Saint Delia Online

Norma found her first.  Delia Smith, patron saint of British cookery and promoter of cranberries, is online in all her recipe-providing goodness! Check out these recipes:

Those chocolate truffles were almost my undoing as a teen.  Dad promised to get Mum out of the house so my sister and I could wrap the Christmas slippers he got her.  Mum promised to get Dad out of the house so we could make truffles for Dad.  Everything was going fine, dashing out of the kitchen, sliding on the hall rug to run into the lounge for the next videotaped instruction until Delia Smith said "transfer the mixture into a bowl, then cover it with clingfilm and refrigerate overnight."

Disaster!  We had maybe an hour at this point, then Mum and Dad would be back for lunch.  Delia was quite firm: refrigerate overnight.  She was smiling and I wanted to hit her for ruining our plan.  I sat on the sofa and nearly cried.  Even on the replay she still said it.  The solution, after some frantic worrying and arguing, was to shove the mix in the deepest part of the chest freezer, fully stocked for nuclear winter, and hope it would be enough.  Forty minutes later the truffles came out soggy, partly congealed, but it worked.  Dessert spoonfuls of truffle were rolled in cocoa powder, dropped in little paper cases and hidden in the fridge in a Ferrero Rocher box left over from last Christmas, out hands getting coated in chocolate.  We pulled off the fastest kitchen cleanup in history and still managed to get Mum's slippers hastily wrapped and hidden.  When the parents returned we were found nonchantly reading or dusting our bedrooms and the truffles were a great sucess.

To answer Norma's question, my favourite cookery books are two Farmhouse Kitchen books, titled "Farmhouse Kitchen 1" and "Farmhouse Kitchen 2".  They are the recipes of a television show in the 1970s and 1980s broadcast on Yorkshire TV, most of them sent in by viewers.  The recipes are traditional English cooking, the lemon curd and strawberry jam we made from these recipes was wonderful, especially on fresh baked bread.  There's also a beloved student cookbook published by Sainsbury's supermarket chain that I took to university in 1993, full of cheap recipes for a non existent budget.  Lots of fish recipes, since white fish was dirt cheap.  It came in four inch by two inch blocks and cost sixty nine pence from Tesco (less than a dollar).

Curious Thankgiving fact of the day:  We arrived in America in May 1998.  This will be the fourth Thanksgiving where Hubby and I have volunteered to cook the turkey (once with Sehlat in Nashville TN, once with Emily last year, once with Julia and Bill the year before, and this year with Rox).  The British are coming, and they're bringing the turkey!

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