Easter, Simnel Cake and Stuff

A rather rustic Simnel cake

Easter is all but a distant memory already, the only witnesses to it actually having happened are the three baskets still overflowing with chocolate eggs in the larder, which have to be shifted off my box of flour and dry ingredients every time I bake. Oh and the Easter trees still dangling decorated blown eggs, even though I told the kids that we’d take them down again the weekend after Easter.

April has gone by in flurry of life happening too fast. First George had biliary fever, (not unusual for young dogs living on a farm here where ticks are an inescapable part of life, but it can be fatal if you don’t treat it) which luckily we caught early enough for one visit to the vet to cure quickly. Then that was put out of our minds by Middle Daughter getting sick, and staying slightly sick with a low grade fever for over a week. The first visit to our GP/homeopath revealed nothing more than a sore throat, even with blood tests, the second visit with X ray and more blood tests had us despatched post haste to a specialist physician in the hospital. He dictated an overnight stay, as she had an atypical pneumonia, sneakily lurking at the top of one lung where it’s hard to hear.

Never having been in hospital with any of my children (since Middle Daughter’s fall from a kitchen counter as a 6 week baby, don’t ask! – even more scary than this occasion) it was both an experience I never want to repeat and one that we both found an interesting learning experience. She was feeling tired but not all that sick and was completely stalwart about the horrors of having an IV drip put in, not once but three times, when they couldn’t find a vein that would do; this after undergoing the earlier blood tests, where it took them four goes to get a vein, and two lots of blood type thumb pricking, which seems to be just part of the admissions procedure. There was a whole lot of waiting around, very nice friendly nurses, who got us into a single room, so that I could stay with her, even though she is now old enough to be in the adult ward. Then there was the fun of ordering from the menu for the next day and pretending we were in a posh hotel (for the cost of an overnight stay it certainly felt like we should be!).

The lunch menu

Luckily our physician was very sympathetic and let us go home the next morning with a huge goodie bag of antibiotics, nebulising capsules and probiotics, and she got progressively better. After another week off school she had recovered enough to gather her Easter bounty of way too many eggs without staggering under the weight of them all! And now she just gets irritated when we check how she’s feeling, as she is completely better, back to school, riding again, as if nothing happened. Thank goodness!

About to set off on a farm-wide Easter egg hunt

We always have a Simnel cake at Easter, with its balls of marzipan enclosing a heap of speckled eggs. It’s a family tradition, one that my mother used to make, though now she says she hasn’t made one for years. My brother in Australia went all nostalgic when he saw my picture of it on Facebook and asked for the recipe, so I’m sharing it here and have promised to make it for him when we meet up in the UK in July at my Mum’s for a family reunion. I always use Delia Smith’s recipe from her Book of Cakes, but over the years I’ve found a couple of little tweaks make a difference, so here is her recipe with my adjustments.

Simnel Cake Recipe
Ingredients
175g/6oz butter
175g/6oz sugar
3 eggs beaten
500g/18oz mixed dried fruit/fruit cake mix
zest of 1 orange and 1 lemon
225g/8oz plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon mixed spice
3 tablespoons milk

Marzipan
350g/12oz ground almonds
350g/12oz icing sugar sifted
3 egg yolks
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon either brandy or sherry
1 tablespoon apricot jam
1 egg beaten for glaze

20cm/8inch cake tin lined and greased
Preheat oven to 150˚C 300˚F

First make the marzipan.
Combine the ground almonds and icing sugar in a bowl and mix well.
Beat the egg yolks with the lemon juice and brandy and mix the liquid into the dry ingredients.
Mix and stir and knead until it all comes together in a pliable ball.
You may need more lemon juice. Try not to overwork it with your hands as this can make the marzipan oily, especially on a hot day.
Divide the ball into three equal parts, wrap in clingfilm and keep cool until needed.

Now to the cake mixture.
Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Beat in the eggs one at a time.
Fold in the dried fruit and orange and lemon zest.
Sift the flour with the mixed spice and the baking powder.
Fold the flour into the mixture, alternating with the milk. You may need another tablespoon of milk if the mixture is too stiff.
Spoon half the cake mixture into the lined cake tin and smooth it out so it is level.

