Juicy Lucy, anyone?

It’s been a weird start to the week as both Jeff and I have been really busy, so we haven’t really contacted each other much. Jeff had to text me yesterday to see whether or not I was still staying at his last night! I replied that I was and Jeff was kind enough to go out shopping for all the bits and bobs we needed for cooking as he’s not at work until tomorrow.

I arrived around his house at 5:15pm and Jeff made me a cup of tea (Teapigs tea! We bought this at a farm shop at the weekend and it’s actually very nice) and we had a bit of a catch up and a natter in the kitchen. Currently Jeff is looking for another job and will hopefully be changing soon – this means he’ll no longer be on shifts and will be working a more normal 9-5, Monday-Friday type job. Good in one way as he won’t be working with such cretins (his words) however it does mean he won’t get as much time off, which I know he likes as he enjoys doing stuff to his car and generally chilling. I, on the other hand, was ranting about one of my work colleagues who is a friend and who I also manage (tricky situation, I know – I only started managing them a few months ago, they’ve been my friend for while) this ‘friend / work colleague’ is having some problems with their ex and have been moaning, moaning, moaning about it to me. Whilst I appreciate it’s a horrible situation, you know where you get to the point of saying ‘I JUST DON’T CARE’? Especially when they are so wrapped up in themselves that they don’t bother stopping and asking, ‘So, how are YOU?’ it’s all about them? Poor Jeff listened to my ranting with a bemused look on his face for ages before I decided I had better shut up as I didn’t want to turn into my friend!

We started cooking straight away and switched on Jeff’s slow cooker – we had decided we were going to glaze the smoked gammon joint (the one we bought at the Farmers market on Sunday, after Jeff met my Mum) with honey and stick some water in the bottom with mustard. Why? As it seemed like a good idea. What wasn’t a good idea, and what I didn’t realise until we had cooked it for 3 hours was, you were supposed to leave the string around the meat alone as it’s a ‘cooking aid’ – no one has ever told me this before, so there I was, merrily cutting away the string before plonking it into the slow cooker – the whole blinking thing fell apart so when we took it out, it looked a bit sad! Still, it tasted absolutely gorgeous, We tried to eat as much as possible but I had to admit defeat so Jeff has quite a large chunk of the stuff left at his house, which I am sure he will devour today :-)

We also decided to cook a new pudding – ‘Juicy Lucy’  http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1037/juicy-lucy-pudding which was another recipe off the BBC Good food website. Jeff, being pretty proactive, had already got the frozen berries out and had got the correct blueberry jam (after mistakenly buying a cherry one earlier in the day). We peeled and cored all the pears, stuck the correct amount of sugar in and stuck it in the oven. It actually took longer to make the pears juicy than the time it said on the recipe (we’re finding this a lot – that it takes longer to cook than stated and I don’t think it’s Jeff’s oven as he has a normal fan assisted one) Anyway, after an hour, we poured the fresh breadcrumbs mixed with butter onto the pudding, stuck it back in the oven and 15 minutes later it was ready. We were really impressed as for the first time, it looked EXACTLY like the recipe and it tasted bloody great! The only thing we think we would do differently next time is actually make more breadcrumbs (which we did in Jeff’s new food processor) – however we do appreciate that the pudding will be slightly less low fat than if we stuck strictly to the recipe. Either way – we have decided that this is the pudding we are going to be cooking for Jeff’s parents when we go and visit them at Easter.

Next, we decided we would try the toffee puddings again as they didn’t turn out completely right before – Jeff had bought some caramel sauce and we added this due to the puddings not really tasting very toffee like, last time. Did they work this time? Well, yes and no – we tried one with a very runny consistency and even after an hour the thing wasn’t cooked. However the one we added some baking powder to, and an extra egg white was cooked and it tasted ‘OK’ but just nothing amazing so I think we’re going to call that one a part success in the sense that we didn’t kill ourselves, nor throw up, however I don’t think we’ll be doing that recipe again.

We also checked on our tulips and sweet peas that we had sewn in the pots a few weeks ago. The tulips are doing really, really well and you can see that most of them are coming up nicely and there’s a good 2-3 cm tip out of the soil. Unfortunately we can’t see any movement from the peas, which we are hoping is normal and that in a few weeks when it gets a bit warmer, they’ll start to sprout. We watered them a little bit more and left them to it.

After watching some of our ‘normal’ TV programs (I’m not entirely convinced anyone could call the type of TV we watch, normal) I suggested we go out for a drive as I was feeling a bit restless so at 9:30pm Jeff and I went for a small drive around where he lived which was nice. Then we came back, had a shower and went to bed as I am working today.

I’m next seeing Jeff on Saturday where I think we’ll just have a quiet night as he’s working on Saturday and Sunday so I’ll pop over just before he gets back home and start dinner. I know it might seem like currently our lives / relationship revolves around cooking low fat food and visiting farmers markets, however, hopefully in the summer I’ll be able to post about all the other things we are doing – such as visiting a lot of National Trust properties, going to loads of classical concerts and basically not being stuck in the house due to dark nights and horrible weather!

-Molly