Hands off my Leeks

After watching lots of the latest Masterchef series, I now see why presentation of food is so important and any food can taste better than it actually is by being nicely prepared. So when I decided to try a recipe of Frozen Bassa with rice, lemon and garnished with leeks (inevitably), the stylish (!) presentation involved cutting the leeks length-ways and placing alongside the fish to make it look nice. OK - not exactly sophisticated but a start and at least I'd thought about it.

The Consort arrived home from work and while I was busy taking the fish out of the oven, she very kindly started serving up the Leeks. I couldn't help it - before I could stop myself I was shouting out "Hands off my Leeks" and then had to quickly explain that they were the focal point of the presentation and had to be carefully laid onto the plates after the rice and fish had been served.

Think I'm starting to take this all too seriously !

Think I'll stick to flowers

No blogging recently because there has been nothing to report. Just repeating food I've prepared before like the Cauliflower Cheese with carrots, baked potato and salad leaves in the picture above which I served up on Tuesday.

So following a very kind encouraging comment from The Consort's sister and another "prompt", I decided to try my hand at baking today.

I meet with a friend most weeks for tea/coffee (me/him) and we mostly discuss our latest disasters in the world of investment and give each other hot tips about the next big thing we can lose money on. As we left the coffee shop yesterday, he said he would call in at the market to get some flowers for his wife. I was on my bike so buying flowers for The Consort wasn't an option as they would have been decimated by the time I got home. Unfortunately, we'll be meeting with the friends this evening for our monthly "film evening" and there is no doubt at all that he'll mention the flowers to make sure I am embarrassed and left with nothing but excuses as to why his wife got flowers and The Consort didn't get any from me.

So when The Consort left for work this morning and mentioned that maybe I could try some baking (Banana and Apricot Bread) for this evening, I feigned a lack of interest but here was my "get out of jail free" card. When my friend mentioned the flowers he'd bought for his wife, I could respond with a winning riposte of how I'd spent the day preparing the food for the evening. Gotcha !!

So I followed the recipe precisely, carefully measuring everything out, mixing it all up well and cooking for the prescribed 20 minutes at the exact temperature. I let it stand for 2 minutes as instructed and then started slicing it up. The end just collapsed and a load of gooey uncooked mixture oozed out so I put it back in the oven for another 15 minutes and tried again and it was still very runny. I turned the oven up by a further 10 degrees and gave it another 5 minutes and the result can be seen in the picture above. I've got a strong feeling that it will be inedible and The Consort will end up cooking another one when she gets home from work.

Got to go now, need to visit a florist !