Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic (Recipe Not Included.)

Say you find a recipe called Roast Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic. The instructions read"throw everything in a slow cooker and wait four hours," snd say that the garlic cloves turn out  really really good - particularly smeared across a fresh sliced French baguette.  And say that after you’ve dreamily chewed your way through half a loaf, your husband yelps and says "Hey! I've only had two cloves!" and you look down and discover that you've eaten the other 38.

Hypothetically speaking.

That night, you just might just find yourself sleeping by yourself on the living room sofa. For health and safety reasons. 

It's just like French onion soup. Only louder.

Christmas Baking

Popo de Elefante

At the end of October we invited a few friends around for a light spot of Halloween cheer.  We even had a theme - worst nightmares in food and dress.
            Unfortunately for us, my "agoraphobia" costume suffered a fatal structural failure half an hour before the party started (the damned pigeon fell off my head), and on a warm October night, Mr "Arachnophobia" Tabubil flatly refused to wear 6 inches of fiberfill around his chest. To show willing, he hot glued a few wads of stuffing and a couple of spiders to and old t-shirt.  He looked a nightmare all right - a nightmare of last-minute design, and he lost his temper along with his stuffing.
            That's sort of how the evening went. Our friend Sal - rather a man's man - had found the food something of a stretch.  He's not a natural cook, so I set him a simple quiche - eggs, cheese and icky food coloring in a pre-made bought pastry shell.  Half an hour before the party (right when I was wrestling pigeons) he  called from the supermarket in a panic - the recipe had been in imperial measurements and he'd converted everything to grams to eight decimal places, but he was having trouble figuring out what sort of eggs he should buy - vitamin fortified?  Omega 3?  Grade AA?  Grade A?  Did he need to buy a baking dish?
            He arrived at the party 45 minutes late, looking cross and flustered.  He handed me a bag of chips and a jar of salsa.
            "The whole afternoon's been a horror show." He said sourly.  "I hate supermarkets. Why didn't you tell me that a quiche has too cook for an hour? Believe me, the chips count."*

*Speaking of horror shows, you wouldn't believe what a little pulverized walnut does to the look of  guacamole.  It's unspeakable.  Five stars and two hearty thumbs up. I recommend it for all your holiday parties.

And then there was the dessert.  Mr Tabubil and I own a recipe for chocolate mousse.  I may have mentioned it once or twice before, in passing. To do it right, you soak raisins in rum for an entire week beforehand and you use rather a lot of heavy cream  - 
           A triple batch of it makes a rather nice bowl of popo de elephante (elephant poop.): a voluptuous tureen of turds, studded with oozing alcoholic raisins, the heavy smell of rum rising up like drunken heat in summer* from the swirl of well-set soup -

*I might have used two full cups of rum in the raisins, and I might have tipped what was left in the bottle into the bowl as I stirred. Waste is a terrible thing.

After a couple of hours staring at the guacamole, our guests ate lots of it. With a pleasantly buzzy fruit drink on the side.  The blood-red ice hand floating in the punch bowl was a nifty touch. They giggled. And drank some more.  And ate a second helpings of the mousse  -
            Not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of our guests got pished.
            One young lady had three glasses before we caught her.  She giggled, climbed carefully onto the sofa and closed her eyes -  right next to Sal - who is Bermudan and treats his relationship with rum like a religion, but who was lying with his head on the back of his chair and his feet up on hers, sort of snoring, and cradling his third bowl of elephant poop.

Post-script:
We really had radically overestimated how much mousse we'd need for a party of 12, and the next morning we still had a couple of liters of the stuff.  
            We gave it to our neighbors. They brought the bowl back the very next day - licked clean.
            Looking at us sort of anxiously, "That was the best dessert" they said "that we have ever had in our lives - would you like a plant?" 
            And they thrust a potted fern at our chests.

It must have been some seriously good mousse.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, everyone!  Best wishes to all on this totally non-sectarian day of chocolate, finger-paint and bunny ears!

