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.