61: Treacle tart, p65

Yum. Yum. Yum.

What a weird concept for a pudding... and so easy! Breadcrumbs, mixed with syrup, baked in a pastry case. That's it! Wow! Scrummy. Especially with a good dollop of cream - even scrummier!

I cheated though. Bad me. I hope the shortcut taking is not becoming a habit... I didn't make the pastry case :( I used a bought one... Was in a bit of a hurry mid-week and I'm so bad at making pastry (warm paws, melts the butter and makes it greasy and crumbly and an all-round disaster), I decided not to risk it tonight. There's lots of pastry in The Kitchen Diaries, so plenty of other opportunities to practise!

We've had two long term visitors at work for the last month or so, one from Egypt and one from Indonesia, and they are both going back this weekend, and I'd promised them a 'proper English dinner' - so this was part of it! Roast chicken and all the trimmings, and treacle tart for pudding. And they did seem to like it! Must be odd staying in a country so different from home, and living in a B&B for weeks on end, but never really getting to try to food from that part of the world... Fine if you want to go to a restaurant serving Chinese, Indian, Italian, and any number of other countries' food, but where do you go (other than the Fish and Chip shop) for English food, other than someone's home?

Slightly complicated by the fact that both visitors are Muslim and so only eat halal meat - so I went to Hounslow specially to get a halal chicken. Odd cultural note about halal chickens: they look rather odd compared to our normal chickens for eating... they seem to have great big thighs and not much up top, if you know what I mean. Not very well endowed. Which makes them a rather different shape to regular ones...

Pudding also went down particularly well with my boss, whose little girl is coeliac, so he very happily overdoses on gluten when not at home (pastry filled with bread? Definitely a gluten overdose...).

60: A clear, hot mussel soup, p26

A disaster! Possibly the most disastrous meal I've ever cooked - I don't know what possessed me! Home from work late on a Friday, hubby away for a conference,  and fridge almost empty, I suddenly remembered the suspicious bag of frozen mussels I had in the freezer. Bad call. Buying them in the first place. And using them now. I remember thinking in the supermarket 'I love mussels. Surely if they sell them frozen, they aren't that bad frozen? It'd be nice to have mussels whenever I want...'. Doh. They are horrid. Nasty little morsels which either have the consistency of chewed up cardboard or little pieces of bicycle inner tube. Why do they sell frozen mussels if this is what happens to them?? Ick. Ick. Ick. This recipe should have been lovely. A nice simple, Tom Yum style soup, zingy and hot and sweet and sour all at once. And the broth was. But the nasty little defrosted nuggets in it were revolting and I managed to eat two before my better nature saw the next one trigger my gag reflex. And into the food waste recycling bin it went. Along with the rest of the soup. And the rest of the bag of mussels. Oh to have a nice, affordable fishmongers nearby... Will I try this again? It'd be nice to, but the year is racing by already, and I've got a lot of recipes to get through, so I'm not sure...

59: Roast haddock with bacon and parsley, p302

Oh dear, I forgot to write this one up last week, my bad again! A very simple recipe, but a tasty combination and made for an easy, quick supper on Saturday evening. I'd not normally think of putting bacon with white fish, as you'd think it would be too strong, too overpowering a taste for delicate white fish but this worked really well - the haddock was meaty enough to balance out. I'm not entirely sold on the use of parsley as a strong flavour on its own though, except maybe in a white sauce, I don't think it's a flavour I desperately like, but nonetheless...

58: English apple cake, p306

Yummy yummy, what a good recipe to do first on my return from Sikkim. The end of the trip ended up being so busy and with so little shopping time that I couldn't get any Indian sweeties to bring home for work, so I decided to bake a Nigel cake and take in some real Sikkimese 'Temi' tea to have a proper little tea party for our team. This cake mix made a very small amount of batter, which is always worrying, hardly filling a quarter of the tin, and then the cinnamon/lemon apples piled on top before baking. The cake didn't rise very much but wasn't heavy at all, and the fruit slightly sunk in but stayed towards to the top, which was really rather nice. I don't like too much cinnamon in things like this, I like cinnamon but find it very strong and overpowering in lots of recipes, becoming rather sickly...  But the amount in this recipe was perfect, very light and delicate. All in all, a lovely light, not too sweet, definitely not sickly, moist cake - perfect for teatime! And it vanished very quickly at work...

57: Coffee and walnut cake, p355

Bad me - I forgot to post this one, just over a week before I went away. We had a cake sale at work in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care, and I made the coffee and walnut cake that kick started this challenge idea back in November last year. Bizarrely, I didn't get to try it... I put the cake up in our tearoom with everyone else's and dashed off to a lecture, and an hour later went back to slice it up into pieces so people could buy it slice by slice - but the whole cake had vanished! A week later I was chatting to a friend in another department and she said she'd dashed over to the cake sale and bought a whole cake to take back to the office for her team, and that it had been fabulous! It was mine! So at least I know it turned out okay - and I did get to try it last year when I made it, so think I can get away without having to make it again...

Apologies for the lull in posts (and recipes)!

Apologies for the lull - it's been a ridiculously busy few weeks, with long weekends away working, and now I'm off to Sikkim, in the Himalayas, for 12 days so ain't gonna be any opportunity for Nigelling (new verb...) for a couple of weeks, I'm afraid. Normal service to be restored asap!! (post-14th April...)