Baking with Bears, Broody Hens, Carpark Chips
A News Briefing from April 2025
HELLO!
It’s the end of the month so I have a full News Briefing for you!
April seems to have whipped past at high speed. It was March one minute and then here we are with May about to kick the stage door down and cartwheel into the spotlight. I always see May as quite blousy - glitter on the cleavage, hair backcombed to high heaven, shimmer tights.
Recently, I’ve been marvelling how alive everything has become in the past month. There’s green everywhere now and it’s that lovely bright fresh green of spring like someone’s given the new leaves a once over with a damp cloth.
The sides of the lane here are now a ditsy print of yellow dandelions, dainty white daisies, masses of tiny blue Forget-Me-Nots and the first billowing fronds of cow parsley. GLORIOUS!
So other than Beholding! and Exclaiming! at nature, what have I been up to this last month?
Well, firstly - here is a waiter from my sketchbook. Seems apt because this News Briefing is accidentally very food heavy. It seems to have been a month of gobbling things up both with my eyes and my mouth.
Anyway, let’s get the non food things out of the way first…
WORK…
I finished the illustrations for the book I was working on! Hurrah! Hurrah! It’s the third book in my Astrid and the Space Cadets series. This one is called Danger at the Black Lagoon! and there is a very moist theme throughout. This time the gang are called to an underwater planet to help two alien scientists look for a mysterious sea creature, but not everything is quite as it seems…
Here is a sneak peek featuring Space Cadet Beryl and our heroine, Astrid, preparing to battle a robotic, armed-with-a-laser-in-the-gob shark.
You can preorder the book here. It will be published this June (2025)
EATING…
I’ve been baking.
A lot.
Between the middle of January and April, 80% of my family and several of my pals have birthdays so it’s been a quite a cake-filled start to the year.
As well as birthdays there was Mother’s Day when my parents came for lunch. For pudding I decided to make School Cake (with sprinkles!) and served it with hot custard. (I missed a trick by not dying the custard pink as it would have been at school in the 90s. Next time!)
I think sometimes it’s nice not to be faced with a towering mass of cake and butter cream so School Cake (a single sponge layer) is perfect for those occasions. And there’s something so pleasing about the sharp crack of a School Cake’s icing when you chomp into it. And as for sprinkles - I could have them on everything…
As well as having a cake at the end, baking for me is also joyful for the recherche du temps perdu of it all. Whenever I bake I find myself thinking of my Irish grandmother, Alice. We were great pals and I was very fortunate to live just around the corner from her - so close in fact I could see the back of her house and garden from my bedroom window.
Once, when I was very little, I woke in the middle of the night having had a terrible nightmare that Alice and my grandfather, Sid, had been gobbled up. I was so inconsolable that my bleary-eyed parents had to phone my grandparents at 3am for me to speak to them for reassurance that all was well. That didn’t convince me (I was a suspicious child) so Alice and Sid, got up, went downstairs and flashed their kitchen light on and off to let me know FOR CERTAIN that they were a) ok and b) uneaten.
I loved Alice for lots of reasons but one of the most important ones was that she never spoke to me like I was a child. I was always treated like I was a diminutive adult who had just wandered in, or like I was one of her sisters. One evening when I was sleeping over at her house Alice instructed me at bedtime about the importance of moisturising, imploring me to ensure that I ALWAYS applied it to my neck in a smooth upward motion so I would avoid getting neck wrinkles “because it’s very telling…” (I was four years old at the time). One summer she called me urgently in from playing in the garden to tell me about the Potato Famine (I was five), and whenever her sister Gabriel visited I sat between them on the sofa, gossiping.
The other big reason I loved her and why I think of her whenever I make a cake is that she was a terrific cook and I was a tiny piglet child, obsessed with food. I spent hours with her in the kitchen - peeling spuds, chopping beans, watching as she basted lamb chops with sharp marmalade before grilling them, helping as she whisked butter and hot milk into steaming potatoes until they transformed into mountains of creamy mash. One treasured memory I have is sitting on the kitchen counter leaning over the sink munching through a paper bag of cherry tomatoes (sprinkled with salt) that my great-uncle had grown, the juice pouring down our chins.
