disaster averted

Would you just look at this cheerful little owl I made while I was sitting here all poorly. Isn’t he adorable?

He’s from a book of miniature Christmas knits, which I have temporarily misplaced, so I can’t tell you what it is. I can tell you that he looked rather more festive in the book, and was, indeed, wearing a Father Christmas hat.

Anyway, I didn’t come in here to show off my cute little knitting projects. That was more of a sweetener, since the other pictures I’ve got to show you aren’t quite as pretty.

Oh dear.

Oh dear, oh dear.

Can you tell what it was meant to be??

Nope, neither could we by the end.

I can tell you that we (actually, I should stop this use of the word ‘we’ – this was, I’m ashamed to say, entirely my responsibility). So, I was trying to make bere bannocks (tee hee, always sounds a bit rude…). You can read about them here, and if you want to see what they look like when you make them properly at home, take a look here.

We ate plenty of them when we were in Orkney. Well more than our fair share, usually with cheese, or jam, or pretty much anything really. And this time when we came home, I brought a bag of beremeal with me.

I have actually made them before, and they’ve been reasonably successful. On my second attempt I put them under the grill rather than in a pan (our pans aren’t quite up to the job), and they worked pretty well. So this third time I was cocky, and tried them under the grill again, with the last bit of beremeal.

What I didn’t bargain for was that, having only been out of hospital a few days, my brain wasn’t quite up to multi tasking, and that trying to keep an eye on bread-under-the-grill, while also trying to make whatever-we-were-having-with-them (I can’t even remember what it was, that’s how befuddled I was) quite clearly counts as multi tasking.

The bere bannocks were crispy, overdone, and entirely inedible. Pah!

Still – all was not lost, since Sir Peter, Knight of Rescuing Dinner arrived on the scene (he gets a lot of practice), and whizzed up this rather delicious stuffing using said crispy bannocks, and mushrooms, home grown sage, and a few other secret magic ingredients that I also can’t remember.

It was so tasty, we ate quite a lot of it, with not-mashed mash, and gravy.

(not-mashed mash is, er, boiled potatoes that you were going to mash but didn’t quite get round to because you were so hungry after the previous dinner attempt turned into a disaster)

Disaster averted, no thanks to me.

As usual.

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