CAST NE'ER A CLOUT TIL MAY BE OUT so the old saying has it - well the hawthorn blossom has been well and truly out for ages, in fact those Darling Buds of May have bloomed and gone, along with my Irises, and some of my roses too....what will be left to bloom come the summer?

READING:

I’m a huge fan of Anne Tyler, so when a friend lent me a copy of her latest (her 17^th) novel: Digging to America, it didn’t join the teetering pile of books waiting to be read, I dived in straight away. I wasn’t disappointed.

In 1997 two very different families meet at Baltimore airport. The Donaldsons are very much the quintessential middle American couple, and the Yazdans are Iranian-Americans. Both families are at the airport to receive their newly adopted baby daughters who are arriving from South Korea, and from this unlikely start, a strong friendship begins between them. Bitsy Donaldson is the earth mother type, a former yoga teacher and weaver, she is very sure of herself and how to bring up her new daughter. She and her husband retain the child’s Korean name Jin-Ho, dress her in Korean clothes on high days and holidays, read her Korean folk tales, Bitsy is determined to be culturally sensitive at all costs. Sami and Ziba Yazdan on the other hand are first generation born Iranian-Americans, they instantly change their daughter’s name to Susan, and do all they can to get her to be assimilated as a true American.

On the first anniversary of the babies’ arrival Bitsy throws an “Arrival Party” complete with a cake iced to look like the Stars and Stripes, a video of the scene at the airport, and a jolly anthem. The Yazdans are of course invited to the party as Jin Ho and Susan arrived on the same plane. The following year it is the Yazdans who hold the “Arrival Party” with the same video and song and a vast buffet of Iranian food. From then on, the two families host the party on alternate years as the girls grow up, and the description of the parties serves to point out how the Yazdan’s are becoming more and more American even as Bitsy is trying to keep her daughter culturally separate. As the book progresses, the main character emerges almost from the sidelines, Maryam Yazdan, the mother of Sami and adopted grandmother to Susan. Even after 35 years as an American citizen she feels herself to be an outsider, and stands aloof observing the cultural dislocation of the Iranians, and both admiring and being repelled by contemporary American life.

Lighter in tone than some of Tyler’s previous novels, it is a wonderful dissection of identity, both national and personal, and an often hilarious take on suburban middle America.

It was only after finishing the book that I discovered that Anne Tyler’s late husband was Iranian, and from him and his family she must have gained the insight into the yawning gaps that lie between the two cultures, just waiting to trip the unwary.

Rated 4.5*

RANTING:

What do all these pictures have in common? And why would the dreaded gauleiters of Dorset County Council's Trading Standards Department be on the case of one of them? No idea? Here's a clue. There are NO Shepherds used in the making of Shepherd's Pie.
There are NO 'dicks' - spotted or otherwise - used in the making of Spotted Dick.
There are NO toads used in the making of Toad-in-the-Hole.
We are all used to funny peculiar names for certain foods, they are part of our culinary tradition and we don't expect the name of the food to be an exact list of the actual ingredients. We are not fools. Recently Val Temple who has run the Sgt Bub Bakery in Weymouth for almost 30 years was paid a visit by the local Trading Standards Inspectors who said that "someone" had made a complaint that the names of the cakes didn't relate to what was in them. What, you mean they had really thought that the Robin tarts, the Pig Tarts, (just like her Froggie tart pictured here) contained Robin and pork and that the Paradise Slice came from Paradise? Oh what baloney, I don't believe anyone complained at all, I think this was just some under-employed, thick as pig-shit, meddlesome little jobsworth in the Trading Standards department causing trouble.
Ivan Hancock, the county's trading standards manager, said: "The fact is that food needs to be properly described so that the consumer can tell what it is."
Oh, that's consumers from Outer Mongolia or Mars is it? the rest of us know fine well that when we buy a little jam sponge tart iced with the picture of a robin redabreast and called - logically - Robin Tart, that it has no real robins in it. Presumably if it DID have robins in it the Trading Standards w***kers would be satisfied, but then the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds would be breathing down Mrs Temples neck before she could sing "Rockin' robin, tweet, tweet."
Don't these people (paid for by the great British public by the way) have better things to do, like sort out dodgy car dealers, Nigerian scamsters, and crooks selling counterfeit perfume? Renaming cakes at reputable local bakery is just ludicrous.
I bet they'll be round at the local Indian take-away having words about Bombay Duck in a day or two.

