Arrivederci to NaBloPoMo and Lemon Tree Kindergarten

The last day of November the last day of NaBloPoMo! Posting every day has been enjoyable but demanding. Finding something to write about and the time to write about it was often challenging to say the least. I think I can guarantee that I’ll be relapsing, with a hefty sigh, back into posting three or four times a week here. I have been neglecting my book review blog and the writing of articles, which I’m supposed to be doing to get our websites seen out there on the big wide Net.

Food and Family is always going to be my place for friends and family, for me to relax, visit friends and swap stories. The fun part of NaBloPoMo has been discovering other blogs through the Randomizer, and have new people show up here.

We’ve just come home, laden with baskets of crafts, paintings and presents from my six-year old’s Kindergarten festival and leaving ceremony. They did a very sweet Nativity play with us helping out with singing the carols that we knew, especially the endless Gloria in Ding Dong Merrily on High., we duly admired all their hard work of sewing and embroidering cushions for themselves and then came the farewell. One of the mothers had proposed adopting their German tradition of singing farewell to each child leaving kindergarten as they walked out through a flowery archway. We gave each one a rose to take with them to symbolise beauty. It was lovely but nearly caused a tear to be shed.

There is an extra cause for nostalgia, as we don’t know if our kindergarten will be continuing next year. Our teacher is moving on to another school, only four children will be still in kindergarten, so unless Camphill can keep it going as a small playgroup and reabsorb it as part of their organisation, it will have to close. Youngest has still shown no signs of being ready to go back to kindergarten. Perhaps when she does it will be to the new kindergarten building at Dassenberg Waldorf School, where my son is and his middle sister will be starting next year. It still feels sad to be witnessing the end of an era though. Four and a half years for me of taking one or other child to this tiny kindergarten in leafy Camphill village, its atmosphere so sheltered and safe like a little cocoon enveloping the children and filling them with music and beauty. Youngest did have a few months of it before she elected to stay at home with me, but I wish she could have had a whole kindergarten career there, before facing the hurly burly of the real world. Who knows... maybe it will keep going and she will. Che sera sera.

Anyway it was a lovely final festival for the children, something to remember and value when they are in big school. I seem to be splashing Italian around today, so Arriverderci tutti! See you soon.

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Today

Today was the sort of day where you plan what you're going to do and then ditch the plan and go off in the other direction. I'd worked out what I needed to do: make cheese biscuits for the kindergarten end of term festival, they are an essential element by now; put together the drawings that the children had done, to make a book as a farewell gift to their teacher; sort strawberries; make Christmas cake, I started soaking the fruit days ago intending to make it last weekend; maybe with the leftover time catch up on some writing or accounts.

Instead I ended up working on the end of year newsletter for my son's school. A marathon of cutting, pasting, selecting artwork to photograph and then load onto the computer, finding photos from earlier in the year then putting it all together in some sort of order. My husband has kindly undertaken to get it ready in a more computer literate way to go to the printers tomorrow.

This left me at 6pm with all the more essential things to do from my first list plus cooking the supper and of course writing my blog, as there is no way I'm going to fail on the eve of the end of NaBloPoMo having made it thus far! So apologies for the unadorned account of my day making up most of the material.

The only deeply philosophical thought that popped into my head today - "Trust in the process" - it may feel like you're walking blindly through a bank of fog with no idea where you're going, but just the process of putting one foot in front of the other is getting you somewhere that you are meant to be going.

So with that rather incoherent philosophobabble, I'll leave you to collapse on the sofa!

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Cornucopia

This time of year in South Africa should be the time of harvest festivals. I have bowls brimming with fruit on my window sills. Apricots from our tree, with a blush of pink on their warm skins, wait ostensibly to be turned into jam, but they are too delicious – sweet and juicy – to resist. Every time I pass the glowing bowlful, I sneak one and dribble juice down my chin. There are still strawberries in the garden to be picked tomorrow. Youngberries also ripen on their brambly bushes, tempting you to reach in carelessly and prick yourself on a briar. There are peas from the veggie patch to pod, or just eat raw from the pods. I let the kids do this, as they won’t eat them cooked, but give them a basket of fresh picked peas, they’ll scoff the lot in no time. Gem squash too, those small squashes the size of cricket balls, that steam into delectable mellow flesh in minutes – there are far more than we can eat, gifts of plenty to go home with any visitors.

