Emerging from the Fog

Christmas is filled with anticipation. Twenty four days of children popping open the advent windows to reveal something snowy, a robin, a candy cane, hope. Swiftly followed in the blink of an eye by twelve days of Christmas; the siege of bird and roast vegetables, of fruits dried and soaked and flamed at the table with a sprig of holly on top, mince pies, cream, brandy butter. The flurries are not of snow, but of hastily torn wrapping paper and packaging, no time to settle until the next gift is selected, rattled and exposed. Then on to New Year, to kiss strangers at midnight and promise to mend your ways - for January at least - and finally to the stowing of tinsel and fairy lights, the parched tree dropping its needles as you heave it out the door for the council to remove.

Don't get me wrong. I love Christmas. I love my family, love food, fairy lights, giving and receiving presents, and making cards. But when all this bounty is taken to excess I start to feel bloated and bilious - before I've even consumed a thing. So this year Fin and I made a tree from mounting board and hand printed cards for the people I really love and want to reach out to by post. We planned to eat what we fancied, when we liked. I bought old board games from charity shops. It felt like a start anyway. I don't want to be scrooge, but I want to remember that this time of year is for cosying up with my loved ones and enjoying them - not worrying about how many meals I have to provide.

On the 24th I found that I was ill with what seemed suspiciously like the flu that Nick had the week before. My little sister who came to visit was also coming down with something and decided to go stay at her Dad's. We cancelled my mum, remembering the time she came to stay and Nick gave her Scarlet Fever while I played Florence Nightingale. We battened down the hatches and prepared for a low key Christmas.

At first I was pleasantly tired and a little tickly throaty; my head was sore but I never get ill, so I expected to throw it off soon enough. Still, as Christmas Eve rolled into Christmas day the flu covered me in a drowsy fug and settled into my chest like soot. My head ached and throbbed if I so much as moved a foot from under the covers and turning over would send a volley of rattling coughs, choking through me. My bones ached just like I remembered from my back labour with Fin - the only solution being to ask Nick to press his knuckles hard into my back, and even that provided not enough relief to prevent me from weeping in sheer powerless frustration.

The sensible thing would have been to retire to bed and quietly sleep it out, but I am not a good patient, refusing to lie down and take being ill seriously. As I slept fitfully on the sofa with a tissue over my face, Fin and Nick ate their simple Christmas breakfast and came through to open the presents. From a recumbent position, addled with fever, short sighted and high on painkillers, I gently waved my hand in the manner of the Pope and they began the present opening.

I was minded of a scene from, 'One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest', where the hospital ward fills with fog; patients floating into the narrator's field of vision, converse bizarrely with him for a moment before drifting back out of sight. With each gift found bearing my name, Fin would loom into view all wide eyed, grinning excitement, demanding that I, 'open it, open it!' And away again back to the tree like a Christmas ant to fetch another. Of course between each visit I would fall off to sleep, the present rolling out of my hand unopened until Fin returned again with the next. My little pile of squirrel's nuts grew, but I could not rouse myself for long enough to open them. My Grandfather was like this not long before he passed away, he would disappear in the midst of conversation into a benevolent sleep, one hand raised as if to say, 'now just hang on a moment' and then he would wake minutes later, to continue as if not a moment had passed or just to smile broadly and make a simple joke.

And so the day passed in fragments that loomed at me through the fog, floating up to surface like excerpts of a play. Channel hopping in and out of consciousness with the plish, plash of a Lego star ship being created as Nick and Fin worked into the dusk together. Snatching a rare moment of unprescribed time that existed for them alone to fill. The Lego fell into the box and small hands joined big hands to swim through it looking for the right piece, swish swish, swish swish.

There was no fancy Christmas meal; no crackers pulled, no post prandial brandy, no flaming pudding. And yet in the moments I was part of that Christmas day, my heart felt full and light and I blessed the universe for sending me my beautiful family and warm house. I was even grateful to the fateful timing of my flu, for helping me remember that Christmas is about giving thanks for the wonder already present in every part of my life and not about what I chose to put under the Christmas tree on one day of the year.

