Eminently quotable: my Princess Bride story

 

Every now and then, I’ll be having a conversation and someone will, by chance, give me just the right opening to share a favourite anecdote. I try not to trot the old stories out too often (it wouldn’t do to look rehearsed, after all) but there are certain stories that are worth repeating. Virgil knew what he was talking about when he came up with the phrase mirabile dictu.

The conversations will go something like this:

Friend: I was watching a re-run of ‘Minder’ on TV last night.

Me: I had drinks with Dennis Waterman once. That was an interesting evening.

OR

Friend: Did you see that Martha Wainwright is touring Australia?

Me: I kissed her father once at a folk club in Fremantle. Oh, and I stabbed him in the face with a biro at the same time…

OR

Friend: I was watching ‘The Princess Bride’ last weekend.

Me: I LOVE that movie. And I was there to see part of it being filmed.

Now, if you want to know about my encounters with Dennis Waterman or Loudon Wainwright III, (both perfectly innocent, I assure you) you’ll have to ask me in person.  Someone did once point out that kissing a guy and stabbing him with a pen was sending mixed signals but I generally prefer to debate that offline as famous people usually have lawyers and, in this litigious age, one can’t be too careful. However, this post is about my ‘Princess Bride’ encounter which I am happy to share with the world because it is one of my favourites and as far as I can tell, there is nothing in it for which I could be sued.

It started like this. I was watching the Adam Hills show last week and for some reason, they were all dressed as characters out of The Princess Bride. 12 year old walked into the room and fell right into the trap.

12 year old: They’re all dressed as people from The Princess Bride.

Me: I LOVE that movie. Have I told you about the time I was there to see part of it being filmed?

12 year old: Several times. (flees room)

Frustrated with my need to tell the story, I decided to blog it instead. You, dear reader, can then decide whether you need to flee or not and I will never know.

Grayshott is the charming English village in Surrey where I lived from the ages of nine to eighteen. It isn’t well-known for anything in particular. Flora Thompson of ‘Lark Rise’ fame once worked at the local post-office and, apparently, Colin “Mr Darcy” Firth was born there, but that is really all that it has to recommend it.

It was a nice place to grow up though. As a child, I had an acre of garden to play in, most of which was wild, and, if you left the garden and walked through the public National Trust woodland for about a mile, this led to a series of man-made lakes called Waggoners Wells. It was a picturesque place and popular with walkers.

 

Photo credit: National Trust Images

 

On a family walk one day, we chanced across some people dressed in mediaeval costume on horses. There was also a film crew. We stopped to watch them for quite some time as film crews are rare in rural Surrey. Then we walked home and I forgot all about it.

 

Fast forward a few years, and a friend of mine recommends a movie – The Princess Bride. She says that I will enjoy it and she is right. It was destined to become a cult movie from the very first. Then about a quarter of the way in, I give a little yelp, pause the video (yes, video – showing my age) and there it is: Waggoners Wells and the people in costumes on horses plus the pleasure of realising that I was there, just out of shot, while the filming took place.

You can't see me, but I was there - just off to the right.

 

You can watch the scene here. I did have a look on Wikipedia to see if Waggoners Wells was listed as a location for the film, but they have missed it out. I suppose they can’t list every location that they use.

Of course, the film went on to become very well-known. Wikipedia attributes this to it being 'eminently quotable'.

 

Certainly, someone only needed to quote a line and I was there with my story:

Friend: Inconceivable!

Me: Ooh, the Princess Bride! I LOVE that movie. And I was there to see part of it being filmed.

OR

Friend: You killed my father! Prepare to die.

Me: Ooh, the Princess Bride etc. etc. etc.

You can see how much currency I have managed to get out of that long-ago incident, especially when I was able to buy the DVD for myself and inflict it upon show it to my own son.

Actually, he doesn’t mind it as a movie. But, just like the kid in the movie, he objects to any kissing scenes.  The fans among us know that “Since the invention of the kiss, there have only been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure,” and we know that the kiss at the end of the movie “left them all behind.”

And I think I know what puts that final Princess Bride kiss above these Top 5 kisses.

 

Look, no pens.

 

Buttercup didn’t stab Westley in the face with a biro.

 

Photo credit: National Trust Images

 

Cold comfort: suji halwa.

