Brownies, cookies and a whole lot of whisking going on.

Brownies and whipped cream given a good pampering, thanks to 

Pampered Chef.  Ridiculously easy.

Recording a Brownie blog.

Cookie on the medium round stone that's clearly seen some action.

Brownies and cookies.  And so easy, thanks to Pampered Chef

Whipped cream with the Double Balloon whisk, faster than you can say, '...so shall we whisk some cream then with the Pampered Chef Double Balloon Whisk, thingy?'

And below, have a listen to what happened...

Whisking cream? I'd better tell the window cleaner.

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The smell of whipped cream

You always know when cream is being whisked to a frenzy in my house.  You can smell it.

This perhaps only confirms to you that I have finally lost whatever plot I related to, because as most of us will be aware, whipped cream smells of not a great deal.  Even at a cream to nose distance it's not noted for any discernible perfume or aroma. No.  I don't mean I can smell the cream, whipped or otherwise, what I can smell is the electric whisk thing with its viscous spinning blades.

It must be years old, this electric hand-held thing and frankly I reckon it's past its best. It's certainly been instrumental in the creation of dozens - maybe hundreds - of pavlovas as a whole battery of eggs has been converted into wispy meringue things.

Anyway, what you could smell in my house is the electric whisk's motor.  This thing is at full whack, the blades lashing through egg whites or cream at full pelt, spinning and spinning and the clapped out motor is getting hotter and hotter and so is my wife as she wrestles with ageing  kitchen appliances.  I don't do pavlovas or any other meringue jobs as a rule.

Now before I go any further, let me say right now that I have a solution to all this. A whisk that does not require mains electricity and is ridiculously fast at its whisking ability.  Off the scale, in fact. More later.

Electric Light work. No, not really.

But for now, back to this electric thing and the smoke alarms are now wide-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to pounce at any time.  They've just bleeped once to make sure they haven't forgotten what to do in such circumstances, are braced and ready for a damn good bleeping. The kitchen now smells like a mechanics workshop.  You couldn't do this randomly without warning key services such as window cleaners, for example, because the vibration through the glass would constitute a health and safety violation and more than likely action through the civil court as the hapless window operative plummets to the ground.  

Not a laughing matter.  Wobbling and equally ageing double glazing has now taken on all the qualities of those badly designed suspension bridges years ago that turned into huge skipping ropes when the wind topped a gusty 5mph and turned Ford Anglias and Hillman Imps into equally poorly-designed Frisbees.


Any window cleaner that happened to call unannounced as a few egg whites were given a seeing-to could expect to move down his ladder quicker than expected in a froth of suds, buckets and taking a slap from a selection of flapping chamois leathers on the way down to the back garden.  

We wouldn't hear his screams obviously because Ken Bruce is shouting his head off on Radio 2 trying to make himself heard over the phenomenal noise from those damned rotating whisk blades.  The egg whites or cream for that matter after three or four minutes of this onslaught is still a flowing stream of liquidy stuff, refusing point blank to stiffen on command and certainly not while that flipping Adele is wailing from Ken's CD player.  The smoke alarms are beside themselves and on the edge of their seats, willing this to go really badly wrong as they sense what could be smoke coming out of the back of the hand-held mixer.

And still my wife is valiantly holding on to the mixer which has now gathered momentum and spinning around the bowl all by itself, squinting through the noise and now acrid stench coming from the glowing motor. The window cleaner, flat out on the patio, would by now  have now stopped his fruitless attempts at rescue by banging on the patio doors and instead be dragging what's let of him towards the road in front, shedding scraps of chamois leather on the way, in the hope of attracting passing paramedics.

And then, a breakthrough.  Just as the loosened kitchen light fittings were about to abandon the ceiling, the egg whites/cream give up the fight and stiffen to acceptable levels after 20 minutes or so of kitchen carnage. 

All quiet after a cream whisking

Then it's...nothing.  That eerie stillness in the air that I can only imagine is the consequence of a hurricane that's passed by.  All except the radio, of course which is still at 10 on the volume knob blasting out an old Moody Blues standard.

'...Nights in White Satin....'

The ancient electric hand-held whisk is slumped on the kitchen bench, throbbing.

