Vegan Mulled Wine and Brandy-Caramelised Walnut Cakes (for Nicky and Holly)

I made delicious smoking bishop mulled wine last night, so am once again blessed with about a kilo of boozy clementines.  I amheading to Manchester tomorrow to stay with a lovely vegan friend and meet up with another, so decided to pester another friend – joolzrainbow.wordpress.com – for advice about egg substitutes to cakify some of the fruit for them.  I love cooking savoury meals for vegans because they are such cheap dates, and so easily impressed with anything cooked for them that isn’t chili or curry, but have previously had disappointing results with began baking.

These worked beautifully. They are deliciously fragrant with a very light, moist texture.  The lightness is definitely due to the baking powder and bicarb, but the salty, chalky flavour they can impart is completely masked by the intensity fruit and spices.  The texture is more like a very light spionge pudding than a cake, but they certainly don’t feel or taste lacking in any way.

I’ve been effectively vegetarian for brief period of my life – once for a bet, more often for convenience – but I could NEVER be vegan.  I’d sooner be celibate than cheeseless.

Brandy- caramelised Walnuts

24 walnut halves 

2 heaped dessertspoons of dark muscovado sugar

a good glug of cheap brandy

Mulled Wine Cakes

(makes 24 small cakes)

250g squishey, winey citrus fruits

250g soft brown sugar

250g coconut oil

half a nutmeg, grated

a teaspoon each of cinnamon and ginger

6 tablespoons of soya milk

3 teaspoons of cider vinegar

50g good quality glace citrus peel or the zest of an orange

350g plain flour

a heaped teaspoon each of baking powder and bicarbonate of soda

First, smoke your bishop (see last Christmas for details) or use your preferred method for mulling wine with citrus fruits.  If you’ve made smoking bishop, the fruits will be lovely and tender, otherwise you may need to simmer them till they are tender, or put them in a medium oven for twenty minutes or so. Let them cool before proceeding.

Preheat your oven to 180.   Put the fruit, sugar, oil (microwave it for ten to 20 seconds if it is very hard, and check the label very carefully if your coconut oil is in a similar jar to your goose fat), soya milk, vinegar and spices into a bowl.  Blitz them together for a few seconds with a hand blender on a medium speed setting.  If you don’t have such a thing, you could chop the fruit very very finely and blend the ingredients by hand.  Stir in the peel or zest.  Sift in the flour, baking powder and bicarb and beat thoroughly.  Put a heaped dessert-spoonful in each case, then stir with a skewer to even up and flatten the mixture.

Dot a walnut half on the top of each. If your kitchen is very cold the caramel in the pan may harden too much to shift the walnuts; if so simply warm it on a low heat for a second and they will budge.  Bake for twenty minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.   I have only just made them, but suspect they will be better tomorrow than today, and am sure they would freeze beautifully.  Microwaved for thirty seconds and smothered with cream, ice cream or custard they would make a delicious dessert.  Obviously, I mean vegan cream, ice cream or custard.

Spicy Pumpkin Gingerbread

I have tried pumpkin pie several times and even had it a couple of times in its native country.  I’ve never liked it much.  Like that other American staple, carrot cake, it seems a testament to the fact that there were precious few indigenous fruits to be had in the early days of colonialism.  At least carrots are sweet and juicy.  Pumpkin is as hard to cut as parsnip, as sweatily bland as swede, and has a cloying claggy texture when cooked.  In a pie it needs pretty much candying with sugar and smothering with cinnamon to be palatable.

The lovely art teacher at my current school brought a pumpkin in to carve for one of our current projects.  I got the contents to cook.  I normally just treat it as a vegetable and turn it into garlicky mash with other root vegetables, but I needed to turn it into something cakey to feed to my colleagues. What I made was halfway between parkin and ginger cake, and was lovely and rich and sticky, despite having significantly less sugar and a higher fibre and  mineral content than most sweet pumpkin recipes.  My colleagues scoffed it very happily.

Spicy Pumpkin Gingerbread  (Pumparkin)

Preheat the oven to 150.

1. In your main mixing bowl blend:   10 oz plain flour, 4 oz oatbran, two heaped  tsps ground ginger and one of  cinnamon, half a grated nutmeg and a level teaspoon of baking powder.

2. In a microwaveable bowl place:  4 oz dark brown sugar,  4 oz butter, 4 oz black treacle and blitz them on full power for a minute. You can faff about warming the treacle tin in a pan of water to make it easier to measure, but I just tip it from a height, and eat any that sticks to the edge of the tin, then wipe it with clean damp cloth.  Some recipes require you to ensure the sugar is completely dissolved into the other ingredients, but this isn’t one of them.  You just need to make it easily blendable.

3. Then add:  6oz spiced pumpkin sludge (see below), 6oz mixed dried fruit, zest of two lemons (or other citrus), grated ginger the size of your thumb to the microwaved mixture.  I used a piece the size of my thumb, but I have hands like tiny monkeys paws – I seldom teach 11 year olds with smaller hands than me – so if you are a banana-fisted giant, exercise discretion or just make it really gingery.  The dried fruit are an important ingredient for sweetness, texture and depth of flavour. If you are cooking for a tiresome fusspot someone like my lovely friend, Heeno, who doesn’t like them, blitz the fruit into the pumpkin mixture with a hand blender and don’t tell them it contains any.

4. Blend the contents of the second bowl thoroughly into the  first.  Then put two large eggs into the emptied bowl and beat them well,  then thoroughly beat them  into the rest of the mixture.

5. Pour into a well buttered large shallow square dish and bake in the centre of the oven for about 45 mins.  You might need an hour with a smaller dish or  slower oven.  It looks a very wet mixture, but the oatbran absorbs a lot of the moisture.