This year, I celebrated by dying chicken eggs with a friend and her two small children.  Bunny ears in place, the kids parked themselves at the kitchen ledge mixing bowls of food-color and vinegar.  Danette and I had a slightly more haute-couture technique in mind. 
            It is very elegant and simple - you take a stack of thrifted silk ties with nice bright patterns, and you cut the fabric into squares, and you wrap and tie the silk tightly around the eggs, and you boil the eggs in water with vinegar for quite a long time, and when the eggs are cooled, you unwrap them and you find that the patterns on the silk have transferred artistically to the eggshells.  It's very simple and very elegant and very lovely.
            Danette and I leaned on the kitchen ledge and snipped and wrapped and tied, while a small child dunked boiled eggs in yellow food coloring and solemnly explained that we did this to honor the Easter Rabbit, who once a year pooped out chocolate eggs for all the good little children everywhere. 
            My eyes crossed.  "Are you sure that's not the Easter Chicken?  I thought the Easter Chicken laid the eggs, and the Easter Bunny gives them away in baskets." 
            "Nope."  The small child fished the egg out of the yellow and held it half-way in and half-way out of the red food coloring, making a sort of ombre effect. "The Rabbit poops, and we get them under our pillows."
            Who am I to argue? The Easter Bunny and the Easter Chicken haven't graced my house with the Big Hop in years - I'm old enough that I'm expected to go find my own eggs.

The kid's eggs turned out fantastic.  Kid #1  did a whole Jackson Pollock thing with dribbles and stripes drawn on with a wax candle, and Kid #2 wanted pure colors - 
            "Not even a stripe?  Or your name in wax?" 
            "No thank you." He said politely.  "I like mine just plain.  They're perfect."  
            And they were. Really.

Ours, on the other hand…
            Our haute-couture eggs didn't come out quite exactly like the ones in the internet tutorial.  We had wrapped the silk as tightly as possible, but somehow the patterns on the silk didn't adhere to very much of the eggshell, and where it did stick we mostly got lumpy streaks and smears, and one of the ties turned out to contain a very unstable dye that gave everything a base shade of purple. 
            Some test-dyes might have been advisable, in retrospect. I might have done quite a lot of preliminary research, because after-the-fact, the deeper I looked into things, the less simple the silk-dyed-egg technique apparently was - there is quite a lot of crosss-chatter on crafting sites trouble-shooting the elegantly simple instructions and suggesting where to get lots of fresh silk ties in a very big hurry. 
            And most of the eggs burst during boiling, and they hadn't been very nice eggs in the first place, so the blotchy swirls smelled unpleasantly sulpherous and not at all like anything an Easter Rabbit would want underneath her in her Easter nest. 
            They were not, in short, our best efforts.

Mr Tabubil was very severe when he came home. "Not a failure.  Don't use that word.  Did you have fun?"
            "Well - " 
            "You all enjoyed yourselves, didn't you?" 
            "I guess - " 
            "Then it wasn't a failure, was it?" 
            "I suppose not." 
            "Right." And then he spoiled it all by giggling. "It's exactly like one of those Pinterest Fails. The instructions look so simple and clear and go step by step so that absolutely anyone can do it - they just don't tell you that doing it correctly needs five years of art school or an apprenticeship with the Culinary Institute of America. The result at home is… less polished.  But you had fun, right? That's what counts."
            The swirls on our eggs were lovely, when you really looked at them, and didn't compare them to the perfect internet version. I went away and ate some chocolate rabbit poop. Non-sulpherously.

Sunday Brain-Fog Zucchini Slice

This evening I used the slicing plate on my food processor (a lovely instrument!) to grate some veggies, but I sort of forgot to take the food processing blade out of the bottom of the bowl.
            Carrot soup is a wonderful base for any sort of dish, right?

Like zucchini slice muffins, perhaps.
            A zucchini slice is a wonderful dish, but in a fit of Sunday-afternoon brain-fog, I doubled the vegetables, halved the flour, 2/3'd the eggs, swopped the cheese in the recipe for something i found at the bottom of the fridge, spooned the mix into cupcake shells, forgot the spices until I dumped them on as a garnish when the muffins were half-way done.  In the oven I undercooked 'em, then compensated by sticking 'em back in the oven until they were scorched -
            And none of it should have mattered!  A zucchini slice is a recipe that takes whatever you throw at it and comes up roses and zucchini-scented violets.  Heck, I've done it once with exactly three ingredients - zucchini,  carrot and one egg -  and it was divine.
            But these  little muffins?
            They taste... blue.  There's no other way to describe it - they taste like a flavor would smell when it goes wrong, they taste like a bell would feel when it's struck in the wrong key. They taste... absolutely appalling.

Anyone got a good recipe?

Not. A Brioche.

