Domestic Science

50s glamour on two needles

I’ve been busy with my needles this year.  The trick I’ve learned is to only knit things you rather desperately want, and then you tend to finish them.  Like this glam version of ‘resort casual’ from a replica of Vogue Knitting 1957:

I bought the PDF from the lovely people at Vintage Knitting Patterns, and I would quite like to knit up the whole volume eventually. The models looks so elegant, not a bit of dodgy swiss embroidery or badly designed fair isle in the whole book.    I’m rather pleased with my interpretation.  It’s a gamble knitting anything that is supposed to fit, especially using different wool, but I was rather surprised that my substitute yarn (Rowan’s Silk Wool DK) knitted up to the perfect tension, even though I knit using the Continental method (or as my charming younger sister puts it, I ‘knit weird’) and for some reason generally knit things 10% bigger than specified in UK or US patterns. It’s not perfect, but it fits, and it came out how I wanted it.  Now all I need is a demiwave and a pair of perfect white linen shorts…

Down with dry cleaning

Dry clean only labels drive me mad, in so many ways.  There’s the cost, there’s the dubious environmental impact of all that solvent, there’s the remembering to drop off and pick up, and having your stuff out of circulation for a few days - or a week if you have a bad memory like me.  And there’s the worry of handing over your precious clothes to a stranger.  And when that is my best vintage suit, 1950s couture from the London house of Lachasse bought for only £75 because of moth damage and beautifully repaired at significantly more expense by the Invisible Menders in Marylebone, that is rather stressful.  But some things you just have to dry clean.

On the other hand, lots of things you don’t.  I don’t really mean to put lots of cleaners out of business, but it seems more and more things that could be washed are being sold as dry clean only because presumably the makers can’t be bothered to test washability.  So I thought I’d share my recent washing rebellion successes and tips in case you felt like risking it yourself.  But please do be careful - think before you wash!

First up, I tend to think about why the manufacturer would have put on a dry clean label.  Some fabrics or fabric constructions react badly to the usual solvent we use to remove dirt - I.e. soap and water, forcing us to use other solvents to remove the grease and dust.   Sometimes we can manage the impact of soap and water by handling clothes carefully in the process, and sometimes we can’t.   For example, many fabrics shrink the first time they are washed.  If they were made up into clothes without being ‘pre shrunk’, when you wash them in water you may end up with a garment that is too small. Lined items are a particular challenge because the lining and outer fabric can shrink differently, pulling the whole garment out of shape.  A suit jacket is the extreme example of this: a good quality suit has interlining, interfacing, and padding as well as the ordinary fabric and lining - you are unlikely to get that back in shape if you wash it.

Water tends to disarrange fibres, particularly natural ones, meaning you need to iron them flat again when they are dry.  If the item is a fiddly shape, the fabric is very delicate, or the trimming means it can’t be ironed, you may not be able to get the garment to  look how you want it too.  Some fabric dyes are water soluble - if in doubt, try to patch test on a seam or hem.  And some fabrics just can’t be washed as the fibres get too damaged.  However, wool, silk, cotton and linen should not be in that category.  The main think you have to guard against with these fibres is shrinkage, and in some cases fading.  That means washing gently, with cool water, and drying or ironing to manage shrinkage.

So for example - silk blouses.  I can’t understand why these are so often dry clean only.  If it came from a high street store, it isn’t going to be fancy natural dyes, and tightly woven fine silk doesn’t shrink, or not so I’ve ever noticed.  Looser hopsack weaves can, but not blouse silk.  The first time I wash a particular silk top, I might handwash it gently in cool waster with a little gentle detergent - I use a liquid so it is easy to dissolve in cool water.  I rinse well in several changes of water (the boring bit), blot out most of the water by rolling up in a clean towel and twisting the towel roll for a minute or two, and hanging up to dry on a coat hanger.  The blouse may look a little shrunken, because the fabric crinkles up a bit, but it will spread back out fine when you iron it with a cool iron.   If that goes well, I will probably chuck the blouse in the wash in future, on 30 degrees, in a net washing bag to protect them from snags.  The washer rinses better than I do and is more water efficient.

