Ten years ago, before her place in the pantheon of domestic deities was assured, Nigella Lawson got a bit of abuse for a recipe included in How To Be A Domestic Goddess. Her flapjacks were brittle, and difficult to remove from the tin, apparently. I’ve followed her recipe twice, and I dare say that they are on the crumbly side, but I’m no threat to  Nigella. She can rest secure in her elevated position in my eyes and the eyes of the nation now.

My mother’s flapjack recipe is divine. It makes no pretensions to wholesomeness. A mixture of cornflakes, oats, flour, golden syrup and butter combine to make a tooth-achingly sweet and sticky confection. It’s not an elegant creation, and these must be the sweetest flapjacks I’ve ever tasted, but I would defy you to eat just one piece.

Flapjacks could unite the nation. For the healthy, they can be filled with nuts, seeds, and dried fruit galore. For those of us who like a sugar hit that doesn’t feel empty, they are incredibly satisfying.

Last month Felicity Cloake devoted a column of her wonderful Guardian series How to Cook the Perfect… to flapjacks. She tests many recipes and presents the best. I have tried many flapjack recipes over the years, as my waistline would happily attest, and here’s the one I present to you.

Flapjacks should properly be plain, but if you’re going to add something to them, please stop before you reach the packet of raisins. Move your hand slightly to the left and pick up a bag of dried cherries instead. Cherries add the perfect sour note to provide a tangy relief to the unalloyed sweetness of a flapjack.

Makes: approx 20 flapjacks, depending on how greedy you are!

Ingredients:

• 6oz butter
• 6oz demerara sugar
• 3tbsp golden syrup
• 60z dried cherries
• 12oz rolled (porridge oats)

Method:

• Preheat the oven to 180C
• Melt the butter, sugar, and syrup in a large saucepan, over a gentle heat, until the sugar has dissolved. (An aside: I have to confess, my measuring of golden syrup is nowadays very approximate. It’s not that easy to do a clever trick with boiling water and a spoon when your toddler wants to join in too).
• Remove from the heat and add the oats and dried cherries. Stir in.
• Put the mixture into a 23cm square tin. I like to line my tin. Bake for 25 minutes, until the top has turned golden.
• Allow to cool for 20 minutes in the tin before cutting into bars or squares, and allow to cool completely on a wire rack.

I’ve made mayonnaise from scratch, cooked creme brulee (though I can’t equal my mum’s efforts) a handful of times. I make hollandaise sauce, and I scramble eggs to the delight of my husband. I love a Spanish tortilla for supper, with red peppers, onions, and potatoes. Most of all, I’m quite partial to a fried egg sandwich for breakfast; leaving the yolk till last whilst ensuring you have just enough bread to soak up any that threatens to spill onto the plate is a fine art. I dream of having chickens one day and I’m intensely jealous of my brother who is hoping to get some this summer. 

There has been too much Nigella on this blog so far, I concede, but I’m going to celebrate eggs this weekend, by making her Gateau Breton. As far as I can tell, Gateau Breton is a slightly eggier version of a Pound Cake, which contains only eggs, sugar, butter, and flour, in equal quantities. I’ve made the Nigella version before, and its delicious, but it must be six or seven years since I have had it. We bought some fresh, handmade butter from a farm shop at the weekend. What better way to enjoy the unadulterated taste of good ingredients than by using few of them, and using them simply? I’ll let you know how it goes.

Serves: 6-8

Ingredients

• 1.3kg shin of beef, chopped into rough 2-inch cubes
• 2 carrots, roughly chopped
• 2 celery sticks, roughly chopped
• 3 red onions, roughly chopped
• 1 bulb of garlic
• 1/2 bottle red wine
• 3 cans chopped tomatoes
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 tbsp plain flour
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• salt and pepper

Method

• Pre-heat the oven to 170C.
• Put the bulb of garlic, whole and entirely unpeeled, into a pan of hot water and simmer gently for 20 minutes. Then remove and allow to cool before peeling the cloves and mashing them. The result is a mellow garlic paste.
• Heat the oil in a large casserole and cook the onion, carrots, celery, garlic, and cinnamon on a medium heat for about five minutes.
• Meanwhile, toss the pieces of beef in seasoned flour and then add to the pot with the vegetables.
• Add the wine, the chopped tomatoes, and the bay leaf.
• Bring to the boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook for about 3 hours.
• Serve with mashed potatoes, and a leafy green vegetable.