Cooking PSA for the week:

It does not matter how optimistic you are. It does not matter what the interwebs say. You cannot make brioche in a breadmaker.
            Optimism and ambition avail you nothing - the best (and worst) you will achieve is a small, dense, solidly burned loaf of limited utility - a large-size fishing sinker, perhaps, or a small concrete boot for a small commercial dispute - if you sank a small competitor at the bottom of a lake, he would almost certainly stay there.
            But you very certainly would not want that bread on your dinner plate.

Recipe: Cheese Scones

The weather has turned. Overnight. I woke in the small hours of the morning dreaming that I was being force-fed ice cream and not liking it much. Trying to snuggle in against Mr Tabubil, I found that he’d  he had taken his half of the blankets and rolled himself around and around like a caterpillar, so I climbed out of bed and padded barefoot across the icy floor and to drag the rug up onto the bed with me.
            Morning dawned sunless and sullen, with a dark, heavy sky. Cold, dark days inexorably bend my mind to thoughts of cooking.  Hot food.  Comforting food. Scones.
            The pantry being unaccountably bare of clotted cream, I took my mother's scone recipe and swopped the sugar for mustard powder and tipped in a cup of grated parmesan cheese(a canny pantry keeper NEVER being short of a good nippy cheese) and set to stirring.
            The scones came out hot and steaming and vaguely redolent of pizza, but something was missing so we peeled half a bushel or so of vegetables and whipped up a tureen of fragrant, autumnal,pumpkin soup. 
            By now, we were on a roll. The bit between our teeth, we turned out a batch of Chocolate-Guinness Ice-Cream (courtesy of David Lebovitz' A Perfect Scoop), a loaf of Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread and no less than two Madeira cakes.*
            Between Madeira Cakes One and Two, Mr Tabubil made a run to the shops for more eggs and came back with an incidental sack full of whipping cream, so we shrugged our shoulders and whipped up a metric lake (give or take a liter) of that as well. With sugar and vanilla.
            All of this sweet stuff was starting to jangle on our taste buds, so we rounded out the afternoon with a batch of Oatmeal Raisin Cookies. The oatmeal sounded healthy, and cookies looked granola-ish and virtuous, but as they stood steaming on the counter. Mr Tabubil began to swear that he could hear them begging to fulfil their true destiny as the world’s greatest ice-cream sandwiches.  He even pulled The Perfect Scoop back off the shelf and searching the index for vanilla ice-cream, but it was dinnertime, so we stopped. And looked at the trays and tureens all around us, and began to wonder who might be available to help us eat some of it. And possibly begin to sweep up some of the flour on the kitchen floor.
            The weather boffins are promising us a cold, wet winter, but if it doesn't clear up and let us out of the kitchen once in a while, what this winter is going to be is spherical.

*That old canard about opening an oven door on a rising sponge cake on a cold day? It's true. I opened the oven door a squeak to toss in a last dusting of sugar glaze and that sponge opened up like a Florida sinkhole on the first day of the rainy season and sank without even a sigh.  

Cheese Scones

Ingredients
1 3/4 cup self raising flour
1/3 tsp salt
2 tsp mustard powder
80 grams butter - diced
3/4 cup buttermilk*
1 cup strong cheese, grated (Cheddar is best.  Parmesan is also good.)
extra flour to dust ledge

*If you can't obtain buttermilk, use the same amount of regular milk, stirred with 2 teaspoons white vinegar.
 
Topping
15 grams butter - melted
3 tblsp whole grain mustard
1/2 cup extra cheese

Essential Equipment
 
Small scone cutter (>2 inches diameter)

Pre-heat oven to 220 degrees C.

Mix the topping ingredients together in small bowl.

Sift the flour into a large bowl and stir in the dry ingredients.  Cut the butter into the flour with a knife, and use your fingertips to work the butter into the flour, working quickly until you have a bowl of fine crumbs, without any loose unmixed flour at the bottom of the bowl.

Add the buttermilk and stir gently with a spoon until the mixture is just congealed and no further.

Note: There is no yeast or extra baking powder in this recipe - scones require a delicate touch to preserve the springiness of the dough, otherwise they will come out of the oven like rocks and knives will not avail you.

Accordingly, turn the scone mixture onto a lightly floured surface and with your hands, form the dough into a mound and knead lightly.  Bring the dough together, flatten it down, turn it over - for no more than a minute perhaps, until the dough is springy and one defined mass.  If the dough is wet and refusing to form, add flour a spoonful at a time until the dough coalesces.

