Mustard

 I once put up a very similar post to this one, but my views below are, I think, worth echoing. I will no doubt discover a number of people who disagree with this. I consider Coleman’s English mustard kills flavour. The powdered version is useful for dusting beef, for making fresh horseradish sauce or as an ingredient in many other dishes (eg barbecue sauce). I occasionally like the very process of making it using the powder and adding water and leaving to rest. But my mustard of choice is Dijon: sufficient piquancy but not robbing the underlying dish of flavour. A slightly milder but still pleasing mustard is coarse grain. I would prefer either to English (too hot), American (too sweet), or German (too oddly flavoured). And I have never understood why in England if you ask for French mustard a revoltingly sweet brown concoction is produced that has been nowhere near France; it is almost as though it is an attempt to put people off French mustard in favour of English. Indeed I would prefer English to THAT particular variety despite my prejudices away from English. For completeness, I also reject whisky, truffle or any other weirdly flavoured mustard. Again, mustard is so strongly flavoured that I don’t see the point. Other than tarragon mustard which is rather good. Enough from me.

Rhubarb soufflé

This is my own version, based on lots of different recipes I found online. From sources as diverse as “The Times of India” and The Express. Not a single one of the recipes I found was quite right - and any containing cornflour I am afraid I rejected at once.

INGREEDIENCE

300g rhubarb

25g sugar (to mix with raw rhubarb)

Glug of elderflower syrup

3 tablespoons golden caster sugar (to mix with egg whites)

4 egg whites

2 egg yolks

METHOD

Chop the rhubarb into roughly 1.5 inch chunks. Mix with 25g sugar and glug of elderflower syrup. Bake for 25 mins in oven gas mark 9. Mash rhubarb. Allow to cool.

Beat egg whites. Fold in sugar and egg yolks. Finally add rhubarb. Stir together. Spoon into 6 ramekins. Will probably make 7 so one spare.

Bake ramekins for 8 mins on gas mark 9.

Eat.

Two go adventuring again

 I have just had an experience taken straight out of a Famous Five book. You know, the kind where Julian (my namesake) turns up at a farmhouse wanting to buy some milk and gets presented not only with the fresh milk but newly-laid eggs and half a cake. And "I wouldn't dream of charging you, young master. Right nice they are, I'll be bound."

And the episode happened in Buckinghamshire, where Enid Blyton lived for most of her life, and wrote many of her books. I had passed the place many times in a cab on the way to the local station but there had never been an opportunity to go inside, until now. A temporary traffic light, a queue of traffic behind, light drizzle, and the right hand turn leading to (if I had remembered correctly) the farm shop I had spotted previously. And there it was. No lights visible, nowhere obvious to park, and my wife was convinced, at just after 5.00 pm, that the place was closed, so stayed in the car. I was a little more hopeful, having seen the sign outside which they would surely have brought in at closing time. "Follow the garden path to the farm shop" said the sign. So I started walking across the farmhouse garden, thinking that the slightly trodden grass amounted to the path. Then I heard a voice. I was in trouble, I thought. But no. The bearded farmer, wreathed in smiles ("Closed? No we only close after the last customer has left") beckoned me in. I hastened back to the car to fetch my wife and we went in. "It's not much", said our host, "I don't want you to get too excited." But excited we were: a loaf of fresh gingerbread we snaffled at once. Then a jar of homemade honey. "Do you need any eggs?" My wife replied, "I think we've got eggs". "You'll never taste an egg like these ones. Take two as a present." Needing no further invitation, but rejecting the idea of a free gift, I started filling a box with half a dozen. And there was home-cured bacon as well. When we settled up, we were told: "I'm not charging you all that for the honey", and he knocked fifty pence off. Through a doorway, we saw his wife, surrounded by even more eggs on the kitchen table. Away we went, already planning to return.