Cooking for Jeff's parents

I think Jeff and I could quite happily do a grown up 'dinner party' after last night!

I phoned Jeff at 12:30 yesterday afternoon to say I was going to be 30 minutes early to his house as I managed to escape from a prior engagement early. Jeff was cool about this but said he wasn't at home, he was still running around, trying to get all the ingredients for tonight's meal and unfortunately one of the Farm shops we usually go to shut at midday on Sundays so he had to head to another one! I said no problem at all and that I'd pop over his and wait for him.

Obviously when I got to Jeff's house and let myself in, I couldn't just sit there, so when I looked outside and saw the bird feeders were empty (no blame apportioned to Jeff here as he'd been working and therefore was knackered) I decided I would fill them all up which took a few minutes and hopefully meant the birds wouldn't go hungry for a few days. After that I decided I'd wash my car - great idea in theory, stupid idea in practice when I realised all I was doing was smearing the dirt around with a sponge and making it look worse than when I started - whoops :-S Whoever said that women were good at cleaning was talking out their arse.

So, Jeff arrived back home and said he had most things but still needed to get a few bits and bobs at the supermarket so I jumped in the car and we headed off. It took about 40 minutes to go round the supermarket as we kept thinking of other things we probably needed to buy for tonight, however after we had run up each isle about 10 times, bought extra plates, new small plates (for starters and deserts) we called it quits.

After getting back to Jeff's, Jeff kindly helped me clean my car 'properly' and got his hosepipe out (oo-er missus!) which helped a lot - it also meant we could water the tulips and the sweet peas which are still currently in Jeff's garage. As we only planted them a week ago, there isn't anything interesting to report, but as soon as there is, I shall be taking photographs and updating anyone who is interested on the 'Tulips and Sweet Peas from Amsterdam'!

We then decided to slightly tidy Jeff's house and prepare as much food as possible before Jeff's parents arrived. For starters we were going to do the lamb flatbreads with pine nuts and a salad - all of this was prepared beforehand which took about 10 minutes and then we could just put it in the oven when we wanted to start cooking. For main, we did the 'pan fried venison' with blackberry sauce. We did a sweet potato mash and green beans for the vegetables and didn't need to prepare any of this beforehand as it took about 15 minutes to cook in total. Pudding was the 'Ginger puddings' and we had bought some lovely vanilla custard to go with them. These took about 50 minutes to steam / cook in the oven, so Jeff and I made them up, put them in ramekins and just waited until we were cooking the main dish to put them into the oven.

His parents loved the food - even his Mother who is a very petite lady and doesn't eat very much managed to eat everything! Well, she ate the three courses, she couldn't manage the cheese board which we created after pudding (but Jeff's Dad and Jeff had a go at it!).

I headed off about 9pm which meant I could get back home, sort things out for work and not be too tired. It was lovely seeing Jeff's parents as they're lovely people and very friendly, however it was slightly weird as, of course, I hadn't seen them since we split up last time and obviously we didn't talk about that - but thoughts did keep popping up in my head such as 'I wonder if they think we're going to split up again?' or 'I wonder how much they know about last time?' Ahh well. We said we would cook for them again when we go and visit them over Easter and they seemed quite happy to let us :-)

Jeff's parents also decided to buy Jeff a lot of meat at their local butchers so I have a feeling Jeff and I will be cooking some of it on Wednesday night, when we next see each other - God knows what we will cook, but whatever it is, I will be sure to take photographs of it!

- Molly

Amazingly busy weekend

Do you ever have weekends where you just really don’t want them to be over? More so than usual? This is certainly one of them as Jeff and I had a really great couple of days and sadly it’s going to be months before we can spend another weekend together.

It started off really well when Jeff emailed me on Friday night, from work, saying he had actually got his time off authorised – this meant he could go home a few hours early and I could pop over early on Saturday morning so we could get cracking on all the ‘cool’ stuff we had planned to do! I drove over to his for 11:00am and we got straight into the car and headed off to a local butchers which I had been told about by a work colleague. What made this butchers different, is that they sold ‘unusual’ meat such as ostrich, alligator, kangaroo etc. I thought it might be quite fun for us to try and cook something different so I ordered 2 kangaroo and 2 ostrich steaks earlier on in the week and said I would pick them up on Saturday.

