Pistachio nougat

I have always had real trouble celebrating New Year's Eve.  A family bereavement when I was 24 at this time of year put me off the celebrations going on around me and I have never really recovered from it. In past years I have become a degree or two more enthusiastic, and set up family parties and games evenings, consisting largely of 6 hour Cluedo games, a brief break to watch Big Ben chime and fireworks explode over the Thames via BBC1, a quick look outside at crass neighbourhood fireworks, a glass of champagne, and back to the Cluedo before bedtime at around 2am. The death of my sister has made this time of year even more introspective for me.  But I do also feel as if I am beginning to emerge out of the chrysalis of shock and hurt in which I have been shrouded ever since we lost her. I may not want to come out of it, I may even resist it by indulging in the most painful recollections I can bring to mind of her last days, but it does not stop the inevitable reconnection with the future that I think must be like an automatic switch in our brains. At some point my brain has decided that enough is enough. It is time to stop hurting and begin healing. Last week I put out on a shelf a picture of my sister for the first time. This is not something I have been able to do at all. But I found one of her, and my younger sister, and me, and I loved it because it captured my memory of being the middle of three sisters and not what I am now, the eldest of two - and I put it on a shelf where I could see and be comforted by it. I have looked at it every day since and the comfort continues. The loss is still there, it's still strong; but the pain feels as if it is being balanced somehow. So today, on New Year's Eve, I asked my husband if he would come out with me. We slushed our way through a damp and partly flooded Hampstead Heath. We joined our fellow middle classers for a skinny latte at Carluccio's, which we then subsequently raided for gifts. We nibbled on their plates of cut up pannettone. I discovered a pistachio nougat, which I tried, and immediately developed a passion for - I bought one, but will almost certainly be back at the end of the week for more. Who can resist a green slab of sticky almond and vanilla sugar??? We wandered up the street, into the bookshop, and browsed.  We headed back to the car with our bags of sticky Italian goodies, and came home. I sat at the table with a cup of tea, and thought.  Next year, I wanted these things. I wanted to bake a decent triple layer meringue cake. I wanted to quit my scuzzy gym in the City and find a way to exercise that did not involve airless basements and sweaty, slippery equipment. But mostly, I wanted to look forward. Starting with an outing this weekend to stock up on pistachio nougat.  That is my road to healing in 2014.

Puddings

I made some great desserts for yesterday's Christmas Day lunch. Ottolenghi's chocolate krantzcakes. White chocolate pecan squares, courtesy of the Magnolia Bakery cookery book. Nutella cheesecake, thank you Nigella Lawson.  Diabetic friendly coffee and cinnamon mini cheesecakes. All fab stuff, and it all went down about as well as the roasted root vegetables, roasted potatoes, blanched green bean salad, Ottolenghi's sweet houmous (that isn't what it's called but that is sure as hell what it tastes like and it is fabulous), my Mum's whisky poached salmon and my sister's multicoloured mixed salad. Which is to say, it all added up to a pretty memorable meal.  It was fabulous and I'm sad it's over except that most of the leftovers stayed with us which means we get to eat more of it for the next 4 or 5 dinners. Yay. But on Sunday I have friends coming for lunch and need to create a lunch that captures the post Christmas vibe. It's weird, this. As we all know, the period between Xmas and New Year is like a bubble, which most people spend at the sales, or gorging on Roses chocolates and leftover turkey, or going on long walks wrapped up in their new Timberland fleeces which were Xmas presents from relatives (though I passed a man on the canal walk near my house who ran past me wearing a bottle green Ralph Lauren two piece sweatsuit with horses and polo players emblazoned on the chest and thighs, and though it made a refreshing difference from Timberland, it was not a good look. Not for any age, or any guy). So, back to the lunch. It can't be too heavy as Xmas lunches and Roses chocolates have a way of sitting inside you for days, especially if, like us, you are still eating the leftovers. On the other hand, by midway to New Year, which is when my friends are coming over, most people have spent themselves at the sales and are feeling the cold, not to mention the onset of New Year depression that is associated with the gloomy, looming prospect of a return to work in the company of several hundred thousand equally pissed off, freezing cold, hungover, spent out commuters. So it needs to be comforting. And comfort, to me, is pudding. If I'm not well it's soup. But if it's after Xmas it's pudding. I spend some hours looking through my cookery books and surfing the web for puddings and decide that comfort also goes with the classics. So. It's going to be an apple and almond crumble, redolent with cinnamon and cloves. And it will be a dark chocolate pudding, bubbling with muscovado sugar. And a homemade custard, using vanilla pods that drive me nuts because contrary to the ease that chefs like Gordon Ramsay seem to display when scraping the seeds out, it takes me ages and they stick to my fingers or fall on the floor. Nightmare. But I will do it anyway because it makes me feel really smug when I serve the custard. And all this will be made on the day, not the day before, because the smell of these puddings is as evocative of comfort as the eating of them. In fact eating them without the memorable experience of walking into a kitchen rich with the aroma of baking puddings is only half the experience. And after we have eaten these puddings (after my main course of fried homemade fishfingers made of halibut and coated in matza meal, with homemade sourdough bread) we will climb into our wellies, and pitch out into the freezing cold, with invisible glows all around us, like those Ready Brek advertisements. Because that is what puddings do to you in Winter. They make you feel really warm, and really loved, and ready for just about anything. Even a commute on the Northern line with a carriagefull of smelly strangers.

Christmas Day for non Christmassers

I have my family coming over on Christmas Day. This is not supposed to be the same thing as Coming Over For Christmas. Granted, my niece and nephew, who I love dearly, are coming, and we haven't seen them for yonks as they are both at university doing what older nieces and nephews do, and I am so honoured by their prospective presence - after all, I would have understood totally if they had planned to spend their Xmas break dressed in togas pogo-ing to Jason Derullo while swigging tequila out of fetid beer glasses (I may REALLY be showing my age here). And I have put together some pretty awesome party games, including my most epic pass the parcel EVER, and do not pretend for a moment that the best pass the parcel does not take hours of skill in choosing the right prizes, identifying the best forfeits, wrapping it so that things don't fall out of the sides or the paper doesn't tear too soon. And I have bought three different kinds of Christmas crackers, including ones which have Cluedo figures inside them so that you can play the game. But it still isn't coming over for Christmas. We don't do Christmas. We don't have turkey, we have bagels and smoked salmon, though on this occasion I am leafing through Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem cookery book to see how to spice up my non Christmas Day dinner with some Middle Eastern spice just to underline how Not Christmas this is (arguably I am risking turning my lunch into a more authentic Christmas than most turkey guzzling Christians will be - Bethlehem and all that - I'll bet that barn STANK of za'atar).  There won't be gifts, though of course one of the epic features of my Pass The Parcel is that there will be something in there for everyone - nothing expensive mind, just deconstructed swiss army knives, real sized chocolate cameras, hilarious strawberry chocolate false teeth etc...) We will not be watching the Queen's Speech as instead we are going to play table tennis and bounce on my trampoline, waving sparklers, though of course we will end up watching the Queen's Speech later as the BBC will make damn sure it's on every news channel for hours after it is broadcast.  And it will be much less stressful than the usual Christmas day lunch because I won't have started prepping for it 3 months ago with my carefully stored brandy soaked Christmas pudding, studded with raisins and old coins and bits of twigs and whatever the hell else goes into a Christmas pudding. No, I will be throwing together my chocolate krantzcakes which require prepping a full 24 hours beforehand so the dough can rise overnight, and then I will make peanut butter squares, Nutella cheesecake, and a diabetic version for my Dad, and then maybe some Rocky Road....so much easier, right? Yeah. I know. I am TOTALLY kidding myself. Sigh. Apron on.

Gateau St Emilion

Really funny, this one. I have never heard of this dessert before, but I came across the recipe in the back of a magazine associated with a popular Sunday tabloid newspaper.  No mention in the recipe of the fact that this was a classic French dessert. Just a basic recipe. I give it a go. It's a sublimely light concoction of dark chocolate, cream, sugar, egg white...it sits in the fridge for hours and hours and when it is ready, you soak crushed amaretti biscuits in a teaspoonful of rum and then scatter the dampened shards over the top. The result is unbelievable. I can't understand how a creation of such finesse could find its way into the supplement of one of the scuzziest tabloid newspapers in the Northern hemisphere. When I hear Michel Roux refer to the St Emilion in the context of a discussion about fine dining I am even more suprised. But then, I have become an enormous cake snob since I upped my game on baking. I've steadily been climbing the wall of baking ambition. Just a few years ago a decent sponge cake would have been cause for celebration. Looking back at 2013 the most notable factor of my baking profile is that I haven't produced a single sponge cake all year. I've been too busy perfecting my frangipane, my tangy lemon and white chocolate tart, my sweet pastry technique. I've turned out extraordinary triple chocolate layers, raspberry poundcakes, Eastern European krantzcakes etc...well, if you've been following this blog you'll know the score. And it's not like I've been waiting for the ultimate dinner party occasion to launch these baking creations. Most have been snarfed down by my generally undiscriminating family. So, the appearance of a fabulous French classic at the back of an indifferent Sunday supplement emboldens me to serve it up at the Christmas lunch party at my house for all my work colleagues. Normally for a mass catering challenge, complicated by the amount of champagne and mulled wine that would have been imbibed by the time dessert was reached, I would aim for a mass crowd pleaser. Chocolate mousse, chocolate pudding, tiramisu. So I am taking a risk. But it's one worth going for - these are lovely people who have made me very welcome in my new job, so on the table it goes. And there are oohs and aahs and people linger over it, and it becomes the subject of office legend in a very short space of time. So there you have it. A St Emilion is for every lunch. Not just for Christmas.

