The day I finally became Julia Roberts.

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Remember the scene in Pretty Woman, where Julia Roberts and Richard Gere go to the opera? She wears a long red dress, and he presents her with an expensive necklace before their date.

It was not the date, nor the jewellery I envied. It was the fact that she cried during the opera. For a long time I wanted to cry at the opera. I heard that people did. My partner often cries at opera, so moved is he by it. I never have. I’ve tried, because I thought that’s what happened if you really got it, if you were somehow more cultured than I thought I was, if you had a beating heart inside your body. But no.

I grew up in an Italian house where opera was frequently played. I really appreciate opera. I absolutely love some of it. I think the singing is fantastic and I can really appreciate all the hard work that goes into it. But it doesn’t make me cry, and for a really long time, I thought there was something wrong with me. What made me cry, what makes me cry still are cheesey-to-anyone-else Italian tunes from the 1950s and 60s. If you want to see me go silent, turn my back to you and then discreetly pull a hanky from my pocket, with a magician’s slight of hand, play me Claudio Villa.

He’s not an opera singer. He may not even be a very good singer. I don’t know. What I do know is that he makes me cry, because it resonates with me. It reminds me of being little, being in Italy, when I still had two generational layers in front of me, shielding me from the world. When I could look sideways at my family tree, and a little bit up, and see lines and lines of cousins and aunts and uncles. He reminds me of hot afternoons with the orange ‘mangia disco’* in the corner ‘eating’ our vinyl 45s. The canopy pulled down over the balcony shielding us from the worse of the day’s sun, my belly full of gnocchi made by my grandmother and the lunch table a graveyard of bread crumbs and wine corks.

Then there’s art. Growing up, art was for people who had studied it. Who understood. Who knew dates off by heart and who could say thing like..well things like I can’t say because I don’t know. I stayed away from art galleries.

And then, a few things happened. I met my partner, Pete, in 1997. He taught me that art was what you made it – what spoke to you. And what that was was entirely personal to you. That it was okay to not like some art, even if everyone else loved it. And it was okay to like art even if nobody else did. That gave me confidence. Just a few months after I’d met him, (warning: some monumental name dropping coming up) I found myself at the opening of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the only British journalist – for some reason – invited to a dinner and then a do (where there were other journalists)  with Jeff Koons, Dennis Hopper, Frank Gehry, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg. I was sat next to Koons and before I’d simply not have been able to talk to him, but, suddenly I felt able to. I can’t pretend it was the most interesting dinner I’ve ever been to: it wasn’t. But it was memorable.

I was working at the Independent at the time, and my friend, Chris Maume (now obituaries editor of the Independent) was one of those journalists who was so learned that he could write about sport or art and imbue each with knowledge from outside the actual subject. I think that’s a real skill, because if no man is an island, no subject is, either. He came into the office one day having been to an art exhibition (I wish so much I could remember which, now) and when I asked him how it was he said “God, it was BRILLIANT, I wanted to fuck the art.”

Well. I had never heard any of the art journalists describe art like that. Little by little, I got the confidence to go to art galleries, to realise that it was my response to stuff that mattered.

I still didn’t cry at the opera. But a few months ago, we went, en famille, to see Proms no.69: Carmina Burana, and I did cry. At the Latin choir. And that’s when I realised that it wasn’t just Claudio Villa and his ilk that make me cry. Sung Latin does it too. When I used to go to the sung Latin mass at St Etheldreda’s, where there is a splendid choir, I used to cry. In the middle of mass. Like I was having a religious experience, which perhaps, I was.

Last weekend, we went to the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival at Snape Maltings, which is not far from where I live. I love Snape. It has a bit of everything: concert hall, shops, walking, Pump Street Bakery where I can drop £20 on breakfast pastries and pretend I have a family of ten. Ostensibly we went to catch Hollie McNish, whom I’ve been a fan of for some years, ever since I saw her on You Tube reciting a poem about breastfeeding. We all went to a little talk she did about Freedom, where she talked about how she was free to write whatever she wanted, but, in fact, she didn’t always feel free to perform her poems, because some of them got loads of hate mail. One of them was, ironically, the first poem of hers that I ever heard and the one that my children had listened to: Embarrassed, about breastfeeding her daughter. She read it out. I struggled to say upright. I went up to talk to her afterwards to say that I, too, had stopped writing about breastfeeding because of the hate mail. It gets hard to deal with, after a while.

