A good friend just visited from Italy and brought me my favorite food!
A fresh package of gnocchi (frozen for traveling)!
And a container of my favorite sauce for any kind of pasta:
OMG! I am in heaven. I’ll be back online after breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
P.S. you can see that I’ve already ripped open the Crema di Noci to dip in with a spoon, never mind the pasta!
Lately I’ve been all things British, whether it be tea drinking, fool eating, design watching and even time traveling.
These are the most recent shots I have of the jolly old place, taken as I flew across the channel from the continent to the UK. How lucky are we to be able to fly?
You will not believe it!
I should have posted this yesterday. But, it isn’t an April fool’s joke, so I guess it doesn’t really matter.
Many years ago my mother and I went to England. I had art historical research to conduct and she had a daughter to keep company and London and surrounding areas were the perfect place for both of our activities.
I won’t say that we loved all the food we encountered on our trip. Far from it! Grilled tomatoes and baked beans for breakfast seemed weird, but not nearly as strange as some of the meats we encountered.
High tea at Liberty was a huge success, as was high tea at Harrod’s. I mean, what’s not to love? Pour the clotted cream on anything and I will eat it all up! Maybe even on grilled tomatoes. Well, maybe not tomatoes. But anything else.
But while I have a generalized happy memory of all the dainty sandwiches and biscuits served at high tea, there is only one dessert, or pudding, that I have never forgotten. What made it more memorable was that I found it in a church basement cafeteria, somewhere in London.
My mom and I were visiting this particular church in order to see the 19th century neoclassical sculpture in the nave and when we were done it was lunch time and we were hungry. We realized there was a cafeteria in the basement and made our way there.
I don’t remember what we had for lunch, but I do remember encountering something called rhubarb fool in the pudding section of the cafeteria buffet. I had never heard of a fool, but I could tell it was made with cream and I was sold.
One bite of that rich combination of tart rhubarb compote mixed with whipped English cream and I was in heaven. I’ve never looked back.
Enjoyed with a shortbread biscuit, life is never sweeter!
Here’s a recipe and a link. The internet is full of rhubarb (and other fruit) fool information.
Serves 4
450g rhubarb, roughly chopped
5 tbsp golden caster sugar
300ml double cream
100ml Greek yoghurt
Small bunch of mint, leaves only
1. Put the rhubarb in a pan with 4 tbsp sugar and heat gently, covered, until tender. Uncover, turn up the heat slightly, and allow some of the juice to evaporate. Taste for sweetness, adding more sugar if necessary, then drain the rhubarb, reserving the juice. Allow to cool.
2. Whip the cream until it forms soft peaks, then stir in the yoghurt. Fold in the cooled rhubarb, and chill for at least an hour.
3. Serve in glasses with the reserved juice to pour over the top, and a few mint leaves on each portion.
Is fool the finest British summer dessert, both for ease and sheer, simple delight, and if so, what’s your favourite flavour? And what else do you like to do with rhubarb over the summer, now that crumble season’s finally on its way out?
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2012/apr/12/how-to-make-perfect-rhubarb-fool
You just never know, do you?
When looking for a good recipe for something to go along nicely for breakfast with my Lady Gray tea, I stumbled upon boy bait.
And I must admit I had never heard of! Boy bait?! I absolutely love the name and now I know I must bake a pan of this crazily-named cake.
According to tradition, the year is 1954 and a 15 year old girl entered a Pillsbury Bake-Off competition. She submitted a blueberry coffee cake recipe, which took second place in her age division. When asked about the name of her creation, she said that teen-aged boys found her coffee cake habit forming, so she named it boy bait.
Update April Fool’s Day 2016: from this source comes the recipe and more of the story behind boy bait:
http://www.barefootkitchenwitch.com/the_barefoot_kitchen_witc/2009/07/blueberry-boybait.html
I found it in Christopher Kimball’s The Yellow Farmhouse Cookbook, which I seem to be turning to a lot lately. I’ve used a couple jam recipes now, and I figured there would be a tempting blueberry (non-jam) recipe somewhere in the pages as well.
