The winning card

Each week a letter arrives from J’s Mum for him and with it she sends over some recipe cards from Waitrose in the UK for me. They display these cards in the supermarket to encourage people to buy certain ingredients as specific brands are listed in the recipes. Even though I can’t get the brands here in Australia I can nearly always find a substitute. I keep all the recipe cards in a folder and recently I did a flick through them and decided I was only going to keep the ones that I was interested in making, mainly beacuse there was no more room left in the folder. It’s like having my very own personalised cookbook.

Back in May Waitrose were promoting a Cassis Liqueur and had a recipe for Cranachan, a classic Scottish dessert. The image reminded me of a Bircher Muesli that I found on the wonderful Delicious Days blog a few months ago. I have made this breakfast for a number of different visitors and all of them have been very impressed. I like the idea of serving it in the glass with all the delicious layers visible. The same applies to this dessert. It’s simple to put together but is a visual sensation. I didn't have any Cassis so I opted for Marsala instead and it was delicious.

I just noticed that on the recipe card it has a link to an archive of all the recipes so you can check them out here and the recipe for the Cranachan pictured above can be found here.

This is great. Now I can look up lots of different recipes. I’m trying to find one of my favourite meals that takes only minutes to prepare. It must be on a card from a different supermarket. I’ll have a look for the card in my folder and report back but, in short, the whole meal is made in little more time than it takes to prepare some fettuccine. When the pasta has only 5 minutes to go in the pot you add in some green (French) beans. After 5 minutes you drain the pasta and green beans and add in some flaked smoked trout, butter, lemon and lots of cracked pepper. I love this meal and the best bit is that the vacuum packed smoked trout lasts for ages in the fridge. This is probably one of my main fall-back meals. In fact I was tempted recently to post about my 5 main fall-back meals. But while I find them tasty and simple to make, they are probably not the most aesthetically pleasing so I think I'll just keep them to the odd mention here and there on the blog.

On another matter, I'm very happy to report that my Raspberry Cheesecake got a mention in this months Does my Blog look Good in This which was very kindly hosted by Helen at Grab Your Fork here in Sydney. I'm very chuffed, especially as three of my favourite bloggers were the judges. Who would have thought that a simple little food blog could bring so much happiness. Seeing my cake mentioned brought a big smile to my face this morning especially as I only went to see what photos other people had submitted. Maybe soon I'll get to use one of those badges that Matt created.