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

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

Bubba's Bisqwits

A dear friend of ours had a birthday yesterday so bisqwits had to be made!
Now Mr Bubba Long Shanks is a bit of a handy man so the only thing to do was make him his own tool set!
I picked up some tool cookie cutters years ago but I've never used them. There was a digger in the set but icing a digger seemed a bit too advanced for me.
So in the toolbox there's some hammers, spanners, hard hats, saws and even some drills.
Mr Lardshow and I were trying to work out how to package the bisqwits up and it dawned on us that we could pop them in a real toolbox! Two presents in one!
I'm really pleased with how they turned out, especially the writing. Proper joined up letters!
Now who's birthday is it next?
Love Love xBx

A kitchen covered in flour

Hello all my loverducks,
Just a quick post. Today is a new day. Start of a new life. That's what Mr Lardshow told me this morning. Yesterday was hopefully the last of the scary days and to celebrate and give me something to do to keep me from crying we made pasta again.
It was much more successful this time! Hurrah!
Fresh homemade pasta literally takes seconds to cook and tastes amazing. Suddenly your supper becomes about the pasta and not the sauce. I can't wait to make it again. Hopefully next time I won't cover the kitchen, the cats and me in flour nor will I drop half the tagliatelli in the cat food! Darn my clumsy hands.
Enjoy the pics.
Love Love xBx

Escape to the country

Hey lovelies,
My infection seems to have finally left the building (or rather body!) Hip Hop Hooray!
There's lots of scary, stressful things happening this week so we decided to escape this weekend and just be.
We pitched our little tent of blueness in a tiny campsite behind a pub in Shropshire. Can you see the beautiful showman's caravan behind the tent? There were a handful caravans and us, the brave ones in a tent. Bliss.
Our first night we decided to have tea in the pub as we were hungry and tired from the journey and all that tent pegging. After being repeatedly told by the landlord that we'd been there before (we hadn't) he finally agreed to let us have some food...I had chips...they don't serve vegetarians unless they've had prior warning! Brilliant!
The sky was just so clear on our first night, it was impossible to even begin to try to count the stars. So bright and beautiful.
I have to admit I was cold the first night (two hot water bottles and a northerner was clearly not enough) but there isn't a better feeling in the world than waking up under the trees with your loved one on a slightly squishy airbed.
Here's to a lifetime of camping with my Mr Lardshow hopefully in our very own campervan. 

Allo. Allo. Allo.

Listen very carefully, I shall say zis only once...

For those of you that are follicaly challenged, or needing to have a handy disguise to confuse the Gestapo in an old BBC sitcom or if you just fancy a change to what you see when you look in the mirror, I have the perfect solution.
Moustache biscuits!

Aren't they fabulous? The cutter for these is actually supposed to be used to do fried eggs but I thought I'd use them for biscuits instead.

You make your biscuits as normal and then you make a thick paste using icing sugar, water and your choice of moustache colouring. You use this paste to make a line outline around the biscuit. Make sure to join the line up well. If there's a hole you'll end up with a leak and no one wants a leaky moustache!

I used one of my small icing bottles for the outline and a new squeezy bottle that Mr Lardshow's mummy got for me for the next part.

Once the outline is completely dry you make a slightly thinner icing. It needs to be the consistency of custard. Now I don't like custard so I like to say it needs to be the consistency of cheese sauce. Use this icing to flood the biscuit, I use a cocktail stick to gently push the icing into the corners.

Leave to dry, package up and send them off to work with Mr Lardshow for the official cake club tasters to try. Enjoy boys!

Birthday Passion Wagon Bakes

 Hello all,
Life has got the better of me this past week, pacing is extremely hard to do when you're trying to pretend everything is normal. I had great plans to post on Saturday but unfortunately a bit of an incident occurred with my head and a cupboard door. The cupboard door fared much better than my poor, poor head! 

I don't want to be an 'occasional' Blogger, I really need to get back into this, so here goes!

Months ago we found this darling camper van and we've been saving it for the birthday of our dear friend Adam. He loves vw's and as we couldn't find a beetle this was the next best thing.

Mr Lardshow is currently delivering the little cakes to him. Hopefully he likes them. I'm slightly fearful the vw will have sunk into the cake!

Here are the little camper van cakes...enjoy! xBx

Yorkshire Puddings To Die For

You don't get yummier than this...

Hello there my lovelies,
Well it's finally happened, the rain has stopped, the sun is out and I hate it already. I'm already missing my three layered outfits not to mention my knee high socks. The cold will be back soon won't it? Tell me it will, I miss it. It's nearly winter time, it must be!

So To help us all feel that little bit warmer I thought I'd write about one of mine and Mr Lardshow's favourite dishes. The honourable, deliciously proud Yorkshire Pudding. NOM!

Now Mr Lardshow likes to pretend that he is a Northerner, but in truth he's just an East Midlander with a funny accent. When it comes to Northerness I think I have the edge as my Paternal Grandmother was born in York and grew up in Leeds. That's proper Northern that! You don't have to have a little bit of Northern in you to make and enjoy Yorkshire Puddings but I don't think it can hurt, can it!?!

So to the recipe, very simple, nothing fancy, just a few key things and you can have perfect puds every time...

Ingredients

(Makes 4 puddings)

100ml milk,
2 eggs,
70g plain flour,
Pinch of pepper and salt,

I like to make my mixture in a plastic bowl that has a lid. I weigh out the flour and make a well in the middle. Break the eggs into the well and mix in until you have a thick, lump free batter. Then gradually add the milk until you have a thin single cream consistency.

Add a pinch of salt and pepper. Interestingly, Mr Lardshow's mum says that the heat from the pepper is what gives the pudding a kick and the heat from the kick is what makes it rise and go pop in th'oven.

