guilty pleasures and conscious objections

Guilty pleasures: things that I thoroughly enjoy (but, for one reason or another, probably shouldn't). Orange-flavour Revels, pre-bagged salad, Strictly Come Dancing. You know the kind of thing.

So what's the opposite of a guilty pleasure? What do you call something that you should really like, but for whatever reason, you just don't? The closest phrase I could come up with is a conscious objection. My personal conscious objections include: anything done to me in a salon, all seafood, carnations, scented candles, cafes that serve Illy coffee (because of the cups with the handle too small for your finger, gah), Paul Hollywood (a wonderful baker but ick, the bitten fingernails! can hardly watch). I could go on and on and on.

But here's one that I'm nervous to share with you.

I consciously object to baking bread by hand.

I love homemade bread. But for various reasons, I do not bake my own bread by hand. Firstly, we live in an INCREDIBLY small house. In our kitchen there are two linear metres of usable worktop, and by 8am every single morning, those two metres look like this:

This tableau is frantically cleared and lovingly recreated at least five times every day. Add the fact that our house is as cold as a grave for nine months of the year, and any recipe that says "leave dough in a warm place to prove for two hours" becomes absurd in terms of both space and ambient temperature.

The second reason I don't make bread by hand falls into the guilty pleasure category. It's my breadmaker. Which I KNOW will make all the purists wring their floury hands, but honestly, I don't understand why. A twerp I used to know once scoffed at my regular use of a breadmaker, guffing on about "all the pleasure one derives from the kneading and the connection with the living dough blah blah blurg". I asked him how often he actually made loaves from scratch, and he proudly said he did it at least every fortnight (so let's assume the reality was once a month or so). To which I could honestly reply that, by virtue of using a breadmaking machine, we hadn't bought a single sliced loaf for well over a year.

You see, I adore homemade bread, but my intention has never been to connect with my primal whatnots via the medium of dough. My intention is simply to feed my family with bread containing no preservatives and the bare minimum salt and sugar. And using a breadmaker, I can do that in two minutes flat every other day. I can experiment with any sort of seedy, fruity, nutty, sweet, oily and floury additions, get a great loaf every single time, and even set the timer to get that amazing fresh-baked smell when I wake up in the morning. What is not to like?

The third and final reason that I think it's best I don't make handmade bread is that a friend (quite innocently) described me last week as "a lovely girl who grows her own vegetables and tie-dyes her baby's clothes". The only thing that could possibly make that description sound more insufferably worthy is if she had added "oh, and she makes all her own bread too." Smug bloody hippie...

So, while I admire the craft involved in beautiful handmade bread, it's just not something I tend to do very often. Have I defended my conscious objection/guilty Panasonic pleasure enough? Right then, let's move onto this month's random recipe.

Which had to be from a bread recipe book.

Which, of course, I don't have. (Except the one that came with the machine, and that didn't feel quite appropriate.)

So, with quite some trepidation, I asked my lovely friend Lou (who has a wonderful human breadmaker in the form of her husband) to choose me a page from one of her bread books. I texted her a random number, and the result pinged back; Soda bread from Dan Lepard's Short & Sweet. What a relief. No kneading or proving required, and the recipe is online here. Phew!

I tweaked the recipe quite a lot, almost to the point that it's not the same recipe (but I've seen way too many instances of Dan Lepard's people getting well eggy about his material being duplicated on blogs to risk claiming it as a new recipe). Instead, I'll just summarise my modifications; I used wholemeal spelt instead of the normal flour, creme fraiche instead of yoghurt, a bit more sugar, a handful each of poppy seeds and flax seeds, one tablespoon each of cinnamon and finely crushed chocolate (because I'd just read this cinnamon and chocolate nut bread post by our Random Recipe host Dom, and thought it looked rather yum!). I meant to put flaked almonds on the top but I forgot.

Lou also mentioned that she had heard Dan Lepard bake these soda breads on a radio show (you can listen to it here). And if you listen very carefully, he almost justifies the use of breadmaking machines right at the end of the interview.

And that, bread purists, is good enough for me! Check in with Dom over at Belleau Kitchen at the end of the month for all the other bread-y contributions.

Cinnamon chocolate and seed soda breads; breakfasts for the next few days sorted!

bucket chemistry :: rhubarb

There's a point in the year when there are only two edible plants in the garden: rhubarb and chives. We are at that point. Too bad I've misplaced all my many rhubarb + chive based recipes.

We eat a LOT of rhubarb at this time of year (fewer chives). Add the fact that I only ever make one kind of dessert on a week night (and then only if they're very lucky) and what do you get?

You get rhubarb, honey and nuts over yoghurt.

I heard once that the most inherited feature of any British house (ghosts, rising damp, vermin and poor insulation aside presumably) is a rhubarb patch. So if you have a neglected crown or two, please do this. It takes moments to prepare and tastes just as delicious as crumble without any of the hassle.

It's probably too late to start forcing your rhubarb under a bucket now, but there's another reason this is called Bucket Chemistry Rhubarb; the quantities, temperatures and timings aren't exact or important. Just chuck it in the oven and hope for the best, it's not really possible to get it wrong.

But if you can't be bothered to cook up rhubarb, that's okay. Try the other (incredibly varied) desserts in my week night repertoire: yoghurt + passion fruit/berries/mango +/- honey +/- nuts.

I know, bor-ING huh? No, I promise it really hits the sweet spot.

And when your children are in bed, never ever replace the honey with golden syrup. No, I said don't. Stop it, it'll taste frightful.

Not that I'd know, you understand...

because there's always baking...

Easter holidays loom and it's STILL SNOWING. 

If you're trying to figure out how to entertain the children during the break, here's something that should resist the lure of the telly for an hour or so at least. My six year old can get on with this pretty much unassisted while I tape padding to the most accessible walls.