Bear With Me Faithful Readers

Does that title sound like the intro to a sermon? Well I'll tell you all about it when I'm not hacking and crowing like a croup ridden toddler. I just don't want to drag you into my slightly hallucinogenic world today, when the subconscious protrudes above the parapet of decency, and may cause me to mention all sorts of unmentionables that I may later regret. Or just to write badly - and that my friends, is just not cricket. This Christmas is bought to you by the sounds; 'a-hack, e-heck, ee-huck' and the smell of olbas oil and hot lemon and honey with a scary spoonful of cayenne pepper. Whooee! that stuff works don't it?

Well I'm just going to hunker down and try to get better. But in the meantime, my blog is also sick and all the doctors I have taken her to, seem not to have found out why. The temporary plaster I have applied at present is to show only one blog post at a time - in exchange for having my sidebar where it should be. So be patient and just click on the posts you fancy reading from the archive while I try to sort it out.

Happy Christmas all!

x x x

Oh This Is Not Ho Ho Ho!

Folks, I need your help! My lovely picture of Max and all the other elements that usually appear on the sidebar of my blog, have mysteriously disappeared to the bottom of the page. Go and look at them out there in the hinterland........ it's just bizarre!

So if any of you Internet savvy lovelies have any advice for me, I will fall upon it as though it was my last meal.

I just don't care for the spartan way my blog looks just now.

x x x

A Cure For Jamon Blindness

We just got back from Madrid and I think I have Jamon blindness - you know, like snow blindness, but caused by too much exposure to cured meats. We had forgotten what a city was like and were unprepared for the Madrillenos frankly untenable schedule of eating as close to midnight as possible and attempting to smoke a pack of twenty between each course. And that was just the children.

Nick's Spanish language classes were much appreciated as he did all the talking and I hung back demurely silent as an Austen heroine. They saw the ring on my finger, observed my quiet acquiescence to anything Nick said and nodded approvingly at him. Little did they know that it is I who wears the 'pantalones' in Angleterra. We had a similar experience when we visited Las Alpujarras in southern Spain. Fin was a toddler then and when walking we would carry him on our backs in a sling. However, all I had bought to Spain was a sarong and it just wouldn't go around Nick, so the task of carrying Fin on our hill walks fell to me. Nick would stride on ahead on the narrow paths holding back branches and the like. As we passed the rural farmers with Nick five paces ahead and me labouring behind with a small child on my back, they smiled and clicked their tongues approvingly; 'ah this one's got things right, his woman follows behind'. Nick may be a new man, but I swear he had a few more hairs on his chest when we returned from that trip.

So back to Madrid where we ate plates of salty Jamon and pimenton scented lomo, anchoas, tortilla and creamy fresh gambas a la plancha. Nick downed strong coffee with the UHT milk that is so redolent of Spain and small glasses of weak beer that even ladies who lunch aren't averse to. After a few days, all we wanted was salad. Staying in a hotel, we had no way to prepare food; beyond the succulent clemetines I bought by the bagful. We saw the vegetables piled high in markets, but couldn't find anywhere to eat them! In the end after a hypoglycaemic wander through the las Huertas district we came upon a packed tapas bar and sat down. The couple at the next table were eating something that looked surprisingly like vegetables, so we leaned over and asked them what it was. They pointed to 'salad de casa', which we ordered with relief. To our disorientated and growling stomachs this salad was like manna. Fresh tomatoes and preserved peppers, topped with marinated sardines, tuna and those amazing seasonal blue green olives.

In that throbbing, exciting party city I missed the simplicity of what we eat at home and the ability to eat what I wanted when I wanted. We decided that next time we would get an apartment with a kitchen and gorge ourselves at a reasonable hour on fresh seafood and market produce so that we were full of life and vitamins when it came to party time.

Retro Recipe Challenge #10 Storybook Food. Lazy Jack's Unfortunate Cake.....

My mother didn't keep that much from our childhood - not being a sentimental sort. No coiled first lock of hair or tiny shoes to coo over, not even many photographs. What she did keep and pass on to us were books. Fantastic books! Illustrated by the great and good of the 1970's children's book world. So for this challenge, I re-read these precious books from my childhood and finally settled on Lazy Jack by Tony Ross.

Now this is a great book, so I'm going to tell you a little bit about it and help you understand the significance of Jack's cake in my life.