Spread a sheet of baking paper on a baking tray.  Press dough gently until about an inch in thickness.  Starting at the edge, wasting none of the dough (the less re-kneading and reforming of scraps you do, the better!) cut small scones.  One by one, cut and lay on the tray.

Spread the tops of the scones with the topping recipe.

Bake at 220C for 9-12 minutes, until they are risen and lightly golden on top, but not scorched.

Recipe: Garlic Prawns (and New Year's Wildlife)

Mr Tabubil and I rang in the new year in style.  When the countdowns and party hooters began in the street below us, we climbed out of bed and went to the window to watch the fireworks above the city skyline, then went back to sleep!
            On New Years Day, we went to the park and lay under a tree on a picnic blanket.  We watched small children playing soccer, and small dogs who wanted desperately to be part of the game, but ran like hell whenever the ball came near them.  Above us, parrots shrieked in the ceibo, showering the grass with little feathery fragments of seed pods, and beaning pigeons with whole ones when the pigeons strutted past.
            Under a tree was a woman with an accordion and a man with a guitar.  They played German polkas and Violetta Parra and Gloria Gaynor. In the sun, we closed our eyes and fell asleep.

In the evening we made a splendid year-end supper - light and summery and rich.

We did it like this:
 
We heated up some olive oil in a frying pan and tossed in 3 - 4 cloves worth of pressed garlic.
We sautee'd the garlic over low heat until it was fragrant and soft, but not caramelized.
Then we tossed in whole packet of prawns  - (previously peeled by moi) and added lots of fresh-ground salt and pepper.
We tossed the prawns in the pan, so they'd cook evenly without scorching, and added the juice of a lemon.  I decided that the flavor wasn't lemon-y enough and added the juice of a second lemon.
The lemon reacted with the oil  to form a nice thick emulsion. We threw in a handful  of finely diced fresh flat-leaf parsley and basil leaves. (previously diced by Mr Tabubil)
And we stirred and tossed until the prawns were tender but not yet rubbery, and served it up with jasmine rice!

I sent the recipe to my mother, who was so excited that she made it herself, and declared it fantastic.  And it is.  Give it a try!

Happy New Year!

Happy Halloween!

We have descended into the dark underbelly of the kitchen construction industry, and are only just beginning the long claw out.  Posting shall remain sporadic.  Eat some horseradish and sirachi sauce off of a skull, and pretend you're down here with us.

Happy Halloween!

Alba and the Carbon

(the telephone rings.)
            "Tabubilgirl! Quick!  What's activated charcoal?"            "Isn't that the stuff they put in Britta filters?  Alba?  Is that you?"            "You're right!  I have those!  I can take one apart!"            "Why?"            "No time to talk!  I'll call you when it's all over, all right?"
(call ends.)

It wasn't all right.  Not even vaguely.  A question like that needs proper answers. After waiting very patiently for three whole minutes, I called Alba back, on account of how I really really wanted to know why she was taking a britta filter apart to get at the charcoal.
            The answer was pretty good, actually. In between sounds of breaking plastic, Alba explained that she'd cooked pasta for lunch and after eating her way through most of a bowl of it, she'd scraped the leftovers out of the saucepan into a tupperware container and noticed that the lower levels of pasta in the saucepan were evidencing a phenomenon possibly unique in pasta circles -
            The pasta company had put a free gift - a magnet advertising an upcoming animated film release - into the bag along with the pasta.  She hadn't noticed it when she was pouring the pasta into the saucepan, and it appeared that the painted plastic layer of the magnet had melted and boiled off.  The pasta in the lower reaches of the  pot were sort of technicolor swirly, with long, dragging plastic tails, and she was freaking out.
            Alba is good at that.  "On the internet I saw that if you eat like a tablespoon of activated charcoal, you can help cleanse your system. I've already made myself throw up the pasta I ate but what if all the horrible toxic paint - and god knows what it has in it -  has been absorbed into my body already?!   I need to filter it out.  From the inside.  That should work, right?"
            I wasn't so sure.  If the pasta hadn't actually burned going down her throat, it was pretty much inert - sort of like accidentally swallowing a bit of cling-wrap or a scrap of plastic bag.  And even if it wasn't purely neutral, that sort of poisoning generally requires cumulative and repeated exposure to do real damage-
            "I'm not arguing"  Alba said, but she was still making herself a nice cup of activated charcoal tea.  With maple syrup to help it go down.
            "You DO realize that the way activated charcoal works is that it makes you throw up?  You've already done that.  It doesn't actually filter your system from the inside."
             "But not everyone throws up.  I read on the internet that it's like 60% of people.  Tops.  And I'm not really the throwing up sort.  It took a lot of effort last time when I got all that pasta up.  I mean - wow, tickling the back of your throat sure is effective, but boy does it take work.  And even if I do throw up again, well, that's good right?  It means that it's working.  I mean - I mean…. uuuuuuurp.  I gotta go!"
            She hung up.  And five minutes later I got a text saying that activated charcoal really does work that fast.
            The things you learn on a Wednesday afternoon.  In other news, our regular mid-week sketching circle didn't happen yesterday on account of the hostess suffering a bout of self-induced stomach flu.

