in which we go to Sidlesham for my mother’s birthday

My mother’s birthday starts with gloriously warm sunshine that is far too summery for a morning in early March. That said, it is more attractive when inside looking out than it is when actually outside (particularly when the sun is behind a cloud), but it still isn’t bad for time of year.

My mother and I go into Emsworth to buy the ingredients for a one of Nigella’s lovely chocolate Guinness cakes, as I am charged with creating a cake for her birthday. My other proposed option – courgette cake; (think carrot cake but green) – was vetoed by my sister on the ground that the men of her household (sic) don’t like courgettes, which, anyway, weren’t available in 1930’s Ireland, when my mother was born. I’m not sure that Green and Black’s cocoa was either, but, in the words of a popular song, I let it go.

My brother-in-law brings round a suitable tin in which to bake the cake, as my mother has disposed of a lot of her batterie de cuisine, as it was  very much my father who did the cooking, and she hasn’t much interest in that side of things. The only flaw to this is that, when I am down here and entertaining dreams of culinary grandeur, I have to borrow my sister’s stuff, although, as she is normally very well stocked, this isn’t usually a problem, unless we are going to want to use the same tin on the same weekend.

The Guinness cake is actually a ludicrously easy recipe, as there is no strenuous mixing, just heating stuff in a pan. It produces a moist and heavy cake – and really needs the contrast of the topping. I don’t need all the cream I’ve bought for the topping and my sister takes what is left to have on her porridge, issuing a stern fatwah to the effect that fat is not the enemy; sugar is. This is horribly depressing, even though I have been given the identical message from several different sources. Even worse, is being told in severe tones that I am the only member of the family to have inherited my father’s sweet tooth as though this were some kind of wilfully adopted disability. But I go easy on the sugar: it’s generally true that you can reduce it by 25% in most recipes.

 

Chocolate Guinness Cake

for the cake

• 250 ml Guinness
• 250 grams unsalted butter
• 75 grams cocoa powder (possibly add more?)
• a pink of Chilli powder
• 300 grams caster sugar (this is 100 g less than in the original recipe)
• 142 ml sour cream
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 275 grams plain flour
• 2 ½ teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
  

  for the topping

• 300 grams cream cheese
• 150 grams icing sugar
• 125 ml double cream (or whipping cream)

1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 4/180°C/350ºF, and butter and line a 23cm / 9 inch spring form tin.
2. Pour the Guinness into a large wide saucepan, add the butter – in spoons or slices – and heat until the butter’s melted, at which time you should whisk in the cocoa and sugar. Beat the sour cream with the eggs and vanilla and then pour into the brown, buttery, beery pan and finally whisk in the flour and bicarbonate of soda.
3. Pour the cake batter into the greased and lined tin and bake for 45 minutes to an hour. Leave to cool completely in the tin on a cooling rack, as it is quite a damp cake.
4. When the cake’s cold, sit it on a flat platter or cake stand and get on with the icing. Lightly whip the cream cheese until smooth, sieve over the icing sugar and then beat them both together. Or do this in a processor, putting the unsieved icing sugar in first and blitz to remove lumps before adding the cheese.
5. Add the cream and beat again until it makes a spreadable consistency. Ice the top of the black cake so that it resembles the frothy top of the famous pint.

My mother and I are then picked up by my brother-in-law and sister – plus nephew in the back – as they drive us to the Crab and lobster at Sidlesham for a birthday lunch. Alas my niece is not with us, as she is working hard in Liverpool on her History degree. I am somewhat shocked to be told that she has given up both meat and alcohol for Lent – whether for reasons of economy or self-denial remains obscure. What kind of example is that for the youth of today to set for their elders?

Sidlesham is a beautiful, inaccessible (I think they rather like it that way) snooty little village, with an even more pronounced sense of its own superiority than Blackheath or Lewes, difficult though this might be to get one’s head around. Every house is desperately competing to be more stylish than its neighbours in a way that must make them horribly exhausting to live in, as immense effort seems to have gone into demonstrating that the owners have the taste, drive and money to provide themselves with the ultimate in modernity, individuality and comfort, whilst displaying a perfect awareness of what it appropriate when converting a period house into a weekend cottage. It’s rather like a village where all the houses have featured on Grand Designs. It would make a splendid incognito getaway place for a Tory politician to take his research assistant for the weekend.

It certainly looks rather lovely in what is now glorious sunshine, with a splendid view of the sea and a vast, flat grassy marsh that somehow deadens the sound and makes you feel that you shouldn’t make too much noise. We park the car and make our way to the Crab and Lobster, whose interior is as frenetically aspirational as the rest of Sidlesham has led me to expect: more international hotel than country pub.

Partly for eponymous reasons, I have the crab cakes, which are absolutely gorgeous – although it’s really all about the chilli and the coriander when it should also be about the crab. My stone bream with mussels is dressed up to the nines and looks better than it tastes: nothing wrong with it, but somehow all the individuality has been lost. The apple and date crumble comes in a dinky little saucepan with a jug of custard, but isn’t quite as good as it ought to be. The fact is that it would have looked less good –  but tasted rather better – at the wonderful, very local, Sussex Brewery.

Alas, the Crab and Lobster is a little up itself and trying a little too hard – just like Sidlesham itself. There is much effort on flashy presentation that would have been better expended on the taste, which was never less than adequate but not quite equal to the expectations created by its dressy appearance: the food is just a bit disappointing in the manner of a good-looking, beautifully-turned out man who, when he opens his mouth, says that he thinks UKIP talk a lot of sense. I suspect that quite a few people who think like that politically come here. Cuisine du look is what a French film theorist would call it, something designed to cater for a generation that posts photographs of its food on Facebook – and, yes, I know that includes me.

After lunch, the unseasonably gorgeous sunshine has us all thinking that a walk by the sea would be nice. My sister, brother-in-law and nephew all put on their walking shoes which conveniently live in the boot for just these occasions. And we set off. It’s rather muddy and squelchy – a source of some anxiety for my mother and me who are not really shod for this eventuality – but we persist in the hope that things will improve underfoot. And so they do, but only briefly before getting worse again, so that the walk becomes more of a wade. This is a cycle that persists and soon my shoes are completely wet through and streaked with mud. Then the wind starts to get up. And finally we see sense and head back for the car. Thank goodness for tea and Guinness cake when we get home.

In which I make it to the gym for the first time this year

I haven’t been to the gym since early November: Christmas business and winter snuffles both provided good excuses for the lack of inclination. I guess my trips to the gym are a bit like a 19th century Frenchman’s relations with his mistress: something to be engaged in when other responsibilities allow, but not a primary commitment, let alone a duty. Those who go to the gym out of fear – whether of their personal unattractiveness or a premature death or because of an underlying dread that there isn’t enough real hardship in their lives and one day they will have to pay for it – will no doubt be scandalised by this irresponsible attitude. But, let’s face it, no one on their death-bed wishes that they had spent more time in the gym.

In this context, there is a rather appealing flight of fancy – I’m not sure that it’s sufficiently verifiable by experiment to be dignified with the term hypothesis – that we all of us have a strictly limited number of heart beats over the course of our life. Too much activity at the gym could, therefore, be seen as wasting precious heartbeats. However, regular exercise (including the gym) probably has the effect of generally slowing down the heart rate, thereby extending the time it takes to spend your total number of heart beats and indicating that this issue is more complicated than it looks. And, whether I go to the gym to not, I do manage a limited amount of exercise, simply by not having a car and walking everywhere. I am sure that there must be a spreadsheet that would confirm the point at which the benefits of exercise became marginal. Not that simply living for longer is good, if it’s just more time to be spent in bed drooling, incontinent or not my right mind. The variables really are too many for it to be worth doing anything but what feels right for you.

Whatever, going to the Gym for first time in 2015 is every bit as awful as expected, although a sedentary January with lots of food was never going to make it easy, particularly when combined with a largely gym free November and a greedy December. Indeed, the miracle is that my weight has not substantially increased. Needless to say, I have to reduce my exertions on the cross trainer – both the settings and the duration – as I am not anywhere near to my October levels, as judgementally recorded on my phone. Even, after ten minutes on a lower level, it’s starting to feel like a big effort, and I can hardly wait for my ordeal on the cross trainer to be over. The second time will surely not be this bad, I tell myself. It’s rather like the first day back at work after a holiday.

In any case, Tony is coming to dinner, and I have food to worry about. To start with we have cubes of Manchego dusted with paprika – perfect for the lazy entertainer who wants to give the impression of having gone to some trouble – and some black pepper flavoured crisps. Alas, I discover that the latter are best before  January 2012, and definitely taste sub optimal as the spin doctors would say. In a way, I am rather pleased about this, as it shows how rarely I eat crisps, although it also perhaps shows why my nephew when he was staying with me was uncharacteristically inhibited at eating them when I told him to help himself.

