Fish pie for the daddy and the husband

Fish pie for tea.

Mr Lardshow is writing today's blog as Mrs Lardshow is feeling very rough. So....all week she has  been telling me that she has never made a fish pie before...so im here to say for a first attempt it was amazing!

We managed to get a fish pie mix from our little supermarket from the reduced section (wasn't even close to it's sell by date so no idea why it was in there) and we chose to make enough mash potato on Sunday to top it off. Now I'd love to tell you all how she made it but it was done while I was at work. I know it involved poaching the fish in milk, turning this milk into a white sauce. Put the fish into a bowl while you make this sauce then pour the sauce over it all. Top this with the potato (grate some parmesan over to taste) and bake for 40 mins at 185 degrees.  This bit I know as it's the bit I did!

Then you sit back and tuck in. Defend the pie at all times from Finn but make sure you save him some at the end!

P. S. Daddy enjoyed his too.

Welsh Lamb Stew With a Soggy Bottom

Greetings readers,

Here in the little white house we like to pretend we're living in 1940 and that we're still on rationing. We scour the supermarket for reduced items and whatever goodies we get our meals are created from.

Today Mr Lardshow found some Welsh diced lamb so instead of soup for his lunches this week he's had stew. As a stroppy, non vegetable eating vegetarian I can't think of anything worse but apparently this is good grub for the husband.

So to the stew...I think I did it right but I was not really sure what I was doing. First of all you sit on your big high chair that your husband has cleaned the cat sick off and put a new cover on without letting it dry (hence the Soggy Bottom). Then you coat the lamb in flour, salt, pepper and a sprinkled up stock cube. Put it in a hot thick bottomed pan with some olive oil. Brown off the lamb until the pan has a nice covering of almost burnt bits. Take out the lamb and add the onion to the pan. As you cook the onion scrape the bits (you do not want to miss out on this flavour apparently). Gradually add whatever vegetables you have starting with the root veg,  these will take longer to cook. Next splosh in some red wine and Worcestershire sauce. Let the alcohol cook off for a bit and then add enough water to cover the veg. Ooh remember to put the lamb back in at this point (I nearly forgot!)

Then put the whole lot in the oven with the lid on and leave to stew away while you go and see your daddy in hospital (this bit isn't compulsory).

Come home, stir and get the husband to taste. Enjoy. Love. Love. xBx

Pick a Plum, Bake a Plum, Eat a Plum

Morning all!
Yesterday was a horribly grey and wet day. Some days you wonder what to do on those days, curl up in front of the fire, patchwork, read a much loved book or go into the garden with the parentals and a step ladder and pick plums off a very wet plum tree. Yup we did the latter. I was not allowed up the ladder... Humph!
We managed to get most of the plums off the tree and amazingly this year the plums are the most delicious little mouthfuls of purpleness. The past few years if the tree were to be honest with itself its crop has not been a tasty one at all.

So what to do with all the plums... well the Mothership took some home to freeze as our Granny Ivy freezer is too teeny tiny. I on the other hand decided to make a crumble. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea as we had decided to go on a pudding ban after the weekend and you have to have cream with crumble. Shame!

So to the crumble. I like doing crumble. It's something I can do sitting down. You just sit and crumb all the dry ingredients together while the plums soften down in the pan.

For the crumble topping you need:
75g of chilled butter, diced,
175g self-raising flour,
110g Demerara sugar.

Pop the softened plums in your pot. Pop the crumble over the top. Pop the lot in the oven until everything is golden brown and bubbling. Serve with lashings of cream and try to be patient so you don't burn your mouth. We failed... enjoy!

P. S. Any spare crumble can be popped in a bag and popped in the freezer for the next crumble day.

Ring a Ring a Roses

Just a quick post to show you all how the patchwork is coming along. I love turning the roses over and seeing the handwriting on the cards.

We keep on trying to work out if we could put a plain row around the centre rose but we don't think it's possible. The tessellation (I love that word) then doesn't seem to work.

I'm also trying to decide on whether to have set patterned roses like the ones in the picture for just the centre of the quilt and then have the rest as just mix and match ones.

I'm going to try and do one and see what it looks like and if I can cope with it...I do like my symmetry as many of you know.

Hope you like the pics.

xBx

P. S. If any one has any old cards they don't mind being chopped up please feel free to donate them to me. I'm running out!

