bliss in three bottles purple

pickled beetroot with horseradish

1.4 kg beetroot
4 tbs fresh diced horseradish
1 tbs black pepper
1 tbs caraway seeds
3-6 whole cloves
1 bay leave
0.7 l white wine vinegar
125ml water
80-100g brown sugar
1 tsp salt

wash beetroot, cover in cold water and bring to boil for 25-45min, depending on size. peel and slice or dice. fill while still warm into sterilised jars (this lot made 3x 500ml jars), alongside horseradish and spices. boil vinegar, water, sugar and salt. fill jars with the liquid and seal immediately. it keeps for a minimum of six months; i had some of them for well over a year or two; great with olive oil and parmesan. the recipe asks for fresh horseradish but any strong horseradish sauce works as well (cream in sauce doesn't seem to spoil the pickle).

Jars full of distraction

I'm preparing my boxes for next summer by firstly filling lots of empty jars.

With what?



Green tomato chutney. I made some several years ago, forgot about it til recently. Opened a jar. Loved it. Stumbled across unripe tomatoes. Bought them. Made some jars. In fact: many, many jars. It's a 1950s recipe book. So, we're talking several pounds of ingredients. How could I forget.



You know what: it's pretty daft to BUY unripe tomatoes. So: another note to self: next batch will be with my own unripe tomatoes.

Home is where the heart is

I had mentioned a while back that one of the small ongoing projects is one with a colleague at work and an artist, Michelle Letowska. The title and theme of Michelle's project is that of home, people's needs and the urban environment.

Home is where the heart is:
Who are the people and what do they need?
Everyone will have his or her own idea of what are fundamental human needs, and the role that home plays in fulfilling our human needs. Human ecologist Alistair McIntosh has adapted Manfred Max-Neef’swheel of fundamental human needs to give parity to water, food, fuel, shelter, protection, participation, identity, understanding, creativity, transcendence and
affection.

As dwellers in cities, we are witness to, and interact with, theoutside structures which most people occupy –tenements, town houses, high flats, maisonettes, bungalows, cottages. What kind of homes do these external walls house? What kinds of homes do those without
external walls of shelter create? How do we live? How do others live?
How does the way we live reflect our human needs and ability to fulfil these? Where can we see that fulfilment in the structures of ourbuilt environment? When does a place become a home?

This project invites participants from across the department of Urban Studies (postgraduate students, researchers, support staff and academic staff) to explore these questions with each other. We invite you to contribute images, photographs, drawings or objects, madeor
found (anything at all!) that reflects your own experience of home. These items will be displayed, as a temporary and informal exhibition, in the coffee area of the department. The exhibition will be a starting point for a discussion on human needs, and the role we all play in providing these, for ourselves and for others.

It will take the form of a found objects exhibition in what is the commons space within our department. A much neglected communal space at the best of times. And that will be an interesting point in its own right.

Michelle (who has a blog at http://omeiswheretheartis.blogspot.com/) is interested in doing an Artist in Residence project within the department as this should be one of the first projects to explore this further.

With all my travelling back and forth and here and there and ensuing change of stuff I'm very intrigued by this project. It also resonates with a conference one of my friends is organising on Transit.

Currently, I'm favouring the following as temporary contribution:

My mother's layered apple cake. The favourite of all my grandparents' for Sunday coffees, my brother and I failed to see why. But here, the passing of time and some physical distance is rather productive in generating memories. It's currently in the oven in my favourite flat in Berlin, waiting for T. & I. to come back from a cycle tour, just needs some whipped cream and good coffee alongside it.

500g flour
20g fresh yeast
1 egg
80g butter
80g sugar
pinch of salt
1/4l lukewarm milk.

Make a yeast dough of the above, let it prove.

Take a (preferably deep) oven tray, roll out one half of the dough for bottom layer.

1.5 kg sharp apples, sliced and cooked with a bit of water, some sugar and a pinch of cinnamon.

Layer the cooked apples on top.

Roll out remaining dough, place carefully on top.

The top, before the cake is put into the hot oven (fan-assisted at 170C, 30min), is speckled with flecks of butter, some sugar and chopped almonds.

Bake. Smell. Let cool. Smell some more. Eat.

Home.... such a fluid concept.

Recipe #3 this year

I was hoping for some baking activities this weekend but I think this will be as good as my pre-holiday domesticity will get.

It's simply: Cranberries.

