In lieu of poetry - a blueberry bundt cake

I am remembering who I was. I lie awake and am awash with impressions of the past. Ten years ago feels so unbearably different to now. To who I am, to what I encounter, to how I live. Mostly I am so grateful for the stability and love that I have no complaints about the present. Being older grants the serenity to just do the work that needs doing, to chop wood, carry water, so to speak, without needing the blazing epiphanies that marked my youthful quests for enlightenment.

But at the moment, I feel as if something crucial is begging to be brought forth. Is it that the chaos that I had in my 20's was somehow vital to my creativity, and in that, my soul? I got the idea of that aphorism from an article I read, my four year old on my lap, as I carefully sipped coffee at a Saturday morning cafe and didn't even have the trace of a hangover.

My husband and I both lived chaotic creative lives before marriage and family - although he had the benefit of great self belief and I was more prone to oscillating between hope and despair.

We both obstinately lay no material foundations: to work just for money for security was in some way to surrender to the fear, to the forces that wanted to control and keep us small. We studied and made art (in Gareth's case) and wrote and meditated (in mine) and made enough money to get by. I moved all the time. Packing my room of things down into boxes and bags and piling them into my car to drive the vast east-coast highway between Sydney and Melbourne, the Gold Coast and Byron Bay. I used deep optimism and a sense of fate to land the job I needed, to find a house of friends to live in, to meet the right person at the right time.

There was however a need in me to meet someone who would love me enough to want to marry me, to have children with, and perhaps my wandering was not just to find myself, but to find him. In my late 20's I once again trusted my instincts and flew to England on a one-way ticket ready for adventure and secretly sure I would find my husband.

And here we are.

Now, as an on-call, grounded mother with school runs and bedtime cuddles and nutritional lunch considerations, as a reliable worker, a commercial artist (of sorts - food styling has it's freedoms and thrills but is mostly firmly rooted in reality) I have to find ways of making sure that I stay attuned to intuition and a more poetic, animistic essence that was once my greatest ally and defining talent. I can not court chaos. I can not pack my life down on a whim. I must find the extraordinary in the ordinary and keep a sense of magic in the mundane.

So, I am  a keen observer. I keep an eye out for coincidence, the ludicrous, the ludicrous coincidence: like the two women in the exact same full-length faun coloured mock shearling jackets standing outside the off-licence lighting each others fags as I waited at the traffic lights.

I remind myself each morning to stay present and grateful, I stay quiet for a while upon waking and chat to my version of God, I try to remember my dreams. I have an inner dialogue that is so prolific I am shocked to discover sometimes that there is this huge part of me that is rarely shared and acutely edited for the general public.

Music and poetry can touch this secret part and helps me move outwards of sorts from the small but incessant demands that take up my time. Joni Mitchel is one such artist who sang the song of my own. I over-did Joni a while back, and haven't been able to listen to her for a while, but the other day I saw a book of her complete lyrics in the charity shop window and knew it was a gift for me. Small epiphanies. I am enjoying reading her lyrics without the music, letting her poetry remind me of why I loved her so much. It reminds me of who I was, who I still am.

Cooking is a daily poem that needs composing and seems to be the fitting synthesis of the inner and outer worlds: the necessity and desire to nurture, practical alchemy.

So here's a recipe:

Blueberry and blood orange bundt cake
(the blood orange lends it's crimson juice to make a lovely sunset-coloured frosting, but any orange will do. I ALWAYS rush ahead and put my icing on too early when the cake is too warm, hence it has not stuck but slithered off  or been absorbed in these pics, also, my cake stuck to bottom of the tin, and that nice undulated top bundt cakes get was ruined. If anyone knows how to sucessfully extract a cake from a bundt tin, please tell me! It did, however, tastes fabulous!)

165g butter, softened
1 1/2 c castor sugar
3 large good eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
zest of one blood orange (save juice for glaze)
2 cups fresh blueberries
3 c plain flour, sifted
1 tbsp baking powder
1 pinch salt
1/2 c milk with a squeeze of lemon in it or buttermilk

for the glaze:

juice of one blood orange
approx 1 cup icing sugar


Method:


Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius and grease a bundt tin with some butter.