Patchwork

Hello all, 
Not much baking in bed has gone on recently. We've been trying to get over and get stronger from the nasty bug that struck me after the wedding. We're getting there. Slowly but surely.

I'm very fed up of having to spend so much time in bed recently. I spent all of last week in bed passing a kidney stone that eventually popped out. I fear the is another one on the way though.
Anyway, I can't manage much baking at the moment so Mr S and I tried to think of something I could do while lying flat in bed. We saw a lovely film the other day where there was a gorgeous heirloom quilt and it inspired me to have a go.

So here are the startings of our heirloom quilt. I love it already. It's made up of old bits of clothing. This flower is from some old pyjamas and a pair of old boxers of the husband!

I do love making do and mending...

Bespoking a Waistcoat

Hello all,
I haven't posted on here for ages it seems. Life has taken a bit of a blip.

We got married and had a beautiful honeymoon. Then we came home, I passed a kidney stone and then got the most awful stomach infection that I'm still struggling to get over. I genuinely didn't know a tummy bug could make you so ill.

I've been pretty much housebound since June apart from a horrid  time spent in an isolation room in hospital. To add to all that my poor daddy has been in and out of hospital 3 times with his poorly kidneys too. Life just needs to go back to normal.

Anyway, enough moaning. I just wanted to show you something I'd done while stuck in bed. A while  ago the husband and I found a waistcoat for our friend Adam.

It needed a bit of tlc so I rebuttoned it and had a go at sewing some tiny writing on it.

It's not my best sewing as my hands are super shaky at the mo but hopefully he likes it and it looks a little bit different to a 'normal' waistcoat.

What do you think?

Love Love xBx

So reader, we got married...

Hello all,
Sorry I've been away for so long, been a wee bit busy getting wed! We had a beautiful day. The sun finally came out after a week of horrid nasty cold rain and wind and shone and shone on us all.
All the weeks of making things in bed in between naps and infections and lots of 'keep calm and carry ons' finally came to fruition. The cushions mum made were perfect to lounge on. The flowers that mum collected went perfectly in all the jam jars that I'd decorated in bed.
I think one of the things we loved the most was the way we decorated the cake. We had our extra spoons in there and bunting from Auntie Georgie around the base and teeny tiny bunting around the top and across the spoons that I still don't know how I made.
The husband made the perfect speech. Just perfect.
It's lovely to look back at all the photos and remember the day. It goes so quickly, you think you'll get to speak to everyone but you don't, you think you won't have a wobble but you do and you think that no one will come but everyone did!
It was a lovely, lovely day. Just lovely.
Lots of love from Mr and Mrs Shardlow xBBx

Goose Egg Carbonara

Just a quick post as I'm very sleepy today and you'll probably read this and see lots of mistakes.

So you know the other day we went to the Farm and got lots of eggs well my ditzy blonde brain finally remembered we still hadn't eaten that bloomin goose egg! So we had it for tea last night.

Most nights I try to cook similar meals for the husband to be and I. So he'll have a bit of meat added and I'll have a bit of cheese!  Nom!

Carbonara is something that we can have together,  you just have to be a bit cleverer at the start. Cook his lardons,  mushrooms and onions separately and cook my not bacon bits in a separate pan. I'm not having any of that disgusting mushroom and onion business!  Add peas. Boil the pasta and then it's on to the egg business.

The egg business... normally it's an egg yolk each but last night it was a goose egg for two... how romantic!

So you separate the yolk from the white and put it in a jug.  Grate lots of vegetarian parmesan cheese (now available from Tesco, Sainsburys AND Morrisons!) whisk the egg yolk and gradually add the cheese. I really can't give you measurements as we do it by taste. When you have a thick paste add a small ladlefull of the pasta water to the mix. It's the starch from the pasta water that makes the sauce. Taste the mixture to see if it tastes cheesy enough. If not add some more cheese or pasta water. Add pepper if you so desire but you probably don't need salt as the cheese is quite salty already.

Pop your bacon/not bacon mix into your pre warmed pasta bowls. Drain the pasta add the egg/cheese mix to the pasta and stir, stir, stir. Before your very eyes the mixture will turn into a beautiful velvety sauce. Pour this and the pasta over your bacon mix and mix together in the bowl.

VERY IMPORTANT!  ADD GARLIC CROUTONS!  EAT AND ENJOY!

