If you don´t like cake, or stodgy puddings, a great alternative at Christmas is ice cream. To me there is something very decadent, almost naughty, about eating ice cream in the depths of winter. Of course, if you live somewhere that Christmas falls in the middle of summer, then it´s even more perfect.
We´ll be eating this not as an alternative to pudding, but as well as! I´ll serve it with my Light Christmas Pudding and Boozy Fruits….and who knows, a few mince pies may sneak onto the table too.
It´s very easy to prepare, and can obviously made ahead of the Big Day. It´s another Delia Smith´s Christmas recipe, which I have tweaked a little over the years.
The night before you want to make the ice cream, soak about 100g of your favourite mixed candied peel (chopped) and raisins, plus some glace cherries in about 6 tablespoons of rum or your favourite liqueur and stir in 3 tablespoons of honey. I also used dried apricots and cranberries – it´s up to you!
For the ice cream, using an electric whisk, beat 4 egg yolks with 100g of caster sugar until pale. Grate about 75g of creamed coconut into 400ml of double or whipping cream and heat it gently until the coconut has melted. Stir over the egg mixture while whisking (it should thicken a little, but don´t worry if it doesn´t) then when it has cooled a little stir in 200ml of thick, creamy, Greek yogurt and add about a teaspoon of vanilla essence (optional). Finally stir in the fruit and alcohol with honey and pour into a 1litre pudding basin. Cover with a lid or a few layers of foil and freeze.
When it is about half frozen (it took about 8 hours in my very packed freezer) spoon the mixture out into a bowl and mix it gently to distribute the fruit which will have sunk to the bottom, then pack it back into the pudding basin. Cover, freeze and forget about it until you are ready to serve.
This ice cream stays fairly soft, so you can turn it out and serve it immediately. I usually hold a hot wet tea towel around the bowl for a few seconds before turning it out. It doesn´t look quite as pretty in the photo today as it will on the Big Day on a beautiful plate and drizzled with boozy fruit.
You know that Christmas really is upon you when you decide to Get Organised. I put that in capital letters to help motivate me. And then when you decide to Get Organised, Things Go Horribly Wrong. I think you get the idea.
With my parents arriving shortly I sorted out our spare room for them this morning with my best linen, plenty of coat hangers and a few little tasteful decorations. The bedspread is a gorgeous mulberry colour and I have some lovely purple Christmas lights that I wanted to drape around. Do you think I could find them? Like heck I could.
Then I decided to remove all my nice table linen from the chest in the spare bedroom so that I don´t have to go disturbing my parents. What did I find? Well, the linen was where it was meant to be but I also found the remains of an enormous red wine stain on my lovely tablecloth. It´s not even in the middle where it could have been hidden by plates or candles…damn, that´s now doing its third round in the washing machine.
Finally, the dishwasher made a very rude noise and appeared to have given up on me mid cycle. I foolishly opened the door to give it a good talking to, and out flooded a sea of dirty and very hot water. One of those days, you see.
But all was not bad. In the midst of all this mayhem, sorry…Festive Fun… Big Man came in bearing a beautiful poinsettia for me and a parcel from Secret Santa. I also saw that Nia awarded me the Versatile Blogger Award, so a huge thank you to the lovely Nia. For my responses to this in a previous post, check this out.
Tandy over at Lavender and Lime kindly organised this fun exchange of gifts, so thanks so much Tandy! My Secret Santa (you can´t hide your details from the Spanish Postal system!) is a lovely Blue Jellybean from Madrid – thanks Jellybean, I´m so pleased with my gifts! Look at my gorgeous book of Tapas recipes – there are some old favourites in there plus a load of new and inspiring ideas for me to try out next year. I´ve only managed to get a quick flick through it as I had to wrestle it off Big Man who was deciding what “we” (for “we”, read “me”) should try first. I also received some gorgeous decorations…which are very special as I ask Christmas visitors to buy me a new decoration for us to keep and remember them by. So perfect…my first gifts and I am a very, very lucky Chica indeed.
