Food and Chemistry

I took advantage of Ste's absence from the meal to cook a Chicken dish in a Hazelnut sauce. I also cooked another Apple Pie despite still having half a pie left over from the weekend.

The Chicken seemed to go OK. I thought at the time that I should of done a few more vegetables. It turned out that people where fine with the amount I served. Maybe having fresh desert persuades people to take the main course easy to have space left?

After my pretty poor pie at the weekend I thought I'd better figure out what went wrong. I solved the crumbly pastry problem by using the remaining half of the frozen puff pastry from last months pie. That seemed to work well. I was also quite generous with the sugar to take the edge off the apple's sharpness. I'm now firmly on the side of powdered Cinnamon vs the stick type I usually use. Having some cloves also helped, I hadn't realised I had run out.

The custard worked out a lot better with generous heaps on the tablespoons of the custard powder. I cocked up the sugar by a factor of two or three but it didn't seem to mater. Apparently it takes a lot to put too much sugar in something ;-)

Today it seemed like I put my chemistry training to use :-)