Covid Snacks - Make Your Own Healthy Cereal Bars

One of the things about being at home all the time, especially if you're not used to it, is the continuous access to the fridge. It's all too easy to think I'll just have a quick coffee, and maybe a biscuit or three while I wait for the kettle to boil....you know the scenario. Or if you're a bit bored there's the Standing in Front of the Open Fridge Door Wondering What Can I Eat Syndrome?  Or is that just me...? 

Anyway, short of installing a padlock with a timer on the fridge door, it may be worth thinking about stocking up on slightly healthier snacks than chocolate hobnobs, and kitkats.

I posted my recommendations for making your own cereal bars some years ago, -  it has been one of the most visited posts I've ever done, you can still read it here.  Since then there has been a bit of a downer on carbohydrates, so you might want to think of having some little bags of chopped veg ready to eat in the fridge as well, or maybe little cheese cubes if you're trying not to have sugar. But these home made cereal bars  can really be much better for you than commercial efforts which are very high in sugar and not so much on the seeds nuts and oats which you can adjust according to your own taste if you make your own. I would probably substitute a light flavourless olive oil for the sunflower oil I recommended back then to help keep your Omegas balanced, but otherwise I still use the same basic recipe and adjust according to what's in the store cupboard. 
Happy snacking.

Boris is picking up...

I planted Geum Borisii last year, and to be honest it didn't do much. Ok but not particularly impressive. Plenty of flappy leaves, some orange flowers.

So I kind of forgot about Borisii and it got a bit overgrown with creeping buttercups, to which it bears a superficial resemblance, so I was surprised to find it coming into flower a few weeks ago, around the time the lockdown started. It was doing ok actually, but then there were a few sharp frosts and all those overwhelming weed issues, and it started to look a bit sick. 

Very sick in fact, so I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot in the Intensive Care Unit by the greenhouse. It looked a bit dodgy at first, I don't think it liked being moved, but I watered it every day, looked after it as best I could, and I'm pleased to say it has picked up nicely and is starting to look like it might be ready to go back into the border quite soon. where hopefully it will make an impressive show. All of which has made me think that maybe I should spend a bit of money on improving the Intensive Care Unit, so that, comfortingly, one could rely on it being available whenever it might be needed, it as I'm sure Boris(ii) would be the first to agree.

Just to be clear,this is Geum Borisii of course,  not the Johnson cultivar you may have been thinking of.

Small Luxuries in Troubled Times

I thought I would do a blog post, which I haven't done for ages although I'm always meaning to do an update, stuff just gets in the way, you know how it is. Well now with this Covid 19 business I'm finding a bit more time on my hands than I'm used to, and having almost caught up with the weeding and planting, I'm moving onto baking (anything to avoid cleaning and dusting...not to mention bleach spraying everything that keeps still long enough to within an inch of it's life....)

So here's a nice recipe for Shortbread that most people will have the ingredients for in the house. And simple as it is, you just can't seem to buy proper shortbread any more, if you ever could. You just have to make it yourself.

When I say proper shortbread I mean the kind that melts in your mouth, and has a buttery richness even though it's just a plain old biscuit. I don't like a massive amount of crunch in shortbread, some recipes call for added rice flour or semolina and so on, but I demur. Simplicity is the word here.

You can cook this in a big round in the traditional way, marked into triangles and stabbed with a fork but I think it comes out best if you can be bothered to roll it out and cut shapes, they need to be fairly thick, it's shortbread after all, and it's easier to get an even bake that way.

For about 30 generously sized biscuits

300gr 10oz Plain flour
50 gr 2 oz Cornflour (Cornstarch in US)
250gr 8 oz Butter
75 gr 3 oz caster sugar
half teaspoon vanilla extract

Cream the butter and sugar - I use a stand mixer, -until light and creamy, or cream with a wooden spoon, and elbow grease.


Add the flour and cornflour and continue mixing gently until roughly combined
Turn onto floured board and form into a dough, roll out quite thickly and cut your shapes.


Bake for 20 minutes 160c 300F or on the lower shelf of the Aga with the cold plain shelf above. As always with biscuits, don't over cook them, you want the merest trace of gold, certainly not brown, and then take them out. Cool on a wire tray.

They also freeze really well and so are handy to have in for unexpected visitors, as they defrost almost instantly, certainly by the time you've answered the door, and said Hello Vicar do come in, lovely weather isn't it, do have a seat, would you like some tea and biscuits.





And with the bits left over you can either re-roll for extra biscuits or use as the base for a Millionaire's Shortbread for which I make no apology for revisiting my old recipe here

I also make these as an accompaniment for strawberries and cream, maybe rolled out a bit thinner,  and as such they add a nice home made touch. Makes an ordinary bowl of summer fruit and cream seem like you've gone to a lot of trouble, when you haven't really.  And in troubled times small luxuries are well, a luxury. So win-win.


Stay safe, stay home, bake something.