I apply the same approach to cashmere and other fine wool sweaters.  Its really important to keep cashmere clean, as it is prone to grit induced holes, so wash it often. You may get holes anyway, but if you catch these when they are tiny they are easy to stitch up with sewing thread the same shade as the yarn.  Check for them when you are washing.  I confess I also put new cashmere and most wool through the washer on a cool wash too, though I still handwash vintage pieces.  Ok it shrinks sometimes, but it is worth the risk because I have so many of these thin jumpers and I would spend half my weekend handwashing other wise.

When I really started to gamble was with vintage dresses bought on eBay.  They usually arrive filthy and dry cleaning doesn’t seem to get them properly clean.  In particular, one grey wool dress stank of sweat even after dry cleaning, and was unwearable till I could get it clean.  So after several assaults with Febreeze spray, and also white vinegar (good at odour removal on washable items) I took the plunge and washed it gently in cool water and detergent - in the bath so I didn’t need to scrunch it up.  Having rinsed the dress and blotted it by rolling in a towel as described above, I eased it on to my dressmakers dummy and zipped it up.  I reckoned if it was dried on a me shaped model, it couldn’t shrink so that it no longer fitted me. 

Bingo!  Not only did the dress come out fresh, clean, and still fitting me, it also dried smooth and didn’t need ironing.  This is now how I wash all my dresses and skirts, even lined ones, where there is the risk of shrinking.  In fact, with one skirt I made myself of hopsack silk came out a bit big, and I used this method to shrink it to fit.  I have had the odd case where the skirt shortened a bit, and I had to take the lining up to match, but that was another homemade job, and the lining was always on the long side.  If this is a real worry because the lined item hasn’t ever been washed before, I would perhaps let the hem down before I washed it the first time, and then turn it back up the right length afterwards.  I don’t wash suit skirts though - these are always cleaned with the jacket to avoid colour differences between the two items.

You might think its a bit excessive to buy a dressmakers dummy just to wash things, but if you have a lot of items it will save you money in the long run.  Mine cost £150,  but it costs me £8 each time I get a dress cleaned.  I did buy it mainly for dress making, but I am growing convinced that it is essential just for maintenance of your wardrobe if you are serious about clothes, particularly vintage. 

I have also washed dry clean only trousers with success - mainly simple unlined ones,  They shrank a little, but in the case of my linen oxford bags, that was a good thing as I kept treading on the hems.  To make sure I got the full shortening effect I was very careful to press rather than iron, to avoid stretching the fabric lengthways.  On the other hand, my wool pallazo pants needed to be kept long, so when I ironed them out I made sure to iron lengthways and stretch them back to the original size. 

High speed sewing: tea towel cutlery roll

The camping season is upon us.  And this year, the cookbox will stay tidy, and organised, and the teaspoons won't all fall to the bottom, nor will sharp knives lurk under the ketchup to stab the unwary.  Because THIS YEAR, I have made a cutlery roll.  The inspiration struck on Saturday afternoon and by tea time I had made what I needed, thanks to a dash round Tesco and a couple of hours with the pins and needles.  Should you also want to restore order to your cutlery, here's how I did it.

You will need:
a tea towel - mine came from Tesco, £3 for 3 tea towels.  The other two will also go camping, no more drip drying for MY Cath Kidston picnic ware...
Needle & thread
pins
A ball of string (sort of optional)
A crochet hook (even more optional)

First, lay the teatowel out flat and fold one end up to the depth needed to hold your cutlery.  Pin several straight lines, one each side and a few in the middle, to make pockets, like so:
Sew along the pins using backstitch.  This teatowel was waffled so the grid was very handy to help keep my stitches straight. Fold the top part over the pockets and roll up - voila, a cutlery roll.  If you have had enough sewing now, you could always keep it closed with an elastic band or spare hairband.  Alternatively, get a ball of string and your crochet hook.  Make a slipknot, and using the hook, pull the string throughto make a new loop.  Keep hooking the string through to make a chain like so:

When the chain is long enough, cut the string, pull the loose end through, and pull tight to close.  If you don't posess a crochet hook, you could just plait the string to make a similar rope.

Pin the string in place on one edge of the roll. about where the top of the pockets is, and check you can do the roll up and tie securely.  Sew the string in place.  You're done.
Okay, its a very black cutlery roll.  But this is going to a campsite, remember, and black won't show the dirt.  If you wanted something more arty you could use a flowered tea towel , or a vintage one from a charity shop.  You could use anything for the ties - bits of ribbon or whatever.  I quite like string though. 