What I loved best though was when we would bake together. I would literally vibrate with excitement on the days I ambled down the garden path (always to the back door never the front) to find all the ingredients laid out ready and her enormous beige ceramic mixing bowl sitting in pride of place on the counter.
A yearly tradition which started when I was very young was to help her make the Christmas Cakes. I’d arrive early in the morning and be tied tightly into my apron (actually it belonged to my grandad but Alice would cleverly hoik it up and fold it until it fitted me) and my hands would be scrubbed to surgical cleanliness and until they glowed almost fluorescently bright pink.
Then we’d begin.
For the next couple of hours we’d be busily at work: measuring, weighing, cracking eggs and talking! Talking! Talking! (We both LOVED nattering.)
Then it would be my favourite part - the mixing. Alice would stop and an index finger would be raised.
“Now,” she’d say, “Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears we’ve to get this next bit JUST RIGHT, ok?”
I would nod solemnly from under my blond, cut-straight-across fringe, and be handed The Wooden Spoon ready for The Great Mixing.
I (Baby Bear) would go first - stir, stir, stir, then when the mixture got a bit stickier and stiffer Alice (Mummy Bear) would take over - stir, stir stir, Then finally we’d have to call for Daddy Bear (Grandad Sid) and he’d come in to do the final BIG stir.
There wasn’t a moment of his life where Sid didn’t exist at a Comedia Dell’arte level of clowning, so this final bit of the process always became a full circus show resulting in all of us (including their Yorkshire terrier called Tiny) covered in cake batter. Then into the oven the mixture would finally go. Sid’s job was then to clean the kitchen whilst Alice sat with her feet up and cucumber slices on her eyes - to “regain herself”. I’d be beside her picking dried egg, flour and sugar out of the dog’s fur and anxiously watching the tick-tocking clock until it was time for the cake - our masterpiece- to be revealed.
I think about all of this each time I bake. Whenever I crack the eggs I remember another time Alice and I got the giggles over something and I was laughing so hard every egg landed on either the floor or on the dog, and my older brother was dispatched to the corner shop to get more and Tiny had to be bathed whilst the cake was (eventually) in the oven.
This egg cracking business seems to be hereditary. I haven’t baked with my three year old great-nephew (nickname: Mouse) but we are yet to get a full basket of eggs from my coop to my kitchen without at least one being broken. He is chicken mad and his enthusiasm bubbles over to the point of him accidentally throwing the eggs like hand grenades in an attempt to get them ‘safely’ into the house in a speedy fashion. I’m hoping to start cooking with him soon. We might even attempt a Christmas cake in the autumn. Mouse can be Baby Bear and I suppose I’ll be GreatUncle Bear.
Stir, stir, stir.
Fingers crossed it all turns out JUST RIGHT…
I’ll keep you all posted.
NEWS FROM THE COOP…
Winifred’s broody. Again.
At first I thought the reason she wasn’t coming out of the coop was because she was racing to finish her latest Maeve Binchy before the library due date, but then I realised. She had that fluffed up, nestled down, determined look that can only mean a bout of broodiness.
My hens (my Land Girls) are Silver Laced Wynadottes, and as well as being almost perfectly spherical (my preferred shape for a chicken) they are also prone to going broody. I’d love to get some hatching eggs for her to mother as I know she’d be a brilliant (if bossy) Muv to them, but if only I could guarantee the chicks would be girls…
My neighbours would not be pleased by a cockerel in residence, and it would also break my heart to have to re-home a little gang of chicken lads after loving them from the moment they hatched.
So currently I’m having to march down to the coop several times day to gently (but firmly) lift Winifred off her little straw nest and put her outside. If I don’t do this she will forget to eat or drink such is the power of a chicken’s baby brain. MOST of the time she’s ok with me doing this. I’ve even had a good few cuddles with her over the past few weeks. I hold her close to me and talk to her quietly. We like to chat about old movie stars. (She’s gets quite silly over Cary Grant) and I cwtch her chin. Sometimes she can be quite moody though and pecks at me ferocious, but I forgive her.
All this will pass eventually and she’ll be out clucking around soon and screaming at me like her sisters, right as rain. But for now the coop visits continue. And so does the pecking.
(I thought Pearl was going broody the other day but it turned out she was just having a sit down wondering if she’d left her purse at the bingo).