'....Never reaching the end...'

Although the motor stinks to high heaven, no actual smoke appeared from it and so the smoke alarms have retreated sulkily back to their comatose state, bleeping just the once more as if to make a point.

'.....Letters I've written...'

The windows and everything else for that matter, finally calms to a rest.

'....Never meaning to send.'

And yet all this is preventable.  There really is no need  for this level of misery just to create an acceptable pudding/ desert whichever you prefer to call it.  

Pampered Chef Double Balloon Whisk to the rescue

There is a readily available device, as I hinted earlier, that can solve this misery with one flick of its wire frame.  The Double Balloon Whisk. For under fifteen pounds you can help save yourself and others from the ordeal as described.  Now, I'd been told this device by other PCheffers, was a winner and would turn double cream into whipped cream in 10 seconds or less.  Which obviously is ridiculous.  And then I saw a video recorded - I guess - on a phone by Sally, a PCheffer and uploaded to the Facebook thing.  It took seconds.  So I bought the double balloon whisk and a pot of double cream. (Heavy cream, I guess it's called in parts other than the UK).

It's a strange looking thing with the sort of face only a mummy whisk could love.  Apparently although it looks like it might, in truth, be a small mobile phone mast, in fact its thin wires and strange shape is to '...maximise aeration for more whipped cream in less time...'

I whisked away full of enthusiasm and guess what?  It didn't work.  Well it did, that's not true, but it took about a minute or more and I was expecting miracles.  I could simply omit this stuff but I try to be an honest chap - that's what happened.

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All in the wrist action when it comes to whipping cream 

I bought another pot and changed my technique.  With the cream out of the fridge for a little over an hour and poured into a bowl out of the cupboard, I stirred rapidly instead of the up an into the cream whisk action I'd tried before.  Everything about stirring like a spoon seemed wrong.  And for a glimmer the cream was stubbornly liquid.  And then after about 10, maybe fifteen seconds, the clouds parted, the sun shone and the cream thickened visibly.  Transfixed by what I was seeing, I went to around 20 seconds and ended up with a mousse-like cream.

Bizarre.  I shall now try with egg whites to see if the same happens. And more cream to see if it was a fluke. But I see no reason why it would be.  It's just a different technique to the one I'm used to.

Try it my friends.  Embrace the weird wires and get yourself fully aerated and whipped accordingly.

I can think of a few window cleaners that would be very happy if you did.

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P.S  You can always join me in the wonderful world of interactive social media thing, stuff by following me on facebook and twitter: both are mikegetscooking, or even YouTube for goodness sake.  In fact I'd be very pleased if you did and then you'd maybe comment a tad here and there.  Ta ta for now.  

Warning: May contain information

There's nothing funny about food allergies.  Of course they can have dire consequences for those affected.

I'm just guessing now that it's the reason we see so many warnings on packets and boxes of foods these days.  You need to know if nuts are anywhere in vision if you have an allergy to the things.  That's somewhat obvious.  Around 1% of  Britons and North Americans are allergic to peanuts and other nuts.

But it does mean that some of the wording on boxes, bags and whatever do seem to have  gone off on one of late.  I mentioned on these pages a while back about a box of lamb grills that was heading for a BBQ of ours that had the instructions, 'do not grill'.  Odd when you consider that grill featured heavily in the job description of that particular product.

Now maybe that's more to do with just daft language.  The rest, I'm thinking, is more to do with a spin off of the warnings train of thought or arguably a rather literal interpretation of ingredients. The above picture is a classic of it's type, spotted by my son.  A bag of fish fillets.  The ingredients lists fish.  Not such a surprise, in fact I would go as far as to say we would feel pretty cheated to open a bag of fish fillets only to find that fish was not the dominant component part.  You can't really have a bag of fish that's fishless.  

But closer inspection shows that that the allergy advice of a bag of fish fillets is a stark warning (exclamation mark) that the bag may contain fish.  Just thinking this through, I know,  but if I was allergic to the previously mentioned fish, what the hell I am doing with a bag of fish in my hand? 