Dinner is one of those marvellous one pot chicken recipes that you can make a huge quantity of and then freeze in small containers to make your own oven-ready meals.

One pot Chicken with pancetta and Vermouth

50g butter

2 tblspoons of olive oil

4 chicken legs – thighs and drumsticks

salt and pepper

Cubed pancetta

An onion halved and sliced

2-3 Generous splashes of Vermouth – I use Noily Prat

1 Kg of potatoes, peeled and cut into large chunks

5- 6 sprigs of thyme

300ml good chicken stock

Preheat oven to 150C

Melt butter and oil in a heavy casserole.

Season the chicken legs and brown all over and remove.

Add the pancetta and onion and cook until brown.

Pour in the Vermouth and deglaze.

Add the potatoes and coat in the fat.

Stir in thyme and stock. Add chicken back

Bring to the boil and cover and cook in the oven for 60-90 mins until potaoes are soft.

We have it with carrots and roast vegetables and very good it is too.

For our second course, we have rum sauce and a Heston Christmas pudding (reduced at Waitrose after Christmas to practically nothing) with concealed clementine. I mention the sauce first deliberately, as the pudding is, in my view, definitely the accompaniment here: this dish is all about rum and vanilla and smooth and silky milkiness, and the sauce is deliberately much less sweet than its fruity accompaniment. It’s hugely enjoyable, and does raise the question whether it is worth making your own Christmas pudding – the intense citrus of the clementine adds a perfectly contrasting note. Tony and I have seconds and easily demolish something that purports to serve six.

After this, we settle down to watch the DVD of the Chorus Christmas Show. Even after seeing lots of chorus shows in DVD, I still cringe at seeing myself perform, at the same time as feeling full of admiration for the collective impact of the Chorus as a whole.

I don’t know whether it’s embarrassment, drunkenness or innate clumsiness, but, after taking one of several draughts of wine – why is there not an ordinary unobtrusive word for when you have something more than a sip but less than a gulp? – I fail to place my glass back on the table, and it falls to the ground, scattering glass and the deep red Merlot that Tony kindly brought with him far and wide. As icing on the cake, I then proceed to cut my finger when gathering up the glass fragments, spattering more red than I am managing to wipe up, albeit in a rather different shade that really doesn’t go with the Merlot. It seems as though I’ve already used up all of my stock of competence for the month. I shall have to let my battery recharge before I am safe to be let out again. Let alone cook for someone.

In which I have a fabulous New Year’s Eve

Suddenly it’s the day of my big gastronomic challenge: Alastair, Andrew, Faizal and Graeme are coming to dinner on the last day of 2014. Being a sleek, efficient, goal-directed, well-oiled (extra virgin, of course) engine of culinary excellence, I make my way to Sainsbury’s before the sun is up, while the larks are still wanting to snatch a few more minutes’ kip before getting under the shower. Almost before it is light, I am back home on my bicycle, which was so laden with good things as to make it rather wobbly.

Such is the extent of things that I have to do, that I start with some displacement activity in order to keep panic at bay. I have fun making a table display with fruit so that I can confer a decadent Roman banquet vibe on the proceedings. I’m not really sure the ancient Romans went in for vibe, although they certainly knew how to party. However, this doesn’t sop me artily assembling a cornucopia of pineapple and grapes, clementines and Physalis – Graeme tells us later on that he had to suggest to a colleague that it was better if he didn’t pronounce it to rhyme with syphilis – mangoes, passion fruit and lychees. Not all of these were available in Classical times, but what the hell? It’s surprisingly easy, as I have just the right kind of cake stand, to produce something that actually looks quite impressive. Later on it gets turned into a rather good fruit salad.

Spiced Tropical Fruit Salad

This is remarkably good.

115 g caster sugar

1 scotch bonnet chilli/ some chilli flakes

5 black peppercorns

2 star anise

1 lemon

a few drops of angostura bitters

I teaspoon vanilla extract

one Pineapple skinned and cut into chunks

8 lychees peeled and stoned

2 bananas peeled and sliced (better without IMHO)

1 ripe mango, peeled, stoned and cut into chunks

8 physalis

1 grenadilla (I’ve never bothered with this)

pomegranate seeds (not in original but add welcome colour)

Place sugar, chilli, peppercorns and star anise in a small saucepan. Remove peel from lemon and add with 300ml of water. Place over medium heat and stir occasionally until sugar has dissolved. Simmer gently for ten minutes.

Remove from heat, and add juice of the lemon, angostura bitters, and vanilla. Leave to cool and then strain to remove spices. The longer they stay in the syrup, the spicier it will get.

Place chopped fruit in a bowl, pour over syrup, chill and serve.

I realise that I need to get to grips with my biggest challenge first: the Christmas Great British Bake-off triple-decker pomegranate and passion fruit Pavlova. This requires major maths, as I’m doing a version with 8 eggs instead of 10 that is slightly smaller in size, so that I can use my cake tins to draw circles on the greaseproof paper so that the three layers of meringue are all the right size.

Pomegranate and Passionfruit Pavlova

Serves 6-8

8 egg whites

400 g caster sugar

4 passionfruit scooped out, very gently warmed and sieved to remove the seeds

2 tablespoons of sugar.

600 ml double cream

2 tablespoons of cointreau

3 tablespoons of orange curd

3 tablespoons of lemon curd

zest of 2 limes

Some crushed peeled pistachios

The seeds of 2 pomegranates

runny honey or pomegranate molasses

Heat oven to 110C.

Line three baking sheets with greaseproof paper without using any oil.

Draw 3 circles on the paper . I use the cake tins that Tony gave me which are 22cm, 20 cm and 16.5 cm

Whisk the egg whites in a large bowl until they form stiff peaks. Add sugar gradually and keep whisking until mixture is thick and glossy.

Spoon half the mixture over the largest circle, and divide the rest between the smaller two, putting more in the larger circle. Use the back of a spoon to spread to the edge of the circle and to make swirls. Transfer to oven and cook for 5 hours. Turn off heat and leave to cool completely.

Stir passion fruit juice into the cream with the sugar. The cream will thicken without being whipped. Stir in the cointreau and the curds to make a cream.

Place largest meringue on a plate. Spoon over a third of the cream. Scatter with pomegranate seeds, lime and pistachios. Top with second meringue and repeat and again with third meringue. Finish with more seeds zest and pistachios and drizzle with honey or pomegranate molasses.

The recipe claims that you shouldn’t grease the baking paper. I do what I usually do when making a Pavlova, and brush a little oil onto the baking tray beneath the paper, which has a slightly strange – but not disastrous – effect on the meringue base, making it extra soft and sticky and hard to peel away from the paper: an effect exacerbated by only using a single sheet of paper instead of the two stipulated in the recipe book that I grew up with. I can only guess that the oil, even though the paper stops it from touching the meringue, gets rather hot, which has implications for the meringue. Next time I’m going to follow instructions and try without altogether, as modern baking paper is already pretty non-stick, although this term is relative, as it’s still a bit of a faff peeling the paper off. It takes a few hours to do, but, once the meringue layers are done, that is almost it, bar the final assembly, apart from mixing the filling, getting the pomegranate seeds out the fruit, and sieving the passion fruit.

I realise, to my annoyance, that my pistachios are now well past their best their best, and that I shall have to make do with lime peel to provide a green colour contrast (as in the original recipe) rather than the more OTT shards of green nut that I had been fantasising about using. As so often in the kitchen, if you’ve got it, use it, or will pass its sell-by date and have to be thrown away. This is always rather distressing. It’s not so much for reasons of economy: more sadness at food ending up being thrown away instead of being savoured as it was meant to be, rather like the flower in Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, that had the futile experience of being ‘born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air’.

This is perhaps rather sentimental of me. A more hard-headed person would point out just how much food gets thrown away unearned in British kitchens – it’s apparently several million pounds per week. It’s awful when you think about the number of people who are having to use food banks, and are desperately in need of this wasted food. You also wonder whether the supermarkets would have any profits left if everyone only bought the food they actually ate. And is this waste the result of improvidence and poor planning, or exhaustion and overwork? Is it about being the eye being greedier than the stomach? Or perhaps it’s about a reluctance to use the freezer for leftovers, or possibly a credulous belief in sell by dates?

The intention is to start the evening with Savoury Stars, along with a few Devils on Horseback and olives, and champagne cocktails to drink.

Savoury Stars

Delicious with pre lunch drinks. A huge thanks to my wonderful former boss Margaret Jeffery for divulging this recipe

3oz plain white flour

3oz grated Parmesan cheese (I used mature Cheddar)

3 oz. butter

½ level tsp. salt (too much – a pinch would do)

½ level tsp. cayenne pepper

1oz sun-dried tomatoes

1oz pistachio nuts

1 oz. pitted black olives

1 egg (I don’t usually bother with this)

1 level tsp. poppy seeds, caraway seeds or sesame seeds (I don’t bother with these either…!)

