Recipe time

 It's been a long time since I posted a recipe. 

I have several bread books which C has a habit of occasionally browsing through, and then he pins a note to the noticeboard in the kitchen with a few recipes he would like to try - eating, that is. Not baking himself. Anyway, oliebollen, Dutch in origin,  have been on the list for quite some time, and last weekend I decided the time had come to make them while I had fresh oil in the deep fat fryer.

In fact the recipe he had come across was for a firmer dough which you could shape into proper neat balls. It will be worth trying some time, it called for both orange and lemon zest and cinnamon in the dough, which sounds pretty good to me. However, I went for the recipe my mother used to use, which comes from the 1978 Golden Anniversary recipe collection produced by the Chatelaine Institute. I think this must have come from her two aunts in Canada. Even now after all these years I can remember their ZIP code from writing thank you notes each Christmas and birthday, although I no longer remember the house number. 

I halved the amount, and we managed to eat them all by Sunday evening. I worked on the assumption that there was no instant yeast around back then so the yeast would be active dry yeast, and I used one teaspoon. 

So for a half batch I used 1 tsp active dry yeast in 1/4 cup (60 ml) warm water and a pinch of sugar. 

To make the dough/batter I also used 

2 cups (500ml) flour

3/4 cup (190 ml) lukewarm milk

1 egg

1 tblsp  sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp salt

and 1 cup golden raisin and a medium size Bramley cooking apple chopped to about the same size as the raisins.

Mix everything together, cover and allow to rise for 1 1/2 hours. Fry in bathces hot oil (350F, 175C), dropping in a spoonful at a time. I think mine were rather bigger than the heaping teaspoon suggested, more like a soup spoon, and they took a little over 2 minutes each side to fry. 

Fried, and dusted with cinnamon sugar and enjoyed. 

January favourites

 Are not many - work continues to be busy. How did it get to be February already? I won't get to the PC till tomorrow so I can't update my header photo till then, but I thought I might as well  get this posted. 

As I suspected, the header photo has to come from February 21, I have nothing from last year. I actually edited two photos from Farmleigh in Feb 21 - having done the squirrel header I thought I might have used it last year (no, it was snowdrops), so I also edited a tufted duck, which I'll add as a footer to this post.

Warm off the needles

 A couple of knitting projects.

I started out by making these elbow-length hand warmers for one of my nieces. She is into photography, and I know from personal experience that in colder weather, either fingerless mitts (or better yet, flip-top ones) are the way to go. She liked them.

So then I decided to knit a shorter pair for my aunt, with the remnants of some beautiful blue-faced Leicester wool, hence the blue-faced sheep on the tag.

And I'm currently knitting a pair for myself in a dark blue wool, not quite as nice a wool as either of these, but with the merit of being machine washable :D. Not that I have ever found mittens needed washing that often, it was purely that I was out of nicer remnants in the right weight.

But before I started mine, I used up some of the chunky pink from my recent jacket to knit a cowl for my sister. It's  a chunky (bulky) wool, 80% merino with 20% angora, and it's wonderfully soft and cosy. 

She gets a pink sheep on her tag. The main photos of the cowl, the colour of the wool is pretty true. I took the tag late in the evening, because I need to wrap this up and take it to work to post on the way home. In that case, the colours in the tag are pretty true, but definitely not the wool. 

Ever since I went back to work on the 3rd, I have been seeing tree-pruning going on all the way along the central avenue through the park. They start early, even though it's still dark. And often when I'm coming home, I see them all sitting around on chairs and whatever they have gathered at the back of one of the trucks enjoying a warm mug of tea. A workers' tail-gate party, as it were. Anyway, with the moon this morning and a very stormy cloudy sky, I stopped to take a photo. It was pretty windy, I would not have liked to be up in that cherry-picker. 

December Favourites

 Can legitimately include a couple of Christmas cards...

The sentiment behind the gate reads "Trust in your potential, enjoy the process, try something new, explore possibilities, but most of all believe", which I thought played well with the butterfly/caterpillar theme.

No very exciting photos from January 2022 - knitting, baking and marmalade. So the header comes from January 2021 when we obviously had a very cold snap. 

With wishes for good health, peace and contentment for 2023.