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.

preserving 2.0

okay, so yesterday we discussed the fact that when i learn practical skills i tend towards needing repetition in order to feel competent in my technique. hence my aims to both bake bread and practice preserving techniques once a week this year. with bread baking i feel i am deliberately keeping things slow and steady, i mean, a more adventurous person than myself would have probably made the basic bread recipe once and then skipped the chapter and gone on to something more adventurous, like, say, ciabatta, or pitta breads. not i darlings, i've still got several basic variants to experiment with; besides which i rather like the fact i'm creating a home environment in which there is always a handmade loaf on the go and one languishing in the freezer, ready to be refreshed in the oven, crisp and airy as new. i'm not going to mess with the formula, but i am going to move away from basic white bread via the medium of more interesting flours, nuts, and seeds.

with preserves, things are different. preserving is, naturally, dictated by the seasons; you want to preserve some of what is good for when none of it is around. so my patience-reliant learning technique pays off, here. january will naturally be spent making various types of marmalade, since there's not much more than citrus fruits available (although i'm getting seriously impatient about forced rhubarb. seriously, wherefore art it?). i don't mind this, i like trying slight variants on the same technique: see for reference the great houmous challenge of summer 2010, helped massively by living 2 seconds away from a middle eastern supermarket, not to mention shocking it's owner by my ability to lift several kilos of chickpeas with no visible strain. put it this way, they've got nothing on beer barrels.

so yes, you guessed it, i made marmalade again. i hunted high and low for seville oranges (i want some for a fabulous infused gin recipe i've seen, too) but could not find any, so had to make do with valencia oranges, which was a bit disappointing. i prefer seville oranges in general, and back in the days of being an omnivore, used them pretty much everywhere i would have used lemons for the entirety of their brief season. the flesh was particularly wonderful in a variant on a salad an ex girlfriend used to make to serve with fish, that involved rough chunks of it, black olives, mint, and the tiniest amount of feta cheese (the original salad was with pink grapefruits). this seville take on nostalgia was better with oiler fish like mackerel, than the grilled white fish she preferred, mind, which would have sent my calorie conscious ex into a stuttering fit of how long it would take you to burn them off. are you beginning to see why she had to go?

anyway, back to marmalade. i used the same recipe from the river cottage preserves handbook i used for my previous attempt but rather than use a kilo of lemons, i used a kilo of oranges, which meant i had to add 75ml lemon juice when i added the sugar. again, i have tried to take as many process pictures for you as possible, not just to keep as a record of my own learning, but to try and convey what things should look like at various stages of the proceedings.

this is my peel, shredded and soaking in water and its own juice, done the day before i want to make the marmalade. to the left of it you can see a plastic bowl in a debenhams back. this is the bread from the previous post rising, i'm a bit of a kitchen multitasker so i shredded my peel in the rising time. this having several things on the go at once and losing entire days in the kitchen was a habit i picked up in my dissertation writing days when i'd typically have written a chapter and therefore needed to get some headspace before i went back to edit. the peel swells up to almost double it's size at this stage, and honestly, i think i need to work on getting a finer shred (i am categorically not helped by the fact i'm the only one who ever sharpens the knives in this gaff).


okay, so having simmered said peel mixture for roughly two hours, this is my mixture after i added my 2 kilos of demerara sugar and my 75ml lemon juice. it is literally just coming up to it's full boil and as you can see it's about 2cm off the top of the pan. i know i am using a pan that is not big enough, and consequently at the boil stage i have to watch my mixture like a hawk to make sure it doesn't spill over. luckily this is only 20-25 minutes long, so ample time for caffeine and a cigarette and maybe a little singalong to the al green you're listening to. i got paid like, double what i thought i would this month, so along with a couple of books recommended to me by my trainer on wednesday about wine, i'm going to invest in a preserving pan. they're about 9 litres in capacity, and they have volume measurements on the inside so you can see how much your liquid has decreased. handy.

okay, and this is my marmalade after it has reached setting point and been taken off the hob to cool. i guess you can see that some of it did go a little crazy and go all over the hob (and was subsequently a bastard to clean off), but i managed to catch it before we had like, biblical levels of marmalade flood in the kitchen, so nothing too terrible. you can also just about see the lids in their pan of boiling water. at this stage i added 50ml (probably more, if i'm not pouring with a measure i get a little overeager) of scotch. i used glenturret 12 year old; which may seem slightly extravagant but it does have citrussy notes to it; so it seemed like a good little match. is it extravagant to use single malts in marmalade? yeah most probably, but i'm just that kind of girl.

and here are my little beauties all jarred up. the smaller jars are 300ml, the larger 450ml. the tiniest one is i think only a 250ml. you'd have to be hawkeyed to spot that one of these also says 'reserved for ed' on it, i reckon, but he will be the recipient of a jar from each batch when we go for a beer or several on monday (i owe him big time for listening to my whining earlier this year, but we've both since remembered the last time we got drunk together and are fearing for our livers big time). i am always fascinated by how pretty they look in their jars-there's almost a marine-life-in-sepia quality to them that i love.

okay, and this is a close up on one of the jars, just to show that while i did get a more even peel distribution this time, it was still far from perfect. i think perhaps, again, i needed more patience in the cooling time.

i'm not sure what i'll make next. since i'm going to be busy being drunk and then hungover in the early half of the week i thought that maybe rather than a two-part process like the marmalade i might perhaps make preserved lemons. given my love of the humble chickpea and my overliberality with the spices, i make a lot of moroccan influenced dishes and i feel that my own preserved lemons would be a fantastic addition to my storecupboard. i also have plans for early rhubarb jam the minute i find some, and i've still got enough sloes in the freezer to make a couple of bottles of gin, so the preserving every week will continue until i am overrun with jars and bottles.

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.