The GirlAlive Blog

The Easiest Root Beer Recipe in the UK

Okay, so there’s not much root beer in the UK. There’s one brand I can sometimes get, but it’s not great. And it’s way more expensive than any other pop. So my parents sent me a bottle of root beer extract. So I have the root beer flavor, but no fizz or sugar, so it has sat on a shelf for a while as I was trying to find a good recipe.

The other day I had a flash of brilliance. Cream soda already has fizz and sugar, and the flavor will blend just fine with root beer. So a 2 Liter of cream soda + a teaspoon or so of root beer extract = a pretty passable root beer.

Merry Christmas

This year my husband has been eating mince pies, but I can’t stomach them for some reason. They aren’t bad, but I’m just really not in the mood this year. We pretty much never do the usual British turkey dinner for Christmas because we did that at Thanksgiving. We also almost never have Christmas pudding. So we’ll be doing our own thing. Pork loin and sweet potatoes and bread pudding. Should be good. I’ve been watching the Christmas specials on the British food network, and on the American food network and noting some differences. I’ve also just been thinking in general about the things that are different here at Christmas.

Things I love about British Christmas:

Christmas crackers. Little thingies that pop and there is stuff inside. They’re pretty fun and I’m not even freaked out by the popping noise anymore.

Royal Institute Christmas specials. They do a week of science shows for kids, but they’re usually pretty fun and interesting.

Doctor Who. There’s usually a Christmas episode. It is usually awesome.

Extra days off. There’s Christmas, then there’s Boxing Day and the last place I worked made me take the entire week between Christmas and New Year’s off. And you get January 1st and 2nd off in Scotland.

No one has a big yard, so no one puts up obscene amounts of lights. Therefore, no one notices or cares when I refuse to hang lights on my house.

The outdoor temp is not too bad. I grew up in northern Minnesota, so I’m always into a December where the snot does not freeze inside my nose. But it’s still cold and snowy enough to feel like winter.

Things I hate about British Christmas:

Christmas music. They never seem to listen to any remotely traditional Christmas songs. It’s just the same 4 pop songs over and over again, and they’re all obnoxious. Christmas should be more Harry Connick Jr. and a LOT less Wham!.

Brussels sprouts. Who decided that the vegetable that everyone hates is “festive”? I don’t even hate brussels sprouts, but they are nowhere near tasty enough to deserve to be served for Christmas.

Stilton. They include this blue cheese in every cheeseboard. I mostly love British cheese. But I cannot stomach stilton. It tastes like really powerful moist sweatsock. Only worse. I’d rather eat earwax.

They don’t have hot apple cider here. They don’t have eggnog either, but I’ve never been a huge fan anyway.

My family and friends are not here. I miss my parents and my grandpa and my cousins and my brother and his wife and kids.

Food. And lack of food.

I miss food. I miss things with flavor that don’t leave me hungry shortly after.

My husband has gallstones. Probably. He got the temporary pseudo-diagnosis over a week ago. He doesn’t even get an ultrasound to confirm it until next week. So he can’t eat anything with fat in it until he gets surgery. It took weeks to get an ultrasound, so I dread to think about how long it will be to get surgery.

You all know I hate the American health care system. But there are times that it is good. Gallstones, for instance. I had them back in 1999. I had health insurance, and it’s one of those things that is basically always covered. I had no job, but the whole surgery only cost me about $25 out of pocket. I got an ultrasound the same day as my initial diagnosis. I got surgery a week later. I was home the day after surgery and was out at clubs with my friend Heather 5 days later.

On top of gallstones, my husband also has acid indigestion and possibly a healing duodenal ulcer. So he can’t have anything spicy or acidic. To sum up, I can’t have a dinner that includes fat, spices, tomatoes, or basically anything with flavor.

We also don’t have money. I’ve been out of work for about 3 months now. I have credit cards back in the US that cost me about £200 a month. Which I don’t have. My husband can scrape together a little bit of money for food. It comes out to about £5 per day for both of us. As long as the heating bill isn’t too high.

For the last few weeks, it has been an endless cycle of pasta with bland sauce, mashed potatoes with whatever we find in the freezer, and canned vegetable soup. We have some meat and stuff in the freezer, but we can’t eat it because it has fat in it.

I’m so bored with everything we have in our kitchen. I don’t have a problem with low fat cooking. That’s how I got gallstones in the first place (they’re God’s punishment for eating healthy). But the usual way to cover how bland low-fat food is is to make it spicy or tangy or interesting. I can’t even do that. Last night we had macaroni with tuna and fat free salad dressing. With the cold I’ve had for the last month, I literally couldn’t taste anything. It was a big bowl of pasta texture with flecks of tuna texture.

If you’re a friend from the US, send Bacon Salt! If you’re a friend from the UK, for Christmas what I’d really like is some Chinese food. Something deep fried and Szechuan flavored. Or maybe a curry. Cause if I don’t get some real food that tastes like something soon, I’m going to be tempted to try to remove my husband’s gallbladder myself.

