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A taste reminding me of holidays

My holiday in Peru was hardly a gastronomic experience – the most positive adjective I could use to describe most of the food is “interesting”. But I did particularly enjoy one dessert – churros with chocolate. They were deep-fried sugared sticks of dough, like long thin doughnuts, and were the highlight of one otherwise unmemorable lunch. But there’s no way I’d make them at home – I don’t really approve on health grounds, and always resisted Christopher’s sporadic attempts to buy a deep-fat fryer.

In today’s Independent on Sunday I found a recipe by Bill Grainger for cinnamon breadsticks, which he described as a cross between churros and pain au chocolat. So, since I happened to have all the ingredients in the larder, I thought I’d give it a go this afternoon. I’ve replicated his recipe below, but halved all the ingredients. The original served 4-6 people which is way too much for me. Even the half quantities below will keep me in breadsticks and chocolate sauce for most of the week!

150g strong white bread flour, plus extra for kneading
1/2 tsp instant yeast
1/2 tsp caster sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tbsp light-flavoured oil, plus extra for greasing (I used very light olive oil)
1 1/2 tbsp demerara sugar (I think I used muscovado sugar instead. It didn’t look as dark as demerara)
1 tsp ground cinnamon

For the chocolate sauce

75g plain chocolate, broken into small pieces (I used dark chocolate buttons which I happened to have in)
2 tbsp double cream
1/2 tbsp golden syrup

Put the flour, yeast, sugar and salt into a bowl, stir to combine. Make a well in the centre then pour in 100ml of tepid water and stir to form a soft dough. Tip out on to a lightly floured work surface and knead for 10 minutes. Place in an oiled bowl, cover with a cloth and set aside for 1 hour, or until doubled in size.

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas6 and lightly grease an oven tray. Combine the demerara sugar and cinnamon. Place the dough on a lightly floured surface and stretch it out to about 20cm x 10cm. Brush it with oil then scatter with half the sugar-and-cinnamon mix, pushing the mixture down lightly, then place the dough sugared-side down on the prepared oven tray. Brush with oil and top with the remaining sugar-and-cinnamon mix and cut into 12 lengths. Separate the sticks slightly and bake for 12 to 15 minutes, until cooked through and crisp. Transfer to a wire rack.

For the chocolate sauce, put all the ingredients in a small pan over a very low heat. Stir occasionally, until the chocolate has melted. Stir in a pinch of salt. Serve the warm bread sticks with the chocolate sauce on the side.

They’re not as completely decadent as the Peruvian churros. But they were rather delicious! And I found that the chocolate sauce remelts quite satisfactorily with a quick blast in the microwave.

03 03 2013 Gillian recipe Comments Off on A taste reminding me of holidays Permalink

Throwing a tagine

Throwing a lid for a tagine

Further to my last, Jon the Potter at Eastnor Pottery has put up on his blog some photos of last Sunday’s workshop, including some of me throwing a tagine lid. I deliberately don’t take my camera with me, as I get absolutely filthy when I’m throwing, and clay and lenses don’t mix. So I have shamelessly plagiarized one of Jon’s pictures to show you what I got up to.   I was concentrating very hard, as I really did not want to introduce a wobble into the pot at this late stage in the process!

The base of the pot, which will eventually form the conical top of the tagine lid, is far too thick-walled at the moment. But if I tried to make it much thinner, the wet clay did not have enough structural strength to support the splaying rim, and I had several trial lids slump on me. So I had to throw them with quite thick bases. I’ve asked Jon to dry the pots out to a leather-hard consistency, and next time I go to the pottery I’ll trim away the excess clay to make the outer diameter of the lid more accurately follow the inner diameter, which is much closer to the pointy cone that I want.

27 02 2013 Gillian Day out Comments Off on Throwing a tagine Permalink

Making a tagine

On Saturday nights I always make a major effort to cook a good dinner, and last night I pulled out the stops and cooked one of my favourites, a lamb and pomegranate tagine. I cooked it very slowly in a hand-thrown terracotta tagine which Chris and I bought several years ago at a foodie market in Ludlow. Over dinner, I was looking at the tagine pot, particularly the conical lid, and wondering how on earth the potter managed to make it without it collapsing under its own weight. I had a quick look on YouTube and found a couple of video clips of potters throwing tagines, and it looked to be just about within my ability range, so I decided that I’d have a go.