And I've proved you can sew even without a trip to John Lewis haberdashery.  Your local Tesco will suffice, at a pinch.  Next week: Spontex scourers into corsages.  I'm sure Gok Wan would approve...

Slow cooker checken stock

I’ve been writing about my slow cooker a bit recently, but I haven’t covered the main reason I bought it - which is to make stock.  The topic is covered in The New English Kitchen by Rose Prince but she says that slow cookers aren’t really worth it for chicken stock, because you don’t need to cook chicken stock for so long.  I think she is wrong. The best stock I ever made from a roast chicken (pre slow cooker anyway) was using our friend Ian’s method: bung the stockpot in a very low oven overnight.  It worked brilliantly apart from the enormous expense and distressing waste of heating a fairly large oven to cook a moderate casserole of stock (not to mention the racket our oven makes when it’s on - it’s the door cooling fans, I could hear them roaring like a cyclone all night).  Hence my bright idea of using a slow cooker.

It has worked even better than I could have imagined - such a neat and easy way of turning a leftover carcass that you would normally throw out into 3 pints of useful stock that will genuinely make your risottos and soups taste so much better.  (And if you can’t even face chopping a carrot I have a very lazy version for the truly idle, at the bottom.)  To come clean, I have to admit that for the truly easy life you need not just a slow cooker, but a freezer, a microwave, and 6 tupperware tubs that take a ½ pint each.  But that isn’t asking too much of most kitchens, is it?  So here we go:

Take your leftover roast chicken, and pick it over, separating the meat into one pile and the rest into another.  I mean everything - bones, skin, everything you really don’t think you could face putting in a sandwich.  Steal the bones off your diners’ plates too.  Put the meat in the fridge (don’t forget to eat it up) and the rest of the stuff in the slow cooker.  To the bones etc add a couple of carrots, washed and chopped; an onion, skinned and chopped; two bay leaves; 6 or so peppercorns; a good teaspoon of celery seed or a chopped stick of celery (this is ideal but not critical); 3 pints (or 1.5 litres if you are that way inclined) of water.  Note: NO salt.  Close the cooker, and set to cook for about 6 hours.  Go to work, or leave over night, or do something else interesting while it brews.

When you come back to your cooked stock, take a big jug or bowl or saucepan, and sit a sieve in it.  On the work top, also have ready an empty carrier, sides rolled down to it sits up like a bowl and lined in the bottom with paper towel or a layer of newspaper (this stops your bin going soggy).  Ladle the stock out of the cooker and through the sieve into the jug, letting the sieve catch all the veg and bones.  Periodically empty out the sieve into the lined carrier. When you have tipped all the stock through the sieve and got all the bones and mess in the carrier, tie it up the bag and bin it. 

Divide the stock between your 6 tupperware tubs, label, cool, and freeze.  When you need stock, microwave a tub (on high, don’t waste time with the defrost setting) and bung in whatever you are cooking.  I find ½ pint portions are handiest, as it’s easier to defrost two tubs for soup than to only have a one pint tub in the freezer when I need a small amount for gravy.

This same approach works for other leftover bits of bird like pheasant or partridge, and makes fantastic game soup - especially if you shove a glass of wine in the stock pot.  Use proportionally less water - if you are using one pheasant carcass you only need a pint or so - plus the wine.  In this case also add other goodies like bacon and herbs - refer to the recipe for grouse soup in the River Cottage Meat book if you want (slightly more) exact instructions. 

Now, for the really lazy version.  Imagine you have a chicken carcass, but tragically you haven’t a carrot in the house.  Or an onion.  And it is late on Sunday night and not a shop open, and you know if you put off making your stock it just won’t happen, not until the carcass has had to be binned anyway.  Here’s the emergency stock plan:  follow the method above exactly - but instead of adding the carrot, onion and celery you add about 3 teaspoons of Marigold vegetable stock powder.  Continue exactly as above, and you will get a perfectly good chicken stock.  It won’t be as good as doing it with real veg, but it will be a hell of a lot nicer than even the poshest bottled chicken stock concentrate, and a lot more like chicken stock then plain Marigold powder.  Which, for plain risottos or even a leek and potato soup, can be the difference between a perfectly nice supper and a truly great supper.