Entertaining the Troops

In three days' time my entire department is coming over to my house for a Christmas lunch. There are about 35 of them, I live miles away from the office but they appear willing to trek across London for the event and so I need to make it worth their while. Actually just being able to have a glass of bubbly somewhere where you can kick your shoes off can be reason enough to trek across London for a corporate Xmas do. Let's face it. Most team Xmas lunches are dire. Overpriced, lukewarm, indifferent, canteen level meals at androgynous suit and tie bars that offer a deal which mysteriously ends up costing you fifty quid for all that crap booze you ended up quaffing just to try to anaesthetise yourself as much as possible from the experience. Going to someone's house goes a long way to pretending that it isn't a work do. It's a book club, an encounter group, a musical soiree, you just popped over for a cup of tea. It also means you can duck out without a conscience. Restaurants trap you, but if you can pretend you're popping in, you can just as easily pop out again too. Except that in my industry most people live South and I live North so if they are going to come this far to kick their shoes off, I need at least to feed them well. With cake. Lots of it. It's four days to go and I've clocked up a rack of brown sugar spelt cookies and a tray of double chocolate meringues. A damp, rich raspberry poundcake cools on the sideboard.I've popped out for lemons to create a glazed lemon tart. Two cheesecakes are on the list after that - a pumpkin cheesecake with butterscotch sauce, and a Nutella cheesecake wtih hazelnut shards.  If there's still fight left in me after that lot I'll pull off a tray of white chocolate flecked brownies. And what will the main course be? Well, I will probably poach some salmon, stuff some baked potato halvves with a mustard, cheddar and chive filling, maybe do some ricotta and tomato tartlets, a pasta dish and a salad. But let's face it, with desserts like that I could probably serve horseburgers and we'd all be happy. Number one rule for any dinner party - sort a beautiful dessert first. That way you know whatever happens, dinner will end on a high. Christmas lunch for 35 work colleagues? Same principle on a grander scale. Bring it on.

Macaroons at 2am

I was in New York this week. My first business visit there in three years - I have been sailing merrily to Brussels and back on the Eurostar ever since then, crowing to everyone I knew that I could make it to the European Commission for a day's committee meetings and still make it back to North London in time for tea.  New York, in spite of the number of flights to JFK each day, is really not the same bag. It requires planning, more than one outfit, a bigger wheelie, something comfortable to wear for the flight including Special Socks, extra food to counteract appalling aeroplane meals, and most of all, Jet Lag. It's been years and years of business travel, you think I would have conquered jet lag by now. But I haven't. I've been to South Korea on business. To Thailand. To Sri Lanka. To Washington. Every sodding journey includes weird nights consisting of 1 hour asleep, 3 hours watching a movie, 1 hour doze, 2 hours playing endless Scrabble. I meet people who tell me it's OK going East but murder coming back West. I find it all merges into a Chinese torture-like 24/7 sleep/wake/sleep/wake scenario. Kind of like a newborn baby who doesn't know day from night - sleeps all day and wails all through the dark hours. This New York visit was a really jampacked week of meetings, business dinners, speeches, conferences etc. I absolutely love New York City so it was also smattered with dashes into Bloomingdales and quirky boutiques, a late night visit to a hairdressing salon for curly haired people only, a foray into Dean and Deluca, drinks in bars with Wifi (American friends, you have NO idea how far behind your world London still is  on Wifi connection...). I stayed in an apartment in Yorkville, where three walls of the lounge had floor to ceiling windows facing the skyscraper views of 2nd Avenue and the eighties. Every night I woke up, despite all assisted means of sleeping through, at 2am. I rose, walked through to the lounge area, stared at the relentlessly urban, skyscraper view, and excavated my Dean and Deluca macaroons. I relapsed into the corporate sofa, prised open the macaroon jar, took out a scarily green coloured pistachio variety, bit into it, and stared at people still into their gym workout in the building opposite.  Bakery goods hit the spot after work, over tea, on Sundays, in a posh hotel brunch. None come close to a sweetener of night time jet lag. Hold the Nytol and the arnica. Macaroons and a view of uptown make my New York business visit complete.

Girl packs for a work trip

I have recently changed jobs, and consequently the type of business travel has also changed. In my last job it was overnight trips to Brussels. I got the packing for these trips down to a T. See, if you are a guy, your packing is a cinch, or so it would seem from the raft of suit clad men whose company I would routinely join on the Eurostar. These men would travel with only a backpack, which I am guessing, fairly accurately I imagine, contained all the papers and gadgets they needed for 24 hours, plus a pair of boxer shorts, a shirt, and a freebie mini bottle of shower gel. Maybe a deodorant. And that is it. See if you are a woman packing for a work trip isn't just a different affair, it is a different planet. It requires evening wear and boardroom wear, it needs travel wear that is smart but not frigid loooking, comfortable but not slouchy...I could go on. After a few of these trips I had it totally sorted. A cool looking wheelie bag just slightly larger than a briefcase, holding mini versions of all my make up and skincare, just enough to last one squirt of face cream or one squeeze of toothpaste, plus one jacket and two dresses, or one dress and two jackets. Easy. But the trips I have to do now are long haul and therefore more in the 3 to 4 day bracket, which change of circumstance has caused my brain to short circuit. Do I travel in comfortable clothes and then change? We are no longer in the eighties so no more business class, and we ALL know what economy class does to smart clothes. Or any clothes, frankly, Economy class is gross, exhausting and ageing, and requires a Battle Plan. What do I end up with? Smart but casual trousers with my trusty patent leather DMs which look amazingly cool with work dresses and would do for the boardroom or for the trendy dinners I reckon we will be tucking into in NYC. Stretchy dresses that scrunch up beautifully without wrinkling. One, ,just one jacket. Pair of boots. Will I only need these clothes??? No, of course not. But this is NY I am going to. When I run out, Macy's is a block away.

The Alice Band

I have been growing my hair. I say this like it's a proactive thing, like, if I didn't exert myself in some way, like adding Miracle-Gro to my shampoo, it would stay the same length. It's not so much that I have actively been promoting its growth. I just stopped doing the sorts of things that would keep it short. Like, having it cut. I didn't stop cutting it for any particularly positive reason either. I went to have my hair cut one day, sat in the chair awaiting the deft ministrations of G (I have no idea whatsoever what G stands for - everybody calls him G and I am far too British to ask him, so G it remains, and we have to hope I will never find myself in a situation where I am called on to furnish anyone with his full name). Anyway, I am waiting for G to put the last touches to a blue rinse for an octegenarian in the neighbouring seat - G is in no way a trendy coiffeur, he runs a fairly basic operation tucked into a dusty corner of a local gym, and I go to him periodically for cut and colour, neither of which requires either explanation or finesse. If it's a cut he hauls out the scissors, and if it's a touch up, then his tool is a paintbrush and a bowl of black goo, which stings my roots. As he finishes up with his aged client, a picture flashes into my mind of my elder sister. My sister died of cancer a year ago, but this was about 18 months ago and at that time she had finished her chemotherapy and her hair had fallen out completely. She had curly hair like mine, a slightly lighter brown and not as thick but still, similar enough for me to picture her head with its tufts of hair beginning to reappear after the toxic assault of her cancer-nuking drug regime, and I thought to myself, no. I cannot cut my hair. I'm lucky to have it. I apologise to G and leave. And have been back only once or twice in the intervening time, to have my grey roots doused. Otherwise it's been left well alone and now there is loads and loads of it. Its a bit of a culture shock, having long hair. All sorts of issues, like how it slaps you in the face when it's windy outside. Or it sticks to your lip gloss. Or you have to wear brasher earrings otherwise no point in wearing earrings at all as nobody can see them. Or, you turn over in your sleep and get a mouthful of the stuff. In the Summer it's unbearably hot under my copious locks, and in Winter it's toasty warm. The biggest perk is that I can accessorise it. I invested in multiple scrunchies from American Apparel - lots of them, each one a different acid colour - and I play around with them, but unfortunately if there is one issue with curly hair it is that no scrunchie will tame it. Only on film sets do curls tease themselves into perfectly formed tendrils. Mine, if tied back, takes on the form of a rainforest after the storm. And as a keen baker, this is proving a major liability. I don't mind finding your hair in my food, says one of my friends.  At least I know where it came from.  But, he continues tactfully, not everyone may feel the same way. I heave myself off to a department store to investigate the alternatives, and it is there that I encounter The Alice Band. These are loathsome things. They come in every conceivable shape, material, colour and size, but their basic function is the same: to draw your hair back from your face, while simultaneously ageing your look by about 50 years. I try thin ones and thick ones, wooden and fabric, metal and plastic, sparkly and velvet ones, turban ones and ones that look like fascinators, and ones that I cannot believe have not been banned for their potential as offensive weapons.  I pick one out, pay for it, take it home and put it on. It is thin, with spikes that hold my hair back the way an iron gate with anti-pigeon border might.  Within ten minutes, my temples start to ache. My hair starts to protest, then to attempt a Colditz style breakout. I sift flour, nudging my Alice Band away from my temples with my shoulders. Then I shift it an inch with my hands, getting flour bits trapped between its teeth. Aaargh. Then it falls forward (hair having achieved a partial success, a bit like The Great Escape). At the same time one of my kids drops a bag of frozen peas on the floor by accident and hundreds disappear under the fridge. I turn around. Survey the situation. Take off the alice band, stretch it flat, and poking it under the fridge, retrieve the peas. My bid for hair-free baking products has failed, spectacularly - nothing for it but a proper chef's hat, which will be much more fun to wear. Meantime, I need to download an application form to patent the World's first ever Subterranean Pea Retriever.

Delayed gratification

I had a really underwhelming day at work today. I went on a training course that bored me to tears. I punched messages furiously into my Blackberry as complex issue after complex issue dropped into my inbox, reinforcing my sense of being hopelessly trapped in an airless room with substandard tea, nasty biscuits and nowhere to hide. Eventually I gave up on the course, returned to my desk, dealt with the various situations, and then took myself off to redeem the day. I took a long, long route to the tube in the expectation that one of the many shops and boutiques I would have to walk past, would resolve my sense of a wasted day in a flash of impulse retail therapy. But it didn't. I poked in a few but left feeling a bit desultory. In and out of Kate Spade, Paul Smith, Poste Mistress and some weird Danish shop where the assistants wore huge turbans and vibrant potato sacks (well they LOOKED like potato sacks in a former life) had no impact at all. I gave up and went home to continue my work. I work in the kitchen - my kitchen is lovely and big, white and bright, with a beautiful view over my garden, which is small but perfectly formed, with herbs growing near the French windows - a total idyll  for the keen cook - and I realise I won't be able to resolve my day and return to my work until I have baked something. But I am too cross to make a cake, and biscuits feel frippery, and I lack the concentration to make a tart. That leaves dough. I leaf through my favourite recipes, then I surf the internet, then I sit back and think for a bit, and then I get up and mix flour, baking powder, yeast, sugar, lemon zest and butter, in a mixer with a dough hook. I watch it as it goes round and round and round, getting sticky and elasticated and glistening. I take it out. Oil a large bowl with sunflower oil. Place my beautiful dough in the bowl. Cover it and put it in the fridge. It will prove all night, and tomorrow I will think about lacing it with chocolate, splitting it, plaiting it, rising it and baking it. Just the anticipation is enough to transform my mood. Finally I have achieved something worthwhile with my day. I settle back into my work, and I work efficiently and creatively. See, for some people it's a glass of wine, and for others it's a bath. And for me, it's dough. Not an end product, but something that takes effort and skill to create, and then needs patience and gentle hands, which I won't even be eating for another 24 hours. Delayed gratification, Melinda style.