I had a session booked today at Eastnor Pottery, so I decided that I’d spend the time experimenting with throwing tagine bases and lids, to see if I could work out a way to do it. Normally, when I’m throwing pots, I try to make them as thin-walled as I can. But that’s not what’s needed for a tagine – they are often quite chunky so that they hold the heat well. So that means throwing with a larger lump of clay than I am used to. I made the lid “upside down”, with a narrow base with a hole all the way through it, spreading to a wide rim. But I found that the only way I could throw a conical lid without it collapsing under its own weight was to make the base much thicker than I want it to end up, which means I’ll have to turn away the excess clay next time.

I was aiming for a tagine considerably smaller than the one I have at home, which is a good size if I’m cooking for friends, but is rather too big for when it’s just me. But even so, the requirement for a fairly chunky base and a lid that could support its own weight when wet meant that I was throwing with 2kg lumps of clay. That’s about at the limit of what I can comfortably manipulate on the wheel-head, and it took a considerable amount of effort (a mixture of technique and just brute force) to centre the clay on the wheel. I threw three bases and four lids, using callipers to try to get them all to the same diameter, in the hope that they’ll fit together. Next time, I’ll tidy up the lids by shaving off the excess clay, and see whether I can find a base-and-lid combination that fits together comfortably.

24 02 2013 icyjumbo Day out Comments (4) Permalink

A sign of Spring

A drift of snowdrops

There’s another major cold snap ongoing. No snow, thankfully, but a hard frost every morning meaning I have to de-ice and scrape the car before I go into work. But, although most of my garden is either dormant or sulking in the cold, there is one welcome sign that Spring is on its way. The previous owner of the cottage was clearly a galanthophile, as there are many hundreds of snowdrops which have naturalised in the flower beds underneath the front wall. And indeed (though it’s a bit hard to see in this snap) along the top of the wall too. They don’t seem to have minded the recent snow at all. It’s nice to see a sign of life in the garden.

20 02 2013 Gillian garden Comments Off on A sign of Spring Permalink

Quartet

Malvern has a somewhat old-fashioned single-screen cinema, and it takes a while for films to diffuse out this far into the boondocks. When they finally do get here, it’s only the real blockbusters that are scheduled for more than a single week. So that means that, in the event that there is a film on that I actually want to watch, I have to be organised, keep an eye out for it, and make the time to go. The alternative is to go to one of the cinema multiplexes in Worcester, but that’s too much of an effort at the moment.

I read reviews of Quartet in the Sunday papers several months ago, and thought it sounded interesting, so I have been waiting for it to get around to visiting Malvern. But, as luck would have it, it’s here at a time when work has gone absolutely manic. I’m working lots of overtime, and have multiple off-site meetings with customers, all of which means I’m far too tired to go out to the cinema in the evenings. And nor can I work my flexitime to go to a mid-week matinee, as there are too many late-afternoon project meetings to attend. So if I was going to see the film at all, it was going to have to be this weekend. My initial plan had been to go to the Saturday afternoon showing, but I was fighting off a migraine all day, and sitting in front of a flickering screen would only have made matters worse. So that left this afternoon as the only possible opportunity. I really had to force myself to go – sometimes it’s just so much easier to curl up at home and ignore the outside world, particularly when I’m getting over a migraine. But I don’t think it’s particularly good for me to vegetate at home, so I bullied myself into going.

I was glad that I’d made the effort. The film is directed by Dustin Hoffman, and based on a Ronald Harewood play about a home for retired musicians. The quartet of the title were Billy Connolly as a rather dirty old man, Pauline Collins as a very confused woman in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and Tom Courtenay and Maggie Smith as a divorced couple. He’s been resident at the Home for some time, and his comfortable retirement is all shaken up by the arrival on the scene of his ex-wife, especially as she is still acting as a massive diva. The quartet famously sang Verdi together decades ago, and there is a will-they/won’t-they tension as to whether they will reunite and sing together at a gala concert to raise funds for the retirement home. Of course they do in the end, with the Maggie Smith character having to learn to be rather less of a diva on the way.

One of the nice touches about the film was that many of the bit-parts and extras were in fact played by retired musicians and opera singers. During the end credits, there were pictures of them as they are now, and on-stage in their prime.

I bumped into an ex-colleague on the way out, who is now long-since retired, and he asked me what on earth I was doing there as I was far too young for it! I think I may well have been the youngest person in the nearly-full cinema! But it was fun, a good light piece of entertainment, and I’m glad I made the effort to go.

17 02 2013 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on Quartet Permalink

Getting sick of the snow

As predicted, it did indeed snow on Sunday evening, so I was very glad we’d all made it back from the Cotswolds in time. When I woke up on Monday morning, I could tell from the quality of the light through the bedroom curtains that something wasn’t quite right. Then when I got out of bed and went into the bathroom, even though I didn’t have my glasses on, all I could see out of the bathroom window was white, which was snow covering the garden terraces.