 

Like most gingerbread and parkin recipes, it is always best made a day ahead so the top gets properly sticky overnight. You can see the stickiness of the top in the photo above.  The stripes are from the cake being flipped upside down onto the cooling rack and left  for a few minutes before I turned it right way up.

Vegan Version

Use vegan spread in place of the butter and use a large, very ripe and very well mashed banana, and the juice of two lemons,  to replace the eggs.  Lower the temp to 13o and cook for an hour or a little longer.  You’ll get a breadier, denser texture than the regular version.

 

Spiced Pumpkin Sludge

1. Roughly chop  two kilos or so of pumpkin innards and stir in a heaped dessertspoon of ground ginger and one of cinnamon. Put them in a well-buttered baking dish,  and roast for twenty minutes at 200.

2. Pour it into a shallow saucepan, blitz it with a hand blender and heat it gently, stirring constantly as it steams, until you have about half the original volume.

The stirring is a bit a tiresome, frankly, but it makes the mixture much more versatile.   You can just  omit stage one and heat it in the pan, but you will need more butter – and more stirring – and it won’t taste as good.  The initial roasting brings out what little natural sweetness the pesky vegetable contains, and roasting with the spices adds a rich, earthy depth that offsets the armpittiness of the pumpkin.  It freezes very well, and could be mixed with apples in a pie very well, or used in place of apples in a cake recipe.   You can also spread it on toast. Or add a little honey and use it as baby food.

A Surfeit of Golden Plums

I’d love to claim that these gorgeous little beauties came from my own tree, or from local foraging, but they actually came from the little poundoscoop stall outside the newsagents in Twickenham. They were very ripe, deliciously sweet and clung to their stones like greengages do, so googling suggests they are actually Oullins Gages.   Plums as soft as that would be unpleasant, but gages are best when almost honey-runny. Over two kilos for a quid was a magnificent bargain.

Sunday’s tropical storm meant the weather started out chilly, dark and very, very damp. It was autumnal enough for us to want something hearty and warm instead of the light, salady meals we’ve been eating for the last month. So I sent the Idiot Boy out in the howling deluge to the small, expensive Tesco nearby, in the hope that they would have some pork belly to slow roast. They didn’t, so he came back with a guinea fowl, which meant I had to send him back out for a can of cider.

Pot Roast Guinea Fowl with Golden Plum Sauce

One guinea fowl; half a can of cider; a small onion; four large, ripe, yellow plums; a generous chunk of butter, a bay leaf; a sprig of sage; a teaspoon of wholegrain mustard; a chicken stock cube.

Preheat the oven to 180.  Melt the butter in a large frying pan and lightly brown the bird and put it in a deep casserole dish.  Add the roughly chopped onion to the pan, and cook till golden.  Chuck in the plums, whole, cook for a minute or so and then add the cider and crumble in the stock cube. Let it simmer for two or three minutes, then pour it over and around the bird, add the bayleaf and a couple of sage leaves (keep two)  cover with a lid (or thoroughly with foil if your lid won’t fit) and put in the bottom of the oven for about an hour and fifteen minutes.

When it’s done, leave the bird in the casserole dish to keep warm and pour the cooking sauce into a small saucepan. Remember to remove the stones from the plums.   I forgot to do this, and as I then blitzed the sauce with a hand blender to make it smoother, I had to faff about straining it to get all the bits of stone out.   Add the mustard and the other two sage leaves, finely chopped, and let it reduce slightly.

We had the roughly dismembered bird and its fruity sauce with savoy cabbage and mushrooms that I had hoped to flavour with caraway, but I’d run out, so they got a mixture of black, pink and szechuan peppercorns roughly crushed over them instead.  We had some not-so-new potatoes that needed using up, but I think this would have worked best with some mash or big baked spud. The delicacy of the meat and the light fruitiness of the sauce meant that this satisfying hot dish still had a breath of summer about it. Later in the year the same technique  works well with purple plums and red wine and a gamier bird.

Baked Plums with Cider and Vanilla

While the guinea fowl was cooking the rest of the plums went on the top shelf of the oven, in an open casserole dish, with the other half of the can of cider, a vanilla pod (from which I’d previously extracted the seeds), about a tablespoon of vanilla sugar and a couple of little knobs of butter. These fruits were ripe and strongly flavoured enough not to be swamped by the vanilla; it just intensified their sweetness so less sugar was needed.  You could use white wine or apple juice in place of the cider and cinnamon with Victoria or other dark plums.  They take 20 to 25 minutes to cook.

A fusspot or Frenchman might want the skins removed, which is easy enough, but unnecessary, really, especially as the browner bits are lovely and caramelly.  I’d only bother skinning them if I was serving them to someone with dentures. They are best eaten eaten slightly warm – not hot – with clotted cream or ice cream, and will happily keep for a week in the fridge.They freeze very well, too.  They are lovely with custard, or with Greek yoghurt for breakfast, or served as a saucy partner to a chunk of good Wensleydale or Roquefort.

Plumonade (and Gin)

The topmost photo shows how much lovely  juice the cooked plums produced.  I removed the fruits from the hot liquid and zested a lemon into it, followed by its juice.  Cooled and served over ice this makes a lovely sharp-sweet long drink. This is a another good reason for going easy on the sugar, as the juice is much more versatile if it isn’t too sweet; sugar or honey can always be added to the fruit later if your taste requires it.   All the alcohol has cooked off the fruit (probably) but you could still con your kids into thinking they were drinking something very grown up if you gave this to them.  It can also turn supermarket gin or white rum into a very good cocktail.   The juice from greengages cooked in this way with good quality perry, and spiced with a little elderflower cordial, is heavenly with gin.

