Midwinter Challenge - Holy Supper Part II

If you've not caught up already (where have you BEEN?) here's the link to part one of this epic blog post. 

Two days before the solstice found me scrubbing the kitchen. Well, I’m not inviting guests to a house that is anything less than spotless, am I? Magic chore whore that I am, everything was cleaned with my own mixture of lemon juice, rose-water, alcohol with lavender (and a couple of drops of cinnamon oil) blended and charged with being a spiritual cleaner as well as a bloody good ‘get-rid-of-dirt-and-grease’ one. The floor was washed with this too, followed by a wipe over with my Four Witch Vinegar (scroll down a bit on the link for details!) for added oomph. The doorway and step was swept and scrubbed this way too. I smudged the entire house with a home-made sage and rosemary smudge-stick, and did my usual protection at the entrance to our property (yes, in the dead of night; I want to stay on speaking terms with the rest of the street thanks), to make sure that the guests I invited were the ones I WANTED, rather than any nasties or freeloaders.

Finally I was set to get on with calling up the Dearly Departed. Hekate was petitioned to bring them forth, and I lit my ancestor incense and did some rather nifty off the cuff invitation chanting. Nana was there like a shot, of course (but she’s never that far away), and close on behind her I was pleased to realise my Great-Aunt and Great-Uncle turned up and made themselves at home with a glass of Strawberry and Elderflower wine (Nana stuck with a cup of tea; never a big drinker she wouldn’t accept the wine.)

Time to get on with the cooking. Paté first.

Duck and Chicken Liver Paté with Wild Woodland Mix ‘Shrooms

Ingredients

Ms Dirty's Wild Woodland Mix

Wild Woodland Mix with home-grown onion and garlic

              220g/8oz butter
1 onion, chopped
1 garlic clove, crushed
Handful of dried porcini/Wild Woodland Mix
450g/1lb chicken livers, trimmed and cut in half
1 tbsp brandy
3 tsp wholegrain mustard
salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 bay leaf, to garnish

Preparation method

Soak the mushrooms in boiling water. Melt 110g/4oz of the butter in a pan over a medium heat, then add the onion and fry until softened, but not coloured.

Add the garlic and chicken livers and fry the livers until golden-brown all over and cooked through.

Place the liver mixture and 55g/2oz of the remaining butter into a food processor, swirl out the pan with the brandy for a couple of minutes, then add this to the blender with the mustard and blend until smooth.

Drain the mushrooms (keep the mushroomy stock juice - excellent to add to earthy stews or soups) and chop finely. Stir into paté .

Season, to taste, with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Transfer the pâté into a serving ramekin or small dish and decorate with a bay leaf.

Melt the remaining 55g/2oz of butter in a clean pan. Skim off the froth and pour the butter over the pâté. Transfer to the fridge to chill, then serve from the ramekin when ready.

Serve with toast and red onion marmalade.

The scrapings from the bottom of the blender went on a slice of toast so I could check it was ok. Honest.

After I’d made sure it was ok… yes, it was fucking amazing if I do effing say so myself, it was on to the next dish to be made.

Boozy Bakewell Tart

Ingredients

PASTRY
125g plain flour
75g unsalted butter, cold and diced
25g caster sugar
1 egg, separated

FILLING

The last spoonful was all for ME!

2 heaped tbsp Papa’s Necro-fucking-tastic Plum Rum Sauce
150g unsalted butter, at room temperature
150g caster sugar
3 eggs, beaten
1 egg yolk
150g ground almonds
Zest of one lemon
1 tbsp flaked almonds

Preparation

To make the pastry, sift the flour into a bowl, then add in the sugar, then cut the butter into cubes and add to the flour with a pinch of salt. Rub in until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

Add the egg yolk and 1 tsp of cold water and mix until the dough comes together. Don’t work too much! Flatten into a disc, cover with clingfilm and chill for no more than 1 hour.

Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface to about 3mm thickness. Line a 20cm tart tin with the pastry.

Prick the base with a fork and chill for 20 minutes. Heat the oven to 180C/fan 160C/gas 4.

Line the pastry case with baking parchment and fill with baking beans.

Cook for about 20 minutes until the pastry is a pale golden colour. Take out the beans, brush the inside of the pastry case with a little egg white and cook for a further 2 minutes. Cool slightly.

