Ginger Tablet

Leftover Haggis

You will notice that this post does not include any pictures. This is partly because my camera batteries are dead and because we have low energy light bulbs that make things look gross and there are still only 37 minutes of daylight here every 24 hours. But mostly this is because my computer just can't take it anymore. I know this might be unbelievable, but I use a laptop that might be seven years old right now. I'm not quite sure of its precise age because I inherited it from my mom. And while it has been a trooper and it got both of us through graduate degrees, if I save one more picture onto its hard drive, it will rouse itself enough to hobble to my bed, dragging its cord behind it and kill me in my sleep. This old dog has 256 MB of RAM. Even I know that that's pitiable.

But possibly as soon as tomorrow my new computer arrives and with it my new life. That's what happens right? Anyway, when that happens and I have technology devices that can talk to each other again everything around here is going to look a whole lot better. Oh gosh, I feel guilty even using Old Dell's keyboard to type this post.

You were a good buddy. Except for your stupid power cord you never failed me. I'll make sure something nice happens to you. I promise.

And now moving on from one parent's leftover computer to another parent's leftover food:

My father recently asked what one does with leftover haggis. Good question, Dad. Now at first this might seem like a quite a quandary. You have a lump of sheep-gut-infused oatmeal in your fridge. How will this not go to waste? But in actuality haggis is pretty versatile. I think the basic rule is that if you could put ground beef/mince in it, you could substitute haggis.

The uninitiated will not believe me. They won't buy that this horrific food stuff could ever be as comforting and banal as ground chuck. But it's true. That's the secret of haggis. It's just a mind fuck. Terrible to think about, but quite soothing, delicious and inoffensive to eat.

Just think about McDonald's. For year we've been eating meal worms and thinking they're burgers. Mince is apparently pretty easy to resemble.

So, depending on quantity, you could make:

- a sort of hamburger, or a Sloppy Gregor as it's known here

- a fajita or taco or tostada. Throw it on some nachos.

- pizza. I've seen this in the frozen section.

- samosa. I've seen this, too.

- little fritters. Of course deep fried haggis is available at most chippies, so this would just be pretty predictable deviation.

- Lasagna? Actually, I think that's possible. That might even be nice. I might try that. Eventually.

- Chili. Theoretically. Maybe.

- Spag Bol. I would love to see this. If anyone makes Haggis Spaghetti Bolognese, I will bake them a cake and give them all of my change (I've just sorted it so it would be a pretty sweet prize).

I saw a site that recommended making an omelet, and I thought that was a pretty good idea. I was going to do that this morning and I was optimistic when I saw three egg cartons in the fridge. Unfortunately one contained a single egg that was best before December. Another contained a single egg that was broken and the third contained a single egg without a best before date on the it. I might have risked that one egg, but an egg's not enough for an omelet.

Anyway, you could give it a go. I think it would also be nice in some sort of breakfast hash. Like fried potatoes and leeks (make it Scottish-er) with haggis served on potato scones or in a roll. Scrambled eggs, too, somewhere. I think that might work.

Or just heat it up in the microwave and eat it with whatever else you have that's left over. I know your fridge, Dad. It's vast. There are magical combinations in its depths. Let me know what you come up with.

Sleepy Burns Night

The important thing to remember when making haggis, neeps and tatties is to keep it simple.  

Basically the meal consists of three boiled things.  

All you need is three soft piles of mashed potatoes, mashed turnip and hot and spicy haggis.

 

Plus a glass of whisky or two.

   

Yes, Burns Night is often a much grander affair, certainly a lot more elaborate than the lazy Sunday dinner that we just had. And all of that ceremony can be wonderful too. But it's not strictly necessary.

 

Our one embellishment was an onion, whisky and rosemary gravy that was a lot more delicious than it looks.

I'm sure if Robert Burns is up there somewhere, the idea of thousands of people eating haggis on the 250th anniversary of his death must be pretty absurd. But really, endless people eating a simple, economical and delicious meal in your honour is a pretty great tribute. Happy Birthday! I'm full of haggis, thankful for all poets everywhere, and ready for bed.

Veal Good Food

 

Scottish food week had to take a short break because of illness. It wasn't anything very dramatic, but there was a pronounced lack of appetite and therefore not much of interest happening in the kitchen.

