Teach Your Family To Cook - bread and butter pudding

Suggestion
Once a week, or once a day, show your family where vital items are stored, make an inventory, and write out recipes.

Once a week, or once a day, get your family to help with one small item of cooking preparation, not just laying the table.

If you are keen on cooking, share your tips with the family and record them for your descendants.

What do you do with leftovers? Stale bread? Nothing in the house but bread and butter and eggs and milk?

Bread and butter pudding was a traditional way of using up leftover, stale bread. Also very filling. Anything with wheat or oats or bread is sustaining, keeps you going, stops you snacking.

Not just a food for the poor. A food fit for a princess.

scription	English: Princess Diana opens The Paisley Centre and pays a visit to the Accord Hospice. Colorized.
Date	15 February 2017
Source	Own work. Colorization of Princess Diana at Accord Hospice.jpg
Author	Auguel

You might also be interested in the bread and butter pudding recipe which was a favourite of Princess Diana.


UK flag

Bread and Butter Pudding
White bread. Cut off crusts. Soak bread. Soak sultanas in amaretto overnight or at least six hours. Whisk eggs. Add cream. Hm.

My version is easier. No alcohol. Soak bread in eggy milk mixture. Layer with sultanas. (Cut out cream, because I am on a diet.) Add optional lemon juice at the end. (Not too early. You have to avoid lemon juice curdling milk.) Grill the top if you like to get it crispy. Add sugar on top?And almonds?  Depends how much sugar your diet allows.

Watch carefully to be sure it is not overcooked. Whatever the recipe tells you, your size pan, your thickness of bread, your oven, will make a difference.

Add bland vanilla custard, as an antidote to the sugar and to fill you up so you don't overdose on the filling bread.

Wiki recipe

Bread and butter custard pudding
Date	9 May 2007, 19:45
Source	Bread and Butter Pudding and Custard
Author	Nick Richards from London, UK

Recipe Results and The Cook
When I was first married we belonged to a dining club. Six people, three couples. All had the same recipe and made two portions. The weird thing was that although we used the same ingredients and the same method, everybody's results were different. What was the difference? The oven. The cook. If you are not experienced, you can make the same recipe two weeks running and get different results.

As Napoleon said, five minutes makes the difference between defeat and victory.

Useful Websites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_butter_pudding

About the Author
Angela Lansbury is a British writer, (not related to the actress), who has lived in the UK, USA and Spain and Singapore. See her profile and books on Lulu.com and Amazon. Please share links to your favourite posts.

How To Make Your Bedroom And Bathroom Look Like A Five Star French Hotel

Photo of George V hotel in Wikipedia under Geroge V hotel. Photo author Claus.

Problem
You come home from a wonderful hotel and within five minutes you have turned your own home into a slum. How can you copy their system, make the bed and do the bedroom in twenty minutes or less, and look like a five-star hotel?

Answer
Just allow five minutes each morning to set your home up like a five-star hotel and you can enjoy it all day.

I remember sitting in a hotel in Wales watching the breakfast room staff laying the tables for lunch. I also watched them setting up the breakfast tables the night before. I thought, "That's not difficult. I could do that!"

Now, here are some more tips about bedrooms and bathrooms from YouTube videos. I've seen many videos on how to make up beds with sheets folded into what we used to call 'hospital corners'.

I also recall the various ways of stuffing a duvet inside a duvet cover. You can turn the cover inside out and grab the top two corners and shake it the right way around. Or push the duvet up to the top two corners. Frankly, I would shake the duvet over the bed, not drag it onto the floor (unless I have vacuumed the floor in advance).

However, the video from the prestigious George V hotel, (pronounced the French way 'Jorge Sank'), in Paris, France, taught me a new way to put a pillow into a pillowcase. I use the duvet method to get the pillow into the pillowcase. But the demo shows you how to fold the pillow in half the long way in order to get it into the pillowcase.

I also like the way the demo shows you to fold back any overhang of the pillowcase.

George V, famous for, VIP guests such as Princess Diana. The George V hotel is in the street called George V. Who was George V?  Remember with alliteration. King George Fifth, first world war, sixth, second world war. Expect a traditional hotel.

If you want to watch the video, and learn how to obtain French chic, here's the link:

Useful Websites
On making beds like a hotel in France
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqtmT_xVqhM

If this is too much effort for you, consider investing in a self-making bed, which has metal bars both sides to seal down the sheet:
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/conventions/2008-04-02-inventions-fair_N.htm
Or check into the George V hotel and let them make the bed for you.

