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