Fancy a squeeze? Leaf it out, will ya?

It's the time of year when grocers where I live start selling citrus fruit with leaves on. Odd

Normally, the tangerines, clementine, orange and lemon ranks are just piled as they are.  Perfectly acceptable in appearance, but just as they are.  But I've noticed more of this creeping in here.  Outbreaks of leaf action in the Christmas run up.  I'm sure that's quite commonplace in uber trendy urban areas where people buy sausages wrapped in brown paper,  and say things like 'Ya it's all very villagey here, don't  you think...?' but not here it isn't.   And another thing.  They're sold in boxes.  Those shallow, flimsy, wooden boxes with printed adverts that I suppose name the grower or distributor or whatever, I can't say I've stopped to read one.  But they do, I confess, look really nice and you always want to use them for something else later, put them in the shed and end up using said box to light the barbecue with seven months later.

So what's this all about?  Why must my clementine or lemon have leaves now and not all year?  I can't pluck up the courage to ask one of the grocers in town, I mean it wouldn't be right, I can just imagine the look on his face.

'Eh?'
'Leaves on lemons.  Why now?
'Not with you mate...'
'Why do you sell lemons with leaves on now and not in June..?'
'Can't say I ever thought about it...'
'It's just that it makes no sense, so I wa.....'
'Neither do you mate.'

And off he goes to rearrange his roast chestnut display, which you also only get right now, before alerting the authorities about some bloke who clearly needs professional support and is there any specific help available for lemon obsessives.

Waxed, unwaxed?  Don't ask me I've no idea.

Market forces

It's infiltrated the three-times-a-week market in town too.  They've caught on.  I had a quick look today.

'Yer Granny Smiths a paarrnd.   Yer tomarrtas a paarrrnd.  Yer mushrooms a paarrnd.  Yer lemons and clemetines with leaves on a paaarnd a paarrnd....'

Or whatever.  Last year I fell for it and bought a box.  More clementines than I knew what to do with.

They 're probably sold like that in certain supermarkets too, just not the ones I go to.  There is a particular brand of supermarket that's 25 miles away from here, that doesn't normally cater for my sort.  I needed polenta a few months back in its grain form and could only buy blocks here.  As I happened to be (sort  of) passing that supermarket at the time, I popped in because it was inevitable it would be sold there.  Can't remember when I felt less comfortable.  The mummies in there all had sunglasses perched on top of their heads and had children called Magnolia, Apple White or something, and there was certain sort of more mature lady who bypassed metal shopping trolleys and held firmly to her wicker basket.

Takes no prisoners.  The PChef citrus press.
Juice to the max.

The staff looked sideways at me and seriously considered whether I ought to have a DNA swab to see if I was a suitable customer.  As it happens I found the polenta by the hand knitted pasta and left before there was an incident.

Maximum squeeze from a citrus press

Anyway, the sort-of point to all this is that I seem to get through an awful lot of lemons, for one reason or another, so I suppose that's why I notice these foliage situations.

I won't drone on about zesting anymore.  Done that, been there.  But I've a new friend in town.  The citrus press.  You see, after watching endless TV food programmes, I'm used to the idea of squeezing a lemon with one hand into the other, catching the pips.  We have got a plastic roundish, spiky thing that sits over a container which you twist your lemon into.  Useless.

But I've just taken delivery of a PChef citrus press as in the pic above.  Basically a half lemon shaped
cup, as you can see, in metal. Good Lord.  This boy takes no prisoners.  This is the Marines of citrus presses, the undercover Seals Unit.  Punch its solar plexus and you'd be the one with a sore fist.

Half fruits are turned inside out before your eyes.  Inside out.  The end result rind, skin, whatever, is drier than a wash at full spin.  There's nothing left. I've never seen such viscous juicing in a domestic setting.

