Key Lime... er Crumble

Hwsgo has been innovative in the kitchen. Perhaps my "try it and see" style of cooking is rubbing off on him after all. Anyways, he found himself without a lemon (a terrible sin in his household) whilst making an apple crumble, and substituted it with a lime instead.

It's quite a revelation. All the liminess of a key lime pie, but underlaid with the sweet crunch of a proper British crumble. It wouldn't work with nuts in the crumble mix, but with a 'normal' Jamie Oliver 8:4:3 (flour:butter:sugar) mix, it works intriguingly well. Although stewing the apples with a little water seems to have left the results a little on the damp side, it's a very tasty damp side.

Go, innovation, go!

Seedlings

I have delivered lots of seedlings to Hwsgo. They may die, but they probably won't. Apart from the Basil, which is midway through a typical basil sulk that it may or may not recover from. We really need an amalgum of our two homes: mine has radiators, double-glazing and big windowsills, but Hwsgo's has lots of light. Heat, light, water, food: doesn't take much to make a plant grow, but it's surprisingly difficult to get all these things in the same place.

Plants delivered are (so Hwsgo doesn't forget what he has): rocket (currently under debate), parsley (the stuff that looks like grass), coriander (2 types in 1 pot), basil, and sunflowers and sweetpeas for colour. I'm taking the chilli and lobelia back home for a bit more heat treatment, and I have tomatoes and tarragon still under observation there at the moment. Now I have empty windowsills, I'm tempted to grow on something more. A pot of strong mint would be good, some more coriander (can never have emough of that), and some more herbs seems about right. I already have carrot and radish seeds waiting to be put into veg buckets at home - will see how I do with them too. It's just a shame that my garden is too dark to grow much in it (neighbour: big trees). One day I'll move somewhere lighter.

Simon: Omelette Arnold Bennett (p195, 89, 187)

A complicated recipe. Oh boy, is this a complicated one. Not because the steps involved are complex in their own right, but because of the sheer number of things that you have to do at the same time. Although I suspect this can be simplified in practice: maybe we were just in a complicated mood.

The recipe uses two sauces, bechamel and hollandaise, mixed together. First, you have to find the sauces in the book: use the numbers above because the ones in the recipe don't work. And try to do things in order: the bechamel needs 30 minutes to steep, so do that then start poaching the fish, then make up the hollandaise. Yesterday, I messed up - we were cooking this as a two-hander, Hwsgo was around the hob, and my confidence as a saucier just went. I turned the heat up too high, didn't stop early enough, and the egg part of the hollandaise started to go scrambled. A trip downstairs to buy more butter and ten minutes later I'd produced an okay sauce, but it really wasn't a good moment for me. I guess, like transplanting seedlings, it takes a degree of concentration and sympathy for the thing being handled.

There's a lot of seasoning in this recipe (in each sauce and in the omelette mix too), so you need to be careful with the salt: it's easy to overdo it. There's also a lot of stuff going on at once, although having cooked this recipe, I see no reason why the sauces couldn't be made well in advance, leaving just the fish and egg mix to be concentrated on.

The omelettes are tasty and we enjoyed eating them, but we both agreed in the end that given the amount of work (and number of pans) involved, there are many other Simons that we'd rather have eaten for dinner. This recipe is definitely filed under "things that we're happy to buy in restaurants rather than making ourselves".