Recipe: The Chocolate Rum and Raisin Mousse of All Good Dreams

Mr Tabubil tells me that my chocolate recipes are my dowry, and dreamily recounts the way I came to him with a notebook: a fat cardboard portfolio bursting with photocopies and handwritten recipes, all heavily smudged around the edges with egg, cream and chocolate – and rum.       
            I’m a boozy sort of cook. The recipes that Mr Tabubil counts among his favorites are a chocolate almond cake – with rum; a chocolate raisin mousse – with  lots of rum; and a boozy chocolate fondue sauce that kicks your teeth down the back of your throat and puts you to sleep at the table. If I could find a way to put rum into a cookie I'd try it, but philosophically speaking, an alcoholic cookie, doesn't feel quite right.  A cookie's a wholesome thing, and rum is hot and thick and dances on a tropical beach at midnight with its shirt off.  For cookies, dark chocolate alone (85% caffeine!) is as far as I dare go. Caffeine leave me dancing on a beach at midnight with my shirt off and bongo drums banging in both my ears, so I reckon that is sufficiently damned decadent.

             Chocolate, done properly, is a mouth full of silk and black velvet – with that lingering caffeine buzz.  Alcohol is a mouth full of fist and somebody else’s teeth.  Chocolate and alcohol, together, are a pairing that is divinely inspired, in which the alcohol ceases to be boozy, and becomes something intangible, a sensation that hovers, ghost-like, at the edge of your plate.  Try to pin it down and you won’t find it, but if you let go and return your attention to your plate and your fork, it will sneak sideways around the edges of your palate and lift the chocolate up into the realm of the sublime.

             Mr Tabubil has come over to the computer and snorted hugely and said that I wouldn’t know what to do with an elusive alcoholic essence if it came up to me on the street, wrapped its arms around my knees and begged me to take it home.  My recipes, he says, use alcohol in quantities that resemble a one-two punch, a knockout blow that leaves the eater flat on the floor with the carpet wrapped around his head.

             To which I replied that a dessert that isn’t intended as a showstopper is a waste of time and chocolate for both guest and baker, and referred him to the chocolate mousse I made for a party last Saturday night – a chocolate mousse that broke two diets, left four guests under the table (albeit smiling) and sent everyone home in taxis.

            Mr Tabubil snorted again and said it was a fault of my upbringing, and went away. 

            Mr Tabubil is not entirely wrong.  I was raised in a household both sozzly and decadent. Not to drink- my parents never drank, but they kept booze on hand for guests who did, and after the really good dinner parties there were always half-bottles by the score that needed using up - so we cooked with them. And my mother, an almost-teetotaler, tippled while she cooked, and dinners that started with beef bourguignon went down deep and twisting rabbit holes to places that were extremely interesting indeed.  

             Her magnum opus was the evening, two days after a really good party, when I came home to find that she'd used the leftover red wine in a cabbage stew, soaked the cucumber salad in chardonnay instead of vinegar (I don't recommend the substitution) and, halfway down the second half-bottle of the stuff, she'd had a brainwave and boiled the rice in champagne.
             It wasn't a meal that was precisely edible, but it got us through all of the leftover bottles, all right. The liqueurs and chocolates that we ate for dessert were almost conventional - except for the moment when someone giggled and cried 'whoops!' and sat down and missed her chair - with a carafe of hot coffee in her hand.  The next morning was all about caffeine - believe me- but the bongo drums came first.