Peanut Butter Squares

I spent literally the entire day on Sunday preparing for a dinner for some friends. I made black olive rye bread. Tuna meatballs on a Tuscan tomato sauce bed with steamed basmati rice. I made a warm courgette and spinach salad. I made chocolate truffles.  I've blogged about my chocolate truffles before. I make them with the darkest chocolate, lots of espresso powder and honey. It should only take about 10 minutes to make them once the chocolate, coffee and honey mixture semi-sets in the fridge, but in reality the drizzling of the honey into the viscous chocolate and coffee mix is so damn mesmerising I can let half an hour go by just watching it drip off the end of a teaspoon. But this is a dinner party and I need to concentrate. Besides, I am also making my raspberry and almond frangipane tart, complete with homemade sweetcrust pastry, a lemon creme pat, frangipane paste and a whipped cream topping with raspberry and kirsch drizzled over the top, which takes hours and hours to put together. I love, love, love cooking for dinners so no hardship at all to spend pretty much the entire day in a kitchen - all those half hours waiting for dough to prove and truffle mix to set are after all perfect opportunities to paint my nails, drink tea, read the papers and stare contemplatively out of the window at my beautifully emerging Winter garden, which has just been pruned to within an inch of its life, and is feeding greedily on the peat that has been dumped all over it. But this blog post is not about any of this fab food, though I should just close this part by confirming that it went down beautifully with my guests. One of those great moments where you imagine you are actually living one of those scenes at the end of Nigella Bites where she produces, seemingly effortlessly, dishes and dishes of beautiful looking food, floats into the kitchen dressed to the nines, chest standing to attention, and dishes up to her mates who clink their glasses, oblivious to the amazing luck that has blessed them with a friend like Nigella. So, a successful evening, but not the sum total of my baking efforts. Amazing that there was any time left after the scope of that menu. But what happened was that after producing all that grown up food, I was overtaken by a need to revisit my prepubescent years, and I scanned my accumulated book of recipes for inspiration. What would hit it more definitively than peanut butter squares? Made with leftover Speculoos paste, organic unsweetened peanut buter, and I am in the school of Digestive Biscuit base. You need the crunch to contrast with the sticky peanut butter. And my topping must be milk chocolate. Dark chocolate indicates an attempt to transform your peanut butter square into something serious, and serious is something a peanut butter square absolutely is not. It is about comfort, craving for childhood, it is all about reward. It takes an hour to set, and after I have cut the block up into squares, an hour to despatch. My house is full of kids at the moment, not all of them mine. I am lucky to get one, and I make it last over a cup of tea.

Fridge cake in a clean fridge

I went to a hilarious aerobics class. It was quite clearly targeted at stay at home Mums with pre pubescent kids. The class was at 10am, obviously a time no working Mum could make; it was bursting with expat housewives, all in dedicated dance gear; and the trainer, a bouncy and bubbly girl with pigtails and an endearing manner threw in One Direction references throughout the class. A great set of routines, this: there was absolutely no bar to set, you just threw yourself into the rhythm. Instead of walking out in disgust, my superior nose in the air, I had loads of fun. Ah, how the orthopaedically challenged are fallen. Not that long ago I was pumping iron with the best of them. One knee injury and one new foot later, I am relegated to the mid morning beginners Ricky Martin danceathon slot. But look, not only was it unexpectedly good fun, I came out streaming, aching, and if I am brutally honest, feeling more than a little bit sexy. All that hip wiggling. Amazing what it does to the hormones. Perhaps I am a bit closer to understanding the uproar over Miley's opportunistic twerk. Anyway. I come home feeling very virtuous, and cement my place in Heaven by deciding to Tackle The Fridge. This as anyone knows, is a horrendous task, particuarly if you are a foodie and you hoard stuff in the fridge door because Delia has it, or Nigella said you have to have it, or worst of all, you have attempted an Ottolenghi recipe - no recipe by Mr O uses less than 150 ingredients, each scorchingly hard to procure, which then wither gently in the fridge over the course of the year. If that is you, and it sure as hell is me, then clearing out of the fridge rivals Greek myth. And it requires serious motivation to achieve. I discover that in fact a whacky dance class at my local gym is not quite the push I need. What I need is to bake something fridge related, to balance the awfulness of cleaning out and recycling pots a third full of indeterminate goo, the rest of the jar full of white mould. Fortuitously, the Times is running a foodie piece featuring recipes by Gordon Ramsay and one of them is a recipe for a fridge cake. It has salted peanuts and dried cranberries in it. And chopped up pink marshmallows and white marshmallows (actually Gordon does not specify the colours but my imagination fills in the gaps). It gives you the choice of milk or dark chocolate and I promptly choose milk. Chocolate, butter and syrup get stirred into an unctuous paste, to which, when it cools, my chopped up nuts, mallows and fruit are added, the whole lot poured into a square tin, mashe down hard with a spatula, and consigned to the fridge. I prepare each part of this cake in between emptying a fridge shelf, cleaning it with anti bacterial stuff and putting it back again with less than half its previous occupants. On to one of these I then place my baking tin. Oh, the anticipation of it!! I can't wait for it to harden enough to try it, and obligingly it is hard enough in a couple of hours. By which time the fridge is pristine, and I am exhausted and ready for a cup of tea and a slice of my motivational creation. Clean fridge and fridge cake. It's not rocket science.

Chocolate Krantzcakes and Work Life Balance

Such is the power of Yotam Ottolenghi that when I find a recipe in one of his books that turns on my baking lightbulb, I skim the ingredients and reach for my apron. I don't even picture the end product, I just absolutely know that if I follow it through, something fabulous will emerge from my oven. In this case, I have never heard of the term Krantzcake, but I do know what he is describing. It 's kind of like a Jewish version of a brioche, with lines of chocolate running through it, in the form of a plaited loaf. No problem. Except that as I get tucked into the instructions, I see a line that says, this is very complicated and takes a long time to make. Oh dear. Given that all of Ottolenghi's recipes are very complicated and take a long time to make, if he actually goes to the trouble of articulating this in a recipe, you are officially in trouble. But it's too late. The dough hook is on my Kitchen Aid and I am already half way through the dough. You have to leave the dough to prove for at least half a day. Preferably overnight. This is a cake you do not want to make unless you are housebound. Luckily, today I am. I am Working From Home. Make no mistake, people who work from home, do so because they have other things to do than work. I have no truck at all with this. I work at home myself on average one day a fortnight, and mostly I do it not because it is more efficient, or even quieter - most days my house is bedlam even when the kids are at school - but because the combination of very early mornings, commuting, races up and down Whitehall to get to meetings in time, streams of people asking me questions, beating a path through bewildered tourists to get to, well, wherever is within a 5 mile radius of the office, is just bloody overwhelming. I need a working day off. I need one where I do my work away from the hubbub. But if I sat at my laptop or poring over documents for an entire day, a sore bum  and a curved back would be the result, not to mention severe ennui and a serious case of cabin fever. And I am not alone in this. People who work from home combine home deliveries, the weekly wash, some cleaning, a lunch with a mate, a walk with the dog, a longer session at the gym, a long and luxurious personal phone call, etc etc. I like to intersperse my work with baking. It's the perfect balance. Baking requires me to get up, pound things, dance around the kitchen, focus a different part of my brain, and breathe in. A lot. So. I pore over a document about women building peace in conflict affected societies. After an hour I get up and observe my krantzcake dough, which does not appear to be doing a whole lot. So I make a milk tart, sit back down again, and another 2 hours sunk in another document about conflict diamonds. The dough is rising nicely so I jump on my bike, head to the gym which is 5 mins away and hit a class called Shabam. Or maybe, Shazam. It's a dance class for Mums who can't dance but love to move. It is perfect for me. I cycle back again without any feeling left in my lower limbs. I have lunch. Answer a shed of emails. Return to my documents. At about 5, my dough is ready. I divide it in two. Prepare a paste of dark melted chocolate, icing sugar, cocoa powder and melted butter. Roll out my two doughs. Spread my paste over each with a spatula. Roll each one up in the shape of a cigar. Cut them each very carefully lengthways with a sharp, serrated knife. What follows is a GLORIOUS sticky chocolately attempt to plait the two halves over each other. This is more or less successful. It's not Masterchef but would grace any rustic looking cafe table. I leave them to rise in baking tins under wet towels, while I make dinner and take some work calls. By the time dinner is ready, the plaited cake loaves are ready for the oven. I pop them in and the aroma that wafts immediately from within is so distracting we can hardly eat our main course. I take them out. Family tears into them. They are gone in 15 minutes. I take a few last calls. Mop up my emails. Shut down my laptop. Pour myself a glass of wine. And that, my friends, is a successful Work Life Balance.

Chocolate pasta

My family and I watched spellbound as Nigella Lawson cooked up chocolate pasta and whipped up a butterscotch sauce which she poured over her penne, then spooned it into a bowl and tucked into it, announcing that this was the meal you had when you couldn't decide whether you wanted sweet or savoury for dinner. Well, you can bet your bottom dollar she didn't eat more than a spoonful of that pasta, judging from her recently slimmed down look. And b, if you are contemplating a bowl of chocolate pasta for your dinner you are in urgent need of advice from a dietitian. Still I am intrigued and decide to make it as an alternative pudding. I use this word literally. It takes me a while to track down the cocoa penne shells but I find them, boil them up in a saucepan, then make my Nigella butterscotch sauce. I pour it over my pasta, look at it for a moment, then pull out some macadamia nuts which I roast, chop and scatter over the pasta. Then I go totally over the edge and lose all perspective as I come across some marshmallows, which I chop up and use as a garnish. I serve this to my disbelieving family as a dessert. This, make no mistake, is a pudding. It is a proud contender, knocking the socks off its more traditional competitors. And judging from the reaction from the family, all of whom were to be found minutes later sprawled helplessly over the sofas like beached whales, it needs to be eaten in small doses. Is it weird, eating pasta as a dessert? Not if you're Jewish and raised on lokshen pudding, essentially pasta, butter and raisins. Will I make it again? In about a year. When the family has got over this lot.

