Still thinking about food

Would you believe that the company I work for has its own in house hairdresser, drycleaner, and a very well catered restaurant, you can hardly call it a café even though it is buffet style; You could eat anything from sandwiches to a full roast, to fresh cooked pizza, to Chinese to Italian or my personal favourite an enormous baked potato.

Can you tell that I am still going on about food?

Mum used to make a lovely Christmas cake and one I remember she decorated to make it look like pretending snow. The very first Christmas cake I made was a disaster. I thought I had followed the recipe, but after I had gone to all he trouble of icing it, the cake began to slump. And when cut it looked more like bread pudding than cake that is all grey and stodgy. Now that is how a bread pud should look, but now the way a Christmas cake should. Mum’s Christmas pudding was yummy too and would have threepenny bits for the lucky ones. Or did Mum as I did later ‘salt’ each of our plates with them? One year I found a pretty decorating Idea in a magazine and decided to try it for the Christmas cake, it involved cutting and cooking four tree shapes from pale green pastry. The trick to keep it pale green was too cook it on a low heat. The tree parts were assembled decorated and held together with icing. It was quite fiddly and I did enjoy making it, but never found the inclination to repeat it. Nowadays I buy a small one ready iced. I always loved the food at Christmas, Christmas cake with marzipan and royal icing, and warmed mince pies. Oddly none of my offspring have inherited my taste for it.

Apart from cooking lessons at intermediate school no one taught me to cook. There were lots of disasters, Ok some of us are slow to learn from our mistakes.

I did enjoy those cooking lessons. Petite Mrs Clarke was our teacher and we made lots of different things. Sausage and onion shortcake, a sausage-meat and onion mix wrapped in a scone like dough. Ten there were sweet pinwheel scones and something called Dutch apple cake, sliced and spiced apples again cooked in a scone like pastry. We learned to preserve fruit, make basic bread and the odd cake, prepare and cook mince patties, cook vegetable and for our end of year finale we would with our partner cook a roast dinner to which we would invite a parent each and teacher each.

I love the cooking classes so much that I decided that I wanted to be a cooking teacher. My level of enjoyment was so much that I begged the teacher to be allowed to join the boys cooking club as her assistant. When the college prospectus came around one of my choices was home economics.  Why that didn’t come about is another story altogether.