It is safe to say that if was a Spice Girl, I would almost definitely not be Sporty Spice.
I am a) too lazy, b) too uncoordinated and c) not enough of a team player for most sports. Back in the day though, I was a fairly nifty tennis player. My secret weapon was a killer backhand drive that no one ever saw coming – primarily because the rest of my game was fairly weak. I would lull my opponents into a false sense of security then unleash the beast!
Pimms Cup
I still have a soft spot for tennis though and with Wimbledon starting last week, my thoughts turned to all things tennis related. Turns out, my fondness for tennis goes beyond the merely athletic though. So, here are my top three tennis related things that don’t actually involve a racket or ball.
Fred Perry Sportswear, particularly the Amy Winehouse Collection:
Amy Winehouse for Fred PerryFred Perry: Amy Winehouse Collection
2. The Poem, A Subalterns’s Love Song by Sir John Betjeman
3. The Pimms Cup
Pimms is a herbal liqueur and the official drink of Wimbledon. The Pimms Cup, as with Fred Perry Sportswear and John Betjeman poetry is as British as British can be. It was first made in an oyster bar owned by James Pimm in London in 1840 and has pretty much been made ever since.
The recipe is as easy as pie – Pimms, lemonade or ginger ale or both, plenty of ice and garnished with cucumber, lemon and borage flowers if you can find them. I couldn’t so I used mint instead.
It is light, summery and a perfect drink for whiling away a summer afternoon whilst reading some Betjeman or watching a few sets!
Pimms CupPimms Cup 4Pimms Cup 5
I’m going to be spending my week staying up late to watch Wimbledon, enjoy your week, whatever you do! And let me know which Spice Girl you’d be!
I fully intended this week to be devoted to Eat your Way To Love and Beauty, but somehow I ended up drinking my way to oblivion and incoherence!
But you know what? I can now honestly say that I didn’t spend the weekend getting tanked on cocktails. I spent the weekend doing research and development. For you dear readers, I did it for you! I’m selfless like that.
Oh Calcutta Cocktail
I found a version of the first cocktail I made, the Oh Calcutta, in Eat Your Way To Love and Beauty. This combines pineapple, grapefruit, lime and…. curry powder! Yep, a curry flavoured cocktail!
The Swami’s version of the Oh Calcutta suggests you mix the ingredients with spa water. I assumed that was a euphemism for vodka when making my version.
O Calcutta – mixing pineapple and curry
Now, I normally like my cocktails pink and sweet so this was a bit of a shock to my system! Initially I wasn’t too keen on it. Gradually though, the Oh Calcutta won me over. It’s actually has quite a complex flavour profile (whoo hoo, look at me using the foodie words!). There was a slight bitterness from the grapefruit, sweetness of the pineapple, heat from the curry, sour from the lime…the more I drank it the more I liked it!
Oh Calcutta Cocktail
I was still thinking about it the next day and I decided that, interesting as it was, it needed something more and that something was a little salty kick. So, I made it again but this time I edged the glass (badly) with some ginger salt. I made the ginger salt by bashing some ginger to death in the mortar and pestle and then adding some salt to the mix. I twirled the glass in this. It doesn’t look great but it tasted amazing!
In my first version I toppped the entire drink with grapefruit juice instead of using a mixer, in the second version I mixed grapefruit juice and sparkling water. The result was slightly less bitter which I preferred. I also used ruby grapefruit juice so there was a pink tinge to my cocktail!
I’m now thinking ginger beer would be good in this too….version three may well happen next weekend!
O Calcutta Cocktail 4
But the weekend of cocktails was not over because it’s feijoa season and thanks to a tree that is fully laden over at my mother’s house we are swimming with them…
Feijoas
For those of you unfamiliar with a feijoa (aka the pineapple guava), it is a fruit much beloved by New Zealanders, and apparently Russians and Californians. It is:
“green, ellipsoid, and about the size of a chicken egg. It has a sweet, aromatic flavor. The flesh is juicy and is divided into a clear gelatinous seed pulp and a firmer, slightly granular, opaque flesh nearer the skin”
Boo, Wikipedia boo! That does nothing to convey the joy of the feijoa – huh…come to think of it from now on, I’m going to be calling them fe-joy-as. I once read in an aromatherapy book that you need to be careful when burning Clary Sage oil because the smell of it can make you feel as if you are drunk! I feel a little bit the same about the scent of a feijoa, it is a kind of fruity, floral, heady smell that…it’s what I imagine heaven smells like. Not that I’m likely to find out. There is no doubt in my mind which way I’m heading.
Feijoa Marketing Board…don’t even think about it stealing this, I’m slapping a ™ on “Fei-joy-as…what heaven smells like” ASAP. Happy to negotiate with you on the licensing of my intellectual property for your commercial gain though. Call me. I’m easily bought.
Odessa Cocktail
Mind you, someone at the FMB is doing their job. These babies are currently selling in the supermarket for $2 each!
When I told mum I was going to do some feijoa cooking for this she wanted to know if I was going to make jam. It’s that kind of comment that makes me wonder if I’m actually adopted….Jam. Pffft…why make jam when you can make cocktails?
I found a wonderful blog called Feijoa, Feijoa which is bursting with recipes for feijoas and has an whole section devoted to cocktail recipes.
I made the Odessa Cocktail purely because I had all the necessary but each one of the cocktails sound delicious. And as for the recipes…this may well become one of my favourite sites! There are also several jam recipes for my mother to make.