As Jeff usually drives, I offered to drive us there which was great in theory, but we got rather lost and I ended up driving up rather windy roads, doubling back on myself more than once and don’t mind admitting that I was close to giving up! We did eventually find the butchers but it certainly wasn’t easy! One of the nicest things about the place was we had to drive down this windy track and there were loads of wild quails in the grass – they looked very cute and whilst I was born and raised in the countryside, I had never seen wild quails before, not sure why, I guess they just didn’t like the county I lived in!

With the meat bought, we headed back to Jeff’s house and popped the kangaroo steaks in the freezer and started to defrost the ostrich steaks so we could start cooking them a few hours later. We then swapped cars and Jeff and I headed off to Hampton Court. As it’s ‘low season’ Hampton Court stops selling tickets at 3:30pm, so we wanted to get there as early as possible to give us chance to look around the place properly. I had been there before, but Jeff hadn’t, so it was nice to do something together but it also felt nice doing something that Jeff hadn’t done with anyone else before.

Hampton Court was, as always, very beautiful – the gardens especially. We had a lovely few hours walking around the place and holding hands through the gardens before ending up in the small café for a very well deserved cup of tea! On the way back we had decided to go food shopping to get all the ingredients for our recipes that we were planning on trying that night and poor Jeff ended up £50 poorer! (I am planning on contributing to the next few shops so I don’t sponge off him, I am very paranoid about that!).

Whilst being very knackered when we got back to Jeff’s, somehow we ended up in the kitchen and got straight on with marinating the ostrich and cooking a couple of ‘low fat’ puddings that caught my eye in my food magazine (I tear out the recipes I like the sound of and keep them in a binder). We made low fat ginger puddings with light ice cream and berry parfaits. I think we were both bloody impressed with the ginger puddings – they were brilliant and tasted gorgeous. We decided that with a little less ginger and perhaps a lighter mix, they’d be perfect. Sadly the berry parfaits didn’t turn out as well and whilst they looked rather attractive, the sauce was too tart and the recipe said you needed a ripe banana to mash up and mix into the mixture – we didn’t feel it tasted that nice and so we probably won’t be doing that one again.

The ostrich on the other hand – total success! Well, it probably would have tasted nicer if we hadn’t been drinking vodka and Ameretto and had got slightly drunk, forgot about the grilling ostrich and then remembered 10 minutes later so it was ever so slightly burnt, but hey – we called it ‘well done’ and it tasted quite fruity – we’d certainly eat it again and are planning on buying some more, soon. We served it with vegetables and were quite chuffed that we had done something different.

The rest of Saturday night was spent watching films and pre-recorded TV and generally enjoying being with each other.

Sunday morning – lie in? Of course not! Jeff and I got up and made ‘Almond puff pancakes’ which I thought looked really nice – Jeff used the mini frying pan I had bought him for his birthday and we made a really nice stack of them. We chose this recipe as it was low carb (0.9g per pancake) and low fat (89 calories per pancake) however, I thought they tasted vile so refused to eat more than one mouthful. Jeff didn’t mind them so ate his and then mine, but as they contained ground almond the texture was really strange and not what I was expecting.

After the breakfast disaster we headed to a nearby Farmers market and despite the rain, had a really nice time buying some different meats and random things – blueberry jam, a whole crab (which we are planning on dressing at some point – it’s currently in Jeff’s freezer) a haunch of venison and some parmesan cheese. We also bought some venison and pork meatballs which we had for lunch when we got back – they were lovely!

On the way back we went to the garden centre to buy some compost so that Jeff and I could plant the tulip bulbs that we bought in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago. Jeff also bought a couple more bird feeders as he’s found that the birds in his garden are so greedy, they empty his feeders within a couple of days and if he’s working a shift it can be tricky to refill them quickly which means the birds don’t get fed for a while!

We potted our tulips in Jeff’s garage and also planted the sweet peas we had bought in Amsterdam flower market. I suggested to Jeff we make some pyramids with some garden canes so the peas have something to climb up and we could pop them on his patio in the back garden – I think they will smell gorgeous, especially in the summer when we have BBQ’s on summer evenings and smell the sweet peas!

Unfortunately I had to leave shortly after our garden adventure and driving away was pretty crap – Jeff and I did so much this weekend and I enjoyed every minute of it. Thankfully we’ve got loads of fun things planned in the weeks to come and I guess it makes me realise more so than before, how lucky I am that we’ve got back in contact and it’s as if we’ve both been given a ‘second chance’ with each other.

-Molly