Because if it stays this cold she'll be bouncing off the walls and I'll be hitting my head off them. Repeatedly.

So, y'know, Happy Easter and all that. I shall be celebrating by printing off engineering vacancies in Singapore and using them as my husband's table mats.

sweet potato, sour cherry and pecan brownies :: a great random red nose day bake

Well, after questioning the omnipotent Twitter the other day, it only went and proved its worth in the comments section of the very same post, with the actual s'labrity baker answering a query I had about his recipe. I suppose that's me told.

I still don't understand Twitter, but at least I know a man who does, and that man is our Random Recipe host Dom. Who challenged us this month to pick from our bulging folders, toppling towers and sliding stacks of cuttings and clippings for this month's random recipe. This is my favourite kind of Random Recipe, because if you cut something out or jotted something down, you must have thought it sounded delicious - no risk of frog congee or sherry trifle here.

Well, I used a number generator to select page number 9/52 from my laminated book of dreams (no, not the Bill Bailey Argos catalogue, but my kikki.K baking folder).

Why the baking file rather than the recipe file? Because it was our local baking night in aid of Comic Relief of course!

And so, Dan Lepard's Sweet potato, sour cherry and pecan brownies were made. And I'm pleased to say every single one was eaten at the bake night (or tucked away in a tupperware for later).

They were everything a chocolate brownie should be. And a little bit more besides because:
a) sweet potato is a health food
b) the sour cherries symbolised red noses
c) they were gobbled in aid of Comic Relief!

Despite heavy snow and a modest turn out, we raised £70 on the night, and I understand there's more to come with a blind auction of some goodies.

So, what are you waiting for? Hashtag dosomethingyummyformoney, hashtag don'tevenknowwhathashtagmeans, hashtag don'tevenhaveahashtagsymbolonmycomputer

Hop on over to Belleau Kitchen at the end of the month to see Dom's wonderful RR roundup. Actually, it's only half way through the month - why don't you join in too? You must have a stash of clippings and cuttings kicking around somewhere, don't you...

Happy red nose day. Give all you can to a wonderful cause.

answers on a postcard please

Some of the many things I don't understand:

• Twitter. I just can't wrap my ailing braincells around it. I get lost in shopping malls, so I certainly can't navigate which bit of who said what and where it was answered and re-tweeted and, well, no. Just no. It's not going to happen.
• Multi-functional maternity'x'nursing wear. In my limited experience, these two states are mutually exclusive. The desire for something half decent to wear while nursing means I am obviously not pregnant anymore. The stupidity of this issue makes my head ache. (If anyone can recommend a company that does good-quality nursing clothes that don't make me look like a trog who's given up on herself and flung on an ill-fitting sack, I'd be very grateful.) 
• People who leave their dog mess in our street. Clearly cretins, they have to walk down the street everyday too, so surely skipping round various evacuations bugs them as well? I'm going to take affirmative action with some blue spray chalk. Sorry, that should be hashtag affirmativeaction hashtag turdwars. Or something. 
• Now I do actually really need advice on this last one. "200g baked sweet potato, flesh scooped out". What does that mean? A 200g potato baked and scooped, or 200g of scooped out flesh from a couple of potatoes? It's for this recipe, so I think it's kind of important. I'm veering towards that latter... Answers on a postcard please.

That is all. Thangyaverramuch.

almost parenting... gingerly

Turns out there's one real drawback to parenting a really brainy child. (That is in addition to the fundamental flaw of her being brainier than me, you understand. "Flight of the Bumblebee was written by a man called Rimsky-Korsakov you know Mummy." Erm, no. I didn't as it happens.)

No, as far as I can tell, the main issue is this. The brighter the child, the sooner they realise that you, as a parent, have absolutely no effing clue what you're doing.

Which is fine while we're bumbling along in our everyday shambles of Oxford Reading Tree, damp laundry and glitter glue. But when it comes to actual parenting (I'm talking discipline, behaviour, Ural maestri, that sort of thing) she can tell, without a shadow of a doubt, that I'm making it all up on the spot. And she's not convinced.

After a week of particularly feckless parenting, I'm working on a solution while she's at school: crystallised ginger, date and walnut cake. And while that's baking, a batch of Nigella's meatballs from the Kitchen book.

Why?

Because the former might trick her into thinking, for a valuable minute and a half, that I'm one of those awesome, capable Mums that knows what she's about. And the latter? Well, they're turkey meatballs, so presumably there's no dobbin in them. Though it turns out you can't be too sure...

Crystallised ginger, date and walnut cake (a variation on an old favourite)
Ginger is supposed to boost the immune system isn't it? So with the fibre-rich dates and walnut Omega-3s, you can pretty much convince yourself that it's good for you.

120g chopped dates
large pinch bicarbonated soda
170g sugar
50g  room temp butter
170g self-raising flour
50g chopped walnuts
finely chopped crystallised ginger to taste (I used 15g)
ground ginger to taste (depends how spicy you want it, I used just half a tsp)
1 egg
1tspn vanilla essence
1/2 tspn salt

• preheat your oven to 180*C and line your cake tin
• cover the dates with one cup of boiling water with a pinch of bicarb and set to one side while you weigh everything else
• blitz all the other ingredients together with a hand-held mixer
• mix in the dates and their juice (then put it in the oven for two minutes before realising you've forgotten the walnuts, so burn yourself whipping the tin out and stirring the nuts into the batter, like one of the more hopeless GBBO contestants you love to scorn)
• bake for 35 minutes or until the skewer comes out clean.