If you had  the nut allergy pointed out earlier, you wouldn't select a bar of fruit and nut chocolate and say, 'Oh for goodness sake, they've only gone and put nuts in a bar of fruit and nut, haven't they?  I mean how stupid, how dense do they have to be?  Lucky I spotted that one in time...'

I've got a bag of salt in the cupboard that 'contains salt.'  I don't know what to say really except... good.  Thanks for clearing that one up.

There are plenty of other bizarre twists of language out there when it comes to the obvious.  And it's not just the food industry.

For example:  On a box that contained hair curling tongs.  For external use only.  I think you'd need to be fairly up to speed on advanced torture techniques or have unusual tastes in the bedroom to consider that electric heated hair tongs had any internal applications available.  Hairdryer:  do  not use in the shower.  I wish, I really wish I was making these up but sadly I'm not that clever.  A bottle of dog shampoo: Caution, the contents of this bottle should not be fed to fish.

So the warning is clear and obvious, next time the Labrador is a tad dank and in need of a spruce up, don't get confused with Tiddles the Goldfish doing several laps of his bowl with his tongue hanging out.  Trust me: dog shampoo and fish food are significantly different.

My eyes have been itching of late and I know it's because I have to be careful what I slap on my delicate little face.  It took a few years of frog-like facial expressions in a range of Mediterranean destinations to work out that I'm allergic to suntan lotions dripping into my eyes when mixed with a sweaty brow.  I now use a suntan lotion for babies less than a day old and it seems to work.  The rest of me is bathed in factor whatever, just not from the neck up.

The fact that my eyes have been itching recently means that I'm going to stop now and head for the shower to check on something.  Like most women, my wife's shampoo contains ground pearls, gold leaf, the extract from leaves only found in one acre of Brazilian jungles and so on.  I strongly suspect she's got me something from the value range at Pets R Us again.

Something fishy's going on.  

Ketchup? Make mine brown any day.

No, seriously, I can't be doing with tomato sauce, ketchup, whatever you'd like to call that weirdly red thing.

But you're not really supposed to say that out loud.  I get some very funny looks from those that are clearly major fans of the red stuff.  I'm not sure what the look is; it's not pity, it's more bordering on loathing, like you've admitted you have a fondness for Dallas or doing something unusual in the bedroom with bananas.  They just don't get it, they can't understand what your problem is.

I only mention this because I heard, fleetingly on a newspaper review on the tele, that we're not buying bottled sauces like we used to.  Can't tell you which paper it was in because I only caught a sentence or two.  But what I did hear surprised me somewhat.

We certainly haven't cut down or fallen out of love with bottled sauces.  I'm a brown sauce kind of bloke.  Now, I suspect no-one outside the UK will have a clue what I mean by brown sauce and it's a bit difficult to explain.  I'll try in a minute.

A quick peek in my cupboard and there's Worcestershire sauce, soy, brown, the hideous ketchup and various  remnants of various hot sauces.  In the fridge a fish sauce, and I think that's it. No, hang on, salad cream and mayo, if you count them as sort of sauces.

Hot sauce can be deadly

I like reasonably hot food, as in spicy.  A chilli has to be a lip-smacker for me or it's just mince. I have been known to blob a dab of hot sauce on a range of stuff that's on my plate much to the disagreement of my wife who sees it all as...well, I'm sure what she sees it as, but it's certainly worth an audible 'tsk!'  So stocking filler Christmas presents or a present from someone you get a bit of something for, for me will usually include at least one bottle of hot sauce.  And naturally they've got welcoming labels such as ' Death Sauce' or 'Eternal Damnation Sauce' or Burn your Trousers if you Spill This Sauce.'

I've still got a bottle of unopened hot sauce I was given last year in the cupboard.  Which reminds me, I'd better check the sell-by date.  I've not bothered yet probably because I remember the other bottle that came in the set.  It was allegedly a reasonably hot marinade in a bottle.  So I got meat - can't remember what now - and did as per instructed then cooked said meat.


I think my wife gagged on the first mouthful from memory and I have no recollection of what happened to my face for a few hours.  Good Lord, it was hot. The sort that makes you go from dry to moist to wet through in under a minute. Hells Bells.  It may well be the ideal cure for athletes foot, except that most of the good skin would probably go too after a smear.

