Dear me, it really is the Year of Food. Last year was the Year of Wilderness Camping. Last spring I loved to read guides to surviving in the wild, and now I am surrounded by cookbooks. I even have a cookbook geared to surviving in the wild--or, rather, in poverty in rural Greece.
Not being in poverty in rural Greece, on Saturday I had a pound coin with which to buy 250g of unsalted butter. Therefore, on Saturday night I made raw croissants and left them to prove in the fridge overnight. I awoke in a panic at 5 AM and moved them to the kitchen counter. At a more reasonable 7 AM, I woke up again and had a look. They had indeed doubled in size although I must admit they were not (and had not started) at uniform sizes. Getting a 20 cm x 65 cm rectangle of dough to the same thickness throughout was a challenge I met but imperfectly.
Into the oven they went for 25 minutes. I did them too brown (as Georgette Heyer would metaphorically write), so next time I will have a look after 20.
Even when overly brown, there is nothing like a hot, freshly baked croissant straight from the oven, as I now know. The outer layers snap and flake, and the inner layers cling softly together until you pull them apart to apply the jam. You do not need to add butter. They are butter.
Various online wags say that after making your own croissants, you understand why there are bakeries. I wonder where the online wags live; it can't be suburban Scotland. It is a 30 minute bus ride to the nearest French bakery, and we consider ourselves lucky. Moreover, it costs less to make your own croissants (approx 10p each) than to buy even a bad, bready one from Tesco (approx £1).
Meanwhile, making croissants is not that difficult, especially if you add the butter in one-inch cubes instead of pounding it into a flat slab, as did Julia Child. The important thing is not to lose your nerve when the greasy dough sticks to your rolling pin. To avoid this problem, roll the dough between lightly floured sheets of baking paper. It will still stick, but don't panic.
Besides butter, flour, yeast, sugar, salt, milk, water, baking paper and a cool head, you need a refrigerator and time. The butter-studded dough needs about an hour to rise. The twice-turned dough-envelope needs about that (see recipe) to rest in the fridge, and then another hour for its second rest in the fridge. The crescent shapes need two hours (perhaps) to double--unless you put them in the fridge overnight, as I recommend. If you want croissants for breakfast, you have to start the night before, perhaps right after supper.
The long-term goal is to have croissants for breakfast, so the short-term goal should be to have the crescent-shapes in the fridge before you go to bed at your normal time. In the morning, you pop them on a counter/table, wait an hour for them to finish doubling, and then bake and eat them. This may mean getting up earlier than usual. As a morning person, I love the blissful solitude of being awake and busy before anyone else.
A problem I did not foresee is that 12 -14 croissants are too many for a middle-aged married couple, even over two days. (This morning's day-olds tasted great after being warmed in the oven.) Next time I will either freeze half of the proved-but-unbaked crescent shapes or I will wait until there are overnight visitors in the house. Of course, there is always the option of halving the recipe and making just six. Rolling the dough to just 32.5 cm must surely be easier!
By the way, I didn't have plastic wrap to cover the dough, so I used a large white linen napkin throughout. French bakers thrived for at least three centuries without plastic wrap. I wonder how they coped without refrigerators, but presumably they had cellars.
Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts
Monday, 1 May 2017
Saturday, 29 April 2017
The Friendly Alien Eats Edinburgh
My search for a good croissant led us this morning to The Wee Boulangerie, and there I hit buttery gold. Yes,The Wee Boulangerie sells plain croissants that taste like croissants and not--as they do perhaps everywhere else in Edinburgh--like bread. And they are NOT £3 a pop, as someone claimed on TripAdvisor. I do not know how much they are exactly, however, as B.A. ordered a pain aux raisins. Together our pastries came to £3.75. We ate them happily while wandering down Nicholson Street in the direction of Brew Lab.
Brew Lab, that hipster mecca of coffee, was not overcrowded, and so we sat and enjoyed an espresso (B.A.) and a macchiato (I) made with Has Bean beans imported from Kenya. B.A. sat in one of the red leather armchairs in the window and read The Spectator while I sat on a bench beside two philosophical young Poles and wrote a letter in Polish. I hope the Polish youths did not think I was recording their conversation, averting to the Collins Polish-English English-Polish dictionary when I got stuck on the spelling.
The letter having been written, B.A. and I went next to Central Library where I returned two books and took out five more. Then B.A. complained of the dizziness and double-vision that come upon him when he is hungry, so we went straight to Mother India's Café. There we ate a dhosa (lentil pancake) wrapped around spicy spinach and served with lentils; smoked chicken with peas; onion bhajis and pitta bread and drank a bottle of sparkling water. This tasty feast cost £19.75 + tip.
B.A. then proposed another coffee, so we decided to visit Baba Budan under the Waverley Arches after I picked up my new glasses from Specsavers. These are very special glasses that you can wear both to see the world in front of you and to read. We took them to Baba Budan and ordered two filter coffees (£2 each) and sat on a bench. I read Ada i Adam na Wsi aloud to B.A. using my new spectacles and was slightly nonplussed when I realized that the hipster girl crocheting in the armchair at my elbow was Polish.
Baba Budan is constructed on the usual hipster brick-and-board lines, only its ceiling is a bona fide stone archway and its walls are smooth and white. It advertises itself as a "donutterie", so I went back to the counter to buy a doughnut (a whopping £2.50 each) for BA and me to share. Baba Budan was down to passionfruit-mango and strawberry jam, so I picked the latter and it was TOO SWEET. Sugar is evil; I shall not do that again. Believe it or not, Goodfellow & Stevens offer a very decent chocolate-covered ring doughnut in supermarket bakery counters, so one need not search Edinburgh high and low for a good doughnut.
The coffee was served in round juice glasses, but we will not hold that against the café. It came from the Coffee Collective and was very good. The young ladies (Irish and Polish) beside us chatted amiably about taking each other on visits to Ireland and Poland and what their relations think of Lesbianism (e.g. fashionable, curable) and how, as these girls are Artists, their relations cut them some slack. I haven't seen these girls at Mass, but then perhaps they go to the Cathedral.
As B.A. and I were so close to Waverley Station, we took the train instead of the bus home, stopping at Co-op to purchase something for B.A. to eat later for supper. (I shall have a restorative mug of miso soup.) B.A. would have bought the boxed corned beef-with-mashed-potato dinner had he not noticed that it had something like 150% of his daily sodium requirements. He put it back with the haggis-and-mash and macaroni-and-mash (etc) boxes, and I reflected that the brand's motto could have been "Slowing killing Scots since 1904."
Skipping lightly over our supper prospects, we can reflect that we have had a very good foodie day. For croissants, we highly recommend The Wee Boulangerie*. For a relaxed coffee, we vote for Brew Lab. For an excellent Indian lunch, we are all for Mother India's Café. For a quick coffee near Waverley Station, we give Baba Budan the nod although I didn't like the doughnut.
Update: B.A. made himself corned beef stovies according to his mother's recipe. It is composed of corned beef, mashed potatoes and a can of baked beans. Although B.A. refers to it as "Splodge", it is actually very tasty. Instead of having soup, I had a half-cup of Splodge and then began to make croissants according to Ruby Tandoh's recipe. If all goes well, B.A. and I will have homemade croissants for breakfast.
*Correction: Not La Petite Boulangerie but The Wee Boulangerie!
Brew Lab, that hipster mecca of coffee, was not overcrowded, and so we sat and enjoyed an espresso (B.A.) and a macchiato (I) made with Has Bean beans imported from Kenya. B.A. sat in one of the red leather armchairs in the window and read The Spectator while I sat on a bench beside two philosophical young Poles and wrote a letter in Polish. I hope the Polish youths did not think I was recording their conversation, averting to the Collins Polish-English English-Polish dictionary when I got stuck on the spelling.
The letter having been written, B.A. and I went next to Central Library where I returned two books and took out five more. Then B.A. complained of the dizziness and double-vision that come upon him when he is hungry, so we went straight to Mother India's Café. There we ate a dhosa (lentil pancake) wrapped around spicy spinach and served with lentils; smoked chicken with peas; onion bhajis and pitta bread and drank a bottle of sparkling water. This tasty feast cost £19.75 + tip.
B.A. then proposed another coffee, so we decided to visit Baba Budan under the Waverley Arches after I picked up my new glasses from Specsavers. These are very special glasses that you can wear both to see the world in front of you and to read. We took them to Baba Budan and ordered two filter coffees (£2 each) and sat on a bench. I read Ada i Adam na Wsi aloud to B.A. using my new spectacles and was slightly nonplussed when I realized that the hipster girl crocheting in the armchair at my elbow was Polish.
Baba Budan is constructed on the usual hipster brick-and-board lines, only its ceiling is a bona fide stone archway and its walls are smooth and white. It advertises itself as a "donutterie", so I went back to the counter to buy a doughnut (a whopping £2.50 each) for BA and me to share. Baba Budan was down to passionfruit-mango and strawberry jam, so I picked the latter and it was TOO SWEET. Sugar is evil; I shall not do that again. Believe it or not, Goodfellow & Stevens offer a very decent chocolate-covered ring doughnut in supermarket bakery counters, so one need not search Edinburgh high and low for a good doughnut.
The coffee was served in round juice glasses, but we will not hold that against the café. It came from the Coffee Collective and was very good. The young ladies (Irish and Polish) beside us chatted amiably about taking each other on visits to Ireland and Poland and what their relations think of Lesbianism (e.g. fashionable, curable) and how, as these girls are Artists, their relations cut them some slack. I haven't seen these girls at Mass, but then perhaps they go to the Cathedral.
As B.A. and I were so close to Waverley Station, we took the train instead of the bus home, stopping at Co-op to purchase something for B.A. to eat later for supper. (I shall have a restorative mug of miso soup.) B.A. would have bought the boxed corned beef-with-mashed-potato dinner had he not noticed that it had something like 150% of his daily sodium requirements. He put it back with the haggis-and-mash and macaroni-and-mash (etc) boxes, and I reflected that the brand's motto could have been "Slowing killing Scots since 1904."
Skipping lightly over our supper prospects, we can reflect that we have had a very good foodie day. For croissants, we highly recommend The Wee Boulangerie*. For a relaxed coffee, we vote for Brew Lab. For an excellent Indian lunch, we are all for Mother India's Café. For a quick coffee near Waverley Station, we give Baba Budan the nod although I didn't like the doughnut.
Update: B.A. made himself corned beef stovies according to his mother's recipe. It is composed of corned beef, mashed potatoes and a can of baked beans. Although B.A. refers to it as "Splodge", it is actually very tasty. Instead of having soup, I had a half-cup of Splodge and then began to make croissants according to Ruby Tandoh's recipe. If all goes well, B.A. and I will have homemade croissants for breakfast.
*Correction: Not La Petite Boulangerie but The Wee Boulangerie!
Friday, 28 April 2017
Croissanterie
Not being prepared to banish wheat flour entirely from my life, I have begun a mission to find Edinburgh's best croissant. This may be a difficult task, for I am used to the splendid croissants of French Canada and have encountered superlative croissants in Paris and so far no plain croissant in Edinburgh can compare. I have threatened on several occasions to make my own. It may still come to that.
Today I had a hazelnut croissant from Edinburgh's Twelve Triangles, and it was delicious. However, the plain croissant I had afterwards (the hazelnut croissant having disappeared in a frenzied attack), though good--and indeed aeons better than the horrors one gets from Costa Coffee, Caffé Nero, et al,, did not conjure up Montréal or the Chartres Pilgrimage.
The game's afoot!
Today I had a hazelnut croissant from Edinburgh's Twelve Triangles, and it was delicious. However, the plain croissant I had afterwards (the hazelnut croissant having disappeared in a frenzied attack), though good--and indeed aeons better than the horrors one gets from Costa Coffee, Caffé Nero, et al,, did not conjure up Montréal or the Chartres Pilgrimage.
The game's afoot!
Wednesday, 26 April 2017
Fighting Weight
As a part time teacher, I guard against being a bad influence on my pupils. This sense of caution was reinforced for me when one of them came to class with her hair braided up just like mine. ("Look!") Well, that's okay, but I would be abjectly horrified if any of my pupils talked about food and dieting as much as I do. I have explained that dieting stunts teenage brains, but occasionally I still let it slip that I am anti-sugar or not eating bread. Over-emphasis on food, dieting and body-size is a North American epidemic, and I do not want to pass on the germs to naturally slim, healthy, physically active Scottish lassies.
(She collapses forward and bangs her had on the coffee table.)
Okay, that's done. Now let's talk about my super-brilliant Low Blood Sugar Diet. I promised an overweight male reader I would post about it, so here we go.
Right. So I followed Dr. Michael Mosley's Low Blood Sugar Diet more or less strictly for 8 weeks, and then, as it was Good Friday, I baked up some delicious full-wheat hot cross buns from scratch and ate two or three. I ate another two on Holy Saturday although for supper I had the ever-tasty Red Pepper and Squash Soup from my best-friend-for-eight-weeks, the Low Blood Sugar Diet Cookbook. So, incidentally, did everyone else at the table. There are a number of garnish options for this soup, and on this occasion I chopped up some of the mountain cheese Polish Pretend Daughter brought from Poland and fried it like halloumi. It melted much faster than halloumi, but it was still delicious, adding much-needed texture and salt.
