Tuesday February 15, 2005

White Chocolate Mouse in a box or a Valentine's meal

A year or so ago I saw Friends for dinner where a woman made this amazing dessert. The description does not sound so wonderful but I have been itching to try it. So for Valentines day I had a days holiday to make a three course meal for my wife. We started with Thai fish cakes and a small side salad. I then cheated buying one of Lloyd Grossman's green thai sauces putting chicken and prawns in it. The Thai sauces are excellent the Italian/Indian ones less so. A tip here if you make any meal that has sauce in it eg spagetti, curry etc cook it twenty four hours before you eat it. The time it spends in the fridge the flavours develop and become more intense.

Back to dessert. The whole thing as can be seen is a biscuit box which is a devil to make. The pastry is cooked with score lines in it so after cooking it can be broken into the pieces that make the box. Fondant icing is meant to be used to hold it together but I could not find any so my neighbour made me an alternative with icing sugar and egg white. The amounts of ingredients listed made me six of these cases. It has to be said about a third of the pieces fell apart on dividing so I had a high failure rate. I found in the end the best way of dividing them is to do so as soon as you can hold the biscuit in your had after it comes out of the oven.

The funny part is I produced a menu for the meal to show my wife when she came to the table. Of course I missed the typo I had done. Mouse instead of mousse. The first meal I cooked her years ago I did exactly the same thing. I should have told her it was deliberate...

The other cool thing to say is the picture above was loaded from my Canon IXUS camera at work. We are running JDS, Solar10 and Sunray version 3.0. I plugged the camera into a USB port on my Sunray, cranked up the Multi media Camera browser, selected my camera and up the pictures came. This is just as it should be !

First setting of the new year...

Last weekend I set the first of this years crops in the allotment. Although the winter has been mild it is about the right time to set shallots and garlic. The shallots are simply pressed into the ground with a foot between rows and perhaps nine inches between each bulb. As the bulbs are bigger than standard onions they do not suffer the same problem of birds pulling them up thinking the brown top might be useful addition to their nests. When setting the shallots disgard any that feel soft, they are going to rot on you.

The garlic is buried two to three inches deep with the pointed end upwards. Both will be ready as soon as the tops die back usually August. Never use supermarket garlic always buy proper bulbs. Each bulb is broken up into individual cloves before planting.

Back home my potatoes are in the garage 'chitting' which means they are on a tray and will sprout and then be put into the ground when it is much warmer. The chitting brings them on and speeds up the time it takes before they appear after being planted.

Next week I will be sowing my leek seeds and to avoid 'damp off' problems I should spray them with water with a small amount of copper sulphate added once they germinate.

I have finally cleared my ponds of debris like old lily pads etc which I should have done in the autumn when the pond water was warm after the summer. It is now very cold and a rake and net saved me having to dip my hands in the freezing water.