Enter Lazy Jack the layabout. A happy-go-lucky, not too bright, chubby slouch who expected his mum to wait on him hand and foot. Well, eventually she grew tired of looking after her son entirely and sent him out to work for a farmer. But being somewhat challenged in the common sense department, he managed to lose the pound he was paid on the way home. 'You should have put it in your pocket you twit!' cried his mum, exasperated.

So next day he goes to work with some cows and the farmer gives him a pint of milk for payment, which he promptly pours into his pocket - with obvious consequences. And so on through a selection of jobs each with a different reward which Jack manages to stuff up by inappropriately following the advice his mum gave him for the last item, from carrying a cheese on his head, to carrying a donkey on his back and finally the cake you see above, being dragged home on a string (meant for bringing a cat home on).

Well you know how I love cake! Cake was something quite rare in my childhood (I don't want to come off sounding deprived here - at least I have all my teeth as a result) so the thought of someone dragging one behind them on a string was really painful to me. Like fingernails on a blackboard painful. I knew I had to bake Jack's cake in order to repair the horror I experienced as a small child imagining that lovely cake being wasted by Lazy Jack; and so as a kind of Gestalt gesture, I offer you my cake and hope to soothe my inner child in the process.

Before you read on I would like to insert a disclaimer here. Anyone who doesn't like treacle or molasses, stop reading now. Look away. You will only be distressed by what follows. For as Nick will tell you, this cake is seriously dark. Or in his own words, on eating a piece last night; 'ack....euckk....blek!.....eeuwww!'. Nope, that boy don't like treacle and that's a fact. For those of you with more than a few hairs on your chest, read on, my treacle loving darlings......

Jack's cake is a pure piece of fiction. Look at it, go on. It's a fruit cake, full of cherries and angelica, with a flat iced top and filled with cream and jam! It may look good in the picture, but when you deconstruct the cake it comes off a bit of a dogs dinner. So I looked instead towards ginger cake and thought I would add the cherries and angelica afterwards as none of us would eat them (these are GROSS! said Fin when he tried a cherry).

So I went to my retro books and found this gem of retro desert horror on which to base Jack's cake. It's called 'Jolly Ginger' and hails from Marguerite Patten's, sensibly titled, 'Book of Puddings and Deserts', published in 1963. Long after the war had finished, Margerite still felt it was prudent to use as many substitutions as possible, so the book is replete with margarine, egg substitutes and mock cream (ack...blek....etc). Check out the jaunty way she has with angelica and cherries - hey, gingerbread never looked so jolly!

I'm not going to give you the original recipe here as it is full of wheat and as you know, here in this little corner of the blogosphere it's my way - or the wheat, barley and rye way.... (groan). I'm just going to give you my version of the ginger cake recipe which was really very good, rich, dense but with a good crumb and so dark it could be mistaken for chocolate. It would be further improved by adding half a jar of chopped preserved ginger and wrapping for a few days to get really sticky. If you have to, ice it with cream cheese or lemon vanilla butter-cream (as I did in the picture). But on reflection, I think it is best left alone to do it's thing and enjoyed meditatively when one fancies a little something in the afternoon. You can vary the flour mix according to what you have to hand.

Jolly Ginger

5oz butter
6oz molasses or treacle (or half golden syrup for wussies)
4oz brown sugar (dark as you dare)
2 tsp ground ginger
2 large eggs
grated rind of a lemon
2 tablespoons water
1/2 tsp xanthan gum
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp cream of tartar

7oz gluten free flour made up as follows : 
1oz each, brown rice flour, chestnut flour, sorghum flour
2oz each: teff flour and tapioca starch

Turn the oven to 160C and line a deep sided 8 inch cake tin with greaseproof paper.

Put a saucepan on the weighing scales and measure in the treacle or molasses. Add to the pan the butter, sugar and water and set over a very low heat to melt the butter.

Sift all the remaining dry ingredients except bicarb into a bowl and beat into the molasses mixture once it is melted.

Beat together the eggs, lemon rind and bicarb and bet into the mix until smooth. Pour straight away into the lined tin and bake for about an hour, turning the oven down to 140C for the last 15 minutes. Leave to cool in the tin and wrap in greaseproof and foil for a couple of days to mature (or eat straight away - who keeps cake that long anyway?)

Thursday, December 6, 2007

A Light, Moist, Apple Scented, Christmas Cake..