Of course, while things were exploding and flooding all around me, I did have time to make a little bite to eat. Inspired by some Baked Brie recipes From the Bartolini Kitchens and Rufus´Food and Spirits Guide, I decided to do a simplified version with a Camembert which was so ripe it was about to take a walk all on its own! I unwrapped the very stinky camembert from its box and separated the plastic paper from the waxed paper which I wrapped around the cheese again. I put it back into the base of the box and baked for about 20mins in a hot oven.
We ate it with bread sticks, and I put a few spoons of my plum compote in the top of the cheese. The strong taste of the cheese worked well with the cinnamon and vanilla notes in the plum and we quietly sipped a glass of vino Rosado whilst the dishwasher groaned and breathed its last breath. Guess what Santa might be buying tomorrow?!
It will look prettier on the Big Day on a Christmas Plate!
With the forthcoming arrival of my parents, I´m getting into the swing of Christmas food preparations. Traditional Christmas cakes and puddings in the UK can be made ages ahead of time (even a year) to allow them to mature. Of course, I am nowhere near as organised as all that, and none of us is mad keen on the heavier traditional pudding.
For many years I have made a lighter version based on a recipe from my trusty Delia Smith´s Christmas Cookbook. In fact, looking back, I made it the first year I was in sole charge of Christmas lunch for 10 people. My beloved grandfather had died in the November, and this was 21 years ago. Of course, we were all still in a state of shock and sadness, especially my darling grandmother, but we still wanted to celebrate. I lived up the road from my parents in a little flat, and it was decided that we would change things a little so that memories of sitting in my parents´ dining room with Grandad at the head of the table would be a little less vivid.
My parents cooked the turkey in their oven as I just didn´t have room, but everything else was done in my little kitchen. All my wobbly hand me down tables and chairs were pressed into service, and the family walked up the road carrying girft and fold up chairs. Plates were borrowed – I was a 25 year old in her first flat as a non sharer, so I was still building my collection. Tears were shed, but much there was fun and laughter too. It was emotional but happy and we all ate and drank far too much. The meal ended with this pudding – made initially as my grandfather would probably have grumbled about there not being “proper” pudding and this made us all chuckle. Since then it´s become a new kind of family tradition whenever I am the Christmas lunch fairy, and my parents requested it this year.
I haven´t changed the recipe much at all, so I hope Saint Delia won´t mind. It can be frozen once made, and then warmed through in a steamer or Bain Marie on Christmas Day while you are eating lunch.
Put half the peel in the base of a 1.2 litre buttered pudding basin. Beat the butter and sugar until creamy and then add 1tbsp of egg and flour and mix in, continuing until both egg and flour have all been incorporated. Add the rest of the ingredients and stir in, then spoon the mixture into the basin.
Cover with a double layer of pleated foil and tie a string around to keep the foil tight and give yourself a handle to lift it out.
Mucky Cooker – oops, don´t let it boil over!
Place it in a steamer or saucepan half filled with boiling water and steam gently covered with a lid for 2 ½ hours. Keep a kettle of boiling water to hand to top up the water when needed.
When the time is up, let it cool completely and you can then turn it out and wrap well in cling film to freeze until needed. If making ahead and reheating on Christmas Day, slide it back into the pudding basin and cover again with foil to do this.
Delicious with custard or brandy sauce, boozy fruits, ice cream….whatever takes your fancy!
PS. Stir Up Sunday (the last Sunday before Advent) is when Christmas Puddings were traditionally made to allow them to mature. Of course, I missed that date, but never mind! I was also always told that every member of the family needed to give the cake or pudding a stir and make a wish – so we did this too…
One of my “go to” books at Christmas is Delia Smith´s Christmas. Sometimes I follow the recipes with just a few tweaks, and other times the book just inspires me to try something new.