             In her honor, and in the honor of the six sozzly guests of Saturday last, I present to you my mother’s own recipe for Chocolate Mousse.  You can work with the given amount of rum, or you can go the whole Tabubil and magnify it.  I leave the choice to you.  I will only note that dinner invitations to our house are a highly sought-after commodity, and a guest who doesn’t have a headache after the dessert course is a guest we haven’t yet satisfied. 

Chocolate Rum and Raisin Mousse

Begin Marinating raisins 2 days ahead of serving.

Make the mousse 1 day ahead of serving.  

You need at least twenty-four hours to soak the raisins (a full week is even better), and the completed dessert must rest in the fridge for another twenty-four before you serve it so that the flavors can blend and mellow.  Serve it early and you will be astonished by its insipid banality.  Wait a day and you will be hit with a bolt of pure chocolate goodness.

Ingredients:

225g semi-sweet chocolate (substitute for 112 g dark chocolate and 112 milk chocolate)

1/2 cup sour cream

3 eggs, separated

1/2 cup loosely chopped raisins (slice them open to allow entree to the alcohol)

3 tablespoons dark rum (start with 1 1/2 and add the rest as and when needed)

300ml thickened cream

2 tablespoons castor sugar

The day before you plan to make the mousse:  

 Put the rum and raisins together in a shallow bowl.  Cover and leave to soak.  Add more rum as and when necessary.  Use as much as you like!

The day of the cooking:   

Bring the sour cream and egg yolks to room temperature.  Melt the chocolate.  Add the melted chocolate to the sour cream and egg yolks and stir until smooth; add the raisins and all the unabsorbed alcohol.  Lightly whip the cream and fold it in. 

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, gradually beating in sugar.  Fold beaten egg whites into the chocolate mixture. 

Spoon into serving glasses (keep portions small!) and refrigerate overnight.

Enjoy!

(Important note – you must always add melted chocolate TO the eggs and dairy – and not the reverse.  There’s a complicated chemical reason for this that I can’t precisely recall  – but I can tell you from extensive personal experience that if you do it wrong the chocolate tends to seize and solidify and ruin, and you have to start over!)

Christmas Cake Requiem

For a lot of Australians, one of the best parts of the holiday season is the Christmas cake - a fruitcake of gargantuan proportions and grandiose preparation -

             I have written previously about the Christmas Cake  - the deep cultural resonance of butter by the brick, of sugar by the tonne, of eggs by the dozen, of apricot jam, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, and above all of dried and glace fruit -

             It is the fruit that makes the cake.   In 2010 I wrote -

"In August or September you gather your fruit. A pound or two of raisins, the same of sultanas, another of currants, candied citrus peel, glace cherries, crystallized ginger and pineapple, glace apricots and peaches and pears and figs and oranges and kiwi-fruit and quangdongs and cantaloupe (if you can get it) all chopped into little pieces no larger than a raisin. When you have a lasagna pan overflowing with sweetly aromatic fruit, you begin to add the alcohol. Slowly, pouring and turning and stirring and resting, over the course of a week you pour in bottle of brandy - and then another. As the fruit swells, you move the overflow into another great bowl and tend to both. The house smell thick and alcoholic - 
            "Like a distillery" Mr Tabubil sniffs ardently, "but in a good way."

I baked a Christmas Cake last year, for our first Christmas in Chile, but Chile doesn't have much of a glace fruit tradition.  Chile's confectionery heritage runs mostly to German kuchen and dulce de leche, or manjar, as it is know locally - a thick, sweet, sticky mess of boiled evaporated milk and sugar cooked into in everything from wafer crackers (alfajores) to croissants (media luna) to layer cakes (torta mil hojas). 

             I began looking for fruit in October, just after we arrived in Chile.  Raisins and sultanas came easily, and diligent searching resulted in a single packet of glace apricots from a little Armenian import shop in the comuna (suburb) of Patronato, but as for the rest of it -

             Home-country traditions mean even more when you're an expatriate far from home.  I had the bit between my teeth now, and I wasn't stopping for anything. The Australian shops I'd worked with the previous year wouldn't ship internationally, European outfits would only ship wholesale, and North American offerings were slim. Calling in favors from anyone I knew to be traveling up and down from Canada and the USA,  I shipped myself tubs of glace cherries and candied orange peel and pineapple -

             Christmas had passed by, but that was no matter. This Cake was going to happen.  By mid-January I had collected all the fruits I could, and by mid February they 'd been boozed up till they sweated out an alcoholic haze and the flies that blundered through the window into our flat fell insensible in the kitchen doorway and never rose again, but it was a scant and simple cake that I loaded into our oven -

             And because I was still learning its tricks and temprament, that dearly bought cake came out over-baked: a cinnamon, nutmeg and alcohol soaked charcoal briquette.

