The compulsory post-Christmas fruity breakfast post

So, grapefruit is bad for us. Or at least it may be bad for some of us, if we're taking certain medicines.

Like so many of these stories (coffee, tea, red wine, chocolate, burnt toast etc etc) you have to read between the lines to see what's really going on. This story came along just a day or two after I was having a conversation with Mr Breakfast about how the grapefruit seems to have fallen out of favour. I remember a time when half a grapefruit with half a glace cherry on top if you were feeling really fancy was considered the dieter's dream breakfast. I love grapefruit - especially the pink ones. I even love the tinned segments that you get in B&Bs - a big bowl of them with a dollop of natural yogurt. Or sprinkled with demerara sugar and grilled until the sugar bubbles. Mmmm.

My mum made this salad for me once when I was staying with her and it's remained a favourite of mine ever since. It's lovely on a hot morning (ha), or on a day when you may have over-indulged a little - so ideal for post-Christmas slump days. The flavours are really bright - the lovely zingy grapefruit contrasts well with the perfumed lychees. You can make it with all fresh fruit, or if you're feeling lazy (and lychee peeling does get rather tedious, I'll admit), it's also good with tinned grapefruit and lychees. If using tinned grapefruit, make sure it's in juice.

I eat it on its own, with natural yogurt, or with a sprinkling of nice granola on top. I won't be precise with quantities - it depends how the fruit comes in the supermarket and on your own preferences/budget. It'll keep OK in the fridge for a day or so, and it's best if you can chill it for a while before eating (say overnight). It's not really even a recipe, truth be told, just a suggestion for some fruits to fling together for breakfast.

Fruit salad

Lychees, tinned or fresh
A couple of pink grapefruit (or tinned grapefruit segments)
A bunch of red grapes. Or green if you don't like red. Make them seedless grapes anyway.

1 Peel the lychees if using fresh and cut in half.
2 Peel and segment the grapefruit. If you are being truly diligent, I guess you should probably take each segment from its skin too, but I don't usually bother. If the grapefruit is large, cut segments in half.
3 Halve the grapes.
4. If using tinned fruit, just open and pour into a bowl and add the grapes. You may want to drain off some of the juice first.
5. Erm, that's it.

Some other fruity breakfast combinations:

Watermelon and chopped fresh mint
A mixture of melon types (canteloupe/honeydew/charenetais/watermelon) with lime zest, lime juice and a little honey
Red grapes, blueberries and cherries
A mixture of oranges (bloods orange and new season oranges) and grapefruit (pink/yellow)
Chilled stewed early pink rhubarb with greek yogurt and a drizzle of honey (I stew mine in a little orange juice and zest)

What's your favourite fruit combination for breakfast?

Awaffly good Christmas breakfast

My mother sent us a parcel for Christmas, all wrapped up in a big cardboard from you-know-who (the tax-dodgers). Unfortunately, the surprise was ruined just a leetle bit by the fact that the words 'WAFFLE MAKER' were printed in giant letters on the side of the box. Cheers Santa. Well, we've kept it in a cupboard and at least managed to pretend to ourselves that it is going to be a surprise.

I am however, delighted with this gift. I love waffles. Mum used to have a whacking great old waffle iron which always produced really delicious waffles, and I'd asked her if she still had it (we haven't got to the answer to that yet) which must have given her the idea. She rarely used it, because it was so heavy that it almost broke your wrists hoiking it onto the stove, but the results were always splendid.

So, having known for some weeks what I was getting, I've been able to plan for a waffly Christmas Day breakfast. Is anyone else old enough to remember the days when part of the surprise was 'will it come with a plug or not'? That is an improvement (take note, battery-less toy Christmas destroyers). I think one of the keys to a successful Christmas day is to get the children to stop eating chocolate santas for long enough to eat a decent breakfast that will sustain them for long enough to prevent a mood crash before the main event hits the table. Usually this would be pancakes in our house, but obviously we had to try out the new toy, so waffles it is this year. With cream and maple syrup. No pics yet, because that would be cheating. I'll add some after the event.


