Kitchen nightmares

As I mentioned yesterday, I celebrated my houses's rehydration with a bout of baking, and I think it's fair to say that I did a half good job. Without it being an exaggeration, I've done more baking over the course of the last year or so than in the rest of my life put together, and whilst my historical lack of culinary prowess doesn't exactly make that a difficult feat, it's still been something of a personal revelation.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not putting myself in the Gordon Ramsay league as packets and instructions still largely dictate my cooking technique, but I've been branching out and yesterday I made my first ever quiche which, even if I say so myself, came out rather well. It was a bacon and broccoli affair, and whilst Chef Ramsay would most likely have taken a forkful and declared it to be bland, I was very pleased.

I said at the beginning of this post that I did a half good job though, and there was indeed a downside to my relative success with the quiche. I also made a couple of apple pies, which should have been in the oven for around an hour, but they ended up baking for considerably longer. When I spoke to Melanie on the phone in the evening I proudly told her all about my adventures in baking, but as I was doing so I remembered the apple pies, and the fact that they were still in the oven.

It wasn't as bad as my spoon-based misadventures from earlier in the year, but after three and a half hours I don't think the pies were as moist as they could have been; apple crisp is a popular dish in these parts, but these were more like apple burnt-to-a-crisp. I probably do myself an injustice there as I think what emerged is still going to be edible, but a large amount of apple filling remained in the oven having burst through the pie crusts, and is now charcoaled in lumps at the bottom in a small-scale recreation of the last day of Pompeii.

I'm currently debating as to whether I should clean up the mess since it could eventually be of archaeological interest to future generations, but as I'm still going to be here for the next month I think history is going to have to lose out on this occasion. I'm going to make a cake at the weekend though...