Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #28

 Today's Challenge: Fast from... all highly processed foods.

In many parts of Europe it is traditional to eat fish on Christmas Eve. Carp in Germany, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe; salt cod in Provence and Italy; a spicy fish stew known as halászlé, in Hungary and gravadlax, or cured salmon in Scandinavia. In part, this is a reflection of European Christian heritage - Christmas Eve is traditionally observed both by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians as a strict fast day on which no meat is consumed since it is the vigil of the Solemn Feast of Christmas. But this also reflects seasonal availability, more relevant in the past than today perhaps. Unlike fresh meat, fresh fish continued to be available throughout the winter, either from the sea or from freshwater lakes and rivers and if fresh fish wasn't available, dried salt fish or pickled fish in brine were additional options that could be relied upon when other food could be scarce. 

Fish these days is a luxury - it is expensive, often prohibitively so - the days of being able to fill up on oysters and salmon because they are so cheap are long gone. I often serve fish on Christmas Eve - a nod to past tradition and since it is a treat, I feel it is also an appropriate harbinger of the feast of the morrow.

I usually make a fish soup - either a flaming scarlet, Italian-style burrida with a base of onions, fennel, carrots, tomatoes and white wine, flavoured with orange peel and rosemary, or a paler more English-style one, with onions, leeks, celery and potato, flavoured with saffron and dill and finished with cream. The fish in either soup is usually of one kind rather than a mixture, cubed white fish such as cod or haddock loin, monkfish if I'm feeling extravagant, or pale scallops, halved if they're large, dropped into the simmering broth and poached until just done. Sometimes I use fresh salmon fillet for the English-style one which looks beautiful - the pale pink of the fish against the golden yellow backdrop of the soup. 

Today I have not made fish soup; I've produced something I usually leave until after Christmas to make and that is homemade gravadlax. This sounds more ambitious than it is and if you've never tried preparing this at home, I recommend it. Minimally processed, it has all the nutrients and vitamins of raw fish and is absolutely delicious. 

I first tried it in 2014 the year I got 'Salt, Sugar and Smoke', Diana Henry's excellent book which contains a couple of recipes for cured salmon, one with vodka and one with whisky and I've made it for high days and holidays ever since. I prefer the version with vodka. To make this, you do need at least one whole side of very fresh, good quality salmon, cleaned and boned but with the skin on. I get mine by mail order from here ahead of time and freeze it. Freezing is recommended in fact, prior to curing, as it kills off any parasites. I m not sure how this works but that is the advice given by Diana Henry and elsewhere. 

Preparation (it can hardly be called cooking) is a doddle but it has to be done well ahead of time as the cure needs several days to 'take'. You mix sugar, salt, black peppercorns and chopped fresh dill together and sandwich this together with the vodka between two pieces of fish. 

This 'sandwich' is then tightly wrapped in a double layer of tin foil, placed on a baking tray and weighted down in the fridge for four - five days. Diana Henry says two to four days but I would say it's best to leave it to cure for the full four days before unpacking and slicing . You can either sandwich two whole sides of salmon together or, if you want to prepare a smaller quantity, you can cut one side of salmon into two chunks and place one on top of the other. This is what I've done for today. Either way, you need to turn the salmon once a day, replacing the weights to keep the fish in contact with the cure. I usually put my weights on a tray or plate as once you've started to turn the salmon, the cure draws out a lot of liquid and you don't want that all over your weights. 

At the end of the curing period you remove the fish from its foil parcel and slice thinly with an extremely sharp knife. You can discard the peppercorn and dill residue of the curing mixture or I like to add some of the black and green fragments back over the sliced salmon. And the best bit of the process? Those teensy weensy nuggets of cured salmon that haven't made the grade of proper slices are the cook's privilege to sample and savour in the quiet of the kitchen. Christmas has begun in earnest! Actually the apostrophe is in the wrong place - it should come after the 's' as this is usually a joint effort between H and myself. I prepare and turn the salmon beforehand and H, armed with a wickedly sharp, very long, slim blade is generally charged with the slicing as he is far more proficient than I am at patiently and skilfully taking off long, thin, elegant slices right down to the skin at the base of the fillet. 

