the weind

...a web journal from the north

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

well, that’s a wrap

January 4, 2016 by Ana Leave a Comment

The holidays are DONE, thank god, or will be, as soon as I take down the decorations and tidy up the house. Right now, I’m just having a cup of coffee and roasting an aubergine, after roasting a bunch of peppers, and prior to slow-roasting some cherry tomatoes with za’atar. Phil’s back on the road for work, poor guy, and although I miss having him around already, I do feel a sense of relief about having nobody but myself to feed for a couple of days. (See above, roasted fruits and veggies.)

I am knackered. It was a busybusybusy holiday season, and for the last three weeks or so, I have mostly been working flat-out. Other than being tired, I am full of the new year’s vigour, and eager to get on with my various house-related projects, to get back to running, after a long break (two injuries in quick succession knocked me out of a promising start last year), and to branch out into some new interests, mainly artistic. While I’m pretty sick of cooking right now, and will enjoy a couple of days of salads and poached eggs, and all the vegetables, all the time, my interest in cooking in general has been rejuvenated. I am also feeling good about this blog, and will start tearing into plans for that. Phil’s been reading up on photography, I am looking into styling, and as once upon a time, I was a graphic designer, maybe it’s time for me to get back into that, because while I like a pretty spare and simple blog format, this one is flat-out amateurish.

All this, and as far as I know, nobody is reading, which is OK with me! I’ve journaled all my life, and don’t need an audience, although if one develops, or you’re reading this, feel free to say hello.

…and then I took a break from writing, tore down all the Xmas stuff, gave the house a lick-and-a-promise, went out, paid bills, had my hair cut (big change; several inches off the ends, and a fringe cut into it!), bought the flowers I’ve been promising myself as soon as I’d de-Xmas’d the house, bought more vegetables, came home, ate roasted vegetables, and a salad as big as the Ritz. So my day was plenty busy, but the point is, I didn’t have to rush.

I lucked into a really good hair stylist at Andrew Collinge on Castle Street in Liverpool. I’d been there once before, and the woman who worked on my hair that time was good, but dammit all if I could remember her name, so I ended up just going with the stylist who was available, and I liked him a lot! I usually suck at making small talk with hair stylists, which may be why I can go years without getting a real cut, but once I’d decided on the fringe, I knew I was committing to frequent trims, and getting on so well with the guy was a relief. So now I have a hair guy, yay!

Assuming, of course, he doesn’t move on in the next six-to-eight weeks, and I don’t go back to my previous method of fringe maintenance — the nail scissors. To be fair, I’ve had a fringe for more of my life than not, despite a couple of long spells of fringelessness, and I can do a decent-enough job of maintaining it myself, but as a grown-up ladyperson, really, I need to get over it and just get pro cuts more frequently. God knows my beat-up ends were an ongoing disaster, and even though I am loath to cut even a few centimetres off my hair, it just looks so much better when the ratty bits are gone. Bonus: I asked him how my natural colour was holding up, and if he saw much grey, and he just laughed and said he saw no grey at all. None. Given how old I’ve been feeling I look of late, that was heartening. And a fringe is better than Botox, as far as I’m concerned. Once the fringe settles down, that is, and quits trying to split along my old part.

It felt pretty good, after letting my self-care go all to hell during the Tapastravaganza, to do something like that for myself. The sheer luxury of having somebody else wash my hair almost made me giddy, to the point where I am thinking a wash-and-blow-out at our local Andrew Collinge Graduates place might be a nice treat every once in a while. Next up, on the self-care list: getting my eyebrows done, and buying some new make-up, instead of continuing to scrape the bottoms of my old containers. I have scaled way back on my make-up use as I get older, not because I don’t give a damn anymore, but because I find what is evidently the new standard (serious contouring, false eyelashes, terrifyingly defined brows, thick, heavy, eye shadow and liner) utterly intimidating. I am incredibly angular, something I discovered after losing a lot of weight, and the last thing I need is fucking contouring.

I am unused to this new face of mine. The softness is gone, I look my age, and there are all those hollows and planes I frankly don’t really know how to work with. Having the fringe back, though, made me somewhat more recognisable to myself. I remember that fringe; that fringe was omnipresent until my late 20s, came back in my early 30s, disappeared again in the mid-30s, came back in my late 30s and the first couple of years of my 40s, then went away for six years. I’ve only had short hair for a few brief periods in my life, and it felt weird, and I went back to long as fast as I could grow it out again, and now, as the slide into proper middle-age continues, I don’t give a shit what anybody says; I like it long, and anybody who thinks it’s inappropriate can kiss my ass.

The new hair must make me look younger, though, because I got checked out more today than I have in a while. Either that, or I was just feeling confident and sassy enough to draw more attention than usual. Good to know I’m not quite invisible yet, at least not all the time.

Filed Under: Food, Health, Householding, Self Care Tagged With: food, hair, post-holiday, vanity

new year’s day

January 1, 2016 by Ana Leave a Comment

So we ended up having an unexpected guest last night; Phil texted his dad at midnight, to say happy new year, and invited him to drop in when he got back from his evening with Phil’s cousin’s family. He came in and had a drink and a chat with us, ’round the dining room table, then eventually pushed off and I went to bed. Phil obviously stayed up for a couple more hours, so come morning, I was up early, and he still slumbers on.

