Elderflower cordial recipe

 

This is a recipe given to me by Liz, a family friend famous for her hospitality and good cooking. I make it every year, and it's wonderful! These quantities make about 4 pints of cordial.

  

You need: 

20 heads of elderflower picked at the end of a sunny day

3lbs caster sugar

2 pints water

Grated rind and juice of 2 lemons 

2oz citric acid powder

Method:

Dissolve the caster sugar in the water, add the grated lemon rind and juice, add the elder heads and leave to stand, covered, overnight. I do this in a really big saucepan, but a large mixing bowl would do as you don't need to heat it.

In the morning, add the citric acid powder and stir thoroughly. Then strain the liquid into plastic or glass bottles and keep it in the fridge.  Mix to taste with sparkling water (I use about 1 part cordial to 5 parts water), or sparkling white wine - Liz says it improves Lambrusco no end! Garnish with borage sprigs if you have any.

Notes:  

•  The sunny day specified is desirable but not critical; I made my latest batch on a rainy day and it tastes fine.
• Don’t wash the flower heads first, even if they have little bugs on them. Straining the mixture later will get rid of any such critters, and they don’t impair the taste. 
• Citric acid powder is sold in most chemists, and is not expensive.
• To strain the mixture I've found the best method is to use a muslin cloth (as bought for babies to be sick on, or sold for jam making): line a big mixing bowl with the muslin cloth and then scoop the elderflower mixture into it with a ladle (don't pour it all at once or the flowers will drop in with a splash and spill sticky cordial everywhere...). Then gather the corners of the muslin and carefully lift it, allowing the cordial to drain into the bowl. Resist the temptation to squeeze the muslin as this makes the cordial cloudy. When it's stopped dripping, dump the muslin into the saucepan or bowl you began with, and then using a ladle and funnel, fill the bottles with the cordial.
• I sterilise the bottles first with Milton but if you're planning to drink the whole lot quite quickly it probably doesn't matter. 
• You can freeze the cordial; if you're planning to do this, fill the bottles only about three quarters full.
• The cordial is very sticky so be prepared to clean the kitchen thoroughly afterwards, especially if small people “help” you with stirring and pouring.

My first necklace

This is me, aged about 7, I think, wearing my favourite necklace. It was the first necklace I ever bought, from a stall at the Saturday market in my home town. It was an old fashioned market, with all sorts of bric-a-brac and food (the bags of broken biscuits were a family favourite!), and exploring for hidden gems became a bit of a family outing. I don’t remember how much it cost, but I do remember picking it out on the stall, determined that it was mine. 

And I wore it and wore it, until one terrible day the string broke, and even now I can picture the beads pinging across the room, and hear that skittering noise as they disappeared under the furniture, and down gaps in the floorboards. I’m sure I collected what I could, but it was never mended, and the beads I saved are long since lost. Now when I make a necklace for a child, I use knotted silk, so if the worst happens and it breaks, only one bead will fall. And one of these days I’ll make a copy of this one just for me...

[This blog post also appears on my jewellery website www.morganandpink.co.uk.

Commissions for children's necklaces or other designs are always welcome!]

Peony

My neighbour's peonies are in full bloom, which reminded me of this beauty. I took the photograph a couple of years ago, in the garden of the house we were then renting, and seeing it again now is prompting me to vow, publicly, right here and now, to plant one in our garden here, so that I can see blooms like this next year. To that end, if anyone can tell me which variety this one is, I would be very grateful!

Book Review: Someday

Someday by Alison McGhee and Peter H. Reynolds is my new favourite book about what it feels like to love a child. It's very simple, and very powerful (it has made me cry every single time I've read it so far...). It begins at the beginning with mother and child:

And as the child grows, so the mother's thoughts turn to the future:

The mother imagines the child growing up, and leaving home: "Someday you will look at this house and wonder how something that feels so big can look so small." It encapsulates perfectly that love that encompasses pain, as the child leaves home, and the mother is left standing on the porch watching until she can no longer see her daughter. That's not to say it's a sad book; rather it illustrates the complexity of parental love, and its lasting power.

It's a beautiful book, with Peter H Reynold's pen and ink and watercolour illustrations displaying his trademark fluidity and life, and the hand-lettered font perfectly matching the simple text. It's one to buy for yourself if your children aren't old enough to appreciate it yet!

http://www.peterhreynolds.com/
http://www.alisonmcghee.com/index.html

Word and pictures?

