Wednesday 13 January 2016

Chop chop!

The problem with not cooking is that when, very occasionally, I get the urge to bake something, I have nothing to do it with.  So I have to be inventive... and me being inventive with cookery can get a bit messy.
I rather resent paying well over £1 for a piece of flapjack, so when I came across a tasty-sounding recipe for snacks I could {probably} make myself, I thought I'd give it a go.  It looked simple enough....
"Blitz 35g pistachios in a processor..." The only processor I own is the one in my computer, and even I know that foodstuffs shouldn't go anywhere near it.  However, I do possess an evil soup blender, maybe I could put the pistachios in a saucepan and use that?  Not without a lid, apparently.  Fortunately, I also possess a rather serious chopping knife. 
It was in a box of assorted kitchen equipment given to me by a friend when I moved north.  Goodness knows what she thought I was going to do with it, I was only going to Yorkshire, not Yosemite!  Ok, so my garden is a bit of a wilderness, but I've been here nearly ten years, and I've yet to meet any bears.  Although perhaps it's been put about in the ursine community that I have cutlery and I'm not afraid to use it.

After successfully chopping pistachios and cranberries, I was suddenly thwarted by, "Blitz 150g rolled oats...."  I was rather doubtful about the efficiency of the chopping knife for that.  Perhaps I could put the oats in a plastic bag and then crush them with the rolling pin?  Well, maybe if I had a plastic bag.  I do actually have many plastic carrier bags rolled up under the sink, ready to use as bin liners, but none of them seemed quite clean enough.  Then I remembered the loaf of bread in the fridge - that was in a plastic bag!  I quickly re-wrapped the bread in tinfoil, tipped the crumbs out of the bag and re-filled it with the oats.  I wasn't sure how fine I was supposed to crush them, but after I'd rolled them for a few minutes the bag started to get holes in, so I decided that was enough.

Right, what next?  "Add warmed honey and orange flavouring and mix well.  The mixture will be very sticky."  Yes, it was.  And rather gritty, so perhaps I should have rolled the oats a bit more.  It was also too crumbly to roll into balls, as suggested by the recipe.  All I could manage were unattractive sausage shapes, so I squidged them up a bit between my thumb and forefinger, so they looked more like mini granola bars and less like giant owl pellets.

I am now waiting for them to "set before serving" but it doesn't say how long I have to wait; an hour? 24 hours? until Hell freezes over?  I'll probably wait until tomorrow, and if they're no good by then I'll leave them out for the bears.

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