Take
500 g cranberries
500 g jam sugar
some orange juice
some whisky*

Do the usual jam making stuff with it, adding the whisky right at the end. And fill into sterilised jars. Label and give away as presents.

It goes - like cranberry sauce - with game; but also makes a dessert when mixed with some quark/milk/cream. My unbeaten favourite use for it is alongside scrambled eggs and mashed potatoes. I was rather put out earlier this year when I discovered there weren't any jars left. Glad I sorted that problem for the time being.



* Of course, there's room for experimentation: one recipe I have calls for mixed peel (about 50g or so) instead of the orange juice, but I'm not convinced by that; you can also just use less sugar - half the amount of sugar makes it wonderfully tart; etc etc.

The darkest, lushest magenta

in my large pan is the only remains of my lucky find today.

1 kg blackcurrants
a good gluck of sloe gin
1 kg of jam sugar (or whatever you use to make it set)

I stumbled across a plenty of reduced blackcurrants in one of my local shops. Jammy, really. Usually, three blackcurrants tend to cost an arm and a leg here, if you can find them at all, and my mum would turn her eye to heavens knowing that I would spend money on buying fruit to make jam with - that's what the garden is for. Never mind.


This is what's left - except for the six jam jars full of delight, of course.

Jam: the darker the better, I think.

A bit of Middle Eastern promise

To compensate for my postponed travel plans, here's a recipe:

Baclawa
(makes about 20)

250g filo pastry
80g butter, melted

For the syrup
125 g sugar
75 ml water
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon liquid honey
1 tablespoon rose water

For the filling
180g walnuts, coarsely ground
80 g sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
grated zest of 1 lemon

To make the syrup:
boil water and sugar for 10 mins, add honey and rose water and boil for another minute

Mix the filling ingredients.

I used a round 20cm tin, but probably some square baking tin or dish would work better. Grease tin and fit half the pastry sheets in the tray, one a time, brushed generously with the butter, fold/overlap - or simply: crumpled - the sheets around the edges. Spread the nut mixture evenly over sheets; layer the remaining sheets as before; also brush the top layer with melted butter. Cut parallel lines through all the layers with a sharp pointed knive. Bakes in preheated 160C oven for an hour.

Take baclawa out and let cool for five minutes; pour syrup over the cut lines and the whole tin; put back into oven for another five minutes [this is the cheating bit as per recipe]; you can reduce the amount of syrup for a less sweeter version.

This is a jumbled together version of different recipes from Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food which I love for the Sephardic recipes.

Enjoy! I pictured myself on West Jerusalem's shuq, and it worked.
Look for yourself:

Have some biscuits for christmas...

... and Oma Eschede's* Kolutschen would be an excellent choice.

Well, there was a plan to take a picture of the full tin,
but by the time I got round to it,
only these three were left...

They are part of my first memories of making Christmas biscuits. My mum, my little brother and myself in our old house's kitchen had set up an elaborate division of labour: first, Torben and I would have to attempt to roll the perfect round globes which wouldn't fall apart - difficult one, that one. Then we would argue a bit of who would have to baste them in egg white (not much fun) and who would be allowed to roll them in sugar after (much more fun).

Because he was younger, he wasn't allowed to carry out the more delicate task of poking little moulds into them (of course this isn't part of my memories but vividly in his; and probably one of the few disadvantages of being younger - which is of course my vivid memory ;)), the final task would be to fill the little moulds - like bird nests with jelly.

These were my mum's mother's Kolutschen - simple short crust dough with sugar and jam - unbeaten for Christmas sweetness. Strangely enough, these are biscuits I have still to make myself but without fail they would be in one of my mum's biscuit tins, as they are indeed this year.

Here's the recipe

Kolutschen

250 g sugar
150 g butter
1 pack of vanilla sugar
3 egg yolk
400 g flour

Whisk butter for 15 mins, add sugar, yolks and flour, form globes (about 2 cm diameter) , roll in egg white, then in sugar, use one of those squeeze things to making meringue (well: in German it's Fingerhut) to make a mould which you then fill with a bit of jelly (like the redcurrant one here).

Bake for about 10 mins in oven of 180 degree C (fan-assisted).

Here's another gem from my mum's cook book. It's not so much the recipe - I don't think she ever made that After Eight Cake, but it's my other granny's handwriting... and from the titling by me it must be about 20 years old...




* well, naming grandparents in my parents' house happened according to location, so we had Oma and Opa Eschede and Oma and Opa Uelzen ... and as a geographer I would learn some 20 years later that space and place mattered ...