Blueberry Boy-Bait does not disappoint. Not only is the cake good, but so is the little story behind the name. Mr. Kimball writes:
“This is my all-time favorite recipe name. It comes from Renny Powell, a teenager from Chicago, who submitted this recipe in 1954 to the Pillsbury $100,000 Recipe & Baking Contest (now known as the Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest) and won second prize in the junior division. This is a very light one-layer cake with blueberries and a simple crumble topping. Ms. Powell evidently found it useful in attracting members of the opposite sex and, based on my testing, I would have to agree that it’s pretty good bait. I made a few changes from the original, including reducing the sugar level (recipes from the 1950s are usually too sweet), cutting back on the amount of topping, and increasing the volume of blueberries. We now use this recipe at the farmhouse, so that when neighbors stop by for a cup of coffee we have something to serve with it.”
Isn’t that delightful? You really have to make it now, don’t you?
Okay, here’s the recipe:
2 cups flour
1 1/4 cups sugar
10 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) cold butter
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs, separated
1 cup milk
1 1/2 cups fresh blueberries, washed, drained, and blotted with paper towels (or frozen blueberries that have been thoroughly thawed and drained)
You can also Google boy bait pudding recipes and find many on the web. Or, you can watch this Youtube video and be inspired.
Be careful, though, you might be swarmed by boys!
The snow is melting, the sun is shining, the birds are chirping and it just seems like the right time to open this fine tin of Twinings Lady Grey tea that I brought home from London way last September. I’ve been saving it since then for just the right time.
Now the pot of tea is brewing and it fills my kitchen with a warm citrusy scent. Very nice!
Wiki tells us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Grey_(tea)
Lady Grey tea is a variation on the famous Earl Grey tea. Like Earl Grey it is a black tea scented with oil of bergamot (though in lower concentrations in Lady Grey). Additionally it contains lemon peel and orange peel oil.
Lady Grey tea was named after Mary Elizabeth Grey, the wife of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, after whom Earl Grey tea is named.
‘Lady Grey’ is also a registered trademark of Twinings. The Twinings blend contains black teas, Seville orange, lemon, bergamot, and cornflower, although other companies’ blends of Lady Grey include lavender instead of or in addition to Seville oranges.
Lady Grey tea is a modern invention, created by Twinings in the early 1990s to appeal to the Nordic market, who found Earl Grey tea too pungent.
It first went on sale in Norway in 1994 and in Britain in 1996.
You see the stance of Donatello’s David when you look at a little girl’s posture.
Ha ha. I could be perfectly happy traveling the world comparing products and stores in all the various countries. And by stores I mean grocery and hardware stores and pharmacies. My favorite store in all of Florence, Italy is a hardware store that goes on and on, seemingly forever. I could spend a lifetime looking at the items for sale in that bazaar alone.
Last fall I traveled through London on my return from Italy to USA and bought a few items on my London layover. One of the quotidian items I purchased was this funny box of safety buds.
In the US we call safety buds Q-tips. You know the brand.
Let’s do a side-by-side comparison of the products:
The swab in the center above is the British safety bud. Interesting shape, no?
I can tell you from experience that it is difficult to shove the safety bud into your ear after a shower. It’s too big.
But, even though the safety bud is too big for my ear canal, the packaging assures me that the cotton buds are “good for baby and you.” If you say so!
Ah, but then it says, don’t put it in your ear or nose. Got it! My bad!
Here’s another interesting fact: the British Boots safety buds are actually made in Turkey!
So this is a very multi-national post. I actually have to wonder if the shape of the Turkish safety bud, which looks like an Islamic arch, is a cultural thing.
Who knows? Not I. But it is fun to think about. And I have a fun Turkish/English souvenir.
Here’s a fun Italian read with some very witty new products. I doubt the designers thought the items were witty, but…:
get back, lauretta! 
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