The next day, at her performance, she read out other poems: about what it’s like to be old, what real beauty is, what happens to your body when you have a baby. I felt incredibly moved. I may have cried again. My children were sat, transfixed. I love how Frozen hardly touched them, but here they were in a concert hall listening to a slam poet and utterly in the moment. My youngest wrote poetry all the way through in this little note book she’d been given. Two were utterly brilliant, one  was about the sea and one was about her going into a coffee shop and drinking 17 coffees. She’s six.

I was so emotional that afterwards, when I went up to Hollie again and get her to sign her second book, Cherry Pie, for my girls, all I could utter was ‘hi’.

On the Saturday, my eldest and I had also been to see Jack Rooke‘s performance: Good Grief. Rooke is 21 and his dad died six years ago. The performance is about his dad, his nan and Jack’s grief. No poetry was read out. It was a great performance: so well observed and funny. Plus he gave out malt loaf, Get out of Shit cards (mini moo cards yay!) and a tin of custard creams was passed round half way through. There was a bit of swearing. Swearing and biscuits. I could see my eldest thinking “wow, this poetry festival is great!” But half way through he does this bit about his dad, and how for six months after he died, he’d still call his dad’s number, asking him to “come home now”, asking him to pick him up (he was a cab driver).

I cried.

*mangia disco means record player in Italian but it literally means ‘eats the records’.

Halloween spider’s web cake

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We do Halloween in our own way in this house, which is not very much. We don’t do trick or treating because that kinda contradicts everything we say the rest of the year (“knock on strangers’ doors! Eat lots of sweets! Ghosts and ghouls do exist!”).

But we aren’t total killjoys, either. We do stuff and have our own traditions and one of them is that I make this cake.

It’s basically a red velvet chocolate cake – or that’s how it started – but I don’t add red colouring so mine isn’t red, it’s just a light chocolate cake with cream cheese/sugar/butter filling and covered with a chocolate ganache, then iced with white chocolate. It’s actually fairly easy and really tasty and if you have one, a plastic spider on top looks good.

This recipe is adapted from a recipe in Waitrose magazine. The changes I’ve made are: no salted butter, no red food colouring, more cocoa, I used kefir instead of buttermilk (don’t worry if this means nothing to you!) and I cut the sugar down. But you can’t tell. It’s still very much a proper cake.

The cake

200g butter at room temperature

350g plain flour

1 tsp of baking powder

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

4 tablespoons of good cocoa powder

quarter of a teaspoon of sea salt

300g caster sugar

3 eggs

1.5 tsp vanilla extract

284ml buttermilk/kefir

Cream cheese filling

120g butter

120g cream cheese

100g icing sugar

Chocolate icing

300ml double cream

250g 70% cocoa chocolate, chopped

1.5 tablespoons of liquid glucose (you can buy it in tubes in the baking aisle)

50g white chocolate (I use Green and Black’s – absolutely the best white chocolate there is that doesn’t cost loads)

You’ll also need an icing bag and fine nozzle

What to do

Oven to 170C.  Line a 23cm spring-form cake tin with parchment or treat yourself and buy some cake tin liners. Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl, but not the sugar. Put the sugar and butter in a separate bowl and either beat by hand or put in a food mixer with whisk attachment and beat until smooth. Now add the eggs (continue with the food processor if you have started with it, but by hand is also, of course, fine) one at a time, beating well with each addition.

Now add the dry ingredients, alternating with the buttermilk/kefir until all combined. That’s it, your cake is done. Scrape into a tin then bake for about an hour.

It needs to cool completely. When it is cool, slice it into three. You’ll probably have two flat layers – the bits of the cake that were the middle and the bottom – and a slightly domed layer – the natural top of the cake. You can, if you want, straighten the slightly domed layer out by cutting it, or you can just use it as the middle layer of your cake. Either way, you want a very flat layer for the top, please.

Place what will be the bottom layer on a cooling rack on top of a baking tray (this is important for later) and spread half the filling on, place other layer on top and finish with a flat layer. Put it in the fridge for about 30 mins (longer if you want).

When you are ready to do the topping: place the double cream, dark chocolate and liquid glucose in a bowl atop some simmering water until all smooth and melted. At roughly the same time, melt the white chocolate in the same way and prepare to put into an icing bag with a thin nozzle icing head-piping-thing.