1. In a food processor, blend the flour, cheese, butter, salt and cayenne pepper until the pastry forms a soft ball. Knead lightly, wrap in clingfilm and chill for about 10 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, chop the tomatoes, nuts and olives finely.

3. Roll out the pastry on a floured work surface until it is about 5mm (¼ “) thick, Brush with beaten egg, and then sprinkle on an even layer of nuts, tomatoes and olives. Fold the pastry to enclose the filling completely.

4. Roll out pastry to 1 cm (½”) thickness. Use cutters (they suggest Christmas tree, star and moon shapes…!) to stamp out shapes and then place on a baking sheet. Brush lightly with beaten egg and sprinkle with seed. Chill for 20 minutes.
5. Bake at 180ºC (350ºF) Mark 4 for 15-20 minutes or until well browned. Leave on baking sheet for 5 minutes before removing to a cooling rack. (Can be frozen!)

The stars are not the easiest thing I’ve cooked, rather in the way of the spiced ginger Christmas biscuits, as the olives and sun-dried tomatoes are damp, which makes the pastry sticky and tricky to roll, but, unlike the ginger biscuit dough, this one does eventually get the idea – regular dusting the rolling-pin in flour helps – and soon I have some nice looking stars, and it starts to feel like things are going in the right direction.

Then I make the Sweet Potato Soup.

sweet potato soup (probably misremembered from Nigel Slater)

Place peeled and chopped sweet potatoes (with a couple of peeled and quartered onions if you have them) on a sheet of foil

Pour some olive oil over, followed by chilli flakes, black pepper and dried herbs.

Wrap them tightly in the foil and roast in the oven at a high heat – this will probably take an hour.

Tip into a saucepan. Add a tin of coconut milk and the juice and zest of at least one lime and some stock or water

Simmer until the sweet potato is tender. Liquidise or mash

Garnish with chopped coriander if you have it (I didn’t)

Alas, I overdo the chilli – it is all too easy to scatter the flakes with gay abandon – and have to try and calm it down with extra lime juice and creamed coconut. It’s all much easier with one of those stick blenders.

Then it’s time for the tricky stuff in the form of Salmon en croute, which is completely new territory.

Salmon en croute with currants/cranberries and ginger

Serves 6

2 x 550g pieces of skinned salmon

100g softened unsalted butter

4 pieces of stem ginger, well drained and finely chopped

25 g of currants or dried cranberries (the latter briefly soaked in boiling water and then drained)

1/2 teaspoon ground mace

750g chillled bought puff pastry

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Season salmon on both sides with salt and pepper.

Mix the softened butter with the stem ginger, currants/cranberries, mace and some black pepper.

Spread the inner face of one salmon fillet with the butter and place the other fillet on top.

Cut the pastry in half and on a lightly floured surface, use one half to roll out a rectangle about 4 cm bigger all round than the salmon. Roll the other half to about 5 cm bigger all round.

Lay the smaller rectangle on a well floured baking sheet. Put the salmon fillets in the middle. Brush a wide layer of beaten egg all the way around outside the salmon.

Lay the second pastry rectangle above the salmon, taking care not to stretch it. Press the pastry tightly around the outside of the salmon, trying to ensure that you haven’t trapped too much air in. Press the edges well together.

Trim the edges to leave a 2.5 cm band all the way round. Brush with beaten egg. Mark the edge with a fork and decorate the top with a fish scale effect by pressing an upturned teaspoon gently into the pastry working in rows down the length of the fish.

Chill for at least 30 mins in the fridge.

Preheat oven to 200c and put in a large baking sheet.

Remove salmon from fridge and brush with egg all over.

Take hot baking sheet from oven and place salmon onto the hot sheet. Return to oven for 35-40 mins.

Remove from oven and rest for 5 mins and then cut and serve.

All goes well to start with, and it looks so good that I take an adoring photo of my handiwork. This means that I am distracted at the critical moment and forget to put the second salmon fillet on top of the cranberry butter, which is what I am meant to do before putting the top layer of pastry on. A a result, what I produce looks gorgeous but it only has half the salmon in it, and the cranberry and ginger butter is right at the top where it will seep into the pastry rather than flavouring the salmon.

I consider my options, and realise that I only have one: I have to take the top layer of pastry off  – which by now has cranberry and ginger butter all over it – scrape the butter off the pastry and reapply it to the salmon, put the second layer of salmon on top of the butter where it belongs, re-knead and re-chill the pastry, and then roll it out and try and stretch it so that it covers both fillets, which is difficult when it is sticky with the bits of the butter, ginger and cranberry that I failed to scrape off. A tougher man than I am would have got on his bike and bought some more pastry, but I really can’t face that! It feels like adding extravagance to Improvidence somehow. And there isn’t really time.

The moral is never admire your food until your guests have done so at the table. I shall never post food porn on Facebook again.

Nigella’s Dauphinois potatoes – possibly the most sublime combination of fat and carbs in the known universe – do, however, go completely to plan. They are deadly to the waistline, but so delicious that they can be eaten on their own with nothing else.

Dauphinois Potatoes

Nigella is probably more correct to call this creamy potato gratin. Whatever, it is the most wonderful combination of fat and carbohydrate known to humanity. I can quite happily eat this on its own.

2kg floury potatoes (Edwards, Maris piper)

500f ml full fat milk

500 ml double cream

I onion, peeled, halved and sliced

1 tablespoon of salt

50g unsalted butter

Preheat oven to 240C.

Peel potatoes and slice into approximately 1cm slices and put into a large heavy saucepan with the milk, cream, onion and salt.

Bring to boil and simmer til verging on tender – around 45 mins to an hour.

Grease a large roasting tin with butter. Pour in the potato and milk mixture. Dot with butter and cook in oven for 15 mins. Rest for 10-20 mins

My guests most considerately all turn up more or less together, despite their differing routes (by car, train and on foot) and on time but after giving me a bit of wriggle room. I have such well-mannered friends.

Things get off to a fizzing start with the Champagne cocktails, which feature sugar lumps soaked in orange angostura, clementine peel and Armagnac. Alastair gets us all to wear ear rings from his vintage collection. Now that he has played Mephistopheles – and knows just how to bend all to his will when he is feeling like tempting people to mischief – he is completely lethal. Fortunately he is too indecisive to do this very often. The earrings certainly add both decadent and hilarious notes to the proceedings, like a transgressive version of the party hat.

There is general approval of Kristin Scott Thomas’s damehood in the New Year’s Honours List, and a few unkind laughs about the one for Joan Collins. I am cruel enough to suggest that she got it for her charitable work rather than her acting, but in no time we are reminiscing nostalgically about her wonderful Alexis in Dynasty and the way she pushed that noxious, bland, all-American Barbie Doll Krystal into the swimming pool.

The soup – especially once it’s been through a sieve, which makes it gloriously smooth – goes down quite well, although it is still a bit on the spicy side. Not overdoing the chilli flakes is a useful lesson to have learnt. It’s just a bit of a shame that my guests have had to learn it with me. Chilli is the one spice in my experience that needs to be used with circumspection rather than exuberance.

I start to worry that the food is all a bit too elaborate, but soon I am having far too good a time laughing to be too bothered about it. Nigella’s upmarket mushy peas – prepared in good time – get forgotten and my guests have to do without them.

Nigella’s Upmarket Mushy Peas

800g frozen petit pois

100g butter

4 tablespoons of crème fraiche or double cream

some freshly grated parmesan

Salt some boiling water and cook the peas until well done.

Drain, tip into food processor. Add butter and process. Add crème fraiche and process. Add parmesan and process. They can be reheated as wanted.

Also good on crostini

However, they get used later for a soufflé one day and an omelette with sun-dried tomatoes and goat’s cheese another. As a mixture, it’s damn good, especially on crostini.

It’s not that the salmon is short of other accompaniments: roast tomatoes add colour, although I realise that cherry tomatoes are much, much taster than the more convenient larger ones; and the baked carrots and parsnip, despite being beautifully garnished with maple syrup and sesame seeds, are, unfortunately, somewhat undercooked – or, rather, some of the pieces were a bit too large when they went in the oven, which is a bit of a shame. But there you go.

I had followed my sister’s instructions to the letter about chilling the salmon en croute in the fridge and then placing it on a preheated baking sheet before cooking it in the oven, but it still ends up with a slightly soggy bottom. I wonder if it is because my oven was so full of stuff that it needed to be on a higher temperature than the recipe said. I also wonder if it is retribution for my photographic narcissism earlier on. Or is this kind of thinking just the result of a personal delusion that everything that happens in the universe must be all about me? There may also be an element of me not enjoying the salmon so much because I’ve cooked all day. Certainly, the piece left over afterwards – which I reheat and eat the day after for a gloriously maintenance free lunch – is much more enjoyable. I never believed my sister when she complained of this particular syndrome, but I now wonder if she is onto something.

