Flossie

Forever-young - I really like the idea of a cookie exchange. I must see if I can try this in the new year, maybe it will encourage some of my friends to bake.

Thanks, Therdogg, I'm beginning to get it. It's like that here with Christmas cake - people have a ritual for 'baking the cake' and probably don't bake again until next year's cake. At least, it's like that nowadays; when I was growing up my mother baked every week.

Pardon me for interrupting but I am fascinated by this thread and by the variety of cookies that people bake and the effort that they expend in so doing. I am from the UK (Northern Ireland to be precise) and we don't have a tradition of this frenzied baking. I speak as someone who loves baking and loves collecting recipe books and I've never heard of a lot of the cookies mentioned in this thread. What do you do with all those cookies? Keep them in the house to serve with coffee? Give them as gifts? I'd love to know the background to all this cookie baking. Is it widespread across the US? Canada?

Definitely need a machine to get that creamy texture. Mine is a cheapo Phillips job, cost about £40 and makes about 1.1 litre. From memory: 4 egg yolks 100g caster sugar Whisk these together then whisk in about 250 mls full-fat milk and about 300 mls cream. They also offer the optional use of skimmed milk powder 'to stabilise the mixture'. I don't use it. Then cook in a bain-marie until the custard thickens slightly. Chill it. Add about 200mls passionfruit puree. I buy 4 - 6 p.fruit and make up the quantity of juice with passoa, as stated above. Churn in your ice cream mixer, transfer to a container and freeze until ready to eat. Apologies that the quantities are so vague, I'll check later with the recipe. Any way, you get the idea. Make an egg custard, flavour it, churn it. Eat it. I read a thread on ice cream making some time ago where the chief protagonists were Steve Klc and Jonathan Day. I realised the depth of my ignorance about the whole process. But the above recipe is pretty tasty to eat while I'm trying to learn more.

My local Tesco has the bitter chocolate and the lime and mago. I bought the latter last night. It was good. However, I have to say that I prefer the passionfruit that I make myself using a recipe the Hill Station people gave in the Daily Telegraph magazine a few Saturdays back. I add a couple of slugs of passoa to the mix and it's really rather good, if I do say so myself. I've just made two batches of ice cream today at the request of a friend who's having a party: lemon meringue in one and Maltesers in the other, with the subtle addition of some caramel. Just off to deliver them now!

Jan Moir gave it a glowing review in yesterday's Daily Telegraph.

I'm only a home cook so I feel a bit out of my league here but: I've made raspberry creme brulee many times in the past 10 years and it is one of my husband's favourite desserts. There's a lovely contrast between the acerbity of the raspberry layer on the bottom of the dish, topped by the creamy custard, topped by the crunchiness of the burnt sugar on top. I only make this when I have fresh raspberries to hand, preferably from my own garden. Never frozen. Might try a puree sometime, though. I once saw a recipe for apple creme brulee - didn't like that AT ALL. The apple was stewed then mixed with the custard. Gross.

What Rachel said.

Isn't the language we use when talking about food interesting when we're trying to lose weight? We talk about 'cheating' and having been 'good' (i.e., not having eaten something which is high-calorie and therefore'bad'? I know there's a vast area of psychology attached to this subject but it's only really impacted me recently when I started hearing the things I was saying.

Varmint, thanks for this thread. I'd never have started it myself but I'm finding it enormously encouraging. I'm around your age and I've been advised to lose weight because of hypertension. Have managed 11 lbs in 5 weeks. I agree with almost everything almost everyone has said so far. Smaller portions, exercise, not denying oneself, only eating good food. I've done the 'lose 14 pounds in a week' type diets before and in the long-term they don't work. It really is all about thinking carefully about what goes into your mouth. Keep it up and thanks for the encouragement by proxy!

At the risk of sounding smarmy, may I say how much I enjoyed your book?

I've about 250. Only a modicum of financial discretion stops me from buying more.

Thanks, Simon. I'm off out at lunch-time to buy some more gram flour and try again.

Simon or Scottish Chef - would you care to share your recipe(s) for onion bhajis, please? I have made them a few times but always been very disappointed with the way they turn out and end up buying them from M&S. Thanks!

Scottish Chef - thanks. Sounds delish - might be a way of getting Himself to eat turnips all unknowing. Simon - I agree about Margueritte (sp?) Patten. My first cookery book was one of hers and I was given it as a prize at school, aged maybe 16. It was the first cookery book in our home since Elizabeth Craig and I found it fascinating. Pored over the recipes for hours.

Scottish Chef - what's Creme Freneuse?

Anna - a good thread. I have piles and piles of recipes that I have clipped out of magazines and newspapers or copied from library books or downloaded from the net or been given by friends. The last three year's worth are in a concertina file beside the toaster. The 7 year's before that are jammed into ring files in the larder. I've also got a box of index cards but I don't find that method very helpful.Sometimes if I see a recipe that I really like and know that I will try soon, I'll stick it into a related recipe book - for example, Simon's Chicken Tikka Masala recipe is filed at the back of my favourite Indian cookery book. And I know what you mean about the pages becoming a mess when cooking from a book. I'll often cook a meal using several recipes from that Indian book so it's a nuisance to cover a particular page when I'm turning back and forth in the book. In other words, I have no real filing system and a lot of the recipes I keep are never tried out. However, I'm about to begin a year off work and I plan to try a lot of new recipes during that time. Maybe I'll even bring order to my chaotic non-filing system. And maybe I'll get the extra shelves I need to store all those books.

Simon - thanks for posting this recipe. I made it at the weekend and really enjoyed it. I followed Scottish Chef's method and blended the sauce. The last recipe I tried for CTM was so long and tedious that I haven't made it for a while but I think your recipe will now be my default Indian standby!

I can't bear the smell or taste of honey but Himself likes a teaspoonful stirred into his porridge.

Nll - when you perfect your onion bhajis can you pass on the tips you've gleaned, please? I love them but mine are horrible - stodgy and greasy.

My mother used to make thick chicken broth with loads of vegetables and this stuff called soup mix. As far as I can remember, it contained pearl barley and lentils. I couldn't bear the barley and refused to eat it until one day she forced it down me with the inevitable consequences.... I have NEVER eaten that stuff again. Actually, a lot of things she made had that lumpy, claggy texture - tapioca, cornflour, Bird's custard. Yuck! But some of her cooking wasn't bad.

Chocolate!

I remember my aunt making butter in the late 1960s. She had milked her own cows by hand, then churned the (unpasteurised) milk and shaped the butter. As I recall, the butter had quite a strong but not unpleasant flavour which varied with the time of year, dependent on what feed the cows were receiving. She also baked wonderful bread and the combination of the two tastes is a very happy memory.