potato salad

this is the recipe in consuming passions scaled down a bit. From what i can gather this is a typical type salad from America and very different from the average potato salad in the UK. Our shop bought version is just potatoes, sour cream with spring onions and chives. I loved this type.

easy potato salad for exhausted cooks

ingredients

250g new potatoes

dressing

3 tblsp mayo

1tsp mustard

1tsp honey

juice of half a lemon

a jolt of white wine vinegar

1 red bell pepper sliced

paprika, salt and pepper to taste

boil the new potatoes to your liking, then sprinkle with salt.

then mix together the dressing ingredients and serve over the potatoes.

that easy and super scrummy.

a summer slaw

I'm still having trouble uploading certain images I'm afraid.

But anyway here are the last two things i made for my down to earth dinner. The potato salad was from consuming passions, and was devoured by my boyfriend even though he says he doesn't like mayonnaise. The coleslaw was from the river cottage every day cookbook and was very refreshing due to the fennel involved in the mix.

summer slaw

ingredients

• 
  
  3 radishes, thinly sliced
• 
  
  1 carrot grated
• 
  
  1 small fennel bulb, finely chopped
• 
  
  1\4 of a finely sliced red onion
• 
  
  1 little gem lettuce
• 
  
  chives to garnish
• 
  
  mix the above with the dressing made from the below ingredients
• 
  
  this served two of us
• 
  
  1 tsp English mustard
• 
  
  1 tblsp cider vinegar
• 
  
  3 tblsp olive oil
• 
  
  salt and pepper to taste

Barbecue sauce

So this one was in Consuming passions, yet I don't feel I can call it Uncle buns barbecue sauce as I had to leave some ingredients out! Over here in ole Blighty I have several times heard of liquid smoke but never seen it anywhere!

If anyone can give me more details on this stuff please let me know? Any how, I used smoked hot paprika hoping that it would give me that smokey taste and I also used passata instead of prepared tomato sauce.

T he story of Uncle Bun by the way is kinda tragic, he falls in love, marries a unfaithful woman, goes mad and he's barbecue place shuts down. He's recipe for barbecue sauce though is rescued from a toilet wall and here's my take on it...

Barbecue Sauce

• over a medium flame fry
• 1 onion until translucent, then add
• 2 cloves of garlic
• set aside
• now over a low flame stir together until the sugar dissolves
• 1 packet of passata
• 1 cup ketchup
• 2 tblsp brown sugar
• now add
• 1 tblsp smokes paprika
• 1\4 tsp chili powder
• 1 1\2 tsp dry mustard
• 2 tblsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1\4 cup cider vinegar
• 1 1\2 tblsp lemon juice
• 1\2 cup beef stock
• salt\ pepper bring to the boil and simmer for an hour or so

this doesn't taste anything like commercial sauce, being more tomatoey. It's damn fine on the side though.

slow fried pork chops and boston baked beans

First things first, I'm going to apologise for the lack of pictures, I'm having trouble uploading anything right now. So here as promised is the first recipe I cooked, which was ever so easy to make If time consuming.
I've adapted this recipe from Richard Whittington's book Home Food, a book that sadly seems to be out of print. If you ever see it i highly recommend it, being full of interesting recipes.
The main changes I made was to Quantity's as there was only two of us and I couldn't get any salt pork so I used bacon instead. I started this recipe the night before.

slow fried pork with Boston baked beans

Ingredients

1. 
   
   200g dried haricot beans soaked overnight
2. 
   
   half tblsp paprika
3. 
   
   2 pork chump chops
4. 
   
   1 onion, chopped
5. 
   
   1 tin of tomatoes
6. 
   
   2 tblsp muscovado sugar
7. 
   
   2 tblsp black treacle
8. 
   
   1 tsp mustard powder
9. 
   
   3 rashes streaky bacon chopped into small pieces
10. 
    
    1 bay leaf

method

1. 
   
   the day before cooking make a paste with the paprika and olive oil. Rub this all over the pork chops and leave to marinade overnight in the fridge.
2. 
   
   the next day preheat the oven to a low temperature 150'c, 300'f or gas2.
3. 
   
   Bring the beans to a boil and then change the water. Then bring to the boil again turn off the heat and leave. Keep the water in the pan.
4. 
   
   Blend the onion, tomatoes and all the other seasonings except the bacon and bay leaf in a blender.
5. 
   
   Add this to the beans and bring to the boil on top of the stove, then transfer it all to an ovenproof dish.
6. 
   
   Add the bacon and bay leaf, and pop it all in the oven. If your a real cook you could have heated it on the stove in a casserole dish and then put it in the oven. Thus saving yourself some mess and some energy. Oh how i envy you cast iron casserole pan owners.
7. The recipe then says to bake for 4 hours, mine was done in about 2. Keep a eye on it though. Add water if it seems to be a bit dry and whatnot. This makes a really nice spicy dish of baked beans.
8. when the beans are done, turn the oven off and leave them in there whilst you cook the chops. I used my cast iron griddle pan as I love the lines you get along the food. But grill or fry however you normally do your chops.
9. Whilst the beans were cooking I had plenty of time to make the sauce and salads. Now eat with gusto and pretend that your an southern homemaker.