Spread the plum rum sauce in an even layer over the base of the pastry case. Cream together the butter and caster sugar. Gradually add the beaten eggs and egg yolk. Fold in the ground almonds and lemon zest. Carefully spoon the mixture over the jam and spread level. Bake for 20 minutes. Scatter with the flaked almonds and continue to cook for a further 15-20 minutes until golden and set. If the top looks as though it’s going to start burning before it’s baked all the way through, cover the top with some grease-proof paper or tin-foil.

Cool to room temperature, dust with icing sugar and serve with pouring cream or custard.

Or as I found out, you’ll probably want to serve it with a second helping of itself.

Last to be made that day:

Nana’s Chocolate Yule Log.

(I found this recipe on a torn out piece of yellowed newspaper tucked in her last diary. Fitting. This is just as it written on the newspaper.)

Ingredients

1 oz plain flour

1 dessertspoon cocoa

Pinch salt

3 separated eggs

Large pinch Cream of Tartar

4 oz Caster Sugar

2-3 drops vanilla essence

Icing sugar

Preparation

Grease and flour a Swiss roll tin, 8” x 12”. Sift the flour with the cocoa and salt. Separate the eggs and whisk the whites with the cream of tartar until stiff, then gradually beat in half the sugar. Continue whisking until the mixture looks shiny and will stand in peaks.

Cream the egg yolks until thick and then beat in the remaining sugar and add the vanilla essence. Stir the flour into the yolks and pour this mixture over the whites. Using a metal spoon cut and fold carefully until thoroughly blended.

Turn the mixture into the prepared tin and bake at 325° F for 20-25 mins. Turn at once onto a sugared tea towel and roll it up with the towel inside the cake. When it is cool, unroll the cake carefully and fill with either a chocolate butter cream or Chantilly cream and roll up.

Cover the cake in chocolate butter cream and use a fork to mark in bark effects. Add green marzipan holly leave and red marzipan berries as decoration. Dust with icing just before serving.

Incidentally, this was so good, I got talked into making another one to take to the in-laws for Christmas day.

Baking done, it was time to clean down the kitchen, wash up, dry, put away, and get my head down - veg prep and soup making the following day ready for the BIG DAY itself. Which will be in part three, because you’ve heard quite enough from me for one day. Go off and do something magical. Shoo. Yes, you too. Arse off chair, now go. GO!

Midwinter Challenge - Holy Supper Part I

It’s now January, and I think I have lived in my kitchen for the last four weeks. I have magic chore whored my ARSE off so much that if I sit down, I’m fucking balancing on my ribs. And there's a whole lotta New Year magic shit to get going, so I have to finish Midwinter before I can possibly start on any of the 2012 magic chores (my fucker of an OCD demon won't let me!)  So, here’s the low-down on the Old Kitchen Witch’s Magical Midwinter. Grab a drink, get someone else to fix you some food because we may be here for some time, my pretties *cackle*.

To recap: the a-fucking-mazing Ms Dirty set up the Midwinter Magic/Holy Supper challenge, and right from the start there was no way I was chickening out of this one. First things first - the ancestors. I know very little about my ancestry, as I said here, but I do work with my Nana on a regular basis (I’ll do a whole post on my Nana one day, she was one helluva woman) and I wanted to honour her first and foremost. Then I thought of my Great-Uncle and Aunt, who were very close to Nana (and completely mad as hatters - my favourite kind of people), so they should be included too.

So, the menu. Well, it really should have been goose. Nana used to buy two goslings in the spring and raise them all summer. At Christmas she would slaughter and prepare both for roasting - one would be our Christmas dinner and one would be sold to pay for the next year’s goslings. But I wimped out - I’ve never roasted goose before, so I went for a beautiful organic duck instead. It still fits: we would all travel to my Grandparents a couple of days before Christmas and she always did roast duck for the afternoon when everyone got there. So duck it was. Goose is for next year! (Oh yes, there WILL be a next year!)

Seeing as Ms Dirty got us into this, it was only fitting that some seriously superb Ms Dirty produce was included in the meal, so I planned home-made paté using some Wild Woodland Mix of ‘shrooms, and a Boozy Bakewell Tart with her Necrofuckingtastic plum rum sauce.

We needed to include the Witchlets as much as possible - this is a tradition I want them to grow up with, and remember with fondness when they reach my advanced age (and hey, maybe do it themselves!) so the meal was planned for early afternoon - too late in the evening and we would have had children snoring face down in the gravy (the Witchlets are early risers; neither seems to be able to stay awake past 8pm which is FINE BY ME) and I’m told snorting roast meat juices isn’t desirable at their tender ages.