Storms and junk food

Round about the middle of last week, the UK's Met Office showed prescience and accuracy in its forecasting - two qualities which rarely go together in UK weather forecasting - in warning all us Brits about an impending storm. It was going to track its way across the Atlantic, they said, before reaching the South West mid Sunday eve and hitting the whole of South England on Monday morning. It would be gone by lunchtime on Monday but in that brief period it was going to wreak havoc. Oooh, we said. And, aaaah. But I'm not sure how many of us actually believed it, not least because the weather forecasters stopped short of calling it a hurricane - a political exercise in definitions. It wasn't going to be a hurricane because the 90mph winds would only be felt in gusts. Oh well that's all right then, we said to each other. Not a hurricane. Well, at around 2am the entire population of South England was woken up, and thereafter kept awake, by howling winds and lashing rain, which pulled the trees almost horizontal. Particularly alarming if you live in the shadow of trees that are at least 10 times your height, as I do. By the following morning, anyone who owned garden furniture could no longer locate it. I put my nose outside the door and withdrew it in terror. The wind took my breath away. I wondered for a few minutes whether I couldn't just decide that my work was less important than my wellbeing, and stay at home as the travel advice sugested. But a misguided sense of duty made my mind up for me and 15 minutes later I was out in this weather. Walking up to the main road was like a scene from a science fiction film. Bins flying through the air. Tarpaulin howling, half ripped off scaffolding. Contents of a skip scattered across the road, complete with iron bars that twitched and slid. By the time I reached the main road I had been hit on the leg by a food recycling bin, and been blown over on my back twice. I made it to the station, only to see a tree come crashing down on the line, thus ending any prospect of rail travel for the day. I took my life into my hands and climbed on a double decker bus which pitched and swayed dangerously. I got off near my work 2 hours later, to see that a crane had crashed into the roof of the neighbouring building. I fought off leaves and refugee insects to get into the office. In a building of 2000, maybe 20 of us had made it in. When I left for home, I was exhausted. The storm had moved on but debris was everywhere. I walked back down the road to my house, still littered with bins, branches and iron bars. I let myself into the house. And proceeded to devour two chocolate bars and a tub of ice cream. Sometimes. Just sometimes. Junk food really is the only reward for a very, very hard day.

Pretzels and feet

I went to see my foot surgeon earlier this week. This man is fast becoming a member of the family. After all he has had more intimate contact with my left foot than anybody I've ever met. I've also howled over his shoulder twice (once because having 60 stitches removed from my new foot was so bloody painful, the other because I'd been waiting outside the X ray theatre for over 2 hours for my turn and was still too drug addled from prescription painkillers to be rational about it), clutched on to his shoulders while dragging myself across the room in my orthopaedic boot, and flung my arms around his neck after taking my first unaided steps. OK it doesn't hurt that he is serious eye candy. A friend of mine had a similar issue with one of her feet and I recommended my surgeon, and she hasn't stopped talking about his sauve good looks ever since her first consultation. Anyway. I digress (but you can see how that would happen, a bloke like him). I went back to see him as I have new pains in my new foot. Essentially the tendons that my fit surgeon rerouted in order to give the foot new stability, compromised its ability to complete the range of motion that it needs to take a step. Essentially, my big toe won't finish the job. And this tiny lack of movement has resulted in crippling pain across the bridge of my foot. This is all correctable, with even more physiotherapy and differently shaped orthotics - after all, this is me we are talking about, and if you are following this blog you will know I am not one to Give Up. But still it's wearing to find myself back in orthopaedic outpatients, subject to my usual 3 hour wait (though recently I've discovered that if you insist you can screw a 9am appointment out of the booking bureaucrats, thus cutting your wait to less than 15 minutes - this is tantamount to the invention of the wheel). My usual response to the next orthopaedic challenge is on a par with my response to any quirk in my daily life, which is to bake. The tougher the challenge, the more adventurous my baking session. This one was mammoth. It included a gateau St Emilion - no base involved, just a concoction of creamy dark chocolate with amaretti in brandy broken up and scattered across the top (yummmmm), tomato and oregano pizza for my cheese-hating eldest, and another thick cheese pizza for my cheese-obsessed Youngest.  Chocolate fridge cookies with white chocolate and creme fraiche buttercream. A crumble of squash and parsnip with nuts, mustard and blue cheese. And finally, Pretzels. I watched these being made with some curiosity on the Great British Bake Off. Things always look very easy on GBBO but of course you are watching the Heavily Edited version of events, so it always looks a bit weird when you see them turn out their beautifully rendered pretzels with deftness and ease, and in the next shot you catch them wiping their brows and swigging back water like they've just navigated the Karoo on an outward bound weekend. I want to see how hard these things are. And they are. They're really hard to make for my first attempt. No problem with the dough, which proves obligingly in a corner. No problem to make 12 doughballs out of the mixture. Rolling out each one while maintaining its integrity, and looping each long rope into a pretzel shape without breaking it, is a fantastic bicep/tricep workout, I discover as I do this. With each one I become warmer and more achey, I start to sweat - quite a lot, even for someone like me, experiencing my Personal Summer for the nth time this week alone - and when I have all 12 done I have to lie down for a few inutes before dunking them each into my water and baking powder, which by the way froths fabulously, not unlike a scene from one of Professor Snape's potion lessons. This is a perfect antidote to my orthopaedic encounter. You see, when the medical profession takes on the challenge of your malfunctioning body, either you instantly cede all control to He Who Knows What He Is Doing, which leaves you totally helpless. Or you take on the challenge of Self Help, which even the strongest patient will tell you can leave you staring, metaphorically, at Mount Everest. You're at the bottom. How to get to the top. Nobody would blame you for giving up and just seeing out the rest of your life with limited left foot mobility. Baking a pretzel reminds me that tricky though it is, control, even triumph, even a temporary win, is not just possible, it is endlessly satisfying. I sprinkle my puffed up pretzel dough with sesame seeds, slide them into the oven, and take them out 20 minutes later, deeply golden brown, crusty on the outside, chewy on the inside. They are delicious, especially with a last minute inspired addition of sprinkled rock salt on the outer edges. I made a pretzel (twelve of them). Surely I can get my big toe to take a proper step.

Learn from someone you love

There was a memorial service for my sister yesterday. It was very emotional, and very beautiful. Only slightly marred by the torrential downpour that comes with the unsettling shift into a British Autumn, and let me tell you, in case you don't already know this, that there are plenty of unfortunate places to be caught in a thunderstorm and downpour, but none quite so thankless, bleak or depressing than a cemetery. Five minutes in my feet were soaked, my hands were freezing, and my obligatory hat drooped miserably at the edges. Still, the service was a meaningful one, one my sister would have been gratified to have heard, a set of reflections that paid true tribute to her wonderfulness. Something that was said during the service set me thinking. A common strain of thought in my faith, and one which was repeated at the service, was that in trying to come to terms with the death of someone you love, one of the best ways forward is to replicate their virtues as a legacy of their life. What were my sister's virtues? She was extraordinarily generous and kind. At the service there were many people I didn't recognise. One, a woman in a wheelchair, wheeled over to me to say hello. She looked to be in her early seventies, more than 20 years older than my sister. I asked how she knew her. She said she was in the next bed in the hospital when my sister had had her mastectomy. My sister, even in recovery, had taken an active interest in her neighbour, and after they left hospital they stayed in touch and became very close. I was very touched by this story. In hospital wards, and I have spent time in a few, generally the last thing on most people's list of priorities is to make friends with your neighbours. My top priority is to get the hell out as soon as I decently can, and avoid catching MRSA comes a close second. In any case I am usually so drug addled I am too moody to communicate with my own family, never mind total strangers who are twenty years older. Not my sister. She had had a breast removed in a desperate treatment regime designed, ultimately, to claw back two years of life. And she still managed to take an interest in the people around her, even in her pain. I am sure I can learn from this, though I am also sure it will creep out my fellow commuters if I start taking an interest in their lives on the 0600 to Charing Cross. At the same time, my sister was an accomplished baker of occasion cakes, because she was arty and creative and loved making something  beautiful to celebrate a milestone in somebody's life. Well. I think I have the baking thing sewn up. And, like my sister, I love to bake a cake for others. I am rubbish at piping icing, my line tends to be in a damn fine chcoolate tart for someone who is sad or recovering from an illness or just needs some TLC. But it gives me extra pleasure to bake something with my sister in my mind.  I mull over this as I put together a massive chocolate pudding. It is about recalling elements of my sister's special gifts that form part of my healing journey, not about replicating them completely. At least, I hope not. She used to knock out four tier cakes shaped like computers and guitars. If I turn out a guitar shaped cake it's because the neighbour's dog has chewed the sides.

Moving on

Today is the stonesetting for my sister. It is just over a year since she died of secondary breast cancer, and today the tombstone, which was laid on her grave just a few days ago, will be consecrated. Really it is an excuse for a memorial service, and the year marks a point at which the bereaved should probably begin to think about moving on. I am one of the bereaved, and my response to this milestone is to bake up a storm. A tarte au chocolat. Chocolate crunch, made of honey, oats, Rice Krispies, coconut, cocoa powder, organic milk chocolate, honey and sunflower oil. Soda bread. And, umm, I dunno, other stuff. I'll just keep going until it's time to put on my purple outfit and go and commemorate my sister's life, consumed by cancer that killed her when it pursued its inexorable, unstoppable, toxic path from her breast to her liver, taking in her lungs, her ribs, her arms and her spine on its malignant route.  Baking might seem like a weird response to the memories of such horror (and by the way,while I totally agree with the view of Jennifer Saunders that cancer happens to loads of people and we should all get on with it, I also beg to differ on the grounds that she was lucky enough to have a survivable strain. I did too, when I was treated for thyroid cancer 5 years ago, and I don't make a song and dance out of it. I had it. It was treated. It's gone. It's unlikely to come back. End of. When you lose someone to cancer, though, the helpless process that takes hold is an hourly, living nightmare that changes your life. It is a horror for the suffering and for those who love them. So, baking.  Why? It is a therapeutic process like no other. And as a keen gardener, pianist, linguist and general cook, I think I would know. It demands concentration and creativity. It produces an outcome that is deeply satisfying. it looks beautiful. It has comfort written all over it. I bake to erase some of that nightmare quality. And I think I have to do this. Because after the stonesetting is over, and the last cup of tea has been drunk by the friends who will have joined us, I will have to find a place for all this pain so I can move on, and remember my sister in the shape of all the wonderful things she did and all the wonderful qualities that defined her (including her passion for purple, hence the dress). And right now that pain is just too, well, painful, to put away. It needs reshaping. It needs reducing. It needs rebalancing. My sister loved to bake. She was an extraordinary creator of Occasion Cakes. When I bake, my memories of her pain are overlaid by memories of her passion. So baking is part of my process of moving on.