Joining in with April's 'Fred & Ginger' edition of Just Desserts over on Domestic Sluttery.

random recipe fail

You know when there's a trend, a consensus, dare I call it a "movement", that you're just not part of for some reason? Well, here's my guilty secret, I'm just not as in love with Nigel Slater as is expected of me. The blether-sphere is ram-packed full of people raving about his Kitchen Diaries, literally RAVING, but I haven't made time to read it. I have it on good authority that it's magical, but I find him so thoroughly unwatchable on tv that I haven't made much effort.

Which is also why I rarely choose to use the one Nigel Slater recipe book we own: Real Food. But you can't cheat on the Random Recipe Challenge, so when my husband picked some numbers at random, Real Food it was, and a recipe for grilled mustard and herb chicken.

It's very simple: a store-cupboard marinade of delicious things, chicken thighs, and a griddle pan.

When you're mixing oil, tarragon, mustard and parsley together, you kind of know that good things are in store. I was willing to accept that my reluctance to join Cult Slater might have been a bit baseless. Especially when he writes things like "They will probably take about eight minutes total cooking time, depending on the size of your thighs (or, rather, the size of the chicken's)."

That did make me chuckle. But it was at that point things started to go a little wrong. My instinct was to flatten the chicken thighs a bit with a rolling pin, or even chop and thread them onto skewers satay-style. But Nigel didn't instruct me to do that, so I did as I was told and just flung them on the griddle. It turns out that lovely organic chicken thighs (unflattened) are too plump to cook through on a griddle in eight minutes.

Mine (or, rather, my chickens') needed more like twelve. And while the recipe states that "There will be much smoke and sizzling", after twelve minutes the outsides were burnt to buggery.

Which is fine. I mean, they were largely inedible, but we had a bigger problem. We live in one moderately small room, by which I mean that our kitchen, sitting room, dining room, and study all occupy a single 8m x 3m space. And Nige was not wrong about the smoke.

After leaving all the doors and windows open for three hours (on a freezing February evening in the North of Scotland) every fibre and pore of our lives is still thick with the smell of burning. Every surface within a metre radius of the cooker is coated with a fine layer of fat, and I've lost the cat. I occasionally hear her miewing in the middle distance, but my streaming eyes can barely focus as I claw my way through the haze.

The verdict from the panel?

"Mummy, I don't really like the chicken."
"No sweetie, neither do I."

tartiflette :: a random recipe paradox on a plate

In Scotland, a staple of the national diet is called Irn Bru. It's pretty rare for the best-selling carbonated drink in a country to be anything other than Coca Cola, and even rarer in a country where you are actually allowed to sell Coca Cola. But we manage it, thanks to the national weakness for Irn Bru.

It tastes like nothing else, it looks like nothing else, and it smells like nothing else. It's truly... unique.

A particular speciality in the West of the country, babies are sometimes practically weaned on to the Bru, weepily slurping it from their sippy cups as they recover from the general anaesthetic required to pull their milk teeth out.* S'alright though, they were going to fall out anyway, right?

School kids, who know only too well the importance of keeping hydrated, frequently achieve their daily fluid intake in Irn Bru alone.* High Five! It does make it a wee bit harder to keep the complex orthodontic work clean (adult teeth grow in like a pile of tangled knitting if you've had a full clearance at the age of two) but hey, at least they're not thirsty.

In our late teens and twenties we discover that it makes a great mixer for vodka. And a few wee drinks helps take our minds off the raging toothache.* Thankfully, it's no biggie if the first set of wallies is fitted long before middle age, loads of people have them. Then we can forget all about tooth decay and erosion, supping the "ginger" for the rest of our days, while cursing those mysterious modern plagues of type II diabetes and morbid obesity.

Sadly, for once, I am not exaggerating. It was into this culture that, as an over-sensitive, naive seventeen year old, I started to train as a dental surgeon. I graduated six years later, and nine months after that I quit. It's not that it was a thankless task; after all, people in Scotland really need dentists. It was just incredibly demoralising. I'm in awe of my friends who continue to practice, successfully and sympathetically, a decade later - I was ready to throw myself under a bus by third year.

I couldn't imagine a more disheartening job, and then something made me think again...

I happened to be at my friend Louise's house the day that this month's Random Recipe challenge was set: to cook a recipe from someone else's kitchen. She produced a beautiful book for me called Roast Figs, Sugar Snow by Diana Henry, all about Winter cooking. I came home (after a lovely lunch!) and used a random number generator to pick a recipe. It chose page 16: tartiflette.

For the uninitiated, tartiflette is a dish from the French Alps, comprising sliced boiled potatoes, sauted in butter, with lardons, onion and garlic. Then the whole lot is chucked in an oven dish, covered in creme fraiche and reblochon, and baked. Butter, bacon, cream, cheese and carb-loading, what's not to like?

My primary reaction was "this is bloody delicious!"

My secondary reaction was "it could've been worse, I could've wasted my youth training to be an Alpine cardiologist."

But then the French have their pesky paradox. Lucky blighters. If only the Scots had one of those, maybe I'd be driving round in a sports car like all my old classmates...

I couldn't get reblochon, so I used a good stinky brie, for which all purists/French
people will now demand immediate beheading by guillotine, apparently.

The addition of some French beans, to stick with the Gallic theme, and
because I didn't want my arteries to clog before the kids went to bed.

Louise also cooked a recipe from my cook book shelf this month, and sticking with the seasonal theme, she chose something from the January section of Tessa Kiros' lovely book, Twelve. Head over to Please Do Not Feed the Animals at the end of the month to see how she got on. And to read all the other randomness, please visit Belleau Kitchen - Dom does a brilliant round up every month without fail, and the list of dishes submitted is always mouthwateringly inspirational.

