Nourish Me

rice pudding

 

If pushed, I might just have to admit that Kingsley Amis is my favourite writer. Perhaps because of this, I also happen to love the work of his long-suffering partner, the late (great) Elizabeth Jane Howard. Howard's love of cooking may have bypassed Amis, who famously preferred vats of booze to her carefully crafted meals, but she did manage to hand it along to a young Tamasin Day-Lewis while the latter's father lay dying, poetically, in the Amis' home. After some searching I tracked down a copy of On Food (as opposed, I now wonder, to Amis' brilliant On Drinking) a book she wrote with Fay Maschler in the 1980's. It was worth the effort, for the writing is superb. This, from a chapter titled Jane Grigson to Dinner sums up why rice pudding has been, for a long time, something I have actively avoided:

To restore delectability to a dish that has been desecrated and damaged by institutional, or simply negilgent cooking, is a crafty tactic in the business of feeding a foodie. Rice pudding, sinned against by schools, hospitals, prisons, no doubt, and the nursery is an ideal candidate.

For all that sinning - and the sins above are great indeed - rice pudding is simply not a dessert I grew up with, therefore, I don't long for it in the way that, say, Peter and his boys do. Then, one weekend some months ago, I found myself with a litre of super-fresh raw milk and no use for it. Rice pudding finally called.

Simple things, done well, are worth mastering. My rice pudding is based, rather loosely, on Nigella Lawson's in How to Eat. Need I also add that this is gluten-free dessert at its easiest? Good milk makes all the difference here. Raw if you can get it, but failing that, full-fat unhomgenised milk that is either organic or, better still, biodynamic. Trust me. 

a rice pudding

Preheat the oven to 150 C. In an oven-proof dish you will be serving the pudding in at the table, place a large knob of butter. The real stuff, please. Pop the dish in the oven while it comes to temperature so the butter melts gently, then swirl it around the dish, just to coat things. I often skip this and just whack a knob of butter in with the following ingredients, but your call. Add 4 level tablespoons of arborio rice (3 if you're using Australian measures), lots of vanilla extract (a split-and-scraped pod or 2 would be ideal, but one is not always made of money), 3 level tablespoons of sugar (of your choice, of course) and 500 mls (2 cups) of milk. You will probably need more milk along the way, so make sure you have some. Stir well, and place in the oven for 2 1/2 hours, stirring every half hour or so, adding more milk as you see fit.

Serve with big splodges of jam, at the table.  

 

18th of december

The clock reads 1.09 yet here I sit, wide awake, hot wheat bag draped around my neck in a feeble attempt to relax muscles made tight by, well, no doubt a serious and days-long now lack of sleep. It's been a doozy of a run up to this full moon (only 4 hours to go, a-bloody-men) and that, combined with worries about publication dates being set back because I have no time to chase and cajole, means that the relentless way that customer service eats into one's private thinking during that other mad run-up (by which I mean xmas) is stifling all my creativity. I feel truly - deeply - weary. 

I was reminded today, no, yesterday (1.31 now) of the things that used to upset me about my old werking life, of personality traits that grate and clash. I vow to simply float along above things today. Peter helpfully reminded me (though at the time of offering it annoyed the hell outta me) that it's not my life, not anymore. Deep breaths will help. A lot.

We watched Nigella Lawson on the telly last night. Do you know, I think I've worked out that her newly-slurred speaking voice may have something  to do with all the cosmetic surgery. Well, it's a theory we enjoyed giggling about at the time. You do have to larf about a woman who looks down the barrel of a camera and, while massaging crumbled panetone into sausage meat, says, "When I feel food, it makes me hungry". Almost as silly as her other classic, "Tumble the potatoes joyfully into the pan".

Almost there. Only a week to go, people. We can do this, right?  

 

       

     

crackers

Every time I pick up Nigella Lawson's How to Eat some new gem falls into my lap, some fresh insight into who Nigella was pre-Charles Saatchi, way back when her husband was dying of tongue cancer and she was flying along, writing so intelligently, at her peak. As a book, let alone a book about cooking, it is entirely absorbing, something Salman Rushdie, a quote of whose graces the back jacket, and I can agree upon. Flipping through, searching for the intro to digestive biscuits, witty words wedged into my brain years ago, I stumbled across this aching confession toward the back of the book, in her feeding babies chapter,

 

When I was young, I was so often made, to the point of torture, to eat up every cold, congealing thing on my plate, that I now can't help but finish up everything in sight, on my plate or other people's. This might be a polite party trick, but it doesn't make for a serene life or stable weight.       