Diana Henry comments that the preparation of cured salmon is traditionally done in Scandinavia 'in coolness, in silence and in shadow' and I can confirm that preparing this in silence, by candlelight, before dawn, around the time of the winter solstice, feels wonderfully atavistic. On a practical note, regardless of how you conduct the preparation, the slicing should definitely be undertaken in coolness and silence, although not in semi-darkness. It is a job requiring very clean hands, good light and plenty of space and time. Always slice horizontally away from you as H is doing in the pic below this afternoon. Any interruptions or distractions should be banned - a blade that lethal should be treated with considerable circumspection. Enough said!

Breakfast

tea with unsweetened soya milk

apple juice

fruit

homemade Greek-style yoghurt

Lunch

homemade game pâté on granary toast and homemade apricot and tomato chutney

Tea

black tea

panforte di Siena

Supper

cured salmon

watercress salad

pickled marinaded mushrooms with dill and black peppercorns

Russian sourdough rye bread with unsalted butter

mince pies made with homemade damson and hazelnut mincemeat with cream 

chocolate meringue log*

* A BBC Good Food recipe from 1995 - I can't find a link to this anywhere - it pre-dates Internet days - but it's basically meringue flecked with grated plain chocolate, baked flat and rolled around a filling of whipped cream, rum and melted milk chocolate. The only tricky thing is making sure there isn't too much of a differential between the temperature of the melted milk chocolate and that of the whipped cream for the filling, otherwise, if the chocolate is too warm and the cream too cold, the chocolate seizes on contact with the cream. Not a disaster if this happens - it just makes the filling a bit granular in texture. This has happened to me in the past and I've served it up anyway - no one has ever complained! 

The chocolate holly leaves are a frivolous extra but do make it look very pretty. You pipe the outlines in melted dark chocolate before filling in with melted white chocolate. They are 'glued' in place with a little bit of reserved filling. 

I am conscious that although the roulade is homemade it does rely on the processed food that is chocolate. I fear this therefore may be a fail at the last fence as it were! 

Anyway, Happy Christmas Eve to you and all who are with you in spirit, body or remembrance.

E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #27

 

Today's Challenge: Fast from... all out of season foods.

For various practical historical reasons, I've often not been able to cook a traditional roast on Christmas Day and we've made a virtue out of necessity and roasted a bird on another day. In the past it was usually after Christmas itself but in recent years it's had to be brought forward because of practical arrangements with the farm which supplies our bird of choice, goose. Actually, this works out rather well. Roasting a goose is quite an undertaking, not because it's inherently any more complicated than roasting a chicken or turkey but because geese give off a great deal of fat as they cook. By a great deal, I mean a medium sized goose will give off around a litre and a half of fat! This has to be regularly poured off and the process is best done without a million and one other distractions because the pan with the roasting bird which has to be tipped up is heavy to manhandle and the fat is not only copious but very hot. I find it easier to do all this not on Christmas Day itself. So the goose hunts closer to the winter solstice than Christmas Day these days which seems not inappropriate.

Goose is one of the few foods that remains resolutely seasonal - traditionally, geese were reared over the spring and summer, and fattened during the early autumn ready for killing and eating either at Michaelmas at the end of September, Martinmnas in mid-November or Christmas. That remains true today. Here in the UK, you cannot buy fresh goose in March or June, say. For me, its seasonality is one of its attractions and because it is expensive, we generally only ever have it at Christmas. It therefore remains intensely evocative of this and no other time of year. 

Although red cabbage is available throughout the autumn and winter, for me, a bowl of braised red cabbage, spiced with cloves and cinnamon and cooked long and slow in the oven with red onions, apples, some demerara sugar and a splash of apple cider vinegar is also always very much associated with Christmastime. It accompanies roast goose or game beautifully and has the great advantage of being better made ahead and chilled (or frozen) and then reheated when required.

