Birthday card recipe no. 6: Ayo’s Rice For All

There is a story behind this recipe (well…’recipe’ is a stretch). Our rations included three one kilo bags of rice, and we chief rationers calculated that to be 8 cups of rice for a meal, and overall we’d be able to have 4 of those meals. However, we didn’t really specify how big those cups were. I presumed we’d just use the cups we brought with us. Problem was that everyone’s cups ranged from small tea-sized-cups to massive travel mugs. Ayo’s cup happened to fall into the latter.

Surely a recipe that doesn’t even fill the whole page can’t take that long to make, photograph and blog?? Read on…

Birthday card recipe no. 5: Joe’s Essex Noodles

There is just something comforting about eating noodles. Singing ‘mmmmm….noodle soup!’ is pretty satisfying in itself. AND you can write with them. Can the humble noodle do no wrong?

Birthday card recipe no. 4: Florence + Britt’s Amazing Tomato PASTAAA!!!

I was appointed a chef in our first night at Bombong Tiga,
With Florence and Britt, we impressed with our pasta,
We added some sauce, some veggies and this thing called ‘corned beef’,
(Some tinned reddish stuff that was supposedly meat),
We cooked and we served; the portions were small,
But hey don’t complain! It’s Raleigh rations for all!
I think and I hope the meal went down well enough,
Because trumping ‘Amazing Tomato PASTAAA!!!’ is going to be tough.

Changing for the sweeter (and apologies for the messy transition)

I realised today in ‘10 tips for a better food blog’ (I didn’t know people got so into these things) that in order to get your blog better known you will need to make yourself known in the foodie community, and to start by at least commenting on other people’s posts. They probably had a point.

I’ll start tomorrow.

But, I mean, is it too naive to think that some 40 year old working mum will just be browsing the internet and think “Oh! What should I cook tonight…In The Kitchen?? Hm… I will type those very three words into a BlogSpot search engine and hope to find some suitable recipes accompanied by blatant witty dialogue”. And then find my blog and tell Susah, Sarah and Jane at church group on Sunday all about this girl’s road-to-self-discovery-through-chocolate-cooking-and-other-important-things?

Well, it could happen.

However, I have decided that ‘In The Kitchen’ (despite being useful in the above search engine example) would be a little generic. I mean, I can imagine that is EXACTLY what Susan would be saying to Sarah (behind Jane’s back, because she loves the name).

So on the way to the airport (en route to Prague with family), we passed a road with a name that was perfect for my blogging purposes: Pudding Pie Lane (a perfect excuse to blog more sweet recipes, hence bake more and eat more chocolate). Now I can see the conversation between Susan and Sarah:

”Oh yes, THAT blog! When I first saw it I had an image of the gingerbread man strolling along the pavement and Hansel and Gretel waving at me from behind their candy cane windows! Cute. And memorable”. This would probably still be behind Jane’s back because she preferred ‘In The Kitchen’. You can’t please everyone.

Pudding Pie Lane: I like it. I hope you do too.

p.s. sorry about the messy layout of the blog right now. It's late and my eyes are blurry and I know that's not an excuse but it's the best I've got.



I would have gotten more photos, except that some sadist had plonked the sign right in the middle of a patch of stinging nettles. And I happened to be wearing a skirt. I now have a dozen or so neat little bumps on my legs; a nice addition to my collection of mosquito bites from Borneo :)

Lesson learned today: Don’t stomp about in a bunch of stinging nettles. Common sense should have taught you that already. Either that, or you don’t have any nerve endings.

A Digression into Dumplings

This was an article I wrote for a magazine at uni on how to make dumplings, and I was so proud of it (mostly of how I managed to stand up for 4 hours on end making them no not complaining once) that I wanted to share it on here! So taking a step back from the birthday recipes, dumplings are dominating the day.