Religeuse

The wind is blowing through the trees outside and it is peaceful after a busy hot day. It felt like holiday today , which is good because we are off to France tomorrow. Actually first we are going to London to have Dim Sun with my sister in law and then off to France on Friday.

I keep remembering all the food I've tasted in France over the years when I went on holiday there as a kid. I particularly remember being introduced to a pastry called a religeuse which is choux pastry and on the inside has a creamy custard style filling. It is iced with chocolate icing and has cream somewhere in it, I forget where just now!

A religeuse is made by putting a mini ball of choux pastry on top of a larger ball of choux pastry, a bit like a round pope with a hat on top. They make them in chocolate and coffee flavours, photos will follow after my holiday. For me a religeuse has a regal place in the French patisserie. Being introduced to one , by my mother, was part of my education into French society and as always with my family the food culture was an important part of this education. As if eating a religeuse was a rite of passage and gave me a distinguished air among the French that was on the outside. On the inside when I tasted the rich, thick, chocolate filling I felt as if a new world was opening up for me away from the emptiness.

A bientot

Caramel Shortbread

Been at H's today. Kids had a ball with her kids . I love the ease with which they all play with each other. Another one of those rich family days that makes me wander, that stops me in my tracks and lets me just be and then everything else just fits into place and I have no need of the things I thought I had need of. I use the word family because good friends is like family to me.


H gave us all lunch, the kids had a ham sandwich and we had brie with cranberry sauce on walnut and cranberry bread, toasted, lush. She had also made Caramel Shortbread for her daughter's birthday tomorrow. She saved me a little bit of the caramel sauce and gave it to me before lunch. I pause as I try to describe how it felt to eat it, it's a thick, chewy toffee, sort of golden brown in colour, made me want to sort of slip off the wagon, I'm trying to eat healthily at the moment! It had such a home made taste about it as well. The caramel is like a thick jacket on the shortbread with chocolate on top of that. In fact while I was there H melted Cadbury's chocolate in the microwave and then spread it on the top of the caramel. They always make this family recipe on Birthday's, her daughter's being tomorrow.



H told me that the recipe comes from a hotel in St Ives in Cornwall where she would go on holiday as a child. A nanny would look after them and they would have high tea with the caramel shortbread.



I've known H for 10 years, she once put me up for 2 weeks rent free when I lost my job but it turned into 2 years!! Her house was like the rolling Yorkshire Dales where she came from. She had a beautiful set of cream crockery which made a home long before she had a husband and children. We feasted on it and there is a story I O'h so want to tell you but I will have to ask her first!!



Recipe for caramel shortbread to follow.

Pizza

The kitchen smells of yeast, it feels like something is going to happen. Bastiaan makes pizza dough and says it reminds him of Josephus, his Dutch grandfather. He pulls bread, folds it and then bangs it down on the kitchen surface. I asked him how it feels to make dough like Josephus, “It feels good, connected. He use to do it on a table without a bowl. It was a big table with one of those truttig (meaning naff in Dutch) table cloths on it. He’d have a big pile of flour on it and he would make a hole in the middle and pour on the water, then he would start mixing and kneading it. He used to be quite a big man and I just remember his big arms going PHAM on the table just pounding the dough.

Pham…..Pham…….”

Croissants and balloon fiesta

Foggy, sun coming up, balloon fiesta in Bristol. Kids out of bed at 5.47am
I had packed the following: Waitrose 12 mini croissant, 4 pain au chocolat and 2 flasks, one with tea and one with rooibos. My neighbour had made lovely sickly sweet cocoa; we sat on a cow print blanket and had breakfast.


A cacophony of generators turning air into the balloons which rise with puffed out chests like opera singers. My favourite a posh old champagne balloon called Tattinger Reims. The hiss of the burners, the addictive aroma of propane gas and grilled bacon on Tesco barbies. The nasal breathing of the commentator, boobs bums and legs on the balloon advertising underwear. Looking up everyone’s noses as they watch the huge mammas rise. This was a good day, on a bad one, they would lie forlorn on the grass, waiting for a little bit of action.

