Some might say it is a rotten rainy night in London but I rather like it – especially as I’ve been in all evening rather than scouting for boys at the Circulus gig.  I rather fancied seeing if I could bag myself a bearded boy but the lure of an almost full bag of spinach and some new 78rpms to test out was too great.

Carole’s soup was good.  A really delicate flavour – not bright green and robust like a modern Spinach Soup would be, but a very pale milky wishy washy green.  I liked it though.

Although I felt sort of guilty about not going to my friend’s gig, I was also pleased to have an evening at home getting my play list sorted out for Grace’s wedding on Saturday.  3 days in the country – I can’t wait!

I really intended making Carole’s soup tonight but I admit it, I got too drunk.  Since moving into the Palace of Solitude, Fridays have become the most significant night in my (un)social calendar.  I wriggle out of all and any invitations and scurry home so that I can be sitting in an armchair with the radiogram tuned to Desmond Carrington on Radio 2 at 7pm sharp with Vodkatini in hand,  It is becoming my”family of one” tradition.

Tonight I realised that I should probably explain to one and all that I am not the ace cook it may seem that I am from this blog.  It’s true, I do probably cook more than the next person but that’s because I am trying to write this b****y  Silver Screen Suppers book!  In reality, left to my own devices I will “graze” as Rosalind puts it.

So this evening I ate the following whilst standing up: a small can of Green Giant sweetcorn, from the can with a fork, interspersed with 3 delicious slices of ham my mum gave me last weekend left over from the 60th Wedding Anniversary party.  And that’s it.  I really and truly couldn’t be bothered to cook anything.  Too busy drinking basically.

The funny thing about deciding that Friday is the “Spinster’s Night In” is that there is endless amusement to be had with me myself and I.  I’m not sure if I would feel ashamed of some of the events of this evening if there had been some kind of man in residence. I think that yes, I probably would have been apologising all over the place…

For example, I laughed heartily out loud when attempting to get peas out of their pods in front of the gas fire as one PINGED out in a kind of science fiction style, bounced off the metal hood of the fire and was never seen again.  Later on in the kitchen upon opening the lid of my vintage French cake carrier I SHRIEKED OUT LOUD to discover that there was the lemon frosting encrusted tupperware container I’d taken into work for Jim’s cake leaking all over my precious pot of edible glitter!  Upon trying to clean aforementioned glitter pot I managed to dump half of it on my draining board, washing machine and floor.

Oh and hearing Bette Davis singing, “They are either too young or too old” on “Friday Night is Music Night” was basically the icing on the cake.

Um.  Yes.

It’s fun, but not as most people know it..

I am not normally a jealous person but when a new test cook in the USA sent me a photo of the stove on which she cooks I went BRIGHT GREEN with envy.  A 1936 “Magic Chef” cooker that is a joy to behold.  Check out the picture on the Flickr page – Magic Chef.

Rebecca aka Alice emailed me out of the blue from Snowy Wisconsin when she stumbled on the blog and was very excited about the prospect of test cooking for us.  She tried August’s Recipe of the Month and declared the ribs to be YUMMY.  “The family ate every last bite” she said.  There is a pic of Alice’s ribs (if you know what I mean) on the Flickr page alongside that gorgeous cooker (bought for $100 I am told – CURSES!).

I just LOVE getting emails from people all over the world who are interested in the Silver Screen Suppers project so don’t hesitate to drop me a line.  I am such a nosey parker that I adore seeing pictures of people’s kitchens and finding out little bits of information about them. I know that Alice doesn’t like peaches for example and my powers of Sherlock Holmes deduction tell me that she may have an Airedale Terrier.

It’s like when I was a child and I had penpals.  I belonged to some kind of international penpal organisation – can’t remember what it was called.  Whenever I read letters from other children in different countries I would imagine them living their lives and daydream about what my life would be like if I lived where they did.  One of them send me a pendant their dad made from a piece of reindeer horn.  Wonderful.

So these reports from test cooks make me EXCEEDINGLY happy.  Keep them coming new and lovely Silver Screen Supperers!

Well I learned several lessons making Ronald’s pie last night.  First one was that a small mistake in a recipe can cause absolute chaos!  This is why I am so grateful to all my test cook volunteers, because if I make a howler like there was in Ronald’s, hopefully someone will spot it before it goes in the book.

I double checked against the original recipe when I saw that Ronald’s pie required 4 lbs of suet.  Four pounds of suet is a lot of suet!  I was doing half the recipe and even then, 2 lbs of suet is around 5 boxes.  Still, in a case of the blind leading the blind, I tried to faithfully follow the recipe, putting 2 lbs of suet in a frying pan and watching it melt into a big old tallow-faced mulch was not a pretty sight.  Neither was my attempt to cook the steak in the aforementioned mulch a pretty sight – bleaugh.   It eventually dawned on me (after doing some compare and contrast on the internet) that there was indeed a mistake in the recipe and it should have read 4 tbsp not 4 lbs.  There is a lot of difference between 4 tablespoons and 4 pounds.  Damn you Milwaukee Gas Light Company and whoever your recipe transcriber was!

I managed to seive the steak out of the mulch just before Charley turned up to see the horror!  Another lesson I learned was that I need to read the recipe and work backwards from the time I want to serve it.  This pie took a LONG TIME and Charley was starving.  As I’ve been cat sitting there wasn’t much to nibble on so I cobbled together a hard boiled egg with an anchovy on top to keep him going!  Ha ha.  Nuts.

