Sporadia

Winter has arrived here on the Edge.

I just took this photo of outside with most of the street snow gone (plows are quick on the job here, as is the super of the building with his mini snowplow and shovels and brooms)

In honour of winter, last night I fetched down my mother's old recipe for steak and kidney pie and made two. I was drooling. I only make them once or twice a year as they're a bit picky and energy consuming to put together. Bonus: being low in iron, I get a bit of a boost from such ingestion.

This evil man is dead, I won't even put his name or picture here. Millions and millions of deaths on his hands. If there is a hell, I hope he fries forever in agony. Nobel Peace Prize, my arse. How corrupt our world is in honouring such a monster.

An art piece brought back from Ireland by my daughter for me. It shows the famous "milk bottle" beacon which dominated my summers in the West Cork island where we spent years and years. I love it.

And this is an actual photo of the "milk bottle".

Momma in the Kitchen

Did you ever feel you were going insane? Well maybe not "going" maybe arrived would be a better qualifier. (What, no party?)

Here I was making my weekly yogurt, filling my wee jars and next thing, milk is squirting all over the kitchen, my best tee-shirt (wear an apron, you idiot, an apron), the floor, the counters, the yogurt maker, even a squirt into the sink. You'd never think milk could go this far, a wee jar. But oh yes, down the sides of the cabinet doors and on to my slippers. I just love the way Ansa skulks away when this happens. With an eye-roll: Humans? Mine can't even manage a small jar of milk without a catastrophic tsunami.

Before I wound up gibbering on the floor I spotted it, one of those perfect little holes (in the side of the glass jar towards the bottom, how did that happen? Note to self: check the jars before you pour your weekly yogurt mix into them.

So then I make the weekly gluten free bread. I would think in the old days: what an awful nuisance GF bread must be to make, acres of product, where do you get the ingredients, etc. etc.

And then I adapted my granny's bastable recipe for GF Daughter and was stunned at how simple it is. Today I made a banana-zucchini version of the old bastable, currently baking in the oven. Sugar-free, fat-free. The aroma makes up for all that lashings of milk sprayed all over the place.

And yeah, in case you ask, I did clean up. 5 dishrags later.

Clementine Bread

One of the great bonuses of a sort of semi-retired life (at least retired from the stuff that never quite fulfilled me) is baking and cooking. There never was time for it before. I've always cooked and baked of course, but never got time to experiment, take the time to create. I dig into the memory box and mentally go back to my granny's kitchen and watch her gather her bits and pieces about and throw it all into the bastable oven and hang it over the turf fire. This is how I remembered her bastable cake/bread recipe.

I infinitely adapt it as the mood and supplies take me. Just like her. Today I had an overload of clementines. Those luscious little balls of sunshine. So I made a zest of 3 of the skins to the music of Frankie Gavin and kinda pulped their insides. Added 3 more clementines for good measure, these I sectioned and halved. For more colour I threw in cranberries. And bingo!

I bet you never saw the marriage of those two words, clementines and bread, before now did you?

And you were asking about Frankie? I just love the fresh twists he puts on Beatles, Mozart, etc. Here's a sample, try not to dance.

New World English

~~~My treacle/fruit/wonderloaf~~~

I had to learn a brand new English when I began to live in Canada. I think I've basically assimilated now but for a while I was completely lost. Pinafores and jumpers (jumpers and sweaters here) just the starting course. Don't even talk culottes and bonnets and boots.

It has taken me a while but I'm still tripped up now and again. There should be a dictionary.

I was baking a loaf last night and remembered my mother doing much the same thing. Her saviour in Ireland for baking cakes was grease-proof paper. You lined your cake pans with it. When I came here first and wanted to bake I couldn't believe grease-proof paper was nowhere to be seen racking the grocery shelves as I did, asking store managers who viewed me as deranged. They had never heard of such a thing and guided me to the wax paper. Well, I used it but it just didn't have the, let's say detachment, of the stoic old greaseproof. It often wound up strangling cakes and breads and it kinda turned me off baking as it left an icky taste where the paper touched the mix.

Imagine my surprise when I was at a friend's a few years back and she was baking a cake and she had greaseproof!!! I just about screamed in excitement. I picked up the box. It was called "parchment paper". Parchment!! Lawdy lawd. I couldn't wait.

Now I bake a lot of the time with this lovely parchment. I wish I'd known sooner. And I can also use treacle again - now that I know it's called molasses here.

A Kitchen Dervish

:

~~~~~~~~~~~Irish Soda Bread w/ chopped apricots and prunes~~~~~~~~~~


I can't believe how many meals I've frozen in the last 10 days. Some serious baking and canning were happening also. I have to be in the mood, unfortunately. That old routine and discipline gene completely skipped my sorry self. But I try. And glory in these accomplishments when they happen.