Whatever you're having for breakfast tomorrow (and I'd love to know what that is), I hope you have a very merry Christmas and a peaceful and happy 2013.

Breakfast lady xx

 Update: it works!

Multicultural mincemeat

I've long been impressed by the English language's ability to swipe words from other languages and integrate them into our mother tongue. Not for us a hawkish Académie Française banning the use of Anglo-Saxon le weekend. Oh no, give us your tired clichés, your poor comparisons, your huddled mass nouns and we'll take 'em all and turn them into a linguistic stew of a language. Hurrah for that, I say. Vive la différence!

As I've been preparing for Christmas, I've been thinking about how we absorb Yuletide influences from other cultures too. This is nothing new of course - much of our Christian Christmas is nicked from the  pagans in the first place  - all that holly and ivy, mistletoe and wassailing certainly didn't come from deepest Judea - and the Germans have long been purveyors of the finest Christmas traditions to the Royal family of this country.

I've been deep into a book on Scandinavian Christmas cookery this year, and the supermarkets and shops are full of German stollen and pefferknusse, French marrons glacés and Swedish flat-pack gingerbread houses. I've seen little Japanese dolls used as tree decorations, and John Lewis is heaving with Scandi-style red and white ornaments. And of course while the Americans have taken our trees and made them 10 feet taller, our Father Christmas and turned him into Santa, and our string of fairy lights and turned them into entire towns swathed in flashing reindeer and snowmen, they have also given us back some of the finest Christmas traditions - cranberry sauce, It's a Wonderful Life, and...erm..pumpkin pie. Only kidding. They'll have to think of something that's stuffed full of raisins and spices if they want us to accept one of their sweet Yuletide offerings. See, we've happily embraced the calorie-fest that is a German stollen, and the lighter (relatively...), but still fruit-laden Italian panettone, but even they are still bringing up the rear behind a mince pie or a Christmas pud or a big wedge of Christmas cake. It seems that at this time of year, a Brit and his/her dried fruit-based confection cannot be parted.

So, for any American readers out there, here's an idea - a mincemeat muffin. Bear with me, Brits, these really are surprisingly delicious. They are like a mini, lighter version of a Christmas cake, all cinnamony and just reeking of Yule. And you don't have to make pastry, which is always a bonus.  And while I certainly wouldn't eat Christmas pudding for breakfast, I would certainly toy with one of these babies on Christmas morning.

Now, the first thing I'm going to say to you is this: make your own mincemeat. I know that it looks like a thing that would be very time-consuming and faffy, but it really isn't, apart from a bit of apple peeling and chopping. It's the easiest thing in the world and tastes so much better than most shop-bought mincemeat. It'll keep for ages too, so make a few jars and you'll have some for next year too. There are a kerjillion recipes out there in the ether, and the great thing about mincemeat is that it is very adjustable to cater for different tastes, so find a basic recipe and have a fiddle - add cassis or cointreau instead of brandy, or no alcohol (if you must), use cranberries instead of some of the dried fruit, use more nuts, or fewer nuts, or no nuts at all. See? But essentially, it's a case of weighing out your fruit/nuts/suet/sugar/spices, adding citrus juice and soaking for a while, then cooking it all very slowly in a very low oven for a few hours, then mixing in some alcohol, whacking it all into some jars and presto! Christmas in a jar.

Look to Delia, my friends. 

The muffins are as easy-peasy as ever. I've adapted this recipe from Muffins: fast and fantastic by Susan Reimer.

Mincemeat muffins
The dry stuff:
275g plain flour
1 tsp cinammon
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
pinch of salt
85g golden caster sugar

The wet stuff:
1 egg
240ml milk
350g mincemeat
85g melted butter

The extra stuff:
85g sultanas

1. Mix the wet stuff. In a separate bowl, mix the dry stuff.

2. Add the wet stuff to the dry stuff, mixing in the sultanas with the last few strokes. Pop it all in to 12 muffin cases, and cook at 200C for about 20 mins until they are springy on top.

