the weind

...a web journal from the north

quick comforts

March 6, 2016 by Ana Leave a Comment

I’ve been making, what is, for me, quite a lot of bread in the month since Harry died. Probably, in an ideal world, where both Phil and I weren’t either almost constantly watching our weight, or actively trying to lose it, I would bake something every day, and more often than not, that thing would be bread. There’s just something about making a loaf of bread I find immensely comforting and reassuring.

In this very sad and busy time for us, I’ve been turning to quick breads frequently. I love proper yeasted breads, but quick breads have many obvious virtues, not the least of which is found in the name itself; they’re quick. No rising, no kneading, and in my experience, they’re forgiving little things, which take to freestyle adaptation happily enough. As long as you basically get the ratio of dry ingredients to wet right, and don’t stuff up the leavening, you’re golden. If you’re using self-raising flour, you’re set for the alkaline part of the leavening reaction without needing to find the measuring spoons. Yogurt, buttermilk, sour milk, beer, etc., will all take care of the acid. Then it’s just flavour as desired.

Mostly, I’ve just been making soda bread. I’ve always got yogurt, buttermilk, or, alas, milk that’s gone sour hanging about in the fridge, and if I’m not just going with my handy, ever-present little sack of self-raising flour, there’s always baking soda and/or baking powder in the pantry. Salt and honey in the house are givens. I’m never more than a couple of minutes of gathering the ingredients and mixing up the dough away from having a loaf of soda bread in the oven. I’ve been adding in rolled oats and playing with the flour mix from time to time, because both Phil and I prefer hearty, chewy, wholegrain bread, but you can always sweeten it up by mixing in some dried fruit — currants are particularly nice for this. You get something that tastes a bit like a rather austere scone.

This morning I realised that having a small loaf around for the rest of the weekend,would be useful, which brings me to another of quick bread’s chief virtues: you can make a pretty small loaf. If you’re using little packets of dried yeast, one is usually the right amount for a full-sized loaf, but if you have neither the time, nor the need, for a full-on 2lb sized loaf, this is where a savoury or plain quick bread will serve you well. I didn’t want to make soda bread yet again; I wanted something a bit savoury, and as I happened to have a single, lonely, bottle of Peroni taking up space in the pantry fridge, and most of a small bag of self-raising flour around, it seemed like a good time to make an old favourite: beer bread. I also had a nice-sized wedge of mature Lancashire cheese that wasn’t going to be used if we didn’t actually have bread to use it with, so I grated about a very loosely-packed cup of that into my dry ingredients, ground a bunch of black pepper in after that, then whisked about a teaspoon of honey and a tablespoon of melted butter into the beer, mixed it all together (do not overwork the quick breads, for they are like muffins, and benefit from lumpy batter!) and dumped it into a greased  1lb loaf pan. Pop it into a 180º C oven, and one gorgeously fragrant hour later, there’s my loaf of bread to see out the weekend.

Cheesy Beer Quick Bread
Cheesy Beer Quick Bread

Filed Under: Baking, Family, Food, Self Care Tagged With: baking, bread. cheese, comfort food, homemade

nothing really good about february

March 4, 2016 by Ana 1 Comment

Well, one good thing about it; Phil and I have worked together, as a team, very well indeed, in the hard and painful aftermath of his father suddenly passing away early in the month. We got his funeral organised and done, we’re working on probate, and I have been cleaning and clearing out his house, which Phil inherited, and which, conveniently, is the other half of our semi. We’re still mulling over what to do next, now that Harry is gone. Do we sell one house, do we sell both houses, and move somewhere else? Or do we go ahead and reunite both houses back into one, as it originally was, when his parents, grandmother, and one of his uncles all purchased it together fifty-odd years ago?

