small sweetnesses.

one of the oddest compliments i have ever had in my life was from a fuckbuddy who said the things he liked most about me were my 'small sweetnesses'. when pressed about what he was even on about anyway, he explained that my personality default of being somewhat brash and loud was undercut by little moments of being quiet and gentle that were total blink-and-miss scenarios. he has a point, but i think it was mostly the cocaine and the literature degree talking. still, the phrase has stuck with me for a few years, and i think the idea of delighting in life's 'small sweetnesses' is something i try to do when the general atmosphere of my life is pretty fucking rough. there've been a few in the past week or so, and they've kind of kept me going.

it started with a lemon. a lemon given to me by one of my regulars, an american septagenarian with a house in france (and oddly, coincidentally, also called ed), who i talk cooking and gardening with regularly. i'd given him some of my failed marmalade cake, and a couple of jars of the stuff, explaining the story behind the cake in the process. when he visited his house in france apparently he got thinking, and picked me a lemon from his tree, which he gave to me on the premise that i should retry the cake with my honey and lemon marmalade, telling me i shouldn't lose faith in my ability over one mishap because the cake was lovely. small sweetness, right?

i am actually sappy and sentimental enough to have taken a picture of this lemon, here it is...

and apart from changing the fruit, the marmalade, and the oven i used (fuck you top oven, seriously), i followed the original recipe to a tee, and it was a triumph this time. it looked a little something like this:

...which restored my faith in my ability admirably. there's a piece missing because my mum came in after a bad day after work so i put a piece of cake in front of her before i even said anything. i guess the small sweetness cycle is self perpetuating? the cake was amazing, and the lemon was really, really sharp, so the icing was even better on this one.

anyway, the other moment that made me smile that involved acquiring odd foodstuffs, also happened at work. after clearing up after a christening and spending most of the time talking to two little girls who took a shine to me and were following me about and 'helping' (tiny tots often do, it's the brightly coloured hair and penchant for behaving ridiculously), their mother bestowed a load of the leftovers on me to say thankyou. one of these leftovers was a litre bottle of jersey cream; thick, primrose yellow, and begging to be used in something decadent. i also had, stored away, a bar of green and black's espresso from christmas (i have barely touched the sugar stash from christmas; it's starting to perturb me that my sweet tooth appears to have lessened with age). what i did not have, was any inspiration to do anything exciting and innovative. but as we are learning with my endless repetition, food doesn't have to be either of those to be good. so i decided to make the truffle recipe i have been making since i was like, sixteen, that i'm sure i got from a newspaper if i remember correctly.

basically, i cannot remember the recipe for these properly. i had 100g of chocolate, which i melted in a saucepan over a low heat with 85ml of double cream, and a dab of butter. the original ratio was, i think, 275ml cream, 300g chocolate, and 25g butter, but i eyeball it these days. when it was melted, i left it for about three hours in the fridge, then rolled teaspoons-full into small balls, rolled them in cocoa and (pro tip here people) tossed them hand-to-hand to get rid of excess cocoa. these need to be kept in the fridge. also, for thorntons-goers who might be confused, these are french ganache truffles, as opposed to the lighter, sugarier belgian truffles most people know. they're darker, more intense, and, in my experience, impossible to turn down. i have used these to win friends and influence people in many walks of life, and i give them to almost everyone come christmas time. you can add booze, use milk, white or dark chocolate, infuse the cream, add booze, they're kind of unlimitedly customizable.

and the first thing i did with them? present my mum with a half dozen, cos she'd had another shitty day. and they were good enough to elicit a smile, so no small triumph. cos what have we learned here, apart from that two literature students shouldn't fuck, and i shouldn't internalize something someone said to me on coke? the small sweetness cycle is self perpetuating, that's the one.