Now, spread the chocolate layer over the top with a spatula knife – this is where the baking tray comes in useful. It takes some practise but you will get some chocolate on the sides as you really need to cover the whole thing. Flatten the top. Now you pipe a spiral of white chocolate around the cake – start a bit off centre. When you’ve covered the whole cake, take a cocktail stick or skewer and make lines from the centre out, to make that ripple effect. Put back in fridge to chill and take out and serve at room temperature.

It’s good. Happy Halloween!

Little Ondine nail polish

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I have, on the top shelf of my fridge (it seems to last longer in there), at least 30 bottles of nail varnish. Mostly Chanel, because that’s always been my favourite nail varnish make. Some of the bottles date back to my life pre-motherhood, and still the varnish works beautifully.

But I have a new nail polish love, and that is Little Ondine. Little Ondine is not like other nail polish. It has no solvents in it. It doesn’t smell. And it peels off. it’s cheaper than Chanel by almost half, the varnish is more chip resistant and the colours brighter and shinier. And, dare I say it, I think the colours are a bit more ‘on it’ than Chanel’s are these days,

I know, it’s like getting a divorce! All those things you once loved, now surpassed by someone new, different, maybe a bit younger. Definitely shinier and more eco-friendly.

The packaging is cute, too.

Modernist cuckoo clock

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A few Christmases ago, my partner and I decided that, instead of buying each other presents, we would pool our money and buy something fabulous, luxurious, indulgent and beautiful for the house. The first year we bought each other half a cuckoo clock.

In southern Italy, where my mother is from, my maternal grandmother had a proper Swiss cuckoo clock. As we lay in bed I could hear it sing in the room below mine. To this day the sound of a cuckoo signalling the hour makes me feel safe, happy, nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time. Could our first present, I ventured, be a cuckoo clock? My partner, he say yes. But, however sentimental, I didn’t want a cuckoo clock like my Nonna’s; it would not look right in our home. Did such a thing as a modernist cuckoo clock exist?

It did. And it was made by Diamantini and Domeniconi.

The one we decided on was the Cucu, because it HAD to have a cuckoo coming out (the Cucu Low Cost doesn’t). Cucu comes in various finishes, but we wanted it in oak, so I ordered it from My Marca. It was one of those transactions where it all seemed so unreal, I had to make a real leap of faith and convince myself the money was not just going to disappear into an offshore bank account never to be seen again. Communication was not great. But lo! Just before Christmas – on something ridiculous like Christmas Eve – our Cucu arrived, beautifully packaged. And it’s been hanging in our house ever since.

I think we paid about £250 for ours to be specially made in oak (as in, it was as special order at the time and not available off the peg as I think it is now) and delivery from Italy.

The cuckoo’s song can be switched to low, high or off. And it has a light sensor, so it doesn’t sing at night. It is beautiful and is a real conversation piece. We adore it. It makes me happy every time I see it or hear it.

When the clocks went forwards, I couldn’t remember how to change the time so that the cuckoo still sings at the right time. I emailed the company and didn’t hear anything for a while. Then, in (what I find is) typical Italian style, the reply came: late but utterly charming. And direct from Dan Domeniconi himself.

 

Big beautiful bags that are brilliant for tidying up, storage, and car travel.

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Years ago, I worked, briefly, in the Evening Standard fashion department. When we weren’t ordering champagne off the stationery list (really), and drinking it on a Friday night, we were working hard. I used to write features about Chrissie Hynde’s fringe and we would look out over the atrium at who was coming and going. Late into the afternoon, as the sun was starting to set over Kensington, the fashion editors and stylists would come back from their shoots with tales of who had done what and the shots they had got (or not). And they would be wielding these enormous chequered laundry bags stuffed with clothes that, for some reason, held some fascination for me (the bags not the clothes, I was utterly sick of them by that time).

Earlier this year, as I struggled to fit our duvets (Brinkhaus silk and wool filled brilliant), sheets and pillows (Ringsted Dun, excellent) into a suitable receptacle for going camping (we camp in luxurious style), I thought of those bags again. Weren’t they huge? Couldn’t they accommodate everything? And so I looked them up.

