Christmas is Coming....

....or Yule, or Midwinter, or whatever you fancy calling it.  OK, it's still a few weeks away but I ought to consider getting into gear.  So far I've made the Christmas Cake (about 4 weeks back) and it's sitting, tightly wrapped, in the bread bin waiting to be marzipanned (sometime at the start of December) and iced (a week before Christmas) and I'm pondering making a Christmas Pudding this year.  I haven't tried before - mainly because I find the thought of hanging around waiting for a pudding to steam for 8 hours is a bit off putting - always a first time.

Normally by this time of year I'll also have my sloes soaking in gin in time for Christmas gift giving ( *hic* ), but the sloe harvest has been shockingly bad.  No exaggeration here, we went out last month and found a grand total of five! Five sloes?! That's not even enough for a thimble full of sloe gin.  It's not just the sloes that have been lacking....the horse chestnut out the front of the house has no conkers (every year previously there's been large quantities scattered across the ground ready to be gathered for conker fights), the blackberries were either rotten before they were ripe or, if they did survive, were bitter and watery and I've not seen any elderberries either.  The birds are going to be hungry this winter - which reminds me, I need to stock up on seed and mealworms.   Birds deserve a happy Christmas too, in the same way we really deserve our Christmas sloe gin ;)  Seeing as we're lacking in that particular department I thought I'd have a go at making a sort-of spiced mead as an alternative.  Although I doubt it'll be ready for Christmas it's another one of those things I've fancied making for a while (although I won't be able to enjoy it myself for at least another 7 months but shhhhhh, the reason for that is still a bit hush hush - at least until we have the first scan next month!).  I used a recipe for a mead in a book I own called "The Real Witches Kitchen", which I bought years ago as it had various interesting recipes in (for cosmetics, incense, food, all sorts).  I didn't have all the ingredients needed but I adapted it a little and this is what I came up with.  I used:

• 1 and a half large oranges, chopped up, pith removed.
• 2 large eating apples, chopped up
• Large handful of currants (or raisins)
• 12 cloves
• 2 large cinnamon sticks
• Roughly 1inch piece of dried ginger
• 8 pints of water
• 4 jars of honey (weighing 454g each, which is roughly a pound - so 4lb of honey)

The orange, apple, currants, cloves, ginger and cinnamon sticks went into a large stock pan with half the water.  I brought that to the boil and left it to simmer - supposedly for half an hour but I got distracted by other things so it was probably a lot longer (if I'm honest I got distracted by guinea pigs - we have two; R's 4th birthday present and a lesson in responsibility. Both boys - she's named them Holly and Dave).  After the appropriate simmering time the mix came off the heat (all the spices and fruit simmering away produced a beautiful Christmassy smell, reminiscent of mulled wine) and the rest of the water was added as well as the honey which was stirred in until it dissolved.  I then mixed in a sachet of wine yeast (a 5g packet which is what? About 0.2oz? Probably around a teaspoon give or take I imagine) and then strained the whole lot via sieve and funnel into a 2 gallon demijohn.  Added a bung and airlock and voila!.......

Now it's just a case of waiting for fermentation and maturation and I'll unfortunately have to use my husband as taste tester.  Exciting! (Note - I remembered to sterilise everything I used.  Had some sterilsing tablets left from when R was a baby....well, I had a full unused packet as we never bothered with bottle-feeding.  Far too much hassle!).

Now to plan the family Midwinter Feast (I have parents, in-laws, grandparents and siblings around for a three course monstrosity on or around the 21st December) and ponder whether I've got the time to make some new Christmas decorations with R.  Pass me the glitter! :-D

Birthdays and families

I'm exhausted!

It was my daughter's (R) 4th Birthday at the weekend and I had Parents no.2 staying for a few days (my parents divorced when I was a child, both my mum and dad remarried, so I have two sets of parents besides my parents-in-law.  Parents no.1 live two doors down and are mum and stepdad. Parents no.2 (dad and stepmum) live a couple of hundred mile away and they visit, or we visit, as and when we can - depends when my dad's home from sea as he works in merchant shipping).  They headed back this morning so we've got the house back and I can take some time to recover from the last week.