What do you think of when you hear a word spoken? Is it different if you hear the word in isolation, or hear it as part of a description? Can you think about it without altering what you think of? 

So if I said "cat", would you think of this?

 

Or this?   cat

This is not in any way a scientific piece, but it is prompted in part by something I realised a little while ago; asking friends and family, I have found two distinct responses to the first question posed above. The first group of people see the word itself, usually printed in black on white paper; some people saw the same font every time, for others the font changed depending on the word itself, or other factors. The second group see an image: either still like a snapshot, or moving like a video, or sometimes an immensely quick visual collage of images, both still and moving.

I discovered these two responses as a result of a problem which developed during my post-natal depression. One of the things that plagued me then (and which still lingers and flares up when I’m tired and vulnerable), was my mind’s ability to conjure up very real and graphic images or “videos” when I heard or read something unpleasant or violent. So hearing about Baby P, for example, gave me mental images of a tiny child screaming in pain, bruises all over his body. This in turn triggered a physical distress response so that I felt some of the same physical sensations of distress that I would feel if I really witnessed someone harming a child (a sick feeling in my stomach, adrenalin surging through me, fear, anxiety, fury, etc). It was the same with anything distressing on the news, or in a novel, or even just a chance comment. It has largely faded now, and I have learnt some strategies to control the images, but it's still there: my mind still responds very visually and viscerally to language. It also affects my interpretation and response to everyday sights - seeing a field of yellow rape flowering, there is a part of my brain that begins a distress response to the idea of the act of rape.

One book in particular, “Mister Pip”, gave me waking nightmares for several years about the denouement (which, without spoiling the whole book, involves a scene of gang rape, two people being hacked to pieces with machetes and fed to the village pigs, and the torturing of a mentally disabled child to death; and by the way, the Times newspaper reviewer who said this book was about the “redeeming power” of Dickens clearly hadn’t read it to the end, and should be struck off immediately.)  

  

I began to be much, much more careful about what I read, sticking by and large to the classics, things I'd read before so I knew they were “safe”, and children’s books. I stopped watching the news, or listening to it on the radio, and bought newspapers only for the magazine and culture sections. I cut out most TV dramas, and any films with a 15 or 18 certificate; and I still don’t open a book if it has words like “gritty”, “hard-hitting”, “tragic”, or “violent” on the cover blurb.

But still things get through, and my husband is occasionally the guilty party for casually mentioning something he’s seen, in language that then causes this distress response in me. When I challenged him, he was surprised by my response: he, I discovered, is one of that first group of people who just see the word(s) on paper, black on white, without any emotional connotation at all. Until that conversation, I hadn't realised this was even possible. Sometimes when he’s listening to something he’ll actually be analysing the syntax, rather than becoming involved in the meaning (and I get very cross when he does this to something I’m saying – he should be listening to what I mean, not being pedantic about the way I’m saying it!), whereas my response is almost always more visceral. I constantly puzzle over the way so many people seem to find violence a suitable, even relaxing, subject for entertainment, when to me, it always feels personal, real, brutal and horrible in every way.

What about you? What do you think of or see in your mind when you hear a word? If you are a visual person, do you also have difficulty watching or reading about violence, or do you think this is a separate issue? Do let me know, using the comments below. Thanks!

And before I finish, I’d like to do a shout out for Mental Health Awareness Week – happening this week, 21-27 May 2012. You can find out more about it here.

Ullswater

This is where I'd like to be right now:

Why breastfeed a toddler?

Or for that matter, why breastfeed at all? 

The recent Time magazine article and its provocative cover has kicked off another round of controversy over breastfeeding in the West, and it set me thinking. The article itself is about Dr Sears and Attachment Parenting, about which more another time, perhaps. For now, I’m going to focus on breastfeeding, since much of the fuss worldwide has been about that. 

So what exactly is the problem? Is it that in western societies the extended family unit is now relatively rare, so breastfeeding is not something we readily see as we grow up? Is it down to the sexualisation of society, so that breasts are now primarily seen as being “for men” and as sexual objects rather than the feeding glands they are in biological terms? Or is it that we have, over the last century or so, become so focused on “progress” and work and freeing women from the “slavery” of parenthood that we have become ignorant about the benefits and joys of breastfeeding? Or is it just that the formula manufacturers are bloody good at advertising?

