The ginger biscuit dough yesterday looked a bit funny. Not that I am worried. The biscuits will either work. Or they won’t. And what’s 300 failed biscuits between friends?
I used my trusted and very worn Vår Kokbok from the mid 1970s. Mother-of-witch equipped me well when I left home. I first made ginger biscuit dough all by myself the first Christmas in the Brighton Bookwitch Towers.
That was the day when the Resident IT Consultant went out shopping for all our Christmas needs. After multiple trips lasting until about four pm I was hungry and wanted us to eat lunch. He looked at his watch and conceded that OK, we could have an early lunch! Turns out his watch had stopped and he’d been on eleven o’clock all day.
Anyway, I was worried about my dough, because every single year when Mother-of-witch made it, we never knew if the biscuits would fall to bits or not. So instead of asking for her recipe – as she never remembered from one year to the next which one she picked last year – I turned to my very own Vår Kokbok, where it said that this dough rolls out really nicely and there need be no concerns about how it handles.
So yesterday I just wanted to read that sentence again.
It wasn’t there. All these years I’ve been calmed by a non-existent reassurance.
Having said that, the biscuits have always been fine. None of the older generation’s issues.
I also made some soup. Kale soup was one of them. That well known Christmas speciality, which I discovered a few years ago was merely a family Christmas tradition and no one else makes it. It’s in Vår Kokbok too, but I can make it without looking in there now. Seeing as it’s such a tradition.
Finished my kitchen stint – the Resident IT Consultant had taken himself off to Edinburgh for the day – with a Temptation for our late dinner. Didn’t need Vår Kokbok for that either.
