Thursday 29 January 2009

Dissertation woes

The dissertation is looming, and I haven’t had much time this week. I’ve even resorted to taking a packed lunch to uni so I don’t have to lose an hour of study time walking home for lunch!

I’ve still found the time to make a few things, mainly to cheer me up between the seemingly endless bouts of reading government strategy papers.
- Tea bread, mainly to use up loads of dried fruit that had been in the cupboard too long. I think next time I might soak the fruit in Lapsang Souchon to give it a different spin.
- Roasted vegetable and feta tart. I still don’t like feta cheese though.
- Lemon Buttermilk pie. My flatmates were having a chilli evening, and we wanted an authentically tex-mex dessert. Google told us buttermilk pie. It was a bit like an English egg custard tart, but lemony instead of flavoured with nutmeg.
- Canadian pancakes. We had vast quantities of buttermilk left over from the chilli night, and buttermilk is not an ingredient that crops up much in British food.
- Lentil, bacon and roasted winter vegetable stew. Took this in to uni in a thermos flask and looked like a total nerd.
- Raspberry and vanilla muffins. This was to use up some raspberries I had in the fridge, as well as the seemingly endless amount of buttermilk. They were a tad dry so I topped them with some sweetened cream cheese.
- Chicken, lemon and tarragon soup. One of the success stories for the NCG book of soup.
We still have some buttermilk left, so I might make some scones, or marinate some chicken drumsticks with herbs.

I also enrolled on a sugar-paste modelling class, partly with the idea of making some kind of topper for D’s wedding cake. At the moment we are learning to make carnations and lilies. I need to practice with icing too, although she hasn’t worked out what flavours she wants yet so I can’t choose which type of icing would go best.

I’ve only got 25 days of my dissertation left and I cannot wait!

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