The finalised menu looked like this:

Leek & Potato soup (our home-grown potatoes, our neighbour’s home-grown leeks)

Chicken & Duck liver paté with wild mushrooms

- both served with fresh soda bread

Roast organic duck

Rosemary roast potatoes cooked in goose fat (I got a bit of goose in there!!!!)

Sprouts and chestnuts sautéed in brown butter

Honey-roasted parsnips (neighbour’s garden again)

Thyme buttered carrots

Yorkshire puddings (because there would be a family revolt if I didn’t serve yorkie puds with a roast dinner. They’ll forgive me many things, but lack of yorkies and I’d be history.)

Chocolate Yule log (to keep my resident chocoholic Witchlets sweet)

Boozy Bakewell Tart

Local cheeses with Port (obviously I wasn’t giving any Port to the Witchlets before ANY OF YOU LOT THINK ABOUT CALLING SOCIAL SERVICES!)

But what about ye olde traditional element to the dinner? That carefully researched dish from ye dim and distant past of ye dim and distant ancestors? Yeah, I guess it could look a bit like I’ve missed the point - AHA!!! THAT’S WHERE YOU ARE WRONG!!! The plan includes all four of used parading out to our lone apple tree (grown from a pip, ten years old, never flowered or fruited) and wassailing the hell out of it, hanging toast dipped in Lamb’s Wool (a traditional spiced mulled ale or cider) from its branches and scaring away any evil spirits that are stopping it fruiting by banging drums, tambourines and shouting. (I was pretty certain the kids would be up for this bit.)

Menu sorted, I could turn my attention to decorations. As usual, our main living/dining room was decorated with as much red, gold and green as could be stuffed in the place. I can’t help it; I realise that black, pink, blue, red fake trees seemed to be the in-thing this year, but it’s just not right - sorry!  

I’m so ridiculously anally retentive about my decorations that I only do them when everybody is out of the house and I’ve told the Witchlets that the Yule Fairy comes and does them. It’s my OCD demon - all the decorations have to go up in a certain order, in the same place each year, and don’t even THINK about suggesting anything different. I felt quite bad that I JUST CAN’T let the Witchlets get involved that I bought them a mini-tree each, with multicoloured lights and lots of sparkly baubles for them to decorate in their bedrooms. (They adored that, by the way.)  I even fake-leaded and snowed the windows.  ALL of them (here's just the back door and window!)

Just as I got the decorations down from the roof-space, I got a call from the tree-surgeons we’d spoken to about removing two hulking great Leylandii trees from our front garden. Initially they couldn’t do it until January, but suddenly they had some spare time - did I want them down now? Too fucking right I did. They left me with a beautiful off-cut of trunk for a Yule Log, and I got an awful lot of greenery for the house (and to dry for incense - much as I hate the rapid growth of Leylandii, I do love their smell). The gods were working with me already.

In the roof space I found a second 7ft narrow fake tree that I’d completely forgotten I’d been given by a friend last year. Considering I was about to be spending one hell of a lot of time in the kitchen over the coming few days, I put it up next to the fridge-freezer for some added sparkle. I had a string of 200 lights to go on it. I’m not stupid, you know (stop laughing in the back, I can throw knives) so I plugged it in to check they worked before spending a ridiculous amount of time winding it around the tree. Plugged them in - nothing. Absolutely fucking not working. I went from one light to another, twisting and pushing, but still no fucking twinkle. Luckily I had a spare set, and they went on, worked perfectly without any trouble. Just to be sure, I plugged the first set in again as they lay on the kitchen floor… yeah, you guessed it, the fuckers lit up. If I tell you that tree is dead opposite The Old Man’s altar - you know who I blame for the whole sorry affair. He’s got a fucking sense of humour on him, that’s for sure. Why it’s nearly always directed at me, I’ll never know. (It’s ok, he’s taken pity on me and said I can have a shot of his spiced rum now.)

*glug* So anyway, lounge/diner decorated, kitchen tree up, I then remember that I bought some glass icicles earlier in the year, so they went up on the herb drying pole above the kitchen window. Just the altars to do at last. The Old Man got really giggly and silly when he got two Green Man cards (one from me; one from hubby and the Witchlets) and an arrangement of ivy and fir cuttings for his altar. I’d also got him a pyramid candle (it’s black, and as it burns down it has red wax in the middle - we’ve got some serious workings to do in 2012 and the candle is a big part of it) and some Cadbury’s Snowball sweets. (He almost regretted the whole fairy light thing then…. almost).