On Easter Day I had that splendid breakfast, including cake and a potato pancake or two, and I ate a magnificent dinner, including cake and trifle, but a minimum of roast potatoes. On Easter Monday I tried to keep bread and sugar to a minimum while otherwise scarfing what I was served. By evening my resolve had collapsed, and I ate the sugared wedding almonds. Next to dates stuffed with walnuts, I adore sugared wedding almonds.
Sugared wedding almonds are the official snack of marriage. They symbolize marriage because the sugar is sweet and the almond is wholesome but the almond skin is bitter. Sugared wedding almonds are a reminder that Marriage is Hard and has its bitter elements although, all-in-all, it is lovely and eventually your teeth fall out.
Actually, our teeth wouldn't fall out quite so much if our Elizabethan ancestors hadn't added sugar to our diet, but they did, so good-bye teeth. However, I believe you can preserve what teeth you have left by cutting out as much sugar as possible, plus visits to the dentist who beg you to floss.
Besides cutting out sugar and anything that swiftly turns to sugar in your blood--wheat flour, anything made from wheat flour, rice, alcohol, potatoes, oranges, dates (boo)--the Low Blood Sugar Diet discourages SNACKING. All my current diet gurus, including Toronto's Doctor "Obesity Code" Fung, hate snacking and love fasting between meals. Dr Fung also loves fasting between supper and lunch, which is not all that difficult, if you sit down to work with a big mug of coffee and forget all about eating until noon.
Some diet gurus think you should eat all your meals in eight hours, leaving your body 16 whole hours to recover. If you eat,brunch at 12 PM and finish supper at 8 PM, this is doable. When I finished eating my allotted 800 calories much before 8 PM, however, I went to bed feeling hungry.
It was possible to stick to 800 calories or thereabouts thanks to coffee, herbal tea, water and--especially--sparkling water. Sparking water is a profligate use of money--as drinking water is more-or-less free from the tap--but in our house it has replaced wine, which costs at least ten times as much. Because we derive a lot of water from our food, not eating food makes us dehydrated and headachey. Also, most of the recipes I tried in The Low Blood Sugar Diet Cookbook were delicious.
Underscore most. There were some failures, most notably the almond flour pancakes I tried to make on Pancake Tuesday. Woe. Then there was the lackluster Chicken Korma, so inferior to my usual korma, which could have been easily adapted to my stringent regime. However, the "Thai Red Curry" was a hit, as were the "Thai Fish Cakes" until B.A.'s gag reflex decided fish sauce (i.e. fermented anchovy juice) is a kind of vinegar.
The "Guilt-free spaghetti" recipes were so good that eventually I bought my own spiralizer for the courgette (zucchini) "noodles". You really can trick yourself into thinking you are eating pasta when you eat a bowlful of "courgetti" with sauce.
"Fast off, fast on" is the usual advice about losing weight, but I have been weighing myself every morning since I ended my eight week regime, and I am still 15 lbs lighter than when I started. This is 10 lbs heavier than my "fighting weight" when I was a 20-something boxer, but I'm not complaining as I am not a 20-something boxer anymore.
The Low Blood Sugar Diet is predicated upon "lifestyle change", and my lifestyle changes include:
- drinking over a litre of water every day
- eating a lot more veg and berries
- not snacking (except on coffee, tea and water) unless in a social situation
- keeping the simple carbs to a minimum (so only small helpings of the ever-fattening potatoes)
- counting ye olde calories
- continuing to use the Low Blood Sugar Diet Cookbook
- avoiding sugar
Not snacking and avoiding sugar are difficult in social situations, as I reflected the day I was handed a piece of sugar-topped mazurek during a mid-afternoon visit. I took it with thanks and ate every delicious morsel. I don't think the odd lapse made to please a hostess is hurtful in the long run.
However, I am keeping the German and sugar-loving part of my ancestry in mind. My father's Great-Aunt Tilly features hugely in family legend as, thanks to her addiction to soda pop, she weighed well over 300 lbs. I appreciate that my German ancestors and relations were good at making money, loved to cook and loved to eat, but some of them had a fatal tendency to run to fat. And, alas, none of my siblings are naturally twig-like in adult life, and we all have to fight against the inexorable creep of fatness.
By the way, I cannot emphasize enough how silly it is to think we will keel over and die if we do not eat 2000 calories a day. A woman my height and weight who sits at her job and takes only mild exercise should eat about 1500-1660 (and these 1500-1660 should be full of nutrients). Here is a handy calculator. Oh, and this is where I should say I am not a medical doctor, am just stating my layman's opinion, and am no substitute for a proper medical adviser, etc.
Update: Another lifestyle change: daily weigh-in. I've heard that's important.
(She collapses forward and bangs her had on the coffee table.)
Okay, that's done. Now let's talk about my super-brilliant Low Blood Sugar Diet. I promised an overweight male reader I would post about it, so here we go.
Right. So I followed Dr. Michael Mosley's Low Blood Sugar Diet more or less strictly for 8 weeks, and then, as it was Good Friday, I baked up some delicious full-wheat hot cross buns from scratch and ate two or three. I ate another two on Holy Saturday although for supper I had the ever-tasty Red Pepper and Squash Soup from my best-friend-for-eight-weeks, the Low Blood Sugar Diet Cookbook. So, incidentally, did everyone else at the table. There are a number of garnish options for this soup, and on this occasion I chopped up some of the mountain cheese Polish Pretend Daughter brought from Poland and fried it like halloumi. It melted much faster than halloumi, but it was still delicious, adding much-needed texture and salt.
On Easter Day I had that splendid breakfast, including cake and a potato pancake or two, and I ate a magnificent dinner, including cake and trifle, but a minimum of roast potatoes. On Easter Monday I tried to keep bread and sugar to a minimum while otherwise scarfing what I was served. By evening my resolve had collapsed, and I ate the sugared wedding almonds. Next to dates stuffed with walnuts, I adore sugared wedding almonds.
Sugared wedding almonds are the official snack of marriage. They symbolize marriage because the sugar is sweet and the almond is wholesome but the almond skin is bitter. Sugared wedding almonds are a reminder that Marriage is Hard and has its bitter elements although, all-in-all, it is lovely and eventually your teeth fall out.
Actually, our teeth wouldn't fall out quite so much if our Elizabethan ancestors hadn't added sugar to our diet, but they did, so good-bye teeth. However, I believe you can preserve what teeth you have left by cutting out as much sugar as possible, plus visits to the dentist who beg you to floss.
Besides cutting out sugar and anything that swiftly turns to sugar in your blood--wheat flour, anything made from wheat flour, rice, alcohol, potatoes, oranges, dates (boo)--the Low Blood Sugar Diet discourages SNACKING. All my current diet gurus, including Toronto's Doctor "Obesity Code" Fung, hate snacking and love fasting between meals. Dr Fung also loves fasting between supper and lunch, which is not all that difficult, if you sit down to work with a big mug of coffee and forget all about eating until noon.
Some diet gurus think you should eat all your meals in eight hours, leaving your body 16 whole hours to recover. If you eat,brunch at 12 PM and finish supper at 8 PM, this is doable. When I finished eating my allotted 800 calories much before 8 PM, however, I went to bed feeling hungry.
It was possible to stick to 800 calories or thereabouts thanks to coffee, herbal tea, water and--especially--sparkling water. Sparking water is a profligate use of money--as drinking water is more-or-less free from the tap--but in our house it has replaced wine, which costs at least ten times as much. Because we derive a lot of water from our food, not eating food makes us dehydrated and headachey. Also, most of the recipes I tried in The Low Blood Sugar Diet Cookbook were delicious.
Underscore most. There were some failures, most notably the almond flour pancakes I tried to make on Pancake Tuesday. Woe. Then there was the lackluster Chicken Korma, so inferior to my usual korma, which could have been easily adapted to my stringent regime. However, the "Thai Red Curry" was a hit, as were the "Thai Fish Cakes" until B.A.'s gag reflex decided fish sauce (i.e. fermented anchovy juice) is a kind of vinegar.
The "Guilt-free spaghetti" recipes were so good that eventually I bought my own spiralizer for the courgette (zucchini) "noodles". You really can trick yourself into thinking you are eating pasta when you eat a bowlful of "courgetti" with sauce.
"Fast off, fast on" is the usual advice about losing weight, but I have been weighing myself every morning since I ended my eight week regime, and I am still 15 lbs lighter than when I started. This is 10 lbs heavier than my "fighting weight" when I was a 20-something boxer, but I'm not complaining as I am not a 20-something boxer anymore.
The Low Blood Sugar Diet is predicated upon "lifestyle change", and my lifestyle changes include:
- drinking over a litre of water every day
- eating a lot more veg and berries
- not snacking (except on coffee, tea and water) unless in a social situation
- keeping the simple carbs to a minimum (so only small helpings of the ever-fattening potatoes)
- counting ye olde calories
- continuing to use the Low Blood Sugar Diet Cookbook
- avoiding sugar
Not snacking and avoiding sugar are difficult in social situations, as I reflected the day I was handed a piece of sugar-topped mazurek during a mid-afternoon visit. I took it with thanks and ate every delicious morsel. I don't think the odd lapse made to please a hostess is hurtful in the long run.
However, I am keeping the German and sugar-loving part of my ancestry in mind. My father's Great-Aunt Tilly features hugely in family legend as, thanks to her addiction to soda pop, she weighed well over 300 lbs. I appreciate that my German ancestors and relations were good at making money, loved to cook and loved to eat, but some of them had a fatal tendency to run to fat. And, alas, none of my siblings are naturally twig-like in adult life, and we all have to fight against the inexorable creep of fatness.
By the way, I cannot emphasize enough how silly it is to think we will keel over and die if we do not eat 2000 calories a day. A woman my height and weight who sits at her job and takes only mild exercise should eat about 1500-1660 (and these 1500-1660 should be full of nutrients). Here is a handy calculator. Oh, and this is where I should say I am not a medical doctor, am just stating my layman's opinion, and am no substitute for a proper medical adviser, etc.
Update: Another lifestyle change: daily weigh-in. I've heard that's important.
Saturday, 22 April 2017
Bigos It's Delicious
It really was a splendid Easter. My brother Quadrophonic arrived, dog-tired, on Holy Wednesday night, and I put him in the best guest room. On Holy Thursday, I brought Quadrophonic along to Tesco to help carry bags of ingredients home, and in the evening we all went to Mass. Afterwards Benedict Ambrose reminisced about the Holy Thursday curries of his youth, and so Quadrophonic treated us to a splendid curry feast at the nearest snazzy sit-down. In deference to B.A.'s recent surgery, we took a taxi home.
After that, it was cook, cook, wash, wash, clean, clean, bake, bake, rush off to church and welcome another guest or two. Occasionally I would leave B.A. in my brother's or Polish Pretend Son's charge with the instruction that he wasn't allowed to do any work. It cut me to the quick to prevent B.A. from washing the dishes, but my top priority was conserving his energy for church and, ultimately, our friend's Easter Monday wedding banquet.
With all the baking and cooking to do (self-imposed, I know), my life was a round of going to bed very late and getting up rather early, and by Easter Wednesday I was beginning to lose things and leave them behind. On Easter Thursday night, I informed the same stranger two times that there had been an accident on the South Bridge. He looked at me warily, poor chap.
I went to Polish class on Thursday night, and I was rubbish. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. This is partly the fault of my Polish Pretend Children, who did not speak to me in Polish while they were here. The only guest who addressed me po polsku was Polish Pretend Daughter's French husband, and we exchanged greetings and information in learners' pidgin, to PPD's great amusement. "You both make mistakes, and yet you both understand each other," she observed. However, this was no great wonder to me, as I speak Polish more often with non-Polish students of Polish than with actual Poles.
Yes, my performance during the Easter Thursday Polish class was abysmal, but the day was not a washout, for I had made Polish hunter stew---bigos (pron. BEE-ghos)--for the first time ever, turning dry roast lamb into nectar and ambrosia. And it was a REVELATION. In general, the longer you cook meat, the tougher and stringier and more horrible it gets, but for some reason, the process of turning a leftover roast into bigos makes it melt into delicious meat manna.
My Polish teacher said she had never heard of making bigos with lamb, and when I cited Anne Applebaum's recipe, she sniffed about Polish-American cooking. I argued that baranina is what I had, so baranina is what I used. Frankly, I think any Polish babcia would agree that it is better to use roast lamb in bigos than to waste (marnować) it or, worse, serve it cold and tough or, worst, warmed up with gravy. I suspect that bigos is the best solution for any kind of leftover roast meat.
Having looked at several bigos recipes (and every Polish family has its own) in advance, here is how I did it:
Edinburgh Bigos
1 big jar of Polish kapusta kwaszona (preserved cabbage)--NOT vinegar-laced sauerkraut!*--mixed with carrots (The carrots aren't at all essential.)
1 handful of dried mushrooms (I had Italian, so I used Italian. Next time I will use Polish.)
