Clementines ….it’s not really Christmas without clementines …and of course an essential part if every Christmas stocking, sock, sack or fo me pillow case.
There were certain things we always got in our sack of pressies and clementines were one….watch out for others.
And yes I make sure everyone gets one still 
A little late this one but here we go….
A hand made felt star Christmas tree decoration (made by my Mum)…..just one of the lovely handmade decorations that have appeared in my advent calendar from my Mum the last few years. This one has a permanent place on the notice board above my desk (which is empty of notices and full of nice things).
Read my post from day 1 to find out how my advent calendar works this year
I quite like advent calendars.
Even as an adult there is something fun in finding out what’s behind the door each day. In recent years it mostly been chocolates and lovely little handmade gifts from my mum. Each year she sends me a little parcel of goodies to put in the refillable calendar. How fab is that. This year though she had been a little too busy to do that.
So instead I’m going to post something each day that she has given me not just in advent calendars but more generally things I know she has passed on to me.
So day 1..
LISTS
Yes that list making habit comes right from my Mum.
I can picture the book she had where she wrote each year how long Christmas dinner took to cook, what presents we all got (and totting up of their costs to be sure to be fair)….and in summer the list of what we needed for camping trips. It was I think a triplicate receipt book with loose carbon paper in the back. Acquired from I don’t know where and put to another use.
A book of detail yet mystery from the shortening of words she chose to adopt. Her own kind of code.
My own list making ranges far and wide and is less contained in one place. But there are notebooks and lists, many of them.
It’s pretty much the hottest day of the year and I’m about to eat a full Christmas dinner in deepest Berkshire. Just what is going on. Especially as I’m not turkey’s number one fan. It’s okay but to date its not had a guaranteed place on my christmas table….
When I was a kid we always had roast turkey for Christmas dinner and it was good, but it never seemed as nice as the excitement it generated amongst everyone else. For me it was never quite a tasty and juicy as roast chicken. Maybe the plethora of trimmings overshadowed it …. what with tons of chipolatas wrapped in bacon, my mum’s top notch roast potatoes and my gran’s secret chestnut stuffing I’m not sure the turkey had much of a part to play. At least not for me.
So once I got to be in charge of cooking christmas dinner I varied what was on offer. If we were having turkey cooked for us elsewhere close to Christmas. I’d cook something else. If we were hosting the main event I’d stick with turkey (and still secretly wish it could be chicken we were having), if there was just the two of us well then I had free rein beef, duck, goose,chicken, pork, ham all possibly except lamb eaten over the years.
So is this turkey different? Well for a start I know a lot about where its from and how its been reared. On the basis that an animal that has lead a happy life is supposed to taste better then this has all the hallmarks of being winning. It’s also been cooked by Brenda Copas and is about to be carved by her husband ‘Old Tom’. What the Copas family don’t know about rearing, cooking and carving turkey probably isn’t worth knowing. They’ve been rearing turkeys since 1957 and still use traditional methods and breeds. All the turkeys are grown to maturity and the different breeds provide the size variation rather than many producers some of whose turkeys are slaughtered younger to provide smaller birds. Copas say that for traditional breeds its the way the turkeys are reared rather than the breed that creates the flavour.
We’ve visited the farm and met the turkeys (curiously inquisitive animals whose odd looks belie a docile nature). We’ve heard about what makes the turkeys special:
– grown to full maturity
– only raised during the traditional breading season and not year long
– raised outdoors in orchards, grass fields with maize banks for foraging
– access to shelter at all times and spend overnight in big roomy barns
– slaughtered with the highest possible welfare standards and low stress environment
– dry plucked by hand
– game hung for 10-14 days
– hand prepared and packed
Tom carves, plates are handed round and after a toast we tuck in. Its good, very good. Lots of flavour, moist, tender. The breast meat is excellent with a good balance of delicateness and proper flavour to satisfy everyone the legs are gamier and much more remisent of other birds. Some of each is a good contrast. Several people have seconds (this is getting rather like real Christmas) some of us are pretty full so save a little space for dessert.
So will I be switching to turkey every Christmas??
That’s a really difficult one, now I know what excellent turkey tastes like and how to cook it…well its definitely much higher up my list but I’m a contrary thing and I’d probably still vary from year to year depending on who I’m cooking for. One things for sure I’d be seeking out a Copas turkey and if I was too slow and missed out (after all they do only rear about 50000 turkeys each year) then I’d be looking for something that was reared in a similar way from a farmer with high standards.
Copas Turkeys have a Great Taste Awards Two Gold Stars (2010) and having been a judge for the 2011 awards I know how high the standard is to achieve that .
Order your Copas turkey online or through one of the butchers who stock them. Be quick they sell out fast.
I was a guest of the Copas family and Story PR.
This is one of the ace bargains I got when I went to an auction last year with chum Lynne @josordoni (she’s a bit of an auction expert)
It lives on the dressing table in the guest room
I just investigated the mark on the bottom and it seems its Bishop and Stonier, the pattern is Shirley Poppies. I haven’t any proper idea of its age other that 1891-1933 being when the firm was called Bishop and Stonier rather than other variants.
