I am in mourning, and also in a rage. About pastry. Edmonds has announced it will no longer produce pastry. This is amazingly rude. I have been using its butter puff pastry forever. It has to be butter pastry. You cannot make pastry with nasty margarine.
Nobody, unless they are an insufferable show-off or have too much time on their hands, makes their own puff pastry. Have you ever looked at the instructions for making it?
There are recipes that assure the reader that there are “quick and easy” ways to make puff pastry. Yeah, right. And I’ll just nip to my kitchen and whip up a batch of croissants in half an hour. A properly good croissant, which is the ultimate example of flaky pastry, involves a folding in of butter up to 30 times.
Here at Lush Places, we are partial to a pastry-clad thing. Now that Edmonds has discontinued its butter puff pastry, how am I to make my friend Linda’s famous sausage rolls? (The trick – don’t tell her I told you – is the addition of grated apple or pear.) Or the bacon-and-egg pie we often have for tea?
Butter puff pastry is also essential for my Eccles cakes. These are strange little lumpy cakes, minimally stuffed with currants and mixed peel and sugared on top. They are sometimes known as squashed fly cakes. But they are very nice. They are English, and were first made commercially in the Lancashire town of Eccles in 1793. But the recipe is much older. They were originally made to celebrate the feast of St Mary and were later banned, along with all saints’ day festivals, by Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans in the 1600s.
They’re still dangerous. In Britain, an alert about the cakes was issued in 2013. Not by Cromwell, presumably. The cakes were being heated in microwave ovens and allegedly burst into flames. Only an idiot would put pastry in a microwave. Doing so results in soggy pastry and apparently turns an Eccles cake into an explosive device.
We have a happy ending: I have found an even better butter pastry. So, sucks to you, Edmonds.
Last week, Greg wrote about the incongruously mad sight we see here every day at Lush Places: that of cats and chickens eating out of the same food bowls.
The chickens – which are birds, which cats ought to kill – boss the cats. I saw Joanna the chicken peck Molly the cat on the head the other day. Molly retreated. And so would you.
Last week, Molly, who we suspected was with kitten, was finally caught, on attempt number four, put in a cage and taken, howling, to the vet to be spayed. She was looking suspiciously thinner. But we had seen no sign of kittens.
Greg had a thought: if she had had kittens, the operation might mean that her milk would dry up, so if they were alive and hidden they would die. The vet confirmed this. But where were the kittens?
Meanwhile, we had finally discovered the nest where our annoying chooks have been laying their eggs when they can be arsed: under ivy growing over an old wicker bench.
Two days after Molly came back from the vet, I noticed her hanging about this nest. I peered in and what did I see? Our hen, Joanna, and beside her, two tiny kittens.
To let Molly get to her babies, Greg lifted Joanna out, discovering she was sitting on an egg … and two more tiny kittens.
Nobody can know the tiny mind of a chicken. Perhaps she had decided that the kittens were her chicks.
We put those four tiny, gorgeous kittens into a shoe box lined with a soft jumper and took them to the vet to be euthanised. I cried.
On the way home, we got a call from the clinic. A vet nurse, St Jordan, would take them, bottle-raise them and foster them.
How’s that for the happiest of endings? I made sausage rolls to celebrate.