The Bishop: Smoked, Bashed, Bottled and Smeared on a Pudding

Smoking Bishop is now my favourite mulled wine variant.  I made it for the first time for my party on the 29th and it was gorgeous; richy, dry, mellow, fruity.  It bears no resemblance to the jammy, Ribena-ish gloop you get in pubs and at Christmas markets. Dickens mentions it in A Christmas Carol, where the reformed and jolly Scrooge offers to take Bob Cratchit out for a celebratory bowl of it. Earlier in the novel poor old Bob, whose family have only three glasses between them, have some sort of heated gin, sugar and water concoction after their Christmas lunch.  Gin was cheap enough for  poor people, but port, the key ingredient in Smoking Bishop, was a gentleman’s drink.

Smoking Bishop

Ingredients: five oranges, four clementines, a bottle of red wine, a bottle of port, cloves, cinnamon sticks, ginger, allspice – serves six to ten.

You need to prepare this the night before.  Forgetting this, until late in the evening before my gathering, meant I didn’t  have quite the right ingredients, so I substituted  four clementines for the two lemons that are more traditionally used.  You can use all lemons, in which case it is called ‘Oxford Bishop’ and is presumably a bit High Church tasting.   Bake your fruits in a medium oven until they are soft and slightly brown.  This took about 25 minutes for the clementines and 40 for the oranges, and made the flat smell gorgeously festive.  When they are done, stick three or four cloves in each and add them -and any juice that’s escaped from them – to a large saucepan into which you have poured the wine and the spices. I used a chopped ‘thumbtip’ chunk of ginger, the half dozen remaining allspice I had and three cinnamon sticks.  Squish them slightly to break the skins and let the juice and wine mingle, and then leave them overnight.  I defy you not to prod and sniff them at intervals, though.

When you are ready to swig your bishop, add the bottle of port and warm gently over a low heat, so that it never boils away the precious alcohol. I served this in little cups, with a sugar cube added to each for those who wanted it.  It is easily the best mulled wine I have ever had.

Bashed and Bottled Bishop

Ingredients: fruit from the above, juice of one lemon, half a pound of granulated sugar, one bottle of red wine, one tablespoon of muscovado sugar, two cinnamon sticks..

I loved nibbling on the bits of fruit that found their way into the last couple of cups of smoking bishop and found them delicious. There was no way I was simply going to throw them away unscoffed. So the next day I chucked another bottle of red wine on top, gave the fruit a good bashing, and warmed it gently back up.  I strained off half the warmed wine and drank it as a normal and perfectly good, dryish mulled wine.  I fished out, and roughly sliced, the fruit and returned it to the pot, to which I added the white and muscovado sugars, the lemon juice and cinnamon.  I let this simmer gently on a very low heat for thirty to forty minutes till the wine was reduced to a glossy syrup coating the fruit, and then decanted it into a oven-sterilised 2lb preserving jar.

I’d put up a photo, but it’s basically a big jar of dark, purple, winey, fragrant unphotogenic loveliness. It should keep very well, and be delicious spooned over ginger ice-cream, or with Greek yoghurt and cinnamon glazed walnuts, or with mascarpone as the filling for a Victoria sponge, or over a steamed pudding drenched in clotted cream.  This last option is what I did with the couple of spoonfuls that wouldn’t fit in the jar.

Instant Steamed Pudding with Added Bishop

Ingredients:  One dessertspoon each of soft butter and muscovado sugar, one medium egg, half a small, grated dessert apple, two dessertspoons of self- raising flour, a teaspoon or so of grated ginger, a pinch of salt.

This is the easiest, laziest and most puddingy instant pudding you can make. It entails fractionally more effort than a ready made one, with none of the wasteful packaging and ghastly additives. Eat it straight out of the bowl, with the spoon you stirred it with, and you’ll barely have any washing up.  You do need a large plastic bowl or tupperware container.  I used a two pint plastic mixing bowl this time, but have made this is in a grubby student kitchen with a carefully washed takeaway box (I could probably write an entire recipe book just for squalid stoners).  Do not attempt to do this in a china bowl, or it will be dried out at the top before it cooks properly at the bottom.

Put the sugar and butter in the bowl and beat thoroughly.   Beat in the egg, add the spices, apple and salt, then the flour.  You really don’t need to peel the apple or sift the flour.  Microwave on full power, for two and half minutes in a 800 watt machine.  I’d try two mins 50 seconds in a 750 and 3 full minutes in anything smaller.  The amount above will serve two easily, one greedily and three to four after a savoury meal.  Eat it straightaway, piping hot, as it becomes a little bit rubbery if it is allowed to cool, though you could make it in advance and warm it up again in the microwave, in pool of lovely, moistening custard.

Instead of the apple, you could use a whole fresh fig, half a ripe banana, a tablespoon of dried fruit softened for a minute in the microwave with fruit juice or wine, or a tablespoon of marmalade, mincemeat or jam. Or you can grate or chop about a tablespoon of chocolate into it, if you prefer.  You can use different sugar, but dark gives a much better result.  You can, of course, use different spices.

Happy New Year, intrepid Readers!

This Little Piggy Turkey Roll

On Christmas Eve afternoon I did my traditional bargain-catching trawl of the nearest supermarkets.  The pickings weren’t spectacular, but I did score a turkey crown for just under a fiver that should have been nearly twenty.  I watched lovely Tom Kerridge’s Christmas special  and really liked the way he cooked a turkey roll in clingfilm, maximising the juiciness, so decided to do my own version for a buffet dinner party for friends last night. His was tidily butterflied and filled with a sausagemeat stuffing, but mine was inelegantly hacked off the bone and stuffed with as much pig as I could get into it.

