Esther77's Profile

Grapes are my favourite to eat on a journey - wash a whole load and put them in a tupperware box. They're easy to pick at while you're driving, it's not going to get messy if one falls in the floor, are juicy and hydrating, and they taste great - the perfect travel food!

Redcurrant jelly is also great with lamb... I like them mixed with raspberries in sweet things, as I find them a bit tart on their own. Personally, I'm a blackcurrant girl myself - they really can't beat beat - except maybe by a jostaberry (a gooseberry/blackcurrant cross) crumble!

That looks like a November 5th Guy Fawkes bonfire to me - minus the eery sillhouette of a guy on the top... Bonfires are more of an autumnal thing surely - when the warmth and light of the bonfire is actually a welcome attraction? A mug of pumpkin soup and a jacket potato with some thick slices of cheddar shoved in to melt is a bonus then!

I always used to make up a batch of cheese & chutney sandwiches en mass at the beginning of the week, take them out of the freezer in the morning, by the time lunchtime comes around, the sandwich has defrosted, but hasn't got warm. The cheese never suffered from it, and it saved me making a lunch up every single day. There's probably an argument about things with a certain fat content not freezing particularly well though.

I've never baked from cold apart from with a recipe that has a sachet of instant yeast in it, and I figured that the warm up time would give the yeast a head start, so the instructions made sense. The comment about not getting such a browned top on the cake makes a lot of sense too.
I think that you should probably make sure that your oven was preheated if some of the cooking process has already happened before you put the mix into bake - for example, if you've heated the liquid ingredients to melt, stirred them into dry, then they should go straight into a hot oven.

I prefer to cook a whole salmon en papillote - a layer of foil, a layer of greaseproof (the greaseproof is there to stop any interaction between lemon juices etc from affecting the taste of the fish), the fish, and any stuffing within, then wrap it up using the foil to seal in the goodies. Cook in a very hot oven till all of a sudden you smell fish and remember it's in there. It'll be perfectly cooked at that point (about half hour for a salmon filleted). No sewing/thread skills required, and all the juices stay contained, and the fish can't dry out.

@Apfelmus - what kind of stuff are you talking about throwing out? There are some things that I would just reheat in a conventional oven, straight from frozen, but for a longer time (there are plenty of supermarket foods that you can cook directly from frozen, and similar principles apply - just make sure your food is piping hot), covering with foil for the first part of cooking to reduce browning can help on that score.

@ Melbourne Paula - Jamie Cullum - the jazz pixie. It doesn't seem like a usual match when you consider her previous romantic links... Apparently they got married in January - here's a picture of the two of them together with article about the wedding: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1242316/Sophie-Dahl-marries-Jamie-Cullum-secret-winter-wonderland-wedding.html

Or, if you want them fancy enough to serve to guests, use a melon baller to make mini round scoops, shove a toothpick in each one, put them back in the freezer to harden up, melt some (real!) chocolate and then dip the balls in. You can re-heat the chocolate when you need to, and using the toothpick makes it easy to dip quickly, so you get a thinner shell. Put them back in the freezer to harden. If you don't like the look of the hole where the toothpick came out, you can drizzle a bit of chocolate over the top to disguise it.

I think the question "how could you possibly get the two muddled up?!" is more to the point! Crumpets never get split, and are like a deep holey pancake - we used to toast them in front of the fire, then they would be coated in butter and golden syrup. Muffins, as everyone else notes, are so much more of a bread - and perfect for splitting (I like mine with scrambled egg on top).
For maximum amounts of butter/jam/syrup etc, then the crumpet is a winner every time - push everything into the holes, and then exclaim "but there's barely anything on it!" knowing full well that basically it's solid fat and sugar through and through - bliss!