I have a cooking show booked in December with a host who is also into her lemons.  She squeezes and turns the fruit - get this - inside out with her thumbs.  Now that's serious.  A woman with thumbs that can inflict that sort of injury isn't to be trifled with. I'll have to behave myself.

All lemon-ed up. Ciao for now

So now I'm fully equipped with my ever-present zester that never leaves my side and my Jackie Chan of a juicer, I'm urged to move into the big league of home-made mincemeat and - wait for this, a bright idea from my wife last night - home-made lemoncello.

'Let's get some vodka at the weekend....it's dead easy, apparently...'  Says she with enough home-made sloe gin and sloe vodka fermenting for Christmas to kill several armies.

Lemoncello.  Really?  Me?  Mind you, if word got out that I was into that kind of thing, maybe I could go to whatever supermarket I chose.  Even pop into a cafe there, if they have such things, I have no idea, and buy a skinny something or other and bird seed drizzle muffin.

Ciao bella.  Oh Dear.

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Zesting cheese and walnut whips. It's all getting out of hand.

Nothing's safe at the moment, from the zester

I've got a terrible addiction.  Actually that's not true. I've got several, but there we are.

Some I've already confessed to elsewhere on these pages.  Chocolate for example.  I'm a big girl when it comes to chocolate.  I could eat the stuff everyday (but don't) - on a biscuit, wrapped around a chocolate bar filling or just a solid bar of it.  Don't care.  I worked with someone years ago who did clearly have an addiction to chocolate. She was eating it by the sack and had become a real issue for her, so whilst for me it's just a slobbering desire, we shouldn't forget that for some people, these things take over lives in a most unpleasant way. Eating a whole pack of Penguin biscuits plus a multi pack of Mars Bars nightly is at best, unusual I would have thought.

I was prompted because on the tele last night I saw a piece about a young woman who shifted, I think, because I was only half watching, six litres of cola a day.  She rarely ate anything but said nothing quenched her thirst properly other than cola.  There was some extraordinary statistics in there; eating the weight of a four year old child in sugar over a year or something bizarre. I wish I'd paid more attention. A team of doctors got her off the stuff in the end but she was biting the walls on the way there as she came off it. She now eats three meals a day and - as they say - has a balanced diet. I'm full of admiration for people that manage successfully that kind of struggle.

Sweet childhood memories

So this puts into perspective somewhat my 'desires' rather than addictions. I drink too much tea and coffee, but have never smoked, so in my head (incorrectly) one cancels out the other. Back to chocolate for a minute, I've rediscovered Crunchies; that honeycomb in a choccy coat is just fab.  Well, it is at the moment.  I've had fads.  I favoured Mars Bars but haven't eaten one now for years. Snickers, or Marathons or whatever they're called this week have lost the appeal.  And I do occasionally hanker after my youth.  Whatever happened to Spangles?  Not choc, I know, I'm just meandering. Aztec Bars.  Sherbet Fountains.  They were a yellow paper tube full of the kind of sherbet that once in your mouth turned your lips inside out and made your eyeballs lurch violently backwards inside their sockets.  Inside the tube and hanging out of the top was a stick of fairly acrid black liquorice.  Magnificent, they were. Can't remember the last time I saw one.

My memories are
whipped into shape

For years I questioned the absence of a half walnut in the bottom of a coffee walnut whip.  As a kid I hated the damned walnuts for being too bitter.  Now of course with a shift of palate, I like them. Anyway. I was convinced a semi walnut resided there at the very bottom of the Whip. Chomping one a few years back the Whip was sans walnut. Disappeared.  So anyway the conversation about the 'thin end of the cost-cutting wedge', 'how dare they abandon my childhood with such a dismissive attitude towards nuts', 'no respect for tradition, culture and heritage' rumbled on for months with me going increasingly round the bend.

