Kitchen pioneer

The early settlers in the Americas had to be pretty resourceful. An unfamiliar land, with different flora and fauna, required them to be canny about what to hunt, what to eat, how to store supplies for long winters, how to make a bolt of calico make dresses for all the girls in the household, and so on.

And so it is with me. You'd think one can get all the specialty foods imaginable in a world city like LA. Actually you probably can, but not in the bubble of the South Bay. Maybe Koreans, or Mexicans, can find all the ingredients they need at the local H-Mart, if not the Vonns. But us Brits are a tiny minority. The only specialty store for British food is the lame-oh King's Head which is fine for wine gums and hobnobs but not for proper food (plus driving to Santa Monica is the equivalent of 'going to town to buy calico' in terms of effort). It's a culinary desert, at least where British baked goods are concerned.

Not only do I need to make my hot cross buns from scratch but I have to make the raw ingredients too. I cannot buy candied peel - say for Christmas cake or hot cross buns - for love nor money. Nor can I find stem ginger for proper ginger biscuits either.

So I've learned to make them. It turns neither are particularly difficult. It's a bit of a faff, as in it takes longer to make candied peel than it used to take me to walk to Sainsbury's and buy some. But not much longer. And the results aren't as good - not as neat, or sugary - but they aren't bad. They'll do. Same goes for the end result, really:

Not quite as good as the kind you get in the supermarket. But better than nothing.

I'm my very own pioneer woman, it turns out! And P is working alongside me learning not only just how to bake from scratch, but actually using weighing scales (because that's how British recipes are written), which takes 'from scratch' to a whole new level in this country.

Unlike the Starck lemon squeezer, the scales are not just for show

Now if only I can figure out how to make a proper granary loaf I'll be quite content.