… a baking day. Or, rather, a food making day.
We started off by making another batch of vegan hummus. You can see all of the ingredients here, plus some coarse-ground black pepper of course.
I started off by cutting the pepper into tiny cubes and then roasting it.
While that was doing, I took my whizzer, added a pile of chick peas, half the weight of tahini (sesame seed paste), chick pea juice, olive oil, garlic, sea salt, black pepper and tarragon, and whizzed it all up into a nice creamy paste.
It doesn’t need to be too liquidy so I usually don’t add much liquid and oil at first, but keep on adding it during the mix to make it right. Remember that you can always add more liquid, but you can’t take it out.
Once it was done and mixed how I wanted it, I added the pepper and olives, and gave them a little whizz, just enough to distribute them throughout the mix and not disintegrate them.
Some of the mixture went into the freezer and some in the fridge for lunch for the next week or so.
Later on, I made an apple pie.
Having an affinity with Belgium, I used boskoop apples, brown sugar, desiccated coconut, raisins, cinnamon, nutmeg and a couple of vegan pastry rolls
Some lemon juice too, of course.
So first you spread out one of the pastry rolls onto your cutting board, and using the baking tin as a template, cut the pastry round the tin to make the top of your pie, allowing for a 1cm overlap.
Then, grease your baking tin, unroll the second pastry roll and put it in the tin, pressing down VERY LIGHTLY the roll to fit the base properly
Cut the apples into quarters, decore them and cut them into very thin slices. Then add them into the baking tine.
Add them in layers, and on top of each later add some lemon juice (to keep the apples white) some brown sugar, raisins, desiccated coconut, nutmeg and cinnamon.
By the time you’ve built up the layers of filling, the base of the pastry should be completely covered.
Moisten the edge of the pastry in the pie where it overlaps the lip of the pie tin, and then put the pastry top that you cut out earlier on top.
With a fork, press down the edges onto the lip of the pie dish so that the pie top and the pie bottom are completely sealed. Then trim off the excess pastry that’s overhanging the pie dish.
Brush the top of your pie with milk, and then prick holes into it with a fork to let out any steam that might build up.
Bung it into the oven at 200°C until it looks like this.Probably 40-45 minutes, something like that.
So what do you do with the excess pastry and apple that you have left over?
Roll out your patry with your rolling pin until it’s flat. Keep on cutting off the irregular edges and adding it back to be rolled in, so that the pastry resembles a square as best as you can.
Add your apple, coconut, spices, raisins, lemon juice etc into the centre, and then fold the pastry over the top and, dampening the edges, squeeze them together like a cornish pasty so it’s all sealed togather.
Brush with milk, poke holes to let the steam out, and then bung that in the oven too until it looks like this.
Yesterday I remember saying that knowing my luck, with Sunday being a Day of Rest and no alarm, I’d be wide-awake pretty early on.
And I reckon that 03:50 corresponds pretty closely to this definition. But there was no chance of me rising from my stinking pit at anything like that time. 08:50 was much more like it.
Plenty of time of course to go a-rambling. I was with Liz Ayers last night in Crewe round by the Wistaston area. I’d been taxiing and we had quite a few jobs going on including taking Mrs Urion home for lunch and pick her back up at 13:45. But she was already booked in at 13:45 for a trip to the bank, so I wondered if I was expected to combine the two trips or were they separate. In between jobs I was socialising with Liz then nipping out to do jobs. Liz was talking to a load of other taxi drivers – not me because I didn’t get on with them. She was chatting to him who lived in Ruskin Road. I went past twice, shook (or rather touched, because that was all he was willing to do) his hand and went off to do a job. She said that she was going to stay behind and have a drink. She was chatting to this guy and said they were going to have a drink together. I went back home, and Roxanne was there. I told Roxanne what Liz was doing and she commented that she bet that she was flirting with this guy and she wanted to see. So I put her in the car and we went to this pub at Wells Green and sure enough that’s what she was doing. The dirty look on Roxanne’s face was priceless.
