A mammoth undertaking

Although I rather like Yorkshire puddings, and often have them if they’re on the menu at the canteen at work, I’d never cooked one. Partly I think that was because Christopher never cooked them – he wasn’t particularly keen on the texture, so they never formed part of the accompaniments when he did a roast dinner. And partly I think it was because we had them very rarely when I was growing up. I found out years later that in fact my mother had cooked them regularly for Sunday lunch, but they “didn’t work” for one reason or another, and usually went straight from the oven to the bin, without going anywhere near the dining table! Since my mother is a very good cook, I got the idea fixed in my head that Yorkshire puddings were firmly on the “too difficult” list.

I’ve been so busy recently at work, preparing for the two back-to-back equipment trials, that I’ve been really tired in the evenings, and consequently I think I’ve got into a bit of a rut with my cooking. So I decided to use the fact that I was off work all last week to try out some new recipes and challenge myself a bit. I looked through Jamie’s Fifteen Minute Meals to find something that looked interesting and a bit different, and came across a recipe for rosemary-flavoured yorkshire pudding with smoked salmon. I gave it a go, and was pleasantly surprised when the batter rose on cue, and the dish came out of the oven looking just like in the picture. I’d cooked it for exactly as long as the recipe stated, 13 minutes, and to my eyes it was a bit under-done, being a pale golden yellow. It tasted fine, but the texture was a little rubbery. I then looked up a basic Yorkshire pudding recipe in my other cookbooks, and found that they all specified baking it for at least 30 minutes. So I think Jamie was perhaps trying to be a bit over-ambitious, trying to do it all within 15 minutes!

However, it was close enough to a “proper” Yorkshire pudding that I thought I’d try again, but this time cook the batter for half an hour, as instructed by Delia. I often have sausages on a Sunday evening, so I had a go at Toad-in-the-hole with onion gravy. The gravy turned out to be more like onion marmalade – tasty, but not as runny as I had envisioned. But the Toad-in-the-hole worked really well, with a light crispy batter. I was very pleased, and will definitely do it again.