Umbrellas

The weather changed abruptly in the middle of this week. After a really beautiful October of sun and calm, during which I congratulated myself on staving off the dreaded moment when 60 denier black tights would have to be excavated from the depths of my drawers, compete with runs and fluff, the moment finally came.Followed, of course, by the inevitable, panic stricken mass purchase of the bloody things. I HATE tights. They are just too risky. The number of tights related mishaps are just too many to list, but if it's a toss up between mud splattered calves and blue knees, I'll take the former any time thanks. Not much you can do about the mud in rainy and windy weather - wait till it dries, then scrub it off with a tissue, or just pretend it's part of the design (that has personally NEVER worked for me). No, the real challenge in this weather, is Hair. This is the best possible weather if you want your hair to look as if you have run the gamut of an alien invasion and electric shock therapy. I tend to look this way at weekends and feel cheerfully unselfconscious about it, but work hair has to be tidy if I am to hold my composure in meetings dominated by sleek looking blokes. And that means wrestly with the worst accessory in the world - The Umbrella. They are hopeless things really aren't they. Small portable ones manage to camouflage themselves in my bag. I can never bloody well find it when I need it. Or I stick it into my coat pocket, which is ungainly but then at least I know it's there, and I open it up and five minutes later it's broken. Or you spend several fortunes investing in a smart full size one, maybe with a wooden handle, or one of those posh see through ones like the Queen has, and you walk along wtih it to the tube station and by the time you get there you realise that the reason why the Queen uses it is because she has some lackey carrying it for her. You never see her struggle out of a train with a curved stick attached to some plastic and metal spokes that somehow manages to wrap itself round your legs, or if it's wet, create rivulets of running water down the tube floor, causing venomous looks from fellow passengers whose bags are getting soggy bottoms. But hey. At least I always have one. It's reassuring. Which is more than you can say for the average bloke, who seems a lot less unselfconscious about the prospect of being hurled on all over the shoulders of their suit. Presumably this is because the material is drip dry? I was at a work lunch on Friday with one woman and three men and when we came out of the restaurant into an Autumn deluge the only people who had umbrellas were the women. Who were also wearing coats with hoods. So, we put up our hoods and donated the umbrellas to our hapless male colleagues, who muttered things like, it wasn't raining when we came out (it was actually, you were just being macho and ignoring it). Sigh. Muddy tights. Frizzed wet weather hair. Flat, rainhood hair. Damp shoulder pads. Broken mini umbrellas. Welcome to Autumn.

Frangipane

Frangipane. That is a really, really great word. It's one of those words where, the more often you repeat it, the weirder it sounds. For a while I've known it's a type of sweet tart, but it wasn't until seeing it made on a foodie TV programme that I finally clocked what went into it. Problem, of course, with TV programmes is that even if they 'fess up and tell you how long it really makes to produce one of these creations, and that's if you know what you're doing, it doesn't feel like it takes that long because of course they've edited out loads. Like, the bit where you put the dough in the fridge to prove for two hours and you go off shopping or you sit in front of the telly with a cup of tea and a doughnut, or you do the ironing or text people or check your FB page, as this would all make for really boring telly. Consequently, they tell you it takes four hours, you think duh! You made it in 15 minutes!! Then you go off and have a go and two hours later you're kneading dough for its second prove and regretting, bitterly, that you didn't just go for the choc chip cookies which take 15 minutes from start to finish. So. Here I am in the evolutionary process of creating my raspberry, lemon and almond frangipane tart. It's not going to take me four hours to make. It's going to be more like twenty four hours. My dough for the tart is in the fridge, where it needs a minimum of two hours to rest but the recipe tells me helpfully, that an overnight residence in the depths of my fridge is more likely to produce the crust I need so I have decided to take this advice at face value. My lemon creme patissiere needs to be watched like a hawk to ensure it does not form a skin - I love custard skin myself, I used to sneak a skim off the top of the Birds Eye custard my Mum used to make when her back was turned (though it was the solidifying type of custard so I'm guessing that she clocked the oval indent in the side of the bowl, put two and two together with ease but was just too nice a person to let on) but you can't have a skin on your creme pat (this is the jargon of foodie professionals) if you want a perfect frangipane. After a few hours of this, I become slightly mesmerised by it. My brain slips into alchemy mode. Making a creme pat takes serious concentration if you want to hold the flavours right and get the consistency perfect so that you can like your jam across the top. And concentration is good for anyone who has had a tough week. And mine has been a tough one. Still in the early days of a new job, in that horrible bit where everyone around you knows more than you do, including the security guard (because he knows where all the bogs are and I'm yet to discover them), and the sheer  volume of information is overwhelming etc etc and you go home most days wondering whether this was all a terrible mistake. Of course it isn't, and in a few weeks I'll be climbing back up the hill of mental satisfaction which comes of saying something awfully clever in a meeting and clocking that I might have got with the programme. In the meantime, baking is a salvation. You can produce a beautiful frangipane even if you don't know where the toilets are on the 5th floor of your building and this is immensely confidence restoring. It's just lucky I'm not producing this frangipane for a TV baking competition. There'd be an awful lot of editing tape on the floor.

Neon Tweed

Neon tweed. There are two words you don't hear together very often.  I've just bought a skirt that describes itself as exactly that, which is why I bought it. Any item of clothing with that sassy an identity deserves an airing. Truth is I was on the hunt for a conservative suit. Something in , say, taupe. Skirt, jacket - nice white shirt, maybe some pearls, American Tan tights, sensible court shoes courtesy of some shoe manufacturer that puts extra padding in the insole. I have started a new job, you see, in a work environment I am not yet wholly familiar with but which looked terribly conservative from the outside so I thought I had better at least make an optical effort to fit in. But of course, face to face with said taupe two piece somewhere bland on the faceless, generic high street, I couldn't bring myself to take it off the hanger, never mind try it on. It was a good moment, an empowering moment. Though I knew this about myself - I may be tenuous on occasion, apologetic, a bit too ready to hide in my comfort zone - my public Me is enthusiastic, energetic, upbeat.  These qualities demand colour. The fact that I had signed up to spend the next three years of my career in a building with pillars, tiles, arty ceilings and entrances with personal names, did not mean I needed to blend in with its distempered walls to become worthy to wear my pass.  My eye wandered past the taupe two piece to a flash of colour. I head straight for it. It's tweed. Neon tweed. Brilliant. Five minutes later I'm out the door with the skirt in a bag. I haven't even tried it on but I know it is going to look great. It's going to make its debut with a black turtleneck, a metal rope of small multicoloured beads, patent knee high black boots, really big hair.  I pick clothes the way I bake. Start with the accepted recipe. Two minutes in, I've changed the plain flour for nutty spelt, the raisins for chunks of chocolate. I've whipped egg whites into the batter to give it height, and my buttercream has been whisked and whisked and whisked till it's so light it's practically taken off. It gets decorated with a riot of M and Ms, colours arranged in organised chaos. Neon tweed. Exuberant cakes. I don't know what my work legacy will be in three years. I do know those corridors will be the perfect backdrop for my neon tweed to sing.

Baking with a Tan

I have been on a holiday. Probably the laziest holiday I have taken in my entire life. One involving RyanAir from Stansted in the company of scores and scores of Essex boys and girls, the boys wearing Calvin Klein boxers protruding well above their neon sweatpants, the girls clutching Michael Kors bags over one arm and self tanner in the other hand. Car hire at Malaga, a brief scrum to get out of the airport away from everyone patiently awaiting their package tour buses, and into the hills, to a villa with beautiful fragrant flowers bursting from every crack in the wall and paving, two lemon trees, dusty window sills, and a pool to lie beside. Which I do. Practically every day. Aside fro brief forays to Granada, La Torcal, Nerja, and an ill advised afternoon attempting Malaga's market, I stay by the pool in a permanent doze. It is wonderful - the sun shines and I come back from Spain with a pool tan. Which, seconds after touching down in the grey dawn at Stansted a week after leaving it, I realise looked fabulous in the Andalucian hills, but positively tawdry on the commute to work. In fact the tan looks out of place even when I am up to my elbows in icing sugar. I decide the only answer to the tanned-arms-baking conundrum, is to bake tan-appropriate food. In the villa in which we stayed the owner had thoughtfully placed random Spain-related books - coffee table books with beautiful photographs, maps, tour books, and, yay, cookery and foodie books. One is Claudia Roden's Spain, and in between poolside snoozes, I leaf through it with increasing excitement. During that week I make her rustic egg, potato and onion frittata like meals over and over. I covet an opportunity to make the tuna pie but even I know pies are not things you make when on holiday, even a self catering holiday. Self catering holidays are about bakery bought bed, olives and a great bottle of wine. maybe frozen fishfingers for the kids.  Now I am home contemplating my bronzed arms, Claudia's Spanish tuna pie seems exactly right as a postscript to a fabulous week. I make the pastry (while watching The Great British Bake Off on I Player, which, uncannily, features a pastry episode), and an hour or so later I lift my beautiful, tomato-redolent, oozing creation from the oven. Yup, this is what someone with an Andalucian tan puts on the table for dinner.