And it is lucky that Charley lives in the same building, I daresay it was not a relaxing night for him.  Firstly he had to go back to his flat as he’d forgotten the special i-pod lead he is lending me for the party.  Then as we were just about to crack open the wine to accompany the pie I remembered I still didn’t have a bottle opener so he nipped back for that and then when the pie finally came out of the oven at 10pm we decided it really needed some gravy so off he went for his Bisto.  It’s keeping him fit though, going up and down those stairs!

And today, I’m off to Daryl’s for lunch so I making him a Cherry Pie.  You know what they say about wives and cherry pies?

Oh, and even though this is possibly the longest post ever, just one more thing.  Does anyone know what has happened to Carla over at carolelombard.org?  I love her site but it seems that it hasn’t been updated since November last year…

The pie by the way was yummy so will PROBABLY go in the book – with the correct amount of suet.

I feel a bit like that today Carole – yipee!  The first ever Silver Screen Suppers newsletter has gone out today and our first cookalong begins.  I wonder how many folk around the world will try out Carole’s Barbecued Spare Ribs in July – if you do please email us, we just ADORE hearing about how things turned out, who you scoffed them with and how much fun you had!

If you didn’t receive the newsletter and you think you should have please email us and we’ll work out why not.  If you haven’t signed up yet please just pop your email address in the box to the right hand side of this page under the word NEWSLETTER in big letters.  The RSS feed at the top of the page is something else entirely (boys stuff – I don’t understand it) so if you want to hear about the cookalongs and other insider gossip please sign up.

The lucky winner of a portrait to be painted by Brian Dennis in the Gloria Swanson dress was PATRICIA ROBERTS – congratulations lovely lady!  I’ll update here on the progress of the picture and when it is finished will post a pic of course.  I can’t wait to see how it turns out.  All this from me buying a frock on ebay that my boobs were too big for!

If you don’t wish to sign up to the newsletter (we know how the inbox doth pileth up) you can still join in with the cookalong – Carole’s Spare Ribs recipe can be found on the Recipe of the Month page.

Happy cooking Silver Screen Supperers!

Shoulders!

They are playing the National Anthem and I am feeling all tearful and worried for our boys.  COME ON ENGLAND!  It’s such a momentous match, so very exciting.  I’m watching it at home as I am hosting a post match barbecue so have to tend to cooking stuff at half time.  The spare ribs are in the oven already.  In superstitious fashion I expect that when I go out to baste them with sauce at 3.30 England will get their first goal.

Ava’s party was wonderful as usual.  I really enjoyed chatting to my lovely friend James and the Italian girl he has staying with him.  Reminds me of the great things that generosity of spirit can bring.  He met her at a film festival a couple of months ago, she needed somewhere to crash for a few days in London and he offered.  Also made me realise that for the first time (possibly ever) I can also offer the same hospitality to anyone I fancy now that I have my own place.  All kinds of adventures could ensue!

No romantic entanglements or otherwise to report from the party.  GC lookalikee was there and we had a brief chat but I was so busy spinning the discs – for FOUR HOURS – that we didn’t really get a chance for anything more than chit chat.  A good thing.

Oh Carole!  Lounging poolside on a fur rug, only YOU could get away with that!

Well on Saturday the entire contents of my lock-up were transported in a van and carried up four flights of stairs by two beefcakes for hire and 5 true and trusted friends.  Everything is IN.  I am surrounded by hundreds of boxes and bags of absolute nonsense and I am VERY happy about it.

On Sunday I decided to test Carole’s recipe for Spare Ribs as I’m planning to make these the first “Recipe of the Month”.  I invited Charley round and we drank the last of the moving in beers and ate ribs standing up in the kitchen (no table and chairs yet).  The ribs were utterly delicious but most of my kitchen ended up being covered in drips of BBQ sauce.  Sticky as anything.

It is lovely having Charley as a neighbour and not just because he was more than happy to go home and fetch his bottle openener when we decided to cotinue drinking.  We had a most companionable evening working on the saucy  “Slave Trader” jigsaw and discussing the risible state of our lovelives.  I anticipate many such evenings and very much enjoyed the Sunday selection of music on R2 as it boomed out of my radiogram.  All that worrying about how we were going to get such a massively sturdy 1950s piece of musical furniture up the stairs were unfounded.  The Man with a Van and his mate hoisted it up there like it was a matchbox.

Back from a wonderful weekend camping in Epping Forest with my Crouch End family. On the way there, Paulette cracked me up by doing her “Cleopatra” line-dance routine in the car and losing the instructions to the campsite through the car window. We found it though, and fabulous it was too.

Those who weren’t born and bred Essex like Paulette and myself were astonished at the lawlessness of the campsite. Nothing new to us though, we Essex folk don’t like living by the rules. We two Essex girls weren’t surprised at all at the amount of axes lying around the place next to the fire pits and the number of fireworks going off at all hours.

I didn’t mention the delicious cherry pie that Paulette made for the book group in the previous post. As the original 1950s housewife she is queen of baking and I loved her variation on the theme – using cherries soaked in kirsch. She was a little alarmed at the amount of sugar in the recipe and yes, it was very sweet but as Jane said, “Sweet, schmeet”, we all loved it.

Today Shirley told me that I was her favourite grown up in the whole wide world, which after the week I’ve had has done my self-esteem the world of good. I even forgave her for attempting to curl my hair and getting it in such a tangle that Paulette had to use scissors to remove the hairbrush.