My parents are coming out to Spain this year to celebrate Christmas with me and Big Man. To say I´m excited would be a huge understatement. When I was growing up, and ever since to be honest, they always made Christmas a very special and magical time for me and my brother. My grandparents lived with us (my mum´s parents) and next door was my godmother, Zia Luciana, and her two daughters who were all part of our extended family. I have very happy and treasured memories.
Although I have entertained my parents before at Christmas, it´s been a while, so this year I really want to make it extra special. Of course, one of the ways I can do this is through the food I prepare for us to share.
My dad requested a Light Christmas Pudding, which features in the Delia Smith book that I have made previously. I´ll post that soon. I´m also going to make an ice cream inspired by another recipe and I´ve just made some Boozy Christmas Fruit. The recipe in the book uses mainly glacé fruit, but it´s a recipe that is flexible.
All these are put into a jar and covered in a sweet dessert wine (I used a local wine which is very much like Vin Santo). The recipe calls for Madeira. I took the shot before it was mixed up to show you the different fruits. This will now sit quietly in a cool dark place until Christmas Day when it will be spooned over the ice cream and any other desserts we fancy eating it with. I may have to do a few quality control spot checks beforehand though…just to be sure its maturing nicely you understand.
For anyone not familiar with mincemeat, let me explain. It has nothing to do with minced or ground beef, it´s made with fruit. Well…initially it was made of meat, flavoured with sugar, fruit and spices. This, historically, was probably to mask the strong flavours of meat which needed to be preserved without the benefit of refrigeration.
Over time the mixture became sweeter and all that now remains of its meaty ancestor, is an ingredient called suet, which is usually beef or mutton fat. This melts down into the mix to preserve it. Vegetarian suet it now also available.
When I spent my first Christmas in Spain 6 years ago, it was impossible for me to track down ready made mincemeat for my Christmas Mince Pies, let alone suet to make my own. Things have changed now over the years, but I still use a recipe I came across (and I don´t know where, so apologies to whoever it “belongs” to) which is a suet free version of mincemeat.
The flavours develop and improve over time, although it´s excellent even freshly made. If you make a large batch, it will be wonderful next Christmas!
Ingredients
250g brown sugar
250ml cider (sweet or dry) or apple juice
1kg of peeled and chopped cooking apples
½ teaspoon ground mixed spice
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
250g each of currants, raisins, cranberries
75g glace cherries
75g blanched almonds
Rind & juice of ½ lemon plus rind of 1 orange
6 tablespoons of brandy or rum (optional)
(Feel free to vary the ingredients according to your taste)
Dissolve the sugar in the cider over a gentle heat, add all the other ingredients except the alcohol and cook until soft and pulpy. Cool slightly, stir in alcohol and put into sterilised jars.
Remember our beautiful walk recently? We had such a wonderful morning and came home with about half a kilo of wild mushrooms.
Because they were so fresh, I knew they would keep for a day or two, so in the first dish I made, I used half of them and kept things very simple.
We grow oyster mushrooms in our garage. No, don´t worry – there´s no nasty fungus creeping up the walls or anything. You can buy bales of straw which are impregnated with mushroom spores and then wrapped in black plastic. You cut slits into the plastic and keep the “alpaca” as these bales are known in the dark and ensure that they are kept damp. About a week after acquiring your little treasure your first mushrooms will appear. Just cut and eat. Then when you´ve harvested as many as you can, you flip the alpaca over and cut a few more slits. If you keep it going you can be eating your own grown oyster mushrooms for several months.
I took about the same quantity of oyster mushrooms as wild, cut the wild mushrooms into thick slices and tore the oyster mushrooms into strips.
In a deep terracotta dish (or you could use a frying pan) I added three crushed cloves to garlic to the mushrroms together with about 3 good tablespoons of olive oil, some Maldon (or kosher) salt, several good grinds of black pepper and two red chillis (these are optional). I turned the heat up to high and as soon as the mushrooms began to sizzle I reduced it and covered them to let them sweat and get tender for about 10 minutes. I then removed the lid and added a small glass of dry white wine and let everything bubble away until the liquid had reduced by half.
