BRUNCHING IN SICILY

Throughout Italy it has become fashionable for bars and restaurants to advertise lunch as "brunch" when what they serve bears no relationship to a brunch at all.  So yesterday, for St David's Day, I decided to do the thing properly for a few Italian and expat friends.

There was sausage and baked bean casserole in the kitchen for those who wanted it - the beans came from Cristaldi in Catania - and my main table looked like this:

I like to make "Glamorgan sausages" - which contain cheese, not meat - in round shapes and there they are on the left. Those are Nigella's "Welsh Rarebit muffins" next to them - what my muffins don't have in height they make up for in breadth - and that's homemade chutney and cranberry sauce being served with the cheese.

I know my bara brith, which I'd made on Sunday, didn't look perfect but sliced and served with butter and a friend's homemade marmalade, everyone thought it tasted good!

Those are my "chocolate thingies" on the cakestands, with my strawberry tiramisù at the back and almost-Cadbury's chocolate fingers on the right.  [Thanks, Lidl.]

My "tipsy cake" became rather an Italian one as, given the unavailability of sherry,  I used Maraschino in it.  I'd found the sugared sheep in the supermarket and decided they would be an appropriate decoration:

And of course there were Welshcakes:

A Welsh male voice choir CD,  my blown-up plastic daffodil, good company and a singalong completed the occasion.

MAKING APPLE CHUTNEY IN SICILY

Every autumn in Britain, I would make a batch of apple chutney.  For American readers, chutney is a kind of thick salsa which is, however, a preserve.  The word "chutney" comes from Hindi "chatni", meaning "strongly spiced" and it was the colonising British who began eating spiced mixtures, probably as condiments, in India.  The custom spread to other colonies and tropical fruit, too, began to be incorporated into some of the recipes. Then the travelling British decided they wanted spiced mixtures of fruit and vegetables which would keep and so began adding vinegar and large quantities of sugar.  Eventually they brought their recipes and the word "chutney" back to Britain.

And now I am carrying on the tradition of chutney making in Sicily!  Sadly, it is wasted on most of my Sicilian friends who abhor the British habit of mixing sweet and savoury ingredients and when I point out that they do it themselves in several dishes such as coniglio in agrodolce [sweet and sour rabbit] they just shrug their shoulders and say that is different. Anyway, I brought my preserving pan and extremely long-handled wooden chutney-mixing spoon from Britain and I haven't given up yet!

On Saturday - better late than never -  I made my first batch of apple chutney here in three years: Once again Rosa was the willing "gofer" and once again I used a mixture of Granny Smith and Golden Delicious apples in the absence of cooking apples.  The recipe I use, from a Jennifer Paterson book called Feast Days [published long before her incarnation as one of the famous Two Fat Ladies] calls for white malt vinegar, but as I like apple chutney to be quite dark and you can't get malt vinegar here, I used a mixture of red and white wine vinegars. I don't leave the chutney to cool before potting it but pour it straight into sterilised jars and then I leave it covered with a clean tea towel for twelve hours before putting on the lids, which I line with greaseproof paper, just as my mother taught me.

This time it took ages to cut out the "hats" as my pinking shears has seen better days and is getting hard to manoeuvre but all will be worth it when the flavours have mellowed after a month and I can use the chutney!


Oh, and this is a 2002 photo of me making chutney in Carson City, Nevada, USA., where a friend had cajoled me into giving a demonstration!

AIUTO!

Above you see the results of a morning spent making apple chutney, with Rosa as the willing "gofer". Even with 2 of us plus food processor the whole operation took 4 hours. I use a Jennifer Paterson recipe from a book called Feast Days, published long before her incarnation as one of the Two Fat Ladies. I like this recipe because it includes fresh dates and I found some lovely, plump ones in the supermarket a few days ago.

All was going well until it was time to ladle the mixture into the jars, when we realised we were going to be a jar short. [Yes, I do usually prepare and sterilise more jars than I think I will need but I miscalculated this time - or the Sicilian apples give a better yield.] I hastily found the preserving jar on the right and sterilised it but the trouble is now it is time to seal the jars and I have run out of rubber preserving rings.

About half an hour ago I remembered I had an unopened jar of Foie Gras in the fridge and that it is a similar type of jar; therefore I thought I would be clever and use the ring from it. [Yes again, I know you should use a new one each time but I would have sterilised it and replaced it on Friday as I have better things to do tomorrow than go rubber-ring-hunting!] But can I get the goddam jar open?! No, I just can't and I have tried every trick I know and every Lakeland gadget [Lakeland is a UK kitchen shop famous for inventing problem-solving devices] at my disposal. So please, before I get myself into a "Mr Bean" situation of smashing the wretched jar and binning the contents in order to get the ring, does anyone know how I can open the thing?!

Rosa was very interested in the whole process and went home with a [ringless] jar of chutney onto which I popped a pretty label and a nice Christmasy "hat" before she left. Leafing through my "Preserves" cookbooks, she came across a recipe for piccalilli and was much taken with a picture of the finished product, so I translated the recipe for her and gave her dollops of the necessary spices which are difficult or impossible to find here: mustard powder [impossible], ginger [difficult] and turmeric [difficult]. I hope the recipe works for her!