cider insider insides

OK, so am not even going to try covering the month since I last posted – lots happened, and some didn’t.

But! I went to the lovely Bruno’s Xmas party on Friday night, and as he is obsessed with not getting red wine on his beige carpet, but wanted to do a mulled xmassy drink, I did a bit of thinking in my head and came up with the recipe below. And luckily, it turned out YUMMY!  The idea behind this was largely self-preservation on my part, as he was threatening to make mulled BEER, which sounded minging, and also I’m not a big cider fan (too many teenage memories), so I wanted a spiced cider that was appley and boozey, but not really that cidery.

hot spiced cider recipe:

8 cloves
1/2 teaspoon allspice
2 cinnamon sticks
juice of half a lemon
half a jar of honey (ish)
carton of apple juice (clear or cloudy)
bottle of cider
bottle of rum (light or dark depending on how sensitive about carpets you are lol, I prefer good old captain morgans)

get a masseeev pan and gently/slowly warm the cider, apple juice and rum with the spices. try and keep the drink in the proportions 1 part rum to 2 parts cider & 1 part apple juice, diluting the flavour with water if it gets too strong.

how to make a quilt in a week (almost)

The story in pictures of my first ever patchwork quilt. I was racking my brains trying to think of what I could make for one of the most awesome couples I know as their wedding gift, given that money was not just tight but non-existent, and the travel costs alone to their wedding would just about wipe me out. And I realised I had a whole ton of material… the more I thought about it, the more it tickled me, the idea that the most un-traditional wedding I’ve ever been to (lesbian) would be accompanied by the most traditional present I could ever have thought of. Unfortunately this inspiration only struck me a week before the big day, and so after that it was a bit of a mission to try and get it all done. And I aaaaallmost made it…

SUNDAY: realise quite early on that this mission is going to be impossible to complete without large amounts of cake. Bake said cake. Not delaying tactics at all, oh nooo.

SUNDAY: lay all your bits out on the bed and realise you need to make lots more bits.

MONDAY: finish stitching the squares together & realise you need lots more bits.

TUESDAY: start adding more bits before realising you will need lots more bits.

sit in a corner of the room hugging your knees and rocking gently back and forth, gazing at the quilt pieces, as you realise what a fucking insane project you have taken on. then pull yourself together, make a large coffee (though wish you had some gin) and get on with it.

WEDNESDAY: make eleventy-million more little squares, sew bits together, and realise you need more bits.

also realise that a quilt like this will give the recipients acid flashbacks and needs to be calmed down a bit in the interests of their ongoing mental health.

note dvds in top corner are because you have watched the whole of series 1 & 2 of battlestar galactica whilst snipping & stitching (also the 6 ep mini-series).

THURSDAY: rejoice in having a digital camera so that you can take pics of squares so you don’t have to remember what order all the bits are supposed to go in when it comes to stitching them.

FRIDAY: find a big plain bit and add it, which has the effect of calming down the scary trip effect and also of being ONE BIG BIT of cloth not 7 billion tiny bits. lazy, moi?

SATURDAY: make a quilt sandwich with a bedsheet on the bottom, thermal blanket in the middle, quilt on top. safety pin 100x all across it to keep the sandwich together when stitching. sew round the edges & trim. then realise you have no unbroken sewing machine needles, or hours in the day to do handstitching left to do the binding and cry.

Decide you are going to take quilt as wedding present anyway just to show them what they could have won.

blueberry hooch

Inspired by the fact I am ‘hosting’ Xmas this year at mine (just me & my sis, shouldn’t be too hard!) I have been planning all sorts of culinary delights, imagining a house scented with cinnamon and oranges and pine needles and stuff, whilst I float gracefully from room to room in a silk nightgown, soft focus, pausing only to stir my mulled wine. Bit like a fatter ginger-er Nigella Lawson in a north London council flat.

All I have managed to ‘make’ so far is this: borovnicke (borov-nitschka, if you want to practice sounding foreign). It’s fab, I’ve been looking for a recipe since I went to Slovenia where they appear to give it out free with beer, breakfast, and virtually any other time you might potentially open your mouth. AND to my delight it’s piss-easy – put berries and sugar in a bottle, cover them with lighter-fluid/de-icer type plum schnapps (or Slivovitz – if you have an aversion to booze which removes your tooth enamel you can also add a glass of red wine to eke it out). Then do up the bottle and stick it in a cupboard for a couple of weeks. YUM!!!

In the house we stayed in the wife served it to us at 9.30am with fresh homemade doughnuts she had made us in case we got cold (not likely on our diet of horse-burgers and pork-based products). Not bad for 12 quid a night. Seemingly the way to tackle a constant temperature of around -15 is to remain moderately drunk throughout the day until you reach evening when you top it up a bit.

Unless I manage to make anything more ambitious than this I may have to swap the silk nightgown for a nylon housecoat, headscarf and moustache and ask to be called Boris throughout the holiday season.