More cheese biscuits / biscuits for cheese

My second attempt was OK (made with flour, butter, Tesco's value soft cheese and a few bits of olive) but the consistency was more like pastry than biscuit.

The Technomage-cum-Chilimage therefore decided that it was his turn, and he, naturally, picked a spicy recipe. This is the one he used - Cheese Thins, from Chocolate & Zuccini. He used cheddar and made zillions. We topped a third with a few salt crystals, a third with a spicy mix and left the rest plain.

He reckons these are the first biscuits he's ever made, and jolly good they are too.



We scoffed four each while the tray was still too hot to touch but have showed a little bit more restraint since then - can't see them lasting very long though...

They are actually much cheesier than the original aim. Having lots of cheese is of course is a Very Good Thing and makes them very scrumptious, but we still want to perfect something that still leaves scope for putting cheese and chutney on top to serve, whereas these are just great on their own (though we're about to try a few topped with olive tapenade).

We've still got half of this batch to bake, but then the next attempt will perhaps be based on these but with less cheese and maybe a little oatmeal to see what that does to the texture.

I like this kind of cooking...very wicked....

The gang's all here

All four of our neighbouring Jacobs ewes have now had their lambs and it's clear why the one we called Chocolate looked so large when she was expecting - she's had triplets!



However one is very tiny and a bit wobbly...





so we're hoping that it is able to thrive despite having to compete for milk with two bigger siblings.



But it does at least seem to be getting the hang of gambolling!



The twin lambs that arrived first are growing fast....



...and the two single ones seem very content too.





Now we just need to decide what to call them all - a good thing about Jacobs sheep is that it's easy to tell them apart!

Cheese biscuits

You'd think that with this many cookbooks...



...it would be easy to find a recipe to satisfy my sudden hankering for cheese biscuits.

I looked through loads in vain - including a book devoted to cheese recipes - but eventually two old favourites came up trumps with three recipes between them.





I can't remember when I last made biscuits, so opted for the simple Cheese Biscuits from Sainsbury's Best of Entertaining (which used to be one of my favourites though I haven't opened it in years).

It just involved 4oz plain flour, 2oz butter, 2oz grated Cheddar, the yolk of an egg plus 2 teaspoons of water (in fact I found I needed more). It was very easy - just rubbing the butter into the flour till it resembled breadcrumbs then stirring in the cheese before adding the yolk and water and mixing to a firm dough. Cooking was 10 mins at 200 degrees C, gas mark 6.

The results far exceeded my expectations for a first attempt. They were a bit thicker than I expected - they seemed to fluff up a bit - but maybe I hadn't rolled them thin enough. Who cares - they tasted (and smelt) great!

Restraint proved impossible and we polished them all off in two evenings (just like with the old Cheddars slogan - "bet you can't eat just one").





I'm so taken with them that I'm now planning variations with olives, chilies etc. And I've still got the other two recipes to try - Chive Biscuits (made with soft cheese) from the Sainsbury's book and Cheesy Cocktail Biscuits from the Marks & Spencer one. This involves sandwiching two paprika/cheese biscuits (one of which has grated cheese sprinkled on top before baking) with a filling - bit more elaborate but very tempting.

More signs of spring

Another welcome sign of spring - the first lambs born to our local and now rather small flocklet of Jacobs sheep (just four ewes and the ram instead of the 20 or so put there some years). The brown ewe looks very large and we're betting that her offspring will be there on our next walk.



These first twin lambs - a boy and a girl - have very similar markings.



They seem so very tiny that they must only have been born in the last day or two.



This morning's other enjoyable sighting was a treecreeper - quite easy to spot due to his rapid movement up the truck but much harder to get a decent picture of. This was the best we managed - but at least it's good enough to confirm what it was!



Time to go and plant some chili seeds now while the weather's still good .... the first spring gardening task.

New things to listen to while getting on with the cushion

I've been a big fan of talking books for probably about 20 years and listen to far more books than I read. Mostly I get them from the library but also get a lot of other drama and readings eg from Radio 4/Radio 7, groups like like Darker Projects or from 1950s Old Time Radio collections.

But it's always nice to find new things to listen to and so I was very pleased on Saturday to come across this article on anythingbutipod which alerted me to some great-sounding resources, eg Literal Systems, with recordings by a group of actors. I'm also very taken by a service called Overdrive that libraries subscribe too. Luckily, two of my three local library services are members and - while there's not much choice yet - it looks like a great and very convenient way of getting unabridged talking books.

Coupled with all these new sources of entertainment, I got rather carried away twice in the last few days with impulse buys of two teensy weensy little mp3 players, at prices that were too good to miss.



I'm particularly impressed with the Sansa Clip + (£15 off at Currys, making it just under £25 for the 4GB version) - very well made and with features that are ideally suited to audiobooks. The equally tiny Creative Zen Stone Plus with built-in speaker (£19.90 as the "deal of the day" on ebay last week) seems less user-friendly for audiobooks but the built-in speaker more than makes up for it. I'd been half looking for one of these for a while, but hadn't really thought about the Sansa Clip till seeing it highly recommended at anythingbutipod on Saturday, then spotting it in Currys where we were trying to spend some vouchers we'd got stuck with.

Neither player is intended as a complete replacement for my beloved Frontier Labs Nex 3 model, which is packed with features such as a "repeat track" option (that helps stop me from waking up in a later episode of a serial and hearing whodunnit....)



Its use of an AAA battery is another reason why I'll keep on using it - it's far easier to carry a couple of spare rechargeables than to have to charge an internal battery.

The tiny Sansa Clip is proving great for wearing while pottering around the house, and the Stone's speaker will be very useful while travelling or just to carry round.

Splashing out on these made me realise that I do seem to have accumulated quite a few mp3 players over the years.



None of them is a particularly popular, fashionable or fancy model but they were all chosen for a particular USP - playing mp3s on CD, having speakers, taking compact flash cards, being cheap enough (£3.99) to risk on the beach, a spare etc - and all continue to be used.

The resident Technomage listens to mp3s just as much as me but isn't remotely interested in trying new models. He still sticks to the trusty Frontier Labs Nex II that he bought in 2001 - though it's had a few repairs after nine years of daily use and he keeps an eye open for secondhand/cheap ones as backups.