But it's all better now. In fact things are pretty wonderful. The early signs of spring were out there in the sunshine today. Coming across those first branches covered in tentative pink blossoms in the last days of January is miraculous. Green shoots cropping up, snowdrops stretching out. Yes, tomorrow there will be rain and the days are still endlessly dark, but it's difficult to find something that better epitomizes hope than these first flowers. And if they happen to arrive three months earlier than they do in your home country, then you are liable to think that this is a good place, that this is just fine.

 

(Hyacinths. An impulse purchase from Woolworth's closing sale, planted in early December)

I went to the farmers' market  and the local shops this morning and came back with tarts for brunch, homemade jams, my favourite rye bread, a haggis for tomorrow, a newspaper, a new cookbook and a pound of stewing veal.

Veal. So delicious, and yet so strangely elusive in Scotland, a land of beef and dairy. When I first moved here I couldn't understand why I could never find veal in any store or at any of the butchers I visited. It's not served in restaurants here, the popular chefs don't often talk about it. Why was this? I still don't quite understand. Yes, I understand that veal is often raised in pretty awful conditions, but really, is the meat that's consumed most of the time that much better? Did those animal cruelty campaigns work that effectively? If so, I'm pretty impressed. Is it the baby animal thing? In a land that's ravenous for lamb? J is certainly treating me like a baby-eater right now. Is it just not traditional? I have no idea. There just seems to be a tacit agreement that veal is one meat too far.

But we, the inhabitants of Scotland, should eat veal. Not the white stuff, produced by crating a calf so it can't move and then feeding it a liquid diet low in iron to make the meat tender and pale. Nope. Don't eat that. It's been illegal to raise veal in those conditions in the UK since 1990. But get yourself some "rose" veal (again, imagine an accent. It's like the wine). The stuff I just bought is free range and nursed by a lady cow and had room to roam and have a nice life and develop some muscles. And that's nice, because these are male dairy cows so if they weren't raised for food, they would just be killed days after birth. They're not that useful for dairy farmers understandably. And if they're not killed, they're shipped to Europe where there is a market for them and where they could very well be crated. Instead, a few months on a picturesque farm in Dumfries and Galloway isn't that bad, is it? (The BBC has a pretty interesting page on this debate, here.) 

If you're in Glasgow, you can buy veal from the nice people at Sunnyside Farm at their market stall. They have a website where you can read about the various sheep, cow and pig breeds they have, but be careful, they have a gallery of pictures of their critters and that's a tough thing to look at before dinner. Unlike their meat, which is a tender thing to eat for dinner. Honestly this veal is beautiful. It's some of the best I've ever had.

I just made a light stew of veal, carrots, leeks and cavola nero, with some finely chopped dill shoved in there close to the end. Normally not an herb I would reach for in that context, but I am loosely basing this meal on a remembered stew my father and stepmom used to make for us. Chunks of veal, carrots, dill and pasta in a delicious and light broth. Those tastes are a nostalgic little bundle for me. I served this over some buttered pasta I just made that incorporated a little rye flour for some slight textural heft and more chopped dill. It was a pretty satisfying meal. Meaty and flavourful while still feeling healthy. And that veal. My goodness. The tenderest little chunks.

And so I would like to advance Veal and Leek Stew as a new Scottish classic. As the BBC website says, as long as there is dairy there'll be unwanted male calves. The least we can do as active meat and dairy eaters is to make sure they have a nice life and give them a delicious send-off.

Ingredients

1 pound of veal chunks

2 leeks, chopped

2 carrots, chopped

3 cloves of garlic, chopped

bay leaf

A bit of white wine

one slender head of cavola nero (or any of kind of kale), cut into thin slices, delicate pieces

dill

Method

1) Add a bit of oil to a big pot, heat it up, add your veal and loads of salt and pepper getting it all over the chunks.

2) Once the meat starts to cook a bit, add your leeks. Let the meat continue to lose its pink and the leeks get soft. About 10 minutes. During this time you can add your carrots and garlic.

3) Fill the pot up with just enough water to cover the meat and vegetables. Throw in the bay leaf.  Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat to a simmer. You're going to want it to simmer for about 2.5 hours. Believe me. Mmmm.

4) About an hour before serving, throw in the kale and some dill. I added another whack of fresh dill right at the end as well, because I wanted a pretty fresh, kicky flavour. I also added a bit of white wine I had just to top up the liquid levels a bit.

