A Taste of Home

Let's start, in the words of the late. great Douglas Adams, with "a nice, hot, cup of tea". Here they are:

 Industrial strength tea to deal with industrial strength jet-lag.

What's not to like? It's strong, it's hot, it has full cream milk and it has sugar. Look at the pea-green mugs. Tea in a mug. On a wobbly table. In the village of Haworth. Luvverly.

Context: three hours before we had disembarked from a plane at Manchester airport, stumbled feeling jet-lagged and grubby to our hire car and headed north. We'd been on the plane for more hours than I care to mention, flying from Perth to Singapore, Singapore to Munich and then Munich to Manchester. The carrier was Singapore Airlines so the food and service were great but, let's be honest, airline tea and coffee, especially when you factor in those little containers of UHT milk, are not the best.

Determined to beat the jet-lag, we wound our way up through quaint towns such as Todmorden, Halifax and Hull, and then decided that, being fairly close, we would go and pay homage at the town-cum-shrine to the Bronte sisters, Haworth. By the time we got there, we were gasping for tea. Opposite the railway station was a tiny, hole-in-the-wall English tea shop. If I told you it was staffed by two hearty Yorkshire lasses with rosy cheeks and strong accents, you might not believe me, but it was. We sat outside on wobbly chairs by the wobbly table on a thin strip of pavement. It's fair to say that we gulped but, by heck! (or 'by 'eck!' as they say in Yorkshire), it was a grand cuppa. One of those memorable cups of tea that will live in legend. Nectar!

Fortified, we now had time for a bit of a look around. I won't dwell overly long on the village itself except to say that if you can go, as we did, on a glorious spring day with not too many tourists around, then it is well worth a visit.  It's very, very pretty as dour mill towns go.

Looking down Haworth High Street across to the moors.

We found a bakery in the high street with all kinds of interestingly named provender in the window. I had, of course, heard of parkin, which to me has always been a more substantial take on a flapjack or a more vigorous version of gingerbread. Parkin keeps well once made and apparently tastes better after a few days anyway, so I bet these ones stacked up in the window were approaching delicious.

I regret not buying some. They looked great and you could smell the ginger.

The jet-lag had robbed me of my appetite so I didn't buy any. Why I didn't think to buy some for later, I don't know, probably the jet-lag again. Neither did I purchase any of these:

It has to be good just because of the name.

I don't know how I managed to resist the fabulously named "Fat Rascals". I had never heard of them before but I will never forget the name. A quick search tells me that these are not only particularly local to the Cleveland and County Durham area but also that the recipe ( a rock cake with currants and fruit peel) dates back to Elizabethan times. Curiously, there is also an option to stuff them with the elements of a cooked breakfast - sausage, egg, tomato and bacon - to make a breakfast sandwich. Not something I feel I could stomach on a regular basis but  a combo that would surely make an excellent hangover cure.

We were staying in the little fishing village of Staithes where we had an 18th century fisherman's cottage (yes, I have been in Australia long enough now to be awed by anything architecturally older than 200 years) and where we also had a local pub.

On a cold night, it's great to be inside with a pint of ale and a roaring fire.

The Cod and Lobster has been on its site for many years but the building has been through a few changes. This is mainly because, sitting right on the harbour wall as it does, parts of it periodically get washed away by the huge storms that brew up in the North Sea.  Optimists that the locals are, they rebuild it and go on with the serving of beer and good pub food. It is a warm, welcoming place and has the added benefit of allowing children in until 9pm which our boys thought was 'cool'. The boys also liked the fish and chips:

I like it when you can tell there's a fish under the batter.

Now I live near to the port of Fremantle and have to say that the fish and chips there are great. However, too often the portions of fish that you get are amorphous lumps of shark covered in batter. You can't see that they were ever a fish - possibly because to do so, you would have toserve up a whole battered shark.  In Yorkshire we got used to fish that was fish shaped - wider at the head section tapering to the tail. It had a different texture to Aussie fish, firmer and chewier, very white and the sections falling cleanly apart. The chips were different too, thicker and very moist after they had soaked up the malt vinegar. And mushy peas are are main part of the dish...

 Shh! Don't tell - apparently most mushy 'peas' are really lentils.

Mushy peas with mint sauce or vinegar will come as a side serve if you order your fish and chips in a restaurant or, if you are in a chippy, close to the top of the extras' menu. A friend of mine who knows about such things, tells me that mushy peas aren't really peas but yellow lentils mushed and with green colouring added. This is because if you mush actual peas and then try to preserve them they will turn grey. Hmm.