All for half a damned walnut, I know.  I'd lost it.  The big questions of life were passing me by. Bear in mind this happened years ago, I'm since recovered, but as I said, the big issues of the day such as why was Robson and Jerome in the Top 40 and which vindictive halfwits were responsible for buying the damned records, were not reaching my radar.  It reached such a peak, I had to contact Nestle's/Rowntrees (I think) and demanded an explanation for their damned cheek.  Around a million walnuts are used by the company every week on Walnut Whips and they've been a crucial ingredient since 1910.  So in my eyes a walnut whip without a walnut is falling well short of expectations and fundamentally alters the description. In that scenario it's just a Whip. End of. Unsatisfactory.

Whipped into shape

'What the hell are you playing at woman...!'  I bellowed down the phone to some hapless and admirably polite PR lady on the other end.  You can see I was at the end of my tether, and I'm not proud, let me make that clear.

Turns out there was never a half walnut on the bottom of a coffee walnut whip.  It seems the original vanilla whip did enjoy a half nut on the chocolate base, inside the mallow, and not on the top. As a marketing ploy, a walnut was later added to the top and the nut inside was removed not long after.

My childhood memory had let me down badly and I retreated, embarrassed to lick my wounds and hang my head.

Anyway.  Back to addictions.  Or as I say,'desires' because I suspect the word addiction is a bit strong. I can't stop zesting.  I'm zesting everything.  I've mentioned this before and I thought it was a phase but clearly not.  It's sitting there smirking at me on page 17 of the new Pampered Chef catalogue.  The Microplane Zester.  Quote: one swipe removes the zest and leaves behind the bitter pith. I'll say it does.  No citrus fruit is safe in my house, or nearby supermarket for that matter.  It safely gathers all the fragrant zest effortlessly which just sits, patiently, at the top of the zester, waiting for instructions.  Try as you may, the revolting white pith is nowhere.

The medium round stone

Pampered Chef microplane zester multitasks

I've become adventurous.  Not content with fruits I've moved onto cheese - feta in particular.  At a recent cooking show, I was making a pizza on the round flat stone (medium round flat stone with handles to give its proper name) and I grated or zested some feta cheese on top.  The point being I hardly used any cheese - so healthier - and my little zesting friend was more than able to cope with a cheese as incredibly soft and crumbly as feta.  Small wisps of feta floated down like dessicated coconut.  It was a win.
The snag is of course it's done nothing to ease my appetite for seeing what else I can zest that was never intended for such treatment. And before you even suggest the heels of your feet, you can think again.

Now I've caught a whiff of childhood, I'm off to see if I can buy a pack of Munchies. Or Treets.  I don't hold out much hope though.

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Sweaty? I'm throwing in the towel, Juan.

 

‘I’m sweating like a fat lass in a club…’

Now, I’m not sure where I heard that, I think it might be a Peter Kay line, but I’ll stand corrected. We do like to make jokes to cover up emissions of a personal nature be they from armpits or twixt buttocks.  It’s the former that is taxing me at the moment.

 I’ve been quiet on here for a while mainly because I’m several thousand miles away in Northern Cyprus – the Turkish side.  I also had to miss the PChef annual conference which happens every year in Birmingham for various reasons, so I have no insider gossip on that front to reveal.

This isn’t to say that I am in a non PChef zone right now, because I’m not, as I shall jabber about in a minute.

The temperature here bounces around 40 degrees, give or take. We are staying at a friend’s house equipped with all the usuals – fridge, freezer, blah etc. And this is kit that really has to put its back into it to keep anything from rotting within hours of purchase.  And you want to buy.  As with some many other countries the markets are amazing.  I’ve shifted more fruit and veg in the last few days than within six months at home – water melons the size of unfurnished flats; and water, gallons of the stuff.  But we’ve been coming here for a few years now so we knew – or at least I knew – that bodily functions would be put to the test.

I’ve been cooking. Apparently that’s my job on holiday.  In 40 degree heat.  So here’s one example.  I’m (loosely) cooking a PChef recipe of chicken, chick peas, chorizo (Turkish sausage) pepper, chicken stock , tomatoes etc, all bunged into one pot and served with rice.