Right now, I think we are both too shocked and sad, and too damn busy, to make a solid decision. We’re not going anywhere for the immediate future. Harry was 80, very close to 81, when he died, so to lose him wasn’t entirely unexpected — he was old, he had some of the health problems that come with age — and while he was both good and brave, and not the type to just give up, he never got over losing Phil’s mother three years previously. It was an exemplary marriage between people who loved each other devotedly for most of their adult lives, and, even after she was lost to pancreatic cancer, it was so hard to think of them as anything but a pair. I miss him dreadfully — Fridays and Sundays, when he almost always came over for dinner, are particularly hard — but the small mercy in it is that he didn’t go to a ghastly, prolonged death. It came suddenly, it was incredibly fast, and he went at home, at the end of what seems to have been a pleasant day. If the death of a fine and much-loved person can be good, then his was. I won’t call it consoling, or at least not very, but I am so glad he was utterly independent to the finish, because that mattered to him.

And he mattered to so many people. We had a full house for the funeral and the luncheon afterwards, but for the internment on Monday, it will be only Phil and me there to say the final goodbyes. We’ve spent the last month looking after the feelings of the other people who are grieving for him, but on Monday, we don’t have to be strong and capable and calm and dignified, if it’s too much.

I am a great big crybaby, but somehow, just this once, I held myself together. I was so worried I would just ugly cry at the funeral, but I did not. When Phil was giving his beautiful eulogy, I somehow managed to remain mostly dry-eyed, and composed. It was hard. I cry easily. I have always cried easily. All around me, people were crying. I still don’t know how I did it, but Phil said it helped him get through his speech.

I miss him so much. He was so good. He was a quiet man, and I am mostly a quiet woman, and we could be quiet together in the most companionable way. He got it, that I am shy and introverted, and it often takes me a while to relax and know people well enough to loosen up and be actively friendly, instead of reserved and polite, and he simply left the door open until I was able to feel comfortable, and let my actual personality show. It made me love him, possibly more than anything else ever could have. That I’ll never have another busy Friday or Sunday, running around frantically trying to shop for, and prepare, a dinner to please him, makes me desperately sad. Yes, there were times it was stressful, but by the time I’d told Phil to fetch him and bring him over, everything was ready, and it was worth every bit of effort and time. The wildly extravagant Tapastravaganza was really done for his benefit, above all else, and, as it turns out, he hardly shut up about it, once it was done. I succeeded in my secret wish to please and impress him. It felt important at the time, and of course it was, given what happened such a short time later, so there’s my own personal consolation, and it’s a pretty big one: We gave him a damn good send off, even if we didn’t know that’s what we were doing at the time.

Filed Under: Family Tagged With: family, loss, love

quick dried fig & seville orange jam

January 27, 2016 by Ana Leave a Comment

I did a really good job of cleaning up the pantry during the run-up to Christmas, and then promptly trashed it while preparing the Tapastravaganza. And then I just kind of let it go, because I was so tired after the holidays, and things slowly got more chaotic, and now I’m having trouble finding stuff in there, which is where I was before I cleaned it up last time. So that’s on my list, and given that I spent last night deep-cleaning and reorganising the kitchen, I sort of feel like I should let the momentum carry me into the pantry and get that all straightened up again. I’d like to paint and really properly sort out the storage space in both rooms, but right now, I’m sort of in the looking-at-paint-chips-and-research phase, and absent some magical free intervention by a proper joiner and decorator, who would have to know more than I do about what I actually want, besides effortless perfection, I have a lot ahead of me.

In the meantime, as a very small start down the road to merely tidier, I took a bag of ageing dried Turkish figs, and made some quick jam. Figs are one of my favourite fruits, and as I have some as-yet-unzested-and-juiced Seville oranges knocking about, as well as a bit of juice that was just sitting in the fridge, I thought I might as well combine two of the fruits I’m keenest on into another well-loved food: homemade jam.

I only had fifteen good-sized figs in my little bag, meaning I’d get about one jar of jam out of them, so there’s really no point in processing that for long-term storage, because once I’ve got a jar of fig jam in the fridge, it’s not going to last long enough to go bad. I’ve only ever made fig jam from fresh before, but I knew it was perfectly possible to make it from dried fruit, and a quick consultation with Chef Google brought me to The Kitchn’s Mission Fig Quick Jam recipe, which I adapted to make mine.