The same better-if-prepared-ahead characteristic applies to the potato and celeriac purée. This is a Delia Smith recipe from her 1990 book, Christmas. The vegetables are cooked, drained and then mashed together with sour cream, salt and plenty of black pepper. I like to dust the surface with a bit of freshly grated nutmeg too. 

Both the red cabbage and the potato and celeriac purée sit happily in a bain marie in my upper oven while I deal with Mrs Goosey in the oven below!

This year, my Christmas guests arrived this afternoon so today has marked the beginning of Christmas celebrations here. Advent has felt appropriately observed and abstemious enough to sharpen the anticipation of a little uninhibited feasting over the next few days, without a feeling of boredom or déjà vu. That in itself has been quite a precious Christmas gift. 

Breakfast

tea with unsweetened soya milk

apple juice

pear

Greek-style yoghurt

Lunch

leftovers from the fridge

Tea

black tea

baby Christmas cakes with marzipan and fondant icing*

*These cakelets are a forerunner of my Christmas cake proper. I use a, slightly adapted, version of the BBC Good Food boil-and-bake recipe by Sara Buenfeld for the cakes.  For the marzipan, I use Delia Smith's almond paste recipe in her Complete Cookery Course. I can't give you a link to the marzipan recipe itself because it doesn't seem to exist in any On-line form. It's a cooked almond paste so it's slightly more complicated than some but I think it's unbeatable - it has an excellent flavour and texture and it's easy to work with. It's also suitable for anyone who shouldn't eat raw eggs. I've made it every year for over 30 years now and although whisking the eggs and sugar over hot water for 12 minutes, (which is what's involved), is time-consuming, it's non-negotiable. Hell will have to freeze over before I'll willingly abandon it!

The fondant icing recipe I've only come to in the last few years but am a convert to it for icing these little cakelets, even though I still use a classic royal icing mix for my big Christmas cake. You can find the recipe I use here. The flavour of the homemade stuff, I'm afraid, does knock the spots off what you can buy. Not worth it perhaps if you know people are going to leave the icing on the side of their plates uneaten, but if it's there to be eaten and enjoyed, (and in this house that's what it's there for), then it's worth the trouble. I started making fondant rather than royal icing for these mini cakes in order to use a rather jolly, snowflake-embossed rolling pin my mother-in-law gave me a few Christmases back. I love the effect this has - the raised white-on-white design is understated but elegant. 

The world divides into dyed-in-the-wool Christmas-cake-lovers and others. I know some people really don't like the classic, British Christmas cake. Too much dried fruit. Too much sugar in the marzipan and icing. Or just too much, all in. But for me, this is one of the great culinary triumphs of British baking; one of the highlights of Christmas and I love it. 

In fact, in all truth, I'd be happy to pass up all other Christmas food and just have the cake! 

Supper

roast goose with herby stuffing** 

apple sauce made from cold-stored apples in the garage 

braised spiced red cabbage with apple and onions

potato and celeriac purée

pigs in blankets

mince pies with damson and hazelnut mincemeat and Cointreau and clementine cream***

**The stuffing is my mother-in-law's recipe which is very good with chicken, turkey or goose and yes, I do use it to stuff the cavity of the bird. So long as the bird is fresh, not frozen, and has had a bit of time out of the fridge before cooking to take the chill off it, I find this is fine. If you cook stuffing separately, you miss out on the unctuous joy of the meat juices and fat seeping into the stuffing during cooking. 

It's made from a loaf of two-to-three-day-old homemade 50% wholemeal / 50% white bread, de-crusted and whizzed to crumbs in the food processor - about 400g for Mrs Goosey today, lots of chopped fresh herbs from the garden (parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, hyssop, summer savory - whatever is still going in the garden basically), salt, pepper and boiling water to mix. It has no fat - plenty of that drips through as the goose cooks. And it has no egg - the egg added to stuffing is what makes it stick together but it also makes it tough, I think. I much prefer the looser, almost melting texture of this stuffing and just add enough boiling water to the mix to allow it to coalesce enough for me to get it into the cavity of the goose easily.