Last year I wrote a few recipes for the You magazine supplement of the Daily Mail. I'm a Guardian reader myself, but I like to share recipes with whoever needs them and the response from readers was amazing. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I was inundated with calls and emails from folks asking about the recipe and then letting me know how pleased they were with the way it turned out. 

If you visit the link above, please ignore the image that accompanies it! It plainly has nothing to do with the recipe as it shows a dark vine fruit rich, iced cake!

This recipe is also suitable for Diabetic Coeliacs, that rare and special breed. As most of these people already realise, most of the gluten free substitutes available are packed with sugars and quick releasing grains that are totally unsuitable for Diabetics. To be honest, the rest of us could do with as little of these products as possible too to avoid developing insulin resistance in the future.

So I thought I would put it up here for those of you who would like to try it too. A couple of points first though: It is best to keep it only a few days to a week to mature - it doesn't have all the sugar, dried vine fruits and booze that would preserve most Christmas cakes long enough to leave as heirlooms. This is the type of cake that you whip up quickly (after soaking the fruit overnight), cooks in only a couple of hours and fills the house with a delicious smell of apples and spice. Don't cover it in marzipan and ice it, unless you're confident that your blood sugar levels are nice and stable - definitely not if you are Diabetic!

If you have trouble finding rice bran in your health food shop you can order it from Goodness Direct. If you are not diabetic you could substitute another gluten free flour. I would try one of the following; chestnut flour, brown rice flour, amaranth flour, buckwheat flour (hard to digest so beware) or Teff flour.

If you think it might take you longer than a few days to eat, slice it up and freeze on a parchment covered tray - lifting once during freezing to prevent it sticking. Then just take a piece out as you need and let it defrost for a couple of hours - or warm and serve with cream and a sprinkle of cinnamon (reputed to help lower blood sugar levels)....mmmmm!

Gluten Free Christmas Cake – suitable for diabetics

GL stands for glycaemic load. Those with diabetes or trying to lose weight should try to limit their GL per meal to 15 GLs maximum. This will help stabilise blood sugar levels.

Cut into 8 slices = 11 GLs per slice or 10 slices 8.8 GLs per slice

170gms (6oz) pitted prunes
115gms (4oz) dried apple rings
115gms (4oz) dried apricots
1 small apple grated
85gms (3oz) fruit sugar
170gms (6oz) soft butter
3 large eggs (4 medium)
85gms (3oz) ground almonds
85gms (3oz) rice bran
50ml (double measure) brandy
1-2 oranges
Desertspoon vanilla extract
1 ½ tsp baking powder (or ½ tsp bicarb and 1 tsp cream of tartar)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
½ tsp fresh grated nutmeg
2 cloves ground to a powder with a pinch of fruit sugar

The day before you intend to make the cake, chop the dried fruit roughly in a food processor – or by hand. Put into a bowl and pour over the brandy – it will not cover the fruit. Leave to soak overnight, giving it a little stir when you are passing.

Line a deep 20cm (8 inch) diameter cake tin with a double layer of brown paper, bottom and sides. Finish this with a layer of greaseproof paper. Alternatively, double line the inside of the tin with greaseproof paper and tie a few sheets of carefully folded newspaper around the outside with ovenproof string. Do not let any of the paper touch the sides of the oven though! Set the oven to 150oC (gas mark 2) or 160oC if your oven is not fan assisted.

Cream the butter and fruit sugar and stir in the chopped fruit, zest from 1 orange, grated apple, vanilla and spices. In a separate bowl whisk the eggs together until they are well mixed and stir them into the mixture a bit at a time. Don’t worry if it looks a bit curdled – it will be fine!

Stir in the ground almonds, rice bran, and baking powder until a smoothish mixture is formed. Finally, squeeze the juice from half the orange and stir into the mixture to make a soft dropping consistency (add more if it seems stiff at all – you may need up to 2 oranges). Pour into the prepared tin and level the surface lightly.

Bake for 1 ½ - 2 hours until a skewer comes out clean. As soon as the tin is cool enough to touch, put a piece of foil tightly over the top and leave till completely cold (this softens the top of the cake). Un-mould and wrap in greaseproof paper and a double layer of foil. Eat immediately or keep it for up to a week in an airtight tin, in a cool place, before eating - but not longer or it will start to go off. Do not ice this cake, but instead enjoy it with some thick double cream or Greek yoghurt for an indulgent guilt free treat.