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| Tonight's tea - lasagna |
In Yorkshire, we do not call our main evening meal dinner, we call it tea. So, for example, I will often say to Mrs Pudding, "What do you fancy for tea love?" The question has nothing to do with the hot drink that is also called tea.
Now you might imagine that given my pen name - Yorkshire Pudding - the only dish that I am capable of making for our tea is err...Yorkshire pudding but you would be wrong my friend. In the kitchen, I am like an amalgam of TV chefs Gordon Ramsay, James Martin and Rick Stein though of course I don't have my own TV show or a pile of fancy recipe books with my grinning visage on the cover - "Yorkshire Pudding by Yorkshire Pudding" etc..
For tea tonight I made a lasagna using some leftover bolognese sauce that I prepared last Friday along with ;layers of sliced mushrooms, courgette, white sauce, tomatoes and lasagna pasta sheets. I also had some of yesterday's cauliflower cheese left to serve with the lasagna.
When the main course was in the oven I went to the bottom of the garden and picked a pound of brambles ready to make a bramble pie. Last time I made one, it kind of erupted towards the end of the baking time and purple bramble juice trickled across the pastry lid. It was as if my beautiful golden pie had been attacked by a pie vandal with a purple pen. This time I made a little pastry dam around the air holes before brushing egg yolk over the pie, just in case there was another eruption of bramble juice.
Nurse Pudding works late on Mondays but when she arrived home at 6.45pm, there was another nice tea waiting for her courtesy of her own personal chef:-
Bramble pie - with juice dam
So, Mr. Pudding, is bramble pie a pie filled with blackberries from the bushes? And, Mr. Pudding, was the main and most substantial meal 110 years ago served in the afternoon and then a "light" tea in the evening? Or, has it always been thus as you describe above? Whatever, it looks lovely. Shirley is one lucky woman, I tell you!
ReplyDeleteI don't know why we Yorkshire folk call the evening meal tea. Down in London and thereabouts they call it dinner but I have called it tea all my life. And yes the bramble pie was made from blackberries (brambles) from our bushes. Thanks for calling by once more Mama Bear. I hope you're in good form.
DeleteLovely. Does Nurse Pudding hire you out at all ... ? Just asking.
ReplyDeleteShe hires me out but not for cooking.
DeleteTomatos on a lasagne ?
ReplyDeleteYou mad fucker!
Sometimes you have to live on the edge.
DeleteWhen we were in Victoria, BC in Canada, "high tea" at the Empress Hotel was a big tourist attraction. Are BCers really Yorkshire folk in disguise?
ReplyDeleteI have seen "The Empress Hotel". I guess that their "high tea" involves little sandwiches, fancy cakes and teapots. Please don't insult me by likening citizens of British Columbia to Yorkists!
DeleteI'm aghast at John Gray's "aghastness"! I, too, oft times, have placed tomato slices on top of lasagne. There is nothing strange in doing so.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a child we referred to the evening meal as "tea"; lunch was called "dinner". From around the late 60s to early 70s it all changed as far as I was concerned. Since that time "dinner" has been the evening meal and lunch is the mid-day meal. (I think I wrote something similar about this subject a few weeks ago).
Your lasagne and bramble/berry pie both look delicious. I'd be right over, but I guess there will be none left of either by the time I arrive!
(And I didn't make a typo this time...here we spell lasagne - "lasagne").
You're a good man, Charlie Brown! What's your going rate?
Lasagna/lasagne should contain a tomato sauce with mince or vegetables. I cannot understand why Earl Gray would bristle at the idea of slices of tomato on top of the dish. Probably envious of my superior culinary skills.
DeleteGoing rate? Twenty five bucks an hour.
Same use of "tea" here in Scotland, and "High Tea" means something substantial like a plate of fish and chips for your "tea"; but "pudding" always means something sugary, unlike in Yorkshire. "Nut" up here means to dunt someone in the face with yer napper (aka heid, aka head), rather than a food, too; while Yorkshire is what we call in "the South", whereas you lot seem to think you are in "the North". Words are very confusing.
ReplyDeleteScotland is what we call "There Be Dragons!"... Thanks for calling by Andrew. I am intrigued by the letter R in your name. I am thinking either Reginald or Reamus?
DeleteRobertson
DeleteI need to use the R. professionally as there are a confusing number of us Andrew Scotts, some even in almost the same business as me. It does unfortunately make me an "ARS" but there are people with worse burdens to bear,
DeleteAndrew Robertson (Scot) is Hull City's left back. A great, wholehearted player. Is that you? May I have your autograph?
DeleteYeah, and I am also the handsome young actor Andrew Scott off the telly; then there is the rather sassy Andrea Scott (for the weekends)... But mostly I stay in the boring old grump persona as it gets me less attention.
DeleteWhat a smashing meal!!
ReplyDeleteSteve Reed is going to be beside himself, if he reads this post and the comments. How confusing for English speaking people who in theory speak the same language but with different meanings for different words...
We also at tea in the evening when I was a kid but times changed when people began to be a bit posh and started going out to dinner in the evenings.
