I used to cook for a living, as I may have mentioned before (cf My Book), but haven’t done it very much for a while now for one reason or another. Laziness, being too busy, whatever.

I have started cooking again, properly, over the past couple of months though; lasagne, shepherd’s pie, cakes and, for the first time in a very long time, bread again today.

I cooked two focaccia-style loaves this afternoon, in the air fryer for the first time; the one on the left got 17 minutes after the one on the right came out slightly too cooked after 20 minutes. They both taste delicious. I used a multi-cereal flour, rather than a white flour, for health reasons and did the mixing in my bread machine. I hate kneading dough, it’s boring, my hands are acidic and kill yeast and it’s – for me – a waste of time, so I don’t do it. Please, if you enjoy it then you be you and pleasure yourself, as my students used to say. These I cooked in a one litre Pyrex dish in the air fryer; I’ll freeze one and eat the other tonight and tomorrow.

Pea soup

Eat them with what, you wonder: Why, the lovely pea soup I also made today. After cleaning out the freezer – action packed day here at the beach – I found I had two bags of frozen peas, so used half of one to make some soup: caramelise a couple of onions, add 200g of peas (I’ll add more next time) and a little cumin, add in 300ml of (home made) chicken stock, simmer for about 7 minutes until the peas are cooked, then whizz up with a stick mixer. Stir in 200ml of cream (best before date: June 2024, I have little regard for such dates) and it’s really delicious. Will definitely make again. I made mushroom soup a couple of weeks ago, a variation on my famous mushroom sauce, and am thinking about my favourite winter soup, English Minestrone for next week.

Fruit cakes

I made a couple of cakes last week, one a traditional but small version of the Delia recipe, the other a recipe I came across online which is really easy. I made a one-third version of this, again cooked in the air fryer for 40 minutes:

• 1 kg of mixed fruit (everything I had lying around including hazelnuts, walnuts, dried figs and dates)
• 600 ml of Baileys
• 300 g of self-raising flour
  • 
    Soak the fruit in the Baileys (I’d already soaked mine overnight in brandy and you can replace the Baileys if you don’t like it with literally anything you like, just add some cream or condensed milk too) for about four hours, then add in the flour. Bake for two hours but, as I say, mine was done in 40 minutes in the air fryer using a third of the mixture. And it’s really, really delicious. In fact, I may even prefer it to the traditional Delia recipe which I’ve been making for more than 30 years now.

Next: the moving process revealed the dehydrator I bought years ago in the Lidl sale for €10 which I’ve never used, so I’m going to try that now.

Happy cooking everyone.