On your marks....Strawberry jam!

So what book was I going to kick off with? Well it had to be my very first cook book that came in to my ownership and that book happened to be Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course. It's the edition for the 1990s and was bought for me by my ex boyfriend's mother for Christmas circa 1996! Acoording to Sally, (I've changed her name), this book was going to be indispensable, she swore by Delia, confidently stating that  if you diligently followed her recipes you couldn't go wrong! I hate to admit it, but I think she was pretty much right in her assessment, so thank you Sally!

Anyway I had a good look through and decided I'd have a go at the Cold Chicken Pie on page 192. This was a recipe that I'd never tried before and my aim is to try a new recipe from each book. Time got the better of me, and after being too lazy to pop to the butchers and get the sausagemeat (Tescos hadn't got any), it didn't seem to materialise!

So quite by accident, I've gone for strawberry jam! Astonishingly I've never made strawberry jam.  I've done gooseberry and blackcurrant owing to having a load of bushes in our garden (it used to be a fruit farm). It was coming back from the animal sanctuary this morning (to view our prospective baby rabbits) and driving through the narrow Norfolk lanes that we couldn't resist stopping to buy a couple of large punnets for sale outside someone's house; a bargain at £1 a punnet!

The recipe is on page 616 and I'm going to have to confess that I didn't follow it to the letter, mainly because I didn't have enough granulated sugar in the cupboard but I did have a 1kg bag of preserving sugar! It was the type particularly suitable for strawberry jam. With that in mind, I omitted the lemon juice and didn't worry too much about the strawberries being extra dry which is the worry with normal sugar (not having added pectin like the preserving sugar) as the pectin can become diluted.


General verdict was it was fairly straightforward. I kept the strawberries whole and let them absorb the sugar for a few hours because as Delia suggests this lets the juices draw out and then you get lovely plump strawberries in your jam.  And the taste I hear you ask? Husband says it's delicious, nice texture. I'll let you know my verdict on my next blog after I've sampled it myself!

Strawberries absorbing the sugar

Cooking gently

Bubbling away

My copy of the book

The finished article - yes I need to label those jars!






http://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Illustrated-Cookery-Course-Classic/dp/0563214546/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342109993&sr=1-2

The aim of the game...

"So what are you going to do with all those cookbooks" my husband asked one day whilst I was having a tidy up. My reply was, "Well, I will use them... you know I love cooking." But it dawned on me that I did own rather a lot and that I ought to start delving in to more than just the usual suspects, the ones that you always relied upon for that fail-safe recipe. 

A few years ago I started cooking a different cake every week from a little BBC Good Food magazine supplement that I had, and got husband to give each one a score. That little episode lasted about six weeks and then fell by the wayside partly due to the fact that like 90% of women I needed to cut down and go on a diet.

So why is this time different I hear you ask? Well, I want to give myself more of a challenge and not just cook cakes (even though I do lean towards cakes, puddings and desserts!), I want to cook new things and experiment. Some of the time I'd like people to choose what I should cook, whether it be a random page number or something particular. 

I know there's loads of people who do similar things and write blogs about it, but I feel compelled to do so for my own benefit as a record of what I do and also it's the teacher side of me coming out, sharing experiences and knowledge, oh yes, because I forgot to mention I do have a job as a school teacher. Thankfully I only work part-time which will hopefully allow me to indulge in this venture. Well, we'll see how it goes....