Add the chilli, garlic and roasted squash to the pan.
Pour in the chicken stock.
Bring to the boil and permit to simmer for 10 minutes.
If you insist on blending the soup, you could use one of those noisy, new-fangled electric blenders. I like it lumpy.
To serve, swirl a teaspoon of crème fraîche on top and sprinkle with the roasted seeds and some chopped flat-leaf parsley.
Rita’s Socialist Squares
What do we want? Socialist Squares for all! When do we want them? Now!
Darlings! I do realise that all confectionery is equal but, in this instance, I have to agree with and paraphrase Orwell. Some confectionary is simply more equal than others and the Socialist Square is one such sweetmeat. These delicious little squares of soft buttery shortbread, gooey caramel, topped off with lashings of chocolate is my mother’s recipe and can be found in her book ‘How to … Care for Your Sweet Tooth’. She made these delights once a year for our birthday teas and I loved them almost as much as the party itself.
Ingredients
Shortbread base:
60g icing sugar
300g plain flour
175g of unsalted butter (melted)
Pinch of salt
Caramel:
1 can of that store cupboard faithful, Carnation condensed milk
180g unsalted butter
40g caster sugar
3—4 tbsp golden syrup
For the top:
100g of cooking milk chocolate
Method
Heat your oven to 150°C.
Make the melt-in-the-mouth shortbread by adding all the ingredients to your mixer and mix until it becomes a dough.
Press the dough into a lined swiss roll tin, I find your hands are best for this job. You should probably wash them first.
Pop in the oven for about 20 minutes but do keep an eye on them as ovens invariably differ. Take them out when your kitchen is filled with the most delicious buttery smell. The shortbread will delight you with its pale golden-brown look.
Next, in a large saucepan (heavy-bottomed is best) add all the caramel ingredients and heat gently until the sugar has dissolved.
Turn up the heat full blast and let this golden concoction boil furiously. Don’t neglect it! You must keep stirring, even when you lower the heat and wait for the mixture to cool and thicken. I promise it will be worth it.
Pour the caramel over the shortbread base and allow to cool.
Last bit is to melt the chocolate. I realise that there is an array of high-quality chocolate available and by all means use one if you wish, but cooking choc brings me right back to my childhood at Ancaire. Swirl the chocolate over the caramel and leave to set, if you can.
Enjoy my darlings, preferably with a cup of my wild herbal tea.
Rita’s brown soda bread
My grandmother tried to teach me how to make this bread when I was a girl but I’m sorry to say I wasn’t all that interested back then. Luckily, she wrote the recipe down. It’s a traditional Irish recipe and can require a few attempts before it’s just right. Even if, like me, you get it wrong at first, the very act of kneading dough is like meditating. But in a good way. You’ll see.
Ingredients
4 cups (I use Ethel’s china cup) of plain flour
2 cups wholemeal flour
1 cup of bran
1tsp of breadsoda
Pinch of salt
I cup or so of buttermilk
Handful of mixed seeds plus extra to scatter on top
Method
Preheat the oven to 200°C.
Sieve the flour into a large baking bowl.
Add in the wholemeal, bran, breadsoda, salt, and seeds. Mix it like you mean it.
Add a splash of buttermilk, a bit at a time. You need the mixture to be not too soggy, not too dry. Add extra flour if it’s too soggy, a drop more buttermilk if it’s too dry. Don’t worry! It’s all trial and error, just like life.
Plop out onto a floured service and knead gently.
See? You meditated, didn’t you?
Shape the dough into a circular loaf on your lightly buttered baking tray and use the handle of a dessert spoon to draw a cross on the surface of the loaf.
Sprinkle with the remaining seeds.
Pop into oven for 30 minutes, after which turn the oven down to 160°C and bake for another 50 minutes or so.
Remove from the oven, inhale that heavenly aroma and wrap the loaf in a slightly damp tea-towel. Try and leave it to cool awhile. It will be worth it.
Rita’s Lemon Melts
This is the very first recipe I perfected when I got sober. It took me a few goes to get it right so don’t be disheartened if you don’t succeed at first. No matter what happens, there’s always the pot to lick.
