The Doctor’s Dilemma: the ‘Healthy’ Christmas Cake

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

It’s Monday  – a semi-retirement day, and an appropriate day to bake the Christmas cake.  Abandon any ideas of little old ladies cosily enveloped in warm, Christmassy smells as they briskly bake a time-honoured recipe.

Oh, I’ve researched this cake.  ‘Himself’ was told he was pre-diabetic a while ago.  More recently, it appeared this wasn’t quite right – he’s pre-pre-diabetic. (A term I’ve probably  invented – you’re welcome!)  Anyway, a huge, hugely calorific and sugar-laden Christmas cake didn’t sound very sensible.  You can imagine the glee with which he contemplated a Christmas without treats.

One of my first career ideas, aged 13, was to be a nutritionist. That went by the board when I realised I’d need to take biology.  Who’d have thought I’d end up devising pre-pre-diabetic Christmas cakes in semi-retirement!

I took to the internet for recipes. Oh, I found diabetic fruitcakes, all right. But I couldn’t see how something baked with carrot, banana, courgette and apple would keep as long as something with dried fruit. I reflected ruefully that Mrs Patmore, the fictional Downton Abbey’s cook, probably never saw such an apparently bizarre ingredient list! (Indeed, the real, fin de siècle Scots whom I’ve been researching might not even have had a Christmas cake – Scots Presbyterians made virtually nothing of Christmas, but had a right good knees-up at Hogmanay – New Year’s Eve.)

Back to the drawing board.  More of the dried fruit with lower sugar content (marginally!). Cut out the treacle.  Splenda instead of sugar.  Rapeseed oil instead of butter.  Wider tin so we get more, smaller portions  …

I left the fresh fruit and veg in the fridge. Another time! 

Working with two recipes, one of them using American cup measurements, posed its own problems.   How much butter is a cupful, and how much oil replaces it?  Google sorted that out.  I measured water into various cups before realising I could use the measuring jug itself.  Hey-ho.

Meanwhile Himself, almost (albeit reluctantly) resigned to a no-cake Christmas, has agreed fairly willingly to a new concept:-

Portion control.

(I was going  to say, watch this space! But the scoundrel has just beetled off to demolish a KitKat …)

The Grumpy Friar (okay, Air-Fryer)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Today’s the last-but-one day of annual leave that I’ll ever take as a librarian. (The day before my 66th birthday will be the absolutely final librarian’s annual leave day.) After that, I’ll be semi-retired, not a librarian, and any annual leave will be as a researcher.

As you know, I’ve been thinking about healthy eating and more home cooking – although, since I’m not passionate about cookery, the less time I spend on it, the better. Tidying the lounge, I found the book I’d bought during the worst of the energy crisis. I had recently bought my first air-fryer – an appliance that a colleague assured me was the best invention ever. Less time means less energy, too.

Hannah Patterson, The UK Brand New Air Fryer Cookbook. 2023 edition. First published by the author in 2022. ISBN 9798360567448

Whilst enjoying my mini-holiday loafing around at home (getting things done, in a leisurely, unstructured way), I used the slow-cooker to cook some chicken. And then pork chops, which were very tasty but looked over-done. Surely, I reasoned, there must be more to it than this!

There is, however, a problem. As Patterson explains, there are different kinds of air-fryers. I knew mine was a small one – I thought it would do for three people – but along with being small, it’s also unsophisticated.  I didn’t know, until I opened her book at the beginning, that what I have is a Cylindrical Basket Air Fryer. As Patterson says,

‘Aside from the noise and the size, another downside is the functionality, as it only has one function.’

Mine isn’t noisy, but I was beginning to see what the problem was. Reading on, I discovered – as I had suspected from the recipes – that ‘basket’ means different things in different air-fryers. Mine is not open like a chip-frying basket. It’s basically a non-stick deep tin. And although there’s a ‘crisper’ – or whatever you call the round removable component that keeps the food off the bottom of the tin/basket – if you put the food on the crisper, it stays dry, but if you remove the crisper, everything is in the bottom and I’d worry about it burning the bottom of the tin.

And it got worse. Many of the recipes needed a baking tray or metal bowl that would actually go in the air-fryer. There isn’t room for either, in my wee machine. (Why did Russell Hobbs make a machine with so many limitations? Can I really only cook chicken or chips?!) Some recipes could be halved in quantity, but I still doubted that the food would fit with room for the air to circulate.

Sometimes, I fear people think I’m terribly negative. I prefer ‘cautious’ or ‘realistic’. Anyway, since I am at home reviewing a cookery book, I thought I’d just go with the flow and be myself. I went through EVERY recipe, and marked the index with whether it was technically feasible in my wee air-fryer. I honestly only marked a very few more that would need too many new ingredients, ingredients I would struggle to source, or that wouldn’t suit the tastes of my slightly conservative family. I haven’t done a statistical calculation, but it’s pretty clear that I’ve ruled out easily half the book – and possibly more than that.

Grumpy Friar (Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay)

It’s a pity – the book is good value, and the food looks tasty. Perhaps much of it is not in our usual repertoire, but that’s not a bad thing. With some meals, I suspected that the preparation would be longer than I usually spend, partly due to unfamiliarity, or the faff of stuffing or rolling stuff into flattened chicken breasts or steaks.

Anyone got a book of recipes for a small, cylindrical air-fryer with minimal functionality? Until then, I’m off to make a quiche. In the oven.