5) You can use this time constructively to make your own pasta. Or you can log onto Facebook. No one's judging.

5) Once your house smells amazing and you can't resist it any longer, adjust seasoning and serve this beautiful stew over some buttered noodles, mashed potatoes, or any other starch of your choice.

Extra Credit: Did you know that the thing that differentiates a Scottish leek from all others is how (long and pale it is? It's the David Bowie of the leek world! ) Update: Woah. I'm totally wrong about this. It's the other way around. The Welsh/English leek is longer and paler. The Scottish kind has more dark green leaves, which are used to create deeper broths.

 

(Scottish on the left. Clearly.)

Potato Scones, Baking with Whisky

         

(ugh. horrible picture. horrible dark winter and lack of natural light. very, very pretty pan)

I love potato scones. You can make an excellent breakfast by frying up a couple of them and topping them with some fried tomato and slices of smoked salmon. They are the perfect textural addition to a bacon roll. They make for a very indulgent grilled cheese sandwich. 

I'm going to go back to buying them at the store.

To make potato scones you simply mix some flour into some mashed potatoes and cook them on a buttered griddle. The advertised ratio of flour to potato is about 1:5. I tried this easy recipe the other day and it was a disaster. My dough was really, really wet so I had to add quite a bit more flour than suggested just to get it in any kind of shape. The recipes said to roll it out and cut circles of dough to fry up. I was sort of squishing disks directly onto my skillet. They stuck and would absolutely not be turned. I then remembered that I now own a very beautiful copper-bottomed non-stick frying pan so I tried them in there. This was better. I still had to drop rounds of dough onto the pan and flatten them out with my spatula, but at least they were browning nicely and somewhat willing to turn. I expected to make a huge pile. I ended up with three. All the rest of the dough ended up in a half-charred lump. And they were only ok.

I guess I'll try again in the future. There was one that was almost tasty and the promise of that could be enough to battle again. The texture/taste was softer and fresher than the ones from the store. But a whole package of those ones only costs about 49p. That's not a lot of money to spend to save a pretty big pain in the ass.

Moving on.

Let's say you want to do some baking and you want to use whisky. Personally, I like baking with Jack Daniels, but if I felt the need to keep it Scottish, I would use Bell's. Bell's is a blended whisky which means that it's a mutt. Unlike a single malt which only comes from a single distillery, a blended whisky is from many sources and this makes its character less defined. In the case of Bell's you get something quite sweet and smooth, i.e. something that's not going to make your cake taste like peat. Plus the blends are way, way cheaper and if you're going to be masking the subtleties with chocolate, fruit and mounds of sugar, you don't need the expensive stuff. You should add a tiny bit of water to a nice single malt, you should never add cake batter.

Cullen Skink, Old Pulteney

 

Cullen Skink. Quite possibly the most intriguingly named soup on our fair planet.

This smoked haddock chowder is also fantastically delicious, creamy and indulgent despite it's lack of cream and is a breeze to make.

I made a batch on Sunday while simultaneously baking J a birthday cake, cleaning the kitchen, making potato scones, hearing J's recent tales of London and looking at the accompanying pictures. I was also listening to the radio and worrying about our broken boiler and performing some light scheming and negotiating quite a hangover from a girls' night that involved martinis so dirty they were actually obscene. Basically this recipe is difficult to screw up and tastes far more involved than you ever have to be in putting it together. Serve it at the start of your Burns Supper.

The best bowls of cullen skink I've had have come from Cafe Gandolfi's and it's their version I aspire to. Unlike a lot of recipes, they add a tiny bit of tomato to their soup. I think this is essential. You want a bit of acidity in there to cut the creamy, smoke flavours. It makes you love the creamy, smoky flavours even more. Likewise, lemon is mandatory. As is the bright parsley. There aren't a lot of ingredients to this soup, but if one were removed its character would suffer.

You'll also find some recipes that call for cream and diced potatoes instead of milk and mashed potato. I would stick to this version. The texture is far more interesting and the milk allows the smoked haddock to come through without being choked by dense cream.

I've adapted my recipe from this source since I think it's the simplest way to get the best result and it's not a bad approximation of Gandolfi's.