Once I’d put my glasses on and opened the curtains in the living room, it didn’t actually look too bad. There was under an inch on the grass, and less than that on the drive. So, although the car was pretty well covered, at least I wouldn’t have to shovel the drive in order to get to work. There’s a lot going on at work at the moment (end-of-year-itis has struck again) so I really needed to get in to the office to deal with things. But when I went out to clear and defrost the car, I struck a problem. I simply couldn’t get in to it! The doors had frozen shut!

I cursed to myself, and fetched a watering can of hot water to pour over the door handle and along the door seals, and at least managed to defrost things enough to get the central locking to unlock. But I simply couldn’t open the driver’s door, no matter how hard I tugged it. I don’t know whether there was ice in the seals freezing it shut around the edges that I wasn’t strong enough to overcome, whether there was some critical part of the lock mechanism that was frozen in place, or whether ice/water had got into the electrics and made it malfunction. But I could not open the door at all. So that meant getting another watering can full of hot water, and pouring it carefully around the passenger door, to try to get in that way.That worked, and at least I had access to the car. Fortunately, I’m quite slightly built, and was able to clamber across the passenger seat to get to the driver’s seat, though I did give myself a fright by knocking the radio on button with my knee and suddenly having Radio 4 booming out!

I drove into work in a filthy mood, chunnering to myself all the way. And even when I parked in the work car park, I still couldn’t open the driver’s door. I had to scramble back over the passenger seat, trying to avoid doing myself a mischief on the gear stick. I spent most of the morning wondering whether I’d have to put the car into the garage to get looked at, and if so when I’d have the time to do so – I’ve had off-site meetings for three days this week, and work is really manic at the moment. I decided that I’d have another go at getting into the car at lunch-time, and try to sort out a mechanic if I still had problems. However, work is at the bottom of the hill, and was below the snow-line, being noticeably warmer than at home. The snow had all melted by lunchtime, and whatever the problem was had righted itself. The doors all unlocked without any dramas whatsoever. Phew!

I think I’ve had more than enough of the snow!

14 02 2013 icyjumbo car Comments Off on Getting sick of the snow Permalink

A particularly gluttonous weekend

There is a group of women I know through work (though through a combination of the Three Rs – Retirement, Redundancy and Resignation – only one of them is still there) who have a standing arrangement to go away together once a year to a meeting of The Pudding Club. This year, for the first time, I was invited to join them. The core group have been attending for the past dozen years or more, so they have a well-polished set of rituals they have worked out to make the most of the weekend away.

This year, there were seven of us in the party. Five of us live close to Malvern, so we all met up at 09:30 on Saturday morning, and piled into a car for the drive to Stratford. There, the first part of the weekend ritual became apparent – coffee, toast and croissants in a particular coffee shop off the high street. This was followed by an hour of light retail therapy in Stratford before lunch. I did think of spending the time going round one of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust buildings, as it’s many years since I’ve been there. However, the entrance fee was £14, and though the ticket covered three buildings I didn’t expect to have enough time to see more than one. So I told them I simply wasn’t prepared to pay that much and walked back out! There were large parties of Japanese tourists though who seemed totally prepared to cough up the money.

We all met up again for lunch at the same pub the group go to every year, and were joined there by another two of the group who live further away, plus a third ex-colleague who joined us just for lunch and brought her extremely well-behaved baby along too. We had a major gossip over a long but very light lunch of sandwiches, as we knew we’d all be pigging out later.

After lunch it was time for more retail therapy in Stratford. I’m not usually a big one for recreational shopping, but I really needed a new sweater as I’m about to wear through the elbows of my current favourite. So I was very pleased to find a very soft cashmere sweater at better than half price in the sales, which it would have been a crime to leave behind! The other women did rather more shopping than I did, and it was a bit of a struggle fitting all of the bags into the car boot!

Then we drove in convoy out into the depths of the Cotswolds to a very pleasant hotel which is the home of The Pudding Club. Having checked into our rooms, we all then met in the bar for a further gossip and drinks. Then it was time to get changed for dinner. I had been warned of the absolute necessity of wearing something loose or elasticated around the waist, as closely fitting clothes would be disastrous at the latter stages of the evening! So although I very rarely wear a dress, I thought it would be the most comfortable option under the circumstances….. The next part of the evening ritual then unfolded, as we all met up in one of the bedrooms, bringing the toothbrush glasses from our bathrooms with us, for some pre-dinner bottles of wine.

