Generally Gemma

Food Fad, Now Focus

I haven't mentioned my diet here for a while, those of you who perhaps have an inkling of my will power, practically nil, may have guessed why. I stalled. I more than stalled. I more than fell off the wagon. I jumped off. Into cake. Then ate my way out. 

It all started with Christmas, over which I actually didn't do too much damage, but then as the previous post mentioned life started to get a little hectic and interesting. I don't know about anyone else but when someone I love is hurting I try to fix it with food, fat and calorie laden comfort food!

 

It started innocently enough one Saturday night with lasagna, Bro and I are particular about lasagna, it mustn't be too runny, have a minimum of three layers and be crunchy on the top.

 

We followed the lasagna up with a Mississippi Mud Pie. I was given the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook for Christmas, this has also done damage! Oh such delicious damage!

 

Then on Sunday I made blondies, Bro has a white chocolate thing so these were perfect for him, not so perfect for my hips though!

 

Bro's 30th Birthday then arrived, bringing with it the traditional family birthday tea, which involved handmade sausage rolls. Oh flaky puff pastry how I love thee!

In addition to these badly photographed delights there has been pizza, fish and chips,chinese takeaway, cake, chocolate, krispy kreme. Let us just say whilst it has been a fabulous few months weight loss wise I have enjoyed every single mouthful!

I'm back on track though, as of yesterday I have lost all the weight that I have put on since just before Christmas. The final four and half pounds came off last night and now I am actually beginning to feel as though I am making some progress again!

Having said that, I've just baked more cupcakes for G's brother's birthday at the weekend, but if I only have one you won't tell will you!

Fish Finger Sandwich

picture from linked website

I am a huge fan of the fish finger sandwich. Not that I've had one for a while due to the ongoing diet, which I will update you on in the next couple of days. But for me there is a specific way of making them. The bread should ideally be white, for me as cheap and plastic as possible. The fish fingers should be grilled to a crisp. The bread should be buttered and the condiment of choice should be salad cream. Shredded iceberg is an option but certainly not essential. 

The fish fingers should be place onto the bread whilst still warm, the sandwich should be cut into triangles. The fish fingers should then start to slightly seep through the bread so that when you hold the sandwich your fingers leave marks in the bread. Disgusting I know but as far as I am concerned it is the only way they should be made and eaten!

One way they should certainly not be eaten is cold and from a plastic packet! I understand the craving issue, the need for comfort food but really is it comfort food if it comes ready made in a packet? For me part of the whole ritual of comfort food is the making of it. The sitting down with something nostalgic on the tv to transported back to your childhood and a simpler time. Part of the charm is burning your fingers on the hot fish fingers and the smell they create as they are under a grill. (Must be grilled not fried as otherwise the crispy crumb falls off!)

Somehow scoffing down something so beloved as a fish finger sandwich out of plastic whilst sitting in a car park or at your desk just isn't right. In fact, it could be the absolute antithesis of comfort food. At least to me anyway!

PS I seem to have screwed the formating of this post up somehow. I have no idea how. Does typepad ever do this to anyone else?!?!

cooking squid

After my last post a few people asked what M and I actually did with our squiddy bit and pieces after all that ridiculous effort in cleaning them! I didn't take any pictures of that process because I was sunbathing by that stage in the day and she had done it all by the time I got back into the house!

What she did though was slice the squid into strips and put the strips and the tentacle bits into marinade. We used some olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, chili flakes and salt and pepper. When you get fish as fresh as those squid were as a family we tend to prefer to go light on the flavourings so that fish remains the main star of the show. 

So we let them marinade for a few hours and then we slapped them on the plancha for a bit. (If I was doing this at home I would just use a really hot frying pan.) Let them cook until they are a solid white colour and just starting to get a bit of colour round the edges. It shouldn't take longer than a few minutes. 

We had ours as you can see with salad and some really nice bread. I am a sucker for tasty bread. In fact the only time I broke my diet all holiday was for bread. Lovely stuff!

