A few weeks ago I somehow managed to invite ten family members for Christmas dinner, which with the four of us will make a total of fourteen. I am quite looking forward to it and will write a post on the planning and outcome at a later date. One of the things that sprang to mind was the possibility of a black forest trifle for a Christmas dessert, I have been researching it and decided to include cherries in kirsch, allegedly available in Sainsburys. However, the procurement of said cherries has not proved easy...
One of the few good points of living in a city for me would be the easy availability of any ingredient you could wish for, probably even key limes. Living in a small village means that sometimes even in the nearest large towns I can't find what I want, so I have to search online and pay postage and wait for ages for whatever it is, or travel to a city, or substitute for a similar, but usually less successful ingredient. If I do go to London or somewhere, I look out for shops which might sell interesting ingredients, rather than looking for clothes as the average woman might...
Going back to the cherries - I tried ebay with no success at all. I tried Amazon, who had them but you either had to buy six jars at once, the postage cost was more than the cost of the item, the availability was stated as "four to six weeks" or in one case the customer review said they were bitter and went in the bin (which after today's experiment with radicchio... but we won't go there at the moment!) So I had the bright idea of asking my friends on facebook to have a look for me if they happened to be going to a large Sainsburys or a Waitrose (who always seem to have all kinds of things you didn't even know you wanted and make you spend a fortune). Two of them kindly offered to help, and at the time of writing one has looked with no success and the other hasn't got back to me. I feel I might need to resort to Plan B - either getting some fresh cherries and cooking them in Kirsch and sugar, or just cheating and mixing tinned cherries with the liqueur. Either way, I get the rest of the bottle to play with!
Speaking of liqueuers, they ARE well worth buying online. I've discovered a wonderful website called drinks direct who sell virtually every liqueur known to man. A trifle makers heaven! And they often have special offers on. It was there I purchased the vanilla galliano for the first of my designer trifles. I also got white Creme de Cacao, which was unavailable in Asda; and a gorgeous lychee liqueur, which has been half drunk already without being used in any recipes at all! I was going to add a splash of it to my celebrated lychee cava cocktails: liquidise a tin of lychees in syrup, freeze in ice cube trays, then pop one in a flute and top up with cava or champagne.
Despite my lack of success with the cherries I have managed to get quite a few ingredients online. Liquid glucose, membrillo (quince paste - which I cut into chunks and had on sticks with manchego cheese but didn't like it as it tasted too much like honey), matcha green tea powder - used to make green tea icing for cupcakes, Japanese panko
breadcrumbs. Wing Yip is an online Chinese supermarket I have used in the past, when my sister was alive we used to combine orders, and buy things like five spice powder in bulk and share them. Another friend of mine sometimes goes to Leicester and gets me massive packs of garam masala and cumin seeds from Indian supermarkets.
I have this happy vision of my retirement that I will live somewhere near the sea, and I can spend my twilight years finding lovely fresh fish and other ingredients on a daily basis, forgetting the menu planning and shopping lists, having time to browse in a market and see what's available without being in a rush, and having the time to play around in the kitchen inventing recipes... one day...
Thank you for reading,
Caroline x :-)
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