One of those 'ugly' desserts - if you can get past the way it looks, it's really quite nice.

The first time that I tried suji halwa was at a music festival. Back then, I didn’t know it was called suji halwa, I called it ‘that yummy pudding stuff that they serve at the Hare Krishna stand’. Whenever I go to Fairbridge Festival, the Hare Krishna food stand is my preferred place to eat. Not through any particular religious connection, you understand, (religion is not something that I do) but because it serves filling and tasty curry for a low, low price and in amongst the curry, they will dollop a lump of tasty beige pudding stuff that makes you forget that you have just spent a rather cold and miserable night trying to get comfortable in a tent.

(People say it is possible to get comfortable in a tent but I just don't believe it. The air-mattress always deflates. My nose always gets cold and I can't sleep if my nose is cold. Then there are the other campers who stumble back to their own tents in the early morning, drunk, stoned or drunk and stoned, and always loud. Them's the breaks at music festivals, I guess.)

When not at music festivals, and it has been a while since I've been to one, there is a Hare Krishna restaurant in Perth where you can get the same deal. When I worked in the city centre, I was often at Govinda’s because, hey, teachers’ salaries. I liked that restaurant. Curry, rice, and extra dollop of pudding stuff if you asked really nicely, and still there was change out of a $10 note. I haven’t been back since it moved to its new premises in William St in 2011 but as I will soon be working in the city centre once more and as teachers’ salaries haven’t changed that much in the last few years, I’ll have to check it out.
 

I was prompted to make some halwa because I recently made a lemon cake that called for semolina. It was a great cake, but it only used 1 & 1/4 cups of semolina, and I had no idea how to use up the rest in a way that wasn’t reminiscent of the worst of English school lunches (where the semolina dessert with the glob of industrial ‘raspberry’ jam in the middle went by the rather unappetising nickname of ‘nosebleed pudding’).

Happily, the idea that the Hare Krishna pudding might be semolina-based occurred to me, and entering ‘Hare Krishna pudding’ into a search engine not only proved me correct but yielded recipes and the correct name, suji halwa - suji being the word for 'semolina' in several Indian languages.

I’ve used this recipe because it is the simplest and because the ingredients are readily available from any supermarket (as opposed to a specialist Indian or Asian supermarket). Also because, a long time ago, I used to enjoy the Kurma Das cooking show on television and this is his recipe.

It's a warm, stodgy, buttery pudding, fragrant with cardamom and saffron. I didn't use the recommended sultanas in my version, but I did sprinkle some extra almond slivers on top before serving. It's a great dessert for a cold winter night.

And I ate it in bed. My nice cosy bed with extra pillows all around me, a minky blanket and a wheat-pack to warm my feet - infinitely more civilised and more comfortable than a tent.

The Meaning of Life: the Hitchhiker's Guide to cake.

 

The meaning of life is 42 - or so Douglas Adams would have us believe because, of course, we never really knew what the question was.

 

I'd like to offer an alternative answer - the meaning of life is the ability to sustain friendships over time. Family is a different matter, most people are able to put up with family because they are... family. But choosing to invest in a relationship of twenty years plus with someone completely unrelated to you  - that takes some doing. It takes work. But everyone needs friends - without them, life is pretty...well...meaningless.

 

I'll throw in a little Latin because I can. :) Ex Cultu Robur. It was the motto of my high school and it means, roughly, "Strength is achieved through cultivation". I translate it for myself  as "The strongest relationships are the ones that you nurture". I believe in keeping in touch, in being interested in what my friends are doing, I believe in texts and notes that say "I am thinking about you" or "It's been a while, what are you up to?" I like phone calls that come out of the blue and emails for no reason other than you have thoughts to share.

 

Katy and I have known each other since we were 16 and students at the high school whose motto I have written above. We helped each other through two years of study and other crises: boyfriend dramas, teenage angst, not being in the popular set... Often we set the world to rights over a tub of ice-cream (with a Cadbury Flake or two crumbled on top) and two spoons. When my family moved to Australia, and I had no one left in the UK to take care of me, Katy's family adopted me. When I stumbled off the ferry after my time in France, it was Katy and her dad who met me and took me home to stay with them until school started.
 

I moved to Australia and Katy stayed in the UK. Letters were exchanged for quite a while before we both got busy with grown-up stuff and lost touch.