1 cup pitted prunes
2 cups of hot water
4 strips of streaky bacon
1 onion, chopped
1/2 a medium green cabbage, chopped
4 medium tomatoes, skinned and chopped
1/2 lb smoked kielbasa, chopped into 1-inch pieces
leftover cooked white kielbasa, chopped into 1-inch pieces
leftover chorizo sausage (mine was already sliced for a pizza that didn't get made)
almost 1 lb leftover roast lamb cut into approx. 1-inch pieces (Next time I will use leftover roast pork.)
1 bay leaf
1 cup of red wine (okay, it was dry sherry, but that is what I had open)
Use an enormous hob-safe casserole with a lid.
1. Soak preserved cabbage in cold water for half an hour and drain.
2. Pour 2 cups of boiling water on dried mushrooms and prunes in a medium-sized bowl and let them sit for half an hour.
3. Skin the tomatoes after pouring hot water on them and letting them sit in the hot water for a bit. This makes the skins loosen enough for you to pull them off. Don't burn yourself, however.
4. Fry bacon in the casserole at low temperature to get the fat out, and then tip in the chopped onions and fresh chopped cabbage to fry merrily.
5. When the fresh cabbage has reduced to half its original bulk, put in the drained preserved cabbage, the mushrooms and prunes and their soaking liquid (being careful to leave any sand at the bottom of the soaking bowl), the tomatoes, all the kielbasa and other sausage, the leftover roast, the bay leaf and one cup of red wine.
6. Bring to a boil on medium heat and then turn heat down to lowest setting. Cook with the lid on for at least 2 hours. However, the longer you cook bigos, the better it gets. (Just check periodically to make sure the liquid hasn't all evaporated.) Many Polish cooks say it tastes better the next day and even better the day after that. Salt and pepper to taste. (I'm just salting and peppering each serving.)
There are 6-8 large helpings of bigos in this recipe. I had some for Thursday lunch and left the casserole bubbling away on "1" until I came back from Polish class and had more for supper. (B.A. had had his by then.) I left the pot on the chilly windowsill overnight. Yesterday, after I returned--dead tired--from teaching Ancient Greek class, I put the casserole back on the burner, brought it to a boil, turned the heat down to "1" and napped for an hour or so. Then I had a big bowl of bigos for lunch, and it was splendid. I turned the heat off, and B.A. turned it on again to get hot bigos for his Easter Friday supper. Before we went to bed, I put the remainder--enough for three helpings--in the fridge.
It's supposed to be served with dark bread and/or boiled white potatoes. This is probably a good idea, keeping you from compulsively eating too much bigos. If you know anything about Polish cooking, you are probably amazed that the only herb used is a bay leaf, but I assume this is because there is so much flavour in the mushrooms, prunes and kielbasach. As for how the dried out lamb became so squishy and delectable, I can only guess that fresh cabbage + preserved cabbage = magic.
*Anti-sauerkraut note: Vinegar makes Benedict Ambrose nauseous, so I was delighted to inform him of the many times it is condemned in bigos recipes. To preserve cabbage, Poles usually just stuff it in jars with salt and let nature carry on. However, commercial giants cheat, so if you are cooking for someone who hates vinegar as much as B.A. does, check the label on the jar. Vinegar in Polish is "ocet." Due to commercial use of ocet, I had to make our own horseradish sauce this Easter, so thanks to my brother Nulli for the awesome food processor. Grating raw horseradish by hand would have been a beast.
Tuesday, 18 April 2017
Celebrating Easter with Food
As far as I am concerned, the Low Blood Sugar Diet--strictly followed according to the recipe book--works very well. What I liked best was that no gym membership or boring exercise regimen was necessary. The only overall change to my physical activity was carrying out Spring Cleaning---and, come to think of it, a lot of rubbish and recycling, since my husband is not yet physically fit enough to take them out himself.
The funny thing about living on 800 calories a day is that I thought about food quite often, watched even more cooking shows than usual and read several books about cuisine. I feel a bit ashamed of that; I am relatively sure that when monks and nuns fast, they don't spend that much time dreaming about food.
Be that as it may, I very much enjoyed planning, preparing and--at last--eating special Easter dishes. We had up to four overnight guests in the house, so all this food was as necessary as it was enjoyable. Two of the guests were Polish, which gave me an excuse to make exotic stuff, not just solidly British fare.
The Home Cooking and Baking Menu
Good Friday: Hot Cross Buns
(It is traditional in the UK to bake hot cross buns on Good Friday.)
Easter Sunday Breakfast: Żurek (Polish sour soup with white kielbasa); coloured hard-boiled eggs; grilled white kielbasa with ćwikła (beetroot-horseradish sauce); potato pancakes; śledź w oleju (herring in oil, which I forgot to serve); chałka (braided egg bread); mazurek królewski (shortbread pastry with jams); baranek (cake shaped like a lamb--the centrepiece, not to be eaten yet); makowiec (poppy seed cake); coffee.
Easter Sunday Dinner (4:30 PM): prawn salad on baby gem lettuce; roast leg of lamb with butterbean-mint sauce, roast potatoes, gravy and peas; Easter Trifle; leftover makowiec, leftover mazurek; white wine; red wine; cava; pudding wine; Laura Secord chocolate Easter Egg; coffee.
Easter Monday Breakfast or Brunch : Random selection of bread, cheese, black pudding, bacon, fried banana, as half the household gets ready for a wedding, and the other half takes its time while waiting to go to just the wedding dinner/dance.
Easter Tuesday Brunch: Leftover żurek; black pudding; fried eggs; morning rolls with jam and/or butter; the baranek (eaten at last); coffee; tea.
Both my Polish Pretend Children and my Franco-Polish Pretend Son-in-Law were here, so Easter meals have been all very entertaining, with Polish Pretend Daughter insulting Polish Pretend Son at intervals by telling him that he is actually German.
Sunday, 26 March 2017
Laetare, Ierusalem!
Hooray! It is Laetare Sunday--a Rose Sunday--and that means Lent is drawing to a close. At least, we are two-thirds of the way through, and tradition calls for a celebration. In days of yore Benedict Ambrose and I went to (or hosted) a dinner party featuring pink foods (like barszcz, ham and strawberry fool) and pink alcohol of varying quality. Since then we have become more abstemious and more prone to going to bed unsociably early, so today we had just had a late lunch at Edinburgh's Bar Napoli.
Another reason for celebration and thanksgiving: yesterday was Edinburgh's first warm day in weeks and weeks or months and months. B.A. and I carried folding chairs to the top of the Historical House's rather grand porch and basked in the sun. (I basked under my giant green straw hat.) The sky was as blue and cloudless as Our Lady's mantel, which was apt as yesterday was Lady Day.
But back to Bar Napoli, where B.A. and I shared a plate of calamari before B.A. tucked into a bowl of spaghetti carbonara and I chowed down on scallopini con limone. I also ordered a Big Glass of House Red, which was wild and crazy for me these days whereas B.A. made do with the bottle of sparkling mineral water. We were prepared to go without vegetables, but to our surprise, the waiter brought a side dish of green beans and cooked potato halves.
I was happy to see the green beans, but dubious about the potatoes as I have not eaten a potato since long before Ash Wednesday. However, I forked up an experimental piece of potato, and it was heavenly. Simply heavenly. We think it was roasted in garlic butter. Although we looked at the dessert menu, I decided that I would rather have another piece of buttery, garlicky potato instead.
Since it is Laetare Sunday and we may be frivolous, I shall reveal that I have lost 13 pounds since I weighed myself at my parents' house in Toronto circa February 15. I know this because I finally went out and bought a new bathroom scale, not only to how much weight I was losing, but to make sure B.A. wasn't losing too much. I am also--as you see--still alive after five weeks of eating approximately 800 calories a day--although I put this down to the fact that the most exercise I do is walk to the supermarket and back (2.4 miles, 1.2 miles with a knapsack full of groceries). Do not attempt this if you live in an agrarian society, work in a factory or find yourself in the gulag.
Five weeks of living on such a ridiculously low number of calories has its lessons. I should write them all up and sell them to a magazine. But here are some freebee observations:
1. When you have not eaten a potato or anything made of potatoes for five weeks (or more), a potato roasted in garlic butter is like CANDY. It is CANDY.
2. Real candy seems rather pointless and disgusting. The thought of a box of chocolates--even high-end ones like, say, Godiva--leaves me cold. THE most amazing sweetmeats in existence--as you can be sure I have told B.A.--are soft DATES stuffed with WALNUT HALVES. There was a day a week or two ago in which I went over ye olde 800 calorie limit because I kept filling the dates I bought for B.A. with walnut halves and then guiltily eating them.
When Easter comes, I hope B.A. painstakingly replaces the stones of dates with walnut halves, sticks the dates in ruffles, puts them in a fancy box and presents them to me as a gift. I recommend this also for our wedding anniversary, Christmas, my birthday and Valentine's Day. (He can reuse the fancy box.)
3. When on the Blood Sugar Diet, keep dates out of the house.
4. After a while, you do get used to the following:
a) eating breakfast very late
b) having only coffee for breakfast
c) never snacking
d) never eating bread, potatoes or rice or any prepared food
e) going for hours and hours without food
You never get used to eating only 800 calories a day, however.
5. The higher in cocoa dark chocolate is, the higher in calories it is. Cocoa fat is higher in calories than sugar. However, sugar is STILL worse for you than cocoa fat. Ponder the mystery and eat only one square at a sitting, preferably as part of your incomplete supper.
6. There is absolutely nothing like eating when you are actually hungry, not to mention hungry and tired. When you eat lunch and feel like it has actually made a new woman out of you--that's a great feeling. Those Eastern Christians sure know what they're doing when they fast like it's 999.
Update: I have been reading up on dates. Apparently they are 60% fructrose or something ridiculous like that, so perhaps it would be a bad idea to eat more than one or two of my Date-Walnut Sweetmeats a day. Interestingly, they would be about 34 calories each; a square of 85% dark chocolate is about 52.
Another reason for celebration and thanksgiving: yesterday was Edinburgh's first warm day in weeks and weeks or months and months. B.A. and I carried folding chairs to the top of the Historical House's rather grand porch and basked in the sun. (I basked under my giant green straw hat.) The sky was as blue and cloudless as Our Lady's mantel, which was apt as yesterday was Lady Day.
But back to Bar Napoli, where B.A. and I shared a plate of calamari before B.A. tucked into a bowl of spaghetti carbonara and I chowed down on scallopini con limone. I also ordered a Big Glass of House Red, which was wild and crazy for me these days whereas B.A. made do with the bottle of sparkling mineral water. We were prepared to go without vegetables, but to our surprise, the waiter brought a side dish of green beans and cooked potato halves.
I was happy to see the green beans, but dubious about the potatoes as I have not eaten a potato since long before Ash Wednesday. However, I forked up an experimental piece of potato, and it was heavenly. Simply heavenly. We think it was roasted in garlic butter. Although we looked at the dessert menu, I decided that I would rather have another piece of buttery, garlicky potato instead.
Since it is Laetare Sunday and we may be frivolous, I shall reveal that I have lost 13 pounds since I weighed myself at my parents' house in Toronto circa February 15. I know this because I finally went out and bought a new bathroom scale, not only to how much weight I was losing, but to make sure B.A. wasn't losing too much. I am also--as you see--still alive after five weeks of eating approximately 800 calories a day--although I put this down to the fact that the most exercise I do is walk to the supermarket and back (2.4 miles, 1.2 miles with a knapsack full of groceries). Do not attempt this if you live in an agrarian society, work in a factory or find yourself in the gulag.
Five weeks of living on such a ridiculously low number of calories has its lessons. I should write them all up and sell them to a magazine. But here are some freebee observations:
1. When you have not eaten a potato or anything made of potatoes for five weeks (or more), a potato roasted in garlic butter is like CANDY. It is CANDY.
2. Real candy seems rather pointless and disgusting. The thought of a box of chocolates--even high-end ones like, say, Godiva--leaves me cold. THE most amazing sweetmeats in existence--as you can be sure I have told B.A.--are soft DATES stuffed with WALNUT HALVES. There was a day a week or two ago in which I went over ye olde 800 calorie limit because I kept filling the dates I bought for B.A. with walnut halves and then guiltily eating them.
When Easter comes, I hope B.A. painstakingly replaces the stones of dates with walnut halves, sticks the dates in ruffles, puts them in a fancy box and presents them to me as a gift. I recommend this also for our wedding anniversary, Christmas, my birthday and Valentine's Day. (He can reuse the fancy box.)
3. When on the Blood Sugar Diet, keep dates out of the house.
4. After a while, you do get used to the following:
a) eating breakfast very late
b) having only coffee for breakfast
c) never snacking
d) never eating bread, potatoes or rice or any prepared food
e) going for hours and hours without food
You never get used to eating only 800 calories a day, however.
5. The higher in cocoa dark chocolate is, the higher in calories it is. Cocoa fat is higher in calories than sugar. However, sugar is STILL worse for you than cocoa fat. Ponder the mystery and eat only one square at a sitting, preferably as part of your incomplete supper.
6. There is absolutely nothing like eating when you are actually hungry, not to mention hungry and tired. When you eat lunch and feel like it has actually made a new woman out of you--that's a great feeling. Those Eastern Christians sure know what they're doing when they fast like it's 999.
