Not that I actually left. For me, real life will always trump the virtual world. Now those who know me, know my whole life was re-written by the net in the form of one balding fat furry Welshman - so it's ironic that the net and I aren't the best of friends. Mostly because without Tone to "chat" to incessantly, the net is boring to me. I have a life that's already filled to the brim and I'm always trying to find ways to slip more and more into it - writing, cooking, writing about cooking - you get the picture.
But lets catch up, the last time we spoke there was the looming death-by-sugar axe swinging above my neck. I'm not happy to say that little thing called diabetes was "confirmed" when my blood went from 14.9 ten days ago, (UK scale, normal is between 5-6), to 17.6 five days later... Have got meds to take nightly and a blood letting machine of my very own, on a side note; Tone's green with jealousy as my unit is the newest and fabiest on the market and his was built in the dark-ages, more a medieval torture device than medical procedure, heehaw.
So, there it is... I'm newly diabetic. Have to say I'm not taking it well. Have been about as pissed off as any brilliantly talented, newly diagnosed, diabetic pastry chef could be. I mean really, REALLY pissed off. Though, I think I'm starting to getting around that slowly.
But my vow is this; I may have diabetes, but I will not be a diabetic! It's important that I will not let this change me. I will not let this be what I'm defined as. I'm still me and I will continue to be a brilliant pastry chef... I just can't sample the goods in fits of gluttony as I would have before.
Rock on and lets start a new day!
Tuesday 12 April 2011
Sunday 27 March 2011
Don't let brownies go the way of the dodo
A friends recent post on a well known "social network" was a rhetorical question while waiting to see if her trashed kitchen was worth it in the pursuit of a batch of home-made brownies. And I say yes, YES! it's well worth a trashed kitchen in pursuit of any home-baking.
I see, all around us, a vast and rapid extinction of the family food traditions of our youth. I remember the weddings on my fathers side of the family, indeed all celebrations - mile-stone anniversaries, baptisims, confirmations and especially first holy communions were important - and thus were occasions to gather all the branches together in celebration. And in true old-fashioned terms, this meant church-hall tables laden with so much baked goods. Long tables upholding tray after tray of cookies the likes of which you can't begin to imagine.
The deliveries began the day before these events. Husbands or brothers tasked to deliver huge Tupperware cake-keepers with layers of waxed paper to provide protection between strata of butter cookies, chocolate & spice "meatball" cookies, butter balls perfumed with ground pecans and rolled in icing sugar, cuccidati (scilian fig cookies) and biscotti di reginas or sesame cookies. If it was an occasion to pull out all the stops, there would be other plates piled high with delecate aniseseed flavoured waffle cookies known as pizzelles as well as other assorted bite sized tokens of love.
There is little evidence of today's children standing at the elbow of their mothers and grandmothers in the kitchen. Learning the old-fashioned traditions handed from generation to generation. I wanted to begin my life here by bringing both my own flavours as well as the traditions of Wales to our combined holiday table and so have asked collegues and acquaintances here for their own tried and true family recipes... and to all my requests I've been told family baking isn't a part of their holiday tables. Over and over again the answers I've received were recommendations as to which shop or brand of christmas pudding or treat is their family favorite.
Sadly, just as with home, there are even fewer home-bakers here - here in the land of Dickens and Shakespeare - and us just living a stones throw away from Pudding-Mill Lane!
And in these economic times the small independant bake shops are closing too. Leaving us only the commercial mass-production loaves and machine peeled apple pies with stamped out crusts. It's dreadful what passes for quality and how the next generation and those to come after will look at the Sarah Lee and Mr Kiplings brands as those things that are cherished from their childhood.
Please, please, find a bowl, let loose the spoon. And even if it's a box mix - bake those brownies and mix those scones. All is not lost when the effort is made to ensure those who will proceed will have been given the skillset to be able to turn out a yeasty loaf and be capable of providing a lovely cream tea for their friends and family.
d xx
I see, all around us, a vast and rapid extinction of the family food traditions of our youth. I remember the weddings on my fathers side of the family, indeed all celebrations - mile-stone anniversaries, baptisims, confirmations and especially first holy communions were important - and thus were occasions to gather all the branches together in celebration. And in true old-fashioned terms, this meant church-hall tables laden with so much baked goods. Long tables upholding tray after tray of cookies the likes of which you can't begin to imagine.