 

Why do I love this excerpt with all of my being?

The Nigella she lays bare in that final sentence feels substantive, honest and intelligent in a way that her latter books do not. Can not. A raw, uncomfortable resonance with my own complex relationship with greed/food-as-reward in there? Yes. Mostly though it's because of this one, rare thing: serious food writers do not casually admit things that make them vulnerable. She's rather wonderful in pre-Nigella-on-the-telly mode in How to Eat. A favourite book because she's so utterly on form.   

It's a leap from digestives to crackers, but not a large one. It is, however, a giant leap from Nigella Lawson to healthy baking, but that's what I sat down here to write about, and delicious, gluten-free crackers ye shall have. Nigella in her new, slimmer shape will not, I am sure, mind one bit. 

Swore black and blue that a return to bookselling would not increase the girth of my bookshelf, but who was I kidding? Bloody hopeless. Two new books, two new cracking cracker recipes.

Jude Blereau's brown rice and chia crackers in her excellent Wholefood Baking (on the right) are, admittedly, a whole lot more work than the unthinkably simple seed crackers from Green Kitchen Stories (on the left).  Both have their relative merits - Blereau's are a genuine revelation and you'll have to buy the book for that recipe - but let me say this straight up: the easier choice, for once in this 'ole life, is what everyone swoops upon. 

simple, addictive seed crackers

Slightly (very slightly) adapted from Green Kitchen Stories pretty new book in that I make less - the full version goes just as quickly as the half, and they are really an unskilled sort of simple to make. Some specialist ingredients, but a good health food shop should have most of these on hand.   

Set your oven to 150 C. In a roomy bowl mix together 1/4 cup of sunflower seeds, 1/4 cup of sesame seeds, 1/4 cup of hemp seeds (use more sunflower if you canot find)  with 1/6 cup of linseeds, 1/2 cup of quinoa or amaranth flour and a fat pinch of salt. Pour in 1/8 cup of olive oil and 1/2 cup of water. Whisk well. 

Despite what Kathryn and I think about baking paper, this is one occasion you'll want a sheet. Use it to line a baking tray. Pour the cracker batter on top. Smooth out with a spatula, right to the edges of the paper, as thin as you can go. Bake for 25 minutes. Peel the paper off the mixture, which will be well-set and slightly brittle, and cut into cracker shapes with a large, sharp knife. Rustic is good. Return to the tray, then the oven until crisp and golden. They say 30 minutes, but my oven takes about 10 minutes, so keep checking. Cool before carefully setting them out and keeping your wits about you.

 

 

sweet

Spent the morning making candied grapefruit peel, propped on a stool in the kitchen sipping tea and reading Jane Grigson, a surprisingly enjoyable thing to do on a clocks-back autumn Sunday. The peels - drying on a rack before me - taste of Campari, a medicinal balance of bitter and sweet, a taste I happen to really love. got distracted halfway through by Stephanie Alexander who boils hers in 6 or 7 changes of water, a little worrying when you've done yours in only 2, then I remembered that Stephanie, much like Nigella, likes a lot more sweet than I in recipes. (Stephanie's Lemon Delicious pudding actually hurts my teeth.)

Grigson was writing in 1982, 2 years before I got to high school, and I'm convinced that our collective tastebuds have shifted since then to sweeter and sweeter (and beyond). Mine'll be just fine then. 

For one

Single-use equipment is pointless, the scourge of ordered kitchens everywhere, or so we're often told. Normally, I agree. The blini pan above was cradled home from a trip to Auckland, but it turned out that the blinis themselves weren't quite as exciting as Nigella Lawson had led me to believe. 

Fortunately a blini pan has uses beside; perfect individual b'astilla's come out of mine, crisp and golden, and, I'm now happy to report, it makes the perfect single, cyclopean olive oil-fried egg. (It was Nigella, I am sure, who wittily described the blini pan fried egg as cyclopean) Served on a big bed of greenery, it makes a good post-run lunch for one.