Frying pan baking

I planned to make enchilladas this week with leftover roast chicken.  Enchilladas need tortillas, and my normal course is to get a pack from Tesco.  However, it was raining, and I had time on my hands, and there is a recipe for tortillas in my lovely new River Cottage meat book, so I decided to try making them myself.  

They aren’t really that hard, being just flour, a bit of lard rubbed in, and warm water to bind to a soft dough that you knead like bread dough for 10 minutes.  I must confess I can only contemplate recipes involving kneading because I have a Kenwood mixer with a dough hook that does it for me, but from all I read of cooks elsewhere, my reluctance to knead is an oddity.  Everyone else seems to find it tolerable, even enjoyable.  I find it desperately dull and prefer to leave it to the mixer which does it better than me anyway. 

For me, the hard bit comes with the rolling out - that is, if you have like me a preconceived idea that a flour tortilla should be round.  You rest the dough for about an hour, and then divide it up into lumps about the size of a small egg.  Each one you roll into a ball, flatten, and press out into a circle with the palm of your hand.  So says my recipe, anyway.  This got me nowhere, and made my arm ache to boot - you are aiming for very thin discs, it takes ages by hand - so I got out the rolling pin.   This was a lot less effort, but the damn things went square, egg shaped, sort of triangular - every shape but round.  At least they went flat.  If I had kids, this would be the bit I’d convince them was jolly fun so they did it for me.

Once you have got your heap of flat thin discs, you get a non stick frying pan pretty hot, and cook the discs one at a time, about a minute on each side, so that brown spots appear and the tortilla puffs up.  You need to press it down once you have turned it over, with a rolled up tea towel, giving you lots of opportunity to burn your hand, but it doesn’t take long, as they cook so quickly. And you just stack them in a tea towel to keep warm and stay soft.  They tasted so much better than bought ones - thinner and crisper, and generally tastier, and they keep perfectly well under clingfilm in the fridge.  You just treat them like shop bought ones once they are made.  I understand they freeze well too, but this batch hasn’t had chance.

Inspired by this successful foray into frying pan baking, I decided to give English muffins a go.  I normally get these from Tesco in packets as well, but muffins from organic flour are pretty thin on the ground, and I also rather resent handing over money to the dreadful companies that perpetuate the Chorleywood Bread Process.  English muffins are a bit more complex than tortillas, being made with a yeast dough: the usual 450g of bread flour, 1 teaspoon quick yeast, a splash of oil, a heaped teaspoon of salt, and  just under 300ml of warm liquid - the difference from ordinary bread is that you use mostly milk for the liquid.  Knead the dough and leave to raise in the usual way, before rolling out to a 1/2 inch thick sheet and cutting out with a muffin sized cutter.  Rerolll and cut till you have about 12 muffins. 

Leave to prove under a tea towel for half an hour, then heat your frying pan over a low flame and cook a few muffins at a time, about 7 minutes a side.  St Delia (for it was her Complete Cookery Course that gave me the method) doesn’t say to use a lid, but I did, and I suspect the resulting steamy atmosphere helped the muffins to rise and stay soft.   Once you have cooked all the muffins, you can cool and store them, to split and toast and smother in butter whenever you get the urge.  Or more prudently in a household of only two people, you put half of them in the freezer in polybags for another rainy day.  

Cold roast pork for a cold night

Snowed in today, which feels odd living in North London.  A good day in the kitchen filling the freezer with tubs of stew and individual shepherds pies, so when I came to cooking my own supper I wasn’t feeling up to much.  Fortunately, we still had a good chunk of roast belly pork leftover from yesterday’s dinner, and I had enough energy to chuck together some spicy kare lomen sauce to go with it.  I got this recipe out of the Wagamama cookbook, though I have adapted it a bit over time, because I don’t generally have fresh red peppers or lemon grass hanging about, when I want to make this to go with leftover roast meat.  I’ve detailed my version below, which is very easy if you have a mini chopper, a bag of frozen roast peppers, and a few basic oriental ingredients about your kitchen.  Its perfect for turning cold roast meat and plain rice into a cheering hot meal - I don’t heat the meat up, I really like the cold cold meat and the hot spicy sauce.