The deliveries began the day before these events. Husbands or brothers tasked to deliver huge Tupperware cake-keepers with layers of waxed paper to provide protection between strata of butter cookies, chocolate & spice "meatball" cookies, butter balls perfumed with ground pecans and rolled in icing sugar, cuccidati (scilian fig cookies) and biscotti di reginas or sesame cookies. If it was an occasion to pull out all the stops, there would be other plates piled high with delecate aniseseed flavoured waffle cookies known as pizzelles as well as other assorted bite sized tokens of love.
There is little evidence of today's children standing at the elbow of their mothers and grandmothers in the kitchen. Learning the old-fashioned traditions handed from generation to generation. I wanted to begin my life here by bringing both my own flavours as well as the traditions of Wales to our combined holiday table and so have asked collegues and acquaintances here for their own tried and true family recipes... and to all my requests I've been told family baking isn't a part of their holiday tables. Over and over again the answers I've received were recommendations as to which shop or brand of christmas pudding or treat is their family favorite.
Sadly, just as with home, there are even fewer home-bakers here - here in the land of Dickens and Shakespeare - and us just living a stones throw away from Pudding-Mill Lane!
And in these economic times the small independant bake shops are closing too. Leaving us only the commercial mass-production loaves and machine peeled apple pies with stamped out crusts. It's dreadful what passes for quality and how the next generation and those to come after will look at the Sarah Lee and Mr Kiplings brands as those things that are cherished from their childhood.
Please, please, find a bowl, let loose the spoon. And even if it's a box mix - bake those brownies and mix those scones. All is not lost when the effort is made to ensure those who will proceed will have been given the skillset to be able to turn out a yeasty loaf and be capable of providing a lovely cream tea for their friends and family.
d xx
Friday 25 March 2011
Where there's heat... get INTO the kitchen
...
It’s a curious thing, heat.
We want it for comfort on a cold winter’s day. We embrace it on a stunning white-sand beach in Mexico. We dread its yearly return when it slides down the California mountains like the Devil's own breath, whipping up raging forest fires along it's path. We take it for granted when we wake up each morning.
And we LOVE to eat it!
I Googled chilli peppers and got over 6.8M hits in less than a nano second. I don't think there's a place on the planet which doesn’t have it’s own version of the chilli pod or peppercorn. There are whole cultures whose identities are closely entwined with the heat of their cuisine. Men folk back home gather at Tom’s Tavern to challenge one another to prove themselves by ingesting a host of different hot-sauces collected from around the world (silly gits).
Growing up in north eastern America, we aren’t as culturally bound to the heat like other regions of the country. Our forefathers in the north didn’t come from old-world hot spots like Spain, Africa and Asia. Our German, Polish, Irish, Italian, Dutch or Scandinavian ancestors were more about slow stews and hearty field-hand fare. If you were to move towards the south and west and you’re moving into regions influenced by Creole, Cajun, African and most especially to the west, Mexico whose flavours were influenced by the Spanish.
And so coming from a heat-timid background, when I arrived in the UK my tastes and senses were naive, (to put it mildly – See? See what I did there?). When I first arrived with my suitcase of personal history, all I could taste was HEAT!!! in even the most mild of dishes. It took time to appreciate the subtle depths and layers of sizzling pleasure one can achieve from these little red flavour bombs.
Another PBS television chef whom I admired greatly was Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet. He was passionate about world travel and brought much of his life experiences to the table. Not just in the dishes, but by the sharing of stories about the generosity of the people who opened their kitchens and lives up to teaching this funny looking gray-bearded Methodist Minister about their day to day sustenance. The most compelling lesson I took from him was this… In order to learn about a culture, start by learning about their food. And it’s really very true. If you study a cuisine from anywhere in the world, you begin to understand their environment (what they eat, indicates what they cultivate which in turn shows what natural resources they can draw on which in turn gives you a larger idea of the environments they live in, etc.).