i'd sure hate to fall off this high horse

right, first things first, let us address the ravioli. it. was. incredible. sage is one of my favourite herbs, to eat, to grow, to work with, in every respect. i fell in love with growing it because of how soft and pleasing the leaves are; with eating it because its taste seems to reflect its appearance somehow, a deep grey-green, almost medicinal note. it pairs beautifully with squash, ed is right, and i love squash for its ability to stop me getting food SAD in winter-the colour and the sweetness keep me going. fruits over roots, every time. anyway, yeah, the roasted garlic was a really, really good addition to the recipe, and i basically ate until i couldn't move, only adding oil and some toasted pine nuts, oh, and a glass of sparkling pinot grigio, which offset the sweetness pretty admirably and seemed an appropriate hedonistic touch. basically, i already held my blogging colleague's kitchen skillz in high regard, but even more so now. i am sending marmalade replacements because the original jars suffered a casualty that neither of us can quite remember (cider and wheat beer are at fault here), so you will have to wait for ed's feedback on that.

so, today children, i am here to talk to you about two very much maligned kitchen entities that i personally refuse to be without. oil, and salt. now, those of you in the know are aware that i take a very self-reflexive stance on food and the female body, so stuff like this is going to creep into my posts from time to time because i think it's important. for those of you not in the know, that was your heads up. as a young woman in contemporary culture, i feel i am encouraged by many media sources to treat food as a form of self-denial, in direct relation to how i am supposed to feel about my body. adverts full of women extolling cardboardy 'cereal bars', low fat (yet still mysteriously oversugared) yoghurts, and 'healthy' salad options abound; and apparently unless i adopt this martyrdom diet i don't have the right to feel good about my body. it's all part of the old chestnut of having to be thin to be beautiful in today's society, and i'm sorry, but i just don't buy it. oil and salt are usually the first ingredients in the firing line in this doublefold war on food and the female body. now, before we get started on why this is quite so wrong and gross, i would like to put out there two basic principles: i am not saying overindulgence in high-fat foods and salt is good for your body if done on a regular basis. and i am not saying i have the perfect body or that i am always happy with it; i'm a uk size 12/10 depending on the shop, and i could probably only really comfortably lose a stone before i started to look ill (not that i'm even trying to, i bruise my hipbones on the bar at work enough without them sticking out any more)

i have previously bought into this cult of denial in food. i couldn't keep it up for two reasons. one; it made me boring; i was a packet-reader, a recipe-editer, and more importantly, completely antisocial regarding food. and secondly, it was boring to eat. people hate on oil and salt but they're vital for a very important thing: flavour. even just a tiny bit glossed over the skin of a sweet red pepper, as though you were applying lipbalm, is enough to encourage it to yield and blacken under a powerful grill heat. now tell me you wouldn't rather be eating a pepper soft, smoky, and sweet like that, than watery and oversugared in its raw state? exactly. and salt? while i don't think we need it in quite the quantities that some processed-food manufacturers add it, it's a very necessary component. imagine a noodle dish without soy? a world where you couldn't pep up depressing tomatoes with a few grinds of sea salt and a lick of (you guessed it) oil? life without that king of sweets, salted caramels? it's horrible, isn't it? if you're anything like me, it's unbearable.

now, i'm not recommending you all start doing what my grandma does and putting a pile of salt on the corner of your plate to dip your food into (no word of a lie, she genuinely does that) but people need to stop being afraid of these ingredients. not least because, aside from anything else, they are so useful in cooking. i have worked with both in preserving contexts this week, something i could probably not have bought myself to do in the previous food-fear days. so let's get onto the first recipe, shall we?

saturday night spinach and mint pesto

(note, i didn't use a recipe, i just eyeballed the quantities, so here's a rough estimate on ingredients)

about 300g spinach (basically half a bag-full if you're using baby leaves like me)

2-3 sprigs of mint

4 garlic cloves, peeled, and crushed

about 100g of pine nuts (maybe a handful and a half)

about 100-150g parmesan (i use a veggie variety from sussex, if you can't find it and are concerned about rennet then you can usually sub grana padano or pecorino as they're easier to find veggie versions of)

juice of a lemon

about 250ml olive oil, plus extra to seal.

okay, about the only step in this recipe is to whiz it all up in a food processer until it's a coarse, bright green paste. when you put it into containers, cover with another layer of oil, because it stops discolouration, and store in the fridge. it keeps for like a month, so if you've made tons like me, it won't be a problem.