I've gone a bit shouty and even sleepier now so I'll sign off. Lots of love xBx

Baby Bunting

So here in our little white house on the hill we've been very busy making things for our wedding. My lovely mummy is doing lots of the big things in her slightly bigger house and here in my bedroom I've been managing to do the little jobs. The jobs where it doesn't matter if I fall asleep on the job! 

We've been collecting jam jars for several months now and I've been trawling the Internet to find lots of ideas for how to decorate them as holders for flowers and tea lights. 

Mum has made lots of bunting to decorate the garden and I've made some teeny tiny bunting for the cakes. I've decorated the jars with twine and my Auntie Topsy's old buttons and then I had the idea of putting some baby bunting on them too. What do you think? 

I like doing all this making, it is reminding me terribly of all the cutting out and gluing that I used to do in my 'past life' as an early years teacher. I woke up this morning thinking about baby bunting and the lovely story Each Peach, Pear Plum...plum pie for pudding this weekend me thinks!

Each peach, pear, plum, I spy Tom Thumb,

Tom Thumb in the cupboard, I spy Mother Hubbard,

Mother Hubbard in the cellar I spy Cinderella,

Cinderella on the stairs I spy three bears,

Three bears out hunting, I spy Baby Bunting,

Baby Bunting fast asleep, I spy Bo Peep,

Bo Peep on the hill, I spy Jack and Jill,

Jack and Jill in the ditch, I spy the Wicked Witch,

Wicked Witch over the wood, I spy Robin Hood,

Robin Hood in his den, I spy three bears again,

Three bears still hunting, they spy Baby Bunting,

Baby Bunting safe and dry, I spy plum pie,

Plum pie in the sun, I spy�..EVERYONE!

Orders from the CEO of the cake club

So yesterday I had a message on Facebook...

Hello

The CEO of the Cake Club is BACK!!!!!

I just thought I would let you know I'm back working with the team now, so any time you feel like making another batch of your wonderful cakes, they will be very welcomed.
Hopefully they will actually make it to the office without 'you-know-who' tampering with them. LOL
Take Care
Simon x

Bit forward I thought but when the CEO gives an instruction one must step to it! So I decided to make a batch of brownies for the cake club. I had to have one myself, just for quality control purposes and I have to say they were mighty fine. The raspberries (which were from the parentals last summer crop) were lovely and tart next to the dark chocolate.

I had a very bad night with pain last night, spent most of it in the bath and sadly I didn't think to fetch a medicinal brownie and now they've all gone off to work with Mr Lardshow! Darn it! 

So here's how to make the brownies...

INGREDIENTS

100g dark chocolate chunks,

50g milk chocolate chunks,

125g salted butter,

200g soft brown sugar,

2 eggs,

70g plain flour,

25g cocoa powder,

100g raspberries, 

METHOD

1. Heat the oven to 180/160 fan/gas 4 and line a baking tray with parchment paper. Do not use a stupid brownie tin like I did, it's impossible to get the brownies out!

2. Gently melt the butter, sugar and chocolate in a pan. Remove from heat.

3. Stir the eggs one by one into the chocolate mixture.

4. Sieve the flour and cocoa powder and stir in. 

5. Add half the raspberries and scrape the mixture into the tray.

6. Scatter over the remaining raspberries and bake in the middle shelf for 30 minutes. Cool before slicing into squares. Enjoy!

Goosey Goosey Gander

Just wanted to share these pictures with you. We went back to the Farm the other day to see if there were any eggs. Every time we went over winter there were no eggs and we always left bereft but this time...

This time there were eggs and not just hen's eggs and bantam's eggs but a whole big fat whopping GOOSE egg!

So we bought it!  I have absolutely no idea what to do with it or how to even go about cooking it but it was just something that filled my little heart with joy so I thought I'd share it with you all too. 

XBx

Back again

Ello all, I've been a bit absent from here for a while,  haven't really felt like blogging much but the lovely Mr Lardshow bought me a tablet for my birthday and I thought maybe I should use it for something more worthwhile than just looking at pretty things on t'internet!

So I thought I'd dip my toe back in by showing you a few of the things I've been getting up to in bed recently...we're getting married next month (eep) so I've been saving my spoons and have just been doing little things in bed. My pain management doctor has been working with me to help me have more structure to my day, I have to get up in the morning, have to eat properly and I have to do 'something' every afternoon.  It's helped a lot with my lack of purpose feeling recently. It can be very boring and lonely even with two mad cats.