I put down 8 single serve pots of my super woodstove soup today. Pots of beef stew has been put aside along with this fabulous dish I do of spinach and chickpeas and sundried tomatoes. And my leek and mushroom soup. Then I put up a batch of blueberry jam (I make mine with lemon zest) and baked a few varieties of my Irish bread. I love adapting recipes. I do it all the time. One for instance is the traditional white Irish soda bread (I do make the whole wheat also) I add an egg to it and whatever dried fruit I have on hand. Tonight it was chopped prunes and apricots. With Irish cheese (and yes, I can get that in Newfoundland!) it is amazing. I sometimes accompany it with hot pepper jam. Grown men have wept over this. No other food is necessary.

I'm on a roll. I need to scavenge more cupboards and the bottom of the freezer. Ah rhubarb? Where have you been? next up:

A compote of rhubarb, strawberries, pineapple and fresh chopped ginger? Whoo-ee baby!

I Play Well By Myself At Recess

There are about five berry seasons here. Immediate bottling, pickling and jamming are things of the past with the advent of the ubiquitous deep freeze so these lovely berries are all bagged and frozen right after harvest.

I still have a dwindling stock of frozen bags of cranberries, marshberries and blueberries left from summer’s happy picking.

Yesterday, which was wet, cold and stormy with multi-footer waves (who goes out and measures these things anyway? A measuring tape would get too wet, so do they use a ruler?) crashing on the shore, I cancelled my plans for a trip to town and hauled out my daughter’s recipe for oatmeal cranberry scones. I also made the loaf of Irish soda bread you see in front of it. I use a loaf shape and not the traditional round with a cross shape as I find it much more workable to slice into squares to enable an easy pile-on of the sangy filling.

Outport Woman uses cast iron cookware (I am the fortunate giftee of most of these pieces) on the woodstove fire for these housebound, unexpected-storm-event-baking days. And there’s something about the woodsome taste of such wonders.

It makes all those tax returns preparation go down so much easier.

(Recipes will be posted subsequently - they need to be keyboarded from my brain to paper - upon request)

A Mango Tale (No, Virginia, the Fruit Kind)

I was given a bag of mangoes the other day. Yes, here on the edge of the Atlantic in an outport in Newfoundland’s sort-of-Southern-Shore, I was handed this ginormous bag of frozen mangoes by this puzzled and frightened-seeming local who held it out to me like it was a dirty nappy.

“You’ll know what to do with this,” he said as he handed it to me and raced off into the sunset at the speed of a bullet before I could say anything.

Well, of course. I’m a CFA*, used to alien mainland fruits and vegetables. Not to mention meats.

But it’s far from mango groves I was born.

So what the hell do you do with the “You’ll know what to do with this?”

Go on the interwebz, of course and find a recipe. Lots of mango recipes as it turns out, but the one that would most apply to this situation would be mango muffins.

Now, I’m one of those who can never let well enough alone.

Give me a recipe for anything and I will immediately add to it, subtract from it, substitute stuff in it.

So I have to meddle, don’t I. I have to add pecans, and nutmeg, and take away the limejuice and add vanilla and yer better quality oil. And by gum the damn thing is very thick, you could paste the lino to the floor with it as my old Granny was fond of saying (she was a pretty awful cook, sorry to burst another myth about Irish grannies and I haven’t even mentioned the brandy yet, have I?).

And today, you could hear the Mango Muffin Mix (sounds like a tropical dance, doesn’t it?) thud into the muffin pan from the spoon that strained under the weight of it.

And there was too much of it for the muffin tins. But I sorted some into ramekin dishes and loaded everything into the oven. And crossed my fingers and toes.

And guess what? OMG what gorgeous, incredible, scrumptious, tasty things these are….

Anyone know of a mango dealer in Newfoundland?

*Come From Away

POSTED LATER:
Here's the Recipe:
Mango Muffins


Original Recipe Yield 18 servings

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour adapt for 12: 1& 1/4 cups
1 cup sugar or honey 4 oz
2 teaspoons baking soda total of 1&1/2 powder & soda
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon go for ginger or nutmeg 1&1/4 tsp
1/2 teaspoon salt sprinkle
a splash of vanilla
3 eggs, lightly beaten 2 eggs
3/4 cup vegetable oil ½ cup oil
1 tablespoon lime juice ¾ tblp – or omit
2 cups diced ripe mango 1 & ¼ cups
1 medium ripe banana, mashed I use more mango
1/2 cup raisins 3 oz
1/2 cup chopped walnuts 3 oz walnuts or pecans
Directions
In a large bowl, combine the first five ingredients. In another bowl, combine the eggs, oil and lime juice; add to the dry ingredients just until moistened. Stir in the mango, banana, raisins and nuts.
Fill paper-lined muffin cups two-thirds full. Bake at 350 degrees F for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool for 5 minutes before removing from pans to wire racks.