Wednesday 12 May 2010

Rowley's way with rhubarb















Le Café Anglais in the old Whiteley's building in Bayswater is one of my favourite restaurants and I also like Rowley Leigh's writing very much. As soon as I saw last Saturday's recipe for Strawberry and Rhubarb Pie in his Financial Times column I knew I would have to have a crack at it. Soon!


Today was a good day to experiment. I woke up to an email telling me not to attend my first school (SATs again), I was only doing one hour out of three at my second (same reason) and then I had a short afternoon session because I teach recorder to two classes of Year 3 children whose attention span is not great. (Nor is their recorder playing). Lots of time for messing around in the kitchen then!

I shopped for strawberries before school. Ugly great things they were too, even though they were British! I prepped the fruit and made the pastry after my first school visit of the day. I do like it that Rowley doesn't mind you using the food processor for pastry. My hand-made stuff is disgusting, I will never have pastry-makers hands.

I followed the recipe to a T, unusual for me. And it was very tasty. The pastry was absolutely fabulous and the pie was not at all soggy which I'd worried about. It would, however have benefited from smaller, sweeter strawberries. But if I had those would I bother to put them in a pie? I think not. I'll definitely make it again though. It's one for when the whole family are round. As an aside, Chris likes rhubarb pie very much and he didn't think adding strawberries improved it. He still went back for seconds though!

My dad phoned from hospital today. He has stopped hallucinating and has reverted to being the miserable old bugger we know and love. Tomorrow he is being transferred from Kings Lynn to his local Cottage Hospital at Swaffham. It is good news all round.
Now, can someone tell me how to put the pictures within the text and not at the top? I didn't seem to bring up the same options this time and when I tried to insert an image it still went to the header.




4 comments:

  1. Photos - the dreaded bugbear of Blogger. Firstly, as you will have seen, the photo you want at the bottom has to go in first, as any thing else added will go in above it - so reverse order for adding multiple photos. Once on the blog, I find I can click on them and drag them into place. Now tell me how you put a border on them!

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  2. Ooops, soory, forgot to say - lovely looking pie. My home grown rhubarb is growing prolifically this year - I was thinking of a free-form pie this weekend - might add some strawberries too, although OH will say wait for our homegrown ones.

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  3. Thanks for the formatting advice Sue. Will have a go next time I post.

    The pie has nearly gone due to arrival of pregnant daughter!

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  4. Yeah - I just highlight the pics, cut and paste them in the text where I want them! Lovely pie!

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