They are really cheap and if you travel by car, I honestly can’t think of a much better way to transport clothes and the like. But, don’t buy too cheap. The really cheap chequered ones of yore can mark the stuff you put in them (the dye is not stable). Then I found these utterly brilliant Jumbo bags from Dot Com Gift Shop. I know it’s slightly mad to rave about a bag but there you go – they are just great: reasonably priced at five Black Jacks under a fiver, good quality, I love the designs (check out the Christmas one which I intend to fill with Christmas presents and not attempt to hide, at all) which are jolly and sweet. You can use them to temporarily tidy stuff away, for storage (although only in safe, stable environment, if you want long term storage that resists damp, wet and all but the  most resistant rodent, you need these Ultimate boxes from Lakeland, which are superb for storing things in the garage/shed, but are not cheap.

And, best of all, and not like boxes, when you’re done with these bags, they fold up really small to be put away.

Sorry about the picture. I’m in the middle of building work and I really can’t be bothered to find mine and stuff them full of stuff to photograph them, so I just nicked it off the DGGS website, I’m reckoning they won’t mind. Plus it tells you that they are made out of recycled plastic bottles!

 

The Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum and Garden Cafe, Dedham

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Dedham is a village near where I live. We stumbled upon it a few years ago, when we did a marvellous country walk along its river bank (the Stour). It is an area of outstanding natural beauty that is heavily protected and, historically, always seems to have had residents who care about what happens there. It is Constable country: the artist lived down the road at East Bergholt and all around is the landscape he painted. He went to school in Dedham – you can see where in the square, the Old Grammar School – apparently walking there every morning along the same sort of route we took when we first discovered the village.

Dedham doesn’t have many shops, but it does have probably the best toy shop in the world (more on this another time).

The last time we went, I thought I’d see where we could have some good tea and cake. And this search took me to the Garden Cafe in the Munnings Art Museum (you see how I access culture? Via cake). The art museum wasn’t anything I’d ever seen or come across in Dedham before, and indeed, it is tucked away, nearly a mile’s walk from the village centre and badly signposted once you’re through the park (good playground). At one stage you are in deep Dedham suburbia (I guess this is where the houses that cost less than a million are) and you wonder if you’re in the right place at all. But you are and you keep going and then, there before you is Castle House, where Sir Alfred used to live and where a great part of his paintings are now kept.

(You can drive there, but we walked from Dedham.)

The museum is lovely. I love that children only pay £1 (adults: £6.50). I confess I’d never heard of him. Munnings painted lots of horses, he lost an eye to a bramble bush and went on to become a war artist for the Canadian army. He was controversial, as president of the RA, he made a speech slagging off modernists like Picasso and Matisse, live on BBC radio air. His first wife, Florence, attempted suicide on their wedding night. She killed herself two years later. The film Summer in February, starring him from Downton Abbey and Dominic Cooper, is about this part of his life (I’ve yet to see it, but want to). Florence was expunged from all record of Alfred’s life.

I didn’t come away feeling exactly warm towards him. But nevertheless it was a captivating museum. Although most of the pictures are of horses, my favourite was the bon viveur one above which is called Taggs Island and is displayed above the stairs.

Alfred’s second wife, Violet, had a black pekingese called Black Knight, which she carried everywhere with her. When he died, she had him stuffed and continued to carry him everywhere with her. One of the stewards in the museum remembers her, in the village, asking other customers to hold the stuffed dog, whilst she got money out to complete her transactions. There was even a ‘autobiography’ written by him, Diary of a Freeman (the dog was made a Freeman of the City of London, of course)..Black Knight is still there, stuffed and forever asleep on a cushion, in a glass case in the museum, with a red telephone next to him, presumably so he can order room service, when no-one is looking. My youngest was transfixed by this. Just goes to show that Karl Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette, isn’t the first pet to chronicle their comings and goings.

The cafe in the garden, next to Alfred’s studio, is lovely. I mean, really first class. The staff were just delightful, the cakes (and you know how I am about cakes) DELICIOUS, all light and airy and even though I didn’t think I wanted them, I managed to eat everything on my plate. We had a coffee and walnut cake and a Victoria sponge, which had just been put out and was giant and multi-layered, the size of one of those pans we have in Italy, to cook pasta for fourteen in.  I didn’t try the food but it looked really good – all sorts of healthy salads and nice looking paninis. I promised the children we’d go back in the autumn to sample lunch, but it was a promise I mostly largely for myself

Do check opening times – of both the museum and the cafe. At the time of writing they were:

“The Café’s opening hours are 10:00am to 5:00pm and the Museum is open 2:00pm to 5:00pm Wednesday – Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays (April to October). Please check in advance if we are open at other times.”

