at the side but not the traditional AGA look at all...just shows you can put them into any setting and they still look at home....

This is the version which I have & probably the look I prefer - I love the warmth of the textures - terracotta & wood...

Another completely different take:

I like this look too - clean & uncluttered with the warmth of the red AGA at the centre:

So there you have it - my guide to living with and loving an AGA! Now, have to run before I burn another lemon cake.....This is specially for Meredy & Jeanne (hope I have covered it all!!!) Happy week of cooking everyone whatever sort of cooker you know and love........s

From my kitchen....

to yours.....







Have a wonderful weekend.......s

Will the Real Domestic Goddess Please Stand Up?

Before the ravishing Nigella got dental work, a stylist and started seducing us all with her particular brand of gastroporn on T.V involving deep fried bounty bars and gammon cooked in cherry coca cola, she wrote, I think, the most brilliant encyclopedic book about food and how to cook (and eat) it.




I am going to own up right here to my secret guilty pleasure - I have two copies of this book, one lives on the kitchen dresser and the other on (or very near) my bedside table...

I love this book, I probably know it off by heart such is the extent of my devotion. I like her and I like all her books, I probably just like the one she did before the publishers and T.V producers pounced a bit more....but as Nigella says:

"Enjoying food, enjoying eating, isn't about graduating with honours from the Good Taste university. I'm not interested in pleasing food snobs or purists."

Who am I to argue?

There are those who will argue that the original Domestic Goddess was writing serious books about food and cooking long before Nigella was even a twinkle in her father's eye (Did Nigel Lawson ever have a twinkle in his eye, it's difficult to imagine....) I digress.....Elizabeth David published her first book, Mediterranean Food, in 1950....when olive oil was something you bought at Boots the chemist and Britain was in a post war slump. Can you imagine? Recipes for octopus & bouillabaise when the jaded workers of post-war Britain were coming home to a stew of vegetables covered in white sauce (made with margarine). I think a lot of her appeal was that she was writing of exotic places and exotic flavours...her lifestyle in France, Italy, Egypt and the Greek Islands a whole world away from grey provincial England where bananas were a rarity.

At that time the things she was writing about were totally foreign to the average cook but that didn't hold her back....

I have read somewhere that this was the beginning of the whole 'food pornography' industry - maybe she and Nigella have more in common than it first appears..........s

I've Got Sunshine on a Cloudy (Grey, Drizzly, Miserable!) Day....

I'm interrupting my fave food writers run to just say thank you to the lovely & energetic Jeanne at http://collageoflife-henrqs.blogspot.com for this: Jeanne, you bring sunshine into the world of so many of us every day & we're glad to have you around - thank you for sharing it....




Apologies for leaving my task uncompleted but I just wanted to let her know that I appreciate this and all that she does......s

Family Life by Elisabeth Luard - Birth, Death and the Whole Damn Thing....

I'm continuing the theme of favourite food writers and this lady would be high on my list of favourites....In fact she is the author of probably my favourite book, ever....'Family Life', the story of her life travelling and living in France and Andalusia with her (often absent) husband and four children Caspar, Francesca, Poppy & Honey. This was written and published before the 'travel writing with recipes' genre really took off and was probably one of the first of its kind. Libby Purves wrote for The Times:
"Robust, wise, light but never flippant...unspeakably moving. You leave it with a strengthened sense of what families are: hostages to fortune, doorways to the worst grief and yet a rough, undesigned shelter from it. Few writers have so well described the solid nourishment of family life. She deserves a medal."

It was the Guild of Food Writers' Book of the Year in 1996.....

Her latest autobiographical offering 'My Life as A Wife - Love, Liquor and what to do about the Other Women' documents her marriage to the charismatic, charming Nicholas Luard who, when she first met him, was the proprietor of Private Eye. Unfortunately for Elisabeth, he was also a philanderer and eventually, an alcoholic.

Her autobiographical accounts amount to just a small part of her work - she writes regularly for several magazines including Waitrose Food Illustrated, and her food writing includes 'Classic French', 'Classic Spanish', the acclaimed 'European Peasant Cookery', 'Saffron and Sunshine' and 'Sacred Food'. She writes with wisdom, honesty, individuality and spirit, the theme of the family table pivotal in every publication. At the end of one of her introductions she admits to having discovered no panacea for the troubles which afflict humanity, unless it is that a meal shared round the kitchen table serves both as a celebration of the good times and a comfort in times of trouble. She quotes the words of a 'wise old clergyman' of her acquaintance "Take a short view of life. Look no further than dinner or tea." I would love to see 'Family Life' included in the Bounty Bag handed out in hospital to all new mothers! Compulsive (& compulsory) reading......s