G doesn't eat fish. He has said if we do anything as revolting as cleaning/cooking squid in his presence he will refuse to come to Spain again! He watched the video. I don't think he took the title as seriously as he should have done!

Easter for us these days is all about the food, the chilling out and the chocolate. We start with boiled eggs and soldiers first thing in the morning, start on the chocolate in the afternoon, late lunch and then cake and more chocolate through out the evening. 

This year we went to Bro's and T's for the day which was utterly gorgeous. T cooked the most amazing lamb from her family's farm and it was delish, all the better for the fact that I didn't have to cook or have anything to do with the washing up! Then we all settled down on the sofas in front of the fire with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on the tv to snooze and drink tea to. 

My contribution to the day was the cake. Bro always likes to test to me when it comes to cooking and crafting and this year he asked for a carrot cake. Which I had never made before. I hate making things for the first time to take to peoples houses where there isn't a chance for tweaking of throwing away completely messed up attempts. 

I wish I'd thought to take pictures earlier in the day with the natural light rather than relying on light bulbs. But when one is so relaxed one is practically horizontal it is difficult to remember to take the camera out of the bag. Especially when a lot of people tense up and panic when I do. Sunday was about chilling with friends and family and a no stress situation which we don't seem to get a lot of these days so when we do we try and make the most of it. 

The cake was apparently delish, I hate saying about something I made but all in attendance were in agreement. For myself, I was especially proud of my marzipan carrots, which I could prove I had made by hand as the hands in question were still streaked with red and green food colouring! Not bad for someone who was the least artistic member of the family huh M and Bro!

And Easter wouldn't be Easter without the obligatory daffodil shot. I'm so going to miss them when they have disappeared from the shops!

Girly Drinks

It seems that when G and I go away there is normally an overwhelming theme to the holiday. Normally centred around some sort of food or drink. This Summer was the Summer of Cocktails. Which for G was rather unusual as he is pretty a beer and wine man who doesn't dabble much in the evil zone of spirits or pink girly drinks. However, he flung himself into the proceedings this year with great gusto!

The first picture up there isn't so much a cocktail as the native drink of Spain, the tinto verano. Cheap red wine over ice topped up with the local lemonade, gaseosa, which is sort of like slightly sweetened soda water. When we first discovered these years ago I fell in love. As a teenager I used to be able to drink these all night without ever once falling down drunk and these days they are my Summer beverage of choice, although I am yet to find anywhere in England that sells the right sort of lemonade.

Normally they are served in ordinary glasses but this one place we went for dinner served them up in tall beauties with feet which brought a sense of elegance to what is normally a work mans mid-day drink.

Next on the list were mojitos! M can't stand these and G wasn't sure so really I was on my own with these. However they were terrible refreshing, I didn't stick strictly to the recipe and did top mine up with the ever present gaseosa to make them go a bit further.

These are mai tais which M has a thing for. Many many years ago when I was but a twinkle in my parents eye she and my Dad went to the Caribbean on holiday and drunk these by the pitcher full and she was determined this year to try and recreate them. So recreate them we did although as the days passed we did water them down more and more. She woke up the first morning after we had them with a hangover after only one! Which considering the amount of alcohol in them really wasn't all that surprising!

I don't have a close up of this but these were pina coladas. M and one of her sisters have a major thing for these. A few years ago when Aunt S came to visit she and M would make up huge jugs of these and sit on the terrace with the sun going down sipping away. So these are as much of a tradition as the tinto veranos are.

Hu in a what now?!

Yes, I have reached that sad blogging stage where I blog about my lunch! However, this is not just any lunch this is a lunch that revolves around home grown and homemade produce as the picture above illustrates. It may not be the prettiest thing alive but it is my first ever attempt at homemade humous, humus, hummus. (How on earth do you spell it anyway? There seems to be some sort of confusion.)

