It’s goodbye, I’m afraid.

I was at the vet’s this week, and it’s not good news. As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader, it’s been touch and go for me over the past months. I’m eighteen years old and diabetic, with an overactive thyroid and a dodgy liver. They’ve had me on a special diet, but I’m still losing weight and becoming badly dehydrated. Martin and Annie have to take me to the surgery tomorrow, and I won’t be coming back.

I’ve been a very, very lucky cat. So many of us get run over by cars before we reach double figures, or drowned, or maltreated, or ignored. Whereas I have been housed in a succession of beautiful homes, fed excellent food, indulged, stimulated, and simply loved more than a creature has a right to expect. I’ve got through thousands of pounds worth of food, medicine, toys and ruined furniture, and Annie and Martin have never been cross with me for long. I don’t want to say goodbye to them and my sister Chutney, but I’ve got to go.

This is my last posting on the blog, though perhaps someone will take it over in the coming year. It’s been a privilege to write for you, and I wish you all the best for the future.

Yours, Dingo.

Heaven and Earth

This doesn't have anything to do with the dreadful God-slot programme with Gloria Hunniford on Sunday morning telly, you'll be relieved to read, but refers back to my last post, in which I mentioned the German Himmel und Erde combination of potatoes and apples. After mein freund Zero from Cologne told me about it, I decided to find a recipe for Martin on-line.

I found several, all of them in German. Fortunately my command of that language is excellent, at least by cat standards. Each recipe was slightly different, so I took what I liked from each. They all used sugar, but I suspected this might be because Germans use very sour apples (there was no mention of variety), and as M only had rather sweet Pink Ladies, I suggested he leave it out. So this is the version he prepared, and it was lovely. This is enough for two or three generous helpings, with leftovers for an apple-flavoured bubble and squeak the following day.

500gms potatoes
500gms apples
half an onion
two or three rashers of streaky bacon or slices of raw ham (smoked Schwarzwald Schinken is great if you can get it)
a splash of cider vinegar or lemon juice
a little bit of lard, salt

Peel, chop and boil the potatoes and apples until soft enough to mash, adding the vinegar or lemon juice and salt to the water. Meanwhile slice the onions and fry slowly in the lard until brown. Slice the bacon or ham and add to the onions in the pan - add the bacon early and cook until crisp, but if you're using ham just heat it through. Drain and mash the potato and apple, return to the pan and replace on the heat, allowing it to bubble away for a few minutes to lose a bit of moisture. Add the onions and bacon or ham, stir through, check seasoning and serve.

You could use a ring mould to get a nice, round serving, and top with a lovely thick slice of good black pudding and a poached egg, and serve it in an elegant restaurant stylee. Or just slap it on the plate and eat something nice and Germanic with it, like cabbage cooked with caraway seeds, and lots of mustard.

Mash it up.

Light, fluffy and smooth, good mashed potato is just like me.

Made with the right potatoes, such as Arran Victory, Maris Piper or Desiree, mash goes brilliantly with hundreds of dishes. Sadly, while the British embrace the flexibility of rice and cous-cous, they tend to think of mash as something you only eat with sausages. (Not that I have anything against bangers, you understand, it’s just that mash can do much more.)

North Americans like their mash, and serve it mostly with chicken and pork chops, and usually with gravy. The Irish have colcannon, where the mash is mixed with hot cabbage, and champ, with lots of spring onions. (Champ is great with salmon, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?) My friend Zero the cat from Cologne tells me that in Germany, they mash potatoes and apples together to make Himmel und Erde, which means “heaven and earth”, and they often serve it with black pudding. Brilliant.

Martin thinks a good smooth mash can be served on its own as a first course, like polenta, and should be dressed with some good olive oil, shavings of parmesan and lots of black pepper. (That sounds just a little poncy to me.) To accompany meat, he usually does a rougher version, more like Scots chappit tatties, leaving the skins on and roughly breaking the spuds rather than pureeing them.