3. I like to sprinkle a little icing sugar on the top, because the only time I ever sprinkle icing sugar on aything is at Christmas. Best eaten fresh, but they keep for a day or so and freeze very well.

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Or out of a jar, or a packet...

When we were on holiday in France in the summer - and doesn't that seem a long time ago now - I picked up a jar of this Bonne Maman chestnut cream, which had been recommended to me by a friend.

You can get most of the Bonne Maman range in the UK now, but this one is rather elusive. I haven't tried Waitrose, which would probably be the obvious place to look, but I can't see it on the Ocado website, and I haven't come across it anywhere else.

 I'm not very familiar with the flavour of chestnuts as my mum never cooked with them when I was a child. They are used much more commonly in French cooking: you can buy chestnut mousse in multipacks alongside yogurt in French supermarkets and desserts such as the Mont Blanc are familiar to all French people. But they aren't used nearly so much in the UK, especially in sweet food. When I lived in London, it was common in the weeks leading up to Christmas to see freshly-roasted chestnuts being sold from stalls on the streets, but it's not something that I've seen in Scotland.  They do seem to have become more common at this time of year in supermarkets, especially vacuum-packed whole chestnuts, which many people use to make stuffing, and marrons glacés. I have no idea what people do with them - eat them straight? Use them for cake decorating? Bof, as the French would say, with a suitably Gallic shrug.

So, with only two weeks to go until Christmas, I've decided to crack open my jar of chestnut cream. I went out in search of chestnut flour, and managed to track some down at Whole Foods Market. 

So, on the menu for breakfast this weekend - chestnut pancakes with chestnut cream. Chestnut flour, it turns out, is ruinously expensive, so this is really a recipe for special occasions - perhaps for Christmas morning, when you want something that will fill the children up for long enough to fuel a long morning of playing with new toys while they wait for the Christmas dinner. If you can't manage to track down the chestnut cream, the slightly nutty flavour of the pancakes would marry well with maple syrup and cream, or indeed with a nice smoky bacon. If you really want to go to town on Christmas morning, it would be nice to add some fresh or stewed fruit - perhaps raspberries or blueberries - to cut through the creaminess.

A final point to mention is that chestnut flour is gluten-free, so if this is an issue for you, it would make a great alternative to normal pancakes, or indeed to all the dough-based baking at Christmas, while still being a bit special for a feast day.

Chestnut pancakes

You can make thick or thin pancakes according to your taste - I prefer thicker, American-style pancakes for breakfast, but if you like crepes better then adjust the quantities (ie add more milk, and leave out the baking powder) to make a thinner batter.

If you are making these for Christmas, you can prepare the batter the night before and leave it in the fridge. It's always good to let pancake batter stand before you use it, and it gets another job out of the way for the big day.

This quantity makes enough for about 6-8 medium-sized pancakes. That's plenty for our family, as the boys don't eat more than one, but you might want to double it up if you're feeding adults or bigger children.

100g chestnut flour
2 tbs caster sugar
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
220ml milk
1 egg
 ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
20g butter, melted and slightly cooled
60g sour cream or creme fraiche

1. Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt together in a bowl
2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg, and add the milk, sour cream and vanilla
3. Make a well in the flour and add the wet ingredients a little at a time. A stick blender or a hand-held electric whisk is the easiest way to do this, but it's easy to mix it by hand with a balloon whisk or even a fork if you don't have one.
4. Let the mixture stand for at least half an hour.
5. Before cooking, add the melted butter and stir to combine well.
6. Heat a little butter in a frying pan (it needs to be very hot), and drop in a small ladleful of the batter. Cook until small bubble appear on the surface of the batter and then flip and cook on the other side.
7. Transfer to plates and add the topping of your choice (see above)

I've linked this post into the BritMums Blog hop - lots of lovely ideas in here for Christmas food, crafts and presents. Do have a look.