***One of the few things I buy in over Christmas rather than make from scratch - I've tried to do a homemade version of this but have not found a satisfactory recipe that actually produces the equivalent of the commercial stuff. If anyone reading this has a good, thick Cointreau cream recipe, please do share it with me.  

E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #26

 

Today's Challenge: Fast from... one meal of your choosing out of your normal daily routine

Today I am back on track with my Advent challenge as skipping breakfast meant I could get on with other stuff today without delay and the rest of the day's meals have been a motley assortment of left-overs before playing the annual game of fridge-tetris where I try to pack what seems like all the residents of the Bethlehem stable into one manger. Never mind 'no room at the inn', it's no room in the fridge, this year and every year! 

I may have to resort to the heavy guns and get H to repack the whole thing. I avoid this, if I can, as I tend to get a raft of derogatory comments about my inefficient use of space and opprobrious remarks about my containers of whey and the like but I have one cloven-footed critter and one winged one to get in there and assistance may be necessary! I am inspecting the mild weather forecast with a slightly jaundiced eye - a temperature of around zero outside is a huge help at this time of year as one can simply turn one's car into a mobile, temporary, additional fridge so long as one doesn't forget its new purpose and turn the heating on when travelling anywhere!

Advent is drawing to a close and although I have eaten, pretty well, I think, over these last few weeks, I am looking forward to indulging without any particular restraint over Christmas. The feeling of appreciation and looking forward to even very simple things has been magnified hugely for me with this little project.   

And instead of arriving at Christmas having overindulged with the gloomy prospect of having to make stringent cut-backs once January arrives, I have the opposite. What is not to like?!

I hope to have a final couple of posts for the last remaining two days of Advent but although they will have an element of constraint as I still have two doors to open on my Advent calendar, they will also be more celebratory in feel as Christmas begins in earnest - after all, that was the whole point of my little Advent challenge in the first place. 

E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #25

Today's Challenge: Fast from... all animal products.

This was meant to be effectively the last day of stringent abstinence in my 'Fast from... 'Advent challenges, although there are technically three more days of Advent to go. I had to do a bit of 'teeming and lading' with the final days of the challenge as with people coming to stay for Christmas and one or two other duties to perform there were some constraints on how much of a strait jacket I could impose on the commissariat. So, as I say, today was meant to mark the last day of real restraint, as such.

Having said that, like yesterday, I haven't managed to make the whole day compliant with its vegan constraint, I'm afraid. For a variety of reasons, today's plans went slightly off piste and with Christmas itself fast approaching I needed to use up various things to make urgently required space in the fridge and freezer. In addition, as it happened, lunch was completely missed on account of being out and about, with a happy stop for a (non-vegan) chai latte, so it's meant that only supper this evening was totally vegan. 

I had been scraping the barrel to come up with something vegan for supper that I either hadn't done already and /or that appealed. Turning to the pressure cooker book again for inspiration, I chose a spiced dish of black lentils and wild rice with greens. I searched high and low for black lentils in various supermarkets without success. In the end I had to order them from Amazon. If you have an Indian or Asian supermarket near you, you may be luckier as 'urad dal', as they are known, are a popular ingredient in Indian and Asian cooking. Urad dal may be white or black in colour. The white ones are simply hulled black ones. They are the main ingredient in poppadums, apparently.  Anyway, what I needed here was the black whole ones as they cook in the same time as wild rice, enabling the two to be cooked together at the same time to good effect. 

