Potato Patties

In Nigella's Kitchen there's an entire section dedicated to leftovers. Naturally, it's a bit odd to be giving someone a recipe in order to have leftovers because that's anathema to the very reason for recycling food we've cooked the day before. So today I am going to share a super-quick recipe to use up leftover mashed potatoes but I will be breezy insofar as quantities and whatnot are concerned. After all, only you know how much mash you have left and how many people you think you can make patties for.

I make my mash with a bit of sour cream and butter but, of course, if you really want to get a mash out of this world, you really ought to add lots of Parmesan and I really do mean go for it generously. Store in the fridge overnight and take it out about an hour before you're ready to make your patties.

Warm the oven to 180C and get going with eggs (two-to-three whole ones, depending on how much mash you're working with), peppers (one I'd say, make it red) and shallots (again, two-to-three). The aim here is to cut finely both pepper and shallots, then to add them to the mash and the eggs. Incorporate them well with a spoon and taste for salt, although you'll probably find that you won't need any if your mash was satisfactory to begin with. 

Spoon the potato concoction (aim for four or five spoonfuls) on a non-stick baking sheet and lightly press each patty down so that it looks burger-size or so. Stick into the oven for 45 minutes and enjoy nice and hot. They don't look like much, but they taste really great. 

February is Winter

A couple of weeks ago, that Phil guy decreed that spring was just around the corner. Well, I believed him. For a couple of days it even looked like he was right. But apart from an isolated and freakish occurrence of +12C one afternoon, Mr Winter has certainly come back here where I live.

Last Wednesday it was my wedding anniversary and I spent it in the city, where the sky was blue and everything looked beautiful, but it was also windy, and deadly so, and it felt more like a bright November day, not a February one. Then again, February is in winter, so I don’t really know why we insist on looking for signs of spring when it’s still so cold outside. It’s a bit like hankering after autumn in the middle of August (ahem… that’s something I do, I know!).

Parts of the East Coast of the USA woke up to a fresh snowfall today and I cannot imagine a better way to spend Presidents’ Day. In fact, I am hoping that next year I will be there around about this time and that instead of fending off cold drizzling rain, I may well be strolling up and down Madison Avenue under a crisp sky, preferably somewhere way below zero. Meanwhile, my friends from Australia speak of incredibly tropic temperatures and of air con whirring away all night. Gosh. It’s unthinkable for me to live in such a climate. After all, if you’re cold, you can always cover up, but where the hell do you go when it’s boiling hot?

Ugh!

In other developments, things shall be spruced up soon enough around these parts and I shall eventually return to chronicling my daily endeavours more frequently than I have done for the past year. While my other site still takes up most of my time, I am inordinately attached to Domestic Miss and I have racked up lots of recipes I would like to share on here. And I’ve got to tell you about movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read and things I’m doing and… more.

Eighteen-One-Twenty-O-Eight

Three years ago today, at this precise moment, I was almost in Chicago. I was there for work yet again, but I had taken some days off beforehand, so that I could have a gander and enjoy the magnificent city, its blue sky, the iced lake, the very brisk -20C or thereabouts and the generous sales. I had only just started this online diary and I certainly regret that in its first few weeks, I was not that forthcoming in updating it. I could have written so much during my days in Chicago, but I was wrapped up in work and in the PhD and I had not yet discovered the immense value of recording one’s life, even the plain, the mundane, the painful.

So much has happened over these past three years that I cannot quite believe I really am talking of three years. On second thoughts, it’s not what has happened that strikes me as incredible but rather what has changed. I still live in the same house and wear the same clothes (more or less… but it so just happens that today I was out in exactly the same knitted dress and puffa coat and long boots I wore in Chicago on this day), but I am a different person. I don’t think anyone who knows me can quite tell the difference, but I can, in that subtle way in which we look the same in the mirror every morning but pictures from weeks before look immensely different to ourselves.

The most remarkable change is one that has nothing to do with the way I look or feel though. I am different because I’ve learnt about the importance of keeping track of my everyday doings. I have a paper diary, as usual, this site and another site as well, and now that there are so many applications for the iPhone, it’s remarkably easy to keep track of every single little thing that catches my eye. So I am a little despondent about my last trip to Chicago, when I was so sparse in the cataloguing side of things, but as my key word for 2011 is FORWARD then that’s what I should focus on. And next time I am in Chicago, I won’t skimp on recording everything.

Depths of Winter

The day started late, as it’s been customary since Christmas. I go to bed early enough in the evenings, but I can happily snooze until 9 am. The hot duvet is such a comfort when it’s cold and dark outside that I’ve got no reason, nor need, to throw my legs out of the bed any earlier. William and Victoria too enjoy these sleep-ins. When I first checked the time today, I heard William’s soft snoring from his corner of the room. That’s a sound that always makes me happy.