I didn't make a cake, this year.  All in all, it didn't really seem worth the fuss.  You can make glace fruit yourself if you're so inclined, but it's a process that takes days of boiling and ends in a perpetually sticky kitchen that sort of leaks into your other living spaces, and I have quite enough of that with Mr Tabubil when he decides he needs home-made marshmallows.  A mixing bowl full of unset marshmallow tends to work its way out of the kitchen into every single room in the house - like silly string, only rather more tenacious, and I've washed the stuff out of my hair often enough this past year that I'm not taking on any more sticky -

           This post, then, is requiem of sorts - the story of the last time we didn't have a fruitcake for Christmas.  That was the year that I was thirteen, the year when the icing on the Christmas cake went wrong. The year we were living in California, and couldn’t find the traditional white royal icing in the local shops.  The year of our really big Christmas party, when all of our expatriate Australian big-talk and honor was on the line.

             You can make white royal icing yourself, if you've sufficient time and masochism. The day before the party, Mum and I set to work. It was a tremendous job; tenting the kitchen in old sheets, we kneaded sugar and egg whites and glycerin until the room was coated in a glistening sheen and we were just unspeakable.

             Nibbling hugely the whole time, we stirred and shaped and molded, and four hours later, we had one fine looking cake  - complete with a little silver mirror on top for a lake and a couple of miniature pine trees around it for ambiance and a border of little silver-painted sugar balls spelling out wishes for a Merry Christmas. Also one kitchen  that looked like it had passed through an icing-sugar supernova, and one empty bottle of glycerin whose label looked, on belated reflection, subtly… wrong.

             We'd found it in the back of the pantry- a battered bottle with the label peeling off - it had looked mostly right and we used it without thinking.  Now, in the bright glow of the aftermath, the label appeared to have a couple of significant spelling errors, and in Big Bold Black Letters, right underneath, a jolly motto reading "If ingested, contact your Nearest Poison Control Center immediately."

             It was all over the cake.  It was all over the kitchen.  It was all over the insides of us.  Burping nervously, we grabbed for the telephone directory and dialed.

             The lady on the telephone at the Poison Control Center was professionally reassuring.  We'd be fine, but did we have more than one lavatory in the house?  She was very glad to hear it, because in about four hours, we'd both be becoming rather intimate with the fittings  for the next day or so.

             She didn't even giggle. Hanging up the phone, Mum sighed and looked at me, and while she showered and rushed out to the shops, I stripped the cake of its gorgeous iced topping and re-laid the floor with fresh sheets.  And we did all of it, all over again. We never did find out where the bottle had come from.

            We were living in California that year, and although we'd stripped the cake bare and even gone so far at to shave off the upper half-inch of cake, just in case, we thought we'd better bow to the local culture and insist that all our guests sign limited liability waivers before they tried it.

             Not one single guest took a single bite of our Christmas cake that year.  Every one of them declined the privilege. 

We found it hurtful.

You Find Great Fries in Amsterdam

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now we’re in Holland.

One day we took a bus into den Hague and rode the inter-city express train to Amsterdam.

The view from the train was as flat as flat – green and wide and growing and we were as deeply agricultural and mentally speaking, as far from the seaside as you can imagine, and there, suddenly, flashing past the train window, was a row of masts.  Closer, and there were sailboats, marooned in the middle of a field. Closer still, and for the briefest flash, we saw a canal, a narrow strip of water, three meters wide and as long and straight as if drawn by a ruler, and the we were past – and there were sails in a field again.

            In Amsterdam one emerges from the train station, crosses a very large road, and enters a terrible tourist zoo- a splendid and picturesque warren of 16th century buildings and alleyways that have been comprehensively touristed out, the elegant bones of the building buried under the bunting and postcard stands and the tie-dyed neon tat of souvenir stands and doner kebab bars and "coffee" shops-

            We escaped as fast as possible. And ate patat -  French fries.