RECIPE:
At this time of year the strawberries which are piled up in the supermarkets are all from abroad, and don't have the flavour that makes you want to eat them unadorned, however they are ideal with other ingredients.
I had 10 for dinner last Saturday, and having seen some rather large Spanish strawberries (which were reduced in price) and the tail end of the fresh rhubarb, I decided to combine them in these individual tarts. Strawberries and rhubarb are a combination made in heaven; when I was first married, my late M-i-L told me her tip of adding a couple of tablespoons of strawberry jam to rhubarb when stewing it or making crumble - deeelish!
I originally spotted this recipe in an execellent food blog called Joy of Baking, and tried it out on the family who gave it the thumbs-up.

RHUBARB & STRAWBERRY TARTS

Makes 8 individual tarts

Pastry:
400g plain flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 rounded tablespoon caster sugar
230g chilled butter cut into pieces
60ml cold water

Filling:
500g rhubarb (only use the really pink/red sticks of rhubarb)
500g strawberries
50g plain flour
200g granulated sugar

Pulse the flour, salt and butter together in a food processor until it looks like white breadcrumbs (this only takes seconds, don’t overdo it). Add the sugar and whiz together briefly. With machine running add the water and process until it forms a smooth ball of pastry. Wrap in greaseproof paper and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes. If you want, you can make the pastry the previous day to save time.

Wipe the sticks of rhubarb and cut off the green ends of the sticks; then cut into 2cm pieces. Hull the strawberries and if they are large cut them up so they are similar in size to the rhubarb. Mix together the flour and sugar. In a large bowl mix the rhubarb and strawberry pieces and then the flour+sugar mix; make sure all the pieces of fruit are well coated.

Pre-heat the oven to 200°C

Take the chilled pastry and divide into 8 equal pieces. Roll each piece out to form a circle approx 18cms in diameter. Trim the edges. Line two baking trays with baking parchement. One by one place the pastry circles on the baking trays, filling each one with about ½ cup of the fruit mix which you spread out to within 4-5 cms of the edge and then fold the pastry up around the filling, pleating and pinching it together but leaving the central part of the tart open.
Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes until the pastry is golden brown and the filling is soft and bubbling.
Remove from the oven onto a wire rack. Serve at room temperature or very slightly warm, with either some crème fraiche or a scoop of vanilla icecream.

UNBROKEN HAPPINESS IS A BORE, it should have ups and downs.(Molière)
Think about it.

READING:

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell was our book club choice to read for this month. It is O’Farrell’s third book, and though I enjoyed her first one the next two left me fairly indifferent, so I was not expecting to enjoy reading this book as much as I did. The writing is very evocative, and it is a fascinating story so I was completely absorbed from the very start.

Esme Lennox is the second child of Scottish parents who live in colonial India just after the first World War. When she is a small girl her baby brother dies of typhoid and eventually the family move back to live in Edinburgh. As a child growing up in central Africa, my sister and I were taken on a trip back to visit my grandparents who lived near Glasgow, and when I read “Esme and Kitty curled round each other in a big bed, their teeth chattering. Esme could have sworn that even her hair was feeling the cold” it seemed to me to be describing my own memories of that visit and how alien an environment Scotland was for me, so I could really imagine how strange life in Edinburgh must have seemed to Esme.

Always a feisty girl with a stubborn streak of independent thought, Esmé finds it hard to adjust to the rigid social expectations of upper middle class life, unlike her pretty older sister Kitty. Even as a very young child she always irked her mother, who finds her irritating and troubling, and this gets worse as she gets older. Things go really awry when the suitable young man who has been earmarked for Kitty shows a decided preference for Esme, and when she is found trying on her mother’s clothes all hell breaks loose.

The book is told in flash backs, beginning in the present when a young woman called Iris receives a phone call to say that her great aunt, Esme Lennox, is to be released, after 60 years, from the mental institution in which she has been kept. The institution is closing down and Iris is thought to be responsible for her – the problem is that Iris didn’t even know she had a great aunt, she thought her grandmother Kitty was an only child. Kitty is still alive, but in a home as she is suffering from Alzheimer’s. There are three distinct voices in the book: Esme, Iris and Kitty, and through their thoughts the reader slowly learns long buried family secrets. Esme seems remarkably sane for someone who has been institutionalised for so long. She had, as a child developed a mental trick of distancing her mind from the situations she found herself in, vanishing in effect. At the end of the book Esme and Kitty meet again which leads to a startling denoument.

As I read the book, I became both sad and angry when I realised how easily a young woman could be locked away under the powers of the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 (which included people, who were deemed to be ‘Moral Defectives’) just on the say so of a father or a doctor.