Alphie
So you became posh Alphie? What is it like being posh? Did you have to practise talking with a couple of plums in your mush?
DeleteRead the last sentence carefully Pudding, I didn't say I was posh (You've got to be kidding), I used the word people in a general sense.
DeleteAnd I doubt many of the poshest people in this country spoke with 'plums in their mouths'. You have to be born to that style of speech...
Alphie
Please accept my sincere apologies for the upsetting suggestion that you might be posh Alphie.
DeleteWell, you're a very capable cook! I've never had bramble pie but it sounds really good.
ReplyDeleteWhat I call brambles, some weirdo people call blackberries Red.
DeleteThis looks so lovely, tasty and wonderful. Lucky Mrs. Pudding !
ReplyDeleteI think the tomatoes on top make it very pretty.
cheers, parsnip and thehamish
I always like to make dishes look nice. Thank you pleasantparsnip.
DeleteThat meal looks wonderful, whatever you call it! I am jealous...my husband doesn't cook.
ReplyDeleteThe Gregg chain in Britain is famous for its pies and pasties.
DeleteLasagne! Didn't think you ate that foreign stuff Mr Pudding. Wouldn't mind a piece of that bramble pie, looks delicious.
ReplyDeleteYou got me Sue! Yes it is true - I do sometimes like to get my gnashers into "foreign muck".
DeleteI'm impressed you could pick so many brambles, otherwise known as blackberries, this late in the year. Our brambles are already looking pretty sad and devoid of berries. (Of course, that could be because I've already eaten them all.)
ReplyDeleteI think you SHOULD have a cookbook! Anyone who names himself after a savory pudding HAS to know what he's doing in the kitchen.
You live two hundred miles south of us and that explains why your brambles have gone and ours are still there to pick. This is the fourth bramble pie I have made in the last two weeks - so that's four pounds I have picked and there's more to come.
DeleteIn my cookbook there'd be these sections:-
1) Using up leftovers
2) Cooking with food sourced only from "Lidl".
3) Using your microwave
4) How to bake a perfect Yorkshire pudding
5) The history of the Yorkshire pudding
6) Making food look nice on the plate
7) Mr Pudding's beef mince rissoles
8) When I put Jamie Oliver in hospital with a single punch
9) Twenty ways to cook courgettes
10) Chicken curry Yorkshire style with homemade chapatis
11) Mr Pudding's world famous bramble pie with homemade custard.
My son-in-law says I make a very passable Yorkshire Pudding!
DeleteI don't recall you ever making me! Did you mean making out?
DeleteYou put me to shame YP - that tea looks delicious.
ReplyDeleteComing from you that's a pleasing compliment Mrs Weaver.
DeleteMay I borrow you every now and then so that you can cook for me? The house keys are in the drawer of the old kitchen table behind the house, next to the bins. I will be home at 7:00 pm tomorrow.
ReplyDeletePS: There's a little pet "hate" of mine - it's really, honestly, truly not lasagnA, but lasagnE. Ask anyone who speaks and writes Italian. I know it is spelled the way you spell it nearly everywhere in the UK, but that does not make it any more correct than Yarkshire Padding would be.
Sorry. This needed saying (or typing).
Thank you for that Meike. I shall endeavour to write "lasagnE" from now on. Yorkshire Padding sounds like a hygienic solution for elderly incontinent people.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteNothing significant was there, just deleted a comment as I put it in the wrong place. I increasingly put a lot of things in the wrong places these days.
DeleteI trust that there is one secret thing you put in the right place Andrew!
DeleteWe've got three kinds of blackberries that grow wild around here - Himalayan, Evergreen and wild trailing. People sometimes pick the wild trailing ones to sell. They are somewhat like secret fishing holes - if you know where they are, you keep it to yourself! Your meal sounds tasty but trying to hide zucchini in a lasagna is just...wrong. What is cauliflower cheese? We put in mozzarella and parmesan (NOT the powdered kind in a shaker...shudder.) Now I'm hungry!
ReplyDeleteI have never heard of powdered cheese Hilly. Cauliflower cheese is basically a boiled cauliflower with cheddar cheese flavoured white sauce poured over it and then roasted in the oven.
DeleteSee, we have those bramble bushes all along my driveway. As posted before, Mr Pudding, if there are any berries on them (which hardly ever happens) then bears are not around. Usually, as I look early in the morning, the berries are completely gone. Which means the bears are about!
ReplyDeleteI would not want to be engrossed in picking brambles and then having a bear tapping me on the shoulder!
DeleteLasagne: Food of the Gods (even with tomatoes on top ('though not if you're Italian).
ReplyDeleteThe tomato slices were decorative as much as anything Mr E.
DeleteYour dinner/tea looks good. The terms are interchangeable here. We are eating strawberries every night as it is the season but they are sour things and white inside and every night we yearn for English strawberries which we think are the best - better than French and Spanish ones that we've had. The thought of free pickings of blackberries in their place sounds too good to be true !
ReplyDeleteI planted those bushes twenty five years ago but in our local countryside there are millions of wild, unpicked brambles.
Delete