Bitterblue

Last Sunday morning I was nursing a mild hangover following a good deal of top-quality revelry the night before at a friend's wedding at which I was the best man. This fact coupled with the extremely heavy late April rain and low temperatures meant I did not feel much like cooking anything too demanding.

As a result I decided to make some blue cheese biscuits which are pretty simple to prepare. I also realised I needed to choose my music carefully as anything too heavy wouldn't do my sore head any good. Accordingly I found John Martyn's mellow 1973 album Solid Air; an album which is full of spaced out acoustics, saxophones and sounds that generally wash over you rather than assault your senses.

I poured six ounces of plain flour into a mixing bowl and stirred it together with one teaspoon of mustard and half a teaspoon of black pepper. I then took three ounces of margarine that I had cut into cubes and mixed them well into the flour, mustard and pepper. I next laid my hands on a large slice of blue cheese (probably about ten to twelve ounces worth) and stirred this in well to the other ingredients. The cheese I used was called Yorkshire Blue but any soft blue cheese that is moist will do. It is important the cheese is moist so as it binds all the ingredients together and stops them being too dry when they are rolled out.

Once I had put the ingredients together into a large mass of cheese, flour and margarine I stuck them in the fridge for half and hour to help them stay together. Half an hour later I took the ball of cheese and other ingredients out of the fridge, sprinkled plain flour on the work surface and my rolling pin and then rolled the mixture out into a fifteen centimetre by thirty centimetre square. I then cut it into rectangular shapes and put them on a baking tray lined with well greased kitchen foil.

To cook the biscuits I put them in a fan oven that was preheated to one hundred and seventy degrees (one hundred and eighty for a regular oven) and left the biscuits in there for fifteen minutes. The smell of the blue cheese cooking did a good job of giving the oven a distinctive aroma but it was worth it as these biscuits are really moreish and you can never have one at a time.

I had found this out at first hand when making them for a wine and cheese evening last Christmas as the friend whose wedding I had been best man at managed to consume quite a few during the course of that evening. The biscuits (which are especially tasty with chutney) I cooked this time round had a similar effect when I took them into work the following day for my grateful colleagues.

The biscuits made the oven smell a bit but it was worth it.