I had a two kilo turkey crown, and stuffed it with: four good quality pork chipolatas, eight rashers of smoked back bacon, 100g sliced chorizo, 100g of good quality black pudding a finely chopped onion, two cloves of garlic, eight large finely chopped sage leaves, about a dessertspoon of chopped thyme, two tablespoons of chopped parsley, two teaspoons of english mustard, one egg and two cloves of garlic.   The ingredients were  simply chopped and mixed thoroughly in a bowl.

I lay the hacked off turkey meat on several layers of clingfilm, making a couple of cuts to sort of butterfly it.  I also had to patch some gaps between the two  breasts with some chunks off the thicker bits, to get a fairly even rectangle of meat.  I seasoned the meat well, slathered the stuffing on top of it and then carefully and tightly rolled it until it resembled a giant sweet in a wrapper.  It was at this point that I realised that I hadn’t got any string, of any kind, butcher’s or otherwise.  Once I’d finished swearing, I realised I could just twist up more clingfilm and use it like string.  I tied it round the centre first, and then put three more rounds either side of it.  It was not quite as neat and cylindrical as Mr K’s, but it did the job.

I cooked it at 70C for 50 mins, in a deep casserole dish with two inches of water in it, then rolled it over and gave it another fifty minutes.  I left it cooling in the pan for a good half hour before I served it, and it stayed pretty hot.  Cooking in this way does leave the meat a bit pale and flabby-looking, and the Tom Kerridge recipe I adapted has a big crunchy bread and fruit topping to glam it up.   I just topped it with home-made cranberry sauce and some posh, fluffy pork scratchings.   The photo above was taken by one of the guests, but this is my less expert photo of what it looked like finished:

Bargain Bambi Backbone Christmas Decoration Casserole

The London borough I live in, Richmond, is staggeringly posh and seemingly untroubled by austerity.  When the Idiot Boy was at the farmers’ market recently he saw kilo bags of venison bones for a quid fifty with a sign attached saying ‘good for stock or pet food’.  He told the stallholder, ‘Ooh, I’ll get some of those for my girlfriend. She’ll really like them.  Ummm, she is a human, by the way’.

The bones are vertebrae, and very meaty.  This is what they look like raw, rubbed with crushed garlic, wholegrain mustard and salt and pepper. Meat is muscle, and deer are very active creatures, so the white marbling you see isn’t fat, isn’t gristle.  These bones need slow cooking in liquid to tenderise the meat.

I tossed them in flour, browned them off in a frying pan, fried a finely chopped tired brown onions in the same pan, added half a bottle of rough, cheap red wine (you could use better wine, or cider or stock) till it simmered and then chucked them in a casserole with two bay leaves, some parsley stalks and left them on a low heat for about three hours, poking occasionally to see if the meat was ready to leave the bones.

You could stew the bones instead of casseroling them.  If you do, you can watch the tiny white strands of spinal cord shriveling up and sproinging out like little white worms to disintegrate in the liquor. This probably not a good idea if you or those you feed have a squeamish disposition.  Once the meat was tender, I strained off the liquid – removing the parsley and bay and squishing the soft onions through the strainer, and let the bones cool long enough to pick all the meat off. A kilo of bones yields about 250 – 300 grammes of lean, tender meat.

I put the meat and liquid back in the casserole dish and added two chopped small red onions, and a couple of courgettes and carrots, and put it back on a low heat, with the lid off, for another hour. You could easily feed four with this if you served it with  mash or baked potatoes  and some greens.  We had it unaccompanied for dinner, with enough left for a lunch for me.

I’ve made this twice now, and cooked a third lot to use the meat in a game terrine.  Each time I have struck by the beauty of the shape of the bones, and the resemblance of some of them to the outline of a stag’s head and antlers.  So I decided to see if I could do something with them.  I boiled up the bones with a bottle of malt vinegar.  This, and cleaning glass is the only thing malt vinegar – or ‘Satan’s own piss’, as I prefer to call it –  is fit for. This opinion isn’t snobbery, exactly, because I am not a great fan of any vinegar, even the expensive posh stuff, and use it sparingly in my cooking.   God help anyone who dares put it on my chips. The vinegar is corrosive enough to remove all the soft tissue from the bones. So why, oh why, would you want to put it in your stomach?  This method of bone preparation, followed by a bit of rubbing with fine ash is how mediaeval fraudsters used to make ‘saints’ bones to flog to ambitious churchmen keen to raise the status of their churches, or those desperately seeking a magic talisman.

After boiling and drying there were a couple of rough bits of sinewy stuff still stuck on the bones, but these were easily removed with bit of sandpaper.   I recycled the stiff foil containers from some tealights and cut and pressed them into the holes so that they would retain small candles.  Then I sprayed them ‘antique gold’ and you can see the results above,   Not quite nose-to-tail and not all eating, but a better end for these bits of a beautiful beast than the bin, I think.

Merry Christmas!  And thank you, very much, for reading.

Easy Biscotti for Christmas Gifting (plus bonus ‘free’ ingredient recipe)

I like gnawing on biscotti. They give you all the sustained oral comfort of a Farley’s rusk, yet still have an air of continental sophistication.  They are very easy to make, and home made ones are much tastier and more fragrant than the ones you get in cafes, as unlike commercial bakeries, the home cook doesn’t have to stint on the most flavoursome ingredients.  They are a good biscuit to make with children, as there are no fiddly techniques (only a bit of firm slicing an adult would need to supervise), the dough is mixed and shaped by hand, and they are pretty foolproof. They would make a lovely present from a child to a grandparent.  They keep for a month or more in an airtight container, so you can post them overseas, too.