Roll out one portion of the marzipan to fit the cake tin.
Lay it gently on top of the cake mixture.
Spoon on the other half of the mixture and level it out.
Bake in the centre of the oven for about 2 hours until the centre is firm and springy.
Cool on a wire rack

When the cake is cool, prepare the rest of the marzipan.
Roll one piece out to fit the top of the cake.
Divide the other piece into twelve and roll into small balls.
Brush the top of the cake with apricot jam.
Lay the circle of marzipan on top and press down gently.
Brush the top with beaten egg.
Make twelve small crosses (arranged like the hours around a clock face) with the point of a knife and fix the balls around the edge of the cake.
Brush them with beaten egg too.
Put the cake under a hot grill for just long enough to toast it to a golden colour, perhaps 5 minutes. Keep an eye on this as it is very easy to go dark tan rather than golden glow(see my picture!)
Cool and store in an airtight tin.

And just a few pictures of our early morning Easter egg hunt:

The final haul being audited and re-distributed where numbers aren't even.

In Defence of Carbs

My name is Kit and I love carbs. There I’ve said it... I’m not doing the paleo thing, I send my kids to school with sandwiches made of bread and cheese, and I love baking. And it may be crazy to feel you have to defend a love for what has always been a staple part of our diet, but there are so many articles out there now demonising the simple slice of bread that it is time for me to speak out!

Let me just say that I eat meat, vegetables and dairy too. I stuck with butter throughout the many years that Flora reigned supreme. I use cream in my cooking and sometimes buy whole fat milk as well as low fat, so I don’t only love carbs, my devotion is shared between all the major food groups.

The ‘paleo’ diet sounds great for those who can afford to buy good quality meat and dairy products in decent quantities; and for those who really do have medical reasons to go low carb, such as diabetes. I’ve heard from several friends, whose opinions I respect, that going paleo has really made a difference to them. But why does a food trend have to swing so violently one way or the other. Suddenly all the information I’m bombarded with says carbs are bad, carbs are poison. Can’t we have some sensible middle ground here?

For most of us (and I mean those without medical problems, intolerances and allergies) a balanced diet is one that includes all the food groups. Carbohydrates give us energy, they are filling and satisfying, they are feel good foods. Yes it’s better to go for complex carbohydrates, like brown rice, wholewheat flour, oats and so on, but even white bread is fine in moderation. Moderation being the operative word here; a diet disproportionately heavy on carbohydrate isn’t going to be good for anyone.

 Moderation, middle ground, middle of the road sounds so dull... it’s not as interesting, dramatic or colourful as being at one of the extremes, but I really believe that when it comes to food it makes sense. Too much or too little of anything can be bad for you. All those claims for thirty years that low fat diets were the answer for a healthy heart now seem to be being refuted. I’m vindicated in my championing of butter. Who knows what research will find out about carbs in thirty years? That they actually are essential after all?

I want my children to enjoy food, to eat sensibly and not get stuck on the latest food fad. I’d like them to be able to travel the world when they’re older and eat with their local hosts without having to cross reference the menu against a long list of foods that they don’t eat.  I’d love it if they ate more vegetables. I’d love to be able to afford ethically raised meat to feed them several times every week. But as long as they are eating a fairly broad spectrum of home-cooked foods, I think that they are getting adequate nutrition.

If we are going to have any food issues in the house, I’d rather banish processed foods and focus on home-cooked. But even that I can’t take to extremes; I still feed our son on baked beans, which he loves, and eat bought peanut butter with marmalade myself as a lunchtime snack.

I have an unsubstantiated suspicion that it is modern methods of preserving and farming foods that is at the bottom of the mainstream reaction against certain foods; that it is the preservatives and traces of agricultural chemicals in flour that may be a factor in many cases of gluten intolerance; that it is hormones and chemicals in intensely farmed meat that may result in meat or animal fat causing health problems.

So my idea of a culinary utopia would be us all sitting down together and dining off a laden table of organic fruits and vegetables, cheeses and cream, organic pasture-reared meat and breads made from organic stoneground flour, without counting a single calorie, and living healthily ever after... with a generous serving of organic fair trade chocolate to finish off with.