I found the book had particular resonances for me as some aspects of Esme’s story were similar to my mother’s early life. Like Esme, my mother was born in India in the years between the two great wars, and when she was a small girl her younger sister died suddenly too – as children often did in those days. My grandmother was grief stricken, and for a long time my mother seemed to remind her of her dead daughter. The relationship between my mother and her parents was never an easy one after that, and she was sent away to boarding school in England where she remained on her own for several years, during which time my grandparents had two more children before finally returning to settle back in Scotland.

RANTING:

HIV/Aids is a truly ghastly disease, but thanks to the tireless efforts of medical researchers it is now much more controllable than it was ten, fifteen or twenty years ago. How the disease can be passed from person to person is now understood, and with some relatively simple behavioural changes people can seriously reduce their risk of catching the virus. In much of the ‘western’ world, the number of people suffering from HIV/Aids has remained fairly low, but in other parts of the world, Africa in particular, the virus is still rampant. Thousands upon thousands of men, women and children have died in South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Angola and other sub-Saharan countries. Aids Charities, NGOs and government health services are all doing their best to bring this disease under control, but it is not easy. I have spent time in villages in KwaZulu-Natal where the entire middle, income-earning, generation has been wiped out, leaving only the elderly and the very young children to fend for themselves. Many of those children are themselves HIV positive and facing an uncertain future. It could break your heart.

The last thing that the people of Africa need is some nutter like the President of The Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, telling his fellow citizens and the world that he has invented a three day herbal cure for HIV/Aids. At the moment he is getting a good deal of publicity, splashing liquid over supposed sufferers, or rubbing ointment onto their bodies – liquid and ointment both being of dubious provenance - and giving them mysterious concoctions to drink. This “treatment” is being seen on TV by millions of Africans who may believe that it is all true. Many of the individuals he is supposedly “treating” may really have HIV/Aids and think they are being cured, which is unforgivable.

The various governments who provide foreign aid on which The Gambia relies so heavily, the WHO and the UN, should tell President Jammeh in no uncertain terms that this is a load of dangerous nonsense and he must stop immediately or there will be serious consequences. The international TV news organisations should be far more rigorous in their reportage, and ensure that no-one watching their coverage could possibly think his cure was genuine.

Only last year the Minister of Health in South Africa, Ms Manto Tshabalala-Msimang made a similarly ludicrous statement, urging HIV sufferers to cure themselves by eating beetroot, garlic, lemon peel and African potato which aroused such mirth abroad that an embarrassed President Thabo Mbeki was forced to issue a rebuttal (and he has not been exactly sound on the treatment of the disease) However this mad claim by Jammeh is much more serious and much more likely to cause harm to people.

The west is very pusillanimous in its treatment of African leaders, it does not call them to account when they behave in dangerous ways and continues to dole out money to the countries they rule, money which frequently makes its way into the Swiss bank accounts of those leaders.

RECIPE:
Last week we did a lot of entertaining, and one of the desserts I made used the delicious new season's forced pink rhubarb. These jellies have such a glorious colour, and taste so good that even people who say they don't like rhubarb will be converted. The added bonus is that you can make it a day or two in advance. It is ideal after a rich main course.

RHUBARB & GINGER JELLIES

Serves 6

500g rhubarb
1½ teaspoons fresh ginger root, finely grated
60g caster sugar
15g gelatine powder (one sachet)
3 tablespoons orange juice ( I use OJ from the carton of ready squeezed we have at breakfast)
2x 275 bottles of Ginger Beer – (use the best you can buy, I use Fentimans)
2-3 pieces stem ginger chopped
200 ml carton crème fraiche

You can cheat by using 1 x 135g packet of Hartleys orange jelly instead of the gelatine and OJ.

Wash the rhubarb and cut it into pieces. Put it into a saucepan together with the grated ginger and the sugar and heat very gently until the sugar is dissolved and it stews in its own juices. It takes about 20 mins. Stir from time to time to prevent it burning. The pieces of rhubarb will fall apart but that doesn’t matter. Remove from the heat and set aside.
Prepare the jelly mixture by putting the orange juice into a microwaveable jug and sprinkling the gelatine over it. Leave for five minutes to allow it to ‘sponge’. (If you are using the orange jelly method, cut the jelly into cubes and put into a microwaveable jug with 3 tablespoons of water.) Place the jug in the microwave and heat on full power for about 1 minute for the gelatine(jelly) to dissolve completely. Stir well. Make the quantity of liquid in the jug up to 520mls with the ginger beer. (You can drink any that is left over!)
Mix the poached rhubarb and its juices together with the liquid mixture and stir well. Pour or ladle the combined mixture into six 200ml wine glasses or similar, and put them in the fridge to set – preferably overnight, but for at least 6-8 hours.

Before serving them, top each one with a dollop of crème fraiche and scatter a few pieces of chopped stem ginger on top.