I hope you enjoyed, and I,ll give the recipe for the barbeque sauce next.

Down to Earth dinner

Each chapter in She Flew the Coop has it's own name, and the first chapter after the prologue is called Down to Earth.
In this chapter we meet one of the main protagonists Vangie Nepper a self proclaimed homemaker, accomplished gardener and home cook.
We get to hear through her own thoughts and daydreams whilst gardening how she ended up with the life she now. Not a bad life, but a life with something missing none the less.
Vangies tells ups that she was raised to be a housewife and make her husband happy by her mum, yet it was her dad she aspired to be like the most. This is shown to us by her wanting to go flying with her beloved father when he's crop dusting when she was little, yet somehow this part of her got lost through the years.
In this chapter we also have a story about how on her 23rd wedding anniversary she invited all her neighbours to a cookout much against her husbands wishes who is miserly with both money and emotions.
The description of this meal got my mouth watering.....

"I baked a pork tenderloin, sliced it Texas-style, and then made a barbecue sauce from scratch.

 The recipe got wrote up in the newspaper- it was that mouthwatering.

I fixed potato salad, slaw, devilled eggs, baked beans, and fresh string beans from my own garden."

Sounds delicious doesn't it? I had to try and make my own version of this for my book inspired meal, I then remembered that in Consuming Passions that there was a recipe for barbecue sauce and also one for potato salad, something I can never get enough of in all it's variations.

I then had to find a recipe for homemade baked beans, I wasn't going to be able to do a whole barbecue and I can't afford to treat all my neighbours anyway.

I found the answer in one of my cookbooks called Home Food by Richard Whittington, this book has loads of recipes from around the world from home cooks. And right there in the section on the US of A was a recipe for slow-fried pork steaks with boston baked beans.
So along with my adaption of this recipe i made potato salad, home made barbecue sauce, summer coleslaw and green beans not grown in my own garden.

I don't often cook meals that are so time intensive even though I really enjoy cooking and it made me think about how the characters in the book must feel about domesticity.

To be told that this is the best way to show how much you love someone is depressing, yet these women used it to their own advantage and expressed themselves through the domestic sphere. Even better yet is that when the women eventually break free of their own prisons they don't suddenly stop doing what they used to like doing, they're just doing it for themselves now.

I love the idea of that, as when I'm cooking or doing anything like that I'm doing it for my own amusement and just hoping that others are enjoying it too.

I haven't got any pictures of the meal I'm afraid but I'll give you the recipes for all of the recipes over the next few days along with drawings of how it kinda looked.

she flew the coop

I really wish that i could call this book a good chick lit book without the awful connotations that go with it! It should probably be called middle aged chick lit, but that sounds so insulting. This isn't a book just for middle aged women although its mainly about them.

It does have a kinda happy ending like those sort of trashy novels do but in a completely different way. You leave this novel feeling like you've chewed on something quite substantial, kind of like some of the food described in the book.

The book starts with 16 year old Olive Nepper drinking poison and going into a coma because shes pregnant with the local preachers baby, which in the 1950s we all know to be a bad thing.
The story then progresses and we meet other residents of this small southern town Limoges in Louisiana and get to know them and their troubles.

This book is dark in plot yet michael lee west uses a light touch in the telling of the story.
This is definitely a book to make you laugh and then cry, sometimes all in the same chapter. Throughout the book are many delectable descriptions of food and recipes, and these arnt just added in as pretty extras.
Whilst the society around them is outwardly controlled by men in the forms of both the church and husbands, in their own domestic spheres these women are god and get out alot of their frustrations and emotions out in what they cook.
The most obvious and heartbreaking example of this are "Sophie's beaten biscuits" a meal that she starts to cook for herself when she thinks her violent husbands out for the night.
I personally loved this aspect of the book but i have a feeling that if you don't think about food all the time like i do that you may find the constant food chatter irritating.
One thing that i did find unsatisfactory about this book for me was the ending, two of the women ended up conveniently widowed which made it feel a bit moralistic in a everyone gets their just desserts way.
Considering the era in which the book is set it kinda made sense since one of the husbands would have been able to run of with he's wife's inheritance.
But i feel that if your going to go down the moralistic route that you should go whole hog. For one man to get killed off for having an affair but letting the preacher who got a sixteen year old pregnant and then grooms and seduces a thirteen year old which results in her walking home bleeding severely only getting tarred and feathered before hes made to leave town seems out of proportion to me.
I know life doesn't work that way but if you take the route of righteousness in a book i want full payback!
Saying all of that though i did really enjoy this book, West is very witty and funny. One of my favourite lines from the book was "A hard dick has no conscience" which made me laugh out loud so much that my partner insisted on knowing what was so funny and then being thoroughly unamused.

I would recommend this book, but i would also warn them that there is alot of sex in this book and not all of it is nice. Overall its quite feelgood in character and would make you feel better if your having a crap time with men, yet in not too twee a way.

In my next post I'll give you the details for the southern feast i devised.