I used the recipe in the book more as an inspiration than precise guide. I added in an extra onion, some fresh chillies and more fresh ginger. As I've confessed before, I have a heavy hand with fresh ginger - difficult to have too much of the stuff, I think! And the tin of coconut cream was rather larger than the recipe specified but I used it all anyway - I don't want a third of a tin of coconut cream lurking at the back of the fridge over Christmas. You can use any greens to go with the lentils and wild rice dal. I just steamed some baby spinach to go on top. The result was very good, I have to say and went down a storm with the rest of the household who are normally a bit sniffy about vegan dishes. The recipe, as written, is not vegan  - it includes lamb - but I don't think omitting the meat remotely shortchanged the result and I shall definitely be making the vegan version again. It's nice to have added a new dish to my rather limited vegan repertoire. 

Breakfast

tea with unsweetened soya milk

bottled morello cherries

Greek-style yoghurt

Lunch

N/A

Tea

black tea

St Lucy's bun from the freezer

Supper

spiced urad dal and wild rice with coconut cream, chillies and greens

baked apples with damson and hazelnut mincemeat 

The rest of my cooking today has not been remotely vegan - mince pies to feed a small army have been prepared and squirrelled away in the freezer, ready to be baked as and when required and pheasant and partridge pâté with cranberries and apricots, intended as part of my parents-in-law's Christmas present has been bubbling away in the oven in preserving jars. 

I feel I may now cooked be out for the day!

E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #24

 

 Today's Challenge: Fast from... all dairy products.

Today has come slightly unstuck from my planned no-dairy menu on account of other things going on and too much other stuff in the kitchen to juggle so although breakfast and tea time complied with the no-dairy rule, lunch was non-existent and supper almost complied but not quite - the spiced, split yellow pea soup was entirely dairy-free but the bread wasn't. I had quite a lot of whey to use up which I often use to mix my bread doughs and rather than throw it out, it went in my granary rolls, I'm afraid.

Breakfast

tea with unsweetened soya milk

bottled morello cherries

sourdough crackers

Lunch

N/A

Tea

black tea

panforte di Siena

Supper

spiced split yellow pea soup made as per my recipe here 

granary rolls

clementines, pears and homemade vanilla marshmallows*

*These are a seasonal joy that make lovely gifts to bag up and give away and even people who think they don't like marshmallows, love them. You do need a free-standing mixer to make them as you need to pour the boiling sugar syrup onto whisked egg whites, while the whisk is whisking, if you see what I mean, so a hands-free set-up makes things much easier (and safer). 

In the absence of a free-standing mixer, you need to commandeer someone to lend an extra pair of hands to whisk while you pour, or vice versa. It's just not possible to manage the operation safely as a one-person band otherwise. Having said that, they're straightforward to make and the homemade version knocks the spots off any commercial marshmallows I've ever tasted. I use the basic vanilla marshmallow recipe in Genevieve Taylor's Marshmallow Magic which, I've found, works reliably every time. 

It's a little bit wasteful to cut out specific shapes because unlike biscuit dough which you can reroll, you can't do that with the set marshmallow mixture. But it is a nice touch to cut them into Christmassy shapes, if you're giving them away, as I shall be doing with half of these, and it's not exactly a penance to eat up the irregular and ungainly off-cuts, or add them to the top of hot chocolate, at home.  

If you are going to cut them into shapes, my advice, for what it is worth, is to stick to simple outlines and avoid anything too small and intricate as the marshmallow mixture tends to cut with slightly blurred edges and also to adhere to the cutter so something uncomplicated works best. 

And it helps to dust the cutter with some of the dusting mixture of icing sugar mixed with cornflour, between each cut. 

E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #23

 

Today's Challenge: Fast from... all imported foods.

Breakfast

black Tregothnan tea

grape juice (pressed from our own grapes and frozen) 

morello cherries picked at the local PYO in July and bottled

homemade Greek-style yoghurt

Lunch

British cheese (Lincolnshire Poacher, Isle of Mull cheddar), granary bread

Tea

black Tregothnan tea

toasted English wholemeal muffin made as per Day #7 with homemade damson jelly made from foraged and homegrown fruit

Supper

egg pasta (made with eggs from our bantams who are kindly still laying) with home-grown tomato sauce* from the freezer and grated Cornish cheddar cheese. 

leftover steamed blackberry puddings with blackberry sauce and homemade egg custard

*I made and froze the sauce for this back in November when the last of our homegrown tomatoes needed picking and using up. 

