Welcome to this week’s blog hop. Today the topic is:

Does food play an important part in your writing? How about sharing a favourite recipe of one of your characters, or maybe one of yours?

Food not only doesn’t play an important part in my writing, unfortunately it also doesn’t play an important part in the rest of my life either. Long, long ago my mother told me there are two types of people; one type who lives to eat, and another type who eats to live. It was imbued in me from an early age that we should eat to live rather than the other way around, and give our stomachs a rest between meals. Neither my mother, her mother, or myself have ever had any interest in food shopping, food preparing, cooking or baking. I don’t remember Mum ever showing me how to bake a cake, but I haven’t been traumatised by that fact (I can’t bake a cake either nor would ever want to). Mum had a box of recipes that she always meant to look at one day, but never did. I found them after she died and chucked them out.

After around 30 years of feeling sick on a regular basis I was tested back in the eighties and found to be dairy and yeast intolerant. I changed my diet and the nausea vanished overnight. I don’t eat anything with cheese, milk, eggs (unless they’ve been baked when in pastry or soda bread) or cream in. I don’t eat sugary stuff, and prefer fresh lean meat, fish with no batter on, wraps rather than bread, fruit, salad, and oodles of vegetables. I eat when I’m hungry, and so people think it’s strange when I eat my breakfast at 06:15, lunch around 10:45, and dinner at 17:00 because, hey, that’s when I’m hungry. Sam eats no breakfast or lunch at all, and so he’s gnawing at his elbow at 17:00 when he finishes work – therefore an early dinner suits us both. He likes the diet we have, and I’m sure he’ll be the fittest one in the graveyard when he eventually gets there (I’m convinced he’s going to outlive us all). At the age of 64 he still gets up on the roof to scrape off all the moss and replace broken tiles, he can dig all the flowerbeds over in one day, and he can cycle up steep hills that I have to walk up. It must be the lack of eating that does it, but I must admit to liking my three meals a day!

When it comes to writing I struggle to add food to any story because I know the whole scenario will be boring. I don’t make anything fancy, and hate expensive fancy restaurants serving what looks like baby food on square plates with another plate underneath (oh yeah, there’s usually something ‘drizzled’ on the top as well). The only recipe I know is the one I read on Sally Cronin’s blog for Irish soda bread. It has no yeast and I actually make this bread every week and have adapted it for my dairy intolerance. So with a fanfare of trumpets, this recipe below is the only one I’ve ever used in my entire adult life and ever will for that matter (thanks Sally!) …

Irish Soda Bread (for those with a dairy intolerance):

500g of strong white flour or strong wholemeal flour (I use half and half)

100g of porridge

500ml of oat milk

2 teaspoons of baking powder and 2 teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda

1 teaspoon of sugar and 2 teaspoons of salt

2 eggs

Method:

Bung it all together, put in 2 loaf tins (remember to use greaseproof paper first or the stuff will stick to the tin), and bung it in the oven on 200 degrees for half an hour.

Easy, even for me! It has to be otherwise I’d lose interest, as I just can’t be doing with cooking, baking, and fannying around with recipes.

I’m terrible, I know, but hey… let’s see what other blog hoppers have written regarding food. You can add your own recipe by clicking on the blue button, or just add a comment:

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