Recipe time

foraging male chaffinch

I've had a fancy for a while to make gougère, but I couldn't remember what on earth we used to have with it when we made it in the classic ring form. Having picked up some Gruyère, I was partially committed to making it - and in the end, I used some leftover roast lamb with it, I made a filling with some chopped onion sweated in olive oil, then added red bell peppers, courgettes, chopped tomatoes and rosemary, and added the diced lamb near the end of the cooking time.

Gougère is simply cheese-enhanced choux pastry, and can be made as a ring and served with a savoury filling or salad, or made into little puffs like profiteroles, or larger puffs like cream buns.

Since my recipe goes back to when I did my Cordon Bleu course, it's not even in metric, let alone with American alternatives! 

For the two of us I used:

Gougère:

1/4 pt (5 fluid ounces) water

2 ounces butter

2 1/2 ounces strong flour

2 eggs

for the choux pastry, and I used about 3 ounces of Gruyère cheese - most of it coarsely grated, and some diced finely to sprinkle over the top.

Other good cheeses to use are Comté or Emmental.

Make your choux pastry (I always beat the last egg in a cup, and add it gradually so as not to make the pastry too wet), and stir in the grated cheese. Shape into your preferred option, the cooking time will obviously vary depending on what shape you are making.

I baked mine in a medium hot oven (180C) for about forty minutes.

On The Way To Work...

I still don't know what these "Three Men in a Boat" were doing - by the time I got as far up the river as I had first seen them messing around, they had pulled back into the centre and were starting to head downstream again.

I don't all that often walk on this particular stretch of pavement - and I think when I do there are usually so many real leaves on the ground that I don't ever remember seeing these sort of "fossils" where leaves had obviously fallen onto the wet concrete before. With the green moss growing on them, they were quite intriguing to look at.

I thought this too looked like  leaf - or maybe more of a ferny frond. The old church on James' Street which used to be a lighting shop and has been empty for at least four years has had a sign up for a while with a planning application to turn it into a micro-distillery. They obviously got approval, because the workman are now in. All I can think is that the green is stained glass and whatever has been covering it up till now has got torn away just there.

Christmas Knit

 This was originally meant to be a September birthday gift - but the initial leaves and ivy took so long that I re-scheduled it as a Christmas gift instead rather than rush.Also, it took a while to find several different shades of green and brown. Actually, after those two initial leafy sessions, everything else went pretty quickly.

The pattern comes from Ravelry ~ Woodland Wreath, by Frankie Brown.
Since I took the photos with different cameras in wildly varying lighting conditions over two months as I added each new item, I'm afraid the colours vary a bit from photo to photo. C'est la vie. A couple were taken with the wrong colour balance - and typicially, when I had RAW disabled so I can't correct them.

The foam wreath I used was just under 14" diameter, 35 cm. Since I got two, I am planning to make another one of these for myself. I had it hanging on the wall for about a week before I wrapped it up and posted it off, which gave me time to make a few adjustments in positioning, and add a few more white dots to some of the toadstools. I missed it when it was gone!

Bare wreath

plain leaf garland

Oak leaves and acorns

Ivy garland

Holly leaves and berries

Mistletoe

Pine cones

Toadstools

Hedgehogs

Owls

Bluebells and flowers

January Favourites

I was sick all over Christmas and well into the New Year, and since I got back to work the mornings have either been dark or dismal, if not both - so the opportunities for photography are not jumping out at me!
I'd been planning to share a knitting project over Christmas, but several photos need editing, so it didn't happen over the holidays ~ no editing package on the laptop which is increasingly geriatric and best used for emergencies only.

But...here are my favourite cards from January.

Christmas on the Canal

We went for a walk on Christmas Day morning, to help give us an appetite for dinner after our Pavés à la Canelle for breakfast (Cinnamon Cobbles, I'll try to figure out the recipe well enough to post soon. It's transcribed a long, long time ago from a French magazine, probably Paris-Match, so the measurements are all over the place, some imperial, some metric... ).
 We brought some old stale bread and saw plenty of birds who enjoyed it - apart from the heron who flew off into a tree. It was a surprise to see a wood duck and a pair of mandarins - maybe they had come from the park.

Season's Greetings

On the way to work

Today was one of those mornings I went to the post office in the centre of town and walked back out to work...some quick snaps along the way.
I missed the first and best skein of geese due to not yet having my camera out.

On the way to work...

It turned into another dull, cold, grey damp day. But as I was going to work there was a lovely sunrise glow, so I took a few photos.
The one of the flying swans is nothing as a photo, but it's always a magical feeling to see them fly overhead and hear them honking away.

Just for fun, because I accidentally hit the "posterize" button when I was editing one if the brewery silhouette photos:

And after I left the supermarket, I was rather surprised to see this: