Merry Christmas

Well, here we are, two days away from Christmas day. I haven't written a post recently due to a death in our family. My normal pre Christmas preparations of all things foodie have taken a back seat, added to which, bizarrely, accessing this blog has been problematic. Every now and then, just as I think I'm very technologically advanced, a problem arises, my computer suddenly wants all sorts of information which I've neither the time or the patience for!

Of course Christmas for us this year won't be marked with joyful celebrations. We will spend a quiet, contemplative time thinking of those no longer with us.

When you get to my age the joyfulness and celebrations of Christmas often mask a more complicated reality. I have wonderfully happy memories of my childhood Christmases, all wrapped up in a thousand tiny traditions. The celebrations didn't begin until the last Saturday before Christmas when my father would decorate our huge real Christmas tree. The scents of Christmas hung heavy in the air with mum's baking aromas wafting through the house and the fresh scent of pine. Presents would be tumbled around the tree, not of the extravagant, excessive kind children expect today, I remember one of my favourite presents was a five year diary with a lock and key.

We would celebrate the 12 days of Christmas, it was a time for friends and family. Nowadays with Christmas starting in November, by the time Christmas day arrives everyone has had their fill, on Boxing day people are heaping their trees and excess food in the bin and heading off to the sales!

My parent's were celebratory people, each Christmas another neighbour would join our Christmas table, no one would be left eating a dinner alone in our street. And that's what Christmas was for me, it was a time of sharing, looking out for the less fortunate, it was a Christian festival, not an occasion to brawl in shops over TVs as we saw on Black Friday.

When my parents died it left a huge, gaping hole in my Christmas. Glenn's family had never done the big family thing, any foolish ideas I might of had regarding the women folk ie his mother, sister and myself, preparing Christmas lunch together sharing the odd glass of sherry while the men went to the pub for a swift half and the children played with their presents, were quickly thwarted. Consequently, I went from what was a huge celebration in terms of everyone squeezed around my parents table, the more the merrier, to lunch for three.

Christmas is for many people, a sad and lonely time. Statistics suggest that more people file for divorce after Christmas than any other time of the year, and we also see a spike in deaths, particularly suicide. It has become less about the  lonely widow down the road and more about little Johnny having a smartphone. Mother's baking with their children has been replaced with ready prepared food, go into any large supermarket in the days immediately leading up to Christmas and it's like Armageddon. Unfortunately, Christmas has become a huge marketing exercise, where shops were once closed until virtually the January sales we now shop late into Christmas eve and are back out, elbowing our way through the crowds on Boxing day.

The cautionary Charles Dickens tale, A Christmas Carol, about a wealthy man who had nothing compared with the Cratchit's who, inspite of being dirt poor, celebrated Christmas with love and what meagre rations they could afford, has passed us by. Like Scrooge, we've become grasping and we're in need (as in 1843) of re examining Christmas traditions.

Last Thursday I drove to the small town of Emsworth and was greeted by a crowd of people singing carols. It was a dull and drizzly day, when I asked why they had come out on such a day they said that each year, on the last Thursday before Christmas, they gather to sing carols and collect money for Christian aid. These people rarely see each other all year round and are from all different denominations, they take it in good faith that they will all meet up this one day of the year in an act of kindness to those less fortunate.

Much as I love opening presents, eating too much and drinking champagne, I've come to realise, it is the people we love who make Christmas magical and that is why for many, Christmas is often a time when painful absences are felt most keenly. We want to conjure our lost ones back and cling on to happy memories of Christmases past.

This year we should all take a moment to realise that the true meaning of Christmas isn't found wrapped up under the tree - but in the loved ones we are lucky enough to have around us. Whilst we must keep those we have lost in our hearts, we must cherish those we still have in our lives.

I'd like to wish all of my readers a very merry Christmas, hopefully I'll have sorted my technological problems and be back with you in the new year.

Lots of love
Donna xxxxxxxx

Baking Cakes The Easy Way

 
I have just received these delicious viennoiseries from a friend as a pre Christmas present. Founded in 1982 in Casablanca, Amoud patisserie became nationally known for its high quality cakes, pastries, viennoiseries and breads which are truly irresistible.

Of course Christmas is all about delicious cakes and pastries, homemade mince pies, Christmas cake, stollen, yule log and gingerbread spring to mind, but as I've mentioned many a time, baking cakes really isn't my speciality.

The problem is that shop bought cakes are, as with all ready prepared food, full of hydrogenated fats, additives, preservatives, artificial colourings, flavourings and a lot of salt. Cakes are never going to be healthy but homemade with natural ingredients like butter and eggs, as opposed to tartrazine (linked to ADHD disorders) and other chemical compounds, there is a lot of cheer in a homemade cake.

I came across ice cream bread via online news forum Reddit, where a user suggested mixing a tub of strawberry Haagen-Dazs with flour then baking for 40 minutes at 200c. Incredibly this works (even for me!) Ice cream is made from cream and eggs, which react with the raising agents in the flour.

The beauty of this simple recipe is you can use various ice cream flavours, millionaires shortbread is dense, sweet and stodgy, chocolate brownie is light, chocolately and studded with chocolate chips, strawberry is sweet and summery......the possibilities are endless.

Ice cream bread

Recipe
1 tub Haagen-Dazs (or similar) ice cream
200g self raising flour

Semi melt ice cream and combine with flour to make a smooth batter

I used a strawberry shortcake ice cream and added some 70 per cent dark chocolate

 

Pour batter in to a greased loaf tin or muffin tray and bake in a preheated oven 200c/gas mark 6 for 40 minutes

These are a a cross between a muffin and a sweet bread (think panettone)

Where cake is concerned I can't offer a simpler recipe! You have all the joys of delicious smells wafting from your oven plus soft warm, fresh cake, delicious.

'Bake with love.'
- Manuela Kjeilen

Love Donna xxxxxxx

Hungry Britain.

Running with the theme of food poverty and our lack of cooking skills which seems to be todays news (and probably tomorrows fish and chip paper) I've just read an excellent article regarding Jocasta Innes, author of The Pauper's Cookbook.

Innes led an affluent lifestyle, eating in expensive restaurants and shopping for food in Fortnum & Mason's food hall, however, with the breakdown of her marriage she fell on hard times and found herself subsisting on £20 a week earned by translating books. As a foodie she had to learn how to make the kind of food she wanted to eat on a tiny budget.

Innes wrote her book off the back of her own hard experience, full of ideas for turning simple, cheap ingredients into delicious meals such as bacon and potato hotpot and oxtail stew, her book proved popular and is still in print four decades later.

Innes daughter Daisy Goodwin wrote an article in response to the Baroness Jenkin debacle (see post: Food Poverty In The UK - savoury dumplings.) Like me, Goodwin thinks Lady Jenkin was absolutely right regarding poor people not knowing how to cook.

A survey published this week estimated that a great many Britons cooking repertoire consists of: toast, cereals, crisp sandwiches and baked beans. Many of those surveyed were bedazzled with convenience ready meals and didn't have the first idea how to turn raw ingredients into a meal.

As Goodwin states: 'Once, Home Economics was widely taught in schools. Today children are taught to design their own apps but leave school not knowing how to chop an onion or plan a weeks food budget.'

The Pauper's Cookbook has a chapter on how to plan and cook a weeks worth of meals, a foreign concept to a generation who, according to a survey, still have no idea what they're eating for dinner at 4pm and will pop into a convenience shop on the way home.

Staff at Action For Children, one of the biggest children's charities in the UK, are acutely aware of the problems caused by a nation's culinary illiteracy. One family who were receiving supplies from a food bank were still sending their children to school hungry. When a charity worker visited she found a cupboard full of dried pasta which the mother had no idea how to turn into a meal. The family had been living on cereal and tinned food. The charity worker showed the mother how to cook the pasta and combine it with tinned tomatoes, an onion and some garlic. If people aren't taught basic cooking skills ie making onion soup from scratch for roughly 20p a head, the inability will make the poor even poorer. A tin of hotdogs or an expensive ready meal won't sustain a family, being able to stretch limited ingredients has been the way people in poorer countries have survived for centuries. Cooking shouldn't be the preserve of the middle classes, everyone has the right to learn how to cook.

As Goodwin points out: 'The fast food, instant gratification ethos is to blame. Microwave meals, ready made sauces, tinned soup, frozen pizzas and chips and packs of expensive vegetables, trimmed, washed and ready to go.'

Our complacency is proving costly, as I have said before, it's not lack of food that leaves Britons hungry, it's not knowing how to cook it, the fact is, poverty shouldn't be a barrier to eating well - bargain vegetables made into a stir fry or soup, cheap cuts of meat slowly stewed, a whole chicken which seems expensive until you know how to turn it into three meals...........

The only thing I will say regarding this current debate is that it's not just poorer people who don't know how to cook. I worked in education where a high percentage of 'intelligent' women wore their lack of cooking skills like a badge of honour. The fact that they cooked neither with, or for their families was like a huge joke.

Which brings me to one of my all time favourites, cottage pie. This can be made very cheaply with only a small amount of meat and lots of vegetables. This dish originated as a means of using leftover meat and I very often make it with Sunday roast leftovers. If making from scratch I buy the meat from my butcher, you really only need 1lb minced meat per 4 people, the trick is to have your butcher mince up some chuck steak or stewing steak, your meat needs to have some fat to add flavour. The extra lean packaged mince sold in supermarkets has no flavour and you will notice when frying, you end up with a pool of slurry in your pan.

Cottage pie

Recipe
1lb good quality mince
1 bag frozen casserole vegetables
1 bag frozen cauliflower florets
1 large onion, sliced
1 tin baked beans
1 litre stock
Salt and pepper
700g potatoes, peeled, boiled and mashed
Knob of butter

Heat butter in a large pan, add onions and sauté gently on a low heat

Add mince and cook until brown and slightly caramelised

Remove mince and onions from pan and set aside
In the same pan add frozen veg, stir picking up all the sticky, caramelised bits off the bottom of the pan

Add 500ml of stock and simmer gently for 10-15 minutes
Add baked beans

Return mince and onions to pan, add the remaining stock and simmer for 10 minutes
Transfer to baking dishes

Top with mashed potatoes and place in a preheated oven 200c/gas mark 6
Cook for 30 minutes

'A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.'
- Elsa Schiaparelli

Love Donna xxxxxxxxxx

Food Poverty In UK 'More Shocking Than Africa.'

             My father with his mother and some of his siblings in their vegetable garden. 

I have included the above photo as an example of poverty in 1940s Britain. My father's family consisted of two adults and nine children, they lived in a two up two down cottage surviving on meagre rations. As with many poor families, my grandmother turned her small plot of garden into a vegetable patch, the vegetables she grew saw them through many lean times.

The senior Bishop of the Anglican church, Justin Welby has opened a debate regarding food poverty in Britain. He has made comparisons between here in the UK and Africa. 

Obviously for readers familiar with my blog they will know this is a subject I am extremely passionate about. I write (rather too often probably) about the scale of food waste in this country, an astonishing 15 million tons of food is discarded annually in the UK. 

Welby has voiced concerns about food waste and the fact that over 900,000 Britons have received food parcels in the past year. He said: 'The predicament of working families going hungry in a wealthy western country are shocking!'

I couldn't agree more! Firstly this is a government and food corporation disgrace, it is not for the lack of food or resources that Britons go hungry, why for example aren't supermarkets redistributing unwanted food to charities? And how have we succumbed to the farce of sell by/use by dates, causing more waste and at the same time more money in the food corporations pockets! 

When I look at the above photo of my grandmother, I see a woman who never saw a sell by date in her life. I see a woman who was resourceful, who on one occasion had to retrieve a piece of meat from the dog who was trying to bury it in the garden. Like many families in Africa, my father's family survived on what my grandmother could make from scraps, an older piece of meat would have been washed and slow cooked, my father actually washed mould from sausages, they survived and nothing was discarded. 

And so, when Baroness Jenkin responded to the Welby debate by saying: 'Poor people don't know how to cook' it caused outrage.

Much as I didn't like the tone of Jenkin's comment, her point is valid. If people had the cooking skills that previous generations had, we wouldn't be eating so much expensive pre-prepared food. 

In Africa people are dying of starvation. National statistics last year showed that 62 per cent of all Britons over 20 are overweight or obese. The overwhelming response on social media regarding Welby's comparisons between food poverty in Britain v Africa has been that we don't know their kind of extreme food poverty. 

People who were interviewed in food banks regarding this debate seemed to be reliant on convenience food as opposed to flour, rice, grains, ingredients they could cook from scratch with. Plain unabashed poor man's food which my father grew up with, has been replaced with an expectation of prepared food from a container or tin.

Part of a traditional British cuisine were savoury dumplings, a cheap way to bulk a stew and quite often used as a substitute for meat. My own mother would make a broth from a chicken carcass, she would make dumplings which sometimes included chopped mushrooms or cheese and submerge them in the broth until they expanded and went golden on top. This meal cost pennies yet was comforting, wholesome and delicious. I don't know how many people are as resourceful as this anymore? Anyone who can discard perfectly edible food governed only by a date is not likely to boil a chicken carcass or make dumplings. 

Interestingly, prime minister David Cameron turned down £22 million from the EU to be spent on food for the most needy. Food banks are a political embarrassment and so they should be given the colossal amount of perfectly good food being discarded year on year! This situation should be a matter of importance to us all! Whilst we complacentley fill our trolleys to the brim with ready meals and snacks, we should be thinking about our ability to think in real survival terms.

Savoury dumplings

Recipe

4 heaped tablespoons self raising flour

2 heaped tablespoons suet

Mix flour and suet with enough water to make a soft dough

Form dough into balls and drop into a bubbling stew or casserole

Vegetarians can make a hearty vegetable stew and use vegetable suet

Dumplings are so versatile, you can add cheese, herbs, wild mushrooms and even jam or raisins or syrup for a sweet dumpling.

'You don't have to worry about burning your bridges, if you are building your own.'
- Kerry E Wagner

Love Donna xxxxx

Paella Por Favor

                       A tasty paella served in one of our local restaurants near Jacarilla

Whilst most non Spaniards view paella as Spain's national dish it is in fact a Valencian dish, eaten widely throughout Spain, most Spaniards consider paella to be a regional dish.

Originally a farmer's and farm labourers' food paella was cooked by the workers over a wood fire. Rice would be cooked in a large pan with whatever else was to hand in the rice fields and countryside, tomatoes, onions, snails, frogs and rabbit. The paella was eaten straight from the pan with each person using his own spoon.

Over the generations paella has adopted many variations, Valencia is on the coast so not surprisingly various seafood crept into the recipes. Our home in Spain is in a rural area where rabbit and chicken paella is more common, however, we do on occasion find seafood paella on the menu which includes squid, clams, mussels, shrimps and prawns.

                                       Glenn enjoying a seafood paella with a cold beer

Families congregate on mass to eat paella at weekends, much as we would eat a roast dinner, it is a celebratory meal which takes some preparing, never to be confused with the frozen stuff served in many coastal tourist areas!

Paella is named after the double handed pan the dish is cooked in, once the rice is in the pan it shouldn't be stirred but shaken from side to side so that the grains swell up. The base of the paella should be crusty, crispy and slightly caramelised, this is referred to as the socarrat. At the end of cooking, a clean tea towel should be placed over the paella for 5 minutes to absorb the steam, there is quite an art to cooking 'pa-eh-ya'.

Quite frankly you have to be in a cooking mood for this dish, I don't mean a rustling up a bit of dinner mood, I mean a full on couple of hours in the kitchen with the Gipsy Kings playing in the background and nothing else to distract you!

That said, this isn't a complicated dish, we're not talking double baked soufflé, paella is a rustic dish which is commonly cooked by men in Spain, in the same way our men have a penchant for barbecues. Whenever we are in Spain it is always our friend Raffa who cooks the paella. In fact paella is a perfect meal to prepare with your partner on a Saturday evening whist enjoying a cold beer or a glass of wine, it makes a great change from a takeaway Chinese or Indian.

Paella

Recipe
Serves 6
350g paella rice
2 tablespoons olive oil
3lb free range chicken joints (joints are more tasty than breast and part of the enjoyment is eating the chicken with your fingers, I used breasts because I didn't have any joints so I reduced the cooking time of my chicken)
1 large onion, peeled and roughly chopped
2 peppers, deseeded and roughly chopped
4oz chorizo sausage, skin removed and cut into chunks
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
1 heaped teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon saffron strands, soaked in a drop of warm milk
12 raw tiger prawns
50g frozen peas
Salt and pepper
2 pints stock

Soak saffron strands in a 1/4 cup of warm milk

Remove skin from chorizo and chop

Heat oil over a fairly high heat, saute the chicken joints on all sides until golden, remove and set aside
Fry chorizo for 2 minutes, remove and set aside

           If using breasts you can saute chicken and chorizo together for 2 minutes

Add onion and peppers to the pan, fry for 6-8 minutes until tinged at the edges

Now add garlic, paprika and milk with saffron and cook for 1 minute

Return chicken to the pan, season and add 2 pints of stock, bring to a simmer and cook uncovered: 10 minutes for joints, 2 minutes for breasts

Remove chicken and set aside
Pour rice into the centre of the pan, bring to the boil, stir once and simmer uncovered for 10 minutes, shake the pan occasionally

Make sure rice is immersed in liquid, top up if necessary, after 10 minutes taste rice to see if it is al dente
Return chicken to the pan along with prawns and peas

Cook for 2 minutes, turn prawns over and cook for a further 2 minutes, they will turn pink when cooked
Remove from heat and cover with a clean towel for 5 minutes to absorb the steam

Serve onto warm plates

Serve with a wedge of lemon to be squeezed all over paella


'The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude.'
- Julia Child.

Love do

The Great Supermarket Scandal

                                                           Shopping in Waitrose

Here's the thing, there are over 500,000 people in the UK reliant on food parcels. 1 in 6 parents have gone without food so they could feed their children, and a fifth of the population are battling food poverty!

Everyday, supermarkets throw away tonnes of food which (although still perfectly edible) has reached it's 'sell by date'. Today I shopped in my local Waitrose and put a member of staff through his paces regarding Waitrose policy on reducing perishable goods. My first question was did they have a reduced section? The answer was no, food was reduced at source, I was taken to the fresh chicken section and sure enough several items had been reduced and were at the front of the shelf.

Most supermarkets have realised that the quickest way to get rid of reduced items is to put them all in one place. Shopper's like myself will head to the reduced section first, to trail around the store seeking out reduced items is time consuming!

I pointed out to the member of staff that although it was past midday several packets of chicken breasts had only been reduced by 50p yet they were at their sell by date. Most people would rather pay an extra 50p and have a few days leeway. Why not reduce the chicken by half?

I appreciate that supermarkets want to avoid a 'feeding time' scenario, whereby shoppers congregate for a half-price happy hour, however, to only slightly reduce items that have reached their sell by date and wait until nearly closing time to vastly reduce them is a risk governed purely by greed.

Waitrose, along with other supermarkets, need never throw food away if they drastically discounted it early enough in the day. Having walked up and down the aisles of Waitrose I found many items reduced but only by pence. To know that people are living with food poverty how can these supermarket chains account for throwing away tonnes of chicken, meat and fish (most of which could be frozen). How does society condone the waste, purely because of a sell by date, of fruit and vegetables when we buy them loose from a greengrocer!

I think it is absolute sacrilege to throw food away! Yet again though we are in profit making, political territory. Every year we have the celebrity friendly fun-fest, comic relief which adresses food poverty. Gestures of helping the impoverished are seen as acts of generosity, however, challenging the wider issues of poverty are seen as an act of politics!

I feel it's time these issues were adressed and I feel so strongly I might start a food waste revolution! I'll keep you posted.

My local co op has a reduced section and although there is no set time for reductions I can normally pick up bargains by early afternoon. Last week I bought an outdoor bred half shoulder of pork, reduced from £15 to under a fiver! I found a recipe online which had lots of good reviews several saying they would always cook this cut of pork by this method in future. I was a little wary as most recipes suggested covering the meat until the last 30 minutes. In this recipe the marinade helps the meat retain its moisture, incredibly so, it also adds wonderful flavour. Apparently this is sometimes called Boston blade roast.

Boston blade roast pork

Recipe
Half shoulder of outdoor reared pork
1 tablespoon crushed red peppers
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon sea salt

Make a paste with all of the ingredients
Score skin on pork and smear marinade all over
Heat oven 230c/gas 8
Place pork on greaseproof paper and put in a baking tray, place in hot oven

Cook for 20 minutes, lower heat to 180c/gas 4 cook for 2 hours

Remove from oven and leave to rest for 15 minutes
Lift skin and meat should be soft and easy to pull apart

'Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor than by the well housed, well warmed and well fed,'
-Herman Melville

Join me in my food waste revolution!
Love Donna xxxxx

Jack Monroe: A Step Too Far? Debacle Re Cameron's Disabled Son.

Well, issue 2 of Shorelines is out, which includes two articles written by yours truly, seeing my name in print makes me feel like a bona fide writer. Now, I'll forewarn you, todays post isn't a recipe, however, it is about a fellow food blogger and writer so I feel it's a relevant post for this blog.

Jack Monroe, food writer and blogger, who describes herself as a lefty, liberal, lezzer (lesbian) has caused uproar, contributing to a thread on a site called 'cameronmustgo' she wrote: 'Because he uses stories about his dead son as misty eyed rhetoric to legitimise selling our NHS to his friends.'

 Cameron's son Ivan passed away aged six and his little life had been a case of round-the -clock care, medication, hospitalisation and everything that goes with complex and severe disabilities. Having worked with children with special needs and their wonderful, brave, tirelessly loving families, I thought her remark was callous and cruel.

I have no political agenda here, personally I don't particularly like Cameron or care much for Monroe, however, what shocks me is that where politics are involved nothing is out of bounds, even the death of a disabled child.

Lets look at Monroe for a moment, born Melissa Monroe, she had a middle class upbringing, was educated at a grammar school, worked for the fire and rescue service, had a child in her early 20s, became a single mother after realising she was attracted to women, gave up her job, claimed benefits and started writing a food poverty blog.

Monroe's blog, A Girl Called Jack, was her story about a single mother, living on the breadline, some of her posts were quite harrowing: 'Poverty is that sinking feeling when your small boy finishes his one weetabix with water and says "more, mummy?"

Nevertheless, it has to be argued that given her educated, middle class background, should Monroe have had a child without first being emotionally and financially stable? In the current climate of political correctness, daring to suggest Monroe could have taken more responsibility would be to tread on her self appointed morally superior toes and cause outrage amongst her comrades.

And that's the thing here, the very people who proclaim they are compassionate seem to only extend that compassion on their own political terms. Monroe, it has to be said, used a lot of 'misty eyed rhetoric' regarding her own situation and her timing was right. Monroe ticked all the boxes, she was a single mum standing up to politicians, hero of the hungry and downtrodden and gay to boot. That her circumstances could arguably have been avoided and that her stance was slightly patronising, given many people are born into poverty, was neither here nor there.

And so, with the pen mightier than the sword, Monroe has struck a vile blow to (regardless of their politics) grieving parents, I can only imagine the furore had the circumstances been reversed!

But it would seem these tribal activists are hell bent on sneering at and mocking anyone who doesn't fit their political criteria. Mrs Thornberry, former shadow attorney general, only last week sent a sneering tweet regarding a Rochester voter, a working father and house owner who had a white van and a England flag outside his house. Her tweet showed utter contempt for ordinary working class citizens, the very people she claimed to represent. Meanwhile Thornberry lives in a £3 millon home and is completely out of touch with working class, ordinary people contributing towards her 'expenses.'

Writers have the moral lexicon quite often of where things go wrong. I am small fry compared with Monroe but like her I have voiced my opinions regarding the things I feel passionate about. But to personalise politics against people who are genuinely suffering takes politics to an inhumane level, the very antithesis of everything Monroe represents and has built her successful career upon!

In an article in the Guardian, whom Monroe writes for, it said: 'Life has changed beyond recognition for Monroe.' I'm pleased that she has overcome her difficulties and is now living with her girlfriend in a nice London pad, appearing on TV and gaining contracts with The Guardian and Sainsburys. I do hope that she shows more compassion in the future towards other peoples hardships and sorrows, whatever their political leanings!

