Now bring us some figgy pudding...

Okay, it isn't figgy pudding, but it's close.

Most people who have listened to Christmas songs throughout their life have heard of Christmas pudding. It's one of those old-timey things like caroling and those pictures of you in a snowman sweater when you were seven years old. However, I doubt most people have a tradition for Christmas pudding that extends beyond that absurd line in "We Wish You a Merry Christmas". But then again, not everyone has an awesome Canadian grandmother.

Every year for Christmas, my grandmother whips up a suet pudding for each of her children's families in her tiny kitchen in Anaheim. About midway through December, the pudding arrives in a tin with terrifying pictures of teddy bears or gaudy lights and we all rejoice. Really, it doesn't feel like the holiday season unless there is a suet pudding on the counter.

However, this year my grandmother was too busy to make puddings for all of us, so I was charged with making the one for my family. And surprisingly, it was fairly simple. Flour, bread crumbs, dried fruit, spices, milk, molasses, and of course suet. What's suet you ask? Well, it's the fat that surrounds a cow's kidneys. They don't stock this next to the hamburger meat at the supermarket, but luckily my Dad was able to score some at the local butchery (the aptly named Blood Farm) and brought me home a bag of the stuff. I was then charged with cutting it up, because Blood Farm wouldn't grind it for fear of gumming up their machines.

I never expected there to be so much connective tissue holding that stuff together. And surprisingly, it wasn't wiggly or squishy in any way. It was the same consistency as when you try to use butter straight out of the fridge without letting it thaw first. After I had cut the block of fat into manageable chunks, it went through the food processor to chop it up even further. The result was what can only be described as pink snow:

That was another surprise. It didn't put up a fight while I was chopping. I've met strawberries that were more resistant to the whirling blades of death. Now that that step was over with, it was just a question of combining the ingredients as you would with any cake recipe. The batter was very thick, like a mix between regular cake batter and bread dough, which I then scooped into my mom's pudding steamer.

I put a pyrex bowl at the bottom of our stew pot and nestled the steamer inside. I then popped on the lid (well, rested the lid on top. I have no idea how to lock the thing...) and filled up the pot halfway with water so that it was halfway up the steamer. Then I set it to boil for two hours and let the steam work its magic.

A steamed pudding is hard to describe. It's not at all like Jell-o pudding (that's more of a thick custard). Rather, it's more like  a dense, sticky bread. Well, at least this one is. My mother's lemon pudding (which I hope to get for my birthday next week!) has more of a consistency somewhere between angel food cake and pound cake. Then it's slathered with lemon curd and swimming in vanilla custard. Mmmmmmmm.

Now that this Christmas pudding is done, all that's left is to put on the sauce: a half stick of butter, a quarter cup of brown sugar, a little bit of vanilla, and (if you're my mom) rum.

Okay, it's not a picture out of a magazine. But hey, after waiting all year for this, I don't care how it looks!

Mantra time

For all intents and purposes, I am home for the holidays! However, now all the fears that I had going into this semester about changing my diet have become a reality. At school, really I don't eat that much. That's because everything I do eat I either have to cook or have enough of it lying around so that I can grab a quick stack. Sadly, I never seem to have a snack surplus. How, I am home in the land of plenty where there are lots of things to eat, but not enough food. 

This is where the food mantra comes in. "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." A couple of months ago I read In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan and that was really the takeaway message. If you can find a copy and have a couple hours to read it (it's fairly short), I highly recommend it.

The "Eat food"  idea is that you shouldn't eat anything that your ancestor wouldn't recognize as food. The first clue is to look at the ingredients. For bread, is it flour, water, yeast, and salt? Or is it packed full of iron, calcium, riboflavin, etc? If your great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize the ingredients as food (or if you don't, for that matter), by Pollan's logic you shouldn't eat it. Why make bread sexier by adding iron and calcium when you can eat some broccoli along with your sandwich?

Okay, by reading labels over the past year I think I've gotten fairly good at determining if something is "natural" or "safe" to eat. If it has "natural flavors" I generally put it down, so I think I'll be able to spot "food" this break. As for the "not too much" part, that's going to be hard. I tend to eat a lot, especially if its food I really like. And of course, Christmas means Christmas food. Even before I went gluten/casein/corn/soy free at school I would go on a Christmas binge because I couldn't get tree-shaped butter cookies with green icing any other time of the year. I think I might be in trouble.

Luckily, my body has become accustomed to working on less food. So far this break as well as during the Thanksgiving break I stuffed myself to the point of shame and being downright uncomfortable. I say this is lucky because it means that I can work on listening to my stomach and gauging when I am full and should stop eating. If that means that I only eat two dinner rolls instead of three, so be it. I can ask my mom to make them again if I really liked them or I can make them myself. Plus, by committing to eating only "food", I can cut down on what I am actually putting in my mouth.

The "mostly plants" part of the mantra is going to be extremely hard. When I got home yesterday, I looked in the vegetable drawer and found it stocked with potatoes and not much else. I know we have bags of frozen peas and corn in the freezer and maybe a bag of baby carrots tucked behind one of the potato sacks, but that isn't a whole lot. There is maybe two onions and a single head of garlic in the house. My boyfriend and I usually use that much every time we cook dinner. I see no cabbage, no parsnips, and no full-length carrots! My world is upside down! Well, at least the potatoes mean that I can make a batch of home fries if I ever need a snack. And because I would actually have to make them  means that I won't be mindlessly grazing. I think I might have to ask my mom to throw some more veggies in our meals too. Also, she needs to pick up some more onions.

So what's my progress so far? Well, yesterday I won't count because I had one foot in Amherst and the other back home and during the drive I was eating leftover Chinese food out of a container I was holding between my knees. I got orange beef (aka deep-fried candy meat) all over my pants. So today I decided to make myself an egg in a basket (for those who don't know, you cut a whole in a piece of toast, drop the egg inside, and fry it). I didn't check the bread, but it probably wasn't exactly food. Damn. I used canola oil as the frying medium, and that is usually genetically modified. Double damn. The "butter" I put on the bread to make it extra crispy was actually Benecol light, which is various vegetable oils solidified, colored yellow, and flavored to taste like butter. Well, at least the egg was natural, right? Well, it was pure white, all the eggs in the carton were uniform, and they each had a little breast cancer support ribbon stamped on them. I'm in trouble, aren't I? Well, at least the only bad thing about the Greek yoghurt I had after that was that it had natural vanilla flavor....

I can't really avoid the bread issue unless mom makes her own bread, which might happen soon. And all of the eggs at the supermarket are going to be uniform and have some sort of stamp, so I'll have to live with that. I don't know what other oil to use because olive oil won't taste right (believe me) and the only other oil we have is corn oil, which would be out of the frying pan and into the gas burner. I can at least avoid the Benecol. In fact, I wanted to use butter for breakfast but I didn't take it out of the refrigerator in time. I was worried that the oil would start smoking so I had to butter my bread quickly with a butter-like substance. I'm trying!