In addition to the slightly motley selection of homegrown tomatoes, I used some British red onions, a handful of carrots, a couple of red peppers, herbs from the garden and four homegrown and home-dried chillies as per the pics below. I don't usually add chillies to my tomato sauces but in the absence of being able to use any black pepper, I thought the home-grown chillies might add a welcome note of warmth.

I usually cook the vegetables for tomato sauce in olive oil first before adding tinned Italian chopped tomatoes and a bit of water before cooking in the pressure cooker for 12 minutes. The sauce sometimes needs reducing, once the pressure has dropped and I then just blitz it with a stick blender for a smoothish pasta or pizza sauce. For this, olive oil was out so I cooked the vegetables first in some British salted butter.

The end-of-season fresh tomatoes made the sauce much more watery so it needed a lot of reduction to  thicken it and  I then had to put the whole thing through the mouli to remove the tomato and pepper skins, chilli stalks and seeds and the woody stems of the herbs which in November were rather tough. The sauce was a lot of effort to make and get to the right consistency but making it ahead of time and freezing it made supper today pretty straightforward. 

E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #22

 

Today's Challenge: Fast from... using the oven.

Another oven-free day. The scattering of oven-free days over Advent has definitely made me think ahead more strategically and double up bread-baking etc where possible which is a good discipline. I'm not sure how much fuel will have been saved over the four weeks of Advent but if I were to persist with observing oven-free days regularly, it would probably make a small but significant impact on our energy use, bearing in mind how much I use it, generally. 

Breakfast
tea with unsweetened soya milk

grape juice

an orange

oatcakes with honeycomb

Lunch
cheese, date and apple chutney, sourdough crackers, fruit 

Tea
black tea

panforte di Siena

Supper

pumpkin and ricotta stuffed ravioli* with chopped fresh thyme, Parmesan cheese and a swirl of olive oil

tomato and black olive salad

steamed blackberry puddings with homemade egg custard and blackberry sauce**

*These ravioli are stuffed with a mixture of roasted pumpkin, ricotta, black pepper, grated nutmeg and some salt. I baked the pumpkin a few weeks back when I had the oven on for something else, removed the skin, mashed the flesh and froze it for subsequent use either in pumpkin rolls (see Day #4), risottos, or, as today, in a filling for ravioli.

I don't make ravioli all that often - they are a bit of a fiddle - but when I do, even if I am making them as I did today for serving on the same day, I always freeze them ahead of cooking. 

This dates back thirty years or so to when I was first making fresh pasta and, in a fit of enthusiasm, decided to produce homemade spinach and ricotta ravioli for a dinner party. It was time-consuming to make the number required but the little ravioli turned out beautifully and I was delighted with them. I'd made them a few hours ahead and carefully stored them in the fridge on flour-dusted plates. Unfortunately, when I came to cook the blighters, despite the fact that I had squeezed the spinach as dry as I could when I made the filling, liquid had oozed forth and turned my beautiful ravioli into a gluey mess of which nothing was remotely salvageable. 

There was nothing to be done but tip the whole lot in the the bin in a cloud of blue language that would not have been out of place on a rough building-site, and send D hot-foot to the supermarket to lay his hands on a commercial alternative. After the considerable number of hours I'd spent making them, it was heart-breaking and ever since then, I've erred on the safe side and frozen them immediately after making  and then cooked them from frozen which eliminates any risk. Because, however dry you try and make the filling, there is always some moisture in there which can't be relied upon to stay put! 

I don't know how this is avoided in commercial, fresh ravioli which seem to sit in their packets and emerge as they're meant to, when you're ready to cook them, but all I can say is that my empirical experience of making them at home has been unequivocal and I ain't risking a repetition of what happened that evening thirty odd years ago! 