Update: I have been reading up on dates. Apparently they are 60% fructrose or something ridiculous like that, so perhaps it would be a bad idea to eat more than one or two of my Date-Walnut Sweetmeats a day. Interestingly, they would be about 34 calories each; a square of 85% dark chocolate is about 52.
Friday, 23 September 2016
Bona Sforza
 |
| This doesn't end well. |
However, it being Polski Piątek, I will bring your attention to an Italian-born Polish queen named Bona Sforza. She is often credited with Italian influences upon Polish cuisine. She is also blamed for the death of her daughter-in-law, the beautiful Barbara Radziwiłł, and was apparently herself poisoned---possibly by an agent of Philip II of Spain. As Philip was the devoutly Catholic king consort of Mary I of England, this rumour is eye-opening. Really, Wikipedia is dangerous--you click on one thing, and then you click on another, and then it is noon already.
According to this, Queen Bona was disgusted by 16th century meat-heavy Polish feasting habits and ordered her own court to adopt a sort of Nouvelle Cuisine--less food on the plate, but more expensive, better quality and including vegetables. (NB Meat-consumption was, as usual, for the rich. According to Wiki, the medieval Polish poor subsisted mainly on grains--like kasza--and beans.)
The Italian queen had oranges, lemons, pomegranates, olives, almonds, broccoli and cauliflowers imported from Italy. The article says, however, that Italian recipes weren't widespread in Poland for another two hundred years. Meanwhile, long before Bona got to Poland, the sons of rich Polish families travelled to Italy to be educated, so it is likely they brought back at least "a stick of celery." (Wiki claims King Jagiello had plenty of vegetables at his court 80 years before Bona turned up.)
Apparently Bona hired Italian chefs, so continued eating Italian food through her married life. Meanwhile, I have wasted much time reading Wiki's list of regional Polish dishes, defeating the purpose of my Polish to Italian mental crossover. Here is an article about Umbrian cooking instead.
Saturday, 17 September 2016
Arise, Sir Cake!
Sugar is stealthily creeping back into my life, and I will have to Take Steps. Seed-and-nut bars from the health food store appear to be a gateway drug: how sad.
Nevertheless, the big bag of caster sugar will remain on the shelf, for cake is an essential element of British hospitality, and making cake without sugar is an extremely fiddly business. Naturally, one can always cut the amount of sugar the recipe demands, which one should do for guests who hail from lower-sugar regions. This week I had four guests: a Scot and a Polish-American (dinner party) and two Polish-Poles (coffee klatsch). I imagined the Scot and American were acclimatized to sugar, but I cut their dosage anyway.
The first cake (for the dinner party) was the plum cake or placek from the Applebaum-Crittenden Polish cookbook. It vastly diverges from the Standard British Cake (i.e. the Victora Sponge) in that it demands only half a cup of butter to the cup of flour, cup of sugar and 2 large eggs. Ann & Danielle were, let's face it, writing for Canucks and Yanks, not Poles, so I reduced the sugar to 3/4s of a cup. I didn't have two large eggs, so I used three medium eggs. Meanwhile, Americans and Canadians are not fans of "self-raising flour" and sure enough A&D asked for 1 tsp baking powder instead.
Normally I turn up my nose at such newfangled things as electric beaters, but as my butter wasn't very soft, I decided to do as they said and use one. This made for a much runnier batter than usual, which is what the ladies wanted, and after poking in the plum halves and drizzling the top with sugar and lemon juice, I popped the pan in the oven and prayed that it would rise.
The problem with Standard British Cake, with its 1:1:1 ratio of butter, sugar and so-called self-raising flour, is that the blessed thing doesn't rise very much. The Victoria Sponge would look really pathetic if one didn't pile one cake on top of another with a thick layer of whipped cream and/or jam in the middle. Even then it does not achieve the heights of the standard North American layer cake, especially my mother's.
My mother makes excellent cake. The first time I was engaged to someone, my grandmother was very sentimental about it, and as it was my birthday, my mother had baked a layer cake--light, fluffy, rich, covered with smooth butter icing, "Happy Birthday" written in delicate letters--delicious.
"Do you think you will ever make cake as good as your mother's?" asked my grandmother, inspiring me with murderous thoughts, as I was very embarrassed to be engaged and dreaded such domestic questions. However, I politely said that I didn't think that was possible, and my father heartily approved my answer, and peace reigned. Had I been a bit more cocky and cheerful about take particular engagement, I might have said, "Well, she's got 24 years on me, so check back in a couple of decades." Ha ha ha!
Still, though, after a happier engagement, I migrated to the Old Country, and had to cope with a fan-assisted over, British flour and no electric mixer. It was a good day when I did get an electric hand-mixer although by then I was so used to beating everything by hand, I used it only in meringue-making emergencies. Thanks to the climate, better recipes and sheer repetition, my (often meringue-topped) pastry now now rivals my mother's, but the perfection of her layer cakes eludes me.
An hour after I put my dinner party placek in the oven I had a look and, lo, it had risen beautifully. The plums had all but disappeared into the batter, so high did it rise. I looked at the electric hand mixer with new respect. Or was it the extra egg? Or the baking powder? Regardless, the Polish-American had two pieces and spoke about his mother. The missing sugar was not remarked upon: baked plum halves are plenty sweet.
Today I decided to use the placek recipe to make a chocolate Victorian sponge for my morning kaffeeklatsch*, and was miffed to discover I had only two medium eggs. Nevertheless, I plunged ahead, making things up as I went along. This time I used about 3/4 of a cup of butter, no more than 2/3 cup of sugar, 3/4 cup flour, 1/4 cup Green and Black's cocoa and 1 teaspoon of baking powder. I employed the beater, and put in both eggs. The batter didn't look runny, so I put in two heaping spoonfuls of soured cream. That did the trick. I poured all into a paper-lined cake tin and spread the top with red currant jelly (made by my mother, 2015).
An hour later, I had another beautifully risen cake, and I waited impatiently for my Polish-Polish guests to arrive so I could try it. When they arrived I did. In terms of texture, the sour cream worked beautifully--resulting in a cake that was moist but not squidgey--and in terms of flavour, the red current jelly worked with, not against, the cocoa. What a relief. It is a cake that needs neither cream nor ice-cream, neither of which are appropriate at 10 AM.
The British love to pour cream on their cake. My Polish guests (girls) and I commented on this as we compared Polish, British and American cake. It does seem a pity to drown a beautiful cake with cream--unless it is dry, and then the baker can only be relieved that cream covers a multitude of sins. We also agreed that British baking is insanely sweet--brownies, muffins, all the ghastly things at Caffée Nero--although a Brit would find this opinion rather ironic, coming from a North American.
I feel that I have had made some excellent progress in my journey towards cake perfection. Again, sugar is the enemy, but as it is culturally necessary, I must keep a bag of it. Instead I will toss the useless self-raising flour and stick to baking powder and sour cream.
*Suddenly I feel all nostalgically German-American. My German-American Great Aunt Tilly weighed more than 300 lbs. I love stories about Great Aunt Tilly. The Scots-Canadians were rather less interestingly from a food point of view--except for my mother, who is practically fluent in German. Wypadek? Nie sądzę.
Nevertheless, the big bag of caster sugar will remain on the shelf, for cake is an essential element of British hospitality, and making cake without sugar is an extremely fiddly business. Naturally, one can always cut the amount of sugar the recipe demands, which one should do for guests who hail from lower-sugar regions. This week I had four guests: a Scot and a Polish-American (dinner party) and two Polish-Poles (coffee klatsch). I imagined the Scot and American were acclimatized to sugar, but I cut their dosage anyway.
The first cake (for the dinner party) was the plum cake or placek from the Applebaum-Crittenden Polish cookbook. It vastly diverges from the Standard British Cake (i.e. the Victora Sponge) in that it demands only half a cup of butter to the cup of flour, cup of sugar and 2 large eggs. Ann & Danielle were, let's face it, writing for Canucks and Yanks, not Poles, so I reduced the sugar to 3/4s of a cup. I didn't have two large eggs, so I used three medium eggs. Meanwhile, Americans and Canadians are not fans of "self-raising flour" and sure enough A&D asked for 1 tsp baking powder instead.
Normally I turn up my nose at such newfangled things as electric beaters, but as my butter wasn't very soft, I decided to do as they said and use one. This made for a much runnier batter than usual, which is what the ladies wanted, and after poking in the plum halves and drizzling the top with sugar and lemon juice, I popped the pan in the oven and prayed that it would rise.
The problem with Standard British Cake, with its 1:1:1 ratio of butter, sugar and so-called self-raising flour, is that the blessed thing doesn't rise very much. The Victoria Sponge would look really pathetic if one didn't pile one cake on top of another with a thick layer of whipped cream and/or jam in the middle. Even then it does not achieve the heights of the standard North American layer cake, especially my mother's.
My mother makes excellent cake. The first time I was engaged to someone, my grandmother was very sentimental about it, and as it was my birthday, my mother had baked a layer cake--light, fluffy, rich, covered with smooth butter icing, "Happy Birthday" written in delicate letters--delicious.
"Do you think you will ever make cake as good as your mother's?" asked my grandmother, inspiring me with murderous thoughts, as I was very embarrassed to be engaged and dreaded such domestic questions. However, I politely said that I didn't think that was possible, and my father heartily approved my answer, and peace reigned. Had I been a bit more cocky and cheerful about take particular engagement, I might have said, "Well, she's got 24 years on me, so check back in a couple of decades." Ha ha ha!
Still, though, after a happier engagement, I migrated to the Old Country, and had to cope with a fan-assisted over, British flour and no electric mixer. It was a good day when I did get an electric hand-mixer although by then I was so used to beating everything by hand, I used it only in meringue-making emergencies. Thanks to the climate, better recipes and sheer repetition, my (often meringue-topped) pastry now now rivals my mother's, but the perfection of her layer cakes eludes me.
An hour after I put my dinner party placek in the oven I had a look and, lo, it had risen beautifully. The plums had all but disappeared into the batter, so high did it rise. I looked at the electric hand mixer with new respect. Or was it the extra egg? Or the baking powder? Regardless, the Polish-American had two pieces and spoke about his mother. The missing sugar was not remarked upon: baked plum halves are plenty sweet.
Today I decided to use the placek recipe to make a chocolate Victorian sponge for my morning kaffeeklatsch*, and was miffed to discover I had only two medium eggs. Nevertheless, I plunged ahead, making things up as I went along. This time I used about 3/4 of a cup of butter, no more than 2/3 cup of sugar, 3/4 cup flour, 1/4 cup Green and Black's cocoa and 1 teaspoon of baking powder. I employed the beater, and put in both eggs. The batter didn't look runny, so I put in two heaping spoonfuls of soured cream. That did the trick. I poured all into a paper-lined cake tin and spread the top with red currant jelly (made by my mother, 2015).
An hour later, I had another beautifully risen cake, and I waited impatiently for my Polish-Polish guests to arrive so I could try it. When they arrived I did. In terms of texture, the sour cream worked beautifully--resulting in a cake that was moist but not squidgey--and in terms of flavour, the red current jelly worked with, not against, the cocoa. What a relief. It is a cake that needs neither cream nor ice-cream, neither of which are appropriate at 10 AM.
The British love to pour cream on their cake. My Polish guests (girls) and I commented on this as we compared Polish, British and American cake. It does seem a pity to drown a beautiful cake with cream--unless it is dry, and then the baker can only be relieved that cream covers a multitude of sins. We also agreed that British baking is insanely sweet--brownies, muffins, all the ghastly things at Caffée Nero--although a Brit would find this opinion rather ironic, coming from a North American.
I feel that I have had made some excellent progress in my journey towards cake perfection. Again, sugar is the enemy, but as it is culturally necessary, I must keep a bag of it. Instead I will toss the useless self-raising flour and stick to baking powder and sour cream.
*Suddenly I feel all nostalgically German-American. My German-American Great Aunt Tilly weighed more than 300 lbs. I love stories about Great Aunt Tilly. The Scots-Canadians were rather less interestingly from a food point of view--except for my mother, who is practically fluent in German. Wypadek? Nie sądzę.
Sunday, 31 July 2016
Too Sweet
An awful thing happened at my last dinner party. I tasted a forkful of my homemade raspberry bakewell tart, and it was too sweet. It was terribly sweet. I didn't enjoy it at all, and to my horror I realized what it has tasted like all these years to guests who don't eat much sugar. Okay, that's three people max, but still.
I have discovered the negative side effects of giving up sugar. When you give up eating sugar, you lose your tolerance for sugar. As sugary puddings (desserts) are an important part of British and Canadian food culture, this can be a problem. As for my raspberry bakewell tart, it was like being spurned forever by an old, trusted, highly amusing and lavishly generous friend. Boo.
Meanwhile, one of the negative side effects of giving up wheat is that you don't much enjoy eating bread. The last time I ate a piece of bread, I thought I could feel it biting holes in the lining of my stomach. This was probably a result of hypochondria more than of wheat; yesterday I ate half a Co-op " Stonebaked Roast Vegetable" pizza and I was fine. Possibly the solution--for a person not suffering from real life gluten intolerance (or full blown celiac disease)--is to eat small amounts of food containing wheat from time to time, so as to keep one's stomach in, as it were.