Tourist visits to France
http://us.france.fr
https://en.parisinfo.com
https://www.tripadvisor.com.sg/Hotel_Review-g187147-d188975-Reviews-Four_Seasons_Hotel_George_V-Paris_Ile_de_France.html
https://www.tripadvisor.com.sg/Hotel_Review-s1-g188672-d266424-Reviews-Hotel_George_V-Ostend_West_Flanders_Province.html

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.

Statues of Women to Photograph in London and England

Amy Winehouse statue, Camden, London, England.

When I was a schoolchild I was puzzled by the idea of a flawed hero, such as Shakespeare's King Lear; when I was a young adult I was puzzled by the idea that as a successful author I had to create a flawed hero of a novel, who had to have a weak point. Why was this necessary? Why was it considered realistic?

After investigating the lives of heroes for a book of quotations, and some people for speeches, I was struck by how many heroes and heroines had been affected by:

Setbacks Before Success
1 The loss of next of kin (such as a parent, spouse, child, beloved grandparent, colleague). Even newspaper articles about successful singers, comedians, authors, actors and pop stars, often add harrowing tales, despite their youth. To give a few examples, Abraham Lincoln lost next of kin and failed in government.

2 Financial or career setbacks. Millionaires frequently have terrible setbacks, losing money at the start, or rising to success and then losing everything.

3 Poor health or death from nasty events. (Pop stars such as Amy Winehouse, dying from drugs and drink whether suicide or accidental; horrific car accidents; or deaths from disease, real or suspected - such as Disraeli, Hitler, and did Mrs Beeton die from complications from childhood or from something caught from her husband? See her biographies.)

Now I look at the life stories of many musicians and artists. The painter Van Gogh who cut off his own ear was, in simple, frank, colloquial language, simply nuts. Artists lived with misfortunes inflicted from outside or self-inflicted and mixed with and painted people you might not wish to meet in real life. Toulouse Lautrec was injured as a child, stunted, and painted women who were prostitutes. (Most respectable women would not pose for nude photos.)

In modern times Olympic heroes lose their status after it is found that they took drugs. Rolf Harris has lost his place. We are quick to knock down statues of modern dictators. Yet we are horrified that vandals destroyed the noses of Roman statues and ancient Egyptian rules destroyed their predecessors works.

Where am I going with this? How is it relevant to the statues of women? I was reading about the controversy concerning the statue of Mary Wollenstonecraft.

Mary Wollenstonecraft and Mary Shelley
She was an unmarried mother. She inspired feminists. Her daughter was equally famous Mary Shelley.

Byron
Our heroes such as the poet Byron were equally flawed characters. Yet we allow their contribution to literature or politics to over-rise our displeasure or controversy over their personal lives.

Boadicea
My first female statue in London would be Boadicea. She was controversial. If you believe she existed, that she mutilated her body, that she and / or her followers committed suicide rather than be captured (again) by Romans.

Most of historical figures are pretty controversial. As a tourist, enjoy the list of statues might add to your souvenirs, your record of your visit or tour around London and the UK:

Beeton
Why is there no statue of Mrs Beeton in Hatch End? Somebody please start a campaign. Every time you read a recipe with the list of ingredients at the start you are benefitting from the system and pattern which she established.

Top Ten Statues
Top ten statues or monuments, plaques or markers of women in London and England
1 Boadicea (fought the Romans)
2 Mary S e a c o l e (Crimean war, see my previous post)
3 Queen Victoria (statues worldwide). See portraits of royals in the National Portrait Gallery.
4 Edith Cavell, nurse executed in WWI, by national Portrait Gallery and National Gallery, near Trafalgar Square
5 Florence Nightingale, Crimean war nurse, lady with the lamp, outside St Thomas's Hospital, looking across the Thames river to Parliament
6 Violette Szabo, Albert Embankment, SEI (WWII heroine, spy, see film about her)
7 Amy Winehouse (singer songwriter, Stables Market, Camden, London)
8 Emmeline Pankhurst, Millbank, SW1
9 Anne Frank memorial in London's Hyde Park (house and statue in The Netherlands)
10 Princess Diana (Fountain)

Plaques in London
1 Mrs Beeton plaque in Hatch End

Statues Outside London
Jane Austen statue in Bath

Homes of Famous Women
1 Anne Hathaway's Cottage, Stratford upon Avon
2 Beatrix Potter, Lake District
3 Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire (The Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne - also see their portrait in the National Portrait Gallery)

Tuesday 18 October, ITV programme , 10.40 pm, In the Shadow of Mary S e a c o l e
She was featured in a Google headline.

Many other women are commemorated with names and institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Amy_Winehouse
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mary-wollstonecraft-frontrunner-of-feminism-may-get-a-statue-at-last-a6914626.html

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.