 

Then came the amazing day when she contacted me through Facebook. (And, whatever its faults, I will always love Facebook for the way it connects people).

 

She was well. (So good to hear!)

She was living in Australia. (What???)

Western Australia. (SHUT! UP!)

In Rockingham. (30 minutes from me. Only 30 minutes. OMG!!!)

 

I think it took about 5 minutes from getting to the end of message to getting on the phone. The very next evening, we were in Fremantle, gossiping over coffee.

 

Of all the people I could have chosen to end up in Western Australia, Katy is the one I would have chosen, and it still seems like some miracle that she is here. Now she lives in Fremantle, and her house is a haven of home-grown veggies, wine-racks full of red, bookshelves full of sci-fi and fantasy, plus three chickens and Bella the dog.

These days when we get together, we are more likely to set the world to rights over a bottle or three of red. We have also been known to get out for lunches and for cocktails. Possibly best not to describe the night when Duran Duran came to Perth and we went to see them - there was a lot of screaming and we probably sounded 16 again, but, and to borrow from Douglas Adams again, we are usually 'mostly harmless' when we get together. Mostly harmless but fairly tipsy.

And here is her birthday cake for this year. We didn't quite manage the party with the dressing gowns and the towels, but the cake was exactly as I'd imagined it when we'd talked about the 'meaning of life' birthday about two months ago.

A nice dense cake to start with then. You don't want anything that is going to collapse in on itself as soon as you put the fondant on. I used this recipe for an orange and almond cake. mainly because it showed a decorated cake.

Don't worry if it isn't very even - the icing will fix a multitude of sins.

I used a packet of ready-made royal icing from the local supermarket to cover this. You can stick it to the cake with a sugar glaze or melted jam, but this cake was moist enough that any extra 'glue' was unnecessary.

Just roll out the icing until it is big enough to cover the surface and sides and fold the rest under.

 

 

Blue sparkles to give the idea of "Earth - Mark II"



Now it gets more fiddly. What I wanted were: a cake topper with "Don't Panic" in 'large friendly letters' and in the classic Hitchhiker's Guide font; babelfish all around the edge; and two white mice, Frankie Mouse and Benjy Mouse - not actually mice but the descendants of the pan-dimensional beings behind the creation of Deep Thought.

 

(Are you keeping up with all the references? You are? Good.)

 

The cake topper and the babelfish were made from the same batch of marzipan. You'll need about 500g.

 

 

I found the font and the image of the babelfish online through an image search. I don't have photo credits for these, unfortunately, but would be happy enough to add them if asked.

 

 

 

I then scaled these down into templates. I'm more of an artist than a mathematician so I wasn't aiming for perfection. Also any errors in measurement can be fixed by stretching and/or squishing the marzipan.

 

 

 

The text was roughly 15 cm across (so it would fit on the 20cm cake) and the babelfish template was about 7cm.

 

I coloured the marzipan - one batch of orange-red and another yellow. If you have objections to tartrazine and other artificial colourings, this is not the cake for you. If you don't like scrubbing and scrubbing at your hands to get rid of the stain from the colouring, this is also not the cake for you. The text was red letters on a yellow background.

 

I hollowed out the letters after I place them on the yellow background.

 

There should actually just be a yellow border to each letter, but that was way too tricky.

 

The babelfish were yellow with red eyes. The pupil of the eye and the fin details are made by using an edible-ink pen.

 



Babelfish all in a row. Any rough edges were later smoothed out. Probably best not to stick these in your ear though...


Once this was all done, it was just a question of positioning. I did use melted apricot jam to stick everything in place this time.

 



 

Finally, and possible the most tricky part - making the two white mice. I should have used marzipan or proper fondant but I had decided to go with the left-over royal icing because it was whiter. It is not easy to sculpt. In the end though, I had something that looked vaguely like albino mice - complete with red eyes and black whiskers.

 

See his cute little tail hanging over the edge? :)

 

And there you have it!

 

 

It is, of course, all completely edible, and, while quite sweet, (hello, marzipan and icing!), the actual orange-almond cake could be tasted quite distinctly when I went to Katy's house, to hand the cake over and we shared it with friends and while drinking red wine.

 

So long, and thanks for all the fish, and happy  (hoopy?) birthday, Katy.