The upside to all this, besides fitting into my favourite blue Hobbs dress with a little room to spare, is that many other foods taste sweet. Carrots taste sweet. 85% dark chocolate tastes sweet. Blueberries taste sweet. Strawberries taste very sweet. Apples taste just a shade too sweet. I suppose all this is okay if you like your sweet eggless. It's not okay if you like a nice eggy, almondy, custardy pie filling, such as one finds atop my raspberry bakewell tart.
Presumably the solution is to cut the amount of sugar in my raspberry bakewell. I wonder how little I can get away with, and if I can substitute Hemsley + Hemsley's beloved standby maple syrup for the sugar. H+H seem to sweeten all possible puddings with 2-3 Tbsp of maple syrup, on the grounds that (unlike cane sugar) it possesses some actual nutrients. However, I am unlikely to make a whole raspberry bakewell just for myself, so I will have to enlist family members to taste-test.
One great consolation is that it is strawberry season. I can eat vast bowls of strawberries (£2 a punnet) with yogurt while my husband and mother eat pineapple tarts from Marks & Spenser, and nobody envies anyone else.
Update: The family members I was thinking of say that my raspberry bakewell tart is perfect and that I am not allowed to subject them to my sugar-free diet. Actually, it's a low-sugar diet, but they know I know what they mean.
I have discovered the negative side effects of giving up sugar. When you give up eating sugar, you lose your tolerance for sugar. As sugary puddings (desserts) are an important part of British and Canadian food culture, this can be a problem. As for my raspberry bakewell tart, it was like being spurned forever by an old, trusted, highly amusing and lavishly generous friend. Boo.
Meanwhile, one of the negative side effects of giving up wheat is that you don't much enjoy eating bread. The last time I ate a piece of bread, I thought I could feel it biting holes in the lining of my stomach. This was probably a result of hypochondria more than of wheat; yesterday I ate half a Co-op " Stonebaked Roast Vegetable" pizza and I was fine. Possibly the solution--for a person not suffering from real life gluten intolerance (or full blown celiac disease)--is to eat small amounts of food containing wheat from time to time, so as to keep one's stomach in, as it were.
The upside to all this, besides fitting into my favourite blue Hobbs dress with a little room to spare, is that many other foods taste sweet. Carrots taste sweet. 85% dark chocolate tastes sweet. Blueberries taste sweet. Strawberries taste very sweet. Apples taste just a shade too sweet. I suppose all this is okay if you like your sweet eggless. It's not okay if you like a nice eggy, almondy, custardy pie filling, such as one finds atop my raspberry bakewell tart.
Presumably the solution is to cut the amount of sugar in my raspberry bakewell. I wonder how little I can get away with, and if I can substitute Hemsley + Hemsley's beloved standby maple syrup for the sugar. H+H seem to sweeten all possible puddings with 2-3 Tbsp of maple syrup, on the grounds that (unlike cane sugar) it possesses some actual nutrients. However, I am unlikely to make a whole raspberry bakewell just for myself, so I will have to enlist family members to taste-test.
One great consolation is that it is strawberry season. I can eat vast bowls of strawberries (£2 a punnet) with yogurt while my husband and mother eat pineapple tarts from Marks & Spenser, and nobody envies anyone else.
Update: The family members I was thinking of say that my raspberry bakewell tart is perfect and that I am not allowed to subject them to my sugar-free diet. Actually, it's a low-sugar diet, but they know I know what they mean.
Monday, 25 July 2016
The Sublime and the Ridiculous
De Waal is a famous British artist; his trade is in beautiful things. It seems a little unfair that he can write as beautifully as he can cast pots, but as The Hare with Amber Eyes captivated the world of letters in 2010, I was not surprised. Moreover I was shaken, at 3:15 AM, by Yagani Soetsu's suggestion, paraphrased by de Waal, that some objects "express unconscious beauty because they [have] been made in such numbers that the craftsman had been liberated from his ego" (Preface, 3). Could this be applied to writing? Is the secret of de Waal's literary masterpiece a liberation from ego?
When I walked into our brunch café, however, I was thinking only about my toothache--now eased by ibuprofen--and my breakfast. B.A. usually has a "full Scottish", and as I have become a meat-and-eggs devotee, I was looking forward to ordering one myself. I made straight for a table near a window--but not the one in the window, as it could seat six--and was surprised by an obese Englishwoman who greeted me loudly and as if she owned the place. (It turned out that she did .) Startled, I returned the greeting, sat down and examined the menu. When I had ordered my breakfast from the Scottish waiter, I reopened my book.
"One sunny April day I set out to find Charles," writes de Waal.
What beautiful simplicity to that sentence. It frees the author to write a longer second sentence, which he does: "Rue de Monceau is a long Parisian street bisected by the grand boulevard Malesherbes that charges off toward the Boulevard Pereire."
Two verbs make the sentence dynamic, and the conceit that a boulevard "charges off" to another gives the sentence extra force. It itself charges off to the splendidly descriptive third sentence: "It is a hill of golden-stone houses, a series of hotels playing discreetly on neoclassical themes, each a minor Florentine palace with heavily rusticated ground floors and an array of heads, caryatids and cartouches."
Having set the scene in April, then in a section of Paris, and then on one sloping street, he focuses on a single house: "Number 81 rue de Monceau, the Hotel Ephrussi, where my netsuke start their journey, is near the top of the hill."
The Hotel Ephrussi has a thrilling neighbour: "I pass the headquarters of Christian Lacroix and then, next door, there it is." Beat. "It is now, rather crushingly, an office for medical insurance."
The paragraph thus ends with a beautifully comic touch that reminds me of Mordechai Richler, in part because de Waal's art-collecting ancestors were Jews, because Canadian Jewish humour is self-depreciatory, and because this is a story about a Jewish family. The Ephrussi family, which originated in Odessa, followed the Rothschilds in setting up branches of themselves in the great capitals of western Europe and becoming as rich as they could. Terrific displays of wealth were a way of asserting their intentions with the unfortunate side-effect of antagonizing their new less-wealthy, non-Jewish, neighbours.
"Well," shouted the owner of the café to her companion, "she's f******g JEW!"
She was talking about a friend who loves Turkey and is always running off to Turkey and managed to do quite well (socially and financially) in Turkey until the friend's son admitted to their Jewishness and then some deal or other, business or social, was doomed. The loud stream of gossip reached me in the rue de Monceau as I waited for my breakfast and became inescapable when my breakfast arrived. Surprisingly, the speaker's companion was male and, if I am not mistaken, a business contact of some kind. Even more surprisingly, for Edinburgh, the speaker spoke with a strong Liverpudlian accent.
My breakfast was a masterpiece of the short order cook's art: soft cooked mushrooms, two halves of a broiled tomato, two sausages, two rashers of back bacon with darkly golden crispy edges, a large spoonful of baked beans, a disk of black pudding, a circlet of haggis. There was no toast, as I had requested, and the dish was not at all greasy. The coffee was black and hot and strong and good. I put down my book to give breakfast my full attention--or so I thought.
"I told her that if he disappeared, I would hunt her down and kill her," brayed the cook's employer. As I ate, I was in some discomfort lest my hostess, as I suppose she must have been, might accuse me of eavesdropping on her conversation with the salesman. Recently I read that the elderly, irascible Graham Greene once denounced a young man in a Capri restaurant for listening to his opinions on Henry James; Greene had apparently noticed the young man had stopped turning the pages of his newspaper and so embarrassed everyone very much by loudly remarking on it. This woman was so loud and so aggressively unselfconscious, she sounded more than capable of such behaviour. Thus, once the immediately danger of staining the book with egg, tomato sauce or bacon fat was past, I took it up again.
But despite de Waal's magic, I witnessed the end of an altercation between the sitting owner and a standing youngish female employee. I had taken off my glasses to read and so I saw only a slim body and a round, tanned, featureless face. "And by the way you no longer have a job," the Liverpudlian was booming.
"I wouldn't work here if you paid me," snapped the girl's Scottish voice, and the slim artistically brown body slid out the door.
"Sorry about that," said the proprietress to the salesman, or whatever he was, and when he was gone, she loudly demanded a phone book so she could call up a locksmith and get the locks changed. "Hello, Local Locksmith," she shouted down the phone.
By the time of this phone call, I had finished my breakfast but had felt the need for a little more coffee. Despite the noisy and shocking manners of three yards from me, Edmund de Waal held me spellbound in Paris. His antecedent Charles, to the disgust of his arch-enemy Edmond de Goncourt, was now having an affair with a married lady named Louise Cahen d'Anvers. They were both passionate connoisseurs of Japanese art.
"Could I please have just a half a cup more of coffee?" I asked the waiter, and the proprietress motioned him over after he assented.
"Could I please have [whatever it was]," she said in a put-on, mock-posh accent, which I daresay was, despite the cadences, nothing like my own.
"Right away, modom," said the waiter, playing her game.
Okay, class chippiness is something I have come to expect from loud British woman who drop the F-bomb, but this was a woman I could hear from 19th century Paris complaining about competition opening up and down the street! What kind of businesswoman mocks her customers?
Suddenly, I very much regretted my request for extra coffee, and I couldn't wait to leave. Unfortunately, once my coffee arrived, it was some time before I could catch the attention of the waiter again, and by the time I finally did, the owner had loudly engaged the locksmith, loudly informed her other employees how much she distrusted the woman she had just fired, and loudly declared "and I'm taking out a contract on her, and I don't care who knows it."
This, incidentally, was after she had surveyed the two occupied tables and loudly muttered, "Everybody leave now. I want a cigarette."
As soon as I could, I threw down a £10 note and acceded to her wishes. Floreant competitores!
Saturday, 16 July 2016
Einkorn
When I gave up sugar, I immediately began looking for sugar-free dessert recipes, and after I read Wheat Belly yesterday, I started looking for einkorn. As a matter of fact, I have cut my wheat intake to almost zero (buckwheat pasta still counts as wheat), but reading something advising me not to eat wheat made me feel very nostalgic for bread. Besides, B.A. is still eating white flour this and white flour that, durham pasta here, shop-bought cake there, white powdery death everywhere. It occurs to me that I ought to bake him things made from einkorn.
Einkorn is one of the wheats our ancestors ate before scientists altered wheat in the 20th century for more yield and easier harvesting. Having been quite awed by Wheat Belly, I am determined to see if I can make good bread, cookies, scones and waffles with einkorn.
Yes, I do jump on nutritional bandwagons. When the low-fat diet was the in-thing, you bet I was on a low-fat diet. It worked for years, but that may be because I was teetering on the edge of an exercise addiction. As I have grown very bored with gyms, I am happy that the current diet advice is less about long bouts of cardio and more about not eating too much and too often. I enjoy eating and baking with nuts, so I am delighted Wheat Belly gives permission to eat as many raw nuts as we like, which is quite a departure from the cautious "only a small handful a day" strictures I have read for the past seven years or so.
Now that I think about it, I know a German grass expert, so I should write to her and ask about the kind of wheat we were eating in Canada (or in the UK) before the First World War. I thought it was einkorn, but Wikipedia says it isn't good for bread. Meanwhile, these people seem to know more about einkorn than Wiki does. (Update: Oh, excitement!)
By the way, I bought a new dress (on sale) on glorious George Street to celebrate the success of my sugar-free diet. Here it is:
Einkorn is one of the wheats our ancestors ate before scientists altered wheat in the 20th century for more yield and easier harvesting. Having been quite awed by Wheat Belly, I am determined to see if I can make good bread, cookies, scones and waffles with einkorn.
Yes, I do jump on nutritional bandwagons. When the low-fat diet was the in-thing, you bet I was on a low-fat diet. It worked for years, but that may be because I was teetering on the edge of an exercise addiction. As I have grown very bored with gyms, I am happy that the current diet advice is less about long bouts of cardio and more about not eating too much and too often. I enjoy eating and baking with nuts, so I am delighted Wheat Belly gives permission to eat as many raw nuts as we like, which is quite a departure from the cautious "only a small handful a day" strictures I have read for the past seven years or so.
Now that I think about it, I know a German grass expert, so I should write to her and ask about the kind of wheat we were eating in Canada (or in the UK) before the First World War. I thought it was einkorn, but Wikipedia says it isn't good for bread. Meanwhile, these people seem to know more about einkorn than Wiki does. (Update: Oh, excitement!)
By the way, I bought a new dress (on sale) on glorious George Street to celebrate the success of my sugar-free diet. Here it is:
Tuesday, 14 June 2016
Fasting, Abstinence and Compassion
It's Traddy Tuesday, and so a good time to repeat that the traditional fasting and abstinence laws are not only penitential, they are good for human health. As I am not a doctor, you can take what follows solely as an amateur's enthusiasm.
The best known contemporary proponent of fasting is Dr. Michael Mosley whose 2013 "Fast Diet" propelled a fasting craze among dieters so widespread that the expression "5/2" is a household expression in the UK. The diet is popular because it assures dieters that they need only restrict their calorie consumption twice a week and "just eat normally" on the other days. When the dieter has achieved his or her goal weight, he or she is expected to restrict calorie consumption only once a week--but for the rest of his or her life. The dieter can pick whatever day he or she wants to fast in, so naturally Friday comes to mind.