We have a pause before starting on the cheese that Andrew has brought. We eat it in the French style before pudding. That that, Farage. After that, we have the Pavlova, which elicits the appropriate gasps of astonishment, but proves rather difficult to serve. It’s enjoyable, but astonishing how intense the taste of pomegranate molasses can be. We follow this with Kate’s delicious dessert wine and nibble at the fruit and some chocolates, although no-one really has any room left.

Then we realise it’s nearly midnight and temporarily vacate the dining room to watch the fireworks on television and hear the chimes of Big Ben – not a reference to the lovely Mr Cohen – from comfort of home. Half the pleasure of watching all of this is the feeling of being warm and comfortable and not having had to queue in the cold and wet.

Then it is time for the changing of the Ben Cohen calendar from 2014 to 2015. We also have a detailed completion to see which is the most alluring photo from my collection, which now comprises a good 7 calendars. Interestingly last year’s winner comes second this year. The winner is something with the legs open in some very tight red shorts that Faizal manages to locate on google, but which is unfortunately not in my collection.

A wonderfully jolly evening that sees the end of 2014 in very painless fashion, even if it takes a couple of days to recover and wash up. This is hardly a problem as it provides  a marvellous excuse to be lazy and gorge on left overs and true blood series 4 for the next couple of days . Happy 2015!

in which I go to zone 9

I meet Judith and Kate at Marylebone Station where we catch a train to Amersham in the depths of Hertfordshire. We are off to meet other friends and exchange Christmas presents in a country pub that feels such an extreme psychological distance from London that it could be on the moon, although it’s actually in something called zone 9. As a zone 4 dweller who periodically gets accused of living in the countryside, it’s rather nice to be able to play the more central than thou card for once.

It feels almost miraculous having got as far as Marylebone. On my way back home from Christmas at my mother’s, I managed to lose my annual season ticket. This was a source of considerable concern, as I had only just renewed it. Fifteen years ago, I had committed the same blunder with similar bad timing. I have never forgotten what a protracted and traumatic process getting a replacement proved to be. It included filling in a multiplicity of forms and being ‘interviewed’ for 45 minutes by two menacing but extremely polite thugs in a cell above Brixton tube station. They proved to be very unimpressed by the string of friends I was able to produce who were willing to testify in public to my high level of general incompetence and inability to function in what is called the real world. Alas these two gentlemen – not to mention their tattoos, uniforms, shaved heads and bulging waistlines – were clearly not going to be satisfied until I admitted that I had sold my mislaid season ticket onto someone in order to finance my crack habit. As I hadn’t actually done this, and was therefore unable to oblige them – although, as a nice middle class boy, I like to be helpful when I can – our relationship never really recovered.

After about a month, London Transport, with great reluctance, issued me with a replacement ticket, on condition that this never happened again. As far as I can see, the only benefit conferred by this exhausting and unsatisfying process was that I gained some understanding into how easy it is to be intimidated into confessing to something that you haven’t actually done. Whatever, I felt sufficiently battered not to lose my season ticket for the next years.

However, after 15 years of competence, I had now loused up again , and I was expecting something much nastier than a Bracknellesque reprimand for carelessness. But it never happened: thanks to the joy of oyster, which means that they can simply cancel the lost card at the press of a button, there was no drama, no threats, no hassle: they merely said that they would pop a replacement in the post, which I ought to receive within two working days. I guess this shows that sometimes things can actually improve.

No doubt the geeks would claim that this was all the result of technology, but I’d like to think that it indicates something in human existence that deserves a response of moderate optimism. I am reminded of a poem by Sheena Pugh that a dear friend – now a nun at St Cecilia’s Abbey – read out at her sister’s wedding:

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
From bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
Faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
Elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
Amiss: sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
That seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you.

I’m not entirely sure about the scansion but the sentiments are admirable,

After a brief taxi ride from Amersham station, we meet up with Tim, John, Susanna, James and Audrey at the Pomeroy for a splendid lunch of chicken, leek and bacon pie and sticky toffee pudding with custard. I do very well in the subsequent present exchanges, highlights of which include

The Futurist’s Cookbook – a strange piece of fascist surrealist whimsy
Some gorgeous desert wine, which will be perfect for New Year’s Eve
An assortment of other food and Italy focused books
Meyerbeer’s Robert Le Diable in Italian
Scented Olive oil

I also learn about a version of Turandot by Schiller, translated into hilarious Victorian doggerel. She is most famous in Puccini’s unfinished version in which the ice princess, who kills every suitor who fails to answer her riddles, finally capitulates to the tenor who sings Nessun Dorma. It’s a rum piece full of sexual neurosis. Turandot is an unattractively vengeful and violent creature who isn’t made any more attractive by her eventual capitulation to the man, kind of frustratingly calls into question her ball breaking attitude which was the best thing about her.

I remember a wonderfully sour version by Brecht at the Hampstead Theatre, where, instead of answering riddles, Calaf had to solve the credit squeeze. These bloody bankers get everywhere. It’s better in theory than in performance – and leaves you feeling irritated. But that, I guess, is what Brecht is all about.

After I get back to Zone 4, I do a shopping list for New Year’s Eve and make a clementine cake

It truly is a classic – easy, light and moist and very satisfying. I’m told it’s also gluten free, but I don’t think that it’s a good idea to pander to food faddists and lesbian neuroses by making a thing of this. Before you know it, you will be intimidated by the vegan nazis into making everything fat-free, nut- free, dairy-free, sugar-free, chocolate-free and taste-free, and will suddenly notice that your food lacks sensual allure.

 

Nigella’s Clementine Cake

4-5 Clementines (around 375g weight)

6 eggs

200 g sugar

250 g ground almonds

1 heaped teaspoon of baking powder

Put clementines in a pan, cover with cold water, and bring to the boil. Cook for 2 hours.

Drain off the water and leave to cool. When cool, cut each clementine in half, remove any pips and place everything else (including skin and pith) in the food processor and blitz.

Preheat oven to 190C and butter and line a 21” spring form cake tin.

Beat the eggs. Add sugar, almonds and baking powder. Mix well. Add the pulped clementines. Mix well. Pour cake into prepared tin, making sure the surface is reasonably level.

Cook for an hour, but cover with foil half way through to stop burning. Cake is done when a cocktail stick comes out clean. Cool in tin on a wire rack.

in which I fail to avoid Downton Abbey

Tags

Christmas Pudding, Downton Abbey Christmas Special

After yesterday’s culinary excesses, my mother and I make our way over to my sister’s for a suitably late lunch. As is traditional, we have spinach and celeriac bake, which also features lots of artery-hardening and delicious Gruyere, to go with yesterday’s turkey, gammon and stuffing, along with the spiced onions I’d prepared earlier. There are also a few leftovers from last night, as well as the pigs in blankets that my nephew didn’t eat for breakfast. It’s a curious paradox that the left overs and meals assembled from bits and pieces in the fridge are so often what taste best. It is glorious  food, and I find it impossible to resist seconds.

I haven’t needed to make any sticky toffee pudding – which I am usually required to produce on Boxing Day – as there is still plenty of Christmas Pudding and rum sauce left over. It’s too rainy for a walk, and, after lunch, we all have a nice time reading our presents,  which provides me with a wonderful opportunity to get better acquainted with my collection of new gastroporn. I also manage to make some necessary notes for the blog that I can write up later. For supper, we have cheese and biscuits – I’ve only room for a very small amount – followed by the Christmas cake, which is finally broken into and which I must admit to being rather pleased with.

After supper, the rest of the family settle down with the Downton Abbey Christmas Special. How this predictably-plotted, sloppily-written, stereotypically-characterised, ineptly-constructed, historically-inaccurate, poorly-paced, clunkily-directed, clumsily-acted, abjectly deferential, substandard soap has managed to deceive otherwise sensible people into accepting it as high quality television is one of the more unfathomable mysteries of our time. It’s even got hard-headed, ardently republican antipodeans, with otherwise well-functioning bullshit-detectors, fawningly tugging their forelocks in admiration.

I suppose this shows how stately-house porn is bad for the judgement, and how, even today, Etonian self-assurance is still an effective conjuring trick. Alas, self-confidence always overtakes talent – at least in the short-term – whether you are a prime minister making it up as you go along, with lots of Bullingdon club banker chums to look after, or an ambitious right-wing hack with delusions of literary and aristocratic grandeur churning out feel-good tat for the American market that can double up as crude and easy Tory party propaganda. Truly, the upper classes really are all in it together: shafting the rest of us.