Here are some of the bits and bobs I've been up to...
I can't work out now to write captions on the pics so hopefully in the order the pics are... making the wedding invites,  cutting out bunting triangles ready for mum to sew,  making confetti cones, baking some very rushed cakes for a comic relief bake off at Mr Lardshow's work (my cakes didn't soon,  competition had some spun sugar on theirs, i was MOST upset!),  making some diamond wedding anniversary cakes that never got delivered because of all the bloomin snow! Turning old clothes into pet beds and cushions and finally a relaxed birthday hot chocolate in Shrewsbury.

I will try to get a bit better at getting back into blogging. It is good medicine for me!  xBx

P.S. the photos haven't come out in the right order...I give up but I'm sure you can all work them out.  X

Boomerang Biscuits

Just a quick post.  I dont think I could feel any rougherer if I tried. My kidney pain has spread up into my ribs and I am not liking it...not at all! 

Anyway,  I think some of my readers don't believe that I actually do bake in bed.  I do...
As much as there are days where my body just wants to hibernate life goes on and I have to keep going.

One of Mr Lardshow' s friends has got a wonderful job down under and so to celebrate and say good luck we made them some boomerang biscuits. 

So back to the bed baking. I made it downstairs and collected all of the ingredients, propped my sore ribs up and used the heat of the electric blanket to help soften the butter.   Genius idea I thought...
So by the time Mr Lardshow got home I was struggling to ice the biscuits but they eventually got done.

Im quite chuffed with how they turned out . Thank you again to Weena Fish for the boomerang idea x ♡ x

Vegetarian Lasagne

Hmmmmm...I can hear you saying it at the thought of veggie lasagne. I spent most of yesterday saying the same thing.

You see I've been a vegetarian for 22 years and apart from bacon butties I've had no desire to eat meat. I never really liked the taste or texture of meat and I don't really like meat substitutes like tofu or Quorn. However a certain husband to be has had a hankering for lasagne and so yesterday I took the plunge and bought some Quorn mince *shudder*. 

Here's how to make it...

I browned the mince and while it was burning nicely I chopped up a carrot and half an onion into the teeny tiniest pieces imaginable and added these to the mince. Once the onions had softened I popped in a squished up garlic clove and a handful of basil and a tin of tomatoes. 

While the mince mixture was bubbling away I made a white sauce...I did add mustard and a generous handful of cheese to it so it wasn't a true bechemal sauce but it was tastier. ..

Now to the construction.  You put a layer of mince, cheese sauce and lasagne over and over again until you have run out of ingredients.  Try to finish off with a final layer of sauce and a generous sprinkling of veggie parmesan. 

Bake, serve and enjoy xBx     

Mini Baguettes

Afternoon all, 

Yesterday was a bit of a 'stay in bed' day.  Saying I felt rough would be a bit of an understatement...  However by the afternoon I was going slightly mad from being in bed so I bundled myself into my poorly jumper and headed to the kitchen, pulled up my stool and let the kitchenaid do all the hard work. 

So these were made with the hope that they would be little delicate breadsticks to go with the delicious garlic dip that the delicious Miss Rachel made.  They turned out quite chunkier though...all the more to dip with!

I do like a recipe like this that you dont need to go and fetch special ingredients for, you can just mix and make.

Ingredients.
2 tbsp honey,
1 1/2 cups of warm water,
1 packet fast acting yeast,
4 1/2 cups of bread flour,
1 tbsp salt,
2 tbsp melted butter

Method (could not be simpler!)
*Measure your ingredients using the darling measuring cups that cousin cath bought.
*Melt the butter in the new sospan fach that the parentals bought me for Christmas.
*Pop all the dry ingredients into your mixing bowl and give them a quick stir.
*Add the honey, water and melted butter.
*Start the mixer on a low speed and mix just until the dough comes away from the sides of the bowl...I told you it was easy!
*Plop the dough onto your work surface and squidge it into a rough rectangle shape.
*Divide the dough into 12/18 pieces (this is where I struggled,  division was never my forte)
*Roll each piece into a long sausage and pop it onto a baking tray.
*Cover and leave in a warm place (under the duvet) until you're ready to bake.
*Bake in the oven until they're golden brown at 200ºc 

Toppings
I put a mixture of garlic salt, butter and olive oil on ours last night but I think you could put anything on them...within reason.  Maybe poppy seeds, chilli flakes, sesame seeds,  parmesan. ..

Eat and Enjoy

xBx