We had a good many meals of this sort over the next couple of weeks.  Sometimes there were variations:

Deep fried garlic mushrooms at The Hatless Heron

Scampi and chips at The Hatless Heron

We discovered a great little cafe in Whitby called The Hatless Heron. I am ashamed to say that we only discovered it because of their big, obvious "Free Wifi" sign on the shop door and we were not just starved for food at that moment but also starved for Internet. We placed a biggish order (so we could eat slowly and garner as much time on-line as possible) and everything came out quickly and was very good. The scampi was juicy and there was lots of it, the garlic mushrooms were gorgeously buttery inside their crumbed coating. I got butter on my iPhone in the process of sampling one. The chips were big and fabulously textured because they had left the skins on the potatoes. I love it when they do that. Do you want a close up? Well, I do.

 Soft chips with just a hint of crunch on the skins.

As you can see from the pictures above, The Hatless Heron was also very good about serving up generous portions of simple fresh salad as part of each order. The staff seemed surprised that we actually cleaned our plates - it seems that often the salad is left behind. We could have had bread and butter for a little extra charge if we'd wanted it.

I have to put in an honourable mention for the drinks:

 I'm not a drinker of stout but I am married to one.

It smells of urine, but in a good way.

English liquor licensing laws are much more relaxed than in Australia, especially Western Australia. While there has been some recent change here about what alcohol you can buy and when, it is still something of a treat for us to go to the UK and have a drink with lunch in a cafe. My partner proclaimed his stout to be satisfactory and, not being a stout drinker myself, I will take his word for it. Me, I had a bottle of organic cider - you can tell it is organic when it is cloudy rather than clear. It was a real flavoursome mouthful, the fizz gentle and not overwhelming, the taste crisp and sour and the scent that strong fusty umami that is pleasantly reminiscent of an orchard in autumn and riskily close an un-mucked out horse stable. My partner took a sniff and declared that it 'smells of pee'. And it kind of does, but in a good appley way. Pee-smell aside, it went so well with the chips.

We did have a good day in Whitby. It was school holidays and quite crowded but we managed to buy some sticks of rock:

  All the colours of the rainbow - plus rainbow.

 And we found, but didn't buy, Vampire Relish.

Spooky.

I did try the Vampire Relish. It was your standard tomato and chilli jam which was being sold on the promise of being super-hot. I've been destroying my palate with chilli of increasing degrees on the Scoville scale for many years now so any claim to superlative chilli heat is like a red rag to a bull. I have to give it a go and see if it I can humiliate the vendor by responding to their concoction with a shrug and a 'meh'. The Vampre Relish to me it was mildly warm and not worthy of anyone's (or any vampire's) attention. It would have been nice in a ham sandwich or on a pork pie though.

If you are wondering "Why Vampire Relish?" this is because of Whitby's starring role in the book, "Dracula" by Bram Stoker. It is at Whitby that Count Dracula first steps ashore in England in the guise of a giant dog leaping off a ship where all the crew are dead, drained of their blood by the vampire.. Whitby Council, bless'em, have capitalised spectacularly on this and as a result, you can now go on "Dracula Tours", "Ghost Tours" and even experience Goth Weekends in the town. Certainly parts of it, such as the Abbey on the cliff top, are gothic enough:

 Spookier.

I don't know about a Gothic Weekend personally. Me, I'd rather go back for the scampi and chips.

Time and relative dimension in gingerbread

A few years ago I had my gall-bladder removed. (Nice hook, Strawberry Thief, you’re onto a winning blog entry here…)

No, actually, this has relevance because, sans gall-bladder, my stomach didn’t take to certain foods anymore, not without protesting its discomfort in ways both loud and embarrasing. One of  these foods was fruit-cake because of the irritating dried fruit. Now, I’m not desperate for fruit-cake for 99.9% of the year but at Christmas, for most people, fruit-cake is a bit of a sine qua non. Suddenly, I needed an alternative. It was either that or eat the fruit-cake and make Christmas afternoon unbearable for anyone who shared the room with me.

So I decided to go with gingerbread. Gingerbread is still Christmassy, causes no embarrassing eructations on my part, and is fun to make and to decorate.

One year I made this:

Christmas 2009 I made this:

But Christmas2010/New Year 2011, I made THIS:

It was the suggestion of #2 son, who, like myself, is a huge fan of Dr Who. I grew up with Dr Who. I hid behind the sofa or a cushion whenever there were Daleks and Cybermen and it is a source of unending joy for me that my own sweet boy is now terrified in turn. (Hmm, perhaps that isn’t quite what I meant, but I digress…)

So when he suggested that this year’s construction should be a TARDIS, I was happy to assent. Three days later, 'happy' was possibly not the best choice of adjective to describe my mood, but #2 son was elated and so were all his small friends.