Later on I was out around Nantwich last night with someone or other and we bumped into this friend of mine. I’d been searching the internet about something and had discovered something about Burt Reynolds – his real surname was Diamond because his father had been a diamond cutter. He played bass, including a weird 2-string bass. I happened to mention to this friend of mine that I’d seen this. He said “yes, but he just happened to have been in the right geographical position. I played bass one day and never had the recognition”. “One day!” I retorted. “I’d played bass for years and never had any”. To which he replied “yes, but I played in the daytime”. This conversation went on and he headed off towards London Road – he was probably staying there with his work. We discussed food and he had been to a Chinese restaurant somewhere for his tea. I ended up back home staying in some kind of strange apartment with two bedrooms à l’enfilade living with a woman who had two kids. They had the other bedroom. She said they should both be in year 2 or 3 but one was much smaller than the other. She’d had serious health problems, including incontinence. We talked quite a lot about these kids. She’d had severe medical treatment but was so much better. I was wondering why this friend of mine never said that he had come to stay down here. I’m sure we could have put him up somehow – there’s a comfy sofa for a start, he would have loved that. The conversation drifted away from there and I ended up in the kitchen. My mother was in there doing the washing up, with a length of green garden hose coupled up to the tap and a high-pressure “squirter”. Every question I asked her was answered with “I’ll tell you tomorrow”. I tried to find out what was going on and in the end she said “do you know my neck cancer specialist? Steven? He’s actually died of cancer and I’m going to his funeral tomorrow”. I said that it happens to all of us. We’re all going to get it some time or other and let’s face it – by the time that we get to our age if we haven’t had a serious health crisis already we are doing really well. She didn’t understand for a minute what I meant. I went outside, to find myself at les Guis. there was a load of my friends out there. They had moved Caliburn but there was a pile of smoke everywhere. Piles of wood had been cut. They said that while I had been in the house they had cut all of this wood for me and put it in stacks and cleared the drive that was all overgrown and got the van down there. I thought that this was really nice. All this wood was nicely stacked up. It just needed cutting to length and then I could burn it. I thought that this was marvellous.
After a leisurely start to the day I attacked the dictaphone notes and by the time I was ready to stop to make my hummus for lunch, I was down to just 129 entries.
The hummus was delicious as I expected, and once I’d dined I went out into the gorgeous weather.
It really was nice out there today, and I took quite a few long-distance photos of things miles away, to see how the new lens performs.
This is a photo of the lighthouse that is just offshore from the Pointe-D’Agon
There’s a really interesting point along the coast where the River Sienne enters the sea.
Because of tidal drift of sedimant, the mouth of the river now faces south rather than east.
And we can see in the background, if we look carefully, the wind-farm near Barneville-Carteret
Jersey was standing out quite clearly on the horizon today too.
The houses of St Helier and that area, 54 kms away, stood out quite clearly in the distance and have cme up quite well in this photo once I enhanced it.
And while I was at at, I was photo-bombed by a seagull. It reminded be very much of that famous World War II photo that a German photo unit took of the UK radar masts at Dover from Cap Griz Nez and managed to pick up a beautiful image of a Supermarine Spitfire that buzzed into the image.
The tide was on its way out and the crowds hadn’t yet flocked to the beach.
There was one early bird out there already though, and I couldn’t at first make out what it was that he was doing. But cropping the photo and blowing it up (which I can do these days despite modern anti-terrorist legislation) I noticed that he seemed to have a metal detector with him.
He didn’t look as if he was doing all that much good with it though
Back here, I regrettably crashed out on my chair for 20 minutes, but I managed to wake up in time for the football. It’s the Welsh Cup Final between (predictably) TNS and Connah’s Quay Nomads. And just as predictably, TNS won it at something of a canter, 3-0.
Mind you, it’s probably fairer to say that the Nomads lost it. The first goal was the Nomads central defence being half-asleep. Greg Draper is probably the best striker the Welsh Premier League has ever seen and you can’t give him even half-an-inch of room, even when he looks as unwell as he does just recently.
The second goal was the fault of the keeper losing his sense of position, and the third goal was the classic keeper’s dilemma from a set-piece of “do you cover the onrushing forwards in case they make contact with the ball, or do you cover the shot in case the onrushing forwards miss it” and in the end being caught in no-man’s-land between the two.
And the match might have had a totally different outcome has the referee awarded to the Nomads at least one of the three penalties that I would have awarded had I been refereeing.
After the match I made my apple pie and then cooked a vegan pizza, which was just as delicious as normal.
Later on I went out for my evening walk around the Pointe du Roc.
The harbour gates must have just opened because the sea was alive with trawlers.
Here’s one of them heading off into the sunset, with the coast of Jersey away in the distance. How long they will be continuing to go off that way depends upon the outcome of Brexit.
But my attention was drawn by some kind of object on the horizon.
I couldn’t see at that distance what it was so back here I used my “crop – enhance – enlarge” technique to see if I could identify it. And I have to say that I’m still none-the-wiser about what it might be, over there on the extreme right of the image.
What I’ll have to do is to take a similar photo in a day or two’s time to see if it’s still there. If it is, it’s a lighthouse. If not, it’s a ship.
Back home, it’s only 21:30 and despite my little repos earlier this afternoon, I’m exhausted.
So badger the writing of the blog. I intend to take full advantage of my fatigue by going to bed for an early night.
hauteville sur mer manche normandy france
buoy jersey channel islands
yachts english channel islands
trawler ile de chausey granville manche normandy france
trawler english channel granville manche normandy france
trawlers english channel granville manche normandy france
trawler baie de mont st michel granville manche normandy france
