Pear Danish

I sort-of made this up based on what little I remembered about danishes. It worked pretty well - nice and sticky and sweet.

• 1 sheet of puff pastry
• 4 tinned pear halves, drained (or previously stewed pears)
• Pear jam
• Canola oil (for greasing)

Cut the pastry into quarters. Spread each with a good coating of pear jam, leaving about 1cm clear at the edges. Place a pear half in the centre of each pastry square, aligned diagonally. 

Fold over the edges a little to create a ridge all the way around, then fold two of the points up over the pear half. Press together at the top where they overlap. 

Place on a lightly greased baking tray, and bake for about half an hour at 180ºC, or until the pastry is cooked. Allow to cool a little before serving, as the jam will be very hot.

You may notice that the recipe doesn't involve icing or sugar or anything on top. It didn't really need it, since as +Annette pointed out, the jam provides enough sweetness. I only just realised that most danishes use custard on the base, but I'm not a fan and I don't think we have any anyway.

I used a bit much jam, so some of it bubbled out onto the baking tray to form a sort of toffee. It came off pretty easily after a bit of soaking, though.

Lawnmowing

I haven't had to do much lawn maintenance over the Summer, because it's been too dry to grow anything. The lawn's pretty much died back, although we did have to apply some Weed n' Feed to keep the dandelions down.

The last time I can remember mowing the lawn was just before Christmas. I just mowed the front lawns last week, but haven't done the back one yet. We've finally started getting some rain (which, if my regular fortnightly trips last year are anything to go by, will probably only happen every weekend), so the green things are starting to grow again.

We have a mulch pile in the back corner of the yard, but it's getting a bit carried away. I filled up the bin pretty quickly, and started working on a pile next to it. It got pretty big last year as I gradually hacked the back grass down, but the fresh green stuff tends to reduce in bulk as it loses moisture and starts to decompose. The few mows I did over the Summer yielded mainly straw and dust, which doesn't get much smaller over time.

I'll probably need to start doing the lawns every couple of weeks now things are getting wetter. At least we have an electric mower, which is nice and light and doesn't require any messy refuelling. It's just a matter of making sure I don't run over the cord, and trying to get the mowing done between rain showers!

Dinosaur Pasta

I like dinosaurs! I saw Jurassic Park three times, and now constantly work to raise awareness that this is a Velociraptor:

and this is a Deinonychus:

Anyway, we were doing the online shopping order a few weeks ago and +Annette ordered a box of dinosaur pasta shapes. I'll ignore the fact that one of them is called "Bronty" instead of "Apaty" because at least Bronty sounds like a real name, even though Brontosaurus has been recognised as a mistakenly-classified Apatosaurus since 1903.

So I was boiling them up on the stove...

Steggy and Rex clearly visible on the fork

...and Annette walked past, and I said "Hey, look!"

"I'm making primordial soup!"

Hair dye

+Annette has had dyed hair for as long as I've known her - mostly black, but with a coloured section down one side. When we first met it was purple, and then she changed it to red. Recently though, she's had it professionally re-styled so it's now black on top, purple on the right, and grades around the back to bright red on the left!

We've acquired some red and purple hair dye, and since it's not a job Annette can do by herself (not being able to see the back of her own head that easily), it's now fallen on me to do the periodic re-dyeing.

The first time was about a week ago. I found it to be a daunting and somewhat stressful exercise; I'm never at my best when learning new skills, especially ones where you only get one shot and run the risk of major failure.

I've never done much with hair apart from occasionally trim my own, so even the first task was troublesome. We had to divide the coloured hair into six bunches and tie it up to separate it. The little loops we made were like pulling a ponytail through, but only half pulling through the last time ("just like making a bun," advised Maddy, like I'd ever done that before either). The exercise was further complicated because the original dye-job had been done in overlapping diagonal wings to help the colours blend together better.

We had two red and one purple tube of hair dye. Mixing the right colours was probably the easiest part of the exercise! Next though, I had to learn about foils.

One at a time, I had to release the colour-separated hair bunches and thoroughly paint them with hair dye. We had to use squares of aluminium foil to pick up a layer of hair, paint it, then fold it up so it wouldn't splatter dye everywhere and to keep it out of the way while we did the hair underneath. It took a good couple of colour segments before I started to develop a good technique and really get into the swing of it.