Dear Lord.  There are cooler blast furnaces.  The sweat after five mins or so of chopping reached crisis levels and I’d not cooked a damn thing yet. That snake-hipped lad and his kitchen towels – Juan Sheet – or whatever he’s called would  need a pack of rolls never mind one flaming sheet.  In fact I wish he’d been here because I wouldn’t mind slapping his smug little face.  Anyone who can wear trousers like that needs to be treated with caution. As the pathetic kitchen towels available to me dissolved on impact with my forehead I had to engage some serious support.

With the start of cooking in progress, fighting for oxygen and with a T shirt that now looked as though it had been taken out before a fast spin, I went to the bathroom and got a hand towel which I plonked on my head and wrapped around me ala Lawrence of Arabia. To cut a long story short, I managed the meal but needed two such towels to cope with the onslaught of moisty bits. 

Pampered Chef note:  I have been using a selection of knives, pink and green versions, stoneware etc all resident in the island.

‘A bit hot…?’ says my wife after a gruelling shower plus sit down for half an hour with a white wine and soda, as her meal is presented.

I think I mentioned something about never feeling dry at any stage and knowing now what a slug feels like.

‘You need to wipe your face,’ said wife or friend Bridget, I can’t remember, I was hallucinating I think; I’d got locked in the Lawrence zone by this stage  and I think I saw camels in the garden. Either way I plonked down in a chair looking I’d just finished the 100 meters backstroke.

‘I have been wiping my face…I’ve been using the hand towels…done it before’

‘You did WHAT!’

‘I used the hand towels to…’

‘I’VE BEEN DRYING MY HAIR ON THOSE..!’

I won’t go on, you can guess the rest.

Tensions were a little raised before because we’d not long finished a chat on Skype via this very laptop with the middle son who was about to head off to Italy for a couple of days of work.

My wife is very big on sun.  Loves the stuff.  A tan – whilst not an obsession - is a summer must-have in her book.

‘Do I look brown then Tom…?’ she asked eager for confirmation.

‘Yeah, you look like Lennox Lewis’

Now, whether it was son suggesting that his mother closely resembled a boxer or my comment about Fatima Whitbread, or my snort of laughter, I don’t know, but it set a tone for the evening that climaxed in the towel incident.

There are other tales to tell from here, but while I’m on this theme, we went to a market which sold just about anything you’d like from clothes and accessories to dodgy rip-offs.  Tucked away was a small booth-come stall that housed two young girls plus an older woman who was turning out what at first glance appeared to be pancakes or crepes – except they can’t have been. That’s because I watched the older lady roll out a ball of - I have no idea what – with what looked like an inch thick piece of dowel rod.  These now ‘pancake’ sized discs were lightly filled with potato or cheese or meat or aubergine or any combo.  They were folded and lightly rolled again with the filling inside, placed on a hot plate which the girls cooked.  Naturally these, whatever they were, were blisteringly hot and tasted fantastic.

However…on the board behind the girls, written in white chalk, that listed the options of meat, cheese etc., there was a ‘Sweat’ version.  Even in this heat it didn’t take much working out that the poor girls meant ‘Sweet’ and not the more unconventional ‘Sweat’.  Look, I’ll try most things – I like faggots and gravy and I’ve eaten snails, but sweat flavoured ‘pancakes’ are a whole new departure for me and not one I’m keen to explore.

Bridget pointed this out and had to visually explain the error by pointing at her armpits.  An urgent search for chalk and the ‘A’ became’ an ’E’.

Anyway…must dash, more later.  There are some towels to wash, apparently.  Some people are so picky. 

Look who's thinking of joining. Is that ...? No, surely not.

 Click on the picture to find out more

Guacamole? No thanks, I've just had a nuclear fallout.

The infamous MFP

Here's a question: will there be any demand for handmade guacamole after the nuclear apocolypse?