Baking for a Fast

A 25 hour fast begins this evening. It may seem like a contradiction, baking for a fast, and every year religious people exhort observers of the fast not to focus on the food but on the meaning of the day, which is about reflection and repentance. Fat chance. The right type of food can set you up for a frame of mind that encourages reflection and repentance, and the wrong food can put you in a bad mood for the whole day, worsening only as the hunger pangs increase. No. Getting the food right is really, really important. And loads of fun, if you are an obsessive baking geek like me. The key is not actually quantity. I have yet to stuff myself silly either before or after a fast. In fact I'm more likely to glug back pints of water - this is a no fluids and no food fast - than guzzle down the pasta. But I do know that comfort is the key here. You thought I was going to say low GI, right? If you stuff yourself with the wrong type of carbs, you get hunger pangs half an hour after you've finished eating right?  I am sure the nutrio-science is right on this but I think fasting is much more about the emotions. A lot of people get tearful mid afternoon, just 3 or 4 hours away from the end of the fast. It is important to tap into that vulnerability and service it with your grub. Which also means, providing food that is familiar, and preferably nostalgic. I grew up eating cholent before the fast. My parents worked full time, very long hours, and the only way my Mother was going to get food ready for the fast was by preparing it the weekend before. So, dumplings, potatoes, large sides of beef, butter beans and a sauce, into the oven on Sunday on a very low heat, and by Tuesday the house was permeated with the amazing aroma, the warm and tantalising wreath like smell coming from the oven, of a slow cooked, Eastern European stew. Come the fast, we'd open the pot and find the top and the sides a blackened mess, if I'm really honest. But underneath the crust (and anyway, my Dad LOVED the crust - urgh, no accounting for taste here) were dumplings pungent with stock, falling apart gently when you poked them with a fork, and beef almost dissolved into the potatoes, and plump, melty butter beans....a bowlful of that and you were ready, not just for a day of reflection, but a day of reflection in a community hall a 2 mile walk away IN THE RAIN. Not many foods you can say that about. So it's no surprise that my starter for the fast is reminiscent of this - a beef and mushroom casserole, slow cooked with carrots, celery, garlic and loads and loads of thyme. Mmmm, chant the kids, who recognise the impending fast from the smell of the thyme. See? Nostalgia, successfully tapped into. If there is any casserole left after the fast I have no doubt it'll be hoovered up with chunks of ritual bread to wipe the remains from the sides of the saucepan. But in case there isn't, I have just finished crisp-frying a small mountain of halibut. It has to be halibut, even though halibut will cost you a mortgage. It's a beefy fish, but also it holds its moisture without falling apart or compromising the breadcrumb crust, which I season with...well I'm not telling you that bit. Counterintuitively for a cook, I like to have one Secret Recipe in my life, and the herbs and spices I use to coat my fish for frying constitute my Secret Recipe. Suffice to say, that the small mountain of fish will be reduced to a few small crumbs, minutes after we arrive back home from our day of reflection, tired, thirsty, strangely cleansed from our communal review of a flawed and testing year, exhilarated from the achievement of seeing through the day, relieved to have concluded it, and looking forward to two things: doing our best not to screw things up quite so often in the course of the next year; and, baking and eating my next cake. What's that? A raspberry and almond poundcake, dusted with icing sugar, since you ask. Once the massive steamed chocolate pudding, redolent with dark muscovado sugar, which I am just putting into the oven now, has been finished.

Aftermath

Aftermath is a word I have always taken to mean, the immediate effect of something happening. It is nearly a year since my elder sister died and in the last week I have been waking up in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking, and spending the next two hours at least calming myself down from the indefinable nightmare that woke me. At some point it became clear to me that these nightmares were somehow connected to my sister. She didn't feature in them at all. They weren't about her. In fact they were totally random and entirely unrealistic scenarios related to my work or places I had been to or planned to visit. Still I felt certain that there was a connection in there somewhere to her. Last night I came downstairs at around 3am having woken from yet another dark dream experience, and over a warm drink I thought about it. Gradually it came to me, that the connection between my sister, and these dreams, was pain. I was feeling intense emotional pain in these dreams. I was, in fact, reliving the experience of the month running up to her death, which was exactly a year ago. I thought about September 2012, and had another realisation, which was, that although I was living one of the most emotionally intense periods of my life - the impending loss of my sister, the terrible experience of watching her fade away from me, powerless to do anything to stop it, with so many others to help and support - I was experiencing it as if from behind a window. The actual pain was so dulled I was numb with it. A bit like when you chop vegetables and the knife bites into your thumb. The few seconds before you experience the pain of the cut - I was living those few seconds that whole time. In fact I was probably numb for a very long time afterwards. And what was happening this week, was that I was only beginning to really feel the aftermath of her death. Actually feel it, like a deep knife cut, and this was playing itself out in my head and heart the minute I went to sleep. I don't know, I always imagined grief as a linear thing - there have even been occasional moments in the last year when I have congratulated myself on coping so well, on escaping relatively lightly compared to others I have read about or met or heard of, who have experienced loss and have struggled to re establish themselves afterwards. Now I realise of course that my own journey has been a longer one to that inevitable pain. What about this pain then? It is terrible. It makes me clumsy, although of course lack of sleep is an obvious contributing factor. It makes me dazed and confused, tearful, deeply nostalgic for my childhood. I spend hours lying on my trampoline looking up at the stars at night imagining that I can see her. I sit over cups of tea while they slowly get cold. All year it's been about coping strategies for me, but in some way I think instinctively that this feeling, however long it lasts, needs to be experienced, to be met and allowed into my life. Not avoided or denied. That if I don't allow myself to feel this pain, I will be numb for the rest of my life. So. No furious kneading of dough or bopping to very loud music, no comfort retail therapy or long walks. Just very protracted periods of aimless introspection and the reliving of memory after memory after memory. This is my aftermath.

Day Surgery

I had to have an arthroscopy recently. The short story is that while working out at the gym I used to be a member of but am no longer because of the accident I had there, I climbed off a cross trainer and slipped, badly, on the polished floor. I slipped because the floor was wet. The floor was wet because the gym managers had decided the cleaners should clean the floors during the day and not at night. I leave you to figure out why. Suffice to say the lawyers and insurance companies are all having a field day with it while I presented myself at my local hospital to have the torn cartilage which has been close to agonising ever since the accident, particularly when it catches in the knee joint, clipped away. This is my third operation in two years so I was more than usually unenthusiastic about doing this but I did have one huge advantage over my fellow patients, which was that after two rounds of surgery, I know how to prepare for a hospital experience. Hospital is a bit like taking a long haul overnight flight in economy class. 10 mins after checking in your brain cells disintegrate. So no point at all in taking War And Peace, or any book at all that challenges your head, or any work, or anything that requires you to do more than just look blankly at it. So. Magazines are the order of the day, preferably women's fashion ones, not Vanity Fair or anything vocational. Four of those go in the backpack. Next an IPod. This is really important. The great thing about checking into day surgery is that you can be anywhere in the ward and do anything - as long as you've checked in if the nurse can't find you in the poky windowless room into which they attempt to squeeze their pre op clients, she has to go and find you. So I seat myself in the pre-theatre waiting room, which is a) large, b) possessed of a large window and fabulous views over the City including the Shard, the Gherkin and Canary Wharf and the London Eye, c) has great armchairs in it and d) is totally empty, because everyone else is Too British to leave the designated pre op waiting room to sit somewhere else. I stick my earphones in, switch to music or some mindless radio station I would never be seen dead otherwise listening to - Heart FM anyone?? - and drown out the bickering from increasingly bored and depressed pre op patients who, like me, have not eaten or drunk since the previous night. Next, clothing. Comfort an absolute must, and clothes must be large. Something about surgery wakes you up feeling like you've just put on 20lb. But even if you haven't, waking up from orthopaedic surgery also involves the realisation that your limb is now padded in 10 layers of crepe bandage. No way on earth you can squeeze that into your skinny jeans. We're talking Nike sweatpants size XXL and a roomy t shirt that you are going to splosh your water/squash/egg sandwich down that they will force you to eat to ensure that you are not going to puke up as an after effect of your anaesthetic. Further forethought on my part obviates the need for an egg sandwich (they are DISGUSTING) - one of my kids is timed to arrive just as I am trollied back from Recovery, bearing a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel, a bottle of water, some sour cream and chive popcorn, an apple, and the Times crossword. And he does arrive exactly on time, just as the sourfaced food woman in day surgery arrives with her plasticated sandwich tray. Aaaah. Proper food is an absolute must after surgery. I eat the food while he does the crossword. And finally. The toxic cocktail of pre med, anaesthetic and morphine does things to your body that most people ie those who do not routinely take such drug cocktails for their weekend recreation, can find distinctly unnerving. The rule generally is, euphoria for 24 hours, followed by major downer for a further 48. My suggestion? Enjoy the euphoria. Then drink about 14 gallons of water to wash the whole nastiness of it away before you wake up the next day with an urgent desire to slash your wrists.

My sister, and my music

It's coming up for a year since my sister died. Quite apart from the constant amazement I wake up with at the speed with which the second worst year of my life has slid by (the worst year of my life was the year leading up to her death. Nothing takes your breath and energy away like total and utter helplessness. Grief is a terrible thing, but I think helplessness might be worse), I am increasingly visited by strange dreams that feature her, and as I commute to and from work, music plays over and over in my head. All this music is associated with my sister. In our teens she was a massive fan of disco music. Some of it I have on my IPod. Some of what I have on my IPod I have listened to over this last year and really enjoyed. Earth Wind and Fire. Michael Jackson, Smoky Robinson, Imagination. Some of it has made me smile with memories of my teenagehood with her. Donna Summer. Oops Upside Your Head. Some of it has reduced me to helpless tears. Try having three sisters, losing one, and then listening to Sister Sledge performing We Are Family....I Got All My Sisters With Me. I used to love dancing around the floor with both of my sisters when that track was played. These days if I do hear it on the radio by chance I just feel bitter. Well aren't YOU the bloody lucky ones having all your sisters with you. I don't have all mine with me any more. That song just sounds smug to my ears now. It's not fair. How come Sister Sledge gets to keep all their sisters? Or Madonna singing the track Jump. My sisters and me, my sisters and me...right now it feels like a conspiracy by divas to emphasise my loss.  And some of it is so painful that I can't listen to it at all, though equally I can't bear to erase it from my online collection. These are songs she loved that I don't like at all, but I downloaded them to feel closer to her. Shakatak. Shalimar. Heatwave. Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand singing No More Tears. Bill Withers. Ain't No Sunshine When You're Gone....music has always been a potent evoker of emotion. Any decent musician worth their downloads knows that. I've always been musical as well as a fan of music. This is the first time music has played such havoc with my emotions though. How is it possible that music can be so duplicitous? So uplifting and inspiring one moment, so motivating another, so flipping depressing seconds after that? Presumably because good music mirrors life. Let's be honest. This last year has been awful and has been hard, and next year will also be awful and will also be hard, and so will many years after that. But this year has also held many joys. Milestones in the lives of the younger people in our family, including my sister's kids. Great holidays. Canoeing down the River Wye in South Wales was a personal highlight. No space for grief when you're fighting to keep your canoe afloat in strong headwinds. Contrary to what the movies tell you, you don't spend the year after a bereavement in hiding. Life is inexorable and takes you with it.