To keep myself occupied, and because we have his dad coming back tonight for our usual Friday dinner, I started mooching through the leftovers, looking for ways to give them new life. I had a bunch of filo scraps, many lemons, so many eggs, and as it happens, horrifying amounts of caster sugar, and a big pot of Fage Greek yogurt in the fridge, along with a vague memory from my baklava research, of something called patsavoura glyko, a sweet yogurt pie made with jumbled-up filo scraps. No delicate handling needed, just bunch ’em up in the bottom of a lightly greased pan, mix up the yogurt with oil, sugar, eggs, a bit of baking powder, and some vanilla extract (although I added some lemon zest, ‘cuz I think lemon zest improves practically any creamy sweet thing), which you then pour over the filo, and bake at about 200° C for 30-ish minutes or so. Then you let it cool, and pour over a hot lemon syrup, and voilà, you got your patsavoura glyko. Because I cannot leave well enough alone, or, seemingly, follow a recipe precisely, I cut the recipe roughly in half, as I’m only feeding three people, and there was the lemon zest, and there might possibly be some rosewater in the syrup, because I love rosewater.

It’s cooling now, and I am soon to take a break from writing to make the syrup. At the moment, however, I have some oxtails roasting in the oven, as a preliminary to making a good, hearty, beef stock. When I first moved over here, the BSE-era rules about beef on the bone were still strictly enforced, and this made it hard to make a really good stock. Happily, the ban ended some time back, but finding good soup bones can still be a challenge, and I was resigned to commercial beef stock (the liquid Touch of Taste concentrate is actually pretty good) until one day, in Sainsbury’s, I spotted some oxtails. Hello! I thought. Beef bones, and in a nice, compact form. I had absolutely no experience with oxtail, but figured they’d work, and so they did. You want an intensely flavoursome jellied beef stock, which freezes beautifully? Oxtail. Very strong, so it has to be cut with water, but it’s nice to have so much flavour for such a small commitment of freezer space, always at a premium around here.

So, to get rid of my stock of wilting herbs, some sad-looking celery, and a few flabby carrots (all still perfectly fine and safely edible, just nothing you’d want to bite into raw), I grabbed a package of oxtails when I saw them in the shop. I’ll pull them out of the oven, chuck them in one of my slow cookers (I, uh, have three of them, and I’d probably buy a mini if I could find one) with the veg and herbs, cover it all with water, and then ignore it for 12 hours or so, which is when the unpleasant part comes, and I have to strain it. Gack. Worth it, but I do dread that part.

There appears to be some kind of paleo/autoimmune cult around bone stock these days, and, well, I doubt it’s quite the miracle devotées of said cult believe, but it’s good stuff, and if people who invest it with magical properties create enough of a demand for it that I can find oxtails easily, without having to go to the inconveniently-located butcher, great! Unfortunately, this also drives prices up — see what happened to lamb shanks for an example — but every time I see a £3 whole chicken in the shops, I feel kind of sad and horrible, as I wonder what kind of conditions those chickens, and the people who raise and process them, must live and work in. Organic/free-range seem more realistically priced, but harder to find. Still, if your food budget is severely limited, there’s a couple of meals to be got from a chicken…and then I remind myself that I am being one of those middle-class people, the kind who is one patronising step away from telling economically disadvantaged people all of the time-consuming and skill-heavy ways they could be feeding themselves cheaper and more healthily, and I want to smack myself.

Right. So that bit up there was such a downer that I wandered off to make my rosewater/lemon syrup, which I duly soaked my cake with, and the cake tastes great, although it’s far from photogenic. You know what is photogenic? This:

I found Yorkshire pudding more intimidating than baklava. I don't cook much plain English, and it would be just like me to fall on my ass with something so simple. Fortunately, it was great!
I found Yorkshire pudding more intimidating than baklava. I don’t cook much plain English, and it would be just like me to fall on my ass with something so simple. Fortunately, it was great!

I made toad-in-the-hole for tea, as I think my father-in-law had kind of hit the wall with all the spicy stuff I’ve been cooking of late, and on a wretchedly cold and rainy night, stodge with onion gravy goes down a treat. I used some of my leftover onion confit as a base for the gravy, and got another couple of hundred grams of flour and 4 eggs out of my overstock — I made far too much batter, but it’ll keep well enough, so I’ll make something else of it tomorrow. Possibly some sort of clafoutis, depending on what kind of fruit I can scrounge up. I swear I am totally going off desserts as a regular thing, once Phil goes back to work, because god knows the extra kilo of holiday lard needs to be driven off as soon as possible, but in the meantime, the ugly Greek yogurt and filo cake tasted much better than it looked.

Filed Under: Baking, Entertaining, Food, Holidays, Uncategorized Tagged With: baking, cooking, dinner, food, greek food, toad-in-the-hole, traditional english food, yorkshire pudding

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