We ate this as a starter with plenty of rosé wine and some crusty bread to mop up the delicious juices.
PS. On a totally different subject – since I changed the look of my blog (i.e I changed the theme) my photos don´t seem to appear properly. They are cut off on the right hand side! Has anyone come across this and do they know how to resolve it? Thanks for any advice anyone might be able to offer me.
Another “Plato de Cuchara” or spoon dish – we like our pulses here in Spain. Many of these dishes were traditional as you could feed large families with few ingredients which were not costly. Meats are typically added at the end (usually pork products) so the beauty is that they can be vegetarian dishes too, if you prefer.
Lentils are great, as apart from being cheap, they cook fairly quickly and only need rinsing but not presoaking.
For four people as a main dish or six as a starter you´ll need
About 500g of lentils – we have the flat green ones here
Water to cover
3 tablespoons of olive oil
1 medium onion, quartered
Half each of a red and green pepper, chopped into bite sized chunks
Two tomatoes cut into bite sized chunks
1 bay leaf
A couple of carrots peeled and finely diced
A stick of celery plus the leaves (if it has leaves). Finely dice the celery but not the leaves.
4 or 5 whole fat cloves of garlic
2 medium potatoes peeled and cut into small cubes (keep these in a bowl of water separately)
Sprig of fresh thyme or rosemary if you have it
¼ teaspoon each of pimentón and paprika
Salt to taste (at end of cooking)
Optional – a couple of chorizo and/or morcilla or your favourite sausages
Rinse the lentils then add all the vegetables and spices apart from the salt to a large cooking pot. Cover well with water, add the oil and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat slightly but don´t let them come off the boil while cooking as this will make the lentils hard. They will probably take about 45 minutes or so.
When the lentils are soft, add the potato and meats (if using) and continue cooking until the potatoes are cooked. Remove the bay leaf and celery leaves and add salt (and pepper too if you like) to taste and you´re ready to serve. Slice the sausages into smaller pieces before serving. A drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a squeeze of lemon over the top really lifts the flavour, but that´s just the way I like it!
Last night was 5th November, Bonfire Night. It´s a night much celebrated in the UK with bonfires, fireworks and all sorts of lovely outdoor parties and food.
Of course, here in Andalucía it´s a day like any other. But for us, it was marked in a small way by lighting our fire for the first time this autumn. We´ve been lucky, the evenings are turning chilly but are still mild enough for a warm sweater and an extra glass of wine to be enough to keep you warm through the evening.
Yesterday, though, Big Man decided it was time to have a fire, so he got it going with dry wood we had left from last year. We still have to bring up a big stock of wood from the olives to get us through the winter. Because the wood was so dry the fire was soon blazing away and I popped out to see a neighbour for an hour or two.
I got back a while later to find another neighbour happily settled in with Big Man, the fire crackling away and very jolly atmosphere filled the room along with the scent of olive wood.
They were in the process of carrying out some serious scientific research – which wine goes best with roasted chestnuts? In order to ensure they were being completely thorough there was a bottle each of dry, semi sweet and dessert wine. Because they are tidy boys, they had even put a cover on the table to protect it…as you can see, it was a very glamorous newspaper. Honestly, we really are such classy folk up our mountain!
Anyway, we ate chestnuts, drank the wine, and to be honest I can´t actually remember which wine one was nicest…I´ll leave it to you to carry out your own research.
I believe there is a saying which goes something like “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive” – well I have to say that I can´t quite agree with Robert Louis Stevenson. But I expect he wasn´t heading to London for eight days to visit my family and friends, so I´ll just have to excuse him.
I arrived home late last night to be met by my wonderful Big Man bearing flowers. Lilies…my favourite. It´s been a while since he bought me flowers, (impossible to get where we live) so the surprise romantic gesture was very much appreciated.
