Pineapple, cranberry and honeydew ice poles

The post has been very dreary lately.  After a wild flurry of excitement (including my stash of amulets from Tel Aviv) it has gone back to the usual fare of bills, circulars, notifications from school, dire warnings from accountants. 

So the thick parcel addressed to Adrian caught my eye.  Serge Dansereau’s French Kitchen – classic recipes for home cooks.  I will freely confess I hadn’t a clue who he was - though the name conjured a 70s crooner in tight white trousers and a deep tan.  Seems he’s a multi-award winning chef, a French-Canadian who trained in Quebec (oh happy memories of getting totally and utterly slewed on Cointreau after the best meal of my entire life – I wonder if he cooked it?) and then moved to Sydney.  His credo is local seasonal produce and I like that credo, always have.  Why cook food that's come halfway round the world when you can eat what's on your doorstep?

Anyhow, it’s a nice book.  Unusually he includes a lot of recipes for breakfast/brunch (blackberry bran muffins; pear and pomegranate with sheep’s milk yoghurt; butter brioche with cognac and almond marmalade).  The dinner/supper section is – as might be suspected with French cooking – not too helpful for vegetarians but there are some nice suggestions in the lunch section. 

Mostly the choices are quite predictable though some of the recipes in the Deserts and Baking section made me lick my lips – er, slurp to Coffee Custards (I love anything coffee-flavoured) and yum to Sugar and Walnut Pie (a traditional French Canadian treat).  ‘Man on the dole’ pudding (pudding chomeur) was a new one on me – basically a brown sugar desert of sugar, flour and margarine (though Serge adds maple syrup and cream) and Basque custard cake looks delicious.  Weird, I never had a sweet tooth until I became vegetarian – riddle me why?

I was particularly interested to see what he’d put in his Cooking for Kids section and confess was a bit disappointed that he just tends to stick to the usual fare – minified.  In other words, mini chicken sandwiches; mini chicken and leek pies; mini beef burgers and so on.  Hmm. 

But I’m rather taken with the idea of pineapple, cranberry and honeydew icy poles (barres glacees aux jus de fruits).  And, given there is a glimpse of sun today, I am going to perform some sympathetic magic.  By giving you the recipe (sure Serge won’t mind) I am hence summoning beautiful sunny days and the possibility of picnics by the frisky sea or by cool deep rivers or atop bright sunny hills (wherever your fancy takes you).  And yeah, I'm very aware that pineapple isn't remotely local to Exmoor but what the hell? 

Pineapple, cranberry and honeydew icy poles (makes about 30)

You can use lollipop moulds or do what Serge does and use little shot glasses (er, he has 30 shot glasses??)

250g (1¼ cups) caster sugar

½ honeydew melon

300ml pineapple juice

300ml cranberry juice 

Make the sugar syrup by putting the sugar and 250ml (1 cup) water into a saucepan and bringing to the boil. Once the sugar has dissolved, remove and set aside to cool.

Remove the skin from the melon, discard the seeds and chop into chunks. Process to a smooth puree. 
Combine with 50ml of cooled sugar syrup. 100ml water and mix well. Pour into ten shot glasses (or similar) and freeze for 30 minutes or until they start to set. Now add “icy pole sticks” (I think we’d call them lolly sticks in the UK) to the glasses.  Freeze for a further two hours or until totally frozen. 

Repeat the procedure with the pineapple and cranberry (using the same quantities). 

When ready to serve, remove the icy poles from the freezer and wait for a few minutes so they come out easily from their moulds.  Serve immediately on crushed ice.

Serge says you can also use juice from strawberries, passionfruit, mangoes, lychees or rhubarb syrup. See if children can guess the flavours.

Let us eat cake

‘Do you ever review things on your blog?’ asked a PR, very politely.
‘Well, not reviews as such,’ I said (though I can oblige with the occasional rant). ‘I tend to write about whatever happens to wander into my life.’
At which point I went into a daydream about the various things that have wandered into my life since I started blogging and, I must say, I haven’t done too badly.

Nobody really seems interested in me as a journalist any more. PRs no longer pitch ideas to me for features or columns. They’d all much rather I wrote about their products in my blogs, or that I tweeted about them or shouted about them on my Facebook page. It seems everyone has shifted over to social media.

‘Do you realise you’re ‘highly influential’ on Twitter?’ hissed my friend Charlie who runs a successful website.
‘I am?’
‘Absolutely,’ he said, trying not to sound bitter and twisted. ‘How did you do it?’
I have absolutely no idea. Maybe I just like talking. It’s huge fun – my virtual water cooler - where I shoot the breeze and have a laugh.

Then, somehow, this blog was runner-up in the Author Blog Awards and I’ve miraculously risen (like a loaf) up the parent blogging charts and the PRs have gone bonkers. Now, as a journalist, one is accustomed to the odd freebie though, in my case, it’s usually limited to herbal throat lozenges and ointment for piles. But as a blogger, it seems the sky’s the limit.

Of course it doesn’t always pan out. For every trip to Florida and every goodie bag of lovely sports gear (thank you Disney, thank you Reebok) I’ve been offered a slew of items which are less than exhilarating: panty liners, nipple guards, DVDs that only play in the US, pelvic floor exercisers, er – marital aids.

But anyhow, coming back from this reverie, I realised the PR was saying a magic word.
‘It’s cake.’
Cake?
The blogging/tweeting world runs on cake. Come 11am everyone promptly stops talking about whether we have a government or how to market your e-book and mutters about muffins, brownies, biscuits and chocolate.
‘Really?  What kind of cake?’
‘Organic cake.'
Oh, well that's okay then. 
'Respect Organics,'she continued.  'They sell them in supermarkets. Shall I send you some samples?’
‘Well, a sample couldn’t hurt, could it?’

The next day the postman struggled up the steps (ASBO attached to his backside like a plug) with a vast box. I’d imagined a few slices – but, ye gods, she’d sent us eleven full-size cakes. ELEVEN.
‘Why eleven?’ asked James, lining them up on the table. ‘You reckon someone got hungry and ate one on the way?’
Frankly that hadn’t crossed my mind but it did seem a strange number.
‘Three into eleven doesn’t really go,’ he continued. ‘Though none of us like ginger so that leaves nine which is three each - bags me the chocolate ones. You like banana and Dad likes carrot so we’re sorted.’

I’ll have you know we conducted a very thorough clinical trial on these cakes. We tested them every which way and gave them marks out of 100 for variations in texture, flavour, density and colour. Oh, the hell we did. We scarfed the lot in a deeply unseemly fashion. Were they nice? Damn nice actually – and not remotely what you imagine when you think ‘organic’. These are the least ‘worthy’ cakes I’ve come across: very light, very moist, wildly sweet and revoltingly moreish. Surprising really, given they are all (bar the chocolate cake) dairy free.
If I’m being very picky I suppose I prefer a slightly more rustic, ‘home-made’ feel, maybe a bit more chew in the banana loaf.  But I was a minority (so very fashionable really).



With my ‘responsible reviewer’ hat on I should add that they’re available from supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons and you can find out more by clicking here

NOTE FOR PRs
I might just mention (apropos of nothing in particular) that I am very partial to the following...


Diptique candles (Baies is my total favourite); Jo Malone soap (wild fig, LBM, oh any really); Aromatherapy Associates bath oil; Green & Blacks chocolate; novels of pretty well any description; Moleskine notebooks.

And I would just add that I could really do with a ‘grown-up’ posh handbag (um, Mulberry or Westwood would do the trick), a washing machine, a 32" HD TV, a Landrover, a week on a fat farm and a family holiday somewhere without the Euro.
Just sayin'    ;)