IT'S BEGINNING TO FEEL A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS

Well I was back and then I was gone and now back again but, sorry, only briefly as I'm off to Mum's in a few hours. I may give myself a hernia with all the books I have to carry as presents so wish me luck. But until then, and until next week, a quick Christmas update from my kitchen.

After spending last Monday chopping dried fruit I spent Tuesday fruitlessly hunting for whole strips of candied peel only to admit eventual defeat and buy ready chopped candied lemon peel before baking the cake and steaming the pudding. As in previous years I used Nigel Slater's cake recipe from The Kitchen Diaries. It contains a mix of raisins, sultanas, currants, cranberries, peel, figs, prunes, apricots, hazelnuts and ground almonds. It is heavily fruity but not the kind of solidly dense fruit cake that makes my heart, not to mention my stomach, sink. I have been feeding it with brandy and will be marzipanning today. My snowy icing will go on tomorrow as it is easier to pack it for travelling without. The pudding is Nigella's recipe and one I haven't tried before so we'll see, I will report back next week. One quick thing though, she says that if you decrease it from a 3 pint pud to to a 2 pint one then 3 hours of steaming/boiling should do it. It didn't. I boiled it for another hour then turned the heat off and left the basin in the water with the lid on to get the last of the heat (it was midnight by then and I needed to go to bed) so it may have been ready after 4 hours, it may have only been ready after slowly cooling in hot water and residual stem, I can make no promises.

And what else... there is a jar of dried fruit covered and gently swelling in Pedro Ximénez sherry for Chris to take to his parents, a few small loaves of gingerbread, there is cranberry sauce which I think tastes a bit weird so I will try it again before deciding whether to take it away. There will be white chocolate, cranberry and pecan cookies, a fallen chocolate cake with grand marnier cream for Christmas Eve, and maybe a cranberry and vanilla cake to use up the rest of the fresh cranberries when I get back to London. Anyone curious can find the first five of these recipes in Nigella Christmas.

On Sunday we had a pre-Christmas dinner as Chris and I are heading off in opposite directions. Saturday's trip to Stoke Newington farmers' market yielded a chicken, chipolatas, smoked streaky bacon, potatoes, parsnips, sprouts and carrots. I roasted the chicken with lemon, thyme, and garlic, wrapped the sausages in bacon and eventually added these to the pan with the chicken, roasted the potatoes in goose fat along with the parsnips, boiled the sprouts and part steamed part boiled the carrots. A light gravy made with the chicken's juices and some wine and we were done. As always I filled up super fast so had cold chicken and sausages with potatoes and parsnips for lunch, last night there was a leftover veg frittata with the rest of the cold meat. God I love Christmas.

BACK, FINALLY

Since the end of November and the end of NaBloPoMo I have, clearly, vanished from view on here. With perfect timing the last day of November coincided with the start of a bout of tonsillitis which left me sick and dosed up on penicillin for the rest of the week.

I was just well enough to go to an Ottolenghi cookery class at Leith's on the 6th but all the exertion left me a quivering wreck for the remainder of the weekend, fun though it was. I'm definitely hanging onto the buttered spiced rice and the meatballs so they should crop up here eventually.

So, I was back at work last week but not back to cooking. A week away from the kitchen ended with a good food weekend in Edinburgh that mostly consisted of revisiting old favourites while we had the chance, I'm a little sad that the weather made eating German Christmas market food an unappealing prospect but with our favourite Chinese takeaway, three great lunches with friends, and a delicious Edinburgh pizza we couldn't complain.

Now I'm back in London and back in the kitchen. I spent this evening scissoring dried fruit while watching Nigella's Christmas Kitchen and am keeping my fingers crossed for finding somewhere, anywhere, to buy whole pieces of candied peel tomorrow and hoping that if I add enough booze to my Christmas cake and pudding no one will notice that they only had a week to mature...

DONE

It's November 30th and I've posted every day for an entire month. There have been new recipes, old favourites, and the odd (to be perfectly honest) nonsense post just designed to stop me failing.

I have enjoyed focusing on NaBloPoMo and will absolutely do it next year but I'm not yet insane enough to post every day of every month of every year as, frankly, there have been times when there just isn't enough time in the day.

I had been planning a final celebration for crossing the finish line. Something to do with nice food and bubbles, a fitting end for a month when I have increased my total post count to over 100 (hooray). But life rarely works out the way we plan it.