* Just to be clear, I'm sure the manufacturers of Irn Bru are perfectly honourable and wouldn't condone using their product in any of these ways, but I can assure you, it happens.

reject the expert :: embrace the geek

So 2012 didn't turn out too shabby. During one short year I created a whole small person from a single cell. Perhaps I ought to say "we" created, but we all know who did the lion's share. And by the time the bells rang 2013 in, that single cell from one year before could giggle when he trumped like a carthorse. An important milestone I'm sure you'll agree.

So, despite not achieving any of my goals last year (largely - though not entirely - because of the small person) I do have a few for the next 12 months.

First up, I'm not going to live the way anyone else tells me (unless I actually know them, and then I might consider it). Because if you add all the advice up, all the layers of rules and checklists and intentions and schedules, you will spontaneously implode.

Fact.

A quick example; here's how an (edited) two-hour segment of Christmas day might have looked had I paid heed to Nigella Lawson's turkey dinner schedule and Gina Ford's Contented Little Baby regime. Let's call it the expert mash-up of doom-laiden stress.

10am

- Peel and cut potatoes, then leave in cold water. Take bacon-wrapped chipolatas out of the fridge.
- Baby must be fully awake regardless of how long he has slept. Encourage him to have a good kick under his playgym or take him on an outing. (Who wrapped the chipolatas? Do we have chipolatas? Bugger it. Take the baby for an outing - I don't CARE if you're still in your pyjamas, IT'S WHAT THE BOOK SAYS.)

10.30am

- Take turkey out of brine, sit it on a rack in the sink and leave to drip, drain and come to room temperature. Preheat 1st oven to 200*C. Trim Brussels sprouts and leave in colander. Take prepared stuffing out of the fridge. (On the day everyone's most scared of food poisoning, I can't wash my hands because there's a turkey in the sink. Hmm.)

10.40am

- Put chipolatas in oven, Infuse milk for bread sauce. Measure out ingredients for chocolate pudding and set aside. (Bread sauce? Chocolate pudding? I think not.)

11am

- He should be given a full breast-feed or full bottle-feed.
- Put prepared potatoes in pan on heat to parboil. (Hang on, I'm breastfeeding.)

11.10am

- Take chipolatas out of oven and leave wrapped in foil (still breastfeeding...)

11.20am

- Melt basting liquid for turkey (yup, still breastfeeding...)

11.30am

- Baste turkey with half the liquid and put in first oven. Potatoes should be parboiling so keep an eye on them, then drain, dredge and leave in pan. (Sod the tatties, I've fed him now so I'm allowed a glass of something dry and fizzy aren't I? Geez.)

11.50am

- Change his nappy, close curtains and settle drowsy baby, half swaddled in the dark with the door shut no later than 12 noon. (Chance would be a fine thing. Put him in a pram and pass me the cooking sherry.)

You see? I suggest paying scant attention to them, for that way madness lies. Even if you have two ovens and pre-prepared stuffing.

So, good on you Cami Walker you generous soul, glad you're teaching the world to grin Gretchen Rubin, and Kim John Payne I agree with all your parenting ideas. But this year I'm going to shuffle through under my own steam if it's all the same to you. Advice is good. But you can have too much of a good thing, and "shuffling through" worked for me on Christmas day.

There's another change afoot in 2013: I'm gently embracing my inner geek. I've realised that no simple or wholesome creative activity is complete without an app or a preparatory session in front of the computer screen.

Not that I'm complaining, it's totally brilliant. I've planned the veg patch for this year, proven that I'm making progress with the post-baby weight loss, lost hours to Ravelry, and completed the first week of an Illustrator course (which I hope will lead to my being able to design things pretty enough to sell...).

Happy New Year one and all. Here's to a geeky one.

growVeg is a very cool tool to draw and plan your veg garden.
you tell it your location and it tells you when to do what
based on your frost dates.

my random recipe for January, chosen by random number generator,
was totally delicious. update coming soon.

pregnancy: plotted.
the NHS BMI Tracker app is so simple, and thoroughly motivational.
I'm getting there... gradually.

the fabulous Nicole's Classes (they of the dotty freebie pattern
you see in my background!) are going to keep me very
busy the first half of 2013, kicking off with a month of
Adobe Illustrator. Here's my first week's homework.

a new blanket idea is hatching - maybe I could use Illustrator to design a
gorgeous pattern sheet to sell on Ravelry? That's my resolution...

positive mental appetite

At 57 degrees of northerly latitude it's dark a lot just now. When the sun does shine it is brief and blinding. But mostly it's dark. And then, last night, the snow arrived. In an effort to stay sane I am trying to see it through the shiny eyes of a five year old who cannot remember the last time she saw snow. They're very shiny eyes.

I am trying not to see it through the eyes of a car-less woman who has to push about 20kg of fully loaded pram a mile up a snowy hill to school before nine o'clock in the morning. Those eyes are not shining.

But when I got home from the Arctic expedition school run this morning, I found the perfect prescription for any weather woes. Meaghan Smith's It Snowed blaring out of the computer, all the gifts and wrapping stuff laid out on the table, happy baby in his bouncer, and a plate piled high with buttered toast. (It really doesn't work without the toast.) I predict the warm fuzzy feeling lasting until we need to tackle the hill again at 3pm.

The recent cold snap has accelerated progress on my current knitting, because this jumper/dress looks like it is going to be so comfortable and warm that I can't wait to finish. Just the sleeves left to do. The Boss has grown out of her jeans, but I think I might have to go and find a cheap pair, because these colours will look great with denim.

Bulle in Araucania Toconao Multy

Where books are concerned, I've been indulging in Nigella Christmas - it's such a great way to start feeling excited about all the catering that the next few weeks promise, rather than being daunted by it. On Saturday, a brunch party at our house is followed by a kids' party at a friend's, so what better day to delve into Nigella Christmas? Chestnut soup, mince pies and Christmas morning muffins beckon for brunch, and Parma ham bundles should transport easily to the party (dates stuffed with goat's cheese and wrapped in ham).