Dad's birthday Party (74)

We ate spiced humous, from a deli in Norfolk. I washed the mud off celery sticks, chopped them up into Julienne and dipped them into the humous, catching as much of it in the groves of the celery as possible, letting it run down into my hungry mouth. Mum had also made Smoked Mackerel Pate with quark, a rougher texture than the creamy humous. My husband barbecued sausages and beefburgers with sundried tomatoes in then, lost in a cloud of smoke on the hottest day of the year. We then had Petillant De Syrah 2005, semi sparkling wine, which slipped perfectly into the blood stream. The wine was wrapped in a cooler, which looks like a blood pressure cuff, as it got hotter and hotter my sister took off the cooler and put it on her own arm to keep cool. We all creep closer under the umbrella. I had my eating head on and all restraint was gone as I piled up homegrown potatoes, salad, sausage, burger. Then we had homemade coconut and homemade raspberry icecream with kiddie chocolate sauce on top. The raspberry seeds twinkled back in the sunlight in my bowl. I let it slip down and felt the film of cream, always present in my dad’s homemade ice-cream, stick to the roof of my mouth. The ice-cream was made before my dad’s knee surgery. We ate provisions from his home made larder. A pink sparkling wine kind of birthday on a hot summer’s afternoon.

After we ate, dad had an afternoon nap and then he appeared for a piece of birthday cake, which we ate while still defrosting, my mum being a little too fond of the freezer. This chocolate button cake was made for my nephew’s birthday so we will have to make sure he gets one to replace it. Another birthday squeezed out of the toothpaste tube of time. Heat and homemade ice-cream and my dad, not busy with making food this time but with getting better.

Mid Summer Party

The sun was shining, it was a still summers morning and we had a party to go to at 09.30am!! Held by someone from Australia, where parties are early to avoid the heat of midday. My daughter brushed her hair in front of her mirror, which we have put down near the floor for her. She looked at herself in her party dress, twirling around. I said to myself, ‘this is where it starts….. feeling good about yourself.’

We left our house and walked across the fields to the party. My son, who used to be very small and is now very tall , strode ahead of us, clutching a packet of cup cakes decorated with smarties on top, my daughter held the birthday present.
The three wise men, bearers of cupcakes, presents and a pram with spare pants and some emergency nappies

We arrived and before really taking in the other mother’s I glanced at the party table. As normal eating rules do not apply at parties Boris had the following before 10.00am in the morning: 2 bags of crisps, a chocolate crispy cake and about 3 chocolate cup cakes with Smarties on top. I wanted to say to them, 'stop, you’ve had enough’ or ‘rest a little,’ and then I remembered myself at parties when I was a kid.

The best parties were excessive parties where there was too much food so you didn’t know what to eat first. Which sandwich to have first? There would be egg, mayo and cress, which was smooth and creamy, with blobs of white egg in it and green cress that would get stuck in your teeth. Then there was diarylea cheese spread sandwiches which would stick to the roof of your mouth. My little hand would clutch a hot sausage roll that would come out of the oven after the sandwiches were on the table. The pastry would be flaky and leave a film on my hands. If the sausage meat inside was hot I use to hop it around my mouth and, in dire circumstances only, would have to resort to spitting it out. After sandwiches there were crisps, so many different varieties. I would put hula’s on my fingers and thumbs, twiglets up my nose, if parents weren’t around and ready salted and salt and vinegar crisps would just go on my plate. I remember the pleasure I took in eating a supermarket own brand of crisps, which always seemed to me to have a stronger flavour than Walkers. The vinegar in salt and vinegar would make you want to weep as the flavour soared up my nose. Cheese and onion would repeat on you later on while playing musical chairs and ready salted would give you a thirst that you could only quench with lashings of birthday lemonade that made your teeth furry.

Then the cakes would come out, Butterfly ones, chocolate crispies, chocolate penguin bars and then just when you thought there was no room left the cake would appear with candles on top. The host would blow them out then the cake would be whisked away to be cut into slices and put in paper napkins to be taken home, along with the party bag. My mum always said that taking your cake home, was a crude American thing to do and she wouldn’t have anything to do with it at my party. But she had no control over other parents. As soon as I got in the door though she would have to prise the ‘going away’ cake out of my hands because, despite complaining that my stomach was aching, I would still try and eat the cake before bed. Instead it would be saved for the next day, when all the cake would be stuck on the party serviette but that wouldn’t deter me.

The picture is of me returning from Simon Harold’s party. In my right hand I am holding a box containing ‘going away’ cake. In my left hand is a balloon and on top of my head a home made red Indian that Simon’s mum made for every child. I think my mum felt a bit jealous or even inadequate about the homemade hat but she needn’t have worried because she made the best birthday cakes ever, something I will go into later on.


We left the little party and made our way home across the field with party bags. I put the buggy outside the house. My daughter took off her party dress, took to the sofa to look through her party bag and ate her sweets, leaving a trail of sticky chewy saliva on my chenille. It had been a good morning.