At 19:30 about sixty people all met up in the residents’ lounge to be welcomed to The Pudding Club and have the rules explained to us. There was a choice of very light main courses, not much more than a starter really, followed by the main action. This was a choice of seven traditional British puddings, and just three rules:
1. You could only approach the pudding table when invited to, one table at a time, by the host
2. You could only choose one pudding at a time, though you could have them in any order
3. Most importantly, you could only go back up to the pudding table for more if you had completely cleaned your bowl from the previous helping.

The puddings vary according to the whim of the chef, and last night were: Vanilla Charlotte, Sticky Toffee and Date, Jam Roly-Poly, Very Chocolate, Jam and Coconut, Ginger Sponge, and Bread & Butter pudding. There was also a choice of jam sauce, chocolate sauce, cream, toffee sauce, and of course gallons (literally!) of custard. I managed a total of five portions of pudding, namely the first four in the list, with a double-sized portion of Sticky toffee and a second helping of the jam roly-poly. They were absolutely delicious. Between us, the seven of us managed to put away over forty portions of pudding! We were lightweights though compared to some people on other tables – there was one man and one woman who each managed twelve helpings! Then there was a vote, taken by show of hands, for the best pudding of the evening. Each person was allowed one vote, except that if you had eaten more then one portion of a pudding, you could vote for it that number times. It was a very tight vote, with bread and butter pudding being declared the winner by just one vote – which was entirely due to my colleague who had eaten three portions of it and so voted for it three times!

On Sunday morning we had a huge cooked breakfast at the hotel, then we said goodbye to the others and the five of us drove to the Cotswold village of Broadway to continue with the weekend’s ritual. This involved coffee (and in my case a completely unnecessary toasted teacake) followed by investigating several of the shops. Although it was a Sunday, Broadway is such a major tourist destination that many of the shops were open. It was a filthy day though, pouring with rain, and with snow forecast for later, so we weren’t really in the mood for a massive attack on the shops. In fact, the regulars said that they couldn’t remember when they’d bought so little in Broadway. Then it was time to come home, and think about having a very small dinner indeed…..

All in all, it was a very enjoyable weekend away. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, as I think did everyone. I can see why the group makes such a point about going there year after year – it was really fun, and a totally self-indulgent occasion.

10 02 2013 icyjumbo Day out
food Comments (1) Permalink

Living in a small town

I’ve mentioned a few times that Malvern has a real small-town feel, and that I find it pretty much impossible to go around Waitrose without bumping in to someone I know. On Saturday I met a current colleague, an ex-colleague who retired a few years ago, and some close friends of my mother who have known me since I was born. That’s pretty typical!

I was at the hairdressers recently having a badly-needed haircut. I’m so short-sighted that once I’ve taken my glasses off, I’m pretty much blind. So although I was vaguely aware that a woman had come into the salon, and I could hear her talking to her two teenage children, who were taking it in turns to get a trim, I really couldn’t see her. I was getting that funny feeling you get when someone is staring at you, so I suspected she was giving me a funny look, but I really couldn’t see well enough to stare back. Then I heard the strange woman asking the salon owner what was the name of “the lady having her fringe trimmed”. At which point she shrieked out at the top of her voice “I knew it! It is Gillian! You’re the only reason I passed my maths A-level!”.

She turned out to be someone I was at school with thirty years ago, and haven’t met since… And indeed I do remember giving her some coaching through A-level maths, though I wouldn’t have rated my contribution quite as strongly as she appeared to! Scary though that someone I was at school with now has teenage children of her own – that makes me feel old!

05 02 2013 Gillian Uncategorized Comments Off on Living in a small town Permalink

More work on the porch, roof, gutters…….

It was pouring with rain overnight earlier in the week, and since I was awake anyway I got out of bed, found a torch, and had a good look at the porch roof in the downpour. I couldn’t see any signs of a leak, so I think (hope!) that problem is solved.

However, there is still clearly a separate problem with the porch, which is that it has no ventilation other than through the (usually closed) letterbox, and suffers badly from condensation. Some of that then drips from the roof onto the floor, which looks like a leak even though it isn’t. So I got back in touch with my now all-too-regular builder, and said I’d pay the remaining outstanding balance for fixing the porch roof the first time round, but wanted him to quote for a few more hopefully small jobs, including ventilating the porch.

Another job I want him to do is to re-route the outflow pipe from my boiler away from the gutter. I really do not want to have to keep going up a ladder in the snow, with a watering can of hot water and/or a hairdryer, to keep my boiler operating. It’s an unpleasant chore, and downright dangerous when it’s icy. I always made sure I had a mobile phone in my pocket so that if I slipped and fell I could at least call for help! It should be a simple job to route the pipe straight down the wall directly into a ground-level drain, which would be much easier to keep free of ice.