After that, my job was done. She sat around for an hour or two with so much foil on her head it looked like she was baking mini-potatoes, then showered and dried it.

We got there in the end, and it turned out pretty well! It was a trial by fire, but at least I know what I'm up for next time she needs a colour boost. I've heard it said that confidence is the memory of past success, so it won't be quite as daunting.

Chickenherder's Pie

This was my first attempt to bake a full-size pie in the oven, rather than the individual serve pies that come out of our pie-maker. It's a chicken and vegetable pie with mashed potato on top, so it's like a shepherd's pie but without the lamb.

It's actually been a while since I made this, so I may be a little vague on some of the exact ingredients and methods.

Top

• Four or five large potatoes, peeled and chopped
• Chives (fresh or dried)
• A splash of rice milk (or regular milk)

Boil the potatoes until cooked all the way through. Drain and return to the pot.

Add chives and mash, adding rice milk as necessary to make the mash smooth but not runny.
Set aside.

(I didn't bother adding spring onions or garlic paste to the mash, since both of those ingredients go into the main pie filling and I wanted the top of the pie to be smooth.)

Filling

• 500g chicken mince
• 1 leek, chopped or sliced
• 2 spring onions, sliced
• 1 celery stick, sliced
• 1 garlic clove, crushed (or some garlic paste)
• A pinch of salt
• A tablespoon of canola oil
• A few teaspoons of cornflour
• A splash of rice milk (or regular milk)

Fry the leek in the oil in a large pan until it softens. Add the chicken mince and cook until it's sealed.

Add the other vegetables and the salt and cook until mostly done and the leek starts to brown.

To bind the mixture, sprinkle in a teaspoon of cornflour and stir in well. Add a dash of rice milk. Repeat a few times until the mixture sticks together well. Try to avoid it becoming too sloppy or ultra-stodgy.

The Pie

• 1 sheet of shortcrust (or puff) pastry
• Mashed potato (from above)
• Chicken and vegetable filling (from above)

Line a pie dish with canola oil, and press the pastry sheet into the dish. Trim around the edges with a knife.

(Normally I would have used puff pastry, but we seemed to have accidentally acquired a packet of shortcrust pastry instead.)

Spoon in the pie filling, smoothing it down so the top is pretty flat.

Cover the filling with mashed potato all the way to the edges. I also used a tablespoon to shape the mash in a spiral pattern, but whatever floats your boat.

Bake in the oven at 180ºC for... a while. I didn't time it, but you basically want to make sure the pastry is cooked and the potato on top starts to brown. Since the ingredients apart from the pastry are all cooked to begin with, it shouldn't matter too much as long as the pastry is done!

Busy busy!

Sorry about the lack of posts lately - I've been too busy living my life to find the time to write about it! And I did say I was bad at keeping diaries.

I do have a list of things I want to write about though, so I'll line up some posts for the next few days.

So, what have I been up to? All the regular housework of course, and lots of taking care of +Annette. We've been watching one or two episodes of The Walking Dead most nights, and we're halfway through Season 4.

I've been planning and running some roleplaying games, and doing some writing on a couple of my own games. I've also been teaching people how to play the Anima Tactics skirmish wargame, which has prompted me to pull out all of my partly-completed miniatures and work on finishing them off.

I've also been working towards getting a button badge production and badge machine hire business up and running, which I'll write about in a future post.

Check back soon for more!

Lessons I have learned

When you put mince in the freezer, flatten it out first so it'll thaw faster. If you leave it in a ball, you're left scraping layer after bloody layer of thawed meat off a lump that looks like a frozen brain.

I think cats charge around the house after making a deposit in the litter tray to make sure they don't have any remnants stuck to their butts.

Apparently you need to cover stuff when you put it in the fridge, to stop it tasting like fridge or stop everything in the fridge tasting like it.

You need to wait for cakes to cool down before you can ice them.

It takes a long time to dry out bread for breadcrumbs if you're actually trying to grill them while they're on a low shelf of the oven instead of baking them.

When +Annette said she wanted to clear all the plants out of the bed along the side of the house, she didn't mean the two herb bushes at the far end. I thought they smelled nice as the whippersnipper cut through them. I think they might be growing back slowly.