Smashed eggs

I did a supermarket shop today. Supermarket shops are never, ever an inspiring chore, particularly after two weeks of enthusiastic foraging for berries and plums in my street and local woods. There is something irresistibly Lara Croft Tomb Raider about plunging into brambles with a tupperware box in pursuit of the perfect blackberry, which gives you some idea of how often I experience adventure in my life. But supermarket shops have to be done, principally because tins of baked beans are not to be found in my local brambles, and as I am more than usually bored, I pick a cart that is just a bit too small for my mound of shopping and on the way out, my box of 12 organic large free range eggs tips sideways and falls out, on to the concreted road, right in the middle of a zebra crossing, so that the whole thing happens under the amused stare of waiting car drivers. Hum. What to do. Well, the average shopper would probably leave them there. But then the average shopper also throws half smoked cigarette butts out on to the street without stubbing them out, never mind finding a bin to put them in. The average shopper throws recipts out of the car and tickets out of bus doors just before they close. The average shopper reads the Standard or Metro and then stuffs them behind their heads or throws them on to an empty seat before leaving the train. I am not the average shopper, so I stoop and pick up the box. The top looks pristine. The bottom feels damp. I have a dodgy cart, one with a malfunctioning wheel (aren't they all) and the idea of trying to about turn the contraption with my oozing box of eggs so I can return them to the shop and plead extenuating circumstances in the hope of securing a replacement box, is just too much for me. I'd have relished the argument actually (if you WILL make your carts too small for my purchases!! - I really should have become a lawyer...) but the car drivers are getting restless. So I push the cart on with my damp egg box perched on top, I take it home, pull it out, put it in the sink and examine the damage. Twelve eggs. Only two have survived. I make myself a cup of tea and think about the other ten. I go to my cupboards and haul out round cake tins and my usual baking paraphernalia. I have had an idea. Which cakes use loads and loads of eggs? Cheesecakes. Who is the queen of cheesecakes? Nigella. I pull out her cookbook (I don't own many - why bother, with a billion food recipes at your disposal with the tap of a finger on the IPad?) but I have always treasured How To Be A Domestic Goddess. In it I find a recipe for a New York cheesecake that I have somehow missed. This recipe calls for 6 eggs. Perfect. I make it. Cheese, sour cream, cornflour, sugar, vanilla, loads of whipped up egg whites, and egg yolks and a biscuit base, and it bakes in the oven for an hour, and then it sits in the oven for a further two hours, and then it sits outside the oven for yet another hour. In fact, it takes half a day from start to finish. But it is so light and fluffy and brilliant, and I still have 4 smashed eggs to use up. So I deliver this one to my neighbour over the road who has recently had an operation and is at home recuperating, and I pad back to my kitchen, and I start all over again. Two cheesecakes. You see? Smashed eggs are not a disaster. They are merely cakes, waiting to be born.

Blackberry sorbet

I foraged for blackberries at the weekend. Actually I got distracted en route to the blackberry brambles down by my local brook, by a plum tree in the middle of my street dropping its ripe fruit left right and centre on the ground, to the delight and ecstasy of our local ant population, who by the looks of things were holding several celebrations in honour of this unexpected fruitfest. I ran back to the house, dug out a ladder and a large cardboard box, lugged both back to the tree, climbed precariously to the top of the ladder so I could reach the ripest of the plums - the ones at the top of the tree, which had had the benefit of the most sun to fatten and juice up - and a few minutes later I had a box full of beautful plump plums, which I lugged away triumphantly while the ants went into mourning. This gives you an idea of how determined a forager I can be. Blackberries are the devil to pick. They are probably the best protected wild fruit I can think of. You want blackberries? Prepare for battle. Of course if you are content with the tiny malnourished ones at the front, be my guest. Me, I want the ones with nodules the size of grapes, which are always tantalisingly, tortuously, just out of reach, at the top of the bramble heap, or at the very back, or, slightly counterintuitively, buried deep beneath the thorns. So you need a game plan. First, dress for battle. Tough jeans, wellington boots, long sleeves. Second, find your weapon. In this case, a very long stick. Third, bring something to put the blackberries in that can hook over your stick as you need both hands for this - one to pick the fruit, the other to wield the stick. See? Years of experience and thousands of superficial thorn scratches have given me this knowledge. I spend hours in the bushes reaching as far as I can for the best that there are. Later on at home I regard my tub of blackberries with the same hilarious sensation I experience every August after a foraging afternoon. What the hell to do with it all? I could freeze them, but the problem is, and you will know this if you are a regular reader of this blog, that my freezer is already stuffed with forest fruits that I picked at a PYO farm just a couple of weeks ago. So why pick these blackberries? Well, why not, really. They were there. Now I need to work out how not to waste them. I'm not a huge fan of pies and crumbles aren't massively popular with the family so I need a plan B. and I find it on the internet, as you find most things, having typed in a google question along the lines of, what can I do with my surfeit of blackberries. And up pops a recipe for blackberry sorbet. I create sugar water, which I chill. I take it out of the fridge after a couple of hours. Blitz all my blackberries, the entire haul, in a food processor, add them to the sugar water, stir. Add lemon, and in my case, because by now I have departed from the recipe, as I often do as ideas occur to me while I stir or pound, I add cassis. I strain the lot through a metal sieve, dispose of the blackberry goo and put the by now gothic ruby coloured liquid into the freezer. Take it out after around 90 minutes, blitz in the food processor, return to the freezer. Leave another 90 minutes, Take it out again, blitz it again. I should put it back in the freezer but it looks so fluffily beautiful that instead I call my family whose antennae have already registered that a baking session is in full flow and who therefore are not tardy in their response. We spoon the half done sorbet. It's delicious. It's sweet and a bit tart and smooth and rich and fluffy. We have to stop ourselves before we've eaten half of it. I drag us away from it and return it to the freezer. I dream about it overnight. We'll have it tonight for dessert. If it survived breakfast.

New Beginning? New Clothes.

My niece has just secured herself a place at university. She has worked really hard for this and truly deserves her success. After the initial whooping of joy and the communal backslapping and booking of halls accommodation, the next question was, what to wear? Never mind, do I need cups/ obligatory jar of Nescafe for random students who drop by at 4am/ folders for my work/ memory sticks, decent book bag, or a map of the city. No. My niece has more clothes than I have ever had in my entire life but she thinks she needs "university clothes" and I agree with her. She does. Not because she lacks the jeans, t shirts, sweaters, trendy boots etc etc that all go with your first year at Uni, giving way after the first term to a universal university fashion statement known simply as Grunge, which I take to mean, clothes you own that you deliberately do not wash for so long that they stick together and you fish them out of your cupboard on a stick in one big lump. She needs them because this is a new beginning. And new beginnings are an opportunity to redefine yourself, to liberate yourself from your previous look and invent a Whole New You. I recently applied for and was offered a new job. I'm really excited about starting it, which will be sometime in October. I'm doing all the responsible things, like poring over my induction reading, getting to know who is who and working out where the bogs are BEFORE I start work so I don't find myself in the horribly, Britishly embarrassing position of Having To Ask For Directions. I'm also spending some time in the evenings mulling over My New Look. The place I am moving to is a bit more trad, a bit more Establishment, the building is echoey with mosaic floors in some places, and there is a sense of musty awe about some parts of it. I have more than a passing feeling that my glittery neon blue t shirt dress is going to struggle to mesh with its new corporate environment. Should I invest in a dogtooth check suit with a pussy bow blouse, I wonder. Every fibre of my being revolts against the idea. Surely I can go Establishment without ageing my look by at least 20 years? OK then how abouts suits and separates with interesting twists? Grey dresses with bright tights and clashy jewellery? Suits with fab retro white lace ups? Now you're talking. I take a dispassionate look at my wardrobe. I fish out my mustard, fuschia, neon blue and burnt orange tights and lay them out on the bed, imagining suits and dresses that they would jazz up. I pull out my stretchy kitten heel boots and picture myself sitting in committees doing a Theresa May impression (yuk yuk. Lose the kitten heel boots). Over these coming days the look will continue to evolve as my niece and I peruse the Autumn fashions and select the pieces which will define the New Her and the New Me. In the end what we buy will more or less hit the mark of our new environments. Much more importantly, whether they do or don't, they will form the backdrop of our new beginnings. That is why hunting them down is so important. And so exciting. Bring on the changing rooms.

Not all Men are predatory sexist bastards. Just a lot of them.

It is just not easy being a woman. It really isn't. I am talking about the social experience here, not the biological, about which my kids would say (both of them boys, by the way) that there is already Too Much Information. I am talking about the daily sexism you experience in your car, walking up the street, in a shop, at the gym...anywhere. Here is my experience of the morning. Just this morning, mind. In my car, I am hooted at rudely at a T junction by a car behind me. It is a BMW convertible and the guy behind cannot understand why I am waiting for the traffic to pass. He wants me to pull out and make them stop. I am a meek observer of the Highway Code, on account of the inherent illegaility of driving under any other rules, and besides I see he has a dent in the front right corner of his car, while mine is intact, and given his behaviour I think there is probably enough proof to demonstrate that the Highway Code was not invented for nothing. So I continue to wait until the road is clear and then I begin to pull out. But this man has had enough waiting so he drives alongside me, pulls out in front of me, blocking me in and narrowly missing a bus, which pulls on the brakes, throwing the passengers around the interior. They appear to pick themselves up calmly. London commuters are, after all, accustomed to such driving. The BMW driver then slows down in front of me, forcing me to slow down. The man puts his hand out of the window and makes the all too predictable rude gesture. I smile and wave graciously, a la Queen Elizabeth, which I know from experience will infuriate him further, so I also check that my doors are locked and windows are down. Previous experiences of this have ended in the maddened bloke jumping out of the car and hammering on my window trying to get in for a good throttling. Or perhaps worse. So. I drive on to the gym giving this man little more than a few second's thought. At the gym I am midway through a range of tortuous floor exercises which Matt Roberts, famous trainer with ridiculously toned body that suggests he may not have much of a personal life, assures me in his freebie Mail on Sunday pullout, will nuke the paunch. I don't believe this for a minute, but I do like to vary my exercise so I am giving this a whirl, and it's bloody hard, so I am huffing and puffing. I hear a small noise and I look up. A bloke who is balancing on a large exercise ball while lifting unfeasibly large weights, is whistling at me. He has been appreciating the view of my cleavage that the exercise I am doing has been affording him. I look at him neutrally, turn 90 degrees, and finish my set. On my way home I stop to buy bread. There is a small queue of 3 or 4 people - this is a popular bakery which opens at the crack of dawn and half the borough buys its breakfast there en route to the office - but this does not stop two labourers from walking past me and calling to one of the staff who they refer to as "girl". They take a minute to stare at my breasts before sauntering off with their supersize me croissants. I complete my purchase and leave. That was my morning, all before 9am, before I had even sat down to my own breakfast.  That, frankly, is a snapshot of my daily life in terms of interactions I have not sought or invited or encouraged, welcomed or responded to, from random strange men. Twitter Trolls? That is scraping the surface.