I find January 17 a peculiar date. It’s usually the day when I feel like the new year isn’t new any longer. I feel like I am hurtling towards month number two, and that in the depths of winter (we’re barely four weeks in), things spring eternal. I was scouring the soil at the graveyard in Knutsford on Saturday, but saw no snowdrops yet, nor the promise of them. On my window sill, on the other hand, cyclamens are pushing through valiantly, even though the new guinea is as low-key as it has been since I bought it many months ago and the azalea looks pretty much dead. I think they’re just… sleeping. Just like me.

Yesterday I had a gander at my local M&S and my heart skipped with joy as I saw the first of the Valentine’s tack that will take over our shops for the next few weeks. Oh, how do I love this non-holiday! My wedding anniversary is only two days later and there is nothing I prefer than to celebrate how lucky I’ve been in love for so many years already. And before then I’ll watch Groundhog Day again (disclosure: actually… I’ve already done…) and will hole up in the house and enjoy winter. God I wish I could stop time. Or maybe I wish I could slow it down. Yes, slowing it down would do just fine.

Au Revoir Mes Amis – Part IV

January doesn’t really start for me until I put away the Crimbo decorations. It’s a process that I’ve always found bitter-sweet (or... sweat-and-sour, I should say). Part of me is usually thrilled at the prospect of novelty that January has always brought into my life, and this is especially true this year.



Yet, another part of me, the larger one, I should add, is not at all thrilled and treats the unhooking of glass baubles and detaching of twinkly things and lights as a little death. If I am spending the first day (or most of it), after such process at home, as was the case today, I end up walking around in a daze, my eyes searching the comforting glow of the lights on the tree, and finding only a dark, empty corner.

I think it’s symptomatic that I’ve wanted to write of these things each year since I started my online diary. In fact, I think that my first post ever was the very first Au Revoir Mes Amis in 2008. Let me check. No, it was my second post ever. Then I repeated it in 2009 and in 2010 and then today.

Today was a dark day. It rained for a while, although I am not sure those spits actually qualify as rain. I had a couple of errands to run, stuff I had forgotten twice over last week. After those, I sat in Starbucks, determined to crack open my new diary (the paper one). And I did so, except... I didn’t know what to write, which is a bit unlike me. I think I was suffering from New Diary Syndrome, that odd affliction that catches most writers out when something new and papery falls open on the table.

A new diary or journal is full of promises, of unwritten adventures, of new hopes and starts. I felt extremely hopeful a year ago, but the result was disappointing. Now I’ve got novelty served on a platter, and I am fearful of it; I am fearful to go after what is righteously mine. Hence I soiled the new diary with an extremely self-conscious page of tentative prose which was neither here nor there, really. But I ended that page by talking about my journal, the one I’ve wanted to start since October 2008 (I kid you not) and the one that I am starting tonight. By the time I will put the decorations away again next January, I will have a journal full of drawings to leaf through and that, in itself, is already uplifting. I don’t know why we treat our journals and diaries as if they were repositories of our pains when, really, they should exist to blunt them, not reflect them.

Hello 2011

Christmas Cooking

When I was in London earlier this month, a friend of mine proffered a cake after our dinner at her digs. But this was no ordinary cake; it was a deliciously zesty, damp clementine cake. I came to know that it was one of Nigella’s recipes, precisely this one. So the other day I set to boil my clementines for two hours solid and ended up with my very own cake, one that I dusted with icing sugar and which I am currently enjoying one slice at a time. The good thing about this, and uncharacteristically for Nigella, is that there is no flour and, horror of all horrors, no butter in it. It’s the almonds that make it so moreish and damn tasty and if that makes you feel a tad more virtuous as you tuck in it, all the better.



Next, and seeing that Rick is extremely fond of Costa’s own caramel shortbread, which, quite frankly, I find about as appealing as a slab of polystyrene with a whack of melted sugar on top, I digged out Nigella’s own version from How To Be A Domestic Goddess (which appears right here), and ended up with absolutely delightful shortcakes with perfect caramel and nice, thick dark choco set on top. The recipe is microwave-centric, which means that, not only are you supposed to melt the chocolate in it (still, my double-boiler is no great hardship), but you’re also expected to make the caramel in seven minutes flat.

Well, I live in the middle ages dear friends. I own no microwave. So I proceeded to melt the butter in a saucepan on low heat, then added the can of condensed milk and the four tablespoons of Golden Syrup. Then I tended to the pan which started simmering, barely, half an hour or so later. I then continued to stir very gently and on the lowest heat possible, for another hour and a half. Yes, that’s right, if you haven’t got a microwave oven, it will take two hours to caramelise this concoction of butter, condensed milk and Golden Syrup, but it’s so worth it in the end. Proceed unafraid but know that, although it does start browning after an hour, it won’t be ready until it has thickened considerably, reduced in volume and has cooked for a long time.

As I await to uncork the Cliquot, I’ve been sustaining myself with lots of sugary goodness, from pandoro to chocolate panettone, from caramel shortbreads to clementine cake, from brownies to chocolate biscuits and then some. I fear that, come tomorrow, not even my hairband will fit me any longer. But what the hell, happy 2011 anyway!

