I love having the internet at my fingertips. Life has become much less cluttered.
No need to hoard shelves of cookery books for the handful of recipes I promise to make but never get round to. My shoulders rose 2 inches the day I ditched years of recipe clippings and started blogging. I’m inspired daily by some foody blog or another but rarely creative in the kitchen any more. I’ve made my peace with that and realised the value of making time for simple things done well.
A few months ago I pulled a suspicious looking tub of cream cheese from the fridge. What is that pink tinge it gets when neglected for too long? (nothing too sinister it seems as we lived to tell the tale after scraping it off and cooking with it!). I decided to make savoury scones and immediately knew who my go-to-gal for baking inspiration would be. For so long I’d been wanting to make something from Kellies Food to glow blog; this was that day. 
Kellie is a nutritionist at the Maggies Cancer Care Centre in Edinburgh and she combines healthy ingredients with her nutritional know how to create jaw droppingly lush nosh. Her food just oozes zest and each time a new recipe drops into my inbox I almost feel satiated simply drinking in the gorgeous pictures. A quick search of Kellies website and I settled on savoury beetroot and cheese loveheart scones. That’s Kellie’s pic at the top – who wouldn’t want to make those in an instant?
I followed Kellies recipe but replaced the buttermilk with watered down cream cheese and used ready cooked beetroot. I’ll use fresh beetroot next time to pink my scones up a bit.
E thoroughly enjoyed them: they have enough flavour on their own to go topping free making them a handy snack for a roaming toddler. It’s a really great recipe for when you only have a small amount of butter left in the fridge and I bet it would work well with all sorts of different vegetables grated into them. 
On day 3 when they were starting to go a little dry we revitalised them with a little warming in a pan to accompany some sauteed greens. 
Ingredients needed to make 12 savoury scones
175 g plain flour
2.75 tsp baking powder
0.75 tsp salt
25 g cold butter, small dice
75 g strong grated Cheddar cheese
50 ml buttermilk/cream cheese/dairy or non-dairy milk with a little lemon juice added)
1 tsp grain mustard
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
½ raw or cooked small beetroot finely grated (if using more beetroot reduce quantity of milk added)
extra flour for rolling surface
(optional) milk for brushing scone tops
(bake at 220ºc/200ºC fan).
What a lovely idea. They look really tasty! X
They looks great. I don’t think I would have been as brave with the turning pink cheese though, haha. Love Kellie’s recipes. Been fortunate to meet her a couple of times too. Such a lovely lady.
Hello sweetie – strange woman here, you know, the one you never hear from …
Hate to be the bearer of bad tidings but there is a fair to middling chance your pink tinge was Pseudomonas. If you ever get a ‘pink tinge’ in the corner of a shower cubicle it’s probably the culprit too, it likes warmth and moisture as well as food. Shouldn’t do any harm to healthy adults, but if you remember the awful deaths of three babies in a Belfast hospital last year? That was traced to Pseudomonas.
OK, that’s the bad news. The good news is that it is not an uncommon bug and we all probably come into contact with it every week without any ill effects.
always grateful for your wisdom Bilbo in all things scientific and green!
Eeek, I’m confident of my deep scrapings but I shall think twice next time to ensure no risk to the little fella.
thanks for sharing absent-but-not-at-all-strange friend x