But until that day dawns I will just do the best I can with the freshest and most ethical foods I can source and afford on a variable budget. I will bake bread, crunchies, cakes and pastries without feeling guilty about it, and I will happily cook for paleo friends, vegetarian friends, vegan friends and gluten intolerant friends (although perhaps secretly hoping that they are not all present at the same meal!)

How about you... are you finding that paleo is right for you? Or are you an unrepentant carboholic like me!

Salt

 “He’s the salt of the earth” 

Salt has been the most essential addition to our food for thousands of years. It was valued and, in some eras, so prized that it attracted heavy taxes, making it too expensive for the common man to use every day, which is why even today, when the salt tax is long gone, much of Italy still bakes its bread unsalted, having acquired a taste for it more than a hundred years ago.  Salt has always been so much a part of our food heritage that it is a little strange that it has become today’s scapegoat of the food world. Fat is back, butter is once more safe to eat (did you ever switch to marg? I certainly didn’t!) but salt is now the demon.

The biggest part of the problem lies with packaged and processed foods and a fast-food culture that relies too heavily on them. Salt is a fantastic preservative, so tends to be used quite heavily in complex foods with a long shelf life.  It’s all too easy to eat too much salt and that can result in health problems such as heart disease and high blood pressure. Another problem is that our taste sensors build up a tolerance to salt, so that if we get used to the taste of a certain amount, any less tastes bland. We end up adding more salt to our food than is good for us. But ruling out salt altogether isn't the answer. Our bodies need salt to function properly, ultra low sodium diets can cause health problems just as much as  diets too high in sodium.

I think I add just the right amount of salt to my cooking. I add to my own taste levels...  my husband’s taste buds are differently calibred and he tends to add salt at the table. I’ve noticed that the children are following suit, our son in particular being a little too lavish with the adding, so when I got an email from Nestle mentioning a Salt Awareness week and offering to send me the ingredients and their recipe for a low salt but tasty meal I thought this would be a good thing to try out.

Expecting some new low-salt products and seasonings, I was a little taken aback when their box was delivered to find packs of stew granules, Worcestershire sauce and 2-minute noodles alongside some flavoured evaporated milk cook-in sauces. It was as if the person packing the boxes hadn’t got the memo that this was a low-salt challenge. The ingredients list on the stew granules was headed up by salt, which didn’t give me much confidence in its health credentials. However it did result in my salt awareness jacking up a notch, as I dug out the magnifying glass, scrutinised the labels and started doing calculations in my head for daily salt allowances. 

The recommended upper limit of sodium per adult per day is 2300mg, equivalent to one teaspoon of salt.

The stew granules had 4600mg of sodium in a 30g packet, intended to go in a recipe to feed four, so basically that is half your entire daily salt allowance used up in one dish. These were intended for the butternut and lentil bobotie recipe, so I gave that one a miss and went for the beef stroganoff, which actually only had two packaged ingredients, the Worcestershire sauce and the mushroom flavoured evaporated milk, both of which were fairly reasonable in salt content.  The cook-in milk came in at 140mg per 100ml serving which puts it just into the official low-salt category and the Worcestershire sauce has 119mg per 10 ml serving.  For the recipe provided this added up to 707mg of sodium in total, giving about 176mg per person if no extra salt is added, which is much more reasonable. To give Nestle their due they had also sent a voucher to purchase the fresh ingredients for the recipe, so I had some lovely beef fillet, red peppers and mushrooms and parsley lined up on the counter.

However, at this point I started to have a logic problem with this exercise.  Normally when cooking a recipe like this from scratch with fresh ingredients I would probably only use about 1/3 teaspoon of salt anyway. A little seasoning in the flour dusted on the meat, a couple of twists of the mill over the whole dish as it cooks and a quick check at the end to correct the seasoning to taste... to my taste that is!

“Take it with a pinch of salt”

And I have to confess to being a food snob when it comes to packaged sauces, so I was already having doubts about smothering luscious fillet steak and fresh peppers and mushrooms with something out of a tin. Why use a ‘mushroom flavoured’ sauce (containing no real mushrooms) in a dish that already has mushrooms in? I tried to stick with the recipe, I really did try, but I just couldn’t bring myself to pour the stuff on. This was supposed to be our family supper after all. I decided to split the dish at the point when the sauce was added and try one part with the cook-in sauce and one part with sour cream, as is more traditional. The two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce in the recipe seemed outrageously overpowering to me, so I reduced the amount considerably.