It's important to lay down reserves for those daily Arctic adventures after all.

you say flapjack, I say flapjack

Everybody knows that in America biscuits are called cookies. And I'm led to believe that they call scones* biscuits. And by scones, I mean scones, not what sassanachs refer to as drop scones. Drop scones are pancakes. By which I mean pancakes, and not what the French call crepes or what the Americans have for breakfast. And then I heard that Americans sometimes call pancakes flapjacks.

So what do Americans call flapjacks?

Confused yet? Let's not even get started on macaroons...

The Boss' new best friend was coming over for tea after school, and I had no shopping in. What to do? The answer was flapjacks. Because every Scottish household has porridge oats, and everything else can be cobbled together.

While I knew the principles, I'd never actually made flapjacks before. So it might have been a bit of a risk to allow the quantities to be dictated by what I had left in various packets. But they turned out pretty good.

They are so quick too. I put the Dragon Baby in his bed at noon, and the flapjacks were in the oven with the dishwasher loaded twenty minutes later.

It might have been beginners luck. Meaning that I'll have to make these many more times. Just to be absolutely sure.

spiced seed flapjacks
makes 20

200g unsalted butter
2 tablespoons runny honey
6 generous tablespoons golden syrup
325g porridge oats
1 tablespoon pumpkin seeds
1 tablespoon sunflower seeds
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
generous pinch ground nutmeg

- preheat oven to 180*C
- roughly line a tin of some kind with parchment (mine is... hang on let me go and measure it... a 20cm x 26cm rectangle. A touch smaller might be better because the flapjacks will be thicker.)
- oil your tablespoon measure (this prevents the syrup and honey sticking to your spoon)
- put butter, honey and syrup in a pan to melt
- mix the dry ingredients together and pour into the pan with the liquids
- mix together and press into the lined tin
- bake for 20 minutes
- let your tea steep while you cut the flapjack into squares in the tin
- let them cool on a wire rack (except the warm one that you have with your tea)

*Scone rhymes with gone in my house btw. When scone rhymes with phone my skin crawls. No idea why.

the award for 'dinner least attractive to children' goes to...

Embarking on my random recipe at 5pm on a weekday night, with The Boss bouncing off the walls and The Dragon Baby babbling on his mat, was not a recipe for domestic harmony.

The rules for this month's challenge found me randomly selecting page 117 of Nigella Lawson's How To Eat, and a recipe for aubergine moussaka. But, as she points out "This is a Lebanese version, very different from the traditional Greek". It's basically aubergine stew.

While I use it now and again, I'm not a huge fan of How To Eat. This might have something to do with the complete lack of photography (which in this case is probably just as well, because a photo of aubergine stew isn't bonny). I'm not wild about the prose style either, because sometimes you have to work quite hard to find the actual recipe. But, gripes aside...

I couldn't buy baby aubergines or pomegranate molasses, and I couldn't be arsed soaking pulses. So I used big aubergines and canned chickpeas. Oh, and since we do actually still seem to be griping, I didn't peel the aubergines "to look like like Edwardian circus tents". (Really Nigella? Really? Give me strength.)

Bugger it, ground-level babbling has turned to wimpering, but we're too far in to stop now. Dance my love, dance to amuse your brother, dance like a dervish!

She says the aubergines smell like a grocery shop. I know what she means.

Bugger it again. Nigella wants the tomatoes rinsed, peeled, seeded and quartered. Not. on. your. life. They'll be roughly chopped if you're lucky. (And isn't all the flavour in the seed jelly and skin anyway? Why on earth would you chuck them?)

The wimpering has turned into wailing. Sing sweetie, sing to him like our lives depend on it!

It's all getting a bit fraught, and rather noisy, but here's the bit I was looking forward to: adding the cinnamon and allspice. Nice festive smells will make it all better.

But hang about, the combination of vegetal grocer aroma and Christmassy spices equals... what is it? It's very familiar... YES! It's that gag-worthy section just before the checkout at the garden centre where houseplants and artificially scented candles combine to form a collective speech bubble above everyone's heads saying "why the hell is all this odourous tat in a garden centre when all I wanted was a bag of compost?".

I don't really want to eat the stew-formerly-known-as-moussaka. And very forcefully, neither does The Boss. She says it's too brown (pronounced 'braaaaan' invoking her cockney sparrow heritage) and it's hard to disagree. I end up having to make a more child-friendly alternative. While the poor Dragon Baby cries himself hoarse.

It tastes absolutely fine, with couscous and yoghurt, but I'm too scarred by the whole experience to ever consider it again. And there are many, many better things to do with cinnamon and allspice at this time of year. Just please don't put them in a frakking candle.

liebkuchen, my contribution for my first visit to a local baking club last night, and a much better way to use cinnamon

oranges and lemons :: a healthy halloween snack

Him: Why have you bought ten organic lemons... and dare I ask about the vodka?

Me: To make limoncello for Christmas gifts... obviously.

You mean the stuff that everyone brings back from their first Italian holiday only to sit at the back the in-laws' booze cupboard for the next twenty years?

Mmmmn-yah...

The stuff we didn't even drink in that place in Naples where they kept trying to hand it out for free?

It's for putting in all those pretty blue beer bottles you got through a few months ago.

No-one in the history of the world actually likes limoncello...

But they might from a pretty blue bottle. Maybe?

...because even the stuff made by actual professionals in actual Italy with actual lemon trees tastes like mosquito repellent.

Well, okay, so he might have a point. I hate the stuff too.

But that's not really relevant where homemade Christmas gifts are concerned. They're about forcing your friends and relations to rave about "how fabulous it is to get something homemade darling", and "oh aren't you sweet, how did you know I love blue glass!" Before shoving them at the back of their drink cupboards for the next twenty years.

