Christmas Gift Guide Volume One : For The Food Lover

Now, I'm very aware that some of you may be thinking that it's far too early to be considering Christmas given that there's still 54 days to go until the big day. However, I for one am very prone to ending up feeling stressed and flappy in December about how much I've got left to do, not really enjoying the build up at all and then ending up absolutely exhausted on Christmas day itself.

It's daft really isn't it; buying presents is the best fun, we all love making our houses look extra sparkly and Christmas dinner is really just a roast with extra vegetables - yet somehow we seem to get ourselves in an absolute tizz about the whole thing which is often over quicker than blinking.

With that in mind, for the last couple of years we've tried to get all our Christmas shopping done before the first of December so we can then enjoy decorating the house, planning all the food and watching Elf and The Holiday multiple times with one less thing to think about.

To hopefully make that process a little easier for everyone, I've put together a series of Christmas Gift Guides which will be posted throughout November. I've tried to steer away from aiming them at Mums or Grandads or Brothers or whoever and instead focussed on the interests of the people in our lives we need to buy gifts for. Hopefully there's something for everyone, and for a range of budgets too.

So first up, we have a roundup of gift ideas for food lovers...

Rivsalt Salt Grater - £25

This is something we came across on our recent trip to Stockholm, and I think it's the epitome of beautiful and useful combined. There is a small version for grating at the table, and a larger kitchen version for grating into dishes. I love how simple the design is and how it brings a real sense of occasion to seasoning your food. I think it would be perfect for someone who takes pride in the way their kitchen looks or loves setting a table to entertain. There's also a raw liquorice version if the recipient is that way inclined - which I am...liquorice hot chocolate anyone? 

Cocoa Runners Subscription - from £18.95

D bought me a Cocoa Runners subscription for my birthday back in September and I can't tell you how exciting it is to have a box of the worlds best chocolate drop through your letterbox. These are not your average bars of corner shop crap, but the most exquisitely flavoured (and packaged) bars of really complex and distinctive chocolate. If you know someone who is into wine or coffee tasting, this would be an excellent choice. 

The Ultimate Cheese Making Kit - £36.50

Every foodie loves a cheese board right? With this kit they'll be able to make 10 different varieties of cheese at home. I love that this gives total control over what type of milk is used and exactly how each one tastes. The kit comes with everything you need (except milk of course!) plus a recipe book, and enough ingredients for 40 batches of deliciousness!  

The Flavour Thesaurus - RRP £18.99

I have a LOT of recipe books. Like, 300 a lot. However, I don't always cook from them, and more often than not we just make things up as we go along, or base a meal on a recipe but change it around according to what we have in the fridge.  The Flavour Thesaurus looks like it would be so useful on those days when you can't decide what to eat, or when you know you fancy something cheesy but can't quite work out what else you want and you're not a student anymore so eating a single foodstuff and calling it a meal isn't ok. It's divided up into chapters based on the type of flavour, and has 99 foods listed along with pairings for each and over 200 recipe suggestions. Plus, who doesn't love a good book for Christmas.

The Raw Chocolate Pie Company Cacao Nib Grinder - £3.95

The Raw Chocolate Pie Company are based in Cornwall and are a longstanding favourite of mine. Their Cacao Nib grinder is used all the time in our house, and is perfect for adding a really intense chocolate flavour to sweet dishes, some of our favourites being crumble topping, porridge and ice cream sundaes, but also for adding a really interesting depth to chillies and stews. I think it would make the perfect interesting stocking-filler-chocolate-alternative for a food lover. 

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That brings us to the end of volume one. I hope it's got you thinking about your gift lists and maybe started to spark some ideas. Say tuned throughout November for more gift giving ideas, including guides for new parents, coffee lover, bearded ones and those annoying people who seem to have everything! 

Seeing Out Summer with The Good Life Experience

At the beginning of September, Pedlars very kindly invited myself and D back to The Good Life Experience, a three day festival held on the Hawarden Estate in North Wales that has very quickly become my favourite weekend of the year. 

It was founded by four friends; Charlie and Caroline Gladstone, Cerys Matthews and her husband Steve Abbott. Four years ago they set about creating a festival that reflected the common desire to return to a simpler way of life, the kind of life our parents and grandparents lived where good times didn't depend on money and excess, where we made things and grew things and past times didn't revolve around high resolution screens, but around each other. The festival is a celebration of food, music, books and crafts people - all the good things in life. 

We arrived to find the same glorious blue sky that greeted us last year, but a week of rain the the lead up to the weekend also meant a great deal of mud - and it was all the more fun for it! We put up our tent to the sound of music in the distance and I could hardly contain my excitement. I felt as though I'd come home when we arrived last year, and knowing what to expect made me even more eager to get in and immerse myself in the joy of it all once more.

Yet again, the only negative I can draw from the whole weekend is that you could do with a time-turner; there's so much happening that you couldn't possibly see everything, and choosing which things to miss is such a tough decision to make.

