Tag: gallstones

One a penny, two a penny

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Tray of wonky but beautifully golden brown hot cross buns

I used to be a bit of a hot cross bun purist. Good Friday only. This was the rule when I was a child: I don’t think they were in the supermarkets for so much of the year, and anyway, we didn’t go to the supermarket all that often.

Marrying someone who didn’t grow up with that rule meant that there were hot cross buns in the house more often. I still didn’t buy them outside of Holy Week, you understand, but if they were already there then I might very well eat one or two.

Then in 2024 I was suffering with a diseased gallbladder, with any injudicious consumption of fat resulting in excruciating pain and vomiting, and at a phone appointment early in Lent the dietician recommended hot cross buns as a suitable snack food. So I ate them all year until I had my gallbladder removed in December. And by that point the rule was well and truly broken.

I can’t see myself making them more than once a year, however, because what with the mixing and the waiting for the yeast to froth and the mixing and the raising and the forming into bun shapes and the waiting for them to rise and the making pastry and laying out the cross shapes and the baking and the glazing the process takes all day. Granted, there was some hanging out of washing and eating lunch and a trip to the swings and some weeding in between all that, but I don’t think the buns lost out. That’s just how long they take.

I actually made them yesterday, Maundy Thursday, knowing that this morning would be taken up with church and vaguely remembering that they take a while. I’m glad I did. Even allowing for the fact that I don’t do the Three Hours these days, there wouldn’t have been time.

Anyway, there were hot cross buns for Good Friday. The symbol of the cross is obvious. My mother always used to say that the currants were for the wounds of Christ, though there are far too many per bun.

My recipe (the Good Housekeeping cook book) calls for 100g or 4oz of currants between a dozen buns, and even if you assume that the currants weigh as much as a gram each, that’s still at least three too many. As it is, I can count as many as that in the quarter that’s left of the bun I’m eating now. We’re looking at something more like Saint Sebastian.

There’s also mixed peel in there. I am not aware of any symbolic value attached to that, though if pressed I’d say it was something about bitterness.

If you have no daughters, give them to your sons. I do have a daughter. She is usually partial to a hot cross bun, though these ones were Different and therefore Wrong.

One a penny will not cover the cost of the ingredients, never mind my time. Two a penny, doubly so. Never mind. I enjoyed making them and I am enjoying eating them.

And my husband came home yesterday with another two packets from the supermarket. But those keep, so we’ll be eating them through Easter week. Hot cross buns!

Stir up!

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
Apple tree, with a few leaves still on the branches, silhouetted against a cloudy sky. One single apple is caught between a branch and the top of the trellis

Not long after I started taking Advent Sunday as my personal new year, somebody asked me whether I was going to push my end-of-year wrap-ups and preparations forward into November. No, I said, the idea was to take the whole of December (and the first week of January, come to that) to do it at a leisurely pace, and to give me something to do other than getting fruitlessly annoyed by all the commercial-Christmas tat.

Which still holds true. My husband bought me a packet of lebkuchen, which are already in the shops: I love them, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to touch them. Not in November. And yet this year I’ve noticed myself looking forward eagerly to Stir Up Sunday – today – the last Sunday of the Church year, Christ the King in new money – and the making of the pudding. Preparing for the preparation. And I’ve been getting out the recipe books and flicking through things that look tasty, things that look fun, things I’d never normally cook or eat but which might be approached in a spirit of “It’s Christmas”.

I do like a nice recipe book. And I have been reasonably adventurous this year. (Quince, ginger and raisin suet pudding, the other weekend, from Modern Pressure Cooking. Very good.) But I’m not usually this diverted by Christmas food.

It’s partly knowing that I’ll get much less church than in the pre-baby days, and other elements of the festival seem more promising (not that I will have any more opportunity to cook, of course).

It’s partly that this year I know I can eat it without causing myself significant abdominal discomfort. (Last year I had my gallbladder removed on 30 December; from the previous Christmas up until that point, eating anything fatty put me at risk of vomiting and hideous pain.)

It’s partly having stayed, last weekend, at a Premier Inn attached to a Beefeater which was exuberantly and prematurely Christmassy.

It’s partly having led an Advent study day yesterday, based on the O Antiphons (usually encountered 17-23 December), and having been preparing for that for several weeks. (We followed it with Evensong, and used the readings for the Eve of Christ the King. They worked very well.)

It might partly be wanting this year to be over and done with. It’s been intense, and often painful, and it’s gone very fast. So why not wrap it up now?

It might partly be wanting an answer to the question So what do we do about the Christmas pudding, in the absence of our mother, who was always in charge of it? How do we stir it, when none of us is near any of the others?

And this year the answer looked like this: I made the Christmas pudding, out of the recipe book that she always used. Except she always used walnuts where the recipe says almonds, and I didn’t have quite enough walnuts, so I made up the difference with pecans. And I found the last-but-one-apple from our trees. And I sent my brothers a Zoom invitation so that they could observe the stirring.

And now the pudding is steaming away quietly on the hob. It wasn’t remotely the same, of course. But it will do. I might even open the lebkuchen.

December Reflections 1: breakfast

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Red berries and a swirl of yoghurt in a square shaped bowl

This is an almost offensively photogenic bowlful, but don’t be fooled. I never used to be much of a one for yoghurt, but I’m still breastfeeding so I need the calcium. And I’m trying to keep my gallbladder from tying itself in a knot, so it’s zero fat. The fruit (Tesco ‘perfectly imperfect’, would be nicer without strawberries, which don’t freeze well and probably weren’t all that in the first place, but it’s perfectly adequate) is there to make it bearable. Greek style is, I have discovered, nicer than the normal sort, but neither is as good as proper full fat yoghurt. Occasionally I lick the spoon after doling out the toddler’s portion, just to make sure.

This has been a year of minor but inconvenient health problems, of which the gallstones have been the most serious. They first made their presence felt after last year’s Christmas dinner, got increasingly uppish through the next month, and put me in hospital with an infection and weird liver markers at the end of January. Since then I’ve been on the waiting list for removal of the gallbladder, and not eating sausages. The trick has been not to cut out fat altogether – still breastfeeding, after all – but to spread it (ha) out through the day. Most of the time I get it right. When I don’t it’s excruciatingly painful. Apparently this is a known thing among people who have recently had babies. Now you know.

I’ve also had mastitis twice, tripped over a park bench and bruised my sternum, and picked up a couple of coughs and colds from the nursery germ pool. As I say, nothing serious – in fact, in terms of overall fitness I’m probably better than I have been since 2021 – some of it a bit silly, in fact – just tedious, really. The list of things I’m looking forward to being able to eat again continues to grow.