 



Lost in Translation: gateau de riz au citron.

The 'Orangerie' guest house wing - once used to grow orange trees to be sent to Versailles.

You know the moment that I'm talking about. That moment, where you are looking for a document or a photograph, and you stumble across an old journal or an old photograph album (does anyone even have photograph albums these days?) and you make the mistake of opening it.

Hours later and you suddenly realise that it's later than you think and you can't even remember what you were looking for in the first place.

I don't believe in living in the past but I do enjoy the occasional stroll down Memory Lane. The catalyst for this particular stroll was a message I received in the middle of last week. Across a gap of 25 years, 2 different hemispheres, and over 17,000kms, a secret admirer let me know that he had been too shy to ask me out when we were in high school and he hoped that this knowledge would, a quarter of a century later, put a smile on my face.

This it certainly did, and also sent me hurrying to get my photograph albums and journals out of the shed.

Let's party like it's 1989 - in a Barbie-pink journal.

During my reminiscences of my high school days, I also rediscovered some photographs from the time I went on my language homestay to France. Digging a little deeper, I came across my journal from that holiday. It was 1989, Easter, and I had received disappointing grades in my report card. To be honest, while I loved languages, French was not my first love (which was, and still is, Latin).

Anyway, when my parents ordered me to France during the school holidays to make some improvements, I chose, from a homestay agency, the most interesting homestay experience that I could find - I went to stay with Monsieur le Vicomte and Madame la Vicomtesse (surname not given for privacy), their daughter, Marie, and their nephews, Thibault and Louis, in a 17th century chateau just outside of Poitiers.

A photo of a postcard- hence the faded quality.

Faded French aristocracy, a crumbling castle with towers and a moat, me in the attic bedroom sighing into my pillow because I had the worst crush on the scion of the house, the sexy and urbane (to my teenage mind, anyway) Vicomte Thibault who had floppy blond hair, wore a tweed jacket and smoked a pipe, and was also nonchalantly right-wing and superior in a way that would probably make me want to punch him if I met him now, but at the time I thought of as sophisticated.

Pining for Thibault - '19, gorgeous, but unfortunately already committed to some elegant blonde'

It's all there in my journal - teenage listlessness, lust, longing, and language learning, often written in green ink because I was trying to be stylish and different. Then again, it is also recorded that I was nerdy enough to give Marie and Louis, both 13 years old at the time, some English lessons - it seems I had started on my future career even then.

Pretentious green ink.

Among the journal entries, I was very surprised to find some food writing - it seems that not only a nascent teacher but a nascent baker/blogger lurked within - an a recipe for rice cake with lemon, written completely in French.

Gateau de riz au Citron

 1 litre de lait

0,500 litre d'eau

100g de riz rond

1/2 citron non traite

50g de beurre

150g de sucre

3 oeufs

1 pincee de sel

50g poudre d'amandes

chapelure

Lavez le riz dans une passoire, sous l'eau courante. Plongez-le deux minutes dans 0,500 litre d'eau bouillante. Egouttez. Faites bouiller le lait avec le zeste du demi-citron et une pincee de sel. Jetez le riz dans le lait bouillant, remuez jusqu'a l'ebullition et laissez cuire alors a feu tres doux pendant 45 minutes environ. Separez les blancs des jaunes d'oeufs, travaille les jaunes avec le sucre jusqu'a  ce que le melange blanchisse, puis ajoutez le beurre ramoli; versez petit a petit le riz bouillant sur cette preparation en remuant vivement pour ne pas cuire les oeufs. Ajoutez la poudre d'amandes. Montez les blanc d'oeufs en neige ferme, incorporez-les au riz en soulevant la masse. Beurrez une tourtiere, saupoudrez-la de chapelure, versez le melange dedans et faites cuire 45 minutes a four modere 210C (thermostat 7). Laissez refroidir, saupoudrez de sucre en poudre. A deguster, tiede au froid.

Below the recipe, I have written "It was delicious (if it weren't I wouldn't have bothered to write it down)". However, my  recollection of making it is very vague. One spring day during my stay, Madame went out and left me to entertain Marie and Louis who told me that they wanted to make their favourite cake. It must have worked because I wrote down the recipe above which, I must admit, I am now struggling to understand. And don't get me started on the punctuation - I was NOT going to attempt to type accents in.