So that link takes you to their version. This here is mine:

200g dried Turkish figs, stems cut off (this is approximate; that’s about what my fifteen figs weighed)

120ml Seville orange juice, plus zest of one orange

125g golden caster sugar

1/2 tsp. vanilla paste or extract

Bung all the ingredients, except for the vanilla, in a small saucepan, mix them up, and bring contents to boil. Allow to boil for about one minute, then drop it back to a simmer, stirring occasionally, until figs soften up a bit, and juice and sugar gets syrupy, about ten minutes. You don’t have to hover directly over it and stir constantly, but don’t venture far away, and keep half an eye on it; depending on the size of your pan, sugar can boil over really fast. Remove pan from heat, stir in the vanilla, and allow to cool for another ten minutes or so. It doesn’t have to be stone cold, but it should be cool enough that any accidental splatters won’t cause injury.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

Transfer pan contents to a food processor, and whizz until you have jam. You may think there’s too much liquid, but you will be wrong. I was prepared to put it all back in the pan and cook it down further, but that turned out to not be at all necessary. That pectin-rich orange has your back. Place jam in clean jar, seal and store in the refrigerator. It should be completely fine for a week or two, minimum.

Tastes like sunny skies and endless summer.
Tastes like sunny skies and endless summer.

This jam is delicious. I knew, instinctively, that swopping the water for orange juice and adding zest would be a good idea, but it was even better than I expected. I will be baking a loaf of bread, and getting some good goat’s cheese to eat with this, as t’s very sweet, and cries out for something a bit salty and savoury to balance it and show it to its fullest advantage, assuming I don’t just shovel it directly into my mouth with a spoon. This is definitely going on the list of recipes to repeat.

 

Filed Under: Food, Recipes Tagged With: figs, homemade, jam, preserves, quick, seville oranges

stormy weather, allegedly

January 26, 2016 by Ana Leave a Comment

We’re supposed to get hit by the tail end of Storm Jonas (when did we start naming winter storms?) today, and here in the generally rainy and windy northwest, we’re anticipating the worst of it. We aren’t due to get snow, alas, just more of the rain that’s been tormenting the north for the last month or so. And yet, nothing’s really happening so far, leaving me with a conundrum — do I hurry up and get dressed, and go out to get stuff done, and hope to beat the rain home, or do I resign myself to getting wet no matter what, and stay here until I’m damn good and ready to go out? The text on the Beeb’s weather page is promising watery doom, but the little cloud graphics are all merely grey, with no raindrops, so I am uncertain.

Given that I’m waiting on a load of laundry, and about halfway through a cup of coffee, probably nothing is going to be decided in the next fifteen minutes. So here’s a picture of our cat I took with my iPhone last night. Phil may be the fancy camera wizard chez nous, but I am the quick-and-dirty iPhone snap queen:

The owl and the pussycat
The owl and the pussycat

A noble beast, albeit kind of a stupid and slightly defective one. That manky-looking pink and beige thing in the lower left is his “raft,” and placed directly under the dining room radiator as it is, he spends quite a lot of time there this time of year. I don’t dare do more than just try to hoover up the matted fur off it, from time to time, because he will freak out and abandon anything or any place he’s previously loved if it changes in any substantial way. (See the basket in our bedroom window I ruined for him forever by a.) putting up new curtains, and b.) exchanging the nasty old fleece blankie for a soft and clean new one, as proof.) So just throwing the grimy old thing away and buying a new one is out. Still, he did better than usual as a photographic subject, by continuing to look directly at me while I took his picture, instead of moving or looking away.