Interesting question.  I hadn't thought about it. I think it's safe to say I never would have given this the attention it deserves until I read some jabbering on Her Majesty's Facebook of late. It set me off, to be honest.  What would you fancy after the wholesale slaughter of the human race? The chippie would be closed, so that's out.

I really ought to say upfront that all this is not my thinking. My chum Carolyn was recounting a Pampered Chef cooking show she was at with a new recruit.  PChef makes this non-electrical gadget which PCheffers insist on calling the 'MFP'.  A 'manual food processor' if you like.  Now as you can see from the above pic, it looks like what a food processor looks like.  But no mains electricity is required.  You 'pump it' to quote from the blurb.  In fact  (quote) 'the more you pump, the finer the cuts.'

So if I've got this right, it could be a workout tool as well as a chopper.  Aren't you supposed to 'pump' when you workout?  I've no direct experience because I'm no friend of gyms and I've never seen this chopper - food processor - in the flesh.  I'm sure The Green Godess on Breakfast TV years ago would have found a use for it.  Anyway, to get to the point. A guest at this show suggested that the MFP would be better knowns as a Post Apocalyptic Food Processor, because it needs no power.  Then Linda, quite rightly joined the dots and suggested the demand for homemade guacamole would probably be a tad subdued, perhaps she was, by default questioning the demand for MFPs long term. Not sure if I agree completely. Guacamole is always a bit bland - no, subtle - to me in a nice way and I think I'd like that.  I mean, you wouldn't want anything spicy would you after going through a holocaust?  Enough excitement for one day.

The microplane zester

Apple, Orange and other devices

I could surround myself with other bits of non - power kit like garlic pressers, microplane zesters and so on, although what there would be left to zest is open to question.  And I couldn't ask anyone to find out because my mobile phone would have vaporised at worst or conked out at best, knackered by electrical storms.  Now that would irrate  all the hardcore mobile users wouldn't it?  I'm quite into techie bits  as a rule but the obsession with phones has left me behind.  Do you know, the fifth most popular thing to do with a mobile phone now, is make phone calls? The fifth!


In a bit of a tantrum I searched high and low until I found a phone that just makes calls.  Just calls.  That's it.  I'm happy.  I have no immediate taste for Apple, Orange, Blackberry, Chuck Berry or whatever they're called.

'Hey...can I show you the 5,000 photos from my last holiday I have on my Hokey Cokey 2000, or do you need to know the latest train times in Venezuela...?
'No, but I do strongly recommend you get a life..'

Actually this whole Apocalyptic thing is getting a little clearer to me now.  Those of us of a certain age may well remember the government's advice in the 80s when a Big Bang was a real threat.  They suggested we take all the doors off in the house, lean them against a wall, drape a curtain or two and hide inside. Or under the kitchen table.  Not sure if this was a foolproof plan.


A blast of thermal radiation to the tune of several megakelvins through your letter box would be more than a match for the deluxe kitchen wood effect suite from MFI. Safe to say the cat would be in for a hell of a shock too.

Pinot Grigio - weapon of choice

So all in all, as much as I like the idea of manual food processors and the like, I suspect I wouldn't have much of an appetite, guacamole or otherwise.

50 Shades of Threat

We don't spend much time these days worrying about nutters with warheads and fingers on buttons, well not in the way we used to, certainly.  Todays threats have a different twist. We'd booked flights to the States two days before the Twin Towers.  Friends suggested we should cancel.  Certainly not.  Out of the question.  Didn't fancy giving into that stuff really: we flew.  I certainly don't lose sleep because rightly or wrongly, I'm not scared right now of the Big Bang.

However...I do keep being asked if I'm going to the Pampered Chef Annual Conference.  A huge room packed with hundreds of excitable women armed to the teeth with well-thumbed copies of 50 Shades of Grey and unlimited cases of Pinot  Grigio.

That's a different story.  That's why I'm writing this under the kitchen table.  Move over Tiddles.


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