now because i was making this before literally my busiest shift so far this year (we had a band on that literally pack the place out every time they play, so you just go into the shift with your game face on, take whatever it throws at you, don't expect to get home before 1:30am, and you're golden) i just served it plain, with as much spaghetti as i imagined i could physically eat:

because i literally couldn't be arsed to do anything more elaborate. it was good, more than good actually. it made what would otherwise have been a mindless exercise in carb-loading a pleasurable experience. this recipe in itself was an exercise in saving food from going to waste. despite my endeavours to reduce packaging and stay seasonal, i have an addiction to those bags of ready-prepped baby spinach leaves that verges on the pathological. i can and do literally wander round the house eating them like crisps. but my cooking has not been in a particularly leafy groove for a while, so i had to think of a way of using up half a bag. and then, lo and behold, i get a kilo of pine nuts free from work. thankyou service industry gods. of course, that now means i have a giant tub of pesto in my fridge, which i will have to think of things to cook with. are you beginning, now, to see how this cyclical cooking thing works out for me? i think i prefer spinach versions of pesto to actual pesto actually. maybe because they haven't been ruined for me by mediocre versions? or maybe because the delicate flavour of spinach acts more as a light background for the bolder flavours like garlic to come through? either way this is a pretty good go-to for the time-pressed who don't do bland.

right, so that was recipe number one, onto recipe number two taken from my trusty river cottage preserves handbook:

preserved lemons

1kg small, ripe, unwaxed lemons

150g good quality sea salt

1 tsp black or pink peppercorns

3-4 bay leaves

1 tsp coriander seeds (optional)

wash the lemons in cold water and pat them dry. set 3 or 4 of them aside - these will be squeezed and their juice poured over the salted lemons.

using a sharp knife, partially quarter the remaining lemons lengthwise by making two deep cuts right through the fruit, keeping them intact at either end. rub a good teaspoon of salt into the cut surfaces of each lemon. pack the fruit chock-a-block into sterilized, wide-necked jars, sprinkling in the remaining salt, peppercorns, bay leaves, and coriander seeds as you go.

squeeze the juice from the reserved lemons and pour over the salted lemons. they must be completely covered. you can top up with a little water if necessary. seal with a vinegar-proof lid. leave for at least 4 weeks before opening to allow the lemon rinds to soften.

et voila. i can't actually tell if these are going to be any good for a month, obviously. this recipe was a big change of pace from sugar-set preserving; no angsting about boil points, or testing for setting. but with its lack of pre-jarring measures it brings a new set of anxieties. namely, 'is this really going to work?'. given that we have about a month to wait, they will be ready in ideal time for my traditional 'invite loads of mates round for a birthday dinner before the horrendous piss-up' early march event, which will, if all goes according to plan, involve a helluva lot of middle eastern food. in the meantime, i'm happy having the jars kicking around prettying up my kitchen. we all know by now that i am a magpie for colour, and i spend all of winter desperately trying to bring it into my kitchen. anyway, things have been so god-damned busy lately that i now have a mountain of laundry and chores to get on with (not helped by the fact my mother has been hit hard by flu, and my brother has a broken thumb), so rather than waxing lyrical about food all afternoon, i'd better get myself back into the real world.

preserving for beginners

oh how i miss squid. i think it would be disingenuous of me to put myself out there as one of those vegetarians who feels no deprivation whatsoever, when in fact i do. i hear it's a year before it gets any easier, but my good friend lizzy says some cravings never go away. hers is pork. mine will probably be seafood in general. it's something i used to go gaga for; i should probably be given some sort of marine conservation award relative to my previous consumption; as the seafood i will now not consume is probably a minor ocean in itself. if you're a marine conservation charity and you're reading this, just sling it in the post will you? i don't want a ceremony, i'm not very good with black tie.

i'm back, with more sweet stuff, which is no surprise given it was my gateway into cooking. in halls of residence i used to spend literally every wednesday baking something from nigella lawson's how to be a domestic goddess in preparation for an evening of literary discussion, darjeeling, and cake with my friend tallie. my flatmate's would get the leftovers, and given that wednesday was the day a lot of people's parents visited, i got the reputation of being some sort of kitchen saint and role model, when in fact it was usually me getting their kids hammered and into trouble. i do actually miss that structure; the idea of devoting a day to doing something in the kitchen every week for a reason, and i'm one of those annoying bastards who always wants to add something new to their skill set, so i have decided to make mastering preserves my goal for this year.

