Day 18: My Kind of Pictures (requested by aardvarkinmud)

aardvarkinmud What pictures do you like to look at? 

This question really made me think and I wasn't sure why kind of pictures to talk about, so I've divided it up. First of all I'm going to talk about paintings, then abstract images and then photos.

( Click to see my choices )

Recipe: My Mummy's Steak and Kidney Pudding

Sorry this took so long, took a while to get dear Mama to write it down. Now she tends to just throw things together so the quantities are estimated, but they should give you the general gist.

Ingredients

• 12oz - 340g - 1.5 cup self raising flour (to make self-raising flour from plain [all purpose] flour just add 2 teaspoons of baking powder for each 150g/6oz/1 cup plain flour. Thank you Nigella.)
• 6oz - 170g - 3/4 cup suet (for US peeps who can't get suet easily this thread on britishexpats.com might help)
• Some water
• 8 lambs kidneys
• 450g  approx 1lb  braising steak (any steak will do as long as it will cook down)
• 2 Beef Stock cubes or about a pint of strong beef stock

Instructions

1. Mix the flour and suet and water to make the suet crust - it should be handleable, but not dry.
2. Line a 1.5 pint (0.85 ltr or there abouts) ceramic pudding basin (like these) with the pastry, leaving enough pastry to make a lid for the top. The easiest way is to just go at it like plasticine, but you can roll it if you like. This is not an elegant pudding - as I said in my entry about it, it's a spoon out of the bowl type of pudding, not one you turn onto a plate :).
3. Dice the steak.
4. Core the kidneys (the stringy white stuff in the middle needs to come out - it is horrid to eat) and chop into large chunks. (You will need a very sharp knife because kidneys are slimy to handle).
5. Put the meat in the pasty case in layers.
6. Mix up your stock (either dissolve the stock cubes in water or melt you normal stock so it is liquid) and pour over the meat until near the top.
7. Season with a little salt and pepper, but be careful your stock may be salty anyway.
8. Seal on the suet pasty lid. If you moisten the edges it should stick easily.
9. Cover the top in tin foil or grease proof paper making sure to leave a gap above the top of the pudding.
10. Place into a large saucepan or steamer and steam for six hours.

This is absolutely lovely served with mashed potato and veg with lots of extra gravy.