But when I invited the builder round to look at the pipe and quote for rerouting it, he pointed out that the brick-work below the offending gutter was distinctly damp. I said that he should have seen it during the snow – the entire wall was a sheet of ice from the overflowing gutter. I suspect that the down-pipe is blocked, and have asked him to try to pressure-wash it free. He’ll also get his roofer to have a poke around the roof and gutter, and check that there isn’t anything more serious going on. A blocked drain is bad enough, but I want to be sure there isn’t another underlying problem.

Yet more expense……. The thing is though that with an old house, there is always something that needs attention, and you really have to keep on top of the maintenance as otherwise problems can grow very big and nasty! So I’d much rather invest now in fixing ongoing problems as a series of smallish jobs than face a huge bill for replacing the roof or repointing entire walls…….

01 02 2013 icyjumbo house Comments (3) Permalink

A study day at the Petrie Museum

My father and I so enjoyed the study day at the Museum Of London that we went on a few months back, that we booked ourselves onto another study day. This was again organised through Andante Travels, my favourite holiday company, who specialise in archaeological trips. However, the weather up here in Malvern has been so atrocious that for most of this week I thought I’d have to cancel going, as I was so thoroughly snowed in. Fortunately though, there was a break in the weather in between the snow and the promised floods, so I was able to get down to London for the weekend after all.

This time, we spent a day at the Petrie Museum in central London. It’s only about 10 minutes walk from the British Museum, but is tucked away down a side street, behind some forbidding-looking railings, and you wouldn’t just stumble across it – you’d have to know it was there, and even then it takes some finding! It is part of University College London, and is a teaching museum with a superb collection of Ancient Egyptian artefacts. It was founded by a very formidable Victorian woman, Amelia Edwards, and its first curator was an extremely idiosyncratic Victorian, Sir William Flinders Petrie, who is known as the Father of modern Egyptology and after whom the museum is named. These days I suspect he’d probably be diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, but back then he just passed as a mad genius. He was absolutely brilliant at Egyptology, but had absolutely no social graces whatsoever. There is one story of another eminent egyptologist unexpectedly going to the museum and finding Petrie crawling behind one of the cabinets, with a piece of sacking over him, trying to hide to avoid the visitor!

There was a small group of eleven of us on the study day, plus an egyptologist leading the group. The museum opened specially for us in the morning, so we had exclusive access to it. We spent much of the morning sitting as a group around a table in the middle of the museum, wearing surgical gloves, and handling a selection of objects from the collection. Most of them were from the New Kingdom, specifically from the reign of Akhenaton in the 18th Dynasty, so dated from around 1340BC. It was a real privilege to be able to handle such ancient and precious objects. One was a blue-green faience ring with the cartouche of Queen Nefertiti, which actually fitted me! Amazing……

We had a rather good lunch included at a Turkish restaurant near the British Museum, where we were presented with plate after plate of mezze. I wasn’t sure what half of the things were that I was eating, but they were all very tasty!

After lunch, we returned to the Petrie Museum, which was now open to the public for the afternoon – though there really weren’t that many people there. Our Egyptologist then gave us a guided tour of some of the highlights of the collection. Since the museum is only two rooms in size, you might have thought that would be very quick, but you’d be wrong! She really had the knack of talking about any of the objects and making it fascinating. It was very helpful having her explain things since the museum is very much a “teaching collection” rather than designed to be accessible to the layman. Unlike, for example, the Ashmolean in Oxford, which is curated and interpreted to within an inch of its life, the Petrie is just a collection of glass cabinets, all stuffed full of objects, with yet more stuff in drawers below the cabinets, and with hardly any descriptive labels or interpretation. So it really helped to have an expert describe what we were looking at and why it was important. In fact, several members of the public also joined our group to listen to her lecturing us, some more blatantly than others!

Some objects that stuck in my mind include a 5000 year old linen shirt, found in a grave, still with perspiration stains visible under the armpits. And there was a beaded net dress probably worn by a dancing girl aged about 12 years old judging from the size. It is one of only two such dresses to survive. One item though was really quite close to home. It was a terracotta box, about 60cm x 15cm x15cm, with holes pierced along it and a trap-door arrangement at one end. It had originally been identified as a chicken-coop, until a member of the public, who happened to work as a pest controller, said that it was clearly a rat-trap. And indeed, apart from being made of terracotta rather than metal wire, it was absolutely identical to the squirrel trap that Tim my pest controller deployed outside my kitchen door before Christmas! Fascinating that people have been having the same problems with rodents for 4000 years, and solving them in essentially the same way!

27 01 2013 icyjumbo Day out Comments (2) Permalink