And a few of my friends don't even drink.

Making stuff I hate seems to have been the theme for this October holiday. Because at the end of the day, it was more about keeping my five year old's hands busy while I nursed the dragon baby for two solid weeks. The end products of all our industry were, like homemade limoncello, frequently irrelevant. Mixing and casting tiny clay bricks with which to build a tiny brick house was a particular low point for me. (No, I am not even kidding. I now have a renewed respect for Lego.)

And Halloween forced me into my least favourite activity. AGAIN. Namely, sewing eyesight-sapping black fabric together with black thread in what's left of the failing autumnal daylight and 10 minutes before we have to leave for the party. This year it was in aid of a bat costume. Next year it's going to be a white ghost suit and a trip to the optician, not necessarily in that order.

But in the (ahem) "spirit" of Halloween (yes, that's right, I'm allowed to snarl and you won't even know if I'm hating on Halloween or just being scary), here's a last-minute party snack idea if you need one before the big night. Now I know that Halloween is an exercise in stuffing kids so full of refined sugar that they vomit on the neighbours' carpets (I've done Halloween "American-style" once before and it was simply terrifying) but this has the advantage of being a snack that children are attracted to while remaining sugar-free and fruit-based. Just call me Scrooge... sorta.

Orange jellies
makes 24

ingredients
6 oranges
two packets of jelly powder (I used Hartleys sugar-free sachets in Strawberry and Blackcurrant)

equipment
very sharp knife
ice cream scoop
large bowl
two 6-hole muffin trays

- half the oranges
- scoop out the flesh into your bowl (I found an ice cream scoop ideal for this) and juice the pulp roughly (just squeeze it with your hands)
- balance the half skins in the muffin trays
- make up a slightly-stronger-that-usual mix of jelly (you want it to be firm enough to cut well: I used 200ml boiling water to dissolve the jelly powder and then topped up to 350ml with orange juice from the pulp)
- pour into the orange skins and refrigerate overnight   
- once thoroughly set, place flat side down on a chopping board and slice in half with your sharpest knife

I'm already having ideas about using this technique for other holidays - little sparkly clementines for Christmas perhaps, or fuchsia dragonfruit for Chinese New Year?

Of course it goes without saying: I hate jelly. So I have no idea how this tastes. Can't be any worse than limoncello though. Can it?

crumbling resolve :: a random recipe

It's not often that Dom, our Random Recipe Host with the Most, allows us to positively select a recipe (normally our methods must err towards random selection). But this month it is a store cupboard ingredient that must be randomly selected - how we cook with it is up to us.

Dom's plan is for us to unearth a back-of-the-cupboard gem. But the combination of my new kitchen and this week's primary school harvest thanksgiving collection (Hurrah! Palm off all our old cans of random tat to the local elderly so that they can stuff them, cursing, to the back of their larders.) means that my cupboard is unusually bare of geriatric dried goods and crusty out-of-date jars.

So instead I closed my eyes and ran my finger over my "spice rack": more accurately described as a narrow shelf filled with a decade's worth of Bonne Maman jam jars. Their contents are varied (birthdays candles, baking beans, toothpicks, star anise, cupcake sprinkles - you name it) and, when I've failed to write on the lid, frequently a mystery.

My finger landed on half a jar of something crumbly and beige. Hmmmm. Too soft for sugar, too irregular for flour. Faintly foosty-smelling, but too mild to be a spice, and tastes of nothing. Ground almonds was my best guess. And if that were the case I knew immediately what I was going to do with them, having cut something perfect out of the paper a few weeks ago.

The preamble to the recipe read: "...we're now in the midst of a rather agreeable seasonal crossfire – the waning of summer and the waxing of autumn. This is a time of rich culinary potential, as the tapering off of some fine sunshine crops overlaps with the nascence of many others that come to fruition in the shortening days." Gah, to be able to write like that. I think it's just super lovely. Though, having not experienced Autumn since 2009, my susceptibility to romance is high and my resistance is low.

HFW* was talking there about the lovely few days when the berries overlap with the apples, and I've been waiting for that magical moment in my own garden. Yesterday it arrived, and I got seven James Grieve apples and about 200g of juicy raspberries from my little plot.

And so, while a contented little baby with a full tummy snoozed on his Daddy's chest, and on the radio someone played Tchaikovsky on a Stradavarius from the Usher Hall, I spent a Friday night making pastry. Because the state of the bathroom floor can wait, and the four piles of unwashed laundry will still be there in the morning, and (even though my scales say there's 10kg to lose) the calories simply don't count if you've grown all the fruit yourself... right?

By the way, I still have no idea if they were ground almonds or not, but the tart tastes lovely.

before...

...and after, the apple and raspberry crumble tart

*Now, as an aside, you might be forgiven for thinking that I am being paid by Mr H Fearnley-Whittingstall, because I seem to make so many of his recipes. I only wish that I were. (I want to be his friend. Big time.) Despite living on a small island, he's lucky we genuinely couldn't live further apart without getting wet, or I might become a stalker groupie. But the truth is, when I said a few months ago that I learned how to cook from the Guardian/Observer newspaper columns, I really wasn't kidding, and they remain my main inspiration. Hence his constant presence here.

late cake

If you're always at least 10 minutes early for everything, ALWAYS, does that make you obsessively punctual, or not? Either way, avoiding being actively late is something I inherit from my father. I am almost NEVER late, and if something makes me late I get ludicrously, blood-vessel-burstingly cross.