In a large bowl beat the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer until pale and fluffy - at least 5 minutes.

Add the eggs one at a time, beating in between to combine, then add the vanilla and zest.

In alternate stages, add a third of the flour (mixed with the baking powder and salt) and then some of the milk, then the flour, the milk etc. Beat for a further 30 seconds - try not to beat the mix too much once the flour is in, just enough to combine, then fold the blueberries through the batter and pour into your bundt tin.

Bake for about 1 hour, or until set, and while cooking make the orange glaze. In a bowl add icing sugar to the orange juice and whisk with a metal hand whisk, adding more icing sugar if the mixture looks too watery - it should be about the density of honey.

Cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn the cake out onto a wire rack, pouring the glaze over with random abandon once the cake is room temperature.

Once he was better

Once Gareth was feeling better and I was liberated from my soup kitchen rota, I served-up this highly textured and densely flavoured couscous, inspired by Yotam Ottolenghi (again). I added preserved lemon because I made some at Christmas from lovely cheap organic lemons - it added a nice salty piquancy. We made a meal of it by accompanying the couscous with slices of aubergine, courgette, baby leeks and red pepper tossed in a marinade of kofta spice mix, sea salt and olive oil and then roasted for about half an hour.

Couscous with herbs and almonds 

150g couscous
160 ml boiling water
1 small onion thinly sliced
1 tbsp olive oil
salt
pinch of ground cumin
1/3 c sliced almonds lightly toasted in a dry fry pan
3 spring onions finely sliced
2 teaspoons preserved lemon rind very finely diced, or the zest of one lemon
3 tabs parsley finely chopped
3 tabs coriander finely chopped
olive oil

Method:

Place the couscous in a large bowl and cover with the boiling water. Cover the bowl with a clean tea towel and leave for 10 mins for the water to be absorbed into the grains.

Fry the onion in the olive oil until it has browned and is soft, add the cumin and salt, stir a few times and turn off the heat. Add the onion to the couscous with the toasted almonds.

Once the couscous is just warm rather than steaming, add the chopped spring onions and herbs. Check for seasoning and drizzle a little olive oil through to dress. Serve at room temperature.

Sicily and soup in bed

Last week Gareth was sick and off from work and I didn't have much on apart from a few nights at the restaurant. We spent the entire below-freezing week in bed, propped up on three pillows each, drinking coffee then chai, Google street-viewing our way around Sicily. We are going in July for two weeks - although I feel now like I've already been. Gareth would point the little man down a street and just zoom on down - the baroque town of Noto is all alley-ways and the odd old couple on a bench taking a rest, they have large municipal bins and it' seems rather quiet in winter. Ortigia is again the high density alleys of two-story houses, some with flowers on the balcony, and weaving about you eventually pop out at the sea where again large municipal bins gather as the sky soars out all wispy clouds and blue.

I could easily eat pasta three nights a week, with risotto on the fourth, but Gareth decided this same week that he had had enough of pasta and scrunched his nose at all my usual dinner suggestions. All he wanted was soup. Seeing as he had a cold I thought ginger would be a good place to start, so, this is what we had (in bed) one day, and Gareth liked it so much he made it for himself the next night when I was at work. I do think using a good quality vegetable bouillon is important if you are relying on it to flavour and season soups, I like Marigold organic Swiss vegetable bouillon powder.

Spiced red lentil, yellow pepper and carrot soup

2 tabs olive oil
1 brown onion finely diced
1 yellow or orange pepper diced
1 stick of celery finely diced
1 inch piece of ginger grated
2 cloves of garlic crushed
2 teaspoons of Chana masala spice mix
3 medium carrots peeled and roughly chopped
1 cup of red lentils, washed and rinsed
2 - 3 teaspoons Marigold organic vegetable bouillon
3 cups water

Method:

In a large heavy-bottomed saucepan cook the onion, celery and pepper in the oil on a medium to low heat until softened and the onion is translucent. Add the ginger, garlic and Chana spices and cook for another few minutes, stirring frequently being careful not to burn the garlic. Add the carrots and lentils, stir and then add the bouillon and water. Turn the heat up a bit and let the soup reach a gentle boil for a bout 5 minutes to soften the carrots, then turn it down and simmer until the carrots are cooked and the lentils have yielded. If it's looking too thick, just add some more water. Transfer the soup into a blender, or with a stick blender, pulse to your desired texture - I like a few lumpy bits.