I wish I had discovered frozen peppers years ago.  They come ready grilled and chopped, grown in Spain so easier on the carbon footprint than local hot house ones, and because they are frozen you never waste any.  My mini chopper is also a kitchen essential, for me.  It’s a tiny little food processor, designed I think for baby food, but handy for small amounts of sauces that you can’t process in a regular machine.  It was incredibly cheap and always seems on the verge of giving out, but somehow keeps working.  The other ingredients aren’t that exotic, really - Thai fish sauce, coconut cream, lime juice, curry powder, and smoked paprika crop up in so many recipe books that anyone with an addiction to cookery programmes like me will probably have them hanging about, bought after one too many episodes of Jamie or Nigella, and maybe forgotten since.  Here’s your chance to use them up. 

So here we go - cold roast pork kare lomen:

 Get out your mini chopper, and stuff into it a small onion (roughly chopped), a clove of garlic (ditto), and about a teaspoon of that ready chopped ginger you get in jars (don’t let me stop you chopping up the real deal if you have it).  Fill up the rest of the chopper with frozen grilled peppers (still frozen), and blitz in bursts till you have a rough paste.

Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a small pan, and fry the paste from the chopper for a few minutes.  Add 1/2 tsp each of sweet smoked paprika and curry powder - I use Bolst’s hot curry powder, and if yours is mild you may need to also add a bit of chilli powder or sauce.  Keep frying until the paste smells cooked, I.e. not of raw onions.

Add 1 cup (250ml) of water and 1 sachet of creamed coconut - I use Bart’s sachets that you heat in a mug of hot water because its easy to deal with.  You could chop up and add about a tablespoon of regular block coconut instead.  Stir all together, then add 1/2 tsp hon dashi powder (japanese stock powder - if not available, leave out.  I get mine from the Japan Centre in Picadilly which is scary as all the signs are in Japanese and you have to guess what you are buying), 1/2 tsp of sugar, and hearty splashes of lime juice and Thai fish sauce. 

Add a good pinch of salt, simmer a few minutes more, and serve with plain white boiled rice and slices or chunks of cold roast pork.  Or lamb.  Or beef, probably, though I haven’t tried it.

My perfect pot roast pheasant

Pheasant is one of those things that I used to eat because I thought I ought.  It’s relatively cheap, nutritious, sustainably produced, a plentiful byproduct of the shooting business - which if we don’t eat it may end up just ploughed back into a field, which is unbearably wasteful.  But I couldn’t find a way to cook it that I liked.  All the recipes I tried seemed to leave the meat slightly rare near the bone - and rare pheasant is, in my view, pretty vile.  Other bits of the bird would be either over-cooked and dry, or just cooked and strangely bouncy.  Increasing the cooking time got rid of the rare bits but increased the overcooked and dry bits.  Even pot-roasting didn’t seem to help - I had no idea what I was doing wrong but it just didn’t work for me.

Then I got my slow cooker - initially bought to make stock overnight, but  I like to get value from my kitchen gadgets so I’ve been casseroling all sorts of things in it to see what works.  And then Christmas came, and I was asked to provide pheasant with haggis for Christmas Eve dinner (something of a tradition in our house as the other half is crazy about haggis - the pheasant is just an excuse really), so decided to give the bird one last chance in the slow cooker.  I was rather startled to find it worked perfectly.  Moist but thoroughly cooked meat, no spooky rare bits, and a really great stock that was easily turned into fantastic gravy.  Cooked like this, the meat is pale, definitely more gamey than chicken - but not as strongly flavoured as those duck breasts you get served rare.  As I serve the breasts off the bone, so that people don’t have to confront ‘difficult’ bits of bird, I would imagine most people would be happy to eat it - if they will eat guinea fowl I think they would be fine with this recipe.  

For two people, you will need:  1 oven ready pheasant (currently £4 each in my butchers, or 3 for £10); handful diced streaky bacon, couple of carrots, an onion, a stick of celery or a sprinkle of celery seed, a big glass of red wine, a clove of garlic and a sprinkle of dried rosemary.    To finish the sauce you will need some redcurrant jelly and some butter, and to go with you will need some veg - a few potatoes and some green cabbage should do it.

Note: Every pot roast recipe I ever read suggests you brown the bird first.  I don’t.  Trying to brown a pheasant in a frying pan is really tricky, the thing keeps rolling around and you end up stabbing it all over with a fork as you try to hold it on the right place to brown it, or you use your hands and get third degree burns.  You fill the kitchen with pheasanty fug, and probably set the smoke alarm off.  And then your lovely golden skin just goes all soggy in the casserole anyway.  My way gives you great crispy skin with very little effort.  Trust me.

