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

Jeff's Birthday (By Jeff)

Birthday!

Finally I have found the time to do a blog post. Normally, this is Molly's domain - she's a much better writer than me, I find, and this kind of thing takes me a lot longer to do. However, I shall try my best. If you get bored at least there are some pictures!

The morning came and I awoke after a surprisingly pleasant night's sleep - but up I had to get as I had a busy day ahead of me, as Molly was coming over after work, and I had volunteered to find the centre piece of my birthday meal - Vension steak.

After trying our usual farm shop and finding it closed (on Mondays! Who knew?) I tried another butcher, who recommended another farm shop, and when I went there they cut some steaks freshly for me.

The recipe had said that I needed to get ones that were thick, so I got them about an inch thick... which is quite a good deal thicker than I was expecting, but as it happened we ended up with a kilogram of venison meat for less than a tenner - not bad value really, especially as it was very tender and very fresh.

On arriving back home, I noticed that my travels around the local area had taken up the vast majority of the afternoon and I only had a few minutes before Molly arrived after her day at work, so set about tidying and making the house sensible (not too lived in, if you know what I mean).

A knock at the door. There she was, somewhat radiant and glowing with a massive grin on her face - certainly something I always enjoy seeing - complete with a big bag of presents!

Excited? Me? Yes, I was. But my excitement pales into insignificance versus the excitement of Molly when she's buying presents for or giving presents out to other people, and this time I was on the receiving end.

As well as a very, very cool personalised moonpig card, I received The Jeremy Clarkson collection on DVD (cool), two low fat GoodFood recipe books (brilliant!), the Collins book fo British Birds (to help us identifying the birdies in the garden), a spanner keyring, a Haynes manual-style VW Golf GTi mug (I'm a VW fan, and the mug is awesome), a lovely new ProCook cook's knife, very sharp, and the best of all a mini single-egg non-stick frying pan, which is the most awesome and cute looking pan I've ever seen. Excellent!

Certainly a very good haul, and I thanked Molly for all her effort with wrapping and buying the presents.
And so to the kitchen to prepare our meal. Molly had discovered a particularly nice fruity gravy (it probably had a posh name, but that's what I think of it as) complete with blackberries, and so while the venison steaks were in the pan being lightly fried, we set about making that and cooking asparagus, cauliflower and broccoli.

The meal was incredibly delicious and the venison so tender - one of the things that I have found that since we've found each other again, the amount of cooking we're doing has really blown me away. I love cooking with Mol, and while we've had successes and failures, we always enjoy the process, as well as the results (when they turn out well!).

Following our meal, we decided it would be a good thing to have a nice relaxing evening, so kicked back and watched some particularly awful TV (as I understand it, we were watching The Biggest Loser USA - Molly has a er, fascination of watching what I deem to be "chav TV", but I don't mind really, it beats soap operas). Sadly Molly had to go home before work the next day, so as she headed off into the night I was very sad to see her go, but at the same time wondering just when my next fried egg was going to be so I could use the incredibly cool mini-pan she'd bought me.

-Jeff