So I couldn't bring myself to even look the other bottle in the eye and there it's sat next to a box of sea salt and it's infinitely milder cousin the Tabasco for almost a year.

HP sauce on everything

Anyway: Brown sauce. Any readers from outside the UK may be confused at this point so...how do I start.  I guess the best known variety is HP Sauce.   The original was invented in Nottingham and registered by Frederick Gibson Garton.  That was 1895.  The HP bit is a reference to the Houses of Parliament but the exact connection is a little muddled.   For what ever reason, Fred made a bit of a hash of it, didn't get it to market by all accounts and sold his sauce invention to clear debts for £150 to Edwin Moore. Moore owned a vinegar company and launched HP Sauce in 1905.  

Basically it's a vinegar base with dates, tomato, tamarind extract, sweetener and untold spices. And I put it on too many foods to be honest.  I suppose I prefer it over ketchup because of that spice element rather than the sweet taste of the tomato.  But then, I don't like sweet and savoury together. Whoever first thought of putting pineapple on pizzas needs a damned good telling off. Or their ear flicked, or something. A Chinese burn.

Quite why bottled sauces are dropping in popularity with younger eaters wasn't made clear.  Odd considering they must have the taste for tomato based sauces anyway as so many consume their body weight in fast food burger rubbish.

One one my offspring accused me recently of putting fish sauce in a chilli I was cooking, which is slightly bonkers and not something that would have occurred to me.  Which makes me think.  Maybe there are just too many sauces now.  When I was a kid there were three TV stations to choose from.  It was either Blue Peter, Magpie or nothing because BBC2 didn't start until early evening.  Now with my Freeview Box (I can't be arsed with Sky) I can choose any number of 1980s repeats or gaze in a glazed state as a man spends an hour on the edge of his seat with excitement as he sells me some XXXXL fleeces in battleship grey or olive green on a shopping channel.

A saucy sandwich over the sink

There was tomato sauce, brown sauce and Heinz Salad Cream.  Oh, and Lea and Perrins aka Worcestershire Sauce.  That's it.  We had yet to hear of soy sauce, fish sauce, salad dressings, etc and so on, and olive oil was sold in tiny bottles at the chemists which you dropped in your ear to loosen ear wax.  If you were seen putting it on your salad then, you would probably have been bundled into a secret institution at Her Majesty's Pleasure.

So maybe we've found the answer.  Too much choice.  Choice can be good but it can chip away at what we had and cherished.  Which doesn't mean we should stop and never move on.  We're programmed now, I suspect for the new thing and long may that continue because so much of what has made our lives more tolerable or pleasurable or even just interesting  is the result of that curiosity.

The girlfriend of one of my sons eats ketchup sandwiches.  In fact she favours sandwiches that, quote ' you have to eat over a sink.'

If that's not a good reason for not buying bloody ketchup I don't know what is, frankly.

Zesting cheese and walnut whips. It's all getting out of hand.

Nothing's safe at the moment, from the zester

I've got a terrible addiction.  Actually that's not true. I've got several, but there we are.

Some I've already confessed to elsewhere on these pages.  Chocolate for example.  I'm a big girl when it comes to chocolate.  I could eat the stuff everyday (but don't) - on a biscuit, wrapped around a chocolate bar filling or just a solid bar of it.  Don't care.  I worked with someone years ago who did clearly have an addiction to chocolate. She was eating it by the sack and had become a real issue for her, so whilst for me it's just a slobbering desire, we shouldn't forget that for some people, these things take over lives in a most unpleasant way. Eating a whole pack of Penguin biscuits plus a multi pack of Mars Bars nightly is at best, unusual I would have thought.

I was prompted because on the tele last night I saw a piece about a young woman who shifted, I think, because I was only half watching, six litres of cola a day.  She rarely ate anything but said nothing quenched her thirst properly other than cola.  There was some extraordinary statistics in there; eating the weight of a four year old child in sugar over a year or something bizarre. I wish I'd paid more attention. A team of doctors got her off the stuff in the end but she was biting the walls on the way there as she came off it. She now eats three meals a day and - as they say - has a balanced diet. I'm full of admiration for people that manage successfully that kind of struggle.