Pick Your Own

I used to go to farms to pick strawberries regularly throughout the Summer when I was young. I grew up in Essex where I have a memory of loads of PYO choices, and given that this was pre-internet, when Steve Jobs was barely out of nappies (that is an exaggeration as Steve Jobs was older than me, but you get the comparative picture right?), choices for family entertainment on a Sunday afternoon looked very different back in the day. My family used to bundle us in the car and head to Southend, or to a stately home (I LOATHED the stately homes, as any tomboy girl might, but absolutely loved the bit where we pitched camp in the grounds, played cricket and stuffed ourselves with sandwiches). And PYO was another of those activities. We would bring back ridiculous mountains of strawberries and my poor Mum would then spend the remainder of the day making months and monthsworth of jam out of it. She claimed she enjoyed it. I'll take her at her word. I left Essex when I went to university and never came back except for family visits. I settled in another part of London, had my kids, and totally forgot about PYO. A few times we would be in the car in Suffolk, Somerset or Devon and see a PYO sign, exclaim to each other, and proceed to drive past it. But this week it is the school Summer hols, one of my kids is in Wales at a Summer camp dressing up in togas and playing war games with paintball if the Twitter pictures are a reliable guide to his activities, leaving my other kid at home with me. On a whim I googled PYO to see if there were any nearby and discovered one a 20 minute drive away. So we hopped in the car and pitched up at a massive farm with acres and acres of fruit and vegetables. So huge was this place that we lost ourselves in the raspberry canes, emerging hours later with suspiciously pink looking mouths. In spite of my early memories and my silent exhortations to keep it all in proportion I did what everyone does when they go to a PYO, which is, to have a kind of brainstorm and go completely nuts with the gathering baskets. An hour or so later we had about a year's worth of blackberries, raspberries and strawberries to weigh and pay. I wanted redcurrants but we didn't have the space for them. I thought we might make it to the sweetcorn fields and carry back one under each arm. That's how obsessive I got. What is it about PYO that does this to you? And, a bit like when you buy souvenirs on holiday that look so great in their natural surroundings, or that dress you saw in the window and went so mad for you didn't bother to try it on, you just ran in and bought it and brought it home covetously, we unloaded our fruit mountain on to the kitchen surface, where it looked, well, like a mountain of fruit we were going to have to find a place for. Ah but if you are an afficionado of PYO you will know that there is so much more fun to be had out of your overspecified fruit gathering than mere JAM! I rolled up my sleeves, stuck Kiss FM on the radio very loudly, and set about pulling out my baking implements, my flour, sugar and butter, and I was off. First , an Eton Mess, creamy and sparkly and pink with strawberry juice from our warm, ripe strawberries that I whizzed in the food processor, chopping up another load roughly, combining the lot with my whipped cream and homemade vanilla meringues. I contemplated an addition of alcohol and decided this fruit was so yummy and beautiful it needed to be left to speak for itself. Next a raspberry pound cake, studded with raspberries so huge they looked like pink spaceships. Then a blackberry and apple tart, 9 tenths blackberries culled from our haul. And finally the best bit. Freezer bags, into which went the tautest and plumpest of our fruit, washed and hulled. Zip the bag almost shut. Put a straw in. Suck all the air out to create a vaccuum pack. Zip the remainder shut and chuck in the freezer. That is if you manage to do the sucking bit without laughing yourself silly, as my child and I did so often we ended up accidentally mashing half our fruit (which then became smoothie fodder). Pick Your Own. It carries a wealth of possibilities. I am going back there right now for the sweetcorn.

Raspberry Poundcake

I went a bit bonkers baking cheesecakes this weekend. I had around 35 people over for a party on the Sunday and even though the co-organiser of this party had created a food  sharing list so organised nobody could possibly have more clarity on the parameters of their requirements, I panicked nevertheless and exceeded my baking responsibilities. I was supposed to make one cake and I made three.The first was my classic chocolate cheesecake. It's not mine actually, but Nigella's. I've made it so often however that I have pretty much co-opted it. I once made a chocolate cheesecake and gave to a community centre to auction it off for charity. It fetched nearly 60 quid and people there have been talking about Melinda's cheesecake pretty much ever since. I don't have it in my heart - or rather my ego - to disabuse them. My second cake was also a cheesecake and also Nigella's. A Nutella cheesecake. Take cheese, Nutella, and golden caster sugar, mix it up, dump it on top of a biscuit and butter base, cover with hazelnuts, and chill thoroughly. This cake is lucky if it gets a full chilling period as Nutella in my household never lasts longer than a few hours beyond its purchase. Which means this cheesecake is routinely consumed at its stickiest. But the third was a revelation. A pound cake. From a recipe torn out of a Sunday supplement. Why in fact does anybody buy cookery books these days? Admittedly, being married to a journalist does have its compensations, and one is the weekly delivery of every known Sunday paper to our doorstep. While he reads the news avidly, I consume the recipes. This one was a raspberry pound cake. I haven't bothered looking up the definition of pound cake so I am slightly at a loss to work out the difference between this and a sponge - this version is a little heavier, but otherwise the ingredients are pretty much the same - but OMG the lush stickiness of pouring half the mixture into the tin, piling in pounds of raspberries, then pouring the rest on top. It looks slightly doubtful as it goes into the oven. More like something you would put in a sundae dish. But, taking a risk is one of the more exciting reasons to attempt a new bake and even though I have broken the cardinal lunch party rule ie never make something that you have never attempted before, I close the oven door with optimism. And, I am not disappointed. I take it out an hour later, cool it, dust liberally with icing sugar, and watch with awe as it melts away on to my guests' plates even as my Nutella cheesecake sits, neglected, near by. OK, it is competing not just with my cakes but also the luscious offerings of my guests  - an amazing looking walnut cake, a pile of meringues, a tray of brownies etc etc. But still, half my guests are kids and another cardinal lunch party rule, practically Biblical in its origin, is that if you serve anything with Nutella in it, kids will flock. But the kids are entranced by our sunken trampoline and forage only for cans of Diet Coke, while my more mature guests fall on the raspberry pound cake. At the end of lunch my cheesecakes, slightly dented, go back into the fridge. But the pound cake is gone. It has been a hit because it has evoked Summer. Quite an important contribution given the soggy end to our heatwave. I would bet that if I served my chocolate cheesecakes again in 3 days time after a solid 36 hours of rain they would disappear in a moment. But in the meantime, I have a new one for my Summer dessert repertoire. Yay.

Lifting my eyes from the ground

I pass a guy selling the Big Issue every day, twice a day, during the week. He stands on the Strand outside Boots. Usually he adopts a funny or silly pose to attract attention. He is popular with kids. But that is pretty much it. He sells his magazines in a commuter stretch where the traffic is either going to or from work, or to or from food, or to or from a workout. Nobody is interested in deviating from their single objective, me included. I've been doing this commute for some years, he has been there for that duration, and until only about 3 weeks ago I am ashamed to say I never raised my eyes to him. Everything that got in my line of sight between the station and the office where I was to begin my busy day of work, was an obstacle. Therefore I kept my eyes to the ground, like an animal tracking its prey. If you look at people walking up the Strand you realise pretty quickly that everybody does this. Not tourists, obviously, and there are a fair few thousand of those in the same neck of the woods. And it is precisely because of these bum bag wearing, map reading, sun visor sporting, merrily confused crowds, that we commuters are so fiercely single minded in the pursuit of our direction of travel.  But a few weeks ago, I found myself walking almost solo up that stretch of road. I say almost. I don't think it's possible for anyone to be the only person walking up the Strand. Maybe the government employs a core group of, say, 500 people to walk up and down it just to make it feel loved. I don't know. But at this time, which was not late at night, or that early in the morning, I found myself almost alone. The Big Issue vendor, seeing me approaching, struck a comic pose, and because I am British, and had not the comfort of a crowd, I was completely unable to ignore him. I slowed down fractionally, I smiled at him, and walked on by. Not until I reached the steps of the tube entrance did it compute in my head that the man had abandoned his pose to smile equally broadly back at me. He hadn't tried to sell me his magazine (which is just as well - I loathe magazines of pretty much every kind). He had just had a human reaction to my human reaction. A few days later I passed him early in the morning, I smiled and said Hello. He beamed and said hello back. Hello became a regular watchword between us, twice a day - en route to my office, and en route back to the tube. Then I took the daring step of deviating from our accepted interaction. I stopped, smiled and said Good Morning. Two words! Double my usual amount! And he said, Good Morning back to me. And then he said, thank you for speaking to me.  He said this genuinely gratefully. I pondered on it all the way to my desk. It depressed me extremely. This man was trying to sell the Big Issue, mostly not 6 feet away from two guys handing out free copies of the Evening Standard or Time Out, so he was in a hopeless competition. He was homeless and game about it, and he was being ignored quite routinely by thousands of people. Including me, up till then. I got up from my desk to make myself a cup of tea and on the way to the kitchen I passed a woman I had never looked at properly before. She was in a blue uniform toting a bucket and mop. I stopped, and said hello. She lifted her eyes from the ground and smiled at me, tentatively. Do you clean on this floor regularly? I asked. She nodded. What's your name, I asked. Fatima, she replied. Well, I said. Thanks Fatima, for keeping this floor clean. She smiled at me and took her bucket and mop away to another part of the office. I walked into the kitchen to get my tea. Pouring boiling water into my cup, I thought my eyes do not belong on the ground. They need to be up in the rest of my face, looking properly about me, so I can stop ignoring people I choose to edit out of my daily life, and give them the dignity of a courteous recognition. I went back to my desk, and got on with my day.