A Picnic Club

Days like today make me long to pack up a thermos of cocoa, some honey sandwiches and a big tea cake and go off into a pine forest for a teddy-bears’ picnic. The sun is shining but it would be far too chilly in the dense shade to enjoy the company of teddy bears and the brisk wind would surely spoil our fun, so perhaps it would be better to enjoy a hillside picnic where we could bask in the sun with our hats over our eyes and wait for the cool dew of dusk to send us scurrying home to our beds.

I picture tartan rugs and huge wicker baskets groaning with goodness, as well as frisbees and cricket bats for everyone else. I would take a good book and perhaps some sewing and sit in the sun under the shade of a wide-brimmed hat and watch everyone else, occasionally kissing my lover’s forehead as he rested his head on my lap.

Sadly I am not usually the picnicking type, I always pick the wrong day to become enamoured with the idea, when it is pouring rain or when I haven’t the necessary leisure to enjoy it. And I never know what food to take, a sandwich seems too everyday, but anything else seems too much trouble to transport to be really pleasurable on arrival.

I read recently about someone starting a picnic club, which I imagine to have little membership badges and a newsletter full of appropriate recipes, or even just combinations, for perfect picnics. It’s something I’d definitely be interested in but I must wait for the scent of spring to waft upon me before I can truly begin planning my fantasy picnic again.

Mulled Wine and Mince Pies

Cafe des Deux Moulins

I love the way that alliteration and assonance tie together this poetic winter feast! These treats are also tied together by the rather Christmassy combination of spices, citrus, booze and sugar. All of these are designed to fortify us through the winter season, the logic of which is irrefutable to me;

- spices to excite the palate of otherwise fairly dull and stodgy winter veg

- citrus for vitamin c and immunity

- booze for warmth and jollity

- and sugar for energy, essential roundness of figure and general sweetness in the face of bitter weather.

These scents, wafting through the air, awaken my senses and take me back to our recent holiday in the UK. With the cold snap well and truly upon us I keep expecting twinkly lights and carols and I feel sad for us Southern-Hemisphere-Dwellers who aren’t bright enough to rearrange our religious feasts so that they correspond logically with the seasons. It just doesn’t make sense to stuff ourselves with a Christmas feast in Summer when we don’t need an extra layer of pudginess to keep us warm and then celebrate the festival of Easter in Autumn when all is dying off around us.

All credit to Jamie Oliver for taking a more is more attitude toward spice combinations, I was wary of the inclusion of a vanilla pod, thinking it would just confuse things but I have experienced a full conversion. The vanilla is a really a mellowing influence and befriends the sweetness in the recipe to make it all the more festive.

1 orange

1 lemon

250g caster sugar

6 cloves

1 cinnamon stick

3 bay leaves

10 to 12 gratings of a whole nutmeg

1 whole vanilla pod, halved lengthwise

2 star anise

2 bottles of red wine (something half decent, preferably with a high alcohol content)

Peel your orange and lemon into a saucepan with a potato peeler. Put in the sugar, orange juice and all the other spices EXCEPT the star anise, then add a little wine to cover the sugar and put the saucepan over a low heat until the sugar is dissolved.

Bring the mixture to the boil and keep it rolling for about 4 to 5 minutes, to create a flavoured syrup. Once it’s reduced, turn down the heat a bit, pop in your star anise and pour in the rest of the wine. Heat it only until it’s warm enough to drink, you don’t want it to boil or you’ll evaporate all the fun off!

Ladle into glasses and sip while indulging in Christmassy movies in front of an open wood fire.