READING…
More food here I’m afraid.
I’ve been reading - well- rereading actually- Apricots on the Nile.
I first fed this to my eyeballs shortly after it came out about 20 something years ago. I remember enjoying it then but what I couldn’t remember was actually much about it other than there were apricots in it. And the Nile…
So I took it down the other week and dived in.
Apricots on the Nile is the first of a series of memoirs (with recipes) by the cook and food writer, Colette Rossant.
In this volume she details her early life as the child of a Jewish-Egyptian father and a glamorous (but difficult) French Mother. Following her father’s illness and early death, her mother bolts (so Mitfordian!) and Colette is sent to live with her wealthy Egyptian grandparents and their extended family in a large, rambling mansion in Cairo.
What follows is a fascinating, beguiling story of life in 1930/40s Egypt. Colette writes so beautifully and vividly about the loud, rambunctious family she found herself plonked into having being uprooted from chi-chi Paris.
The book is about belonging and finding a place for yourself when you are a product of vastly different cultures (her mother returns and sends to Convent school where she is forced to convert to Catholicism). It’s about family (both blood family and found family - Colette is taken under the wing of the family’s beloved cook, Ahmed) and, most importantly, it’s about food and the power of love as an ingredient. There are recipes peppered through the book which is such a lovely touch.
The book is particularly brilliant on women - there are poker playing aunts, pinch-faced nuns, a tumble of cousins, and Collette’s tiny, fierce, meddling Egyptian grandmother is a scream.
You can find copies of the book here.
I’m onto the sequel now detailing Colette’s return to Paris in the late 1940s/early 50s and it’s making me want to race for the Eurostar immediately. I’ve never wanted to rip into a baguette like a velociraptor more.
FINALLY…
Some bits I’ve enjoyed looking at this week:
A behind the SEAMS look at the couture engineering of Dior’s iconic Bar jacket from his New Look collection
This baseball cap that is very relevant to my interests. (I’d go for the pink version.)
I like this photo (below) apparently taken in Ireland in 1954. I don’t know who to credit for it I’m afraid but if you know please do tell me in the comments.
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I had a (very soggy) trip to the fair with my 10 year old neph this week. Torrential, freezing cold rain started the moment we got there, but nothing will deter a thrill seeking pre-teen from getting his fairground fix, so onto the rides we went. We stopped eventually when we soaked through to the skin and our socks were squelching revoltingly in our shoes. The roasting hot chips eaten afterwards in the car in the carpark (with the heating on FULL to dry and thaw us) were spectacular though!
Thank you so much for taking the time to subscribe and read this newsletter. I hope you all have a lovely Sunday. I’m spending today continuing to pot up my geraniums and getting started on my new vegetable and cutting flower patches (more on that soon.)
I’ll be back next week with Joy Parade No.4. The next News Briefing will be at the end of May. In the meantime, please share a link to PIGEON POST with your chums. You can also follow me on Instagram. (I’m @mralextsmith over there.)
See you next weekend!
In Tearing Haste,
Alex T. Smith
HEAD PIGEON.
This has cheered me right up. Thinking of coloured custard in a massive battered silver jug, dinner ladies asking who wants the skin ... (Was that just my school?)
Alice sounds like a wonderful woman! I had an aunt who always talked to me as a confidante and friend as a child, and it’s so intoxicating and exciting isn’t it?
Anyway, I had to tell you about my dad and his mad adventures with fowl (your comment about letting your brooding hen hatch some chicklets reminded me!). My dad lives in the middle of nowhere in Wales, and when him and his wife first settled in, and they got three, yes THREE roosters they named Cocky (rude!), Doodle, and Doo, and no hens!!. They all got got by local foxes over the space of a year or two, during which time they finally relented to sanity and got some hens. I think Doo survived Cocky and Doodle by quite a bit, from memory. They now have a brood of hens, but they have a new Rooster who is an absolute menace! He’s called Boyo, and he attacks everyone with his spurs, and if you are walking around when he is on the loose you have to carry a big stick for protection!! Absolute madness! Every time I visit I enquire hopefully about Boyo’s health in case he has oh so sadly been got by a fox! But he must more than a match for the local canines!