Ingredients

• A little less than one liter of whole milk

• 400g/1 lb of smoked haddock (not the dyed kind)

• 1-2 bay leaves

• one diced onion

• 1-1 1/2 cups of mashed potato (made according to taste)

• parsley (save the stems)

• 1/2 a seeded tomato, cut into small and delicate chunks

 

Method

1. Gently bring your milk to a simmer, add the bay leaves, the parsley stems and the fish. Poach the fish for approximately 5-10 minutes. Remove from the heat and let the fish further infuse the milk for about 5 or 10 more minutes.

2. Fry up your onions until they are just soft while all of this fish action is happening.

3. Fish out the fish from your milk. You can strain the fish/leaves/stems if that's easier, but I keep the milk in the pot and just use a slotted spoon to remove the chunks. Throw away the stems/leaves and then break the fish into small chunks discarding any unappetizing skin and bones. If you took the  milk out of the pot, put it back in now.

4. Put the deliciously fishy milk back on the heat and add your mashed potatoes. Also those onions. At this point I would cook it for a few minutes, maybe 15, to further thicken and reduce the liquid.

5. Reinsert your fish and the chopped tomato. Let them get nice and hot. Add some chopped parsley.

6. Serve it up with loads of pepper and some lemon wedges.

Do you know what whisky might be nice with this soup? Old Pulteney, a new favourite of mine that comes from Wick in the far north of Scotland. In the olden days you could sometimes only get there by boat! Even though it's on the mainland! Remote! While this whisky does not have the same smoky, peaty character as the Islay whiskies I love, it is quite mellow and smooth, being matured in old bourbon casks. Sometimes you need mellow and smooth. But because it's also matured right by the blustery shore, it has a this salty kick right at the end.  That makes it a really fantastic mouthful. A hot flask of soup and a cool wee flask of this whisky on some bracing sea shore. That would be perfect. That could possibly be my weekend.

Coconut Tablet, Bunnahabhain

 

And so I begin a week of Wonderful Scottish Food on the most depressing day of the year. Some would say that was fitting, but those people should be ignored. Instead let's blot out all the pain and negativity with a little bit of sugar, with a tiny piece of Coconut Tablet. Something that, if you were planning a Burns Supper, would be a great way to end the evening accompanied by strong tea or coffee.

Tablet is a pretty easy thing to make in theory. It involves throwing whole packages of things in a pot and turning on the heat. Normally one bag of sugar, one tin of condensed milk and 100g of butter. That's the kind of recipe you can memorize and then magically produce whenever you fancy it. These are the recipes that you can make for the younger generations of your family and when you die, because there's no written record of the culinary trademarks, they all mourn your death terribly, crying to the heavens because they will never again taste whatever it is that you made so well. In this case: tablet. When they themselves try to make it, they will just cry more; as simple as it seems the difficulty lies in knowing the stages of tablet and being able to accurately predict when it will be done. They'll definitely get this wrong for a while. It is this kind of post-mortem adulation that I wish to inspire one day; it's the only kind of legacy I care about leaving. So I'm getting the recipes right, right now.

In thinking about tablet and tablet-making, I often wondered (well, a couple of times) what would happen if you substituted a can of coconut milk for a can of condensed milk. Let me tell you what happens: for a long, long time things appear to be progressing completely normally. Having mixed all of the ingredients together and brought them to a boil, you lower the temperature and mix it now and then letting it simmer for about 20 minutes. In the middle of this you get the most delicious caramel you have ever laid tongue upon. In this case, as it was coconut flavoured caramel, it is excruciatingly delicious. But you don't stop there. You continue to stir until it turns golden and wee sugar crystals start to form and then you take it off the heat, beat the life out of it and quickly pour it into a pan. Except that when you make tablet with coconut milk it doesn't turn golden. And suddenly you're stirring it and there are definitely crystals forming and you are moments away from ruining the batch when you quickly beat the life out of it and pour it into a pan. This perhaps because of a higher water content or a slightly lower sugar content in the recipe. Regardless it is actually quite good; the results are lighter and crumblier than normal and a more delicate hue but the coconut perfume is pervasive and compelling. And think of the other flavours you could add to it - ginger, lime, a drizzle of dark chocolate. Maybe some toasted coconut shavings on top. Rum. Stirred in just after taking the mixture off the heat, any of those would be divine.

If you are making tablet for the first time I sincerely recommend this site. They are more thorough than I would ever care to be.