I heroically remain in the kitchen washing up, in order to reduce my exposure to this sycophantic drivel. It is something of a disappointment that even my niece has succumbed to this brain-numbing tosh, although she has the decency to come up with the excuse that she finds it restful when surrounded by vegan anarchists at university. I’m unable to drag out doing the dishes for a whole two hours – my sister has a dishwasher, after all – and, when I’ve finished, I go in to join the rest of the family. I make notes for the blog, and, from time to time, glance at the screen. There is always the fear that it might not be as awful as I’ve insisted it is. Pleasingly, here Downton delivers: every bit as reassuringly banal, tacky, tedious, poorly-crafted and irritating as I remembered. There is something simultaneously consolatory and disappointing about this.

It’s enough to make you think that good television is dead. But, the following evening, I am utterly captivated on I-player by Victoria Wood’s marvellous musical That Day we Sang, which is both hilarious and hugely touching, simultaneously raucous, filthy, witty and very moving and tender. I am suddenly back in love with the BBC.

In which I have a marvellous Christmas Day

Christmas Day dawns bright and glorious and stays that way all day. As my mother and I make our way to Church, where we meet the rest of the family, there are so many people out walking their dogs in order to avoid getting under the feet of whoever is trying to get the turkey in the oven, that it feels like canine rush hour. Then it’s back to my sister’s for our traditional light lunch – designed not to spoil our appetites for the big dinner later on – which starts with champagne cocktails followed by baked and glazed ham, Irish soda bread, home-made coleslaw, clementines, and one of my niece’s cakes, which, I am proud to say, is as delicious as it is pretty. The Christmas cake that I made and brought down on my last visit, has now been iced, but, as is almost traditional, doesn’t get broken into until Boxing Day.

After a little light unwrapping of presents, we go on a walk by the sea. It is a beautiful, sunny, still day – and, as most people are still in the middle of their Christmas lunch, it’s actually quite quiet. We walk along the shore – the tide is high, but not quite high enough to require us to get our feet wet – and through the woods to Warblington Church where my father’s ashes are buried. He is already in our hearts and memories, as we celebrate Christmas without his physical presence, but it’s good to have walked to the spot where his ashes are and looked at the tablet that marks the spot and the vase of Christmas roses that my mother has left there for him and feel that we have included him as best we can in our festivities.

I love my niece’s take on her mother’s method of dealing with the organisational challenge of the Christmas catering at the same time as having her parents in law to stay – a feat that would have had Napoleon blenching with trepidation and brought Alexander the Great out in a cold sweat. She shares it with me as we walk back: over prepare and then go with the flow. It’s not a bad motto for life. Or, at least, it’s a rather comfortable fit for this particular family’s collective psychological make-up. The younger generation can be so wise sometimes. Or perhaps I just mean able to draw sound conclusions from the older generation’s behaviour.

We arrive back, with cold cheeks, strangely energised, and ready for a cup of tea and some more unwrapping of presents. For some strange reason, I have been given huge quantities of gastroporn, including the opera lover’s cook book, a double helping of Ottelenghi books, a wonderful Australian one, and a list of fabulous places to go for tea and cake in London.

We start (just for a change) with some champagne – a magnum brought by Matt and Jill, who are wonderfully well-informed about matters alcoholic – some olives and some adorably fir-tree-shaped, cheesy-tasting, home-made biscuits. As we make our way into the dining room, I realise that I am meant to be saying grace. I am full of mixed feelings about this. It seems to have fallen to my lot by an arbitrary freak of patriarchy. I’m an introvert and don’t like anything as close as this is to public speaking or seizing attention. But, above all, I don’t want to do it because my father should be doing it. But, alas, he isn’t here to do it, and we can’t always opt out of what we don’t want to do – something that my father has taught me – not least because, if you do opt out, either it won’t get done or someone else (who will probably find it every bit as difficult as you, if not even more so) has to do it. And, whilst there is so much to be thankful for, it can’t be denied that we are also missing having him with us,  on  this, our second Christmas without him.

I’m so full of all these ambivalent feelings that, as our music director would say, I’m not really in the zone. But, fortunately, I come from a family whose modus vivendi is over prepare and go with the flow, which means that I’ve already thought about it, and come sort of prepared. All I need to do is give thanks for food, family, and friends, let the wonderful Wendy Cope say what needs to be said – for she says it far better than I ever could – and read from my iPhone.

Bring in a tree, a young Norwegian spruce,
Bring hyacinths that rooted in the cold.
Bring winter jasmine as its buds unfold –
Bring the Christmas life into this house.

Bring red and green and gold, bring things that shine,
Bring candlesticks and music, food and wine.
Bring in your memories of Christmas past.
Bring in your tears for all that you have lost.

Bring in the shepherd boy, the ox and ass,
Bring in the stillness of an icy night,
Bring in the birth, of hope and love and light.
Bring the Christmas life into this house.

Matt and Jill bring a starter with Parma ham and salad and persimmon and peppers – it’s very colourful and tasty, but without filling anyone up.

The turkey looks magnificent and is beautifully tender, thanks to the cranberry butter. My sister and brother-in-law had a slight (18 minute) disagreement about the cooking time. They go with his calculation. After all, he is an engineer, which means that, as far as our side of the family are concerned, he is endowed with practical skills to an almost supernatural extent.

There are all sorts of wonderful things to go with the turkey. Roast potatoes that are gloriously crisp and soft at the same time. Carrots and parsnips in maple syrup and sesame seeds. Cranberry and onion marmalade that is intensely sweet, sharp and spicy, with, for a change, fresh cranberries – which are a very different  animalfrom the sweeter dried ones in the stuffing and the butter –  and pickling spices that cut through the cranberries and onions with a real edge. Richly flavoured intensely savoury gravy and two stuffings. And then the Spouts. In a misguided attempt to render them edible, my sister has cooked them with garlic, Worcester sauce and pomegranates. Alas, all she has achieved is the admittedly difficult feat of making pomegranates inedible. Matt and Jill produce a succession of splendid wines, including a Spanish red to go with the bird and a lovely sweet red that is lighter than port for the pudding

My Sister suddenly realises that she forgot to put the pigs in blankets in the oven. ‘I thought it felt odd that there was enough space in there’, she tells me. Given the plethora of gorgeous things to eat, this is hardly a disaster. Even my nephew – a particular fan of pigs in blankets – doesn’t feel the need to make a fuss about it, although he manages by way of compensation to eat a whole packet for breakfast the following day.

It’s all so good that I am unable to stop myself having seconds. After this, it’s time for a pause and then it is my delightful duty to make the rum sauce. My mother – who grew up on brandy butter – still insists on having it, and there are one or two other squeamish and delicate souls who find rum sauce too full on and join her. My rum sauce is very much not the bland accompaniment that Delia envisages. This has the darkest of dark muscovado sugar – not too much of it, as it has to be less sweet than the Christmas Pudding – and lots of vanilla extract and enough rum to make a sailor’s legs wobble, which means that you have to add it at the last minute so that the alcohol doesn’t evaporate

We are using puddings that my mother made for last Christmas, but we haven’t got around to eating. (The recipe, rather unhelpfully, makes two large and one small. I’m guessing, but I think we just had one of the large ones last year.) Unsurprisingly, we only get through about half of one of them. Usually I make sticky toffee pudding for Boxing Day, but, given the quantity of this year’s left overs, that is not required. Fortunately, there is an ample quantity of rum sauce left over, which makes everything very easy for Boxing Day.

After clearing up and the usual complaints about being too full, we sit down for the Dr Who Christmas Special. As is traditional, we either fall asleep in front of it or complain that it wasn’t as good as it should have been.

Christmas Eve in which I do a lot of stuffing

After an overcast start, it’s a gorgeous bright sunny day, as I head off to my sister’s to start work on the Christmas dinner. My main task is three preparations for the bird.

First of all, there is a dried cranberry fruit stuffing, which also involves dried figs, boiled and blitzed clementines, rosemary, fried onions, and dry-fried almonds. Then there is the other stuffing, which consists of pork sausage meat plus breadcrumbs, grated fresh ginger, nutmeg, prunes, brandy, and milk. It’s actually a combination I devised personally many years ago when I was still living with my parents. I still stand by it now, although I’d add some fresh herbs and some chilli flakes. In deference to the older generation, the latter are omitted.

And finally, there is the special butter for the turkey, which has clementine zest, more dried cranberries, rosemary, thyme, and sage from the garden, and lots of fresh black pepper beaten into it, after which is inserted beneath the turkey skin – something that sounds horribly fiddly, and hazardous and which I don’t have to do – in order to keep the bird moist. I then peel the baby onions for spiced onions, which we shall have with the cold meat on Boxing Day. It’s so much easier now I know to pour boiling water over them: the skins practically fall off and it seems to neutralise a lot of the tear-inducing properties of the onion. Or is the effect of wearing contact lenses? Whatever it is, it doesn’t entirely eliminate the pain in the eyes, but it keeps in within tolerable levels. In any case, we shall all be grateful for it on Boxing Day.