We perused the line-up with some lunch from Claw who we discovered last year and were hoping would be back again. They serve a whole host of crab and seafood goodness, and we went for the crab on fries which is a rather inspired combination.    

We decided first to see Micheal Rosen. I'd been wondering which bit of the weekend would make me cry this year, and it turns out this was it. 

Micheal Rosen is of course famous for 'We're Going on A Bear Hunt' and he saved this performance till the very end. Before that though, he took us on an animated and completely hilarious journey through his childhood, all the time looking just like the Quentin Blake illustration of himself. We heard about his inability to hear the word 'bedtime,' how heading to the bathroom meant it was time to muck about and felt his Dad's fury after finding the top of the toothpaste buried inside his shaving soap. His explanation? Pirates, of course.  

It was really quite overwhelming to watch the command he had over his audience - children and adults alike were repeating his lines back to him, and gasping with horror when his mum discovered his midnight chocolate cake feast. Such a wonderful poet and performer, and we both feel quite honoured to have watched, with tears rolling down our cheeks, him doing his thing. 

Next it was over to the Campfire cooking stage for something else that I found rather overwhelming. As you might remember from my recent post about podcasts, I've recently fallen in love with Harry Eastwood and her ethos on meat. 

Listening to her talking about honouring and savouring each piece of meat you eat was completely inspiring and cemented our feelings about lessening the quantity and upping the quality of the meat we choose to eat. I had one of those joyous moments where I want to jump up and down and bestow thanks on a person for articulating the jumble of feelings that reside in my head. Also, by following the simple tips gleaned from her talk we've since cooked the best steak we've ever had! 

Just look at my happy little face! It's mostly because of Harry and her demo, a little bit because of the table of foraged mushrooms next to me, and quite a lot because of the lavender soda and spiced rum I'm clutching. I spotted the Lurvill's Delight stand at about 300 paces - lavender and rum are two of my most favourite flavours, and they combined to make the most beautiful (and refined sugar free) riff on a 'dark and stormy' - I may have had more than one. 

Both Makers Row and The Marketplace were bigger and better than last year, with some of the most talented craftspeople sharing their skills and the most incredible wares for sale. D had an excellent time selecting a new beard oil from Old Faithful and I spent a considerable time stroking some beautiful knitted baby clothes from Mabli. Most of the purveyors are local and it's a real celebration of Welsh makers! 

We didn't manage to get booked into any workshops this year, but watching people creating things with their hands, sometimes for the first time, was marvellous. Parents and children made screen prints together, arrows were sharpened and leather punched. This isn't craft in the toilet roll and sticky back plastic sense, this is crafting in the true sense of the word, making something real and tangible using your hands. I love to think that for some of the children, and maybe some of their parents, that this weekend might unearth a passion that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.  

The festival site takes on a whole new magic as the sun goes down. The camp fires are lit, and the music turned up. Children get wrapped up a little bit more, eyes wide with the delight of a late night and a hot chocolate and 'yes you can have one more marshmallow' or they're tucked in to wagons adorned with fairy lights to sleep while the rest of the family carry on the party.

We headed back to the campfire cooking stage for Tom Herbert's book launch which was absolutely inspired! After chatting to Tom, and getting a copy of his new book Do Wild Baking - Food Fire and Good Times signed with the dedication 'Bake Together Forever' we hung it up over the camp fire to 'cold smoke,' to infuse it with the wonderful smell of the smouldering fire.

It's well known that the sense of smell evokes a stronger emotional response than any of the other four, and flicking through the smokey pages immediately transports me back to that night, full of inspiration and memory and the reminder to get outdoors and cook.

As we sat huddled around the smouldering fire, drinking beer, inhaling the scent of smoke now tucked within the pages, watching muddy dogs fighting over beef bones and scraps from the days cooking, I had felt the exact same sense of belonging as last year. There's something tribal about it, a sense of camaraderie and shared joy that makes everyone feel like instant friends. 

On Sunday morning, after a breakfast of bacon and fried duck egg sandwiches, I challenged D to a coffee-off. Allpress coffee were teaching people how to make espresso based coffees, and ever the competitors we decided to show off a bit!  

We decided diplomatically that mine looked better, but D's tasted better - so as ever we make a pretty good team. 

We then headed to a talk with Harry Eastwood and Felicity Cloake, guardian columnist and author of four recipe books. They both have such a passion for food, and a fascinating way with words which made their talk utterly compelling. From cycling round France and inhaling the bread basket to a comparison between the compulsive nature of both Mills and Boon novels and a bag of Wotzits, the two of them together sparked an idea in me that perhaps food might play a bigger part in my life than I ever imagined.  