Being a canny packer of cases, I always go right to the limit on my baggage allowances. 20kg in the suitcase, 10kg in the hand luggage and the biggest hand bag possible. No, I most definitely don´t travel light! I went out loaded with Christmas presents (can´t tell you much about them though, as I don´t want to give any surprises away). The case was also packed with packs of chorizo and morcilla to make Fabada Asturiana, plastic lid things to “flip” your tortilla, chillies from my garden, wine glass/tumblers, gifts from my recent holiday, chocolates for my niece and nephew, books to entertain young children on a long flight to the States to see their grandmother, Spanish fans for a friend´s mum, olives, biscuits….well, I think you get the picture.
The advantage of this is that once you´ve unpacked and “shared the love”, you have an almost empty suitcase waiting to be filled with gorgeous things to take back home with you. Of course, I wasn´t about to go home empty handed.
I carefully packed some lovely pictures done by the wonderful children I got to spend time with. A very flattering portrait of me done by my 10 year old niece, Lara. Look at that fabulous waist and bust…if only! A lovely thank you card from 4 year old William and his 2 year old brother Matthew.
Chocolate. And then some more chocolate. If you haven´t tried Quality Street, track it down! Lots of lovely chocolate toffee and caramel sweets in a tin. They just take me back to childhood Christmases when these were a very special treat. And then you get to use the tin to put your cakes in!
I had a bit of a mad fabric buying spree. I´m laying some of the blame for this on my new blogging pal Evie, over at Pendle Stitches. I was the very lucky winner of this beautiful shawl that she had made, and it was waiting for me at my parents´ house. Very handy actually, as it was a little nippy last week in London. Anwyay, Evie suggested some wonderful fabric shops for me to look at in London. The fabrics were amazing.
"Weigh" too much fabric!
Eventually I bought a huge variety of fabrics in Tooting Broadway, my old neighbourhood in South London, plus an amazing discovery of some vintage fabrics, still neatly folded and never taken out of storage since about 1950. They almost tipped me over the baggage allowance, but as there were only 31 people on the flight home (I felt like I was on my own private jet), the check in girl turned a very kind blind eye to my extra kilo…20 metres of cotton, linen, silk, jersey, viyella, crepe and who knows what else do weigh rather a lot. I also bought a new magazine to inspire me.
I´ll make that one day.....
And finally, to food. My mother stocked me up with all sorts of odd and bizarre things I find hard or expensive to buy out here.
All spice berries, Golden Syrup, Maldon Salt.
Sugar and spice and all things nice
Loaf tin liners and vanilla for my baking.
My mum made me a wonderful beef curry with lots of vegetable curries to accompany it.
Best friend Ria made a fantastic chicken and cannellini bean casserole (recipe another day) even though she was feeling poorly last week.
And talking of food, guess what? I got to meet one of my new blogging pals face to face. It was Mad Dog, who was not in the least bit mad and not remotely dog like! We spent a happy and all too short hour in Bar Italia, in the heart of London´s Soho, drinking coffee and chatting about food, Spain, food, photography, food, ourselves. What a great guy he is, and he gave me a fantastic gift of the film Tampopo, a comedy featuring…yes you´ve guessed…food!
So, now I´m home again and looking forward to getting back into my kitchen. Big Man has already started stocking up on autumn fruits and vegetables.
A neighbour gave us a crate of Membrillo, or quince, so we´ll be making quince jelly this weekend.
Another neighbour gave us some enormous pomegranates (or Granadas) from his tree. I may just have to eat them as is, as I adore them served simply.
I also have a couple of kilos of broad beans, but I think you already know many of my recipes for this gorgeous little vegetable.
So, time to unpack, wash, cook and sew. Sounds odd, but I can´t wait!
PS. Am looking forward to a few days of blog catching up – really looking forward to seeing what you have all been up to.