Last night he made a spiced mash to go with kebabs. Clean a kilo of floury potatoes and boil them whole, with their skins intact, until done. Drain them and keep them warm. Melt two tbs of ghee in a large pan and add a couple of crushed garlic cloves. Fry the garlic but don’t let it burn. Grind a tsp of cumin and a tsp of coriander seeds and add them to the ghee and garlic, along with a tsp of chilli powder. Stir and fry for a minute, then add the warm potatoes. Mash them quickly into the hot, spicy ghee, adding a little milk or yoghurt if they look a bit dry. Check for salt and serve. You could add chopped green herbs, like coriander or dill, if you have them. A more refined and expensive version can be made with saffron - infuse some threads in warm milk and add to the spuds.

Mmm, d’you know, I keep thinking about that German Himmel und Erde combination. I think I’ll try to find a recipe on-line, print it out and leave it where Martin can see it.

Bamb or Meef?

The problem with freezing pieces of diced meat off the bone without putting a label on the bag is that you can’t recognise it when you take it out of the freezer. That’s how Martin came to prepare some beef shoulder steak thinking it was mutton on Sunday evening. He made up an African-inspired recipe, frying shallots and garlic with carrots, browning the meat, adding stock, tomatoes, chillies and plenty of peanut butter before finishing it off with some unrefined palm oil and serving it with polenta (or mealie pap if you’re being African; it’s the same, really). Of course by the time the stuff was partly cooked, we could all tell it was beef from the smell, and with an extra fifteen minutes in the pressure cooker (probably an extra 30 in a casserole) it was fine, and tasted great.

Personally I never really know what I’m eating – unless it’s fish, I can recognise fish all right. But my tinned cat meat could be goat, rat or Desert Orchid as far as I know. It’s still tasty.

What a Mess

As you may have noticed while reading my blog, two things we don’t often have at our house are pudding, and anything made by Annie. This is because Annie doesn’t cook, and Martin shows a kind of macho disdain for dessert, preferring to concentrate on manly, hunter-gatherer stuff like meat and fish.

While he’s rarely enthusiastic about making pudding, I haven’t noticed him turning his nose up when it comes to eating the stuff. And Annie is happy to “make” dessert, as long as “making” can be interpreted as “assembling”. She did Eaton Mess the other day, and here’s a recipe.

400g berries (frozen at this time of year)
Kirsch
1 tbsp icing sugar, optional
400g fresh cream for whipping
6 plain meringues or meringue shells, or ready-made mini-meringues

Dress the berries with a splash of Kirsch and the sugar if using. Mash them up a bit if you like. Beat the cream until stiff. Add the fruit to the cream and fold through. Shortly before serving, break up the meringues and add them, folding through again. The meringues will dissolve in the cream - eat quickly if you want a bit of a crunch. Lovely, and so easy, a cat could do it.

Smoke

I’ve never been a regualar smoker, although when I was little I did enjoy chewing the cellophane from cigarette packets, and I associated the smell of tobacco with Martin, so I had a certain fondness for it. He gave up fags years ago, though, and enjoys a cigar only rarely. Now that smoking is banned in all public spaces in Scotland, I don’t even notice it on people’s clothes. These days, if a visitor does smell of tobacco, I find it quite unpleasant.

As for smoking fish, I have mixed feelings. I’m not fond of a really strong cure, or the stuff that’s artificially coloured, but a mild smoking does something rather fine to a haddock. Like salting, it concentrates the flavour and firms up the flesh, making it denser and drier. The smell of a good kipper is enough to lure me right down to the kitchen from my vantage point on the second floor landing, even if I’m not very hungry. And smoked salmon always makes me purr contentedly, especially if it’s combined with scrambled eggs.

Last night, M. cooked a little smoked haddock that was left over from making the fish pie on Sunday, and topped each piece with a poached egg. He served it with a few potatoes, and preceded the dish with a salad of endives, garlic croutons and Stornoway black pudding. Quite an elegant combination for a Monday evening, I’d say.

They might have asked first….

As you’ll know if you’ve been reading my blog over the past six months, I was living almost exclusively on cod and coley until recently. Then I was diagnosed as a diabetic, and I’ve been put on special diabetic cat food that looks and smells not unlike wild boar paté. It’s very nice, and I can’t say that I particularly miss the fish. On the other hand, it was reassuring to know there were six coley portions in the freezer, just in case I needed them.