.

Autumn interlude

... two fresh figs in lush purply greens with some sugary icing.



They were supposed to become part of:

Take two pears, two figs - cut however fine you like; a finely-cut small piece of ginger; and the freshly squeezed juice of one orange. Place in an ovenproof dish, you can add some brown sugar on top, and bake in a medium hot oven for about 20 mins or until slightly caramelised on top.

Serve with ice cream, cream or nothing else for a taste of autumn warmth.

That'll be tomorrow's dinner then. But before, they really should get a sketch.



.

Off topic accompaniment

... which I meant to post much closer to my jam experiments.

Here is the recipe for the best complementing creation to either redcurrant/strawberry or raspberry/greengage jam:

Marilyn's plain scone recipe (Thank you!)

8 oz self-raising flour
a pinch of salt
- mixed and well-sieved (to get plenty of air into the dough)
3 oz hard margarine (butter makes it too rich and less crumbly)
3 oz castor sugar
1 egg
a little milk

Preheat the oven to around 210C

Rub the margarine into the flour (don't knead the dough)
then add sugar and egg after each other
finally add milk (doesn't need much but enough to make it a soft dough)

This is enough to make 6-7 well-sized scones
I just shaped them individually without a cutter and floured them slightly on top

Bake them for 12-14 mins.

Then you should have something like this:


Needless to say: best still slightly warm, but also good toasted... either with butter and jam, or also with cream/creme fraiche and jam

... With all the worry of coping with imperial measures myself, I almost forgot to include this crucial info to all the metrics among you: 1 oz (ounce) is about 28 g :)

Summer fruits

...continuing my mostly virtual celebration of summer (but: as we speak the sun is actually shining into my living room!!!), I found some more soft fruit in the shops... this time redcurrants, and made yet another batch of jam, this time with half redcurrants, half strawberries (for a fuller recipe, see this post here). I must admit that I always get excited at the sight of summer fruit and vegetable - something about its freshness and beauty. This was on my kitchen counter last night:

















While I've been sketching skies, clouds, rocks and trees this summer, I should take note and plan something on vegetable and fruit for the next summer... so, note taken.

I had started a few fruit sketches at my parents, and here's one with some plums on a branch.

Plums, Mixed media, sketchbook, 14x21 cm

Jam making and creativity

... yesterday's post on how to find subjects to write about is still rippling through my mind. At lunchtime yesterday I had bought a pound of raspberries and greengages. Raspberries in particular have become the fruit of summer for me since I moved to Scotland: so many of them are around and for such a long time that I do on occasions stop minding too much rain.

A fews years ago, when I was finishing my PhD in geography and got exhausted from the sheer endless writing up of all those pages and the constant skintness, I started making jam. My grandparents had an allotment and there would be so much jam made and fruits bottled, similarly, many of my friends would try out new recipes for all the strawberries, currants, plums and so on in Germany. Making jam - if not having a garden - was a way of being closer to them, but also something practical that I really longed for. Subsequently, my shelves - and those of my friends here - got filled with all sorts of jam creations (mind you, that grape and red wine jelly was rather disappointing).

I haven't made much jam in the past few years - I actually rarely eat jam in the morning and there's only that much you can give away. But the practicality of something other than thinking/writing academically was absolute joy - in the process I tried a variety of other things, such as knitting and crochet. While they open up a number of possibilities, their creative potential seemed however rather limited - in the end, the jams I kept liking most and making again were redcurrant, plum and raspberries - so, nothing fancy at all.

Do you see where this is going? When I started drawing, the technicality of the tutor's instructions was easy enough to follow but it took a good few more rounds of being lost and starting to do things differently and 'just try this and see what happens when I do this' for me to get a sense of the endless possibilities and openings of painting and art in general.

This looks like a post that I will be coming back to. But in the meantime, here is a link to a blog which has a whole series of interesting thoughts and commentaries on creativity Libzoid is by Libby Mills, an American artist who works with polymer clay. I enjoy visiting her blog to get pointers on work process, inspiration alongside a commentary on a medium I know very little about.

In the meantime: This is what I had for breakfast

Greengage (Mirabellen) and raspberry jam

500 g raspberries
500 g greengages, finely chopped
500 g 2:1 jam sugar

Mix all in a large pot, mash the fruit up thoroughly and let sit for a couple of hours
Bring slowly to the boil while stirring

Let cook for at least 3 minutes
Fill in sterilised jars immediately and seal.