Ingredients:  400g plain flour, 250g sugar, 120g nuts, 120g dried fruit, 4 lightly beaten medium eggs, 2 tsp baking powder, spices (about 2 tsp), citrus zest.

Variations:   The original  biscotti were  flavoured with hazelnuts and aniseed.  You can use any combination of fruit, nut and flavouring that takes your fancy: pistachio, blanched almonds,sultanas and lemon zest with mixed spice; walnut, glace cherry and cinnamon with demerara sugar for richness; sultana, dried mango, coconut and cardamom to go with chai; blanched almonds, dried apricots and almond essence. The latter two are my favourites, I think.

This time I used clementine sugar*, pistachios, and half chopped home-made mixed peel and half barberries, with about half a teaspoon of grated nutmeg and a teaspoon of cinnamon.  A quarter of a teaspoon of ground clove would have been a welcome addition, but I’d run out.

Method: Heat the oven to 180 degrees (fan oven).  Sift the flour and baking sugar into a bowl, add the sugar, dried spices and eggs and blend roughly with fork.  Knead with your hands for a few moments until the flour is smoothly blended.  Then add the fruit and nuts and mix those in thoroughly with your hands.   Empty the dough onto a floured work surface, knead any escaped nuts or fruit back in, and cut the mixture into four.  Shape each of these into sausages about a foot long, and press them down and spread them out slightly so they have a nice flat bottom as this makes the second baking stage easier.  Put two sausages (not too close together) each onto two well-buttered (or papered) baking trays.  NB if you are making these with your children, don’t spend too long on the blending and rolling as the baking powder will be activated when you add the eggs and needs to be in the oven within five minutes or so.  Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until the sausages have spread out and  are just golden. I swapped the trays half way through so they cooked evenly (even in fan ovens, items on the top shelf cook more quickly).

Take them out, turn the oven down to 140C, and put them on a rack to cool. While they are cooling,  rebutter the baking trays.

When they have cooled enough to handle, slice them, at a slight diagonal, about 1cm thick, stand them on the baking trays as shown below.  At this stage you can freeze them on the trays, put them in bags and they will keep for ages. You can lay them flat on the baking trays if they won’t stand, but to do so you will need more baking trays or to cook them in two batches. and you will have to faff about turning them over halfway through cooking.    Put them in the oven for 20 to 25 minutes (again, I swapped shelves half way through). Take them out when they are nicely golden brown and cool them on a rack.   You can scoff the scruffy ends as your cook’s perks.   This recipe makes about 800g of biscotti, and the little bags above have about 100g each in.

How to Make Citrus Sugar  I love citrus fruits and eat loads of them at this time of year when the navel oranges and clementines are at their best.  I seldom buy unwaxed ones but always use the zest.  You can remove the wax easily by washing the fruit in a clean sink with a little washing up liquid and letting them drain dry or drying them off with a tea towel or kitchen towel. Each time I use a lemon,  lime or oranges I  remove the zest in strips (with one of those zesters with four little holes in it) directly onto a layer of sugar in large preserving jar. You need to do it straight into the jar to get as much of the lovely oil as possible. It’s very quick, and you simply layer some more sugar on top of the zest and stir it.  I use the sugar in baking, marinades, hot toddies, on yoghurt or in porridge.  The lemon sugar is nice is tea; orange is good for sweetening mulled wine.

Clementines or tangerines are harder to zest and too faffy to do individually,  so I do a lot of them in a batch with a medium microplane grater, and if the zested fruit isn’t going to be eaten for a couple of days, I keep them in a plastic back in the fridge.  It’s worth doing because the sugar is so fragrant and Christmassy.   It’s lovely ground up in a coffee grinder or pestle and mortar and sprinkled on cooling pastry or fruit bread. It’s  a very good way to glam up an oven-warmed shop-bought mince pie.

Lazy, Easy, Christmas Cake ‘Icing’

I can’t be bothered with detailed decorations on Christmas cakes because I usually have quite a few of them to wrestle with, and it’s the festive season, and there’s a lot going on, and I’ve probably got a mild hangover. I will, however,  do fancy decorations on a birthday cake, when I have just one cake to fiffle with, and want to make a fuss of the recipient.  But I don’t ever really use conventional icing, soft or otherwise, because I find it sickly and unpleasant to eat.  One of the reasons hard icing was used, back in the day, was as protection and preservation for an important cake for a wedding or annual feast, made with expensive ingredients – no longer issues of concern in our world of fridges and supermarkets.

I do like marzipan, however, very much, and on a good year I’ll make my own, but this year I had too many cakes and not enough oomph, so I bought some perfectly good (if far too sugary) stuff that was on special offer in M&S.    Most of my cakes were small, and I decided to divide the larger ring cake I made into three so that I could gift more and eat less, as I seem to be going off sweet things. This gave me a total of nine small cakes to prettify.  Three of these were decorated and dispatched last week, and the pictures show what I did with the remaining six.  This is a very easy method for decorating cake – easy enough for quite small children to assist in the process –  and the results look good enough to garner lots of oohs and ahhs from the recipients.

I don’t roll out  the marzipan, as rolling out marzipan is time-consuming and fiddly.  I just moulded and pressed it gently flatter and flatter between my palms.  Once the marzipan is on, you can can gently squish the cake neatly into shape.   If your cake is dry, you may need to drizzle melted, strained apricot jam or gently microwaved honey over it  to get the marzipan to adhere, but mine are generally so damply drunk with brandy they don’t need the help.   After the marzipan I used some gold food spray which makes it look very pretty  and also helps to stop the marzipan drying out.  For this reason I put more on the bottom edges of the cakes.    At this stage my three sections of the ring cake looked like sinister, giant Wotsits.

