Castle in the Mud

In response to Sharyn's comment, here is my Lemon Delicious recipe. It is a family favourite which has been made by my mother for as long as I can remember and now my daughter (who used to call it Lemon Dooo-lishus) makes it as well. I am not sure of the origin of the recipe (I will ask my mother) but it is great for when I have have an excess of both lemons and eggs.

Lemon Delicious

1 tablespoon butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons plain flour
1 lemon (juice and rind)
2 eggs
1 cup milk

Preheat oven to 170 degrees Celsius.

Cream the butter and sugar, add the flour. Stir in the lemon juice and grated lemon rind. Separate the eggs. Add the egg yolks and milk to the mixture. Beat the egg whites in a separate bowl until stiff. Add to the mixture and gently fold in. Pour into a greased ovenproof dish and bake standing in a pan of water (about 2cm deep) in a moderate oven for approximately 40 mins.

Serves 4

It is essentially a lemon self-saucing pudding. Serve hot or cold with cream or ice-cream.

Today I thawed out a meal of vegetable casserole. We were out for most of the day and when we got home G decided that was not really what he wanted for dinner. I then had a ferret around in the freezer and found 4 sausages. There was also 4 slices of a loaf of bought white bread which we never normally eat. The bread had been bought especially for the Summer Pudding I made for Christmas lunch and these were the leftovers. We both immediately 'knew'what we would have for dinner - a sausage sizzle! Sausages grilled on the George Foreman grill, topped with sauce and wrapped in buttered white bread. Not a particularly healthy offering but gosh it was yummy and great for an occasional meal.

As part of our renovation preparations we spent the day looking at kitchens in display homes. I now know what I don't want! We have got the general design done but wanted to look at finishes, appliances, door handles, laminex colours etc and I must admit the colours and finishes of most of the current trends leave me distinctly unimpressed although I did get a couple of ideas. I am going to look on the internet and also check out suppliers of taps, handles, laminex etc but I had thought it might be nice to see some of the kitchens 'in the flesh', so to speak.

The other thing I did this morning was mend the dog's bed. It is a metal frame with a cover made from shadecloth. Over a few years he has managed to gradually scratch and break the weave of the shadecloth and create a longtitudinal split of about 40cm. G was sure we would have to replace the cover as the dog was sagging lower and lower in his bed, however I decided that we should turn the cover over so that the split was on the underside. This did not improve matters much so I found about 7 cable ties and threaded one through the shadecloth on opposing sides of the middle of the split and pulled it tight. I then repeated this with the remaining cable ties so that they were positioned about every 5cm and pulled tight. This has mended the shadecloth quite satisfactorily. I had known what I wanted to achieve for a while but it was not until a couple of days ago that I read in a Grassroots magazine from the library about using cable ties to join shadecloth. I remembered that I had some ties and decided to give it a go.