Spiced Onions (6-8)

Another recipe from the Carved Angel and wonderful with cold meat. Perfect at Christmastime with left over turkey and ham.

900 g pearl onions

2 tablespoons of oil

½ teaspoon of whole coriander seeds toasted

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 ½ tablespoons of red or white wine vinegar

1 tablespoon dark muscovado sugar

25g sultanas

1 tablespoon tomato puree

250 ml water

salt and pepper

Pour boiling water over the onions and leave for 1 minute. This helps to make them easier to peel.

Top and tail and peel the onions, and dry them on kitchen paper.

Heat oil in heavy oven proof pan and fry the onions gently for 10 mins.

Grind toasted coriander seeds as fine as possible and add to onions with the cinnamon. Cook for 5 mins, stirring.

Add remaining ingredients to pan, bring to boil and cover. Cook in preheated oven at 140C for 1 – 1 ½ hours. Serve hot or cold

Lunch is yesterday’s left overs from post candlelit carol service supper at my sister’s. Last night  I chose tuna and sweet corn to have on my baked potato Today, it’s baked beans, which I have on toast – which feels rather unusual for me, and rather enjoyable nostalgically comforting in a basic kind of way – followed by a clementine and one of my sister’s excellent chocolate brownies. In my view, Christmas isn’t really a time for bananas, usual or otherwise.

I start to realise, when I compare my culinary duties with last year’s blog, that my sister follows a fixed routine at Christmas – something she shares with Portsmouth Cathedral. And something that my niece, with the fearlessness of youth, refers to, with heavy teenager irony, as The Plan (capital T, capital P). This doesn’t stop her, while her mother and I are focussing on The Christmas Dinner, from deciding to prepare her own recipe – very much NOT part of The Plan – in the form of some clementine and pistachio cupcakes, a fearsomely elaborate recipe that has the temerity to call itself simple, when it requires a great deal of care and fiddly preparation, at the same time as generating a great deal of washing up and creating a vast amount of mess. That said, compared with the other recipes in the book, it is indeed simple – at least in relative terms. I was just the same at her age – and found the unreadably complicated incredibly exciting too. At least on the culinary front.

Then it’s back to my Mother’s for a Heston mince pie and to watch Carols from King’s on the television – which manages to do a different take from Portsmouth, whilst following the same basic formula, albeit with different variations. Then it’s back to my sister’s for dinner . Her parents in law have arrived so there are eight of us sitting down for Salmon en croute – so good that I decide to do it for New Year’s Eve – and stewed plums with a highly caloric, sugary and addictive cream devised by the Wicked Witch of the TV Kitchen also known as Nigella Lawson.

Conversation is wonderfully uninhibited and various and includes the following.

Why women don’t wear heels to commute
My niece – who still claims that her super power is the ability to ŵear heels for eight hours without stopping – insists that it has to be used sensibly, which means not wearing them when no-one can see, using alternative footwear when you need to get somewhere fast, and sitting down as much as possible. Such a sensible girl. As evidence of the importance of knowing when not to wear your heels, she cites the tale of a hapless child who was forced to stop believing in Father Christmas at four years’ old when he saw that “he” was wearing stilettos.

The whereabouts of  the rest of my sister’s  parents-in-laws’ fish cutlery
Eight ivory and silver knives and forks are being used by us to consume the marvellous salmon en croute, but the remainder are in the hands of other relatives. My sister’s father in law still seems to nurse dreams of gathering all the fragments together. I gather that money might even have been offered to the other relatives in possession of said cutlery, but to no avail. Alas using fish cutlery will have disappeared entirely, I suspect, before the set is reunited. I can’t help thinking that John Betjeman would have chuckled and found this amusingly lower middle class.

Phone for the fish knives, Norman
As cook is a little unnerved;
You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes
And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?
The frills round the cutlets can wait
Till the girl has replenished the cruets
And switched on the logs in thegrate.

It’s ever so close in the lounge dear,
But the vestibule’s comfy for tea
And Howard is riding on horseback
So do come and take some with me.

Now here is a fork for your pastries
And do use the couch for your feet;
I know that I wanted to ask you-

Is trifle sufficient for sweet?

Milk and then just as it comes dear?

I’m afraid the preserve’s full of stones;
Beg pardon, I’m soiling the doileys
With afternoon tea-cakes and scones.

That said, I think fish knives are on a different level of solecism,  dating from an era when Victorian cutlery manufacturers exploited the insecurity and desire to show off of the newly monied middle class and got them to spend money on unnecessary cutlery. Nowadays, they just seem a bit of harmless fun – and are santified by age. Debrett’s, whilst not requiring fish knives or approving of them, seems at very least to acknowledge their existence and expect them to be used. Whatever  I certainly  can’t imagine my sister’s parents-in-law being guilty of genteel vulgarisms like serviette, cruet or sweet. But then all of this just shows inexorably the kind of middle class boy that I am.

How cranberries may be so last decade on the Guardian style meter.
The irony is that there could be nothing less stylish than taking the style meter seriously. It’s more just a bit of harmless fun seeing when you are on trend and when you are off it, and  confirming to yourself how ludicrously arbitrary the whole thing is. Cranberries are undoubtedly here to stay. Christmas without them would be like Hamlet without the prince, even if the fashion police have stipulated that introspective Danish indecision is sooo last year.

Your favourite character in True Blood

My niece and I are in complete agreement that it’s Eric.

in which I go home for Christmas

I wake up and realise that I’m off to Emsworth for Christmas. I realise as I pack that I have so much to be thankful for, including not having had to plan and shop and cook for a houseful.

It’s a beautiful sunny morning, but I still find it hard to get moving. Eventually I get to Waterloo, buy my ticket, pick up a new timetable, and buy books at Foyles, as I need things to put under the tree for my mother, niece and nephew. I’m a firm believer that children’s primary Christmas presents should be money – it gives them the ability to buy what they want and is far easier for me – but I still like to provide a supplementary present. They were going to get chocolates, but somehow I decided mental stimulation was more appropriate than yet more nice things to eat. My sister, after dropping a suitable hint, is getting marmalade vodka. I do like the way that I am slowly converting my friends and family to Williams Chase products. It was foolish of me not to arrange to be on commission from them.

My mother provides lunch in the form of a slice of tongue – I realise I have no idea whether this is pig or cow or sheep, though, I guess, given the size of the slices, it must be cow, unless it’s pressed – with bread, watercress and tomatoes, followed by a Heston mince pie from Waitrose – where else? – and the usual banana. Not that this is living up to its name at the moment, as it’s been quite a while since I had one.

It transpires that we shall be eating late, as we are going to Portsmouth Cathedral for a carol service by candlelight and eating afterwards. This gives me an excuse to eat some of the spiced biscuits I’ve brought.

Spicy ginger biscuits for Christmas

This makes around 125, which is an awful lot – and rather more than you need unless you are making them as presents. If you want them to be hung from the Christmas tree, you need to ensure that you make a big enough hole to thread the ribbon through: use an apple corer for this.. You can add even more pepper and ginger if you like them spicy. It’s murder to roll the dough, even when cold from the fridge. Once it gets warm, however, it’s bloody impossible. So take it out from the fridge in stages.

For the dough:
golden syrup 150ml
brown sugar 175g
ginger powder 2 tbsp – actually you can get away with a bit more imho
freshly ground white pepper ½ tsp – actually you can get away with a bit more imho
butter 175g
double cream 150ml
baking soda ½ tsp
plain wheat flour 700g, plus a bit of flour for kneading

For the icing:
icing sugar 300g
food colouring
water a bit

Mix syrup, brown sugar, ginger powder and butter in a big mixing bowl and whisk until soft and smooth. Then add the cream and mix well again. Mix the baking soda and flour, then mix into the butter mixture.

Flour the kitchen table and knead the dough well, then wrap the dough in cling film and leave to rest in the fridge overnight.

The next day roll out the dough really thinly and cut with the cookie cutters, using different shapes and sizes. If you want to hang them from the Christmas tree, then you need a very large hole indeed made with an apple corer. They are real pains to roll out – don’t take more dough out of the fridge than you need

Preheat the oven to 200C/gas mark 6. Place the cookies on a baking tray lined with baking paper and bake for about 8 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

When cold, decorate with icing. Mix icing sugar with food colouring and then add water a little bit at a time, until the icing is smooth. Make sure it isn’t runny.

Later on,  I have some Barm Brack – Irish fruit bread –  with a cup of tea. I know that this looks like overloading on the naughty stuff, but it is necessary, as we aren’t eating until late.

Just before six, we are picked up by my brother-in-law in the car. We arrive a whole 45 before it starts in order to get good seats in the choir – and it proves well worth the wait. The Cathedral is a lovely building, small and 17th century rather than Gothic, although strangely laid out  – almost a square shape – so that the nave and choir don’t really feel like they are in the same building.