Anyway, this is the story of the making the the gingerbread TARDIS. Fans of Dr Who might not agree that she is ‘Sexy’ but she was ‘Tasty’(and only fans will get that joke.) And, BTW, if copyright is a concern, I acknowledge that the TARDIS concept is wholly the intellectual property of the BBC/lovely Dr Who writers etc and this is not the real TARDIS, this is just a tribute.

Step 1:

Study a bunch of TARDIS images. This is easily achieved if you own boxed sets of Dr Who DVDs as we do. Watch them over and over again. Fetch out pencil, paper and ruler. Try to remember your high school maths. Make a ‘toile’ from cardboard. Use the pieces of cardboard for your dough stencils.

Step 2:

Make the dough. FYI – I am not an expert. I have had no training in making pastry or cakes, I own no fancy equipment. My kitchen is small. Things sometimes go wrong. Like this dough. I followed the recipe but it was far too ‘puffy’ and caused my all kinds of problems later on. Next year, my plan is to source a dough that makes a crisper, lighter gingerbread.

Step 3:

Cut out your pieces and bake them. Each piece takes about 15 minutes and there were so very many pieces. My tiny kitchen has no airconditioning and this was in Perth in January in a record breaking summer. Indoor temperature was in the low 30s.(Centigrade, my US friends, centigrade.)

Step 4:

All good gingerbread cooks know that you make your windows from smashed lollies. I wanted clear windows but the only clear boiled sweets that I could find were sugar-free and eucalyptus-flavoured and that would have been simply nasty. I mean, I don't even eat these lollies when I am sick (I have Allen's Butter Menthols - which taste great and make you forget your sore throat. How effective a medication they are, I am not sure.) So I went with bashed up Starburst lollipops and hoped that the effect would be cosmic.

Step 5:

The fondant. I bought this premade but not pre-coloured. Oh, that the original TARDIS could have been made of unpainted wood but, no, ‘tis blue. So there’s me, sweating into the kitchen (but not, you will be glad to know, into the fondant) and messing around with gel paste.

My hands were this colour for days afterwards. Do you remember that scene in ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ where Violet Beauregarde turns into a blueberry?

Step 6:

Roll out the fondant. Hope you have good forearm strength. I didn’t, and my arms only stopped hurting around the time that my fingers lost the blue colour.

Step 7:

Melt apricot jam. Stick on fondant. Cover all the pieces.

Step 8:

I decided to make life easier for myself by stamping in the panel-effect. Technically, on the actual TARDIS, the panels are recessed but making recessed panels would have meant more fondant which would have made the day longer which would have made me swear even more.

Step 9:

Whip up a batch of extra strong royal icing and start constructing. I use mugs to hold the pieces together while the icing dries.

This is when you find out whether your maths was correct. See how one door is higher than the other. Actually, I don’t think it was my maths. I think it was the ‘puffy’ gingerbread recipe.

Step 10:

Oh, sweet heaven, NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

The gingerbread with the fondant on top was too heavy. It folded before my eyes. I think I may have screamed. It's all a dim, dark memory.

Step 11:

Gin and tonic break. Actually, two gin and tonics.

Step 12:

Fortified by “Mother’s Ruin”, I begin the repairs.

Step 13:

No one will notice, right?

Step 14:

The roof and door detail. There should have been four slightly-pitched layers on the roof but I didn’t want to risk another collapse. Nerd that I am, I felt the lack of verisimilitude keenly. Making the light on top was interesting as I had never really paid attention to it before. I also needed to make the notice for the door panel.

Writing in gel-paste with a tooth-pick is fiddly beyond belief. I had to keep pressing on the fondant to give myself more writing space. It was suggested that I could have typed this on the computer and printed it out but I really wanted the whole TARDIS to be edible.

Step 15:

Door signage. Could I find black liquorice straps anywhere in Perth? Could I, hell. What I did find – organic liquorice, which is brown rather than black, doesn’t cut into neat rectangles and looks a bit like squashed slugs, really. By this time, however, I had reached the ‘whatever’ stage. Writing on liquorice using royal icing and a toothpick took over an hour. By that time, I was past caring that some of the signs looked like they said 'publuc'.

Step 16:

Stuck the signage on. We are done. D.O.N.E. Looks like a TARDIS and every bit edible.  Pass the Hendricks. (Actually, I had forgotten to put a Yale lock on the front door. This was pointed out to me later. Too bad. In my eyes, I was done.)

This black-and-white picture is for the William Hartnell/Patrick Troughton fans.

I sprinkled it with edible blue glitter to make it a bit more disco. I also had a tea-light inside to make it glow like the real TARDIS. What you can’t see is that fact that it is crammed, piñata-style, with jelly babies. This was a surprise for when the kids came to demolish it. Jelly-babies, hee hee!, I think Tom Baker would have approved.

