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.