The original text - which has the accents in all the right places, plus a little illustration...

So the challenge for this weekend was to visit my youthful foodie past and give the 'gateau de riz au citron' a whirl - as much from a need to translate and remember as to cook.

Washing the 'riz rond' under running water. I made a guess and bought arborio rice which is about as 'round' as rice gets.

One litre of milk, a pinch of salt and lemon rind. The recipe called for 'citron non traite' which, after a bit of Internet searching, seemed to be a way of saying 'organic' - so I grabbed a lemon from the tree outside.

The separated egg yolks beaten with sugar and melted butter.

The separated egg whites whisked (by hand because my wand blender has broken) into stiff peaks, or, as they say in French 'en neige ferme'  - 'into firm snow' - which is much more poetic.

Bringing it all together, I think there must have been a step omitted where the cooked rice is strained out of the milk. There was way too much liquid otherwise. So I did just that, before mixing it in and then added the almond meal and the meringue. 

I had no idea, none whatsoever, what 'chapelure' was. Turned out to be 'breadcrumbs'. So I made some, and then buttered and sprinkled the dish which I thought most closely approximated a 'tourtiere'.

Ready for the oven.

It needed a little less time than the stated 45 minutes - I also ended up bringing the oven down 10C.

It probably shouldn't be so dark. Next time, I'll have the oven at 200C.

It was really pretty good. although not super lemony and if I make it again (and I doubt that I will wait 25 years before making it again), I'd either add more lemon or serve it with a lemon syrup. 

I never went back to France after that trip. My family had already emigrated to Australia, and in June that year, when I finished school, I had to join them. Madame la Vicomtesse wrote me a couple of letters and then we fell out of touch,as happened in the days before the Internet.

But in the interests of 'where are they now?' a couple of years ago, I did do a search on them and the castle. 

The gate connected the formal gardens to the wild woodland of the 'parc' and my sketch of it.

Little Louis grew up and joined the Catholic priesthood. He became, interestingly enough, one of the first priests in France to also be a regular blogger on religious matters and had a large following. It is thanks to the fact that I came across his blog that I was able to find out what had happened to everyone else. 

His aunt and uncle, Monsieur and Madame, are still alive, obviously much older now, and the castle rooms are still available to paying guests. His brother, Thibault,  grew up (and hopefully got past his right-wing views!) and was married to an elegant blonde (there were photos on Louis' blog) and Louis conducted the ceremony. Exactly one week after Thibault's wedding, Marie, the restless, gamine teenager and one of the first students that I ever taught English to, was gone - killed in a car crash in the town where she was attending university.

But in a journal, in a photograph, in a slice of warm gateau de riz, the happy memories are all coming back to me. It's April 1989 and we're in a kitchen, in a castle: me, Marie, and Louis. We're cooking, laughing, talking sometimes in French and sometimes in English. I'm food-writing in my journal while I supervise the kids, and it's impossible to know that out of the three of us there on that day, two of us will end up becoming bloggers.

The Ultimate Cake Fail

It took me a few hours to get over the nicotine poisoning.

It has taken me longer to get over the humiliation. 6 months to be precise.

I tell you what ... before you read any further, have a look here and here. I just want it acknowledged up front that I wasn’t suddenly overwhelmed by a crazy notion to use tobacco in cooking. Tobacco in cooking is A Thing. A thing that chefs and bartenders do, although fairly unusual. I am not an experimenter in the way of say, William Buckland, – if I cook something, there’s normally a precedent for it. I first came across this recipe for the Richard Corrigan fig tart with tobacco syrup years ago and have been intrigued by the idea of it ever since.

So when the Secret Cake Club announced that the theme for December would be ‘secret ingredients’, I knew instantly what I wanted to do. I would make a chocolate cake and souse it with tobacco syrup, using this recipe which suggests that tobacco syrup goes well with bitter chocolate and stone fruits.

I had a very interesting shopping trip to Devlin’s tobacconists in Subiaco. I’m not a smoker so this is not a shop I would normally ever go into. However, I wanted to do things right. I wanted to get the best ingredients and this meant going to a proper tobacco vendor rather than buying a pouch of cigarette stuffing from the local supermarket.