It's fitting to eat severely sugary food on Burns Night, after all if not for the publication of his poems, Robert Burns was days away from sailing off to Jamaica, to a sugar plantation, to become a slave driver. Technically a "bookkeeper", but as he was going to be in charge of "assets", the job would have involved a great deal of brutality. Instead he managed to avoid the financial and personal situation that was making this appalling choice somehow palatable. Instead he became a national poet and a supporter of abolitionists. So eat a bit of tablet in recognition of our profoundly human ability to be fallible and wrong, of a triumph of art, of the exploitation and atrocities that bankrolled western Scotland and brought in the mounds of sugar. Eat some because it is delicious and because the past is forever complicated.

But back to us, right here, right now. Let's say you are having a bad day, maybe the most depressing of the year. A little bit of whisky could make it a little bit better. If things feel particularly bleak my favourite remedy is a half pint and a shot of Bunnahabhain. Bunnahabhain is an Islay malt and those ones are noted for their peaty and smoky flavour. Being mostly ignorant, I like to think of this malt as being "balanced" because it has smoky, peaty, sweet and smooth aspects. Really this term is reserved for malts that are more cohesive. Rounded and smooth ones from the Highlands. But I feel there is a balance in the way that each taste replaces itself one by one in every sip. I find the slowly changing character of the drink hypnotic, there is a narrative in each swallow. I wouldn't drink more than this to take the sting out of a blue day, this will be enough. And I would drink it at The Pot Still, a small pub near the train stations filled equally with business men and bemapped tourists holding their glasses of whisky with sharp fear. The walls are a dirty warm pink, the ceiling moulds excessive, the wood is dark, the whisky is abundant and miraculously there seems to always be a tiny table in the corner, empty and ready for you.

Trenching your gushing entrails bright - Ginger Tablet Hearts Rabbie

I read the tea leaves incorrectly. I thought that people would be preoccupied with health and fitness at this time of year. I thought people would want to talk about vegetables. Nope. Do you know what my google hits are telling me? They're saying people want to know if they should eat haggis while pregnant and what food goes well with whisky. Screw healthy resolutions! It's almost Burns Night!

 

Ok. I'm with you. It's just that the date always sneaks up on me. But being flexible and highly adaptable, starting on Monday we will have a WEEK OF REALLY GOOD SCOTTISH FOOD AND DRINK. I haven't come up with a catchy name yet. I'm excited though because this is a big year; it's Robbie Burns' 250th birthday. The milk jugs have wee verses on them and tiny pictures of mice. There's a new banknote. People are going to Ayrshire for cultural reasons. The Scottish government is hoping to attract tourist over here in January. This is huge. Plus last year I was sick, sick, sick right about now so I didn't eat any haggis at all. Unacceptable. I'm going to make up for it now.

So what can you expect? I'll be writing about one of my favourite Scottish dishes every day this coming week as well as one of my favourite whiskies. It's going to be informative and instructive and delicious. I'm going to keep things pretty seasonal, so no waxing about Scottish berries (although my goodness they are wax-worthy). Expect potatoes. But in many, many exciting ways. Fortunately we're also back in shellfish season, so some of those critters will make an appearance. And I will show you how to make the most amazing fish soup in the world that also happens to be so easy, that even a poet who's been dead for 200 years could probably do it.

Then we can talk about vegetables again after that. Don't worry.

In the meantime, if you are curious about whether you should eat haggis when you're knocked up, you can find a (sort of) answer here.

If you want to know what I would eat with whisky (aside from "absolutely anything") stay tuned.  

P.S. Dad, please send me a picture of yourself in your full Burns Night regalia. I think it's time for the world/a few people to see.

We'll talk about this once. Eat vegetables, Lose weight.

It's just the worst. It's January, we're broke, it's disgusting outside and the food in the shops is definitely becoming a bit sad. And this is when we decide to really re-evaluate our diets and exercise regimes. It's the wrong time of the year, a punishing month, a stupid trap. And I would like to say that I am so, so above it all, but that would be a lie.

I absolutely never used to think about this seasonal bulge-shifting but then I moved to Scotland and put on an absolutely alarming amount of weight in a very short time. Some combination of lack of exercise, 65 pints a week, too many chips/fries, mild depression and I think the very dark winter. I think it made me hungry all of the time. My hunger just moved in and nothing I ingested could persuade it to budge. And this made me phenomenally uncomfortable. I felt like shit, I looked like someone else, people treated me differently.