nobody whatsoever in my family ever made preserves. i come from a family very heavy on divorced females, all of whom grew up in the career-woman-you-can-have-it-all epoch of the twentieth century (i still cringe when my mother brings up how thatcher was a good role model for women), and i think such dedicated kitchen activity as preserving was seen as a backwards step; an affected hark back to the days of good old 2.4 housewifery. which is fair enough, i can see how things might've been for them, and i would never presume to say my take on things is superior. i grew up in what almost feels like another ideological universe, i have been exposed to fluid conceptions of gender that allow me to feel i am not 'betraying the cause' by continuing this strongly-associated-with-the-feminine tradition. i have grown to embrace environmental beliefs that lead me to believe learning such a skill is a practical and valuable use of my time and, eventually, garden produce.

i am completely new to most aspects of preserving; my only previous experience comes from making infused vodkas and gin (i still have some sloes in the freezer from this years sloe gin bottling; there were too many for me to handle at once and i keep forgetting to buy gin, shame on me). so this is my first attempt at preserving anything that has to be sugar set, and i am thoroughly proud of it.

honey and lemon marmalade (adapted from pam corbin's basic marmalade recipe in the river cottage preserves handbook)

makes 5-6 x 450g jars

1kg unwaxed lemons

1750g demerara sugar

250ml honey

scrub the lemons, remove the buttons at the top of the fruit, then cut in half. squeeze out the juice and keep to one side. using a sharp knife, slice the peel, pith and all, into your preferred choice of shred. put the sliced peel in a bowl with the juice and cover with 2.5 litres water. leave to soak overnight or for up to 24 hours.

transfer the whole mixture into a preserving pan, bring to the boil and then simmer slowly, covered, until the peel is tender. this should take approximately 2 hours, by which time the contents of the pan will have reduced by about one third.

stir in the sugar. bring the marmalde to a boil, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. boil rapidly until setting point is reached, about 20-25 minutes. remove from the heat. leave to cool for 8-10 minutes -a little longer if the peel is very chunky - then stir gently to disperse any scum, pour into warm sterilized jars, and seal immediately. use within 2 years.

5 jars of honey and lemon marmalade. look how dark it is! i was surprised by how dark it was. if you look carefully you will see that one of the jars has 'reserved for ed' written on it. this is because he and i have ridiculously invested arguments about what it is appropriate to put on toast. you would not believe the shit i cop for my preferred poison being marmite. it tastes amazing though, better than any marmalade i've ever had, i might even be tempted to recommend it to people who don't normally 'do' marmalade because the honey adds the kind of sweet richness largely absent from this particular preserve.

as the basic recipe is fairly light on details, i will fill you in. i do not have a preserving pan, i used a four litre pan i usually use for making soup i then live off for a week (something i do way too much of). this led to a few moments that, were i not far too vain, could be described as nail biting, since when bought to boil, the marmalade almost doubles in volume. still, it all came off in the end.

the way i chose to sterilize my jars was to wash them in stupidly hot soapy water (in my job you gain asbestos fingers) and dry them in a hot oven, where i then left them until needed. i sterilized my lids by keeping them in water at a rolling boil on the hob until i needed them.

to test for setting i put a saucer in the fridge before i started; when it came to time to test i dolloped about half a teaspoon of the mixture onto said saucer and gave it a minute before poking it. when it crinkles upon poke, you have your set. it's a bit of a pain in the arse cos you have to take it off the heat everytime you test for setting lest you let it continue to cook and end up with citrussy glue, but it was no big deal lugging that pan around; all the pints i pull have blessed me with some serious guns.

the only problem with my marmalade is that some of the bigger bits of peel floated toward the top of the jars on cooling. reading about this, i discovered there were two reasons why this might be. not letting the sugar fully dissolve before bringing the marmalade to the boil; or not cooling for long enough before jarring. i am inclined to think that given it was only the larger pieces of peel it was probably me not cooling it quite long enough. still, as far as flaws go for a beginner, i'd say that was a fairly minor one, and consequently i am pretty pleased with myself, and already planning next week's preserving project.