Pumpkin makes a nice filling as a change from spinach and ricotta although you do need to season it well. Smoked salmon fillets, baked in the oven and skinned, or mushrooms cooked down, as I did the other day with onion and herbs, and then blitzed in each case with a tub of ricotta in the food processor, also make excellent homemade ravioli fillings, I've found.

**The steamed blackberry puddings are a reprise of what I did at the end of my food challenge project in May here. They have remained a firm favourite and so quick to cook in the pressure cooker - 5 minutes steaming and 7 minutes under pressure is all they need. 

E x

Advent 2022 - Fast Tracking #21

 

Today's Challenge: Fast from... all highly processed foods.

As a household we don't eat a great deal of highly processed food but as I said in my introductory post, virtually any foodstuff acquired in the supermarket has been processed in some way or other. To be 100% rigorous with this challenge one would more or less need to restrict oneself to food grown from scratch by oneself or foraged. At this time of year, the pickings would be very lean indeed so I've compromised by taking a more pragmatic approach that allows basic raw ingredients, processed for preservation and sale, but excludes anything composite or with a lot of extra ingredients added. I've also decided to allow any processing that is done by myself prior to consumption.

The only food that this immediately eliminates for me is the soya milk I drink in my tea first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I've tried to include as much home grown food as I can despite the time of year ie the frozen homegrown grape juice, bottled apple juice and sun-dried tomatoes. I tried to grow a tray or two of  micro-greens over the last couple of weeks but they haven't grown at all well on account of the bitter cold and the poor light levels so that's been a bit of a fail. The honeycomb is not home produced by me but it does come direct from a beekeeper a few miles away.  

For tea time I made some panforte di Siena which is a kind of Sienese Medieval energy bar really - a combination of dried figs, candied peel, raw nuts, spices and honey. Normally I save time by using at least some of the spices pre-ground but today I used all the spices whole and blitzed them together in the spice grinder - my considered verdict is that it was worth the trouble. This batch of panforte is probably the best I've come up with, so far. 

Spices for panforte clockwise from top left - aniseed, blades of mace, cloves, black peppercorns, nutmeg, cinnamon stick, coriander seeds and in the centre, grains of Paradise (a type of scented peppercorn)

I quite often make panforte at Christmastime - the mixture divides neatly into two 20cm tins - I usually keep one to eat and give the other away. It's a straightforward recipe, easy to package and keeps very well. I like it with a cup of tea at the end of the day or with a tiny glass of some liqueur or other, at the end of a winter meal. 

I bake each round on a disc of rice paper  to make it easy to extract from the tin and put another rice paper disc on top as it's quite sticky and this makes it easier to cut and eat. 

The trick with panforte, I've found, is not to cook it at too high a temperature or for too long as this is what can make it tough and over-chewy which is not nearly so nice. I use a version of Felicity Cloake's 'perfect panforte' recipe from The Guardian here but only cook it at 150 ℃ for about 25 minutes. It goes without saying that you need good quality dried figs - soft ones - and ideally, homemade candied peel, not those nasty tubs of dry, pre-cut stuff. You can use whatever nuts you like. I tend to use just almonds - raw almonds and some ground ones as well for cohesion. You can also vary the spices a bit depending on your personal taste. Tradition stipulates that the recipe should contain at least seventeen ingredients - one for each of the seventeen 'contrade', or 'districts', of Siena.

Breakfast

black tea

frozen raw home-grown grape juice (defrosted)

an orange

oatcakes with raw honeycomb

Lunch

yoghurt cheese, sourdough crackers

mango with lime zest and juice

Tea

black tea

panforte di Siena

Supper

potatoes baked in their jackets with watercress, sun-dried home-grown tomatoes and toasted walnut salad 

whole pears poached in home-pressed apple juice with whole star anise, a piece of vanilla pod and raw honey

E x