Next up - just to add to the layers of delicious overwhelm now piling up on top of me we headed back to the campfire to watch Gill Meller (long standing fantasy love interest of mine) cook Mussels Eclade - or, mussels cooked with fire. The plan was to arrange the mussels, opening down, on a large piece of wood, cover them with pine needles, set the needles on fire and have the heat and smoke cook the seafood to perfection. However - the lovingly collected pine needles had somehow gone astray, so hay was employed instead and the result was wonderful, sweet, juicy and perfectly smokey mussels.

It was with very heavy hearts that we packed up the tent and headed home. I can't fully express how being here makes me feel. I think I said last year that walking into The Good Life Experience was like looking at the inside of my head laid out infront of me and that was completely true again this year. If you could give physicality to the emotion of joy - then this weekend nails it, and I haven't even mentioned that everywhere you look there's a dog to make friends with too.

It's something really really special - every single moment of it is so felicitous that it all feels like such a celebration. Every person, whether they're a chef or a maker is so passionate about what they do that you can help but be infected by that same passion too. What I find so wonderful is that everything is aimed at adults and children alike, and the utter joy of making something with your hands can be seen everywhere, from children who have never felt so proud, to adults who had forgotten what that feeling is like.

So, as we all fully embrace Autumn and say goodbye to summer for another year, lets raise a glass and chant: Here's to campfires, here's to rum, here's to finding a double pronged marshmallow stick and singeing your pigtails. Here's to setting up a make believe sweetcorn stand, here's to muddy dogs and muddy pyjamas. Here's to steak, to smoke and to going on a bear hunt. Here's to making it with your hands, to rolling down hills and getting drunk on fresh air. Here's to hiding the top of the toothpaste, here's to infusing books with memories and toasting them with ale. Here's to wellies, here's to family, here's to yoga and fire and music and baking and passion and mussels and stories and crying because you love it... 

Here's to The Good Life.  

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Food Moments: 'For the Love of Bread' by Jill Waters

Today I have the pleasure of bringing you the story of a life long love affair with the one of the oldest and most basic of foods, bread. It comes from one of my very best friends, Jill of Land of The Blue Rinse. She and I met back in 2011, and food (as well as grappling with a class of 12 children with various additional needs) was one of the first things we bonded over.  

Over to Jill...

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I love bread - I think it’s something to do with childhood memories of my dad smuggling home a hot loaf from the bakery where he worked. We’d hungrily devour doorstep slices dripping with butter, despite the fact that we’d already eaten our tea!

When I visit new towns, I seek out artisan bakeries and drool over their loaves, and firmly believe that fresh bread, butter and cheese is one of the greatest food combinations there is.

Baking bread makes me feel like an earth mother! For me, it’s about nourishing my family with a food that often gets a bad press, but that can be totally delicious. When my children were small, I used to make most of our bread. Not always successfully, and I sometimes resorted to turning my brick like loaves into breadcrumbs, but there was something about the process that I felt a deep affection for.  

Whilst I’ve continued to bake, off and on, over the years it wasn't until I retired that I revisited baking bread ‘properly’. My  husband bought me a bread baking course for Christmas, which I finally enjoyed in June. It was really good fun but, although I made four different types of bread, it didn't really teach me anything I didn't already know - to weigh all the ingredients, including the liquids, to add a tray of water to the bottom of the oven to create steam, to keep the yeast away from the salt, and so on and so forth.

As part of a retirement hamper, my daughter bought me ‘Brilliant Bread’ by James Morton and this book has really changed the way that I bake bread - more time, less kneading. Of course not all my bakes work, but even the failed ones taste delicious! Morton promises that everyone can be a baker, but warns against trying to run before you can walk. Running before I could walk has probably been the cause of the majority of my baking flops, but strangely it hasn't put me off. If anything it makes me more determined!

I recently read an online article about micro mastery, which is the art of becoming really good at one thing and then using this as a building block for additional skills. The example the article gives is making an omelette, but the principles can just as easily be applied to sewing, knitting or breadmaking. 

With this in mind, I aim to become a micro master of a sourdough loaf. It is the ultimate loaf to bake, but can be varied by using different flours/seeds and so on. It is the Holy Grail of loaves and is tricky because it takes time, does not use yeast and can be very temperamental. Sounds like the perfect challenge! 

I’ve had my sourdough starter, Bamber (my starter for 10) since last October, but he’s spent most of that time languishing at the back of the fridge, so it’s time to feed him, get him frothing and become the micro master of my own fate!

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Ah bread, such a simple wholesome food that has been so messed about with commercially that the sliced white loaves on the supermarket shelves are barely recognisable as the glorious crusty doorstops Jill's Dad smuggled home from the bakery.  

I too have a sourdough starter (Herbert, est. 2016) cowering stickily in the corner of my fridge, and I think its about time I revived him, especially if, as set out in my year long bucket list I'm going to be self sufficient in bread by this time next year. 

Don't forget, if you have a significant food moment in your life that you'd like to share, please do get in touch - I'd love to read your story.

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