There is a wonderful sense of excitement as the lights are switched off. Suddenly we are no longer able to read our orders of service and have to wait for the candles we are holding to be lit from the candles carried in the procession , as the flame gradually gets passed round the whole congregation. until by the end of the service, the whole place is blazing with light, including the electric variety.  As symbolism, of a shared hope in the darkness that gradually illuminates us all, it is obvious but effective.

It all starts with a single boy treble singing Once In Royal David’s City, unaccompanied and gloriously unaware that he probably won’t accomplish anything so soaringly good in his life with such effortless ease ever again. (Not that this will necessarily stop him doing other things better afterwards, but they will require considerably more application.)

The service starts by following the template of King’s College, Cambridge’s Service of nine lessons and carols to the letter. A quick look at the booklet suggests that they are going to continue in this predictable vein. However, this is deceptive. It soon becomes clear that behind the scenes there is an awareness that the secret of good liturgy – and also Christmas catering, come to mention it- is to follow a set formula, but to add a few variations and surprises in order to combine comfortable reassurance with the thrill of the unexpected.

And thus the musical arrangements of the expected carols were often new to me – something harder to achieve than it sounds, now that I sing in Christmas concerts. It was actually rather a relief to hear versions of Coventry Carol and A spotless rose that were different from those that I’ve sung with the London Gay Men’s Chorus. I felt mildly miffed that they didn’t do Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium – which they did last time I was here a few years ago – but I appreciate the dangers of doing something that was à la mode then, but is now too obvious to be safe. In any case, we were given some modern Scandinavian scrunchy harmonies that I would happily hear again. Trumpets instead of boy trebles were used for the descants in the carols sung by the congregation, which worked admirably and ensured that they could be heard by the hapless souls in the nave.

The formula is then suddenly abandoned, as it is a hundred years since the start of the First World War; and, more particularly, a hundred years since that first Christmas Eve in the trenches, when the futile, macho madness and belligerence, along with the machine guns, temporarily came to a halt, as both sides found themselves singing the same tune – Silent Night – albeit to different words, and decided to abandon war for the day in favour of Christmas.

We have a reading – with musical accompaniment – of a poem from Carol Ann Duffy commemorating this cease-fire. Inevitably, there is so much to think about that I lose concentration and miss the point that she is making. Part of me thinks that it’s all very well to celebrate the pause in the killing, but we also need to remember that that is all that it was. Coming to your senses is good, but still rather disappointing, if you lose them again. There doesn’t seem to be much of a suggestion that the truce was repeated in the following years of the war – let alone in the days after Christmas. It was only a temporary halt to the juggernaut of slaughter. And yet, even brief signs of the potential for a different way of doing things are surely signs of hope. Even if, a hundred years later, the Etonians – just as callous in their reckless squandering of the hopes and energy of the next generation – are still in charge, although now they betray them to poverty global warming and unemployment rather than bayonets.

And yet there is a further interesting parallel. Here, in the stillness of the Cathedral, the relentless conveyor belt of consumerism, excess and self-indulgence that constitutes the Great British Christmas is also halted. Again, the halting is also only temporary, but I am grateful for the opportunity to recollect why we are celebrating at all: we are commemorating the arrival of hope into the world, as God became one of us. It reminds us of a more important truth: that the force of the big battalions is a sign of moral weakness not of strength, and that power is demonstrated not by taking control but by giving it up. A lesson that I have barely started to learn.

In which I have a most enjoyable St Cecilia’s Day

Not only is this the feast day of the patron saint of music, but also the birthday of Benjamin Britten and the anniversary of Thatcher’s resignation. So Hail, bright Cecilia, as I start the day in gratitude for the wonderful gift that is music – something that can not only express our moods but even transform them. As Alexander Pope put it,

Music the fiercest grief can charm

And Fate’s severest rage disarm:

Music can soften pain to ease,

And make despair and madness please:

Our joys below it can improve,

And antedate the bliss above.

This the divine Cecilia found,

And to her Maker’s praise confin’d the sound.

When the full organ joins the tuneful quire,

Th’immortal Powers incline their ear:

Borne on the swelling notes our souls aspire,

while solemn airs improve the sacred fire,

And angels lean from Heav’n to hear.

Of Orpheus now no more let poets tell;

To bright Cecilia greater power is giv’n:

His numbers raise’d a shade from Hell,

Hers lift the soul to Heav’n.

It is strange how Cecilia developed her link with music, which, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Saints was something to do with a passing mention – in the hymn sung on her feast day – of organs playing at her wedding. This turned out to be something of a disaster, almost on the scale of Jane Eyre’s first one to Rochester or Lohengrin’s to Elsa. (Just why do they play the wedding march from Wagner’s opera when people get married? It’s the prelude to one of the worst wedding nights of all time: the bride and groom have a blazing row about the groom’s reluctance to come clean about his antecedents, only to be interrupted by a botched assassination attempt, after which he runs away in a boat pulled by swans and she drops dead of grief. (No. I really am not making this up.)

Cecilia’s own wedding went pear-shaped for different reasons: she put something of a blight on the proceedings by informing her husband that she had taken a vow of perpetual virginity. Rather asking for trouble, one feels. According to the story, despite her awful timing, she managed the difficult feat of converting her husband and brother-in-law to Christianity, after which they were martyred. After Cecilia buried them, she got martyred too. Not a jolly way to go for a saint who left such an appealing musical legacy – Handel, Purcell, Howells, Britten, Gounod and McMillan to name only a few of those who wrote works in her name – behind her

I decide that I am going to take St Cecilia’s Day very slowly. This is not just laziness or ghastly weather, but mainly because of my Friday, which was an incredibly long one: going to Gloucester for work required getting up at 4.45 in order to be sure of getting a 7.30 train from Paddington, as I’m (a) deeply paranoid and (b) need time to prepare and consume porridge and coffee to get myself into a fit condition to leave the house. This does not stop me from having a naughty custard tart on the train and eating rather too many sandwiches during the day.

We got back to Paddington at 6.40, which ought to have given me time to get to the Coliseum for a 7.30 opera performance, albeit without dinner. But I hadn’t reckoned for a Friday night rush hour crammed with misguided people taking their suitcases on wheels for a weekend in the country. As a result, the tube station was closed ‘due to overcrowding’. I just LOVE the way that London Transport makes it all the passengers’ fault. Fortunately, after ten minutes of me dithering what to do next, the tube deigned to open up in time for me to get the opera with ten minutes to spare. Alas, The Gospel According to The Other Mary proved to be rather hard going – John Adams at his least inspired and Peter Sellars at his most predictable.

I am deeply grateful for a glass of life-giving rosé during the interval and even more grateful for the fabulous and jolly meal with Kate, Andrew and Faizal at the Green Man and French Horn afterwards. This features sublime, perfectly-done cod with a warm, creamy, cider-infused sauce, salsify – which is like a more elegant version of watercress – and roasted Jerusalem artichokes. To follow, I have their masterly white chocolate mousse in a ramekin dish with roasted almonds on top and some espresso poured over it. This pudding breaks the first rule of restaurant food – never order what you could easily do for yourself at home – but it tastes so good that I have it every time, and I have yet to regret it.

Nevertheless, as a result of eating after instead of before the show, I don’t get home until 1 am, which means that I have been on the go for 20 hours continuously, and consequently arise late. After a lazy morning dithering over breakfast and the gastroporn in Saturday’s Guardian, I fry leeks in some oil for lunch, and, once they are soft and starting to brown, deglaze the frying pan with a little vermouth. I put them in a dish and grate some ageing cheese that needs to be finished on top, and pop them in the oven for ten minutes. With some Mediterranean fresh bread from the Co-op, it makes for a delicious lunch.

I realise that I am not am not in a state to achieve very much – and decide that, if I’m going to sleep for most of the day, I might as well do it at the cinema in front in front of Interstellar. The plot rather reminds me of those creepy stories I read as a child, where someone is invited is invited by the fairies to join them at their feast. He has an amazing, magical night, but then returns home the next morning to discover that 50 years has gone by and everyone he knew and loved is old or dead. The Freudian implications of this are almost too terrible to unpack. Instead of fairies, Interstellar, plays games with relativity and space, as astronaut Matthew McConaghay is distressed to discover that his daughter, the luminous Jessica Chastain, whom he left on an earth that is starting to die is ageing seven times faster than he is, as he spends the time asleep in a spaceship on a mission to save the world by finding a wormhole that humanity can travel though to reach a new planet. Plot hole more like !