So once the mixture is made, pop the lid on the box and put it in the fridge until you are ready to cook the yorkies. If I'm super organised I'll make it in the morning, the longer it's had in the fridge the better the puddings seem to turn out.

The puddings take a good 20 - 25 minutes to cook and you can't open the oven door once you've put them in so you need to be organised with your timings. We tend to put them in when we've taken out Mr Lardshow's meat to rest, I put the plates in to warm at the same time as the puds.

I put the tray in the oven to get it warm and then when it's time for baking I take the tray out and put it on top of the hob. I hate gas so we use an electric hob. Turn the hob up to the hottest setting, pour some oil into the pans and very bravely watch until you see smoke coming off the pan. As soon as you see the smoke pour the batter into the pans. The smoke will continue but DO NOT PANIC this is what you want. Once all the batter's in, gently put the puddings into th'oven and leave them. Pour yourself a glass of pretend wine and wait for the sloppy liquid to transform into the most delicious pillows of goldeness.

Enjoy my lovelies...

P.S if anyone has any ideas for me to blog about please let me know, Mummy Dearest has come up with a lovely idea that I'm going to get started on but lots more ideas would be very welcome!

How To Eat The Perfect Scone

Hello all,

Recently it has come to my attention that some of you have been struggling with the very delicate task of scone eating and I want you all to fret no more, I am here to help you all out.

Raspberry jam and cream, simply delicious

I've baked scones twice this week, the first batch was fine, lovely and light inside with just enough of a bite on the crust. The second batch, baked in a rush when Cath popped over for coffee and a chat, was a disaster, hard, uncooked little hockey pucks. Not even the birds would have touched them! I don't really understand what went wrong with them. I hate that. I like to know how I can improve my baking. Maybe it was because I rushed them and used too much flour when rolling out? I have to say I am a firm believer that if you cook when you're stressed or not in the mood, you won't end up with lovely baking...

So to the important matter at hand, how to eat the perfect scone. First things first, the pronunciation of the word scone. There is only one way to say this word and quite frankly on a donkey if you can't say this word in the correct way you should not be allowed to even contemplate eating them. The word is SCONE said in the same way you would say GONE. None of this SCONE rhymes with MOAN business. OOF! There you've been told now carry on.

I like to eat my scones (remember, you should be reading this and saying the word so that it rhymes with 'gone') slightly cooled out of the oven with jam on the bottom and lashings of clotted cream. None of this butter underneath the jam malarkey that Mr Lardshow seems to think you should do. NO that is wrong and is almost a crime against bakery.

Summer clearly doesn't want to visit us this year so I feel we should bring summer to us, through the medium of scones. Go on, be a devil and have one, lashings of cream and ginger beer in a frosted glass on a picnic blanket on your living room floor.

Enjoy! xBx

Blueberry and Lime Drizzle Cake

Delicious Drizzle

Hello all,
Still feeling a bit rough here but I'm insisting on carrying on. We've just done cake club and here is the cake I made for it. It's my second attempt at a drizzle cake, my first attempt was a brick, used as a doorstop for a while! This was a much greater success though. The recipe made a huge cake that I have to say is absolutely delicious, thankfully there's loads left so Mr Lardshow will be taking some to work tomorrow. apparently some of his colleagues want to join cake club. Who am I to say no? I used some of the duck eggs we got the other day and they really have made the cake light and fluffy but not too rich.

So the cake is made up of 250g caster sugar, 4 eggs, 250g plain flour, 1/2 tsp baking powder, zest of 2 limes, 200g blueberries and 225g butter all those beautiful, magical ingredients that when whizzed up together in the kitchenaid turn into gorgeous goodiness (Yes, I know it's not a word).

As the eggs came from a farm I made sure i gave them a good wash before cracking them open.

I thought they'd crack open really easily but the shells seemed really tough.The yolks were huge and such a glorious sunshine yellow.

So you cream the butter and sugar together and then gradually add these perfect eggs, if the mixture looks like it's about to curdle just add a spoonful of flour and it will come back again. You then need to add the rest of the flour and baking powder ooh and the lime zest. I managed to fill the kitchen with lime zest and covered my pyjamas in it, ooh lemony, sorry limey fresh! Make sure you keep back a spoonful of flour to gently toss the blueberries in. This helps to stop the mixture turning grey and keeps the blueberries whole and not mushy in the mixture.

Line your cake tin on the bottom and the sides and plop the mixture in and then pop the cake in th'oven as Mr Lardshow would say. It's a long cook, I struggle with not opening the door all the time to check it's cooked...

While you're waiting for it to bake, get on with the lime drizzle, for this you will need the juice of 2 limes and 100g of icing sugar. Now you should you use a thin skewer to make holes in the top of the cake, however I don't have one so I used a knitting needle...it was clean I promise!

OOH! OOH! TAKE THE CAKE OUT OF THE OVEN!!!!!! 

Sorry, I forgot that part, the cake will take about 50 minutes, you'll know it's done when a fork that you've poked in it comes out clean.

So leave the cake for 5 minutes and then spoon the drizzle into the holes that you've made and leave the cake to cool completely in the tin.

Now make the icing, more limes and icing sugar! 5 tsp of lime juice and 125g of icing sugar. Take the cake out of the tin and plate it up. Drizzle the icing generously over the cake and down the sides if you can. Sprinkle some lime zest over the top. Put the coffee pot on, slice, eat, enjoy. 

Done!

P.S This makes a cake that will last for a good few days under a big glass cloche, a tin went to work with Mr Lardshow for Simon, Marlon and the rest of his work colleagues who are literally wasting away in their office. There's also plenty left for Pain Management Group tomorrow. NOM!