Note the past tense. Yesterday Martin made a fish pie when Annie’s parents came round for lunch. They only like bland food on account of being bonkers or something, so he used my coley - along with a little smoked haddock, boiled eggs, peas, parsley sauce and mashed potatoes - to create this nursery classic.

I don’t think that was fair. It’s not as if I eat their food. When I was a kitten I used to jump on the dining table for a nibble of this and that, and I still can’t resist stealing crisps on the rare occasions they buy them, but I don’t go into the fridge and consume WHOLE PORTIONS OF HUMAN DINNER. I suppose it doesn’t matter really, as I’m now on the new regime. But they should have asked me, just out of politeness.

Anyway, I went into a sulk and stayed upstairs throughout the visit, along with Chutney, who simply doesn’t like people. However, I was listening to the conversation drifting up from the dining room, and I couldn’t help laughing when, half way through lunch, Annie told her parents they were eating my dinner. They stopped chewing, mid-mouthful, thinking they were eating cat food!

If you’d like to deprive your own cat of his or her fish supper, here’s how to make the pie.

Heat the oven to 220 centigrade. Put 300gms each of fresh or frozen white fish fillets and smoked haddock (try to get the natural, un-died kind) into a dish and just cover with skimmed milk. Add a bay leaf or two. Put the fish in the oven for ten minutes. Meanwhile peel some floury potatoes and put them on to boil. Hard-boil three or four eggs.

Drain the fish and keep the milk. Break up the fish pieces and remove any skin or bone. Put the fish back in the dish with the quartered eggs and a couple of handfuls of frozen peas. Melt a tbs of butter and add a tbs of flour and mix to a paste. Strain the fishy milk into the flour and butter mixture very gradually, mixing as you go, to make a smooth sauce. Let this cook very gently for ten minutes, add a handful of chopped parsley and check for seasoning. Pour the sauce over the fish, eggs and peas in the dish, gently stirring or folding it all together. Mash your potatoes with butter and milk or cream. Spread over the top of the dish and put it into the oven for half an hour. That’s it, though if your dinner guests are not deeply suspicious of flavour, add a few prawns, some paprika or cayenne, or perhaps some black olives.

To truly appreciate this dish, it should be served in a small metal bowl on the kitchen floor and eaten by sticking your head straight in. Wash your whiskers carefully afterwards.

I'm amazing for my age....

I'm 126 years old, based on the calculation of seven cat years to 12 human months, and I've got all sorts wrong with me, so I'm on borrowed time. Make the most of me and pay attention, as I might not be around for much longer.

Having said that, I was at the vet's last Friday and he's pleased with my condition. My blood sugar seems to have stabilised, and I've lost a bit of weight so - hurrah! - I'm now on increased rations. My sister's not going anywhere in a hurry either, but unfortunately that's literally as well as metaphorically true, as she's suffering rather badly from arthritis. Now she's on yet another medication; a liquid painkiller that's applied in drops to her food. I think that's us on three each now.

I'm quite excited, because it's "Advent". I don't know what that means, but it's clearly a countdown to something. Whatever it's leading to, Annie is excited about it. Perhaps it's a special day when she and Martin won't have to go to work, and we can all play games together, or more realistically, all lie in front of the fire and sleep.

Come to think of it, in the recesses of my tiny brain, there are memories of something called "Christmas" at about this time of year. I think I recall that as a kitten, I once spent Christmas wrapped up in a net curtain in Annie's rented flat in Clarence Drive, and Santa brought me a chorizo. I think Chutney and I may have been in the cattery for Christmas once or twice, too. I can't see that happening this year, however, as A and M have been away abroad four or five times this year already.

Anyway, A is complaining bitterly that she hasn't got an Advent calendar, and that M won't let her have one. This also seems strangely familiar....

As for the human dinners this week, the wintery theme continues. M made beef stew with dumplings the other day; proper old-fashioned English dumplings with suet, and horseradish mixed into the dough. Of course at my age, I approve of anything old-fashioned.