Step 17:

Along with the new tradition of the gingerbread creation has grown the tradition of a Gingerbread Smash. We invite our closest friends and their children around for lunch at the end of which we let the kids loose on the gingerbread.

Like this:

And what’s left is this:

After all the angst of baking and creating, it was actually a sense of relief to see it reduced to ruins and stuffed into small mouths. The kids, nerdy offspring of nerdy parents, all knew what it was but, better still, liked the way it tasted. We won't talk about the next hour or so when the blue colouring and sugar hit home...

And that was it for another year. The problem is that with each successive year, I feel the need to go one better. I’m not sure how I’m going to do better than this but if you want to tune back in around December this year, and if this blog is still around, you can see for yourself how I go.

On a roll

Baked brie.

I have to be feeling really, really self-indulgent to do a baked brie. This one was done on a Friday after a particularly feral week at work.

This is double brie made by the King Island Dairy and I bake it in its little wooden box (although the side-band popped open in the oven and all you can see in the picture is a bit of the base). I stud it with cloves of garlic and drizzle it with good olive oil and into the oven it goes. Don't forget the rosemary on top - it steams in the oven and makes everything aromatic and wonderful. The honey (southernwood honey) goes on when it comes out.

I like grissini or melba toasts to dip into this. Sometimes I will toast hazelnuts and sprinkle them around the brie but this occasion was no dinner party, this was pure necessity, so no nuts, no delay. Just eating.

Baked brie is just glorious the way it melts to perfect creaminess and coats your grissini (and your arteries. Everything in moderation, people!)

I remember I had this with a very good local red wine (but I don't remember what the wine was). It was all a bit of a blur.

Tomato pie

A (very) long time ago, one my my uni lecturers ventured the generalisation that 'A pizza without anchovies is just a tomato pie'. As an anchovy-lover, I couldn't have agreed more. If I order a pizza from one the more prominent pizza chains, I always order anchovies as an extra topping. There's normally a silence on the end of the phone and then a whispered conversation, probably as they send their most junior employee off to locate some. Sometimes, the shop is generous and the pizza arrives with whole anchovies arranged on the pizza like spokes on a bicycle-wheel. Sometimes, the shop is stingy and you would hardly know that they had put any on at all if it weren't for the occasional salty surprise in a bite.

So, for your delectation today, I have four pizzas. Or, if you prefer, one pizza and three 'tomato pies', although, ironically, the 'pizza' has no tomato on it...

Pizza One - The Black Pizza

Can you see the anchovies swimming through the sea of fried onion?

I stole this recipe from Gypsy Tapas House in Fremantle. They used to make little onion, anchovy and olive pizzas as part of their tapas menu. Talk about a slice of heaven. Sticky, caramelised onions, tart kalamata olives and glorious anchovies. I had to go one better and make it BIG. Sometimes, I use a little mozzarella on the base to keep the black ingredients in place. I like this pizza because my children are not so fond of it so my partner and I get half each whenever I make it.

Pizza Two - The White Pizza

Don't tell me that you have never had potato on a pizza! Don't tell me that you think it's 'weird'!

This is my take on the classic 'Roman' pizza. It is completely easy to do and has nothing that will frighten the kiddies (unless they chomp down on a rosemary twig by accident). I use chats potatoes which I microwave until just cooked but still firm, then slice them thinly onto a base which has been sprinkled with mozzarella and little bit of fresh-grated parmesan. Onto that goes fresh rosemary (from the garden), olive oil (from the shops) and salt and pepper. I've seen some recipes that use leeks in the mix, or that use a mandolin (which I don't own) to slice the potatoes but I'm in this for the speed at which I can get it to the table.

Pizza Three - The Kids Pizza

The rocket was not at its best, okay?

Two children, two different palates to please. Number One Son is more adventurous - on his half of the pizza (from roughly 11 o'clock to 5 o'clock), you will find hot salami, diced chorizo, ham. Number Two Son is more conservative, less into the hot stuff - he has ham and he has olives. The rocket is so they can claim to have had 'something green' and I can feel like a responsible parent. Tomato base here, no anchovies.

Pizza Four - The Adult Pizza

Hell yeah.

Here on a tomato base that has been pimped with a blast of Fountain-brand Hot Chilli Sauce, we have super-hot Hungarian salami, pickled jalapenos and a scattering of orange habanero chilli that really, really hurts (but in a good way).

Sometimes, when I can be bothered, I make my own bases. The kids help and they love messing about with packets of yeast and getting involved with the kneading and bashing of dough. Most of the time, I buy my bases. There are plenty of good ones out there and I'm a busy working mother, you know?