Saturday 5 December 2009

Creative cookery

There was a great story on the radio today.  People were sending in tales of how they had cooked meals anyway, after discovering they had run out of a key ingredient.  Using salted peanuts in a chilli when they found they had no salt, that kind of thing.

Someone sent in a tale of how they were making a lovely stew.  Mmmmm stew.

They made the stew, and then prepared to make the dumplings.  But oh no! No suet!  And we all know a stew isn't a stew without the delicious suety goodness of dumplings.  What to do?

Apparently the hapless chef looked out of the window at the bird table, and had a dreadful, dreadful idea.

He ran outside, grabbed the block of birdfood suet and brought it into the kitchen.  He shaved off the "dirty bits", then grated up the remainder to make dumplings.  And only told his wife what he'd done several days later, when it was all eaten up. 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I first moved to France, 30 odd years ago and to the Auvergne, I wanted to make a Christmas Pudding ... no internet, no shops selling English things - so along I trot to the butcher and ask for suet (great big lumps of the stuff) ...

Butcher sells it to me and says that obviously I want it to put out for the birds (like, looney English woman).

Didn't admit it was for pudding and did actually feed the birds with it as incapable of dealing with a mega piece of suet!

livesbythewoods said...

Dragondays, that is excellent. I hope the birds were suitably grateful!

Middle Sis said...

I once made fairy cakes for the playgroup cake sale, only to discover the icing sugar had ants in it. This was after I had mixed it and wondered what the black stuff was. Solution - extra sprinkles!

Nobody ever knew.

Until now.

livesbythewoods said...

Middle Sis, you are an evil genius and I love you for it.