The next stage is very satisfying, and is the bit a child could have great fun doing.  You simply splodge melted, very good quality very dark chocolate all over it, like so:

Then you splodge white chocolate (you could do milk as well; I did last year) edible glitter, edible gold stars and edible white stars all over it, too, and it looks like the picture at the top of this page.  If you are keeping it, that’s all you have to do.   If you are nervous about cake decorating this method is a breeze because you can’t really go wrong.   Specialist cake shops sells glittery stuff in all manner of colours and shapes, if stars and gold don’t appeal.   Once the chocolate has dried, you can sit the cakes you are giving away on foil wrapped cardboard, and then wrap them in cellophane:

You could give them away like this, especially if you were going to use one as the centrepiece of a small hamper, but I used more cellophane and that cheap metallic curlable ribbon stuff to attempt to make mine look more like something you might buy in a French or Italian patisserie, and to make them much easier to pick up and carry.   You can cart them about quite happily in a stout carrier bag, and the nature of the decoration means a little bump won’t hurt them.  They do need to be kept cool, of course.   The double layer of shiny cellophane and  terrible light made them hard (for me) to photograph, but they do look surprisingly impressive – and very festive –  for something so simple to do.

Fasting For Feasting

A food blog in December is probably the wrong place to write about fasting.  I don’t feel entirely at ease even using the word; I don’t like the associations fasting has with extreme self-denial and zealous religious observance.  Two weeks ago, though, from Tuesday after lunch to about the same time Friday, I ate nothing whatsoever and I drank nothing but boiled water.

This was a unique occurrence.  My circumstances are such that I have never been forced to go hungry.  My temperament is such that I have never wanted to.  My constitution is such that, in the event of an apocalypse, I would – tearfully, and not without remorse – kill, cook and eat the Idiot Boy if I had to.  I never lose my appetite.  I can eat my way through gloom, illness or bereavement.  Three hours after chemotherapy and two hours after simultaneously launching the contents of my stomach and leaking the contents of my bowels all over an ambulance, I could still eat king prawn foo yung and pistachio ice cream.  If I’d been Madame Defarge, I’d wouldn’t have been knitting in the guillotine’s front row; I’d have been eating chips.

My main reason for not eating for three days wasn’t to do with weight, exactly, nor, heaven forbid, detoxing.  That’s another reason for not liking the f-word, its connotations of the gullibly narcissistic, or pitiably anxious,  being conned  – by the likes of turd-gazing faux-doctor Gillian McKeith, etc –  into thinking their bodies are riddled with festering poisons.  Like every other reasonably healthy human being, I have operational lungs, liver, bowels, kidneys and skin.  If you are pooping, peeing, sweating or exhaling, you are doing all the  de-toxing you will ever need, unless you are bitten by an an anaconda or are the subject of a Russian assassination attempt. Paying someone to stick a hose up your bum to ‘clean’ your colon  is more likely to be the first step on the road to a Darwin Award than lead to a beautiful, new you.

The reason I wanted to try something as alarming and depressing as a water fast was that  I had read numerous reports of its efficacy for the long term reduction of  the pain and inflammation of arthritis, which I have in my knees, feet, hips and, increasingly – aggravatingly – in my hands.  Recently the pain in my left hand  has resulted in every minor bump or bit of clumsiness being accompanied by a string of profanities. I decided to try going without food for three days before I resigned myself to ratcheting up my painkiller and anti-inflammatory intake for the next couple of months, particularly as the drugs compel me to be pretty much teetotal.  So this was definitely not a detox, rather a desperate attempt to ensure I could unhesitatingly over-indulge in all those lovely Christmas boozes.

The other reason I was interested in trying it was weight-related.  I know full well that short-term starvation is not the way to lose weight.   I wanted to see if it significantly changed my appetite and eating habits afterwards, in the longer term.  I need to lose some weight to ease the pressure on my dodgy joints (and fit back in to my favourite frocks).  I have been shrinking gradually over the last few months, but I really liked the idea of ‘rebooting’ my appetite, to help me sustain, and hopefully increase, that loss over the next few.  My problem is that, not only can I eat in pretty much any circumstance, but I can – and will – always eat more than I need.  I often write in my recipes about making double quantities for freezing, but if I seldom mention leftovers, that’s because I almost never have any.   This seemed like the ideal time of year to boost my near non-existent ability to portion control, particularly as the festive season started very early for me, with two weekends of lovely house-guests to cook for and some fine restaurant meals in November.

I read up quite a bit on the side-effects and risks, but I didn’t consult my doctor.  I am a middle-aged woman of sound body – apart from the arthritis –  and fairly sound mind, so I didn’t see the point of wasting the NHS’s time over something any healthy, adult mammal should be able to cope with.   I did, however, plan to stay at home for the whole three days, as I knew it could make me feel unpleasantly faint and nauseous.  This is what happened:

First 24 hours:   I stopped eating at about three in the afternoon, and made sure my last day’s meals were veg and protein heavy to sustain me and keep me feeling full.  I decided to start half way through a day, as I know that I am always hungriest and most prone to snack in the afternoon, so I thought if my resolve started to quake at that point a day later, I’d know I’d be just about to unlock the achievement of completing the first 24 hours successfully.  This strategy really worked.