I have to say that the assistant in Devlin’s was lovely to talk to and so very helpful.

 I told him all about my plans and he told me that he had never heard of tobacco-flavoured syrup before. He let me smell all the different tins and packets of tobacco, asked me if I wanted a particular flavour (it comes in cherry, Irish cream, whiskey… who knew?).

 I told him I wrote a blog and he was good enough to let me snap as many pictures as I wanted.

Because I wanted to put the best cake possible in front of the cake club members, I didn’t skimp on the ingredients. I bought the best tobacco available. $50 for 50g. The most expensive herb I have ever bought. (I will never baulk at the cost of saffron or vanilla beans again!). I was assured that it was pure compacted leaf, that it had very few preservatives in it, that it would give a delicate earthy scent. Plus it looked exactly like a delicious brownie and, to my mind, this boded well (and which goes to show how wrong I can be sometimes...)

Not a brownie. Not at all.

The cake that the syrup was to infuse was a classic Nigella recipe – her quadruple chocolate cake.  It was an easy to follow recipe (although it did take longer to cook that she recommends but that is always the fault of my oven) and it turned out beautifully. 

 

 

 

As it cooled on the rack, I set about making the tobacco syrup. I followed the recipe exactly – made the sugar syrup, took it off the heat, infused it with the crumbled tobacco leaves for 5 minutes – not a moment more – and then strained it.

 

As the man from Devlin’s had promised, it had a rich earthy scent, something like autumn leaves and bonfires. I liked it. It was different. It was a really good secret ingredient. Clever, clever me!

I tasted it. It reminded me of strong sweet tea. After a few moments, it started to burn in a way that was similar to chilli burn. But I like chilli so no problem, right?

 

I took my beautiful chocolate cake and skewered it all over. Then I poured the syrup on. While it cooled, I made a cute little star-anise Christmas wreath. Looking back, that was probably my most successful creation of the day.

When the cake was ready, I decided that I’d better sample it. I cut a very thin slice and ate it. It was gorgeously dense with chocolate and syrup. I’d used Valrhona chocolate (again, only the best ingredients for my cake club peeps). Again, there was that burning sensation. This time around, it wasn’t as pleasant.

At this point I decided that it might not be a good idea to spring tobacco on people as a surprise. I thought that I would take the cake along, disclose the ingredient to the Cake Club members, then let them try it or not as they wished. Satisfied with this decision, and tired after a morning’s baking, I went to have a lie down.

When I got up, I wasn’t feeling too good. I was a bit giddy and there was a creeping sense of nausea in my gut. Cake Club was only about an hour off. I know that that one of the things that I hate people to do to me is too cry off an event that I have organised at the last minute, so having committed to go, I was determined to make it.

It was at the point that my nausea became bad enough that I decided that I wasn’t even going to put the cake on the table. I decided to take a bottle of bubbly along to compensate for being cakeless at Cake Club.

When I stopped at the bottle shop to buy the wine, I threw up in the car-park. (Classy, I know.)

I was at Cake Club long enough to tell my story, drink a glass or two of water, and then head home. Shortest. Party. Ever.

I held it together for the journey home. Then I threw up in the garden and again when I got into the house. It was the most pathetic hangover scenario, sitting on the floor of the toilet, slumped against the wall with my cheek against the cool tiles. It took me back to the time of my first ever hangover (Hill Head Sailing Club in Portsmouth and more whisky and drys than is good for any 18 year old).

I slept it off. I needed painkillers for the headache that I had when I woke up.

Things that I have learnt:

·         Always do a trial run of your recipe – especially when you are being a bit avant garde with your ingredients.

·         Do your research. To be fair, none of the recipes that I looked at warned that there would be any effects from the tobacco syrup. I saw one that said “Tobacco is a carcinogen and you can omit it if liked” but then alcohol is also a carcinogen and I am still partial to sherry trifle, coq au vin, and rhum babas.

Things that I want to say:

·         Not to brag, but I normally a really, really good cook. Generally, I don’t poison my dinner guests, and I always send them away from my house full and happy.

·         Tobacco syrup or just tobacco in cooking: might be better handled more professionally but I’d advise caution if you ever encounter it.

·         Please, Secret Cake Club Perth, no life time ban.

·         I am not crazy. I am not crazy. I am not crazy.



Best left to the experts...