I breastfed my older daughter until she was over 3 years, and she still occasionally has a quick feed, aged 5, when she needs to feel that connection to me. Her younger sister, now 15 months, is also still breastfeeding, and I’ll keep going until she’s ready to stop. Here’s why:

1. Because it’s normal. I’m a mammal; I’ve got boobs; that’s what they’re for. [Mammal noun: a warm-blooded vertebrate animal of a class that is distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the nourishment of the young, and (typically) the birth of live young. ]

2. Because it’s normal. In traditional human societies, Katherine Dettwyler has demonstrated that children wean between 2 and 5 years of age. From an anthropological standpoint, nursing a three-year-old is normal human physiology.

3. Because it’s normal. It is not in any way perverted or weird. If you see a 3 year-old breastfeeding and you think of things sexual, it is you who are sick, not the child.

4. Because it’s healthy for my babies. According to UNICEF , every year more than 10 million children die from mainly preventable causes, including diarrhoea, pneumonia, measles and malaria.  If every baby were exclusively breastfed from birth to six months, an estimated 3,500 children’s lives could be saved each day.

5. Because it’s healthy for my babies. Breast-fed babies have:

·         fewer gastro-intestinal infections

·         fewer chest and ear infections

·         fewer admissions to hospital for childhood illnesses

·         less chance of being constipated

·         less likelihood of becoming obese and therefore developing type 2 diabetes and other illnesses later in life

6. Because it’s healthy for my babies. Prolonged breast-feeding promotes psychological health, and breast-feeding for less than 6 months is associated with increased risk for mental health problems during childhood and adolescence. If a need is met, it goes away. If a need is unmet (such as the need to breastfeed and be close to mum), it remains a need well into childhood and even the teenage years.

7. Because it’s healthy for my babies. A mother’s body adapts the nutritional content of breast-milk to match the needs of her child as he or she grows. In the second year of breastfeeding, breast milk provides:

·         29% of energy requirements

·         43% protein requirements

·         36% of calcium requirements

·         75% of vitamin A requirements

·         76% folate requirements

·         94% vitamin B12 requirements

·         60% vitamin C requirements.

8. Because it helps my children develop. Dettwyler again: It's possible that we evolved to nurse children until they're around 5 or 6. Breast milk is one of the only sources of long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids that build brain tissue. It isn't until age 5 or 6 that "95% of brain growth has been reached, and that's also about the time that the child's immune system is ramped up to full production," she says.

9. Because it’s healthy for me. Breastfeeding mothers tend to lose the so-called “baby weight” more easily. Other significant benefits include:

·         a lower risk of breast cancer . Studies have found a significant inverse association between duration of lactation and breast cancer risk

·         lower risk of ovarian cancer, uterine and endometrial cancer

·         protection against osteoporosis

·         a reduced  risk of rheumatoid arthritis

·         a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease

·         and breastfeeding has been shown to decrease insulin requirements in diabetic women

10. Because it’s free.  In 2009 the infant milk market in the UK was worth £263 million; worldwide the figure is $9 billion. Why spend money on something inferior to the free version?

11. Because I received the support I needed from my family, and from La Leche League. It is a crying shame that so many women who set out to breastfeed are persuaded, even encouraged, by ill-informed health professionals or well-meaning friends and relatives to give up when they encounter difficulties. Breastfeeding isn’t always easy, but it IS worth the effort, and women deserve to be supported all the way. Their babies deserve it too.

12. Because it helped me recover from post-natal depression. It helped me create the bond with my baby that was lacking the first few months. It helped me feel that I was nurturing her, and has helped us develop a strong relationship as she grows.

13. Because it’s what my babies need. Breastfeeding is a life-affirming act of love.

14. Because it’s beautiful.

15. Because it’s wonderful.

16. Because I love it!

References

http://www.whale.to/a/extended_bf_factsheet.pdf

http://kellymom.com/ages/older-infant/ebf-benefits/

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-05-11/breastfeeding-rates/54909940/1

http://www.whale.to/a/newman.html

http://www.laleche.org.uk/index.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-04-05-study-breast-feeding_N.htm

http://bfmed.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/time-cover-sells-out-moms-to-sell-magazines/

http://www.llli.org/ba/aug94.html

http://mothering.com/all-things-mothering/baby-2/breastfeeding/an-open-letter-to-time-magazine?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+motheringblogs+%28Mothering.com+Blogs%29

http://www.cwt.org.uk/pdfs/infantsmilk_web.pdf