Dr Mosley claims that the health benefits of intermittent fasting include protection against diabetes, dementia and cancer, which makes me think of stories about monks and nuns who live very long and healthy lives.
This year's Mosley diet craze is called the "Low Blood Sugar Diet", which regular readers all know about, since I am on it. In this diet, the poor dieter is supposed to get by on 800 calories a day, every day, for eight weeks--a bit longer than Lent---and abstain from sugar, white bread and anything made from white flour. As most prepared foods--even stock cubes, I discovered to my chagrin--now include sugar, the dieter eats a surprisingly natural diet.
Sugar is so terrible for you, it turns out that giving up sweets and puddings for Lent was a very good and useful discipline after all.
What does not jive with tradition is the inclusion of meat in both diets. Vegetarians (and those who abstain from meat on Fridays) can still follow them, of course, as long as they consume enough vegetable protein in place of the necessary meat protein. Meat-eaters will probably find themselves consuming smaller amounts of meat, so as not to eat too many calories. (I see that there are 239 calories in 100 g of chicken, which is how much chicken I consumed in Sunday's chicken soup. Weighing your food is important in calorie-reduced diets.) Meat-eaters will consume less meat if they give thought also to animal welfare and consume only those birds and animals who were raised humanely, for their meat is rather more expensive than the meat of their less fortunate brethren. However, there are ways around the expense, and you can shop like a traditional grandma, looking for the "cheaper cuts" of ethical meat, which turn out to be even more flavoursome than the expensive cuts, if you cook them properly.
Naturally there are convents and monasteries where the monks and nuns never or almost never consume animal flesh, which is something to consider, and I do consider that at Lent. A low-carb, sugar-free, meat-free Lent strikes me as challenging, but it's still Pentecost, so I shall put that thought aside. Meanwhile, Lent at the Historical House can never be fish-free, for my husband has put his foot down on that. (He's from Dundee. He cannot cope without the flesh of something.)
I suspect we would all be better off at a healthy weight, eating a healthy number of calories, with some fasting (e.g. on Friday) to ensure we aren't going overboard on the calories and then some periodic long-term fasting or abstinence from sugar and other unhealthy foods (e.g. fast food, ready-meals) during Advent and Lent. There is quite a range of "healthy weight", I see from the NHS's BMI tool. Apparently someone my age and height has a 30 lb range to play with. Thus if I, being at a healthy weight, were to lose a bit of weight during Lent, and then gained it back before Advent, I should think it no big deal. Meanwhile, there is always a bit of suffering in not eating tasty things you would really like to eat, so there is the necessary Lenten penitential component. Learning to live with discomfort is a crucial Christian discipline.
There is another spiritual challenge involved in successfully returning to a healthy weight, and it is refusing to feel smug and judgmental about one's overweight neighbours. After all, it turns out that to return to a healthy weight you don't even need to spend money for a gym membership, trainer or club. You just need to reduce calories and stuff as much nutrition as possible in every calorie you do eat. It would seem that anyone could do that, so why don't they? And surely that almost spherical young Polish woman on the Rough Bus didn't arrive in the UK that way? What would her grandmother say? Tsk, tsk, tsk.
The cure for such self-congratulation and small-mindedness is a book called Fat Planet: The Obesity Trap and How to Escape It. It begins with the female co-author getting into a fat suit and living as an obese woman in England for a day. Not only was she incredibly physically uncomfortable, people kept staring at her and making rude remarks. It left her thoroughly depressed. Many obese people are depressed and one easy way to feel better is through comfort eating. Some people get addicted to comfort eating, but naturally to get the "high", as with all drugs, they have to eat more and more. Incidentally, some nutritionists think chocolate should be reclassified as a drug.
Meanwhile, Fat Planet makes a very good case that the overweight and obese are only marginally responsible for their predicament. In short, society is to blame. This is a society that seriously messes with our natural cues regarding food consumption through advertising, food additives, and delicious smells cynically pumped into the air. If the High Street were all clothing shops, it would be much easier to maintain a healthy weight than if the High Street didn't feature a dozen fast food restaurants, cafés, pie shops and bakeries. Whenever we watch television or walk down a shopping street or in a mall, we are barraged by subtle messages of "EAT. EAT. EAT." A current McDonald's advert on UK TV is selling McDonald's as a locus of family-, friend- and even first romantic love. Well, it certainly may be, but only because it has spent a gazillion dollars of advertising itself that way.
In the United Kingdom, there used to be strong cultural conventions about when it was time to eat. If you were a working-class person (and we would most of us be working-class people), you had your supper (or "tea") at 6 PM. If you were a woman of leisure, you might not eat until 8 PM, which explains the popularity of the 4 PM meal, called "afternoon tea", invented by the Duchess of Bedford in 1840. At its inception consisted only of tea, bread and butter. Meanwhile, snacking was not a thing. I have just discovered that in the USA snack foods were once considered shameful. I suppose children have always consumed sweets and snacks when they could get them (robbing apple orchards, etc.), but adults weren't supposed to do that.
However, traditional conventions regarding self-control in the UK have thoroughly broken down, as you can see on the High Street of any British city any Friday or Saturday night, and so UK residents, whatever our origin, are in danger of becoming fat, drunk, and chased around a table in Marseilles by a fascistic Russian wielding a metal chair leg.* The best way to prevent this is by cultivating self-control though the traditional tools of fasting and abstinence.
*Update: Okay, some people won't find that funny. Naturally it was not the fault of the majority of the English fans who were set upon by Russian football hooligans. However, it may have been the English reputation for hooliganism that led to the apparently premeditated attack. Is this reputation out-of-date? I was in German during the FIFA 2006 World Cup tournament, and English fans behaved atrociously. It was if English civilisation had completely collapsed, and somehow it was 594 AD again.
The best known contemporary proponent of fasting is Dr. Michael Mosley whose 2013 "Fast Diet" propelled a fasting craze among dieters so widespread that the expression "5/2" is a household expression in the UK. The diet is popular because it assures dieters that they need only restrict their calorie consumption twice a week and "just eat normally" on the other days. When the dieter has achieved his or her goal weight, he or she is expected to restrict calorie consumption only once a week--but for the rest of his or her life. The dieter can pick whatever day he or she wants to fast in, so naturally Friday comes to mind.
Dr Mosley claims that the health benefits of intermittent fasting include protection against diabetes, dementia and cancer, which makes me think of stories about monks and nuns who live very long and healthy lives.
This year's Mosley diet craze is called the "Low Blood Sugar Diet", which regular readers all know about, since I am on it. In this diet, the poor dieter is supposed to get by on 800 calories a day, every day, for eight weeks--a bit longer than Lent---and abstain from sugar, white bread and anything made from white flour. As most prepared foods--even stock cubes, I discovered to my chagrin--now include sugar, the dieter eats a surprisingly natural diet.
Sugar is so terrible for you, it turns out that giving up sweets and puddings for Lent was a very good and useful discipline after all.
What does not jive with tradition is the inclusion of meat in both diets. Vegetarians (and those who abstain from meat on Fridays) can still follow them, of course, as long as they consume enough vegetable protein in place of the necessary meat protein. Meat-eaters will probably find themselves consuming smaller amounts of meat, so as not to eat too many calories. (I see that there are 239 calories in 100 g of chicken, which is how much chicken I consumed in Sunday's chicken soup. Weighing your food is important in calorie-reduced diets.) Meat-eaters will consume less meat if they give thought also to animal welfare and consume only those birds and animals who were raised humanely, for their meat is rather more expensive than the meat of their less fortunate brethren. However, there are ways around the expense, and you can shop like a traditional grandma, looking for the "cheaper cuts" of ethical meat, which turn out to be even more flavoursome than the expensive cuts, if you cook them properly.
Naturally there are convents and monasteries where the monks and nuns never or almost never consume animal flesh, which is something to consider, and I do consider that at Lent. A low-carb, sugar-free, meat-free Lent strikes me as challenging, but it's still Pentecost, so I shall put that thought aside. Meanwhile, Lent at the Historical House can never be fish-free, for my husband has put his foot down on that. (He's from Dundee. He cannot cope without the flesh of something.)
I suspect we would all be better off at a healthy weight, eating a healthy number of calories, with some fasting (e.g. on Friday) to ensure we aren't going overboard on the calories and then some periodic long-term fasting or abstinence from sugar and other unhealthy foods (e.g. fast food, ready-meals) during Advent and Lent. There is quite a range of "healthy weight", I see from the NHS's BMI tool. Apparently someone my age and height has a 30 lb range to play with. Thus if I, being at a healthy weight, were to lose a bit of weight during Lent, and then gained it back before Advent, I should think it no big deal. Meanwhile, there is always a bit of suffering in not eating tasty things you would really like to eat, so there is the necessary Lenten penitential component. Learning to live with discomfort is a crucial Christian discipline.
There is another spiritual challenge involved in successfully returning to a healthy weight, and it is refusing to feel smug and judgmental about one's overweight neighbours. After all, it turns out that to return to a healthy weight you don't even need to spend money for a gym membership, trainer or club. You just need to reduce calories and stuff as much nutrition as possible in every calorie you do eat. It would seem that anyone could do that, so why don't they? And surely that almost spherical young Polish woman on the Rough Bus didn't arrive in the UK that way? What would her grandmother say? Tsk, tsk, tsk.
The cure for such self-congratulation and small-mindedness is a book called Fat Planet: The Obesity Trap and How to Escape It. It begins with the female co-author getting into a fat suit and living as an obese woman in England for a day. Not only was she incredibly physically uncomfortable, people kept staring at her and making rude remarks. It left her thoroughly depressed. Many obese people are depressed and one easy way to feel better is through comfort eating. Some people get addicted to comfort eating, but naturally to get the "high", as with all drugs, they have to eat more and more. Incidentally, some nutritionists think chocolate should be reclassified as a drug.
Meanwhile, Fat Planet makes a very good case that the overweight and obese are only marginally responsible for their predicament. In short, society is to blame. This is a society that seriously messes with our natural cues regarding food consumption through advertising, food additives, and delicious smells cynically pumped into the air. If the High Street were all clothing shops, it would be much easier to maintain a healthy weight than if the High Street didn't feature a dozen fast food restaurants, cafés, pie shops and bakeries. Whenever we watch television or walk down a shopping street or in a mall, we are barraged by subtle messages of "EAT. EAT. EAT." A current McDonald's advert on UK TV is selling McDonald's as a locus of family-, friend- and even first romantic love. Well, it certainly may be, but only because it has spent a gazillion dollars of advertising itself that way.
In the United Kingdom, there used to be strong cultural conventions about when it was time to eat. If you were a working-class person (and we would most of us be working-class people), you had your supper (or "tea") at 6 PM. If you were a woman of leisure, you might not eat until 8 PM, which explains the popularity of the 4 PM meal, called "afternoon tea", invented by the Duchess of Bedford in 1840. At its inception consisted only of tea, bread and butter. Meanwhile, snacking was not a thing. I have just discovered that in the USA snack foods were once considered shameful. I suppose children have always consumed sweets and snacks when they could get them (robbing apple orchards, etc.), but adults weren't supposed to do that.
However, traditional conventions regarding self-control in the UK have thoroughly broken down, as you can see on the High Street of any British city any Friday or Saturday night, and so UK residents, whatever our origin, are in danger of becoming fat, drunk, and chased around a table in Marseilles by a fascistic Russian wielding a metal chair leg.* The best way to prevent this is by cultivating self-control though the traditional tools of fasting and abstinence.
*Update: Okay, some people won't find that funny. Naturally it was not the fault of the majority of the English fans who were set upon by Russian football hooligans. However, it may have been the English reputation for hooliganism that led to the apparently premeditated attack. Is this reputation out-of-date? I was in German during the FIFA 2006 World Cup tournament, and English fans behaved atrociously. It was if English civilisation had completely collapsed, and somehow it was 594 AD again.
Saturday, 11 June 2016
Tale of the Tape Week 6 (?)
All the feasting stopped my fat cells from further shrinkage last week but this week my fat cells are back on track. Although my powder blue circa 1961 vintage dress doesn't quite fit (especially around the upper arms, oddly enough), it fits better. As the fabric is a bit scratchy, it will have to fit perfectly before I actually wear it. (When did I buy that dress?)
A friend wrote to ask if I am still on 800 calories a day, and I must admit that I am hazy on that point. (I'm not even sure if this is the end of Week 6.) Every once in a while I try to total things up with the aid of calorie counters on the computer, but as Hemsley + Hemsley don't believe in calorie counting, their cookies mess things up. Although naturally they have more nutrients, ground almonds are higher in calories than wheat flour.