R had been excitedly looking forward to her birthday for weeks and had been chopping and changing her mind about her birthday cake.  Originally she wanted an alien cake (last year she wanted a blue dinosaur), but after a short space of time she entered the girly-fairy-princess stage and decided a fairy toadstool cake was the only way to go.  I bake fairly regularly, and make a Christmas Cake every year which is fairly basic in terms of decoration, but I thought I'd give her birthday cake a shot.  It took a few days, handful of hours here and there in between 101 other things, and it would have been a lot cheaper to just pay someone else to make it I suspect, but not nearly as much fun!  Mind you, after hunching over the kitchen worktop, fiddling around with fondant icing, my lower back was killing me!

It seems it was worth it though - not bad for a first attempt....

Actually - who am I kidding? I thought it was damn near brilliant!  No false modesty here, I was so, so chuffed with how it turned out. So chuffed in fact that I could just about ignore the niggling voice of perfectionism in my head telling me that "that bit's wonky" or "the icing has been pulled too thin there so the cake is showing", or "I don't like the smudges/marks/lumps/bumps here - you do know this is nowhere near good enough don't you?".  I'm definitely better at ignoring the voice now, compared to when I was 13 and would throw a teenage strop if something I did wasn't exactly, spot-on, perfect.

And what matters most is R adored it, her excitement was catching! The most fearful part was transporting it on my lap in the car (husband drove) to her birthday party on Saturday.  The internal voice in my head was screaming "don't brake suddenly!" as I stared maniacally ahead on the watch out for unexpected oil spills, small animals running in front of the car or traffic lights ;)

Parents No.2 arrived on the Saturday morning. Birthday party was held Saturday afternoon (I opted for the vaguely sensible approach of  having one of those birthday-party packages at a soft-play centre where they also provided a birthday tea afterwards.  There were 14 children and the same number of parents so I doubt our house would have survived the influx otherwise!). R's birthday was actually on Sunday so we had the whole family over after lunch and I did another birthday tea; Parents no1, Parents no.2, In-laws, godfather, great grandmother no.2 (great grandmother no.1 had my handicapped aunt home for the weekend so couldn't come by sadly), uncle & uncles girlfriend, plus husband and myself.  Not the whole family but a good chunk of the immediate family. R has 3 godmothers and 2 godfathers, only one lives locally, the rest are scattered between Cardiff, Essex and Glasgow - we're not Christian's, the christening was just carrying on a family tradition in the village church; my mother was Christened their, as were my brother and I.  I was also married there (originally it was going to be a registry office wedding but a change of plan for my gran - long story!).  We're very lucky in that respect - family wise, that is.  I also suspect I'm quite unusual to have divorced parents who are remarried and everyone gets on well (when I walked down the aisle I had my dad on one arm and my stepdad on the other).

While Parents No.2 were staying we had a bed made up of the seat cushions from Lola (our excessively tatty VW monster-Bus - she's a 1986 LT31) in the living room as we don't have a spare bedroom and it always seems a bit mean to ask your guests to sleep on the floor/airbed/sofa; so Parents No.2 had our bed.  The makeshift cushion bed was comfy enough but I'm looking forward to our bed tonight.....

......And the calm after the storm........

......My family are wonderful, child-induced birthday chaos is great fun, and it's always a pleasure to to have people to stay but it's nice to breathe deeply in the silence afterwards. Light some incense, listen to some gentle music, and have an early night ;)

Memories

The hedgerows are rich in memories at this time of year; memories I can touch and memories I can taste.  I can watch my daughter run to me with a sycamore seed clutched in her hand.  I can show her how it spins in the golden autumn light, nature's helicopter, inducing the dizzy, giddy joy of watching them fall from the sycamore tree outside the crumbling Victorian school I attended as young child.  I can see her excitement too and I recreate the memory in the current time.

Purple stained lips, purple stained hands, we seek out blackberries together and I am her as she crams them into her mouth.  And I am me, scratched and battered, reaching for the biggest, ripest berry beyond the highest thorns in the thickets of brambles that filled the field at the end of the housing estate where I grew up. The field is gone, more houses stand in their place, but the memories live in the here and now, in my daughter and in hedgerows.