We spent last night hanging around the house waiting for the quasi-nephew to show up and collect a bunch of kitchen and dining stuff I boxed up for him to take to his first flat. It is so very weird to be one of the older, more established, relatives who does the giving away, instead of the receiving, I can tell you that. It feels like most of my adult life has been spent surrounded by the hand-me-downs of kindly older relatives, and to find myself in the opposite position is kind of disorienting. But nice! I’m glad to carry on participating in the cycle in my new role! I gave him our old dishes and pasta bowls, a couple of cooking pots, and a pair of skillets, a set of water/wine goblets, and some other random bits and bobs, all of which are in great shape, but were going unused, as I have my late paternal grandmother’s addiction to dishes and serving ware, meaning every few years I just want new ones — I will never be a pricy bone china person because of this — and recently I’ve hit critical mass on swopping out many of my older pots and pans for enamelled cast-iron ones. Most of what I like to cook really needs heavy-bottomed pans, and while buying an entire set of Le Creuset in one go is probably on par with buying a freaking compact car, if you’re a TK Maxx/thrift shop shark like I am, you can slowly accumulate a collection of great stuff over time. It helps to not be overly concerned with everything being the same colour, which I am not. It also helps to not be hung up on every single piece being OMGLECREUSET, which I also am not. My latest acquisition, the jumbo dutch oven I used to cook the chili in yesterday’s post, is something I picked up at Sainsbury’s for fifteen quid, in the post-holiday clearance.

Anyway, for dinner, while I waited, I hacked together a nice salad out of about 100 grams of salmon leftover from Sunday’s starter, along with half of an avocado from same:

Leftover salad
Leftover salad

It’s pretty similar to the one I made for Sunday dinner, which was, roughly, Nigella’s salmon, avocado and pumpkin seed salad. I add cucumbers and radishes to practically every salad I make, as they’re one of the small number of salad fruits/veg that you can pretty reliably count on being decent year-round. Also, I like them. My tomatoes I buy year-round, and resign myself to slowly and patiently ripening, accepting the occasional failure as the price of eating fresh tomatoes in winter. I know, I know, I know: this makes me a terrible excuse for a seasonal eater/locovore, but I can’t help myself. I need salad. I need it daily, or I just do not Feel Right. At least I don’t buy bags of salad and then end up throwing them away when they turn to slime, uneaten, which is evidently one of the most common ways food is wasted here in the UK. There is little that can send me into a spiral of shame and self-loathing like wasting food, something I do only very, very rarely, so I console myself with that, when I am buying non-seasonal produce. Also consoling in this regard is the compost heap. I am not wasting food, I tell myself, as I chuck another failed tomato into it, I am making more England.

And there’s the spin cycle complete. Time to get moving.

Filed Under: Family, Food, Householding, Pets Tagged With: blithering, family, food, life in the north, weather

everybody makes the best chili

January 25, 2016 by Ana Leave a Comment

Or so you might be tempted to believe, given how people (and mostly these people are, in my experience, men) do bang on about it. Everybody who makes chili seems to have an opinion, everybody’s recipe is different, and people can get downright snotty on whether or it’s real chili if you use beans. Apparently vegetarians are banned entirely from being taken seriously as chili cooks by that standard.

My opinion is you are probably right, and I am making it all wrong, but I get no complaints, so I’m going to carry on doing as I please, as should you. And what I please changes with every single pot I make, and I have made many of them. Chili is more of a concept to me than an engraved-in-stone recipe, which is why I’m not going to give a specific recipe in this post. There are some things that never change with mine; plenty of garlic, onions and green peppers. Both fresh chilis and chili powder. There will be cumin, and probably plenty of it. I always garnish it generously, and I like it thick, with the tomatoes well-reduced. Oh, and there will always be tomatoes in it, somewhere, even if it’s only the garnish on a white chili, which is another controversial topic amongst purists.

When I can get them, either by growing them myself, or lucking into a deli that sells them in tins, I like using tomatillos and chicken in my white chili, although I’m occasionally willing to buy into the pork industry’s The Other White Meat marketing, if I’m in the mood. I also think you could make a pretty nifty version with white fish, and I think I will try that one of these days, as I have overcome my fear of cooking fish in the last year or so.