Turning The Leaf

Frosty morning

I’ve never been more skimpy in keeping track of everyday ongoings than this year. Then again, I also run another site about writing where I posted almost two hundred times since February, so I guess that I’ve been writing as normal, really. But, deep down, I do know that I refrained from updating my online diary too often because I didn’t want a permanent memory of what happened in 2010. It was my annus horribilis, no contest, so much so that I threw away the calendars over a week ago and I shall also consign my diary to the recycling bin, something I’ve never done in my entire life.


Fortnum cappuccino with tiny ice-cream


Fortnum Christmas window 2010


Feeding seagulls in Knutsford on Boxing Day

December itself, however, was a pretty good month, as it brought about the changes I had been chasing for a long time and because I was in London for a while, made some new friends, and cooked quite a bit also. In fact, this afternoon I was in the kitchen for four hours solid, during which I produced carrots trifolate, white cabbage in tomato sauce and a rather mouth-watering caramel shortbread that is currently setting in the fridge. Oh and the other day I made a clementine cake that is to die for, as most of Nigella’s recipes are.


At the Natural History Museum, London


Nativity in Beauchamp Place


Harrods Christmas window 2010

Christmas was subdued but on Boxing Day, which also happens to be my nameday, as it is St Stephen’s Day, I went to Knutsford and fed the birds at the moor. How fantastic to see them swarm above my head (and at my feet), hankering after some bread! It was all frozen and they needed food desperately. Talking of frozen, the weather was completely fabulous up until a few days ago when the air turned, the temperature soared way above zero and now it is all foggy and damp and nothing special. I miss the sharp, blue mornings immensely, but I can live in hope that winter will bring more arctic days in the very near future. And I guess that tomorrow I shall post some of the recipes I’ve been doing...


A Crimbo cappuccino


My upside-down Christmas tree

Nigella Signing in Knutsford

Last Thursday I went to meet Nigella. At least, that's what the in-store poster said, 'Meet Nigella Lawson', except it wasn't so much of a meeting but more of a 'jump on this treadmill and wave at Nigella as you speed by really fast'.



I wasn't born yesterday and I do know that high-profile authors attract a greater following and that each person cannot possibly spend ten minutes chatting away as if they were alone in the room. Yet, having been to such events before, this signing was disappointing. Many people ahead of me merely put their book on the table to have it signed and left with a meek smile, Nigella herself hardly making an effort to engage.

This is what surprised me the most; had I wanted laughter, fun, games and a pat on the back I would have attended a Jamie Oliver signing, I agree, but this isn't just about the character of the person. It is as much about the involvement and the effort that an extremely well-known, busy author should make in order to engage with readers, even if, bah humbug, there are five hundred of them. What a chore!

Who knows, the management at Waterstone's may like to organise things differently at some other time, so that we don't end up feeling like filing morons and more like readers invited to an actual event. How about a quick greeting from the author to those already queuing in store? A few words delivered to the masses would do better than this. Personally, I did engage with Nigella and she was as graceful as I expected. However, I'll remember the day as a huge anti-climax.

Of Golden Autumn

Since the inception of my online diary I've been really, really disciplined with my updates. When 2010 came, I thought that things would be no different, except I could not know that it was going to be one of the greatest tests of my life. And perhaps it hasn't been the most horrible year since records began (it surely is competing with 1995), but there is something about it that makes me wonder whether it will take the prize in the end.

But as I said many times in recent weeks, and certainly since summer, I knew that things were afoot, I knew that things were changing. What I really meant was not merely 'morphing into more of the same' but changing for the better. And now they have. For real. And hopefully, from now on, it won't be just onwards but upwards too.



October has been predominantly golden, which doesn't happen often here. Many days were mild and sunny and last Monday I was up very early, enjoying the frosty garden and half an inch of ice to scrape off my windscreen. Then something happened mid-week; autumn turned from mellow to deep. When I returned home on Friday evening, my garden had turned into something else. The last few pears had fallen to the ground and the oak at the bottom fence had turned yellow. I'm always a bit surprised when this happens, much as I am taken aback by the morning, usually in late April, when I suddenly find leaves everywhere. I swear there were none only the day before.

I surveyed the remains this afternoon and even found the carcass of a bird at the very back (poor thing, I couldn't quite tell what it was, nor how its life ended). Meanwhile, the plants I had cut off in the spring have now composted, the roses are bent over themselves, the cherry tree is canary yellow and the high winds are battering whatever is left. Yellow, yellow, yellow, it's everywhere. Gosh my friends, I love it. I love it all.

Tomorrow I shall wear a thick black skirt with sewn jewels and a soft cashmere cardie. I am sooooo in my element my heart is skipping in my chest. On Saturday I am going to the fireworks and then, very soon, the Christmas Markets will arrive as well. For the first time in a very, very long time, I am going to enjoy myself. I am so happy.