Today is Husband’s birthday. Unspiced chicken with lettuce (with a side of pickles) is his special birthday dinner. And he might be able to have a few bites of low-fat cake. Hooray. My birthday is next month. I want Peking Style chicken and a tub of Ben and Jerry’s. Chances are, husband will still not have had his surgery, and I’ll get to have something flavorless served on top of something boring.

Birthday Pickles

Thursday is my husband’s birthday, so I’ve spent part of this week making pickles. That seems weird, but I’ve kind of gotten used to it. There’s a story behind the pickles.

My husband and I got married in April of 2005. It was a tiny courthouse wedding, so we had another big church wedding in October of 2005. After the wedding, we had a ton of leftover food, like with most big catered events. We especially had a lot of veggies and dip leftover. Carrots and celery could be used in soups and whatever. But what were we going to do with a huge tupperware container of sliced cucumbers? They’d go squishy within days and they can’t be frozen or anything. I had recently seen an episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown make pickles. It seemed like a reasonable idea.

I made the cucumber slices into bread and butter pickles. My husband had never had bread and butter pickles before. They don’t do the wide variety of pickled cucumbers in the UK that you can get in the US (Polish and German influences in the US and stuff). He apparently fell in love with the pickles. Since then, every year on his birthday I ask if he wants anything specific for his birthday dinner. Every year without fail, he wants pickles. Every anniversary, he wants pickles. He’s even asked for them for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

It takes about 3 days to make them properly, so I don’t make them as often as he asks for them. But we have no money and I couldn’t really afford a present for him this year, so I made pickles. They’re cooling in the kitchen right now, and should be fully pickley by Thursday.

The Recipe for Bread and Butter Pickles (can also be found on page 125 of the Girlalive Cookbook).

1 ¼ (566 g) pounds cucumbers, cut into slices (Usually about 2 large cucumbers, with the ends cut off and fed to the guinea pigs)
1 onion, sliced very thin
2 Tbsp (30 ml) kosher salt (or half that amount of table salt)
2 cups ice cubes
1 cup (240 ml) cider vinegar
1 cup (240 ml) sugar
¼ tsp (1.25 ml) turmeric
1 Tbsp (15 ml) mustard seeds
½ tsp (2.5 ml) celery seeds
¼ tsp (1.25 ml) cayenne, or to taste

In a large bowl combine the cucumbers and onion, sprinkle with salt, and toss well. Add the ice cubes and chill, covered, overnight.

Drain the mixture in a colander and rinse under cold water. In a saucepan bring the remaining ingredients to a boil, stirring. Add the cucumbers and onions and bring to just a simmer, stirring. Transfer to a bowl and cool. Chill the pickles, covered, for 24 hours.

I’m not going to go into how to put them in jars for long term storage and all that because I’ve never done it and I don’t want you blaming me if you try and get botulism. So just keep them in the fridge and eat them right away. In the fridge they’ll probably last a week or so. Unless my husband finds out they’re in there.

I’ve done it with thick or thin slices, and most of the time I forget the ice cubes, and it turns out just fine. It seems to be a pretty forgiving recipe. The only problem I had initially was that celery seeds are very hard to find in the UK. Husband found them at an herbal medicine supply place.

I won something!

Okay, so a while ago I happened upon a fairly amusing web site called I Hate My Message Board. The first attraction for me was the snack food reviews. It’s always fun to find someone else who is willing to try all kinds of weird foods just because they’ve never tried them before. There was a contest there for the scariest product. The item I really wanted to enter was a thing I found at the new Lidl here. They had a special on Greek food, including a can of “musky octopus”. Not only was it a horrifying CAN OF OCTOPUS, but they felt the need to include the modifier MUSKY. But I did not enter that product in the contest because the scary can of octupus cost something like £3.50, and I would never ever ever eat it. For £3.50 I can buy quite a lot of food that I am actually willing to consume.

Instead, I entered the product from my British Food site that scares me the most. You’d think that would be Marmite, but it’s hard to see how bad Marmite is without tasting it. No, the one that frightens me the most is the hot dogs in a can.

Today Tracy announced the winners of the scary product contest, and it was me! Hooray! British hot dogs are the scariest product her readers could find. Although the placenta shampoo is pretty darned creepy too.

Cheese

My husband knows that I have a minor cheese obsession. I don’t honestly eat that much cheese, but I like to read about cheese. I have a collection of books about cheese varieties and cheese production. Here is an average conversation in my house:

Me: Maybe I should become a cheesemaker.
Husband: How are you gonna do that?
Me: I’ll buy a cow and then make cheese.
Husband: We don’t have room for a cow.
Me: Goats?
Husband: We don’t have room for goats either.
Me: What about hamsters? Hamsters have nipples.
Husband: You want to milk hamsters?
Me: It would take a while to get enough milk, but think of the premium price I could charge. I could be the world’s only producer of hamster cheese.

At that point husband rolls his eyes and goes back to his video game.