Christmas specials

Not surprisingly, the whole family has had a great ffoodie time over Christmas. All our puppies are keen cooks and have been poring over their new cookery books in attentive silence. Heston Blumenthal is the new interest for s-i-l-to-be Matt. We were able to produce for him two books which HB refers to: Harold McGee's Science of Food, and Tom Stobart's Cook's Encyclopedia, both of which we acquired when we were about the same age as our children are now.

Anyway, I will start with a quick mention of a rare fruit which we harvested from a tree in a carpark sometime back in October. This is the mysterious medlar, a small brown appley thing which cannot be eaten till overripe - bletted, in fact. We kept these two last ones till this week. They taste like a marvellous tangy toffee, with a soft, caramelly texture. The large black pips inside are easily distinguished in the mouth. If you have space in your garden, plant a medlar tree. They only take up about 10' of ground and are an interesting and very tasty old fruit. These are each about the size of a walnut.

Our Christmas lunch was a dish of roast partridges - Matt used a Nigel Slater recipe to cook these 'in a pear tree' - where the soft sweet pears complemented the very slightly gamey taste of the birds. It was very successful. An accompaniment was red cabbage - home grown and absolutely delicious, prepared the day before and allowed to ripen in flavour. It included white wine, juniper berries, sugar, orange and lemon juice, and salt and pepper of course. Here are some of the stages of making:

Finally I will touch on the home-made bread again. I have now made my first sourdough bread. So pleased. The sourdough starter has prospered since I have been using only spring water, rather than the tap water which of course has some chlorine in it. YouTube provides many interesting clips on sourdough, mostly American. They all indicate much larger quantities than I used. Do not be afraid to experiment... after all, this was discovered in Ancient Egypt, thousands of years ago, and no doubt they used all sorts of different quantities and arrangements. I started with two tablespoons of rye flour and an equal amount of spring water. I added the last shrivelled little grapes from the vine in the garden, to bring in any yeasts clinging to their skins. I stirred every day, leaving the pot half covered. I added more flour and water in equal amounts if it looked a bit sluggish. I found it developed a horrible-looking bubbly scum on the top (that's fine) and sometimes a beery-looking liquid between the main starter and the scummy top. Sounds and looks ghastly but the smell is very pleasant. I was trusting to my nose a lot. When it's stirred up, it looks quite fresh and nice:

The bread is made simply by scooping a ladleful of this starter into the flour, adding the salt, oil and caraway seeds as usual and stirring together. I tried kneading it too, but to be honest, with rye flour, it doesn't seem to make much difference. It's just as good tipped straight into the baking tin. The ONLY thing is, there's a huge difference if you put in the right amount of water:

and if you mistakenly put in twice as much as you should, by mistake. Oh dear!

Silly me. I was using the River Cottage Bread book, which makes twice the quantity I was using, and followed the recipe instead of remembering to halve the amount. This loaf was just horrible, never cooked, couldn't be toasted. The birds had it for part of their Christmas feasts.