The recipe for the Odessa Cocktail can be found here:
If you’re wondering why my simple syrup looks like Coke or coffee , it’s because I only had brown sugar in the house. I think it worked though, it added a treacly depth to the syrup. (coincidentally, Treacly Depth would be the name of my indie band…)
The Odessa is a lovely cocktail, it’s sweet but with a little tang from the lime and exactly the kind of cocktail I normally love! Coming after the Oh Calcutta, it seemed a little simple but it was still delicious! My advice to anyone making it would be to strain it really well. I put mine through a tea strainer and it was a little gritty. I would use a finer strainer next time.
Odessa Cocktail 3
I’m going to be spending my week sidling up to people outside the supermarket and asking “Psst…want a feijoa? ..One fifty each or three for three…and they smell like heaven”
We had a little birthday celebration at Retro food For Modern Times last week. I also spent the week reading a bit more of Swami Sarasvati’s Eat Your Way to Love and Beauty. Whilst none of the recipes here are from that book there is certainly more than a hint of nourishing my inner goddess about the recipes I made as part of the celebrations. And yes, I did just write the words “nourishing my inner goddess”. Feel free to vomit.
I kicked off the celebrations with a hefty dose of booze. No lame Swami Sarasvati mocktails here. When this blog celebrates we turn straight to the Goddess of entertaining Martha Stewart for inspiration (and alcohol content). And her cucumber and lime gimlet got the festivities off to a fine start.
Cucumber and Lime Gimlet
Now, you may be wondering how I can justify the whole nourishing the inner goddess thing (Ok, I’ll stop saying that now) whilst guzzling gin? Well, it turns out my inner Goddess is a bit of a booze hound. Who knew?
Secondly, I figure the health affirming properties of the cucumber must go some way to counteracting the negative effects of the alcohol. Yin and yang right?
There is a bit of pfaffing around with this recipe in that you need to make up a mint simple syrup and steep some cucumbers in gin beforehand but it is worth the effort. It is delicious and an amazing colour! And we had sparklers!
Next up…was my Green Gazpacho. Now, I don’t think I have banged on about my love of this Spanish delight yet but believe me, summer without gazpacho is, in my opinion, not summer at all. It is no longer summer here but luckily all the ingredients were still readily available. I also really wanted to try this with some of the super tasty Black Russian tomatoes I love so much!
Green Gazpacho ingredients
If you are planning on making a gazpacho, green or otherwise, please do not go all Atkins and leave out the bread – it really is integral to the texture of the dish. Gazpacho without bread is glorified tomato juice. And no one wants that.
The basic gazpacho recipe follows but you can play with the quantities of ingredients as much as you want. It’s pretty forgiving. And sometimes you need to play around with it. Strangely enough, I wanted my green gazpacho to be green. So, imagine my utter dismay when I blitzed the above and the result was a horrible looking baby pooh brown. It tasted good but looked atrocious!
I had some watercress in the fridge and I kept adding sprigs of it into the mix until it became greener. The watercress also added to the flavour!
Green Gazpacho with an Avocado Garnish
That, along with my dessert was going to be it. Three dishes and done. However, my greengrocer was selling tarragon this week which is a rarity in itself. I love tarragon but it seems to be fairly scarce so I buy it whenever I see it, then figure out what to do with it.
And what better use for tarragon on a week when we are nourish…(I can’t bring myself to repeat it but you know what I mean) than making a Green Goddess Dressing. This is an awesome dressing zingy with tarragon, lemon, chives, yoghurt…lots of my favourite flavours….
Green Goddess Dressing Ingredients
And it looks like this:
Green Goddess Dressing
It’s a gorgeous pale green and it looked super cute in the jug my friend Ali gave me for a birthday present last year.
To go with the dressing I made a salad of steamed asparagus, broccoli and beans with some raw zucchini, mixed sprouts, avocado and some toasted pine nuts and pumpkin seed kernels and I also made a rice and quinoa mix.
Healthy lunches here I come!
Veggies, Seeds and Sprouts with mixed rice and quinoa
This salad is amazing, you can almost feel the health bursting out of you as you eat it. And again, just use whatever vegetables you have. The Green Goddess recipe is here:
Finally, I wanted a retro style dessert. I recently bought Wobble by Rachael Lane which is filled with delicious sounding recipes for lovely jellies. I love the old-fashioned look of these jellies so they seemed a perfect finale to the celebrations.
I made a version of Rachael’s Persian Delight (below) but with a straight jelly, not a blancmange for the rose layer and a third layer of pomegranate. I would have liked to top mine with the candy floss as per the picture in Wobble but the only place I could find it was a high-end department store who wanted an arm and a leg for it.
Seriously, where is a fun fair when you need one? Although I always find those places a little creepy. I’ve read way too many books where bad things happen in places like that to be entirely comfortable. And don’t even get me started on clowns…. Thanks Stephen King et al, for another innocent pleasure ruined…
The rose layer got a little lost but all in all this was a very pretty dessert and it tasted amazing!
Pistachio, Rose and Pomegranate Jelly
In lieu of candy floss we had more sparklers…
Pistachio, Rose and Pomegranate Jelly 2
The recipe for the Persian Delight is found here.
Persian Delight Jelly from Wobble
Finally, I thought we might have a little look at what we might expect over the next 12 months. This is what PBS has to say on the subject of one year olds:
“One-year-olds are just discovering their creative abilities”
And
“They experience a wide range of emotions and have tantrums when they are tired or frustrated.”
And
(They) have no understanding of true “writing,” but many enjoy experimenting with marks and scribbles on a surface.
Hmm…sounds suspiciously like the next 12 months may be quite similar to the first 12!
Thanks to everyone who reads this for a fabulous year! It has been heaps of fun at this end and incredibly satisfying to watch this grow from an idea into actuality.
I’ll be spending the week marking and scribbling on surfaces and some of it might even end up in here.
Thanks again, I hope you continue to enjoy this for the next 12 months and beyond!