'Sneaky' Breakfast Smoothie

Second blog post, more food.  There is more to my life than that and I'm sure I'll get around to it sooner or later but in the interim I have a typically fussy 3 year old and there's only so much pasta and sauce (with blended in carrots, onion, mushrooms, peppers and celery) you can feed a child as a means of getting some veg into them.  I'm veggie and my husband's veggie so it grates a little bit that our daughter would probably live off fish fingers and bread if given half a chance!  No point in getting too concerned about it though as I remember clearly enough disliking a lot of veg when I was little (celery, broad beans, brussels sprouts.....) while my husband pretty much refused anything but raw carrots for a while (according to my mother-in-law).

However, a lack of overall concern doesn't mean I'm not going to attempt to get some vegetable goodness into her, I'm sure every mum has their sneaky way of doing this (I've been told using pizza is a favourite - blend up some extra veg in the tomato sauce and hide a bit more under the cheese.  Sadly my daughter doesn't like pizza either!).  This here is mine:

'Sneaky' Breakfast Smoothie - looking worryingly like the tofu custard pudding ;)

It does look a bit speckled which is down to the berries I used and the fact I currently only have a cheap little stick/hand blender.  It would be a lovely chocolate brown minus speckles if I had a super duper jug blender that costs two weeks pay but this'll do for now.  And yet again, easy as pie....well smoothie.

• 1 large ripe banana
• 4-5 dates (stones removed)
• A small mug full of berries (e.g. strawberries, blueberries, blackberries - I use frozen mixed summer berries or forest fruits that I've defrosted.  Cheaper than buying fresh)
• Milk (we use soya milk at home)
• Large handful of fresh baby spinach or 3 blocks of frozen spinach that's been defrosted (3 blocks of the frozen spinach we buy is about 80g or 2.5oz give or take - this morning I used fresh baby spinach as that's what we had in the fridge).
• Around about a teaspoon of cocoa powder

I haven't given exact measurements because I don't tend to use them - I'm a bung-it-all-in-and-see-what-happens sort of cook.

First off I blend the spinach with a good splash of milk (not too much) until I have a bright green liquid - I do the spinach first as it can be a bit stringy and I want to make sure it's properly pureed.  Then I add the banana, dates and cocoa and blend some more until I have a dark green unappetising-looking sludge (sounds good doesn't it?!).  I finally add the berries, give it a good whizz and the purple/red with the sludgy green turns a nice chocolate colour.  I then add a drop more milk just to get it to a consistency we like, which is normally around that of a thick milkshake.  I don't need to add any sugar as the banana and dates tend to make it sweet enough (even for my daughter!) although if I've put in a lot of blackcurrants in with the berries I'll add an extra date or two to balance the tartness.

Nice and tasty start to the day, and my daughter loves it  - and heres the proof.......

The proof is in the pudding smoothie
(Although I'll be in trouble if she ever actually sees me adding the spinach!)

Chocolate Tofu 'Custard' Pudding.

It's coming around to the new moon, as it happens that also tends to coincide with the hormonal shifts that cause me to alternate between weeping into my keyboard and eating cake; lots and lots of cake.

Today, I have no cake.  In the past that wouldn't have been a problem as I would have made a microwave mug cake - 3minutes to cake-y perfection.  Unfortunately, we recently freecycled the microwave as it took up a lot of room in the kitchen and was very rarely used (bar occasional heating of baked beans and the monthly mug cakes).  I never considered the long term consequences of my decision!

A rummage around in the kitchen came up with few options but the packet of firm silken tofu in the fridge gave me a brainwave as I remembered making a tofu-based pumpkin pie last year.

Ta da....Chocolate Tofu 'Custard' Pudding....

Ok, so it's not cake, but it's sweet and it hit the spot.  And it was about as easy as easy gets.

• 1 packet of firm silken tofu
• 3tbsp honey (that's all I had in the cupboard and I've no doubt agave nectar, maple syrup or old fashioned granualted sugar will do the job)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3 tsps cocoa powder

Put all ingredients in a blender, whizz together, done.  It had the consistency of thickish custard so I poured mine into a glass and topped it with a dollop of coconut milk/cream (I'd had the remains of a can sitting in the fridge) and some blueberries and strawberries so I could fool myself it was healthy.

I imagine it might firm up a bit if placed in the fridge but I'm neither that patient or that concerned with the consistency. 

Yum.