Pump Street Bakery, Orford

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Orford ness is one of our favourite places. We go there at least once a year, for a very long walk, a picnic, and chats. Even my youngest can manage to walk around the red and blue walk (not green though, it’s never been open when we’ve been there, we always time it wrong).

(For those on Fitbit, you can rack up about 15,000 steps, or six miles  walking those routes.)

What we like to do is get up really early and head out without breakfast, fantasising about what we’ll eat from the Pump Street Bakery, when we get there. The fact that such an amazing bakery exists in what is a tiny village in the middle of nowhere astounds and delights me. And makes me very jealous. I wish we had one where I live in Suffolk.

This is a tiny bakery, that is crammed into an old house. There are very few seats. But it is glorious. Please don’t miss it if you venture anywhere near Orford (which is a very pretty village). We’ve sampled the Bear’s Claws, the doughnuts, the brownies, the Eccles cakes and the almond croissants so far. You have to try the Eccles cake to believe that currants can be held in a puff pastry and be a thing of eye-watering beauty.

We have breakfast – cappuccinos (very good) with pastries dipped in them, perched on the benches outside.  I want to try a gibassier next time I’m there. I’m afraid the pastries are so good, I completely forget to photograph them, so the picture above is a photo of my feet on Orford ness beach. Probably my favourite beach in the world.

Not to be missed.

Swing seats (i dondoli)

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On my uncle’s farm in Parma, there was always a swing seat or ‘il dondolo’. We would fight to sit on it and it seemed so much luxurious than a sum of its parts – basically a garden seat which could swing (swang?).

For the first four decades of my life, I never had so much as a scrap of garden. I had a window ledge, on which I could have balanced a plant pot, over the heads of the litigious, but I was not brave enough. In my childhood flat, I did have wide window sills, atop which I would grow pot plants. I was master of my miniature world but somehow this has not translated into my adult life (I know nothing about gardening, it really is like a language I can’t speak).

Anyway. When I got me a garden I went slightly mad with all the things I always wanted, but never had. All manner of garden games, climbing frames, slides, swings. And finally, a swing seat.

I got my first one six years ago. I went for beauty – wooden – with a cream awning. Mistake. Sure I could put cushions on it but it wasn’t really built for comfort, more perching and thinking “isn’t this wooden structure so, wooden?” Then, after a few winters, the cream awning went green and ripped. So when my friend Meg got a swing seat which she talked about with love – how comfy it was, how much it had changed her life etc. I stored this piece of information away in the back of my head.

IMG_2358

Then they sold out.

This year, come April I was in there, at B&Q (from whence it came) to see if it was as comfortable as Meg said.

“Don’t they do it in any other colours?” my partner asked, pained expression on his face. I caught him one day looking up more classy swing seats – they exist but my God do they cost. Anyway, true to what Meg has said, this is so comfy. It sits outside the back door and whenever I have a moment I go and sit or lie on it. Sometimes I work on it, legs outstretched, laptop where it’s meant to be. I’ve also fallen asleep on it. It’s a relatively small thing which has added to the pleasures of life. It augments sunny days and we all sit on it after school’s out. It’s been a really good purchase. I even let my partner sit on it (he did assemble it after all: which took a couple of hours).

(And yeah, I am aware there are wars on. I work in newspapers, this is why I need a swing seat to buy moments of calm and peace.)

Sure you have to take the cushion in if it rains heavily. And in the winter it will need to be striped down (awning and cushions off), but in the meantime, it’s everything you’d want in a swing seat, at a good price. Have I mentioned how comfy it is? And it has a small table upon which you can balance, you know, whatever you want that’s small.

My friend Karen has an Old Rocker – and by gosh they are beautiful and Karen saved up and deserves it – but they cost lots. Too much for me.

But, for the money you can’t beat this one from B&Q. Trust me I’ve looked.