'What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.'
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love Donna xxxxxx

A Cuddle In A Bowl

My friend Carron and I spent a wet wintry day visiting the glorious south downs, an exhilarating place for walkers (and cow lovers, which we both are.)

There is nothing like a bracing walk in the countryside on a cold day to wet your appetite for a bowl of comforting soup with hot crusty buttered bread, Carron and I stopped at Charleston farmhouse (a post about Charleston to follow) where a delicious pan of potato, squash and carrot soup was simmering on the stove.

This was so delicious we both had second helpings, but we were good girls when it came to the homemade cake, we shared a slice.

The beauty of eating homemade vegetable soup is that it's healthy, comforting, easy to make and economical, on top of which you can treat yourself to a little cake or chocolate afterwards. My mum always used to say homemade soup was a cuddle in a bowl.  This next recipe is a real winter warmer, the curry powder really gives it a tasty kick without making it spicy, I urge you to try it.

Spicy sweet potato and squash soup

Recipe
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, peeled and diced
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
1 teaspoon hot curry powder
2 tablespoons torn basil leaves
300g sweet potato, peeled and diced
250g butternut squash,  peeled and diced
250g carrots, peeled and diced
750ml vegetable stock
250ml milk

Heat oil in a large saucepan, add onion and garlic and sweat for 2 minutes
Add curry powder, sweet potato, carrots and squash, give everything a good stir
Add basil leaves, stock and milk

Bring to the boil, reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 30 minutes

Blend or process until smooth, you can add other fresh herbs and croutons

'A first rate soup is more creative than a second rate painting.'
Abraham Maslou

Love Donna xxxxxxxx

Christmas Starts Here

Stir-up Sunday is a tradition dating back to Victorian times in Britain, on the last Sunday before the season of advent, families would gather together in the kitchen to mix the Christmas pudding.

Traditionally, everyone would take a turn to stir the pudding mix and make a secret wish which was supposed to bring good luck. Many households would also put a silver sixpence or threepenny bit in the pudding mix, it was believed that finding the coin brought health, wealth and happiness for the coming year. The pudding was traditionally made using 13 ingredients to represent christ and his disciples.

Stir-up Sunday evokes wonderful childhood memories for me, our kitchen would be full of the heady scents of Christmas: cinnamon, nutmeg, citrus peel and general liqueur laden fruity loveliness. My mother used an Italian liqueur, Tuaca, a combination of brandy and essence of orange and vanilla, now available in most supermarkets, this nectar is a Christmas must have!

Nowadays 90 per cent of us buy pre-made Christmas puddings. Each year amongst much fanfare puddings are put to the taste test with surprising results. Last year Aldi's Christmas pudding which cost less than £4, trumped Fortnum and Mason's pudding costing £24.95. We saw the must have culinary craze for Heston Blumenthal's hidden clementine pudding (I was really disappointed with it) and this year I've bought a pudding finished with edible gold glitter.

Having eaten my way from Fortnum's and Harrods Christmas puddings right through to Aldi's, I can honestly say not one has come close to my mum's! Sadly, two thirds of British children have never stirred, or been bound up in the excitement of making a Christmas pudding.

One of my favourite Christmas treats is stollen, a rich and sticky fruit bread anointed with rum or brandy, laced with marzipan and doused in icing sugar. Having worked my way through one box of mini stollens in the space of 2 days, I thought I had better share the second box with my family. I decided to make a stollen (bread) and butter pudding, it was so simple as the fruit and sugar are already included, although I did add extra fruit, and the marzipan takes it to a whole new level!

Stollen bread and butter pudding

Recipe
1 box of mini stollen or a loaf of stollen
Butter
500ml milk
2 free range eggs
Cinnamon (optional)

Slice the stollen and spread with a little butter

You can add extra dried fruit or citrus zest at this stage
Combine eggs and milk and pour over stollen, sprinkle with cinnamon (optional) and set aside for 10 minutes

Heat oven 190c/gas mark 4
Place stollen in oven for 25 minutes or until risen and slightly crispy on top

Serve immediately with single cream........delicious!

'Stir up we beseech thee, the pudding in the pot;
And when we get home we'll eat the lot.'
- traditional rhyme

Love Donna xxxxxxxxxx