I went ahead and cooked the meal and we all enjoyed the treat of tender fillet steak strips, but I have to admit that the dish as a whole was a compromise. The cook-in sauce version, I imagine, would have tasted fine to those who like to use packets of mushroom flavoured soup in their recipes, but needed the whole amount of Worcestershire sauce to give it enough salt, which would have completely overwhelmed the rest of the spices and the meat itself. The version where I used cream instead of the sauce ended up being bland because I hadn’t added any real salt during cooking and there wasn’t the salt from the cook-in sauce to compensate. I would have been far better off from a low salt point of view just cooking from scratch with only fresh ingredients and using judicious pinches of natural seasalt as I usually do.

So as a salt awareness exercise it was in a way a success – it made me think, scan labels more critically, and it made me even more determined to cook from fresh, use salt wisely and in moderation.  However as a taste test it failed completely. It did nothing to make me want to buy or recommend any of the products ever and I still can’t understand why 2-minute noodles and very salty stew granules made it into a press pack for food bloggers for a salt awareness week. No food blogger worth their salt is going to be thrilled with receiving these products. I’m feeling more than ever cynical about big brands disguising  (not very subtly) a product promotion as a health drive . The best thing they could do for everyone's health is take 2-minute noodles and stew granules off the supermarket shelves altogether.

Three salts in my kitchen: KhoiSan sea salt, Khoisan seaweed salt, FalkSalt seasalt flakes with chilli

If you want some more facts about salt here’s a 2009 report on salt usage from Harvard.

And my salt aware path forward?
Continue to cook with fresh foods, avoid processed foods even more and check labels, check labels, check labels!
Use a good unrefined sea salt. When I switched to using KhoiSan salt from regular table salt several years ago, I found that I needed far less salt to get the same intensity of flavour. Plus there are no artificial additives and chemicals so it’s healthier in every way... as long as you use it in moderation of course!

What are your feelings on salt? Do you have a favourite cooking salt in your kitchen?

Natural sea salt crystals like jewels

Sun Safe

In my lifetime we’ve gone from a tan being the ultimate goal of every summer holiday, and a sign of health and beauty, to having a suspicious love/hate relationship with the sun. Yes we love sunny days, yes we need sun to make the plants grow, but let’s keep it off our skin in case it gives us skin cancer, let’s slather ourselves with strong chemical sun-screens at all times before going outside, let’s protect our eyes with wrap-around sunglasses.

It seems that this devotion to sunscreen has back-fired. Current research suggests that incidences of skin cancer have increased since the general white population took to using sunscreen from the mid 70s onwards. Not only that but some kids are so well protected from the sun that they are suffering from vitamin D deficiency. We need the UV rays in the sun to help our bodies make its own vitamin D. Apparently we also need to absorb full spectrum daylight through our eyes for good health. So sunglasses and filtered prescription sunglasses are having a negative effect.

Living in sunny South Africa we have always been dutifully on the sunscreen bandwagon. Our kids have fair skin, summers here are hot and burny. We’d be bad parents if we didn’t surely? This article has me thinking seriously about re-defining our sun strategies. Perhaps we should reserve the use of sunscreen just for days at the beach rather than for every day going to school? And I should definitely look for a physical sun block instead of a chemical sunscreen. And a new face cream for myself without the chemical SPF ingredients. If you’re interested go and read the article – I’m not going to try and summarize it here, as there’s a lot of information and long scientific names for me to get wrong!

Another article on our need for full spectrum sunlight has me taking off my glasses to go and sit outside in the winter sun for a while, baring my arms to soak up a little vitamin D. This second article on the work of John Nash Ott is based on anecdotal evidence due to the impossibility of getting funding for a controlled scientific study, who’s going to fund a study proving that you can get healthier from free sunlight after all? But it makes sense to me. There are many examples of cancers that slowed their growth or healed once the patient was regularly exposed to full spectrum sunlight.

I guess what it all comes down to is getting some fresh air every day outside in the sunshine, being sensible about how long you stay in the sun and not messing around with artificial chemicals, UV filters and all the rest. Chucking the kids off the computers to go and play outside and build up a natural tan gradually, going for a walk instead of switching on the television... all those usual healthy common sense things, that our parents urged on us when we were kids, and not a quick fix pill in sight.