When I was young we used to spend summers in Calabria, Southern Italy, where my father is from. He was the youngest of 9 children, 6 of whom were girls. His older sisters all used to fight over who we would stay with during our holiday, as most of them had had a hand in bringing him up and treated him almost as a son. We used to try and divide our time up with the various families, but my happiest memories were of staying with my Zia Santa.
Grazie Zia - ti voglio bene
When I mentioned this once to someone in the UK they asked me if it was strange having an aunt named after Santa Claus. How bizarre, I thought, it had never once crossed my mind that her name might sound unusual to anyone else. In Italian Santa is a female saint, or a “blessed one”. My Zia Santa was indeed a saint, she had a hard life and lived in very basic simplicity for the whole of her married and then widowed life. But we loved being with her. She had one bedroom where my parents slept in her huge dark wood framed bed with my younger brother on a fold out bed. Her bathroom only had a toilet and a sink where she also washed all her clothes. The only other room was a large living, dining, kitchen area which looked onto the main street of the little village, called Longobardi. I slept here with my aunt, her on a bed and me on a mattress – and every night we would giggle together like two little schoolgirls rather than an aunt and niece who were separated in age by over 40 years.
There was a small balcony which served as the telephone. If people wanted to give you a message they stood in the street and whoever was nearest the window stood there and took the message. Likewise, if you wanted to let a neighbour know some news, all you had to do was stand on the balcony and tell a passer-by. You were in no doubt that the message would reach its recipient almost as instantly as an e-mail or text nowadays.
Zia Santa was an incredible cook. August was always taken up with drying tomatoes on her flat roof, or bottling tomatoes to go into the huge storage area on the ground floor. It never struck me as odd that there was this enormous space downstairs that could have been converted into a bathroom, bedroom, laundry room…whatever. It was more important back then to have a good space to store the cheese, salami, prosciutto, olive oil and tomatoes for winter.
I´m trying to write down all the recipes that Zia Santa taught me, my mother and, some years, my English grandmother to cook. Today it´s Caponata. I had to call my mum to ask her what the special ingredient was. Our family caponata was never the same as any other I´ve tasted. I´m sure there are thousands of family recipes, each one different from the other. This is ours.
About 1kg of aubergines (eggplant, melanzane) finely chopped and salted, then left to drain for about 30 minutes then rinsed and patted dry
Olive oil – plenty for frying
1 onion finely chopped
3 sticks of celery finely chopped
4 tablespoons of red wine vinegar (although I used white as that´s what we have here and it was delicious)
About 500g of ripe tomatoes peeled and finely chopped
Up to 2 tablespoons of sugar
About a quarter of a cup each of chopped capers and chopped stoned olives (black or green)
Seasoning
The grated zest of half an orange – the secret ingredient!
Fry the aubergine chunks (which in all other recipes I´ve seen is left much chunkier). Zia Santa used to deep fry, I shallow fry. The choice is yours. Set them aside when they are browned and soft.
Now add the onion and celery to the pan with more oil if necessary and fry with the lid on until soft and translucent. Turn up the heat and add the vinegar and allow it to reduce almost completely. Turn the heat back down and add the tomatoes, seasoning and about half the sugar and simmer for about 15 minutes or so or until the celery is tender but still retains a little crunch. Stir in the aubergines, olives, capers and orange zest and taste. It should be “agrodolce” sweet and sour – add the rest of the sugar if necessary and allow it to dissolve.
This dish is best served the next day and will sit quite happily in your fridge for several days. We used to eat it at room temperature as part of the antipasto but it´s also good as a side dish.
And don´t forget, do shout out of the window to let me know if you enjoyed it!
So in 2016 I turned 50. I was in Italy for my 21st, 30th and 40th. To keep this birthday tradition going I always knew I'd be in Italy for my 50! This blog starts with my 5 week adventure in Puglia but my love affair with Italy continues.....
We´ll be eating this not as an alternative to pudding, but as well as! I´ll serve it with my Light Christmas Pudding and Boozy Fruits….and who knows, a few mince pies may sneak onto the table too.
Chica Andaluza 