cooking experiments [more fixation on food]

I received the above bowl (or jar?) above as a[nother X’mas] gift. Not only it is a beautiful pottery from a Norman handicraft centre, at Noron-la-Poterie, but it is specially designed to cook Norman-style rice pudding, and it does it superbly! (The recipe stems from bakers cooking rice in cold and creamy Norman milk while their traditional wood oven was cooling down. The ensuing slow cooking produces a very creamy rice pudding.)

Besides testing this new bowl, I further experimented on the kitchen front this week with a Nutella galette des rois and a red wine risotto, both of which were far from successes! Maybe due to the poor Pic Saint-Loup I used… The most notable achievements were borrowed from two recipes I found in The Guardian. Including a sweet potato tarte tatin. Even though the sausage and kale dish found therein let me [and even more my family] quite dubious about the appeal of kale for human consumption…

hot X buns

Since this is Easter weekend, and given my unreasonable fondness for hot-cross buns all year long, I tried to cook my own buns tonight, with a reasonable amount of success (!) given that it was my first attempt. I found an on-line recipe, mostly followed it, except that I added the yolk mixed with sugar to make the buns brown and shiny et voilà. If I ever try again to make those buns, I will look for an alternate way to make the [St. Andrew’s] crosses!

absurdum technicae

In what could have been the most expensive raclette ever, I almost get rid of my oven! Last weekend, to fight the ongoing cold wave, we decided to have a raclette with mountain cheese and potatoes, but the raclette machine (mostly a resistance to melt the cheese) had an electric issue and kept blowing the meter. We then decided to use the over to melt the cheese but, while giving all signs of working, it would not heat. Rather than a cold raclette, we managed with the microwave (!), but I though the oven had blown as well. The next morning, I still checked on the web for similar accidents and found the explanation: by pressing the proper combination of buttons, we had succeeded to switch the over into the demo mode, used by shops to run the oven with no heating. The insane part of this little [very little] story is that nowhere in the manual appeared any indication of an existing demo mode and of a way of getting back to normal! After pushing combinations of buttons at random, I eventually got the solution and the oven is again working, instead of standing in the recycling bin.

my week in a Tudor farmhouse

As I could not book my “usual” maths house on the campus of the University of Warwick, I searched for another accommodation and discovered a nice shared house in the countryside (next to my standard running route), run by the Warwick Institute of Advanced Study, and called Cryfield Grange. As seen from the pictures, the building itself is impressive, even though there is not much left inside of its Tudor foundations, except some unexpected steps in the middle of some rooms and a few remaining black beams; it is also quite enjoyable for a week visit, with a large kitchen where I made rice pudding and pissaladière for the whole week, and a bike path to the University. I will definitely try to get there in the summer, as it must be even more enjoyable!

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