At my table

I love having plenty of food in the house. I love the happy sunshine of fruit in bowls on the table, the serene rows of dried herbs and spices on my kitchen shelf, coloured like the beautiful textiles of arid lands. I can not rest unless my fridge is full of curry pastes, tapenades, olives, cheeses and the freezer has a stock of good bread ready for toasting. My little dry store cupboard needs aborio, brown and basmati rice, red and green lentils, two tins of Italian tuna, tinned tomatoes and at least 3 shapes of pasta for me to feel comfortable and if a cake is on a plate somewhere, well, I feel almost holy with contentment.

I really am not an accomplished baker, so I suppose it's why I seem to favour posts about baked things - I feel a real pride in my efforts. Also, my evening meals arrive on plates when it's too dark to make pretty photo foodie art.

My mother was always one for having a full pantry, but mostly, I suspect, because she didn't believe in used by dates. My father in his seventies opened a gourmet food provisions shop (with the idea that he could wax lyrical with customers about food all day, eat a few English crackers with some Gentleman's Relish, turn a few jars to face the right way, do the crossword and saunter home with a good bottle of red off the shelf - which he did for the most part because my mother - busy in her fruit shop next door - came in and tidied and kept the fridges stocked, did the bookwork and checked the used-by dates of everything and with a huffy "it's perfectly fine!" would take them home to sit in her pantry for another few years).

On Tuesday I still had some figs and poached rhubarb hanging about in the fridge and wondered if a cake existed using both of these ingredients. I felt the subtle perfume of each fruit would marry well together. I found a recipe online (from some tacky weekly celebrity mag in Oz) and used it as a template as I didn't have quite enough eggs for their version, they asked for ground almonds but I only had polenta ( consequently, the mix was a little dry so I added yoghurt). I also felt that the 250 grams of butter indicated was just too much - pulling out a whole slab of butter for a cake makes me not only nervous about my belly getting wobbly but also because that would mean there wouldn't be any back-up butter supplies left for my toast - and I like a lot of butter on toast (just like my mother).

So, it was with trepidation that I put the cake in the oven. Would it work after so much modification??

It was SUPERB.

You put half of the wet mix in your tin then top it with the rhubarb, then pour the rest of the mix in and top with cut figs drizzled with honey. Already I am thinking of different combinations - poached damson with pear, apricot and apple...

Fig and Rhubarb Cake
(I used a small round tin - about the size of a side plate - 20cm by 20cm)

125g butter, softened at room temperature
3/4 c castor sugar
dash of vanilla
3/4 c fine polenta
1/2 c dessicated coconut
3/4 c organic self-raising flour
3 eggs
3 tblsp plain or vanilla yoghurt
pinch of cinnamon
5 stalks of rhubarb
1/4 cup castor sugar
4 large or 6 small figs cut in half or quartered
1 tblsp honey

Method:

Pre-heat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius

To poach the rhubarb, cut the hard white ends off, peel any tough stringy fibres off with a veg peeler and cut into 4cm lengths. Cook the rhubarb in a pan with the 1/4 cup of sugar and just a splash of water until it's just tender - about 5mins should do it - remember, it will cook more in the cake and take on more sweetness too.

In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter, sugar and vanilla until combined and then add the polenta, coconut, sifted flour and cinnamon and beat for a few minutes only before adding the eggs, one at a time and then the yoghurt.

Have your tin greased (you can use greaseproof paper too, but I didn't bother and it came out a treat) and sppon in half the mix, top with the rhubarb to form an even layer, then add the rest of the mixture, flattening with a baking spatula. Top with the figs - press them in lightly - and drizzle the tops of the figs with honey.

Bake for around 1 hour 15 mins - check and give it another 15 if not set.