So not for vanity's sake alone, but because I felt so alien in my body, over the course of 2.5 years, I lost it all. I think somewhere close to 45 pounds. I'm not sure because when I first weighed myself after the year of binge, I thought the scale was wrong/broken so I blocked the number from my mind. But definitely 30 in the last two years.

And I never dieted. Sure I changed what I ate, I started to exercise again, I got pretty severely ill and lost about 9 pounds in four days (I had stretch marks on my stomach, horrifying), but I never dieted. I never followed weird portion-controlled plans or complex regimes. I made a lot of little adjustments to my life and my body just went back to its more normal state over a long period of time.

So that's all super and wonderful for me and my renewed confidence. And how great is it that I accept my body more now than I used to before the ballooning? But I'm still at the stage where it feels pretty tentative and fragile. I feel like a few too many deviations from my normal routine and I'll be back to thigh-chaffing. This made the holiday period a bit tricky. On one hand I was surrounded by phenomenal food all of the time including many items that are unavailable to me most of the year and I wasn't going to let anything stop me from putting them into my mouth. On the other hand, I just don't really want things to get out of control again. I found the situation stressful; I hope I don't feel that way over future festive periods. What a stupid thing to think about during a family meal.

Upon my return home, a trip to the scale revealed that nothing much had changed, but still I feel the January urge to be fit and healthy. So to get back to a normal, totally in the middle of my recommended BMI, feeling good, clothes fitting state, the main thing I'm going to do is eat my vegetables.  That's my number one tip for losing weight or maintaining where you are. Don't cut things out, don't stop eating. Just eat the stuff you're meant to and you won't be so hungry for crap*.  I'm talking like 5 servings of vegetables a day. Fruit doesn't count, that's additional. Just eat more vegetables than you normally would, but you can still have meat, sugar, cheese, alcohol, whatever.  I've had to seriously restrict and monitor my diet before for non-weight lose reasons and I found it so depressing and soul-destroying. But this really works for me. It takes a bit of thought, but there's still loads of flexibility.

This post is getting a bit long, so tomorrow I'll talk about strategies for getting all of those vegetables in your mouth. In the meantime here are some other things I can recommend:

• Weigh yourself. I know this is counter to conventional wisdom, but it works for me. I weigh myself first thing in the morning almost every day. I like knowing the number. I don't like relying on how my clothes feel. It's too subjective. My feelings about my body are already verging on the irrational at times, I don't need to start thinking about how I feel about how my clothes feel that day. I need a solid number. If things are tipping out of my comfort zone I just try to eat more vegetables. It's actually a pretty sane system.
• Don't bring everything home.I had a habit of bringing things home with me my first year in Scotland: Nutella, biscuits, strangers. I don't really do that anymore. I still eat  a bunch of crap, but there are some items that are banned from my weekly shop. Even though Nutella comes in those little glass jars that I love, I would smear it on bacon if given the chance. It's not a force for good in my life. And I eat biscuits/cookies like normal people eat crisps/chips. Some snacks are just not allowed through the door anymore. 
• Don't drink sometimes. Drinking too much everyday makes you profoundly fat. I try to avoid it a some days during the week now. I still binge on some/all weekends which I know is very, very bad for me but I'm not yet ready to tackle that yet. I've just exorcised the random drinks that I didn't care about very much anyway.
• Do some exercise that you will actually do. I join gyms now and then and they work for me; I like swimming first thing in the morning. But I think the thing that works the best is cycling around the city. Or walking a lot to do errands. Finding a way to exercise in a way that's integrated into your daily life. I think you just do more than if you're watching the clock on an exercise machine.
• Get a debilitating intestinal disorder.Ha! Just kidding. OMG if you have a normally healthy gut please don't ever do anything to jeopardize that. You are a lucky, lucky person and no silhouette is worth the kind of agony that fucking with your intestines will produce. 

None of this content is new. It's just a testimonial. The boring stuff works. Healthy changes make you feel more powerful. It's a revelation to see that you have a bit of control. I had to keep a food diary for a couple of years and the tedium made my eyes bleed so I promise this blog will never become that. I will never post about serving sizes or what I've eaten in a week. It's boring. But I wanted to get this one post up, because I'd been thinking about this stuff and maybe you have to and you know, it's a weight off my mind. HAAAAHAAAHAAAA. hilarious. shut up. eat your peas.