So I began my culinary love affair with the world in earnest here in the UK. And I selected India as the first place I wanted to learn about to create their amazing dishes. I did this by persuading my dear husband to take me out to dinner, as much as possible, to as many Indian restaurants as we could find – not a bad life that, lol. My Indian journey began through their menus and imaginative flavours. The eager waiting staff who didn’t mind the endless questions I’d ask about each dish gave me a lot of insight into how to craft a truly lovely meal. I enjoyed many creamy kormas giving way to the roar of a pungent rogan josh.
Tasting lead to learning which lead to cooking which leads me to here. And the knowledge that when things are getting hot, it’s time to head into the kitchen and be sultry with your spices and lavish with your love. For cooking as a gift to someone is an act of love, it’s a feathery kiss on a fork and a spoonful of embrace. xx
Wednesday 23 March 2011
Writing is easy... right?
I'm envious of my colleague Miss C who, when she gets in extra early, can just sit down and begin writing with quick taps of her long, made-for-the-keyboard fingers. But writing must be easy you scoff, after all if it weren't, how could we have so many books in the world?
Well I'll tell you how...
See, those with the touch of genius can just do it like it's the most natural thing in the world. They are fountains from which thoughts and feelings flow like rivers of truth wrapped in pretty stories. For those of us who are less touched by genius, (hacks and others filled with their own hubris), well we tend to see the writing maxim more like this: There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
I've got ideas you see. Lots of them. Pretty colorized be-ribboned ideas about characters and plots and settings and stuff. A good writer will have things pop into their heads and make connections between ideas, characters, plots and places. For me, notsomuch. It's a bit more like a box you'd find left over from a jumble sale. You open it and there's all this stuff that bulges and falls out in a mis-matched tangle. And when a hack reaches for a character and matches it to a setting they think will work, you find these ingredients will decide they don't want to fit together. And then everything starts fighting against you and your ideas. So now it's a bloody boxing match between you, your character, your notions of where they belong, etceterra. This goes on until all unite just to bitch-slap the sorry writer (me) who unfortunately thinks they know what they're doing when obviously they don’t!
I get how writing works. I’ve read every book on writing a book that’s been published! I know about plotting and pacing and outlining and tension and dialogue and hooks and stuff. But alas there is one other thing that I lack, the missing ingredient. Which is the necessary genius to bring these things together into a story that flows and sparkles and makes people beg to peer into more worlds from my imagination.
But someday… someday, I tell myself, I’m gonna crack that nut!
Well I'll tell you how...
See, those with the touch of genius can just do it like it's the most natural thing in the world. They are fountains from which thoughts and feelings flow like rivers of truth wrapped in pretty stories. For those of us who are less touched by genius, (hacks and others filled with their own hubris), well we tend to see the writing maxim more like this: There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
I've got ideas you see. Lots of them. Pretty colorized be-ribboned ideas about characters and plots and settings and stuff. A good writer will have things pop into their heads and make connections between ideas, characters, plots and places. For me, notsomuch. It's a bit more like a box you'd find left over from a jumble sale. You open it and there's all this stuff that bulges and falls out in a mis-matched tangle. And when a hack reaches for a character and matches it to a setting they think will work, you find these ingredients will decide they don't want to fit together. And then everything starts fighting against you and your ideas. So now it's a bloody boxing match between you, your character, your notions of where they belong, etceterra. This goes on until all unite just to bitch-slap the sorry writer (me) who unfortunately thinks they know what they're doing when obviously they don’t!
I get how writing works. I’ve read every book on writing a book that’s been published! I know about plotting and pacing and outlining and tension and dialogue and hooks and stuff. But alas there is one other thing that I lack, the missing ingredient. Which is the necessary genius to bring these things together into a story that flows and sparkles and makes people beg to peer into more worlds from my imagination.
But someday… someday, I tell myself, I’m gonna crack that nut!
So ever the optimist, let’s just keep going and see what happens. And Karen – daisy girl, if you’re listening - please come back from your heavenly cloud and help me get your world, Silverhawk, into ours?
xx
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