The seasonal altar got decorated, and I remembered the beeswax Yule candle I’d bought a couple of years previously (and forgotten about in the bottom of a box). The Green Man bronze plaque above the seasonal altar was still my Autumn one - the Winter should have been put up at Samhain, but something stopped me this year, and I decided we’d put up Winter as part of the ritual of the Midwinter Feast.

That just left Hekate’s altar. I was going to petition Her to escort the Ancestors back for the festivities, and She has Her moments of being a bit prickly, so I left her altar until I’d done a midnight divination to see whether She was amenable (the fallback plan was to ask The Old Man; I knew he’d be more than happy to bring back the ancestors, but he might add a few others on the way and I’d rather he didn’t for this one - he’s such a party animal at times.) and thank Her, She was. More than amenable, I actually caught her being rather swept away by the whole thing, so she got some pine cones and a bit of tastefully minimal gold decorations along with more fir and ivy from the garden. I also added Nana’s wedding photo to Her altar, and checked that it would be ok for me to serve the Ancestors their meal on Her altar. At this point I might just have mentioned to Her that I wanted to splash out and treat myself to some new crockery for the meal. Low and behold that afternoon, in walks hubby with a box.

“New plates,” he said, “Poppy design. Red, black and white. Do you like them?”

Do I fucking like them? I love them! (Red, black and white… hmmm, I think Someone has had Her hand in this one!)

Now I had menu, I had crockery, I had decorations - time to get cooking. It's not just time to plan Holy Supper, my friends, but with two Witchlets now in school, I had buns and cakes and treats to bake for school parties (and it's WAR in the playground about who can bring the best home-made cupcakes!)

But you are going to have to wait. I’m dead on my fucking feet, I need another drink and to go remind my husband I still exist. The Midwinter Meal/Holy supper story will continue (with recipes! And added Spirits of the Dead!  Stay tuned!)

In which I went mushroom hunting…

I’m up for a challenge (mostly) and Ms Graveyard Dirt’s challenges to go hunting for Boletes and then preparing them were too good to miss. So off I went. I hunted through the woods nearest to home. I hunted in the woods by the canal. I even hunted through the old Victorian park. Nothing. Nada. Zip. I kept looking, and then at the equinox I went down to leave my usual offering for the Old Man at the crossroads in the woods and wahay! Boletes! Of course, no camera on me (idiot that I am, forgot about the camera on my phone) but I donned gloves and carefully eased the huge fuck-off bolete out of the ground, only to find that it had bright red spongey underside and the bruises where I had touched it were turning blue - the bugger was poisonous. Bah. I could damn well hear the Old Man laughing his fucking socks off.

Eventually, fungi sprouted in the garden

- still inedible as far as I could work out - and then I finally found some at the Old Man’s offering grave.

So there we go - I’d give me an A for fucking effort, but a U for results.

In which I can't believe how much time has passed...

I've been full of ideas for blog posts.  I've jotted down probably about fifty-plus things that I-MUST-BLOG-ABOUT-NOW.  And then time, technology and life have conspired against me and not one single sodding one has been done.  There was my great post about First Harvest, which included my fab how-to about making a wheat-sheaf loaf (I did manage to get pictures on to Facebook, it's under the wall photos tab), there was a heated piece about my laptop which has managed to break TWICE in six months, there was.... oh, I don't know, I've lost most of the bits of paper I scribbled notes on to!

I'm going to try REALLY REALLY REALLY hard to blog at least twice a week from now on, even if I have to slice time away from my sleep to do so.

You can always catch me on Facebook though, I tend to ramble on over there on a daily basis.

Before I sign off and get yet another load of effing washing on though, a quick shout out to the divine Ms Graveyard Dirt (and if you don't know about Ms Dirty's Witchcraft, you are seriously MISSING OUT) for the marvellous brooch from her Secondhand Sunday Collection - isn't this gorgeous?

Mind you, it took me half an hour to open it because the packaging was just as beautiful as the brooch!  Enjoying the fuckton of good juju the brooch has brought me.

OK, that's it, I'm off to draft some more blog posts while the Witchlets are at their Grandmother's.  Happy Thursday, and may a fuckton of good juju drop in your lap today too.