Start about 8 hours before you want to eat.  Get out a frying pan and slowly fry the bacon so the fat runs. Wash and chunk up the carrot, peel and chunk up the onion.  Add to the bacon and fry a while - maybe 10 minutes - till the veg is golden.  If you are using celery then chunk and fry that too, but I always use celery seed because it keeps well so I just sprinkle that on.  When the veg and bacon are nice and golden, tip it all into the base of your slow cooker, and add the garlic clove, peeled and crushed, and a sprinkle of dried rosemary.    Pour over the glass of wine, and sit the pheasant on top, breast upwards.  Close the cooker, and set to slow cook for 7 hours.  If you don’t have a slow cooker, use a small casserole and do exactly the same as above, cover with the lid and put in a very low oven (less than 150 oC).   Now go off and do  whatever you want for a few hours.

About an hour or so before you want to eat, put the oven on to about 200 oC and peel some potatoes.  (Or celeriac is nice.)  Toss the potatoes in olive oil and salt in a small  roasting dish, and put in the oven.  Slice your cabbage ready, and go and have a drink.  You earned it with all this labour in the kitchen.

15-20 minutes before dinner, get the pheasant out of the cooker/casserole.  Sit the bird in a clean roasting tray, and put in the oven with the potatoes.  (Don’t put in the same dish as the potatoes, the bird will exude lots of yellow fat as the skin crisps, which is best kept to itself.) Tip the rest of the casserole contents into a sieve over a small saucepan and let it drain.  Chuck away the contents of the sieve.  You should have a good lot of juices ready to be turned into gravy - the slowcooker, being sealed, doesn’t lose any to evaporation.  Turn up the heat under the saucepan and boil hard to reduce by maybe half, to make a good strong sauce.  If you used a casserole that was less tightly closed, you may have more concentrated juices to start with, so you might need to reduce less.  While that is happening, quickly fry your sliced cabbage in some olive oil or butter and season it well.  Keep an eye on the potatoes and pheasant, so they don’t burn.  Turn the oven off when they are done. 

When your sauce is reduced and a bit syrupy, and generally tastes like posh ‘jus’, stir in a small spoon of redcurrant jelly and check the seasoning - you may need salt though probably not because the bacon was salty and will have seasoned the sauce for you.   Whisk in a knob of butter while still boiling, to make the sauce really glossy and smooth.  Plate up the potatoes and cabbage, and take the breasts off the pheasant  with a sharp knife and put one on each plate.  Pour the sauce round.  Serve with pride.

You can of course eat the legs too, but I usually leave the legs and carcass alone, and make game soup with it the next day.  But that’s another story.

How to handle kid gloves

I’ve been quiet over the summer, being preoccupied with a rediscovered hobby, dressmaking.  We are off to the Goodwood Revival  in September, and I needed an appropriate outfit to wear.  I found a vintage 50s suit pattern on Etsy  and dug out my sewing machine from the cellar - amazingly it still worked after 5 years of dusty non-use. 

Several weeks later I have a lovely pale blue silk suit that fits, and I’m really proud of myself.  Thanks to a brilliant book I found in Foyles on couture sewing techniques I’ve learned lots of new ways to do things.  But what to wear with the lovely new frock?  A hat and white gloves of course.  And where does a girl buy her hats and gloves in these Accessorise-blighted days?  Ebay, that’s where.  And that's where the rest of my summer went, haunting Ebay for hats, gloves, jewelry and the odd vintage frock. 

I managed to find the most stunning pair of white kid gloves, perfect to wear with my new outfit.  Actually, I am not sure about whether I should be wearing kid or cotton, if I am dressing like it's 1947 and I shop at Dior.  But no matter.  I’ve seen the photos from other Revivals, there are some very mismatched vintage outfits going on.  But when my lovely gloves turned up they were rather marked and needed a good clean. And in case you should ever find yourself in the same situation, with a pair of white kid gloves that are unwearably grubby, I will share with you my cleaning journey, as it had some scary moments but ended very happily.