Chileans can’t make French fries. Good French fries are crisp and golden and brown along the edges.  Chilean French fries are pale and flabby and drip fry grease and are limp in the middle when you pick them up and taste like uncooked mashed potatoes, straight from the deep-freezer.

Mr Tabubil and I aren’t very big on fast food, but four or five times a year we get a massive craving for fries, and go out and order shocking amounts of deep fried potato grease from McDonalds and KFC.  The first time we tried that here in Santiago, we found ourselves holding wilting white sticks of uncooked potato, and I (who was PMS-ing something fierce and really really really needed the fat) went and cried under my molded plastic food-court seat. 

It’s turned into a thing – two people who never used to give a damn now go out and order French fries everywhere they’re on the menu – just in case. We’ve tried local restaurants, we’ve tried the big international chains and not once, in more than a year, have we found a French fry that’s half-way eatable.

My father in law – Mr Tabubil’s Dad - finds the situation a terrible big cross to bear.  At least once a month he marches into the local Tip-y-Tap (a national chain of German pub-cum-restaurants) and orders wurst and sauerkraut and a pint of German beer - just to get the waitress interested, and then he orders fries.

            “Real French fries.”  He pleads.  “Gold as the surface of a sunburned surfer and crisp and light as summer clouds-”

            “Si senor.”  The waitress says, and gives him a sour look.  “That’s how we do fries here.”

            “No you don't.”   My father in law scowls at her. “Never mind golden.  Make them brown.  Brown as German beer.  Brown as the sole of my shoe – this one, right here, see?  When the cook says that they’re done, tell him to put them back in the batter and do them again. Burn them if you have to! But brown!”

            “Si Senor.”  The waitress says again, and she rolls her eyes, and flees.

He  catches the corner of her apron and drags her back.  “Forget brown – make them black.  Leave them in the oil until they’re grilled through and the oil won’t stick any more, then throw them in the oven until they’re black, and smoking and when the smoke alarms are going off all over the kitchen, then bring them to the table.  Please?”

            “SI, senor.”  And the waitress extricates her apron from his clinging fingers, and escapes. 

           He waits in an agony of anticipation, convinced that this time – at last – the waitress has understood his terrible need.  He plays nervously with his napkin.  He arranges – and re-arranges - the salt and the ketchup and the mayonnaise.  And when the fries come, heaped as high as the ceiling on a platter the size of a wagon wheel, they come as a limp, sticky pile of pale, undercooked undersalted  -

             “Tubes of frozen mash!”  He breathes.  He can’t believe his eyes.  He can’t look away from the terrible plate before him – can’t stop staring at the wreckage of his dashed and wilted hopes -

And my darling mother in lawhas to forcibly restrain the dear man from calling a manager, challenging the waitress to fisticuffs in the alley, and threatening to bring the chef into forcible conjunction with his fry-vat - “an instrument that he clearly doesn’t recognize is even located in his kitchen, because if those things have ever been near a deep-fryer in their lives, I’m not a Dutchman!”*

Having now been to Holland, and having eaten the French fries that he was raised upon, I can sympathize with his point of view.  I’m even tempted to do a little fryer-introducing to the fry-cook at our local McDonalds myself. 

            Dutch French fries, are quite extraordinarily good:  light as summer clouds, crisp and golden as the surface of the sun, with a textural flavor that hints wonderfully at the sort of oil that olives and peanuts dream of becoming when they die.

In a small misunderstanding, Mr Tabubil ordered a Size Large to feed the both of us, and we’d both forgotten what ‘large’ means a country where they super-size their teenagers and feed ‘em up by weight –

A smiling blonde giant handed Mr Tabubil a twisted paper cone fully eleven inches high, ten inches in diameter and overflowing with golden fries, and half a metric cup of ketchup and half a metric cup of mayonnaise poured over the top of it. 

The both of us – he wallowing in nostalgia, and I wallowing in the bliss of my very first time, and neither of us having had any breakfast – even together we didn’t get through more than half of them.

The only fries better than the fries in Holland, mi Suegro says, are the fries from Belgium, and he has been known, while driving from Rotterdam to the German border, to take a detour south into an entire different country for a mid-afternoon snack.

“You ought to try it next time you’re in Holland.”  He told me.  “Best six hours you’ll ever spend in your life.”

* I invite anyone who doubts the absolute veracity of the above accounting to apply to Mr Tabubil, my mother in law, or any waitperson working an evening shift between Santiago and La Serena.