I’m not going to post the recipe, since it would be lifted straight from a book. You can find it at the link above, anyway. This recipe is disarmingly simple, though. Caramelise four red onions in a little oil and butter for about half an hour. Make a cheese scone dough. Tip the onions into a pie dish, press the dough out into a disc about the same size as the pie dish, place on top and press to seal. Then bake for a total of 25 minutes, reducing the heat a little after the first fifteen.

Nigella instructs you to cook the onions gently, until they are lightly tinged with colour. This approach could never produce a result as deliciously dark and glistening as the photo accompanying the recipe. I’ve made the recipe a couple of times before and always been disappointed with the delicate colour of the onions that results. This time I went for the French Onion Soup route and was a bit more fierce when cooking the onions and didn’t even go for the non-stick pan. You have no idea how hard it is for me to hear something crackling on the hob and to resist the urge to stir, stir, stir.

Cooking the onions more fiercely means you could probably use an extra one or two.

Serves: 2 (1 pregnant woman, 1 Man)

Ingredients

For the filling:

• 1lb stewing beef, diced
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 1 tbsp gravy granules
• 1lb potatoes, peeled, cut into chunks
• pinch of salt

For the pastry:

• 3 oz plain flour
• pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 oz margarine and lard
• cold water

Method:

• Put the onion and beef in a pan and add water to barely cover. Bring to a boil, then simmer, covered, for 2 1/2 to 3 hours.
• For the pastry, rub the margarine and lard into the flour until it forms crumbs. Add cold water little by little, stirring with a knife, until the mixture just comes together. Knead lightly for a minute, then flatten the pastry into a disc, wrap in cling film and pop in the fridge for at least half an hour.
• Preheat the oven to 200C/gas mark 6.
• As the meat reaches the end of its simmering time, cook the potatoes until they are just tender. Drain them, then set aside.
• When the meat is cooked, drain off the cooking liquid and reserve it. Thicken this cooking liquid with gravy granules. You shold need about a tablespoon. (If you were to use a stock cube and maybe even some red wine instead of just plain water when you cooked your meat you could thicken this cooking stock with flour, but I’m making this pie the way my mother would have made hers, and that is, unashamedly, with gravy granules!).
• Divide the pastry into two segments, one slightly larger than the other. Roll out the larger section and line your pie dish with it. The pastry can fall over the edges of the pie dish; you can always trim it later, and it is better and easier to seal the lid to the pastry rather than to the pie dish. Put the cooked meat into the bottom of the pie dish, then pop the potatoes on top, and lastly, add plenty of the gravy.
• Roll out the remaining pastry and place gently over the pie. You can moisten the edges of the pastry with water or milk to help it to seal, and remember to press down, with fingers or  a fork. Cut slits in the top of the pastry to allow any steam out.
• Cook in the preheated oven for forty to fifty minutes.
• Devour.

There are certainly things I could change about this recipe to improve it. My pastry was far too thin and didn’t rest against the filling, so it became a little crisp rather than soft and comforting dream I was imagining. Easily solved. More pastry next time, and plenty of gravy should solve that problem. I sent P. up to the butchers to buy the meat as well, and bought a generic ‘stewing steak’ that I’m guessing might be brisket. I wonder if I might get a more unctuous, tender meat if I used a cut such as shin. But it has been months – no, years – since I’ve had a homecooked pie, so the complaints are few!

Over the past few years I’ve often browsed food blogs for ideas and recipes. Reading about others’ attempts to make an authentic cassoulet is cautionary. Most often I look for a recipe from a cuisine I have little knowledge of. Or faced with seven different versions of flapjack recipes, I do a little research to find out which is the most standard, or which might provide me with something really special.

This blog, then, is just a chance for me to talk about food even when there isn’t anyone around to listen! My heart lies with baking, rather than cooking, but a baking blog might well lead to radio silence for months on end. (See aforementioned PhD and toddler for reasons why baking is sporadic.) So, this blog reflects the everyday things that go on in my kitchen, though as long as you don’t mind, I’ll probably leave out the evenings we have a pizza fresh from a supermarket shelf, or cheese on toast. I can’t promise very pretty photos. The lighting in our house is ridiculous in the Winter months, and food photography is not my strong point. But I know how frustrating a recipe without a photo is, so I promise that there’ll be plenty of eye candy, of whatever quality.