In the last 40 minutes, you eventually get some dividend on your substantial and rather dull investment in the previous two hours. But the first two hours comes across as a cynical, protracted, cumbersome and clichéd assembly of the most iconic bits of Field of Dreams, Gravity and 2001 to the accompaniment of some dreadful and intrusive music. It was the visual equivalent of Andrew Lloyd Webber – nicking other people’s ideas and making them less interesting and attractive than they were in their original context. If I didn’t actually fall asleep, it was the volume of the soundtrack rather than the excitement of the film. Anne Hathaway’s gamine bob suggests she has wafted in from the sixties, even though it’s supposedly set a couple of years from now. Nobody’s hair or beard grows during their seven year hibernation on board the spaceship. There is something fascinating about the film’s image of our older selves failing to warn our younger that lingers in the mind afterwards. But I wish I had listened to my lazier wiser self and stayed at home.

Dinner is oven roasted sausages, which is naughty, as pork is bad for cholesterol, but it is soooo good, quick and easy,

4 large sweet potatoes peeled and chopped

2 small onions peeled and quartered

6 sausages

Olive oil

mixed herbs

Chilli flakes and black pepper

cherry tomatoes halved

half a lemon, chopped herbs (optional)

Heat oven to 220C. Put sweet potatoes and onions on a sheet of foil. Pour over olive oil, herbs and chilli flakes. Wrap tightly and roast for 30 mins.

Add sausages and cherry tomatoes and roast uncovered for another 50 minutes by which time the sausages should be golden.

Squeeze half a lemon and some chopped herbs over if you have them and remember. Don’t worry if you don’t.

I follow this with strawberry crumble. I know that this sounds deeply counterintuitive, but no more so than the strange weather we have been having, which has produced strawberries in December,

 

Nigella’s Strawberry Crumble

Completely counterintuitive, but utterly marvellous with poor quality strawberries. If you have good ones, you wouldn’t do this, but it does make a lovely crumble.

500g Strawberries hulled

50g caster sugar

25g ground almonds

4 teaspoons vanilla extract

110g plain flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

75g cold butter diced

100g flaked almonds

75 g demerara sugar

Preheat oven to 200C.

Put hulled strawberries in dish and sprinkle over the sugar, almonds and vanilla. Mix.

Put flour and baking powder in a mixing bowl. Rub in butter between thumb and fingers til mixture resembles oatmeal. Stir in sugar and flaked almonds.

Tip over the strawberries.

Bake for 30 minutes.

With custard, this makes me a very happy boy indeed.

In which my mother and I entertain the rest of the family to Sunday lunch

Tags

pomegranate, Simon Hopkinson

It’s my turn to entertain the rest of the family. I decide on Nigella’s lamb with pomegranate and fresh mint. I guess you could call it all night lamb – as, done properly, it takes 14 hours in the oven. If you want to be on trend, you might even rename it pulled lamb, as, by then, it has disintegrated, and falls off the bone at the touch of a fork with glorious ease, rendering carving marvellously unnecessary. If Nigella Bites had been published a decade later, that is, no doubt, what it would have been called, but, way back then, the only things that pulled lamb or pork were ravenous foxes.

Nigella’s slow roast lamb

1 shoulder (or leg) of lamb (Nigella recommends shoulder as cheaper and tastier, but it works with leg too)
4 small onions, peeled and halved
1 carrot, peeled and halved
Sea salt 500 ml boiling water
Chopped fresh mint
1 pomegranate

Preheat oven to 140C. On the hob, brown the lamb fat side down in a large roasting tin. Remove when browned across the middle and set aside while you fry the vegetables, sprinkled with some salt, for a few minutes. Pour the boiling water into the tin. Add the lamb again, fat side up this time. Let the water come to the boil, then cover loosely with foil, and place in oven.

Nigella recommends a 14 hour cook. If left in the oven at bedtime (11pm) it will be perfect for lunch (1 pm) the following day. Alternatively, you can do it for 5 hours in the morning at 170C.

About an hour before you are ready to eat, remove lamb to a plate and use a fork to encourage it to fall from the bone. Put half the lamb in a serving dish. Sprinkle with salt, half the mint and half the pomegranates. Pile with remaining lamb, mint and pomegranate and more salt and leave to rest. Serve with chunks of skinned roast red pepper, sprinkled with feta, flaked almonds, chopped parsley or coriander and lemon juice. Left overs are good with hummus and pitta bread.

My mother clearly didn’t like the idea of the oven being on all night, so I do it in its sanitized version, for a mere 5 hours, which means getting up at 7 am and browning it with some pieces of onion and carrot and getting it in the oven first thing with boiling water and foil on top.There is just time to have a shower – but not breakfast – before church at 8 am.

After church, in what seems like no time, I am recovering from my early start, with restorative porridge and coffee, and thinking about what else needs doing for lunch. In order to appease my teenage nephew and his huge appetite – what a convenient excuse to pander to everyone’s desires (mine included)! – there will be roast potatoes, although I have to despatch my mother into the village so that we have enough potatoes. I use Nigella’s tip of shaking a bit of semolina onto them, after they have been parboiled and drained, which makes them acquire a wonderful golden crust.

For an easy life, I do roasted peppers, courgettes and onions, and also a mixture of roast Sweet potato, carrots and parsnips, which produces a dazzlingly appetising range of similarly-shaped and differently-coloured root vegetables. As my sister considers Simon Hopkinson’s utterly delicious creamed aubergines overrated, I am inventive with these: I quarter them lengthways and then slice them thinly. I salt them and leave them in a colander to drain for an hour, then rinse them and pat them dry on kitchen paper. I squeeze them firmly in my hands just to ensure that I have got all the moisture out, and then fry them in oil in batches. I add some mixed herbs and some balsamic vinegar to deglaze the pan, followed by a tin of tomatoes and lots of black pepper. The result is a moreish vegetable that even my sister enjoys.

It’s a nice easy lunch, as Sunday lunch should be. The hardest thing is the fiddly but oddly relaxing task of extracting the jewel-like seeds from the pomegranate and removing all traces of membrane. Of course, it all takes a good half hour more than planned for everything to be properly cooked, but one of the joys of Sunday lunch is that nobody has to hurry. There is time to linger over prelunch drinks – served with black pepper crisps and pieces of manchego, possibly the most nibbleable cheese in the world. I am pleased to find that my sister enjoys her marmalade vodka  more than she expected to. Another convert. I sometimes feel like I have become a salesman for Williams Chase.

The lamb needs carving rather than pulling, but, as my superbly competent brother-in-law is at hand to do the necessary, this doesn’t really matter. And it looks marvellous, with the pomegranates and mint – fresh from the garden – scattered all over it. My mother says that the mint has taken on a new lease of life since she started letting one of her neighbours help herself to it: the more it is plucked, the more it grows. There is a moral here about the more we give, the more we are able to give. This is a good analogy to use when challenging the narrowing of generosity and imagination and the generating of fear and meanness that come with a recession.

The sun comes out, and it would have been possible to eat in the garden outside with pleasure, despite it being late October, if we hadn’t put the outside table away in the garage a few weeks’ ago, confident that autumn had already arrived and it wouldn’t be needed again until next year. So we eat in the conservatory, with both doors wide open, and it is, if anything, a bit too warm.We all enjoy the fine weather and the fine lunch, and I’m not the only one to have seconds.

We then finish with Queen of Puddings, which, unusually, doesn’t quite work out, as the scales seem to have difficulty in getting the right amount of breadcrumbs. Even though I add twice the quantity, there aren’t enough to solidify the egg custard properly. Perhaps the bread had too much air and not enough crumb in it. It accordingly ends up as something of a mess and is far too liquid – more like a warm trifle – but it’s a delicious one and nobody minds. I still maintain that this is a classic rather than glorified nursery food, but then it presses all my culinary buttons.

Queen of Puddings

Another Simon Hopkinson special. Soo right for Sunday lunch

Serves 4.

275 ml milk

finely grated zest of a lemon

50 g caster sugar

pinch of salt

50g of fresh white breadcrumbs

2 large eggs separated

a little softened butter

half a jar of warmed raspberry jam

50 g caster sugar for the meringue and extra for sprinkling

flaked almonds (optional)

Warm the milk with the lemon rind, remove from the heat and leave to infuse for 30 mins.

Add 50g of sugar, salt, breadcrumbs and egg yolks and mix thoroughly.

Lightly grease a baking dish with the butter, and sprinkle with a little more caster sugar. Pour in the mixture, and leave for 15 mins.

Preheat overn to 180C and bake in a bain marie for 25-30 mins until set.

Remove and leave to rest for at least 15 mins.

Beat egg whites til stiff, then add sugar and beat until stiff and glossy.

Spoon the warm jam over the bread and egg mixture, covering the whole surface. Then pile the meringue on top. Shape into soft peaks with the back of a spoon. Dust with caster sugar and stud with almond flakes if you have them.

Return to oven for 7-10 mins. Leave to cool until luke warm.

A really enjoyable day. Even the train journey back to London, equally divided between blogging, dozing and reading, is pleasurable.