Generally I stick to the following guidelines:
1. No cane or beet sugar, and honey, maple syrup and date syrup are only for Hemsley + Hemsley recipes.
2. Don't eat more than two Hemsley + Hemsley cookies a day.
3. Don't eat anything made from white flour and eat as little potato as can get away with.
4. Include half an avocado in lunch.
5. Consume full-fat yogurt and if I consume milk, full-fat milk.
6. Oily fish at least twice a week.
7. Think protein.
8. If get the munchies, drink a glass of water or cup of herbal tea.
9. If still have the munchies, eat a small handful of nuts.
10. Eat blueberries every day, preferably in oatmeal porridge.
11. Drink water all day, either cold or made into herbal tea.
We should be eating more veg. I will have to make veg more of a priority when I go to the supermarket. We are eating more soup, especially now that I have fallen in love with the "Pablo's Chicken" recipe and need something to do with the drumsticks. (The most economical way to buy free-range chicken is in big packages of thighs and drumsticks, which are sold separately from the much more expensive breasts.)
Benedict Ambrose is still losing weight and closing the husband-wife weight gap, which I find slightly annoying but what can I do? Men lose weight faster (and with less effort) and they gain muscles faster (and with much less effort) and that's just the way it is.
Two or three weeks ago I bought a digital scale that was on sale at Tesco; it is our new toy. I plugged the number it read this morning into the National Health Service BMI tool, and the NHS says I am (finally) once again at a healthy weight for my age and height. Hooray, hooray!
That said, I shall continue not to eat sugar and other simple carbs at least until my mother, wonderfully thin from months of daily cardio and tomato sandwiches, arrives for her holiday. As I have no tremendous exertions awaiting me, I can't think of a reason to eat simple carbs. It would be different if I were going to Quebec or France because in those happy nations there are croissants it is a crime not to eat.
Friday, 10 June 2016
Dill Soup
It's Polski Piątek, so let's talk about soup.
The Poles are justifiably proud of their soups which are varied, unusual and delicious. In the summers they sip cold fruit soups, and in the winters they eat hot meat-and-veg ones. Catholic Poles also have strictly vegetarian soups for Fridays as the Friday abstinence from meat was never lifted in Poland. Traditionally Polish Christmas Eve is a day of total fasting until the first star appears in the sky. The Poles break this fast by sharing specially prepared wafers made of unconsecrated host-bread, and then they eat delicious vegetarian beet soup with tiny mushroom-stuffed dumplings.
A good Polish hot soup for spring is called koperkowa (pronounced kop-err-KO-fa, i.e. I hope so). Its most important ingredient is fresh dill, and my recipe is based on this one at tastingpoland.com. You will notice that the English of the recipe is rather idiosyncratic, so there was some guesswork involved on my part.
The recipe calls for meat-on-the-bone, but I have always substituted good quality prepared vegetable broth, to which I add the Polish soup vegetables (włoszczyzna). Also I never make the string dumplings, opting for the boiled eggs instead. All this ensures that the soup can be eaten on Fridays and by vegetarians and the gluten-intolerant. It is pointless to serve this soup to a vegan, even by substituting dumplings for the eggs, for thick Polish sour cream is a necessary ingredient.
You don't need to peel anything because the veggies are going to be chucked in the bin.
Koperkowa
2 litres of good quality veggie stock, made up and brought to boil
onion, roughly chopped
carrot, roughly chopped
celery stick, roughly chopped
leek, washed thoroughly and roughly chopped
parsnip (optional), roughly chopped
handful of parsley
bay leaf
salt and pepper to taste
200 mL Polish sour cream for soup, or the thickest sour cream you can find.
big bunch dill, chopped and divided in half
hard boiled egg per person (plus extra for seconds)
1. Chuck all veg except the dill into the boiling veggie stock and simmer for 45 minutes.
2. Strain the soup into another pot and throw out the cooked vegetables. (Alternatively you could mash them and nuke them in the morning for a hot veggie porridge, I suppose. But take out the bay leaf first.)
3. Fry half the dill dry in a hot frying pan for 2 minutes, not letting it burn. (You can use a bit of butter, but I like it better without.)
4. Throw fried dill into soup.
5. Pour a quarter cup or so of soup into the sour cream and mix it up. Then pour the mix into the soup and stir. Add salt and pepper to taste. (There may be a lot of salt in your stock already, so do taste first.) Heat up soup again until it is piping hot but not boiling.
6. Just before serving, add the raw chopped dill and stir.
7. Peel hard boiled eggs, cut each in half, and put two halves in a bowl before ladling soup over.
Serve with delicious rye bread (if guests can take the gluten), and refrigerate the leftovers, if any. Still good to eat two days later.
The Poles are justifiably proud of their soups which are varied, unusual and delicious. In the summers they sip cold fruit soups, and in the winters they eat hot meat-and-veg ones. Catholic Poles also have strictly vegetarian soups for Fridays as the Friday abstinence from meat was never lifted in Poland. Traditionally Polish Christmas Eve is a day of total fasting until the first star appears in the sky. The Poles break this fast by sharing specially prepared wafers made of unconsecrated host-bread, and then they eat delicious vegetarian beet soup with tiny mushroom-stuffed dumplings.
A good Polish hot soup for spring is called koperkowa (pronounced kop-err-KO-fa, i.e. I hope so). Its most important ingredient is fresh dill, and my recipe is based on this one at tastingpoland.com. You will notice that the English of the recipe is rather idiosyncratic, so there was some guesswork involved on my part.
The recipe calls for meat-on-the-bone, but I have always substituted good quality prepared vegetable broth, to which I add the Polish soup vegetables (włoszczyzna). Also I never make the string dumplings, opting for the boiled eggs instead. All this ensures that the soup can be eaten on Fridays and by vegetarians and the gluten-intolerant. It is pointless to serve this soup to a vegan, even by substituting dumplings for the eggs, for thick Polish sour cream is a necessary ingredient.
You don't need to peel anything because the veggies are going to be chucked in the bin.
Koperkowa
2 litres of good quality veggie stock, made up and brought to boil
onion, roughly chopped
carrot, roughly chopped
celery stick, roughly chopped
leek, washed thoroughly and roughly chopped
parsnip (optional), roughly chopped
handful of parsley
bay leaf
salt and pepper to taste
200 mL Polish sour cream for soup, or the thickest sour cream you can find.
big bunch dill, chopped and divided in half
hard boiled egg per person (plus extra for seconds)
1. Chuck all veg except the dill into the boiling veggie stock and simmer for 45 minutes.
2. Strain the soup into another pot and throw out the cooked vegetables. (Alternatively you could mash them and nuke them in the morning for a hot veggie porridge, I suppose. But take out the bay leaf first.)
3. Fry half the dill dry in a hot frying pan for 2 minutes, not letting it burn. (You can use a bit of butter, but I like it better without.)
4. Throw fried dill into soup.
5. Pour a quarter cup or so of soup into the sour cream and mix it up. Then pour the mix into the soup and stir. Add salt and pepper to taste. (There may be a lot of salt in your stock already, so do taste first.) Heat up soup again until it is piping hot but not boiling.
6. Just before serving, add the raw chopped dill and stir.
7. Peel hard boiled eggs, cut each in half, and put two halves in a bowl before ladling soup over.
Serve with delicious rye bread (if guests can take the gluten), and refrigerate the leftovers, if any. Still good to eat two days later.
Wednesday, 1 June 2016
Better than Candy
The new goalpost is my powder blue early 1960s shift dress (Roderick Tweedie by Munrospun). I can already wear the matching coat.
Interestingly, B.A. has also lost weight and reports feeling better than he has all year. This provides more circumstantial evidence for the view that spouses influence each other's health, fitness, diet and therefore weight. B.A. may do most of the cooking, but I do most of the grocery shopping--and baking.
Friday, 27 May 2016
Best Moment of the Day
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| 'A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.' |
After that it's all half avocado here and small tomato there, and how much supper can I eat, and I'm starving: time for another "small handful" of raw, unsalted nuts.
Apparently low-carbohydrate diet are not good for those with "active lifestyles" or are into endurance sports, which is indeed why I should not have started mine just before the Chartres Pilgrimage. As a scribbler, I most definitely do not have an active lifestyle, except very periodically when I do a massive in-depth Historical Flat clean or cook for a dinner party, or do both on the same day, plus grocery shopping. Yesterday was one such day.
Up at six. Tidy a bit. Off to Tesco. Back from Tesco. Bake gingerbread cake (without white sugar, very exciting). In-depth tidy of this room. Adequate tidy of that room. Scrubbing of the bathroom, including the tub. Desperate dusting of tricky place under the skylight. .Sweeping of ancient stone stairs. Cooking of traditional Polish koperkowa soup, only with veggie broth instead of veal.
"I have never seen this so-called Polish soup," said Polish Pretend Son, who nevertheless had seconds.
By ten-thirty in the evening I was starting to flag. At about 11:45 PM, having slipped out of the masculine gathering to wash the dishes, I broke one of the sacred cream jugs. B.A. rushed to my aid, and determined that the cream jug was the one I broke before, and all that had happened was the invisible mend had come unstuck. This was very good news, but all the same I thought I had better go to bed.
This morning I awoke at 7:12 AM, feeling excited that despite hosting a dinner party for six the night before, I would walk into a clean kitchen. And there would be oatmeal with blueberries and yogurt!
Cookie update: I have relaxed my anti-sugar scruples enough to use a little maple syrup, but I must say that as retrained as my palate is, I can't taste it in this recipe. I think next time I'll try an extra Tbsp. Of course, extra retraining may be needed, as I have preconceived notions of what peanut butter cookies are supposed to taste like.
By the way, the gingerbread recipe in Sugared Orange is the bomb. I used 80% cocoa chocolate and kept the honey but substituted xylitol for the caster sugar, It is pure spicy, plumy, gingery goodness.
Monday, 23 May 2016
Abstemious Living
I googled "abstemious living" yesterday and found very, very little. This is a shame. It would make a great title for a magazine. The magazine could feature such articles as "Arise at Five: a How-To" and "Only at Christmas: My 364 days Without Wine."
Yesterday I felt the need for a red cardigan and suddenly remembered my old red teaching suit jacket. I bought the suit--and pricey it was--about twelve years ago, and it was my night school teaching uniform. It hasn't fit since I took refuge from my PhD program in a tub of Ben & Jerry's, but I thought I would try on the jacket. To my satisfaction, it buttoned up.
It fit less well at the end of the day for we went to a 2:30 PM lunch party that ended (for us) at 8:30 PM. Heady stuff for a woman whose typical meal lately is half an avocado and an egg. It was a proper British Sunday Lunch with roast beef, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, Yorkshire puddings, carrots, peas, lemon pudding, bottles of wine and coffee. Guests were offered cold sliced meats and cheese straws while the roast roasted. Everything was delicious, but before pudding I felt extremely agitated: surely it was time to climb a mountain or two, or walk to North Berwick and back.
This goes to show how four weeks on the Eight Week Diet can change your attitude towards food. No longer is it a favourite recreation but a medicine to be taken in the proper doses. Of course, it can be hard to take in the proper doses when it is the star of the afternoon. However, I am consoling myself that one Sunday dinner hasn't destroyed all my careful work and sacrifice of the past four weeks. Meanwhile, feeling over-full has reminded me of how fantastic it feels not to be full.
Quite apart from the penny-pinching joy of being able to fit into old clothes, I have been feeling really well. Part of this is, of course, going for long walks in the fresh air in or near Edinburgh, which is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And part of it is getting up at 6 or 7, which has meant falling asleep very soon after I go to bed at 10 or 11. However, I suspect most of it is eating so carefully: good old porridge, beloved homemade fruit-and-nut bars, avocados, eggs, spinach, salmon, broccoli, yogurt, nuts. Developing a label-reading habit has brought some unexpected discoveries: the Co-op "scotch egg" is really not all that bad a snack, especially if you are on the last leg of what has turned out to be a 19 mile walk.
My social circle is full of people who have food allergies and phobias and, when planning dinner parties, I have to tailor menus to the most delicate. When your guests include one with celiac disease, one with a mushroom allergy, one sensitive to onions, one disgusted by eggs and a vegetarian, it gets complicated. Therefore, I have decided not to complicate matters further by announcing to hosts and hostesses that I "cannot eat" white bread, potatoes and refined sugar. It strikes me as a better idea just to eat a few potatoes (if I really cannot resist) and a small helping of the pudding. Everything in moderation, I suppose--but not including moderation.
Meanwhile I am delighted by the energy and joy of getting up early, going for long walks in the fresh air, eating simply and cutting out the carbs, especially sugar and white flour.
Yesterday I felt the need for a red cardigan and suddenly remembered my old red teaching suit jacket. I bought the suit--and pricey it was--about twelve years ago, and it was my night school teaching uniform. It hasn't fit since I took refuge from my PhD program in a tub of Ben & Jerry's, but I thought I would try on the jacket. To my satisfaction, it buttoned up.
It fit less well at the end of the day for we went to a 2:30 PM lunch party that ended (for us) at 8:30 PM. Heady stuff for a woman whose typical meal lately is half an avocado and an egg. It was a proper British Sunday Lunch with roast beef, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, Yorkshire puddings, carrots, peas, lemon pudding, bottles of wine and coffee. Guests were offered cold sliced meats and cheese straws while the roast roasted. Everything was delicious, but before pudding I felt extremely agitated: surely it was time to climb a mountain or two, or walk to North Berwick and back.