I hunted all over the internet for advice on how to clean kid gloves, with advice ranging from wiping them with soap powder and a soft flannel, to cleaning them with milk, to using benzine (which I don’t happen to keep about the house, sadly). But a feature on Vintage Sewing seemed to offer most hope.  It seemed to suggest you could wash your kid gloves in soapy water.   Well, as the gloves were really very grubby, I decided to chance it.  I washed them quite gently in Ecover delicate washing liquid, putting them on my hands so I could see where the dirt was, and rubbing them with a flannel and each other to get the marks out.  This worked a treat and the stains all came off.  I blotted the gloves in clean towels and laid them out flat to dry.

The next morning, they were dried and mummified.  Stiff as cardboard and brownish yellow.  Oh well, I thought.  Back to ebay for another pair.  As I turned them over in my hands I noticed there were the odd patches of white, and I pulled the glove to look closer - why had that patch stayed white?  As I pulled, the glove stretched and turned white again where I had touched it.  I pulled some more - a big streak of white spread across the glove.  Compulsively, I stretched and pulled and tugged until the whole glove was white and soft and ready to wear.  Honestly, it was like magic!  Before I did the other glove, I took a picture so you can see I’m not making this up. 

So I’m not exactly recommending this is how you wash your kid gloves, but it worked for me.  Though I’m glad it was only a pair from ebay that I nearly ruined. 

Domestic science lets me down: dishwasher failure

The dishwasher has broken.  In a scary overheating and blowing circuit in kitchen way.  This is a disaster as the kitchen is completely designed around having a dishwasher.  No draining board, sink size of puddle. 

This dishwasher is already the second in 6 years.  The first one we bought had the controls built into the top of the door, so they were hidden when the door was shut.  Very cool, very prone to water getting in to the circuit board.  When the electronics failed for the second time we replaced it with this cheaper and (so we thought) more robust version.  When this one too developed electrical issues, we planned to repair it - it's wasteful to keep buying new ones. However:

Cost of repairing dishwasher: approx £250
Cost of new dishwasher: £330

This can't be right!?

At least the new one has a 5 year warranty for parts and labour so we won't have to replace it for a while. 

In quest of dumplings

When I was little, we used to have stew and dumplings.  The stew was sometimes good, sometimes terrible, but the dumplings were always tip-top.  Big fluffy balls of tasty goodness, filling and comforting but not stodgy. 

I've been trying to make dumplings like that every since I left home, and I just can't do it.  Everybody, even quite experienced cooks, has a few culinary Waterloos lurking, and that's one of mine.  (Other cooking tasks I will go out of my way to avoid include poaching an egg, icing fairy cakes, and carving pretty much anything in public).  It's odd that I can't make dumplings, given my suet puddings and suet crust on pies are acknowledged to be pretty damn good.  But there it is.

Then today I decided to have another try.  It was so horrible and cold this weekend, so I made a big pot of beef stew and it was crying out for dumplings to go with it.  So here we go. 

The first recipe I tried was from Nigel Slater - he proposed plain flour, half as much suet as flour, and salt, and cold water to mix, then add to a pan of stock at a rolling boil.  I wasn't going to risk my pot of stew (past horrors of dumplings dissolving into the gravy and ruining the whole pot put me off that idea) so I boiled a pan of water.  The dumplings sank straight to the bottom, but did eventually rise to the top, and acquire some lightness. 

But, you'd definitely call this batch stodgy.  NOT the light and fluffy dumplings of my childhood.  I remembered that in suet pastry I always add baking powder, so I tried again (luckily a few dumplings are very cheap)
with baking powder this time, and there was a definite improvement.  But, during the boiling phase, two of the dumplings practically dissolved, and the survivors were still a bit soggy round the eddges. 

At this point my other half strolled into the kitchen (no doubt wondering what was holding up the delivery of his stew, given all that was usually involved was ladling it out into a bowl), and mentioned he always balanced his dumplings on top of the stew to steam them.  I did spend a minute trying to remember the last time that he cooked dumplings, or stew for that matter, but gave up and admitted he was probably right.  You steam suet puddings, rather than boil them, at least I do, so it makes sense.  I'm still not ready to steam them in my stew though - I think I might try a steamer basket or sieve first. 

At least the second batch today were edible, if a bit on the damp side - which was fortunate because I was too hungry at that point to make any more. 

The search for the perfect dumpling continues.