So what I’m basically saying here is I haven’t more than glanced at a chili recipe in years, much less followed one to the letter. My recently-acquired passion for what I suppose is best described as Mahgrebi and Mashriqi cuisines has led to some damn fine, if somewhat unorthodox chilis, as well as many happy and educational hours reading cookbooks and falling down internet rabbit holes.

And all this, from a woman who made her first pot of chili by following the recipe on the back of the McCormick’s packet approximately 30 years ago. It was pretty good, as I recall, and I don’t have the heart or arrogance to look down on salt-heavy, pre-mixed spice packets. Those things started me down the road, way back when.

It doesn’t matter, though; even if you’re an unswerving pre-mixed spice packet user, your chili is the best, because everybody’s is the best.

But back to my chili. I realised this weekend that it had been, for me, absolute ages since I’d made chili. So when I went to my awesome butcher to buy the meat for the weekend’s cooking, I got a goodly amount of their rare breed pastured minced beef (and oh god, is it good to fearlessly buy minced meat and not worry about it crawling with god knows what filth, and oh god, I’d forgot just how good beef is supposed to taste, and oh godx3, it really doesn’t cost all that much more than the [too-often literally] shitty supermarket beef, and it’s not pumped full of water, either, but this digression is getting out of hand) and brought it home, resolved to end this chili drought, which I did on Sunday, for dinner with Phil and his dad.

Please enjoy my pretty smoked paprika tin, and ignore the (now cleaned up!) disaster area in the background.
Please enjoy my pretty smoked paprika tin, and ignore the (now cleaned up!) disaster area in the background, and my grubby apron.

One recent innovation, courtesy of Spain (Olé!), is an outright obsession with smoked pimentón, which is one spice I’d managed to miss for most of my chili-making career, probably because I thought paprika was boring as hell, based on the probably well-out-of-date sweet paprika my mom tended to sprinkle on cottage cheese, when she was feeling fancy. I WAS SO WRONG. I also thought I didn’t like sweet red peppers, but it turns out, I only didn’t like their bitter, nasty skins, so it’s good to know I can still acquire new tastes in my oncoming dotage. (I learned to blister the hell out of them in the oven and slip their skins off, and hello, ambrosial red peppers, you are now on my short list of favourite foods in the world. Just hitting them with a fruit peeler works as well, if you don’t want them roasted.

So I whacked a bunch of that into it, and unless I am making white chili, in which case I’ll probably sprinkle a little of it on top as part of my elaborate garnish technique, picanté pimentón is joining the roster of permanent chili ingredients. Another new innovation: barring an emergency, in which case I’d just use tinned anyway, as god is my witness, I will never cook dried beans in anything other than my slow-cooker ever again, amen. (Exception: that toxin-killing ten minute hard boil needed for kidney/cannellini beans.) I much prefer cooking with dried beans, and being able to soak them all day, cook them on low overnight, and then use them the following day has totally been a game-changer for me. Why did I spend so long thinking that couldn’t possibly work, and using my super-scary (although perfectly safe) pressure cooker? I’ll tell you why, it’s because up until Nigella Lawson, bless her, offered up this technique in her most recent book, a pressure cooker was the only way I could manage to successfully cook dried beans. I don’t know why the hell I had some kind of terrible cook-it-on-the-hob luck, but I did, and my beans always had horrible hard, crunchy skins on them after like HOURS of simmering, until I tried the pressure cooker. Which is swell, and I’ll probably use it again, if I’m pressed for time, even if it screams terrifyingly, but it’s the crock pot for me from here on in, whenever possible.

So this is getting ridiculously long, so to come back to my original point, chili is awesome, and I am seldom happier in the kitchen than when I am making it. And then we get to eat it, and, as it turns out, my dining companions inform me that I, in fact, make the best chili in the world.

A happy woman, with unfortunate hair, making chili for the people she loves.
A happy woman, with unfortunate hair, making chili for the people she loves.

Except for you, obviously.

Filed Under: Entertaining, Food Tagged With: chili, cooking, food, spicy food, sunday dinner

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