Sweet childhood memories

So this puts into perspective somewhat my 'desires' rather than addictions. I drink too much tea and coffee, but have never smoked, so in my head (incorrectly) one cancels out the other. Back to chocolate for a minute, I've rediscovered Crunchies; that honeycomb in a choccy coat is just fab.  Well, it is at the moment.  I've had fads.  I favoured Mars Bars but haven't eaten one now for years. Snickers, or Marathons or whatever they're called this week have lost the appeal.  And I do occasionally hanker after my youth.  Whatever happened to Spangles?  Not choc, I know, I'm just meandering. Aztec Bars.  Sherbet Fountains.  They were a yellow paper tube full of the kind of sherbet that once in your mouth turned your lips inside out and made your eyeballs lurch violently backwards inside their sockets.  Inside the tube and hanging out of the top was a stick of fairly acrid black liquorice.  Magnificent, they were. Can't remember the last time I saw one.

My memories are
whipped into shape

For years I questioned the absence of a half walnut in the bottom of a coffee walnut whip.  As a kid I hated the damned walnuts for being too bitter.  Now of course with a shift of palate, I like them. Anyway. I was convinced a semi walnut resided there at the very bottom of the Whip. Chomping one a few years back the Whip was sans walnut. Disappeared.  So anyway the conversation about the 'thin end of the cost-cutting wedge', 'how dare they abandon my childhood with such a dismissive attitude towards nuts', 'no respect for tradition, culture and heritage' rumbled on for months with me going increasingly round the bend.

All for half a damned walnut, I know.  I'd lost it.  The big questions of life were passing me by. Bear in mind this happened years ago, I'm since recovered, but as I said, the big issues of the day such as why was Robson and Jerome in the Top 40 and which vindictive halfwits were responsible for buying the damned records, were not reaching my radar.  It reached such a peak, I had to contact Nestle's/Rowntrees (I think) and demanded an explanation for their damned cheek.  Around a million walnuts are used by the company every week on Walnut Whips and they've been a crucial ingredient since 1910.  So in my eyes a walnut whip without a walnut is falling well short of expectations and fundamentally alters the description. In that scenario it's just a Whip. End of. Unsatisfactory.

Whipped into shape

'What the hell are you playing at woman...!'  I bellowed down the phone to some hapless and admirably polite PR lady on the other end.  You can see I was at the end of my tether, and I'm not proud, let me make that clear.

Turns out there was never a half walnut on the bottom of a coffee walnut whip.  It seems the original vanilla whip did enjoy a half nut on the chocolate base, inside the mallow, and not on the top. As a marketing ploy, a walnut was later added to the top and the nut inside was removed not long after.

My childhood memory had let me down badly and I retreated, embarrassed to lick my wounds and hang my head.

Anyway.  Back to addictions.  Or as I say,'desires' because I suspect the word addiction is a bit strong. I can't stop zesting.  I'm zesting everything.  I've mentioned this before and I thought it was a phase but clearly not.  It's sitting there smirking at me on page 17 of the new Pampered Chef catalogue.  The Microplane Zester.  Quote: one swipe removes the zest and leaves behind the bitter pith. I'll say it does.  No citrus fruit is safe in my house, or nearby supermarket for that matter.  It safely gathers all the fragrant zest effortlessly which just sits, patiently, at the top of the zester, waiting for instructions.  Try as you may, the revolting white pith is nowhere.

The medium round stone

Pampered Chef microplane zester multitasks

I've become adventurous.  Not content with fruits I've moved onto cheese - feta in particular.  At a recent cooking show, I was making a pizza on the round flat stone (medium round flat stone with handles to give its proper name) and I grated or zested some feta cheese on top.  The point being I hardly used any cheese - so healthier - and my little zesting friend was more than able to cope with a cheese as incredibly soft and crumbly as feta.  Small wisps of feta floated down like dessicated coconut.  It was a win.
The snag is of course it's done nothing to ease my appetite for seeing what else I can zest that was never intended for such treatment. And before you even suggest the heels of your feet, you can think again.

Now I've caught a whiff of childhood, I'm off to see if I can buy a pack of Munchies. Or Treets.  I don't hold out much hope though.

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