On the first morning I didn’t feel particularly hungry; I did desperately want coffee or tea.  I am not even sure I was craving caffeine, exactly, it’s just that I usually do measure out my life in coffee spoons.  I drink one or two cafetieres of coffee,  a couple of pots of green tea and a hot chocolate every day while I am working from home.  These soothing hot beverages punctuate and regulate my day; they mark my ‘breaks’.  Time seemed to have no meaning without them. Boiled water was a very poor substitute, indeed.  At one point I found myself opening and closing my mouth like a sort of demented baby bird, longing for  my hot silky, caffeine worm.   I missed drink much more than food.

The evening wasn’t too bad.  I kept my distance while the Idiot Boy ate his dinner, but managed to watch Masterchef without licking the screen.  I did feel  mildly irritable, but I often do.

Second 24 hours:  I dozed through much of this day, and even when I wasn’t asleep, I was mostly horizontal.   By the afternoon I found it quite hard to concentrate on my book, and kept zoning out of the radio programme I was trying to listen to.   I did attempt to do a couple of domestic chores, but found them too much effort.  I read Facebook and my emails, and posted a recipe (which was mostly pre-written) on here, but these activities took longer than they normally would.    I wouldn’t say I felt faint, exactly; it was more like being slightly stoned.    I also began to feel a bit stir crazy, but would not have felt comfortable or safe leaving the house.

I was mostly unaffected by the Idiot Boy cooking bacon and eating his dinner, though the smells seemed almost sickeningly strong, rather than appetising.  Masterchef seemed like a broadcast from an alien planet (even more so than usual, I mean) and the food on display looked unnaturally bright, as though it were made with  Lego or Plasticine.  I was, however,  aware that I was psychologically hungry.  My belly was empty and rumbling a bit, but I wasn’t starving. I just ached for  the comfort and routine of cooking and eating.  Like the coffee, these domestic rituals punctuate and progress my day.  Without eating or going out my days were completely shapeless.

Physically I felt quite odd.  My joints, by the 48 hour mark, were much less painful and more flexible than they usually are, especially the left index finger which had really causing me pain lately, but the enforced inactivity was making me feel stiff (like most arthritic people, I generally have more difficulty and discomfort with sustained immobility; my mobility isn’t yet particularly impaired).   The flexibility was markedly better than it is when I take anti-inflammatories, and exceeded my expectations.    I was fed up and bored and dopey by the end of 48 hours – the hardest point –  but the difference in my joints was enough to make me keep going.

Third 24 hours I felt  weak, drowsy and miserably bored by this stage.   I did virtually nothing.  I couldn’t really sustain an interest in reading or Facebook, and found it very hard to concentrate on the film I was watching – Donnie Darko, which  probably was a bit too trippy for my enfeebled state, really – though I also found it much more emotional than I would normally.   It was only towards the second half of this day that I felt I physically needed food, rather than merely wanting it.   I felt quite literally drained.  I’d obviously emptied put my digestive system and was pooping  like a new born baby; presumably living off your own lard is similar to living off breast milk.

When I had read up about people doing water only fasts under medical supervision in expensive hospitals and health farms, I’d read that they were instructed not to shower, bathe or  use lotions, deodorants or toothpaste.   I ignored these instructions, because the showering and bathing ban was due to the risk that people might faint in the shower and hurt themselves, and the lotions ban was apparently because of the increased sensitivity to smell.  I definitely had the latter, but bathing and moisturising were the absolute highlight of my day.  I fell asleep in every bath – I sometimes do on ordinary days – but I am pretty sure I’d have woken up if I’d inhaled any water and if I hadn’t, well, more fool me, really.  The toothpaste ban was to avoid the stomach being tricked into thinking food was in your mouth, and secreting acid expectantly.  I slooshed with mouthwash, and that seemed okay, but by day three my mouth felt slimy and horrible, so I did brush my teeth with toothpaste.  This was a bad mistake; my mouth filled with saliva, my stomach reacted noisily, and it was the only time I felt really sick.  I drank a glass of cold water, quickly, but still felt pretty rotten for some time afterwards, and only held out because I wanted to achieve the 72 hour mark.

Results:  I broke my fast with a home made soya protein shake with blueberries and cocoa.  These shakes are what I used to snack on after strenuous exercise when I was much more active, and what I sometimes have in lieu of lunch if I know I am going out for dinner, so I can maximise my appetite and capacity for fine food later (I am never a cheap date).    The quite bland shake seemed as rich as a creamy chocolate mousse.  I couldn’t actually drink it from the glass, as it was too rich and ‘physical’ somehow, poking my nose into the cup and have stuff going into my mouth.  I had to eat with a spoon, very slowly, in three installments.  About ten minutes after the first installment, I felt fantastic.   I felt jubilant, powerful, amazing.  It can’t have been a sugar rush – not from a handful of blueberries – but it was a very intense feeling of well-being restored.   That night I ate a small portion of  salmon and spinach, again in installments, and felt very, very full.   The next day, a mouthful of cheese – my snacking nemesis – felt like the richest, creamiest, most delightful thing ever.  Possibly because it is, of course, but I felt I was  making this wonderful discovery for the first time.

I was pleased enough with the effect on my joints to fast like this again.  If doing so occasionally eases my discomfort and reduces my need for painkillers, it’s definitely worth the temporary dreariness.  I am not sure I could fast for longer than 72  hours even though six days is supposedly the optimal time (though I suspect a hospital taking wads of dollars off you per day to let you sit in a room and drink filtered water would say that).   It definitely worked as a way of rebooting my appetite and making it easier to eat less, and less frequently.  My sweet tooth has been diminishing for a while, as it does with most people as they age, but fasting seems to have accelerated the process.  I haven’t even fancied a mince pie,  one of my favourite seasonal foods, since.  I still snack on cheese, but less frequently and in much smaller portions.  I’m eating more mindfully and appreciatively.