Ingredients
Shortbread base:
60g icing sugar
300g plain flour
175g of unsalted butter (melted)
Pinch of salt
1 tsp fresh grated ginger (optional)
Zest of 1 lemon (optional)
Lemon Curd:
Juice and zest of 2 lemons
50g butter
100g caster sugar
5 egg yolks
Method
Heat your oven to 150°C.
Firstly, make the buttery shortbread by adding all the ingredients to your mixer and mix until it becomes a dough as per the Socialist Slices.
Put the dough into a lined swiss roll tin. Use your fingers. They really are the best tools. Also, you can lick them afterwards.
While it’s in the oven, you have 20 minutes to make the lemon curd. Here’s how:
Slowly heat the butter, sugar, lemon zest, and juice in a heavy-bottomed pot until it’s a warm puddle of lemony loveliness.
Separate your eggs. Don’t waste the egg whites mind! They will be delicious in a meringue. Or an egg white omelette for a light supper with a fennel and beetroot salad. Sorry darlings, I digress!
Add the egg yolks to the pot and whisk away, taking the pot on and off the heat to ensure the eggs don’t do anything awful, like curdle.
Increase the heat slowly until the curd begins to thicken. Once you can coat the back of a spoon with it, give yourself a pat on the back, turn the heat off and allow it to cool completely.
I like to make circular melts, but you could use any shape your heart desires. I use a small cutter about the size of the brass buttons on my faux-mink coat (Aunt Pearl tells me they’re 3cm in diameter). I fill up a piping bag with the cooled curd and use a star shaped nozzle to pipe a swirl of lemon curd on each base. Serve straight away and store any leftovers in an airtight tin. Only joking, of course. There won’t be any leftovers.
Q&A with Ciara Geraghty
What was the inspiration behind Make Yourself at Home?
I’ve always been interested in the idea of the provident child of improvident parents. What kind of person do two benignly neglectful parents raise? The answer, in this case, is Marianne Cross. In the novel, I centre the action around Marianne and her mother, Rita. The mother/daughter relationship is one that fascinates me. I suppose I have skin in the game, being both. The ‘bad mother’ is someone who is harshly judged. Society holds these women to a much higher standard than the fathers, who seem to get away with it more often than not. Can people change? Marianne Cross certainly doesn’t think so. On behalf of mothers everywhere, I wanted to see if I could persuade her — and perhaps myself — otherwise.
You write about the Irish coastline so beautifully, is it a setting that resonates with you personally?
I moved to a coastal village in north county Dublin when I was eight. From my bedroom window, I could see what my eight-year-old self thought was the sea. It was actually an estuary, but we hadn’t done that chapter in geography class yet. Eight is an impressionable age and I was very impressed with my sea-view. The sound of the water, the colours it could assume, the constant movement of it. Even on boring days when th
ere was nothing to do and no-one to play with, there was always the sea to look at through my window. When I grew up and left home, I lived in lots of places and some of them were more inland than I would have liked. I used weekends and bank holidays and annual leave to make my way to the coast. I was like a compass, my needles always pointing seaward. Now that I’m – mostly – grown up, I have settled in a coastal village in north county Dublin about two miles north of where I grew up, as the crow – and the kittiwake and the heron – flies. Life has changed a lot since I my impressionable eight-year-old days. Everything, really. Except the sea. Is that why I love it? It is one of the reasons.
What does the writing process look like for you? Has this changed throughout your career?
Well, I’d love to get all ‘writery’ and say that I repair to a tall tower where I wander around in a kaftan and smoke cigarettes from long, slender cigarette holders and wait for the muse to arrive … Now, wouldn’t that be grand!
But, no.
Instead, I write at home. In the early days, I wrote at the kitchen table when everyone else had gone to bed. Now, I write in the attic, at a desk, with a laptop, in the daytime. How pedestrian is that? I will say that, for me, the most important part of the process is getting my butt into the seat at the desk. The chair is an all-singing, all-dancing display of ergonomic engineering (it’s got wheels!) and this is important because one thing is for sure; I’m going to be sitting on it for a long time. Kaftan and cigarette holders are optional (and rarely employed), but the rule I absolutely insist on is never, under any circumstances, wait for the muse to arrive. I just steel myself and start writing. Even when I don’t want to. Especially when I don’t want to. Otherwise, I’ll convince myself that the words have all dried up and the cupboard is bare.