There was a perfect description of this in a novel I've just finished: 
I have a crushing fear of lateness. I would rather be an hour early than cause someone a minute's wait. Dev would always say, 'We're not late until we're late.' I knew what he meant and it was technically true, but it never worked for me. Knowing I'll be late is always bad enough. The least I can do is get the worrying in early.
(from Charlotte Street by Danny Wallace)

This is EXACTLY how I feel about being on time.

Which is probably why this baby being nearly a week late is so stressful for me. My last baby's labour kicked off at 9am on her due date. Very businesslike and precisely on time, I hadn't anticipated anything less. So what on earth has happened, why has my scrupulous timekeeping deserted me, what am I doing wrong this time around?

So I'm still filling the days with baking, and then writing about it for you here. Oh, and scarfing it down like a pig of course. Knitting aside, there's nothing better to take my mind off things. To that end, here is a recipe for the most sublime cake in my repertoire. It's the (ahem... late!) Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother's favourite cake.*

Queen Mother's Cake
6oz sugar
2oz butter
6oz plain flour
1tspn baking powder
2oz chopped walnuts
1 egg
1tspn vanilla essence
1/2 tspn salt
4oz chopped dates
large pinch bicarbonated soda

• cover the dates with one cup of boiling water with a pinch of bicarb and set to one side
• preheat your oven to 180*C and line your cake tin
• mix all the other ingredients together in the usual way (ie use a hand whisk or wooden spoon to cream butter and sugar, add egg, vanilla and sifted dry ingredients)
• add the dates, their juice and the chopped walnuts and mix well (it's sloppy, don't worry)
• bake for 35 minutes or until the skewer comes out clean.

Icing
5 tbspns soft light brown sugar
2 tbspns single cream or full fat milk
2 tbspns butter

• Melt together and boil (constantly stirring) for 5-8 minutes before spreading on the cooled cake and decorating with leftover walnuts.

Unlike my Granny's carrot cake recipe, this one must have it's icing. It is literally the icing on the cake, and turns a date and walnut sponge into a bird of paradise in full plumage. This icing, on this cake, is the sensory distillation of my childhood.

My midwife was surprised (though not concerned) to find trace amounts of glucose in my samples this morning. I wasn't. I think taking the photos alone was enough to have caused that.

* I have no idea if this really was her favourite cake, or even where the recipe originally came from. I remember copying the list of ingredients from my Granny's book (a badly printed spiral bound charity pamphlet I think) at least 25 years ago. So if you own the copyright to this, perhaps you can forgive my lack of credit. And if you happen to know that Ma'am preferred another cake more, well, I'm past caring. In my house, this is Queen Mum's Cake, end of discussion.

random recipe :: savoury scones for tea

I had no intention of taking part in the Random Recipe Challenge for September. Because September wasn't supposed to turn out this way. I had predicted days (if not weeks) already of swaddle-wrestling a posset-stained howler monkey, shuffling around as if kicked in the nethers by a Shire horse and leaking copiously into a nursing top full of mysteriously-placed gaping seams. I know, dreaming the glam dream, right?

But it hasn't happened, so I thought I'd try to invoke Lou's labour jinx... again.

This month's challenge is linking with a combination of delightful blogs (which you can read about here via Belleau Kitchen) and focuses on tea time. Something that has become more important than ever since The Boss started school, arriving home after 3pm, ravenous.

I don't have a recipe book specifically on baking, but I do have a plastic file devoted entirely to the subject, stuffed full of clippings and scribbles for recipes both sweet and savoury. With the help of random.org, I was delighted to select a clipping that I haven't made before, that is available for you to read online here, and that opens with the phrase "Irresistible slathered with butter and served for tea". Surely the stars are all aligned for this Random Recipe!

So, while listening to Nigel Slater on the radio, extolling the virtues of savouring even the humblest piece of fruit at the table with a napkin and cutlery, I mixed up a batch of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's Cheddar, Onion and Herb Wholemeal Scones. Very therapeutic it was too. I used up my spelt flour in place of the light brown in his recipe, rosemary from the garden, and included a few chunks of applewood smoked cheddar as well as the regular stuff I had in the fridge.

Looks good right? Tastes good too, beautifully soft, salty and savoury, and crunchy round the edges. I scoffed my slice before even getting round to butter... or tea. Oh, and it's only mid-morning. Certainly there was no napkin, table or cutlery. (It took very few moments to forget Nigel's advice on treating food with the respect it deserves - oops.)

Once again, Lou's labour jinx hasn't worked today, the buzzer went off and I'm still the shape of my gym ball. But never fear, I have more baking on my to-do list. My inherited, hand-written copy of The Queen Mother's Favourite Cake is next up...

treacle, caraway and apple muffins :: it's officially autumn

I have this lovely friend (you can see just how lovely here) who probably won't mind me telling you that she went into a fast, furious labour with her first child while a cake was in the oven. I remember listening, hand clamped over mouth in horror, as she explained that she was fine when the batter went in, but had to crawl across the floor in a painful rescue operation by the time the beeper went off. Her birth story actually got more and more dramatic (and slightly hilarious in the recounting!) as the evening progressed, but that's not what I'm here to share.

I am desperate for this bubba to arrive. DESPERATE. Despite there being officially a few days left on the clock, we're thoroughly cheesed off waiting. So I thought I'd do some baking and see if I could tempt Lou's jinx.

The marvellous Dan Lepard wrote a recipe in the Guardian magazine a few weeks ago that called for some slightly obscure ingredients (spelt flour and caraway seeds) as well as three small apples. Not only did I happen to have the spelt and caraway in the cupboard, but for the first time in its short life my adolescent apple tree was positively dripping with small and nearly ripe apples.

Daily I have wandered around the tree, checking the largest fruits with a gentle twist of the wrist. All the while wondering which would come first: ripe apples for muffins or a tiny baby.

Well, today I got my answer. 