It has now been exactly two weeks since I started the fast.   I lost about nine pounds over the three days (my scales aren’t accurate). Afterwards ,I found it easy to take up the  small-portion, low GI  way of eating that usually works for me if I want to lose (or not gain) weight.  I am eating less food, more slowly and more carefully.    I am drinking less coffee than I used to.  This is  not deliberate, as I don’t have any qualms about caffeine, I just don’t want it as much.  The first post-fast coffee I had tasted extraordinarily bitter, the way I first remember it tasting when I was a child.   I have kept off the nine pounds and lost a little more. The only time I have eaten more than I feel I should have, was the only time I had had some booze, at a meal with some girlfriends.  As ever, booze is the gateway drug to more food (and more booze).  Who ever went into a cheap kebab shop sober?  I have no intention of giving up drinking, I am just saving it for high days and holidays.

Generally, I feel better for the experience. It has lessened my joint pain and my appetite, and given me a bit of a rest and energy boost.  I would not do it again if I was feeling depressed, as the enforced isolation and inactivity and general dreariness would, I am sure, make me feel worse.  I wouldn’t do it if I lived alone for similar reasons, and because seeing someone everyday who was encouraging and distracting and who administered fuss and back rubs made it much less onerous.  It think it would be impossible to combine with caring for a child or doing normal work outside the home or having to cook for someone else.

The most remarkable aspect of it, for me, was being so clearly aware of the difference between real, physical  hunger and conditioned, psychological hunger, because I was constantly forced to question whether or not I really was properly hungry.   Now I seem to be enjoying less food, more.

Rabbit Stew: The Bunny’s Journey from Desperational to Aspirational

Rabbit stew, pig’s cheeks casserole, and pork belly were all things I ate as child  and didn’t encounter again outside my own kitchen, until I saw them on menus in gastropubs and restaurants priding themselves on the traditional Britishness of their food.   

We ate them when I was a child because they were cheap.  At school I  soon learnt not to mention eating fluffy bunnies, horrifying pig’s cheeks and disgustingly fatty pork, unless I actively wanted to give my classmates – many of whose parents were making Bernard Matthews rich and some of whom were affluent enough to have everything in their packed lunches from M&S – a fit of the screaming abdabs.   Now the food of my childhood is all over expensive menus   We bought our rabbit in Bejam! (remember them, and their early adoption of gratuitous punctuation?), chopped up and frozen in casserole packs. Sometimes we got them free, when my brothers shot them.   Once we had to have a hasty cremation in the back garden because my mother was convinced the rabbit had mixamatosis.   but usually they got  hung in the shed for a few days, and then skinned and cooked.  

Now I get my rabbit from the farmers’ market in Richmond at a fiver a bunny, or sometimes from the market in Kingston at two for eight quid, or three for ten if it is the end of the day. Either way, you can get a lean, meaty rabbit for the price of a flabby, grey battery chicken.  This is my preferred way of cooking them. I was fed it on the bone as a child, but think the faff of removing the meat and blending some of the veg to thicken the gravy, makes for a better  dish.

Rabbit Stew with Fennel and Cider 

Ingredients for the stew: one whole rabbit, two or so sticks of celery (I chopped two inches off a whole celery), two leeks (onions would be fine), four carrots, two thirds of a fennel bulb, a can or bottle of cider, a stock cube (preferably chicken or ham), a couple of bayleaves, a teaspoon of English mustard.  

Ingredients for the optional sausage balls: two meaty good quality plain or cumberland sausages, a handful of chopped chorizo,  half a small red onion, finely chopped, the feathery bits from the fennel or some actual fennel, finely chopped (parsley would work, too), ground green pepper (black would do).  

This is quite easy to make and serves four, though we were greedy and ate the lot between three of us. First chop your rabbit up by hacking off the limbs and splitting the back into two sections.  First roughly chop the fennel, and fry in butter on a gentle heat in a large saucepan.  It doesn’t need to be cooked through, just part way, then remove and retain.   Brown the rabbit portions in the same pan, in butter, but on a higher heat. Add the celery  and leeks and carrots and let them cook for a couple  minutes, Turn the heat right up, pour in the cider, let it fizz and up and boil. Add a mugful of water, the stock cube, bayleaves and mustard. Then turn the heat low, put the lid on and let the stew simmer for 40 mins to an hour – it will be done when the rabbit is tender – poke a fork in a leg and test. 

While it is cooking you can make the sausage balls, if you are having them. You just skin the sausages, combine all the ingredients in a bowl using your hands, roll it into balls, stick the balls in the freezer for five minutes, then fry till nicely brown and reserve. In a ceramic pan, you won’t need any oil to fry them in.  

When the rabbit is done, drain off the liquid, put it back on the saucepan and put the leeks and celery back into it.  Put the rabbit portions somewhere cool (I stuck mine out in the garden).   Blitz the liquid, leeks and celery with a hand blender till smooth.  This will give you a lovely rich gravy. Chop or break up the carrots and add those to it, as they give a nice splash of colour .  Pick the meat off the rabbit, which will only take a few mins to be cold enough to handle, and put that in the sauce.  Add the fennel and the sausage balls if you are using them, and bring back up to a simmer..   If you’ve a bit of creme fraiche or cream to use up, you could add that, too. Check the seasoning and serve. 

We had this with some broccoli and  potato and sweet potato mash..  I think it would have been better with just boiled potatoes, so you could mash them into the delicious gravy yourself.  I’d scoffed most of mine – and all the big chunks of rabbit – before I remembered to take a photo.