Last night we had the delicious Turkish food which made me both very full and very very sleepy, then this morning I woke up to rain and a cold and a sore throat. Still in entertainment mode, however, we shivered our way to the bus stop to go and drop my sister's bag at Waterloo before taking her to Wagamama's for some noodles. All went swimmingly until I gulped some green tea and had to spit it back into the cup as it was scaldingly hot. Now I had a badly burned tongue, a cold, a sore throat, and, to top it all off, had lost my appetite.

All that to say I am now back at home, on the sofa, about to watch some suitably inane TV and will eventually make some soup.

I'll leave you now and will be back very soon, maybe not tomorrow, but very soon with plans for bread, Christmas pudding, Christmas cake...

THE DOVER CASTLE

Gosh it's cold.

Today I made the grave error of leaving the house in not very thick tights and ballet pumps. My hat shod head was toasty, my sheepskin mittened hands were lovely and warm, but my legs and feet were abso-bloody-lutely freezing.

We eventually found ourselves sitting in a quiet pub beside a fire basking in peace and quiet away from the Christmas shopping hordes. So, if you're ever on Oxford Street and need an escape (so that would be every time you're on Oxford Street) take yourself off to a few streets back and find yourself a seat here for a well priced pint and a touch of sanity.

And now that I've wrapped myself up in more sensible Winter layers we're off for some chargrilled lamb in one of Stoke Newington's many good Turkish restaurants, this one to be exact.

CAN'T FAIL NOW...

It's the 28th of November, so close to finishing NaBloPoMo but it's quite hard to type...

My sister is staying for the weekend, we had lunch at the National Gallery, went Christmas shopping in Hamley's (hell), got the bus home, and then, well, we drank four glasses of red. Now it's a bit too fuzzy to type so I'm going to eat pittas and dips and maybe, oops, drink another glass of wine (or two).

See you all soon when the computer screen is a little less blurry.

YUCK, SPROUTS...

I would love to tell you that I was traumatised by mushy Brussels sprouts as a child.

I would love to jump on the ‘I grew up being forcefed watery stinky sprouts’ bandwagon.

I would love to wax lyrical about my conversion to the religion of the sprout.

But I can’t as it simply isn’t true.

Well the final conversion to the church of sprout lovers is true but the whole truth is this…

My Mum doesn’t mind sprouts but neither does she like them enough to try to force feed them to us. The same goes for cabbage. Over the past few years boiled sprouts have appeared on the table at Christmas to appease other people who insisted that sprouts were as much of a Christmas necessity as leaving a mince pie out for Father Christmas but most of us (me and my sister) would just act as if they weren’t there.

I had dismissed them as soggy, smelly, and stupid to prepare with their silly little crosses in the bottom. Chris tried to tell me that in his house sprouts were different but I may as well have been holding my hands over my ears and singing ‘I can’t hear you’ at the top of my voice for all the notice I took.

Then, last year, I made this pasta and, oh, it was good.

Then, at Christmas, I bought one of those pretty sprout trees (branches?) and gave the sprouts the briefest of boilings so they were a vibrant green and still slightly crunchy alongside the roast and, yes, still good.

So, I am now an enthusiastic sprout eater to the point where, last night, I cooked some sausages and to go with them melted a little butter in a frying pan, added some pine nuts to brown, then piled in lots of halved sprouts along with some salt and pepper and a little olive oil. I cooked them until they were just softening but still with a definite crunch. We ate up every one.

BLACK AND WHITE BANANA BREAD

Last night, to continue the using up frozen bananas theme (yes, I have decided that there are enough bananas lurking to warrant a theme), I decided to finally get around to baking something from Baking: From My Home to Yours. There are so many things that I have wanted to bake from this that it is almost overwhelming. I have mentally bookmarked the rugelach, various bundt cakes, layer cakes, cookies, and well really it would be easier to list the things I don’t want to make.

So, an easy starting point when there is so much choice and I have bananas to use is banana bread. You can't ever go too far wrong if you start with banana bread, I'm sure it would work for lots of different situations, if only to cheer you up.

The banana bread of choice was a black and white banana loaf with some rum added to the bananas, melted dark chocolate, vanilla, and the fun of making my first ever marbled cake. So many questions. How much to dollop in alternate blobs to ensure a good swirly mix. How much to drag a knife through to marble rather than mix. How the slightly heavier chocolate batter doesn’t all sink to the bottom. But ultimately how pretty it looks when you cut that first slice.



The great banana quest continues, and so far, I have used up the grand total of four bananas. Oh dear dear dear, does anyone have a recipe that requires the use of more than 10 overripe bananas?