The Nutribullet

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Ours is not a house short on gadgets. This is due to many things. We cook and bake a lot. My partner and I were fully formed adults when we joined households and we both cook and bake a lot, as I just said, and we had our own homes. So when we threw our lot in together, we discovered we now had four sieves, 12 pans that all did the same thing, 25 wooden spoons etc.

We have a juicer, a blender, a grinder (two actually), two ice cream machines, a food processor, a food mixer, a dehydrator, a stick blender with enough attachments to build a robot man…you get the idea. And we/I use all of them. Regularly.

So did I need a Nutribullet?

Strictly speaking no. There’s lots of talk about how it busts open the cells in your food. Sounds fabulous! But that’s what your teeth do and also, that’s what any good blender will do.

And make no mistake, the Nutribullet is a blender. That’s it.

But this is why it’s good and this is why I’ve used mine every day since I got it at Christmas.

The foot print is tiny (14cm) compared to that of any other blender that I know of. So it sits on the work surface and you’ll use it.

It’s unbelievably simple to clean. You just rinse the blade part under hot water and put it on the draining board and stick the cup part in the dishwasher if you have one, if not that is so easy to clean, too. If you do this immediately after you’ve made your smoothie you don’t need to do anything else. I have a toothbrush I use to clean any bits that get stuck under the blades, occasionally, but that’s it. No seals to take off like on my other blender (a 1000W machine).

And those really are the two reasons why it’s great. It’s easy to use and easy to clean. What more do you want? It comes with another blade – a grinder – which I use to make things like oat flour (just chuck in porridge oats or oatmeal). The Nutribullet comes in two versions, a 600W one, which is what I have, and a 900W one which costs 50% more.

You get two blades and various container ‘cups’  (the large one is the one I use most) in the smaller version, three blades and various other gizmos in the larger version. I’m sure you can decide which one, if either, is right for you. It costs about £100 for the 600W version, £150 for the other one.

I got mine (with my press discount of 20% which I’ve had for 20 years) from Lakeland which offers a life time guarantee on everything (or at least it used to but this now seems to have disappeared from its website so I’ve asked them to clarify) *.

I use it every day to make smoothies of varying degrees of “Gwyneth-ness” and my children have one every morning (God we are so GOOD). If you need some smoothie inspiration see my drop down menu on the right for ‘smoothies’.

*And Lakeland did:

“Thank you for getting in touch to ask about our guarantee.

We’ve recently changed the wording on our guarantee but it’s still the same Lakeland ethos.

Our guarantee states ‘We’re only happy when you’re happy’. So if you’re not delighted with your purchase or our service, please tell us so that we can put it right.

So, if at any time, you feel the product hasn’t given you value for money or develops a fault we’ll be happy to help.”

 

Zingy green smoothie: cucumber, spinach, apple, mint, lime, ginger

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I know there are loads of debates about smoothies and how much sugar they contain. I agree that you should consume more vegetables than fruit. But, if you eat the whole fruit – either by actually eating it or blitzing it into a smoothie – then you get lots of fibre (both insoluble and soluble), vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. The rise in diabetes isn’t due to people eating too much fruit in its whole, natural form; it’s eating too much refined sugar in sugary drinks and too many refined carbs that busts your pancreas.

Anyway, this smoothie is really zingy and my partner loved it, but my youngest struggled with it – she prefers something that contains banana/berries at its base.

I always put a cube of frozen spinach into my smoothies. Okay, not always, but mostly.

Anyway, for this one you need, for four small glasses:

About 20g frozen spinach (or fresh of course)

Half a thumb size of ginger – be careful, if it’s fresh and good it’ll be quite powerful. I used half a thumb size and it was a bit too much for the children, adults loved it though

The juice of one lime

Half a bunch of mint, you know those bunches you get in the supermarket that cost about 85p (rip off)

Half a small cucumber, washed, not peeled and cut into chunks

One medjool date to bump up the sweetness and fibre a bit but you can leave this out

Apple juice. I get mine from our local farmer’s market, it’s really good but if you can’t get really good apple juice then blend in an apple (not the pips) and some water

Put all the ingredients in a blender/Nutribullet and taste it: because lime sizes vary and the recipe isn’t precise, you may need to add that date, or a bit more apple juice or water or cucumber. The ginger and mint are strong tastes, the cucumber calms it all down, the apple juice adds liquid and sweetness.

i think this would be really good if you had a cold. I can still feel the zingy effects over an hour later.