*Crap is essential. I eat treats every day. I lost at least 45 pounds eating chocolate. Totally tabloid. Totally true. 

It's just a question of timing

Look at all of these festive baked goods. Don't they make you want to puke a little bit? What a difference a month makes. I'm not even going to bother telling you what these were, although they were delicious. And the trifle I made for Christmas day? Perhaps we can revisit it the next time an occasion calls for a dessert made in my image: sloppy, alcoholic and perfect.

If the most boring formula for a food blog post is "I used to hate (random ingredient), but then I discovered this new recipe/technique/variety and now I can't stop shoving it into my mouth..." then the most tedious blogging entries in general are the "I was so going to post a million posts over the last week but somehow stuff came up". Well, I'm sorry, but I really was so going to post a million posts over Christmas, over my vacation when I figured I would be able to snatch a few minutes here and there to tell you about a few great little treats. I had all of these separate posts saved before I left so I could just update now and then, add an anecdote and then go back to enjoying Canada*. It just didn't happen. There were access-to-computer issues in Winnipeg and too many (and somehow not nearly enough) social engagements in Toronto and by the time we got to the wilderness of northern Quebec, all I could do was sleep and read and eat and bake things that involved yeast. I was caught short every day. My precious visit back home became an unstoppable countdown to my flight back to Glasgow.

After a while that's the thing that starts to really sting about going home. It's not that things are different or gone, or that there's now a Starbucks on a corner where yuppies formerly feared to tread. It's not that people move away or social groups shift. It's that your sense of timing gets lost and forgotten. The lovely rhythms you develop when you live in a place are impossible to reproduce in a few compressed days. You stop wandering and exploring and experimenting because it's so important to have that exact taste, that precise meal, that you miss so dearly throughout the year. You try to press all the people you love together, in one tight stream, never allowing a chance to pause and unruffle.

On Saturdays in Toronto, I would wake (possibly hungover) and plan the whole day according to what I wanted to eat (perhaps due to possible hangover). These decisions would dictate the neighbourhoods I traveled to, the shops I visited and anything else I would try to accomplish. It was a pleasing way to structure a day. I would see friends or family throughout this time, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident. And while those moments are an impossible thing to replicate over a rushed few days at Christmas, the absence of that time makes me profoundly homesick. It's what I wish I could do, what I would love to do with J.  When I want to tell him:

life here can be wonderful. taste this. it's lovely. there's more to this city than slush and crawling streetcars. people here make beauty. when they're not being sarcastic.

When you fall out of rhythm with a city it becomes your stranger and things become hidden from your view.

This pervading nostalgia might be overwhelming if Canada wasn't so full of charming people and delicious food.  Even jostled together in the stress of the holiday, out of context and in a jumble, it was perfect. We ate and ate and ate and I hugged a lot of people that I love, nearly everyone possible**, and laughed and wept. I seemed to have wept more this year. These feelings don't appear to follow steady trajectories.

And now we are back in our home. And despite being different, there's great comfort in our space and our routine. We're unpacked and almost sleeping normally, and moving back into our Glasgow patterns.The ones tailored for the brief, dark days of January. A Saturday that comprised solely of two long meals, crepes in the morning, chicken and dumpling stew in the evening, a film, a walk and back to bed. Not enough time for anything else. A Sunday that seemed to only come into focus as it was being finished with a bowl of soup in the evening. There's not a lot you can do in this time but stay warm, dry off and feed yourself. Start the new year in tiny motions. It's probably all we can expect of ourselves right now. The light stretches by three minutes every day right now; that seems like just about the right model of acceleration.

I'll try for that. Armed with new kitchen toys and books and an appetite for long meals during these short days, I'm going to forget what it feels like to be rushed. If you have a minute you should come by. There will definitely be food.

*Actually one of the reasons I didn't post a "Bye! I'm off on vacation for a couple of weeks post" is that I got irrationally worried that someone (a bad guy) would see the post and break into my flat. Not that this site generates the kind of traffic to warrant that concern, but do serious bloggers worry about that? If I were famous, I would. I would run all sorts of subterfuge so no one would ever now when I was actually vacationing. It would take over my life. Thank goodness for obscurity.

**Not Jess. Not Amanda.