This goes to show how four weeks on the Eight Week Diet can change your attitude towards food. No longer is it a favourite recreation but a medicine to be taken in the proper doses. Of course, it can be hard to take in the proper doses when it is the star of the afternoon. However, I am consoling myself that one Sunday dinner hasn't destroyed all my careful work and sacrifice of the past four weeks. Meanwhile, feeling over-full has reminded me of how fantastic it feels not to be full.
Quite apart from the penny-pinching joy of being able to fit into old clothes, I have been feeling really well. Part of this is, of course, going for long walks in the fresh air in or near Edinburgh, which is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And part of it is getting up at 6 or 7, which has meant falling asleep very soon after I go to bed at 10 or 11. However, I suspect most of it is eating so carefully: good old porridge, beloved homemade fruit-and-nut bars, avocados, eggs, spinach, salmon, broccoli, yogurt, nuts. Developing a label-reading habit has brought some unexpected discoveries: the Co-op "scotch egg" is really not all that bad a snack, especially if you are on the last leg of what has turned out to be a 19 mile walk.
My social circle is full of people who have food allergies and phobias and, when planning dinner parties, I have to tailor menus to the most delicate. When your guests include one with celiac disease, one with a mushroom allergy, one sensitive to onions, one disgusted by eggs and a vegetarian, it gets complicated. Therefore, I have decided not to complicate matters further by announcing to hosts and hostesses that I "cannot eat" white bread, potatoes and refined sugar. It strikes me as a better idea just to eat a few potatoes (if I really cannot resist) and a small helping of the pudding. Everything in moderation, I suppose--but not including moderation.
Meanwhile I am delighted by the energy and joy of getting up early, going for long walks in the fresh air, eating simply and cutting out the carbs, especially sugar and white flour.
Monday, 9 May 2016
Marriage and Diet Updates
Marriage
Benedict Ambrose and I have been married for seven years today, and we are evidence that if you have a flash of really good luck--or get a sudden surprise blessing from God--marriage in haste does not lead to repenting at leisure.
As the years go on, I become less and less of an expert on the Single life and somewhat more knowledgeable (or pedantic) on the subject of Married life. Generally speaking, I learned how to be married from my parents, and B.A. learned how to be married from his grandparents, and the two philosophies of marriage are compatible. I am particularly grateful to B.A.'s grandfather for his doleful dictum, "Anything for a quiet life." B.A. is no doubt grateful to my mother's hatred for clothes shopping. Do lower-income wives really go out and spend their breadwinner husbands' money on expensive clothes for themselves? It doesn't seem likely, but footballers' wives do it, so it must happen. I would die of shame, but on the other hand, Footballer's Wife is a sort of job in itself, so perhaps Colleen and the gang can be excused. Me, I stick to charity shops, one of my favourite British institutions.
Happily, we never fight about money. (East-coast Scottish stingy ad East-coast Scottish stingy loquitur.) We do, however, fight about housework. I do not remember my parents ever fighting about housework, but then I don't remember my parents fighting about much. I recall that they fought at least twice in forty years, but other than that, I draw a blank. Maybe they were so blessed by the gift of children than we all brought them to a greater level of holiness. Perhaps when your lives are invaded by an army of children, you need to be at peace with the one adult ally in the house.
The secret to a happy marriage is telling your husband how brilliant he is as often as you can. Naturally this is easier and more convincing to the masculine ear if he actually is brilliant. Thus, it is a good idea to marry someone brilliant. Men don't change all that much, so start with brilliance and shine it up with your wifely praise.
Diet
Two weeks into the draconian two week no-sugar, low-calorie (800) Blood Sugar diet. I am not sure I am strictly keeping to 800 calories since the Low-Sugar Diet Cookbook came into my life. The Fruit and Nut bars (which I did, however, cut into 12 portions for calorie-watching) are just too good not to have with ye olde after-breakfast coffee. Then there were this week's Spelt Episodes. I made the recipe for Spelt Bread for guests and then ate some. Well, that was probably not so bad, but then on Saturday I made a spelt pizza and ate the whole thing. La la la. Portion control was out the window, but at least the glycogen load was low.
Despite these lapses into dietary sanity, I have discovered that I have lost either one or two sizes where shirts are concerned. Oh, and the dress I shall wear to our Anniversary Lunch fits much better. Anniversary Lunch will probably max out my calorie allowance for the day, but that's okay. I suspect that as long as I don't eat simple carbs or sugar, I am ahead.
There is, of course, the training-for-Chartres factor. Really, this was not an ideal time to go on a low-calorie diet. However, I am not lacking in energy except after 6 PM, and that can be blamed on my 6 AM risings. Benedict Ambrose forbade me to stick to the diet turning the actual Chartres Walk, which injunction I am obeying with full wifely submission as I am not actually crazy. My one assertion is that I will not eat simple carbs or sugar--except for a croissant when I wake up in a Chartres hotel on Whit Tuesday morning, of course, because....France.
Benedict Ambrose and I have been married for seven years today, and we are evidence that if you have a flash of really good luck--or get a sudden surprise blessing from God--marriage in haste does not lead to repenting at leisure.
As the years go on, I become less and less of an expert on the Single life and somewhat more knowledgeable (or pedantic) on the subject of Married life. Generally speaking, I learned how to be married from my parents, and B.A. learned how to be married from his grandparents, and the two philosophies of marriage are compatible. I am particularly grateful to B.A.'s grandfather for his doleful dictum, "Anything for a quiet life." B.A. is no doubt grateful to my mother's hatred for clothes shopping. Do lower-income wives really go out and spend their breadwinner husbands' money on expensive clothes for themselves? It doesn't seem likely, but footballers' wives do it, so it must happen. I would die of shame, but on the other hand, Footballer's Wife is a sort of job in itself, so perhaps Colleen and the gang can be excused. Me, I stick to charity shops, one of my favourite British institutions.
Happily, we never fight about money. (East-coast Scottish stingy ad East-coast Scottish stingy loquitur.) We do, however, fight about housework. I do not remember my parents ever fighting about housework, but then I don't remember my parents fighting about much. I recall that they fought at least twice in forty years, but other than that, I draw a blank. Maybe they were so blessed by the gift of children than we all brought them to a greater level of holiness. Perhaps when your lives are invaded by an army of children, you need to be at peace with the one adult ally in the house.
The secret to a happy marriage is telling your husband how brilliant he is as often as you can. Naturally this is easier and more convincing to the masculine ear if he actually is brilliant. Thus, it is a good idea to marry someone brilliant. Men don't change all that much, so start with brilliance and shine it up with your wifely praise.
Diet
Two weeks into the draconian two week no-sugar, low-calorie (800) Blood Sugar diet. I am not sure I am strictly keeping to 800 calories since the Low-Sugar Diet Cookbook came into my life. The Fruit and Nut bars (which I did, however, cut into 12 portions for calorie-watching) are just too good not to have with ye olde after-breakfast coffee. Then there were this week's Spelt Episodes. I made the recipe for Spelt Bread for guests and then ate some. Well, that was probably not so bad, but then on Saturday I made a spelt pizza and ate the whole thing. La la la. Portion control was out the window, but at least the glycogen load was low.
Despite these lapses into dietary sanity, I have discovered that I have lost either one or two sizes where shirts are concerned. Oh, and the dress I shall wear to our Anniversary Lunch fits much better. Anniversary Lunch will probably max out my calorie allowance for the day, but that's okay. I suspect that as long as I don't eat simple carbs or sugar, I am ahead.
There is, of course, the training-for-Chartres factor. Really, this was not an ideal time to go on a low-calorie diet. However, I am not lacking in energy except after 6 PM, and that can be blamed on my 6 AM risings. Benedict Ambrose forbade me to stick to the diet turning the actual Chartres Walk, which injunction I am obeying with full wifely submission as I am not actually crazy. My one assertion is that I will not eat simple carbs or sugar--except for a croissant when I wake up in a Chartres hotel on Whit Tuesday morning, of course, because....France.
Monday, 2 May 2016
The Cardigan Fits
Food is always interesting, even (or especially) when you aim to eat no more than 800 calories a day. (Naturally I would never recommend such a thing to a teenager, a young woman or someone with a history of eating disorders.) Forbidding yourself refined sugar, wheat flour and prepared foods adds to the interest. For one thing, you stop and read the ingredients listed on every package, you read curious new cookbooks, and you buy new foodstuffs from health food shops. The top priority is packing as many nutrients into those 800 calories as possible.
Fortunately, breakfast is always easy as I am long used to making oatmeal porridge. Apparently oatmeal porridge is almost magical in its life-giving properties, and there is no reason to put sugar on it if you mix in blueberries or strawberries. It tastes more satisfying with a dollop of yogurt on top than with milk, which is a nice new discovery.
Then there are a number of delicious foods one can have for other meals, like eggs, herring, salmon, hummus, chicken, an ounce of cheese, a quarter-cup of nuts, an eighth-cup of seeds, vast forests of spinach, etc. The tricky thing is weighing everything to make sure you aren't exceeding your 800 calorie allowance. Drinking 2 litres of water turns out not to be a challenge when you are on 800 calories. I am up to about a half litre of herbal tea a day.
I have been asked how Benedict Ambrose is doing, which is a fair question. I was determined not to let my diet interfere with B.A.'s life, but this is difficult as B.A. usually does most of the cooking and believes in generous portions. The poor chap assumed that brown rice has a low Glycemic Index (at 50, it is much higher up than Uncle Ben's 38).* It is also 216 calories a cup, which is fine for a normal diet--even if you are given a whole cup--but not so fine for a severely calorie-reduced one. Also, B.A. likes to eat at 8 PM, which means either a 6 PM snack or a raging headache for me. Thus, I have had to disrupt the family eating regimen. In short, that B.A. has a pork chop and a baked potato at 8 no longer means I am having a pork chop and a baked potato at 8. Meanwhile, the evening the sugar-withdrawal kicked in was not a happy one. Rarely do we raise our voices, but on that occasion there was a slight atmospheric alteration of the historical roof.
However, not all is adjustment and strife. Benedict Ambrose has enjoyed some of the new dishes I have been making. Homemade hummus with real tahini was a great hit, preferable to my own low-fat, no-tahini version. My first experiment with farinata (made from gram flour) was edible but odd, so we are going to try other recipes. B.A. also likes the "Eat Real" hummus chips from Real Foods, which are a fantastic substitute for potato crisps. (As prepared food, they shall be eaten primarily by B.A.)
Meanwhile, I decided to honour Sunday by relaxing my personal 800 calorie rule and doing some baking from The Low-Sugar Cookbook by Nicola Graimes. First I made the Coconut, Banana and Oat Cookies (p.208-9), and then I made the Apple & Raspberry Flapjack Pie (p. 220-1), which is basically flourless apple crumble (i.e. crisp). This last has 2 Tbsps of honey, brown rice syrup or maple syrup, so I found it incredibly daring. I put an experimental drop of honey on my tongue, and it was the sweetest, deepest, most honey-like substance ever. It zinged into my bloodstream with loud music and crashing of cymbals. When anti-sugar people swear sugar is a drug, they aren't kidding.
The Coconut Cookies are only so-so, I think, but B.A. says he really likes them. When I eat cookies I expect sweet, and these are not sweet cookies. However, they do taste of coconut and banana, which are good flavours, and toasted oat is very nice. The raw cocoa nibs, which illustrate how important sugar, no matter how little, is to the making of chocolate, taste pointless on their own, but do add an indefinable something to the cookies.
The Apple & Raspberry Flapjack Pie (which at 325 calories a portion shall be only a Sunday treat) is the best apple crumble/crisp I have ever made. It's absolutely scrumptious. The secret is to use eating, not cooking apples, as they are already sweet, and the addition of small amounts of nuts and sesame seeds. I have always used oats in my crumbles/crisps; here no addition of flour is asked for. The result is crunchy, fruity goodness. It is sweet but mostly because eating apples and raspberries are sweet. No doubt the honey--I made 2/3 of the recipe, so that was 1.5 Tablespoons--did its work, too.
It is perfectly possible to hike 5 miles on this diet, for I have done it three times. Earlier this week I walked about 10 miles and on Saturday B.A. and I did at least 5 miles. I was not at all hungry. In fact, I don't feel hungry except in the mornings, when I go directly to the kitchen upon waking and start my porridge. When food is in front of me, I certainly eat it. However, "I must eat now" now belongs more to reason than the appetite. That said, I bring a packet of pumpkin seeds with me on my journeys.
Sadly, there has been an unexpected challenge from an entirely different quarter. The walking has been murder on my left heel, and I may go back to the pod to complain. However, at this stage I don't think the bony deformity is to blame. Never having used blister plasters before, I eagerly used one on a beginning blister, only to discover new blisters sprouting up under the sticky plaster edges: now I literally have a blister on a blister. At the moment I have a good old-fashioned cloth handkerchief taped to my heel, and I am not stirring from the house until late afternoon. I very much hope the blisters are all gone by Thursday, when my companions and I are going on a 10-12 mile walk.
*That said brown rice has a relatively low Glycogen Load of 16. (I'm still figuring out the GI/GL relationship). White rice has a GL of 43! Kraft Dinner has a GL of 32! The big surprise is premium ice-cream... Well, look here.
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