Our nectarines and peaches aren’t ripe yet, but the shops are full of them, whole trays for R20. The first grapes and litchis are sneaking into the shops under exorbitant price tags. I’ll be waiting till after Christmas to buy them when they are properly in season here. Then the mangos will also be at their best and cheap – we’ll be feasting off mango hedgehogs at every opportunity (I’ll take a photo to show you when we first have them again, it is a clever way of cutting them to eat easily, but defies clear explanation by words alone).

South African Christmas should be a fresh fruit festival, with all this overflowing abundance. The dried fruit of the traditional feast, the mince pies, Christmas cake and Christmas pudding, stollen and all those other good things, come from winter when dried fruit and citrus fruits were the most extravagant things to celebrate with. We should be piling pavlovas high with fresh fruit, quaffing smoothies instead of mulled wine, feasting on summer pudding with cream and leaving the dried fruit confections to the Northern Hemispherites who need it to lift their winter gloom. The trouble is, it is too good - we want mince pies too, we want it all!

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A Word

I like the word valiant. It evokes images of knights in slightly dented, well-used armour vanquishing dragons against overwhelming odds to rescue those eternal damsels in distress. Courage, brave endeavour and determination.

The word popped into my head this morning as we set off on the school run and I noticed the hopeful shoots sprouting from the base of a wild plum sapling that didn’t make it through last summer. The dead wood above ground belied the vital force still coursing in its roots. A good winter’s rain nourished it and this spring it is trying again, growing from nothing, confident that we will water it properly this summer and not let it down. Valiant.

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Christmas Mince Pies

While I’m on the subject of all things Christmassey, I thought I’d share my recipe for the fruit mincemeat filling for mince pies. I don’t know if they are traditional Christmas fare in the US, but in the UK by now the shops will be brimming with packets of ready-made mince pies. Towers of packets will loom at the end of supermarket aisles, extra special gourmet ones will be found in up-market stores promising real brandy in the ingredients. Next week one of the Sunday papers is likely to do a comparative tasting of popular brands and award them star ratings for flavour and pastry texture and tastiness. South Africa is more moderate in its mince pie consumption, probably because of the hot weather at this time of year, but they still make a regular appearence in the Christmas displays. Our family is fairly immoderate in our mince pie consumption. One batch disappears in the briefest of nanoseconds. I make twice the amount of fruit mince in this recipe and we use it all over the festive season.

I always used to make my own pastry and fill the pies with bought mincemeat, until I found this recipe which is 100 times better. I leave out the traditional suet binder/preservative, so my version is genuinely vegetarian and has a fresher flavour. It keeps perfectly well in the fridge for a couple of months too. This recipe makes enough for several batches of mince pies. If you just want to try making one batch, use half quantities.

Christmas Fruit Mincemeat Recipe

350g/12oz raisins
225g/8oz sultanas
225g/8oz currants
225g/8oz mixed candied peel, chopped finely
450g/1lb cooking apples
350g/12oz soft dark brown sugar
grated rind and juice of 2 oranges
grated rind and juice of 2 lemons
50g/2oz almonds chopped into slivers (optional)
4 teaspoons mixed spice
½ teaspoon cinnamon
½ nutmeg grated
6 tablespoons brandy

Mix together all the dried fruit, add the peel and juice of the oranges and lemons. Peel the apples and grate them coarsely into the mixture, turning them into the juice so they don’t go brown. Add the sugar and spices and mix everthing well. Cover the bowl and leave to soak in the fridge overnight. Stir in the brandy, then spoon into clean jars, packing it in quite tightly. Leave in the fridge for another week for the flavours to develop if you have time.

Making the Mince Pies

I’m not the world’s best pastry maker, and my sister-in-law is, so she usually does the making of the pies in our family. You can resort to bought pastry or use your favourite shortcrust pastry recipe. Flaky pastry isn’t traditional but could work too. You’ll need a tart tin that takes twelve 6cm/2 1/2 inch tarts – not the deep muffin tins, the shallower sort.

