Such Honour!

It is always with a certain degree of anticipation that I go to my blogger dashboard most mornings, and when I see certain of my fellow bloggers' names appear on the list of new posts, that anticipation grows. One such name is Yorkshire Pudding, because I nearly always find either great pictures of beautiful countryside on his blog, or an amusing account of something he saw or heard or experienced, or a well-written piece of prose allowing a glimpse into past times and lives.
Imagine my surprise when, upon opening this post, I was looking at myself, proudly holding the Laughing Horse award!

Thank you very much, Neil - as I said in my comment on your post, this came totally unexpected, and I feel much honoured!

Let me honour Your Puddingship by posting about last Sunday, when I invited my parents and my sister over and made Yorkshire Puddings for them.

Now, I know it is usually assumed that it takes a real Yorkshire man or woman to make real Yorkshire puds. But before you wonder why this Swabian Librarian thinks she can make a decent Yorkshire pud herself, consider this: The recipe I have (if you can call it that; actually, it's a few words scribbled on a yellow post-it) is from an 80-year-old lady from the Barnsley area, Yorkshire born and bred. She passed it on to her son, who had the courage to leave his home county (and country) to live with and eventually marry me, and who taught me how to make them.
Therefore, I think my Yorkshire puds are not that far off from what you'd expect to find anywhere between Scarborough and the Pennines. To really judge for yourself, I'm afraid you'll have no choice but travel to Ludwigsburg and have a Sunday meal at my place.

Here is (almost) everything I needed for the meal I had in mind:

I peeled and diced the spuds and carrots, added three tablespoons of olive oil and some salt and pepper and tossed them in the pan as you'd do with a salad. Three twigs of rosemary were enough. The pan went into the oven and took care of itself for the next 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, I prepared the ingredients for the salad I was going to serve for starters: goat cheese, tomatos, pine apple and spring onions. The mushrooms were not for the salad, but for the meat.

It was now time to make the Yorkshire Pudding batter: 2 eggs, one cup of flour, one cup of milk and a pinch of salt. That's it.

Next, the frying pan came out. Don't you love the smell of butter melting in a pan? I do!

This is meat from (farmed) deer. It is sold at Aldi's as "Hirschgulasch", and I make it relatively often during autumn and winter.

The mushrooms go in the pan as soon as the meat has been fried up well from all sides.

Then a bit of water is added (not too much, since the mushrooms will add liquid, too), and because I am equally lazy and creative in the kitchen, I did not make my own tomato sauce from scratch, but added several spoons of red pesto.

Remember that the oven is blasting away all the time. I now take out my battered old baking tin for muffins - sorry, but that is one thing I don't have: a proper Yorkshire puddings baking tin. But you'll see that this will do the job quite well. In each cup goes a bit of lard. No oil, please, or margarine or butter - it has to be lard. Then the tin is put in the oven.

Time to mix the salad...

...and set the table for four.

The herbs (two types of parsley) can now be chopped up. Half goes into the gulasch, half into the salad.

The baking tin has been in the oven long enough now for the lard to be smoking hot. Whisk the batter through one more time and then pour it into the cups - preferably without as much splashing as I did.

My guests have now arrived and brought a bottle of champagne dressed up in a Santa outfit.

After we've eaten the salad, the Yorkshire pudding and the veg have been in the oven long enough to look like this:

The combination of meat and sauce, spuds and carrots and Yorkshire puds didn't just look good on the plate - it tasted good, too, even if I say so myself.

Dessert was a lazy option again: Cinammom-flavoured vanilla icecream on a chocolate base with bits of gingerbread with almonds.

Everyone ate up what they had on their plates, and some even asked for second helpings, but of course I had plenty of leftovers, meaning I was on a YP-diet for three days :-)