I’ve just come back from the local farmers market (Wanstead to be specific).
I got a bit carried away and scooped up large quantities of goodies.
Including this hoooge cauli
Which handily has a radiator in the background to allow you to assess the scale of its hoooge-ness
For the record I also bought:
12 rashers of smokey bacon
3 types of sausage (4 of each)
2 pork chops
2 pieces of ribeye
2 lamb chops
1 lamb breast
1 lamb neck fillet
1 piece of pork belly
1 fillet smoked haddock
the hoooge cauli
beetroot
kohlrabi
potatoes
rainbow chard
a squash
pippin apples
raspberries
apple and ginger juice
3 quiches
1 slice of poppyseed cake
dozen eggs
ticklemore cheese
berkswell cheese
single gloucester cheese
cumin gouda
Then I staggered home….
Last night I was chatting to fellow food lovers Gower Cottage Brownies and Presents Queen (aks The Foodie Gift Hunter) about cookbooks and in particular first cook books and the first things we cooked.
Now as anyone who has read this post about food book I did knows I now have many many food related books….but of course a long long time ago I started with none….
Here’s five books that have heavily influenced my cooking and count as first in some way or another
The Play and Cook Book, Marguerite Patten (1973)
This is genuinely the first cookbook I had that was my own. It was undoubtedly a gift but curiously I don’t recall who from. By the time I got it I suspect I already helped out cooking things like scones or fruit loaf with my mum and grandma. Neither had hardly any cookbooks and mostly cooked from memory or handwritten notes of recipes passed to them. We did have the Dairy Book of Home Management which I spent countless hours flipping though and looking at the pictures and projects. The book is in great condition mainly because I spent lots of time looking at it rather than cooking from it and also because I learnt very early to keep the cookbooks away from the action. Even my most used cookbooks have no splatters!
The three things I recall making from it are: Stuffed eggs, Eggs in a Nest and Rainbow Squares. The Rainbow Squares were a great disappointment it seemed impossible to get the coloured effect for each layer of the sweet even.
Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course (1982)
The copy in the picture is actually my husbands, my copy has gone AWOL and is a BCA special smaller format on really thin paper…it’s been well used and the pages are falling out. It’s the book I really learnt to cook from. In truth I learnt to cook from my Mum’s copies of the three separate paperbacks printed to go with the television series rather than these subsequently compiled versions. The first recipe I remember cooking on my own is Normandy Pork with Cream and Apples as a welcome home dish for my Mum after she had been on a school trip, I was 14. Other dishes I recall fondly are Paprika Liver, Scone base pizza and Lemon cheesecake. It’s still the book I turn to fist for basics and timings, though i promise I don’t make scone base pizza anymore. I don’t care what anyone says about Delia this book is a great place to learn.
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway (1929, this edition 1984)
Okay now this isn’t a cookbook…but there is a description of food in it that made me want to cook something simple….the book is about the first world war and the part i recall is where some troops have become detached from the column and happen upon a farmhouse…they look for food…
‘There is not much to eat,’ Piani said. ‘They’ve cleaned it out.’
Bonello sliced a big white cheese on the heavy kitchen table.
‘Where was the cheese?’
‘In the cellar. Piani found wine too and apples.’
The soldiers drink some wine and eat slices of cheese and then they move on and back to the horror of the war and the wet and the mud.
In my mind there is a further passage where they simply cook pasta and slice cheese into it…I can’t find it now as I scan through, but the description stuck and the idea something as simple as pasta and cheese can be delicious stuck…and morphed into a regular recipe at home of creating pasta dishes from what ever we had (and calling the result pasta mix!). Of course any self respecting Italian is probably horrified by this gung ho approach…but there happens to be no Italian blood in my family and in Lancashire in the early 1980s I think we didn’t mind whether it was authentic or not just that it was easy, economical and tasted good. The idea lives on in dishes like this.
Middle Eastern Cooking, Claudia Roden (1986)
This is from a series that Sainsbury published in the mid 1980s and edited by Jill Norman. It’s got lovely vibrant illustrations by Julia Binfield. Supermarkets don’t seem to commission cookbooks as much these days but in the late 80s and early 90s there were great compact versions of books by well known authors to be had at bargain prices. I’ve quite a haul of them (not all are quite as nice as this in design terms). All of them though took me on a journey into cuisines I knew little about and got me to experiment with mexican, indian, middle eastern, chinese and more. My favourite recipe from this particular book is the Lentil and Spinach soup with Lemon…a wonderfully thick tasty soup thats easy to make.
The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, Marcella Hazan (1992)
My first Christmas present from my husband, way before he was my husband. This is where I learnt to make fresh pasta, really rich ragu and the best ever lasagne, light yet full of flavour. It’s a sort of Delia of Italian cooking for me and the place I go to check first for an Italian recipe.
All that without even knowing who Nigel Slater was….five books that have shaped how I eat and cook…what are your important five??