This muffin recipe is as delicious as it looks, it's Autumn on a plate and I thoroughly recommend it to you. But evidently, the beeper has rung and I didn't have to commando crawl across the floor to rescue them. Turns out my second born won't be named after you Dan, sorry.

Humph.

trowel to table in three short hours

Four posts in one week? Yes, I'm staying rather close to home and need something to take my mind off impending labour. I thought last night might have been the night. Turned out it wasn't. Can't be far off.

So, let me share something tasty and seasonal with you instead.

A little over a year ago, my second ever blogpost was only read by one person I think (and she kinda had to, she's one of my best friends). A mawkish piece of navel gazing that we won't dwell on. But the subject matter, carrot cake, is very important and deserves to be revisited.

Yesterday, The Boss and I pulled up all of our remaining crop of Chantenay carrots, amounting to about 1.5lb. Actually, she pulled them up, and did the comedy falling over backwards thing when they popped out of the soil. That's why I left it to her, it's funnier on a leggy kid than a massively pregnant heifer. She bounces.

And so, here's a revisit of the yummiest carrot cake recipe I know (even better with homegrown carrots rather than jumbo imported Australian ones that we had to use in Singapore). Details follow the photos.

It's so delicious that I actually think icing slightly ruins it. And it's perfect for making with kids because a whisk and spoon suffices: no need for electronic gadgets with scary finger-chopping potential. (Though I do use the grater attachment on the food processor these days, turning the tedious carrot-grating bit into the work of mere moments.)

with homegrown raspberries - therefore virtually a health food

Carrot cake

6 oz wholemeal flour
3 oz self-raising flour
6 oz muscavado sugar
6 oz soft brown sugar
3 large eggs
6 floz sunflower oil
55ml sour cream
2 tspn vanilla essence
1 tspn grated nutmeg
2 tspn cinnamon
1 tspn bicarbonated soda
½ tspn salt
11 oz grated carrot
3 oz dessicated coconut


Bowl 1: Eggs, oil, vanilla, sour cream. Mix the wet ingredients together (by hand is fine, no need to whip it into a frenzy) and then sieve in sugars.

Bowl 2: Sieve the flours, nutmeg, cinnamon, soda, baking powder and salt together.

Fold the dry mix into the wet mix.

Fold in the carrot and coconut.

Bake in a large tin at 150C for 90-120 minutes. (I find 90 long enough, but test with a skewer.)

These James Grieve apples that are ripening so beautifully had better watch out. I've got treacle-y plans for them next... but in the meantime, I'm off to eat some cake.

almost impossible to believe these colours are straight out of camera!

Post Script:
So strangely it seems that today is THE day for blogging about carrot cake. What can I say, great minds thinking alike?! Here's a gluten-free version from the Domestic Sluts, and for something completely different, here's Shu Han's Singaporean carrot cake (warning: this stuff is seriously delicious).

me and Dan Lepard :: two degrees of separation

Only one week in and I'm officially the neglectful mother of the playground pariah.

Quite some achievement in such a short time and all because I telepathically failed to pick up on an unwritten primary school memo stating that: five-year-old children must be encouraged to snack ALL THE TIME, and you must provide said snacks in her homework bag daily, obviously, you cretinous woman.

[Edit: I'd better clarify for some of my readers who have been kind enough to be aghast in their comments, that here I am being belligerent, melodramatic and bad-tempered because an institution has made me feel ignorant. The actual truth is that the kids apparently have snacks for playtime, and I hadn't supplied any. Go on now, make me feel bad for never even having considered giving her a morning snack before in her life. Dare you!]

Internally I veered from the irate (why the hell didn't they tell me this last week?) to the practical (gah, it'll need to be prepackaged and shopbought, because the homework bag is completely flat and full of paper) and back to the irate again (she's at school for barely two and half hours between breakfast and lunch at home, and school gives out free milk and fruit... yet I have to provide MORE food? WTF?).

So, my mission, should I choose to accept it (not that there's any choice about this): Quick, easy for small hands, won't make a mess in the homework bag, and (critically from my point of view) doesn't require any plastic tubbery that I definitely won't get back.

Luckily, Dan Lepard saved the day. Kind of (this is just really an excuse for me to tell you a story - as if you didn't know that already).

There's a lady of elegant maturity who has known me all my life. The kind of person who has sat next to my family in church since long before I was a twinkle in my father's eye. She made tiny cubes of tablet and macaroons to accompany the coffee after my wedding (and not your atas macaroons either, we're talking the Scottish ones made of potatoes). She made huge boxes of pre-sliced gingerbread and custard creams for my puerperial phase five years ago - demonstrating a clear understanding that high-calorie nourishment needs to be accessible with only one hand at that point in a girl's life. She is a baker of serious calibre.

But don't take my word for it. A few years ago, Dan Lepard wrote about her and published one of her recipes in his column for a national newspaper. Yes, she's THAT much of a legend. And, mercifully, the method that was printed, for pancakes, is exactly the same as my Granny's. Which means it is definitely right. Again, we're talking about the Scottish ones -  not crepes, not fluffy American alternatives, not pan scones or drop scones or any of the other names that people give them - these are pancakes, plain and simple. Dan would agree I'm sure.

A large batch of pancakes, frozen individually in sandwich bags and chucked into the homework bag the night before - phew, I think I've found one solution that we're all happy with for the moment.

So if you're making raspberry jam this month (our wet Summer has been great for one crop at least), then I suggest you whip up a quick batch of these pancakes and smother them in butter and jam while they're still warm.

And if you have any other ideas that would fit my tightly-defined remit (small, flat, non-squishy/non-crumbly snack) I'd really love to hear your suggestions. Because I don't know if a plain pancake, no matter how good, will cut it as a playground snack every day for the next seven years...

Black Isle wild raspberries