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
No. When I left school, all I really wanted was to travel and have a flat. Then, when I was thirty-four, I realised that I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. This felt bad, given that I was, technically, grown up. I was an insurance loss adjuster at the time. I had never planned to become one. It just happened. All of a sudden, as I stood on the train platform in the throng, I realised I was in a rut. The realisation settled on me like a dark cloud and followed me around for months. My husband noticed. He said, ‘What ails you?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.’ He said, ‘But you are — technically — grown up.’ I said, ‘I know, it’s worrying.’
Then, a man fell off a roof in Plunkett College, Whitehall. Don’t worry; he sustained only minor injuries. On the plus side, I — as the college’s insurance company’s loss adjuster at the time — was dispatched to the scene. In the course of my investigation, I spoke to the principal who told me about the college’s adult education programme. He gave me a syllabus. I signed up for a creative writing course the following week. Which is when I realised I wanted to be a writer. Immediately.
Who are the three writers who have inspired you throughout your life?
1. Maeve Binchy. They say you should never meet your heroes, but I met Maeve once. She was in a wheelchair by then. I crouched beside her for a photograph and accidentally pressed a button on the arm of the chair, nearly tipping her out. She smiled in the photograph all the same. I still miss her.
2. Margaret Atwood. I am a staunch feminist and it’s all Margaret Atwood’s fault. I was 15 when I read The Handmaid’s Tale. As a fairly self-absorbed teen, I would not have recognised the text as the feminist manifesto it is. I read it for the sheer enjoyment of it. It was compelling, terrifying, fascinating. I consumed it like a piece of pop culture but something inside my brain was unfurling. It was small back then but noticeable all the same. Like a tiny splinter sticking out of your skin.
3. Nuala O’Faolain. Being a strict fiction-only-reader, I had to be persuaded to read Nuala O’Faolain’s memoir Are You Somebody? The book had a powerful effect on me. What drew me in and kept me reading well past my bedtime was the searing honesty of the writing. And then there was the writing itself — clear and accessible — that helped me to understand the power of words on a page. Reading Are you Somebody? was like a call to arms to my thirty-year old self. The one who hadn’t started writing yet. The one who was gathering her nerve.
What have you read recently that you enjoyed?
Voices which is an Open Door publication, edited by Patricia Scanlan. It is a book of short stories from a variety of writers, including Christine Dwyer-Hickey, one of my favourites. I am a fan of the short story; the way they can haul you into another world, through a window left ajar. And this collection features twenty-seven of them. What’s even better is that all royalties from the sale of the book go to NALA, our National Adult Literacy Agency, who work to support adult literacy and numeracy. The agency is forty years old this year and Voices is a lovely way of saying thank you.
Reading Group Questions
Marianne left Ancaire, her childhood home, when she was fifteen following a traumatic and tragic incident and planned never to return. What struck you most about Ancaire? Can you understand why it was difficult for Marianne to come back after so many years?
Which character in the novel did you relate the most to, and what was it about them that you connected with?
Marianne is a socially awkward accountant who needs to be in control of every situation, and her mother, Rita, a flamboyant artist and recovering alcoholic who lives by her own rules. How do you feel their differences affected their relationship throughout the novel?
How did you feel about the ending of the novel? Is it what you expected?
What would you say about Make Yourself at Home when pressing it into the hands of a friend?
Which of Rita’s recipes are you most excited to make and why?
Keep Reading …
If you enjoyed Make Yourself at Home, you’ll love Rules of the Road – a gripping, emotional, and uplifting novel about the true power of friendship.
Click here to buy now
About the Author
Ciara Geraghty lives in Dublin with her family and an adopted dog called Gary who believes himself to be in charge of everything, and pretty much is. Make Yourself at Home is her eighth novel. You can find out more about Ciara’s books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @CiaraGeraghtyBooks.
Also by Ciara Geraghty
Saving Grace
Becoming Scarlett
Finding Mr Flood
Lifesaving for Beginners
Now That I’ve Found You
This is Now
Rules of the Road
About the Publisher
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