G pointed out that it looked like something you would find on the pavement in town early on a Sunday morning. <shudder> Notice he didn't say on a Saturday night, we don't go out on Saturday nights anymore. It's so loud and busy and you can't ever find a seat. We are 80 year olds did I mention that!

Also note the strange perfect triangular space in the centre of my cucumber. I didn't cut that. It came like it. What on earth causes that!?!? Alan Titchmarsh and Sarah Raven have both been most unhelpful on the subject!

Irish soda bread

250g (8oz) plain wholemeal flour
200g (7oz) plain white flour plus extra for dusting
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
25g (1oz) of butter
300ml (1/2 pint) buttermilk or skimmed milk

1) Sift together the two flours, bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar, then rub in the butter until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.

2) Quickly stir in the buttermilk and mix until a soft dough is formed.

3) Turn the dough on to a lightly floured work surface and knead until smooth.

4) Shape the dough into a round and place on a lightly floured baking sheet. Cut a cross in the top with a sharp knife, sprinkle with a little flour, then bake in a preheated oven at 200 Centigrade (400 Farenhite, Gas Mark 6) for 25-30 mins.

For the flour, I used seeded granary, as I don't ever really have wholemeal in the house and it worked fine. I think I may have been a tad enthusiastic with the cross on here too!

I'm also afraid I don't have the cup measurements which I know America uses as I'm afraid this is an English book.

The recipe is from Quick Cooking for Diabetes, which although I don't have diabetes I do try and follow a low GI diet which is what this book esentially is. A lot of our meals come from it and most of them are really tasty and actually do cook and prep in more or less 30 minutes. 

Fresh

I woke up at an obscenely early hour on Sunday morning. Which is something I haven't done for a while and with a lack of anything decent to read I thought I would get up and have some breakfast. But alack, alas! The cupboard was bare. So, then I dithered about putting the bread maker on but gave up on that when I realised even the shortest programme wouldn't fulfil my urgent need. Then I vaguely remembered reading in a recipe book about a soda bread that didn't use yeast and took a scant half hour in the oven. Just the ticket I thought!

I even broke out the Cornish marmalade with honey that a kind soul gave me for Christmas. Delish! Deffo on the remake list at the Generally Gemma household! G was astounded to be woken up with tea and fresh bread in bed. I think he wondered if he stumbled into the wrong house the night before!

Sweet and Good

There is a health drive going on Chez G&G. After seeing various photos of ourselves during the Summer and the horror that was "back to school" clothes shopping we are firmly on the healthy eating band wagon.

Previously we used to get boxes delivered by Abel and Cole but we both found that we were wasting quite a lot of it as there was only so much chard, onions and bean sprouts that our little household could get through. However, I recently discovered that G's school runs their Farmer's Choice scheme. A bag of fruit or veg or a mixed bag of both that directly profits the school PTA, so in the hope there would be fewer onions we have decided to give it a go.

The picture above is a taster of what arrived in our bags today. Far more manageable! So tonight we will be dining like kings on courgettes a plenty and G will have plenty of tomatoes to sustain him until his home grown ones begin to look a little more like this.

So with the lack of sweet things in our house at the moment I had to replace them with something. I finally cast on for something that I bought the yarn for a year ago! Is that common? To plan and then leave languishing forever and a day?

So with that I shall be off to cook my healthy dinner and look forward to a pudding of sweetness on my knitting needles.

Profiterole mountain

G said the other day thank-you for not putting the pictures of me on your blog and I suddenly realised that I hadn't exposed him to the humiliation that I had intended to!

For his birthday BBQ last weekend he had asked one of our friends to make him profiteroles for his birthday cake.

Which she kindly did and assembled into a profiterole mountain in our kitchen. Gorgeous huge adequate sized nuggets of air filled with Baileys cream and smothered with rich dark chocolate sauce.

And as you can see from the first photo, completely and utterly gorgeous when devoured!