Are you a sun lover or a shade seeker? Do you use sunscreen all the time or just occasionally?

Coffee, Rooibos and Chicory

Coffee is one of those addictions that I almost wish I hadn’t kicked. It smells so good brewing, it looks so rich and it goes so well with dark chocolate, my one ongoing bona fide addiction. Way back when we lived in our London photographic studio, we’d stagger down the ladder from the mezzanine to the kitchen and make a pot of real coffee first thing, to wake us up. Without that coffee I wasn’t fit to speak to. It was an essential morning ritual.

Working in Italy, the  morning coffee was more than a ritual, more like a religion. We’d bypass the watered down coffee served at some of the hotel breakfasts and sneak a real cappuccino directly from the bar. And the coffee and brioches in a certain bar on a cobblestone crossroads in Siena were the highlight of our trip in breakfast terms, greed frequently demanding a second cappuccino and a third brioche, perhaps the one with chocolate or the one with raisins and orange zest, later to be worked into the trip accounts as a legitimate expense. To be fair to the hotels, I’m sure they served the coffee watered down in the best interests of the foreign guests, who were often in the habit of downing several long draughts of hot liquid coffee over breakfast and would have had heart palpitations if the coffee had been of traditional Italian strength – these were the days before Starbucks brought the espresso to the masses of the English speaking world! Anyway back then my body could take several fierce espressos in the course of a day’s work without any ill effects.

It took having a baby to knock the caffeine out of my system for good. Once he was born and I was no longer breastfeeding I tried to go back to my bad old ways. The first time I drank a mug of coffee made in strong jug fashion at a friend’s house, I thought I was having a heart attack, so strong were the palpitations. I was more cautious after that, but to my dismay I found that coffee no longer tasted so good. My taste-buds must have shifted or something. It still smelt wonderful, but the flavour never quite matched up. So I gradually switched my allegiance to rooibos tea, which I can happily knock back black and unsweetened at a rate of several mugs a day. And it’s guilt free too, healthily full of anti-oxidants, even produced fairly locally to where we are now in South Africa.

Unfortunately for my husband he hasn’t had the easy switchover from coffee to something else that my pregnancy hormones did for me. He’s been going through a particularly difficult cycle of giving in to the coffee craving for a few weeks, then getting terrible nauseous headaches whenever he stops drinking it. He’ll stay off it for a while and then the temptation when we have friends to lunch is too strong and he’ll start all over again. So he’s been looking for an alternative, something that he can enjoy drinking instead of coffee or regular tea. Rooibos tea gives him wind (sorry for sharing that!) and there are only so many cups of fresh herb teas that you can cope with a day. Decaffeinated coffee  seems to have more health drawbacks than regular coffee so that’s not a long-term option either. So he sent me out to look for a chicory substitute to try.

I came back with Chikree – a South African chicory drink, that contains chicory, corn syrup, caramel and quinine. It passed his flavour requirements, not tasting just like coffee but having enough of that type of taste to be satisfying. I wasn’t sure how healthy the corn syrup and caramel are, but chicory is naturally bitter so you do have to have some sugar to balance that out.

Another option that a friend directed me to is Romi by Health Food Connection, which describes itself as a cereal beverage – it is again flavoured with chicory but also has rye and barley as ingredients which give it a more creamy flavour, which my husband likes, and is sweetened by beet sugar. It is imported from Poland, so not at all local and that is reflected in the higher price – 100g of Romi costs the same as 250g of Chikree. Isn’t that always the way that the preferred option is the more expensive one! As far as the health benefits of chicory go, it is supposed to help with liver function and cleanse the blood, it is a natural anti-inflammatory, contains vitamin C and prevents constipation.

I did surreptitiously taste the Romi – I still have to get over my instinctive rejection of chicory as anything but an ersatz wartime poverty coffee – don’t know why that’s my kneejerk reaction. It tasted to me not very different from an ordinary instant coffee. A far cry from real mocha java but still not unpleasant. I’m perfectly happy in my rooibos bubble though, so am not going to be joining my husband on this one!

What about you – is coffee essential to your survival? Or do you have another alternative for us to try?