Once the pastry is rolled out to about 3mm/ 1/8 inch thick, use a 7.5cm/3 inch cutter to cut out the bottoms of the pies and a 6cm/ 2.5 inch cutter for the tops. Fluted ones are nice but if you don't have any you can also use glasses of a similar size. Grease the tins, and line them with the pastry bottoms, put in a teaspoonful of the fruit mince being careful not to overfill, then dampen the edges of the pastry with water and put on the lids. Lightly press around the edges to seal. Brush the tops with milk and using the point of a knife poke a small cross in the top to let out the steam. Bake at 200C/400F for 25-30 minutes until light golden brown.

Eat warm with cream or brandy butter or cold with a cup of tea.

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Wind, Sand, Mince Pies and Carols

I optimistically made a long list of things to do today, starting with baking the Christmas cake (I know I was talking about doing it last week, but talking hasn't yet resulted in it happening yet), making fruit mince for the mince pies, baking bread and ambitiously ending with writing something for each blog plus an article or two...

An SMS from a friend proposing a trip to the beach put paid to all that. I had soaked the fruit for the cake in brandy and was half way through preparing the fruit mince. I knew the kids would love to get out for a bit, so we went.

Their energy was overflowing into scuffles as we got into the friend's minivan. We rechannelled it into singing our way through all the songs they're practising for the end of term ('Away in the Manger' heading the request list) and by the time we arrived at the beach my voice was fading from the effort of holding any sort of tune over the rumble of the bus and the blustering of the wind....the wind.

The beach was empty except for kite-surfers. We should have turned around at that point and gone somewhere else. But no! We'd said the beach and the beach it was going to be. The playful south-easter was hurtling sand along the beach, exfoliating our legs and mocking our attempts to put up the wind-break/shade tent by whisking it away from us as we tried to slide the bendy support poles up their sleeves.


One of us had to sit in it at all times once we'd finally succeeded in putting it up, as an anchor and tent pole combined! But the kids had a good enough time. They jumped around in the cold Atlantic Ocean and then dug in the shelter afforded by our tent, my son finding some rocks that broke the wind enough to make a castle. We had a fine view of the kite-surfers leaping high in the air and powering along the length of the beach. To see Table Mountain we had to be facing into the sand stripping wind, so we didn't admire it too often.


On the way home they were begging me to get out the Christmas Carols CD as soon as we got home. I've said not until it is December. I know that they'll be wanting to listen to it all day every day once we start and I really don't want to be sick to death of the beautiful carols sung by the King's College Choir before we've even got near Christmas. For me the CD is a nostagia trip back to childhood Christmas Eves , when we always had the radio tuned to the King's College Carol Service, while we wrapped last minute presents, made brandy butter for the pudding and stuffing for the turkey.

Once home, where it had hardly been windy at all, I finished off the fruit mince and we found ourselves debating whether it would be too soon to make a batch of mince pies tomorrow. We really ought to leave it for at least a week in the fridge, enough time to soak up all the spice and develop the flavour, but greed and anticipation of my sister-in-law's wonderful pastry was leading us astray.

It was only later when I thought about it, that I realised the irony - sensibly confining Christmas carols to December, but considering baking mince pies already in November. Greed overrules good sense every time!

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Moving to Beta

Last night I took a deep breath, girded my loins and switched my Food and Family blog to Beta Blogger. It was getting so that I couldn’t see the Dashboard for their insistent reminders to do so and I was beginning to get the impression that old Blogger might go up in a puff of smoke any day and take my precious blog with it.

I am already slightly acquainted with Beta through my new book blog Great Books Reviewed, so the prospect wasn’t too alarming. Jennifer at Coasting Richly made the switch a little while ago and was having fun labelling all her old posts. So with that encouragement I pressed the buttons and switched.

It was easy. The only unforseen repercussions have been that my two seperate blogs now share the same profile and sign-in name, so Great Books Reviewed has my blurb about food on it instead of my blurb about books. Signing my book posts as Food Mum doesn’t seem quite right either. I’m having to abandon my fancy sobriquets and schizophrenia and write a profile that fits both. Probably I should have opened a separate account and kept them separate, but by the time I realised that, it was too late and I couldn’t face the thought of trying to untangle it all again. So I’ve come out - I am both Food Mum and Original Orange and henceforth I shall be posting as Kit on both blogs!

P.S. I’ve just been reading a fascinating book called ‘Married to A Bedouin’, which I’ve reviewed here at Great Books Reviewed.

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