BBQ roll-call

Late evening, and I've just finished supper of lunch leftovers of my almost favourite kind.*

Our first barbecue in the new house - the first I've hosted for several years, and the only one I've been to in the last two summers - was almost rained off, but valiantly Matt and Terry supervised the coals, and then the sausages and veg-kebobs, and brought the party outside while I hovered and stressed and wished we'd just stuck everything in the oven or managed to buy a garden table of an appropriate size (and height**).

Flesh and M managed to arrive while I was unshowered and still in my jim-jams, and babysat and washed up (irrespectively); everyone else was an hour later than I thought.

The rest is a bit of a blur, so the food, the food:

• Tabbouleh (tomatoes and herbs from our garden)
• Cous cous (with turmeric, chili, bay, rosemary and oregano. May not have worked - lots left; I have yet to taste)
• Hummous (never tastes like bought, whatever I do. Nigel Slater says 6 (six!) dessert spoons of tahini, but I can't bear the bitterness of more than one)
• Salt and Cracked Black Pepper Kettle Chips (my absolute catering mainstay. Any excuse, really.)
• Mixed salad (tomatoes from the garden, as well as cherry tomatoes on the vine from the off-licence - £1.30 for 2 huge long trusses)
• Potato salad (chives from the garden)
• Waitrose really super sausages - pork &: sweet chilli, smoked pepper, leek & chive and garlic
• Vegan marjoram and sage sausages
• Aubergine, pepper & mushroom kebabs

I made up the Turtle Temptations for pud, Becky made fantastic mini chocolate cakes, and Marina made great apple crumble with the tart, tart apples from their garden. Really super-doops.

The best thing - there are sausages left over for tomorrow. A rarely sanctioned treat in our pescetarian household.

* Christmas always wins.
** There's a reason ours was reduced to clear - it came up to my mid-thigh.

The great Betty Crocker backlog, 2008

When my dad died in the middle of the summer, we went to his new-ish house for the first time, to see what we would need to start dealing with. After we looked for paperwork and valuables we checked out the fridge for stuff needing immediate attention. Lots of stuff (paperwork and perishables) we couldn't quite make decisions on, so doors were closed, drawers re-drawn, boxes shut and decisions deferred.

Being a bit on the nosy side, I opened lots of cupboard doors and assessed my dad's recent (post-divorce) lifestyle. So much was so typically dad, from brands and types of foodstuffs to the sheer volume of stuff, and the scant regard for sell-by dates.

There was a huge great drawer full of baking stuff, lots of it opened and half-used and out of date, where he'd clearly had a real flurry of baking last year and not touched in the last 10-12 months.

And then I found the bounty. High up in a cupboard in the corner, boxes and boxes of Betty Crocker. Cake mixes, brownie mix, cookie mix and Bisquik. And all the requisite frosting too. Oh yes, my provincial English daddy loved his trashy American branded bakery! There was a Pilsbury brownie mix and Eagle Brand Turtle Temptations to boot. (Now, they are such a gosh-darned novelty they deserve a link: http://www.eaglebrandkits.com/products.asp). Of course, 2/3 of them were out of date, and the rest were within an inch of it, but I took each and every one and stuffed them in the boot of our car.

And now, the great Betty Crocker bake-off commences. This week, in a snatched moment while Babs was sleeping (mixes really do have the time advantage), were made 18 quite delicious oatmeal raisin cookies. Here are the 12 that remain:


Thank you, daddy.

Buy! No, don't consume! No, buy! Oh God, I don't know.

There's some irony going on at Dwell magazine.

This month's (October 2008*) issue is, according to the editorial (and yes, ok, the main thrust of its features), all about sustainability, with an explicit nod to the notion 'consume less'.

So I chuckled a little that it took me all the way to page 50ish before I found any actual content, but by 135 of 232 I was frankly sick of not being able to follow a feature because every right-hand page is an advert, some of which, for brands I don't know, I simply couldn't fathom.

I understand they have to sell advertising space so they can flog an annual (10 issues) subscription for a bargain-basement 20 bucks, but good golly, that's a lot of adverts. It really clutters things up. It also kind of makes me feel disrespected, a bit marginalised - the reader is less important than the advertiser. Right hand pages are my main focus - of course the marketers want their goods there. The whole magazine is domestic design porn, and makes me dissatisfied in the same way fashion magazines did before I liberated myself from their monthly tyranny. So it's perfect for flogging stuff.

But don't then tell me to consume less. My solution will be to stop consuming your magazine.

*It arrived 27 August. From the USA. Go figure. [Note to publishing pedants: I don't need to fill up my brain with knowledge about why. (Which doesn't mean I don't wish I did know. Though it wouldn't stop my irritation at the fact)]

Only ladies of a certain age

And foreign women.

I just came home from seeing Flesh is Grass, and a lovely little time we had. Babs and I had a happy journey there, she watching trees, me watching another mother, and both we mothers feeling guilty we couldn't help a third with her toddler and her buggy battling a bus driver who took corners too fast and wouldn't keep the bus still so lady3 could fold her pushchair like he wanted. Lady3 avoided our apologetic smiles and her toddler looked timid. Lady2 looked scary at first (young, pushy, child big enough to walk and happily sit on bus seats reclining like a king in a pushchair) but smiled widely as we were embarrassed by lady3's predicament and at some cute kiddie-baby interaction.

The trip home - hardly traumatic by any means - reiterated my misanthropy and provided another illustration of the flippant entitlement that makes the world a scary place to me. Three girls had hopped (waddled) on ahead of us, and plonked themselves in the wheelchair/pushchair space - one in the flip-down seat opposite (and across the space from) the other two. And there they sat, as I manoeuvred the buggy in between them. And there they sat as I put on the brake and took off my bag to keep the buggy from up-ending. And there they sat as the bus took off and I clung on to the pole to steady myself and on to the buggy to steady the baby. And there they sat as the two seats across the aisle remained empty. On the bottom deck. In the priority seats. Like the world was theirs. With their funny sleb-influenced handbags in the crooks of their elbows. And I wanted to ask them if they wouldn't mind just moving across to the other two seats so I could sit down and keep my baby safe without dislocating my shoulder. But I was scared.

Only ladies of a certain age, and foreign women, help women with buggies. But I think that's a different post.

Wanted, E17

I'm not quite sure about freecycle. I mean, I really like it for the giving/getting side - caveats to come - but I'm not so sure about the asking side.

Giving is just brilliant. Re-homing my old stuff for which I haven't the need, space, time, energy or [add your own, I'm sure the list must be long], keeping it from landfill and saving someone else some hard-earned is just perfect. Getting is just brilliant too, and it's perfect when you just need something for a short while - like I just got some baby bottles, saving myself some of my vastly reduced income, and was able to freecycle them on after a few weeks when babs just all-out refused to ditch tit for teat. But the getting can be hard, and here my suspicions kick in and I retreat to the more hostile attitude that armours my misanthropic nature. I just use the 'digest' facility, and get an email or two a day full of offers and takens and wanteds. Yet responding to offers, however quickly, usually results in disappointment. The exception of the baby bottles is perhaps because some folk find sharing that kind of thing distasteful - not us, we like germs (it's becoming a mantra); only 3 people asked when I offered them on. But everything else I've responded to (and they've been pretty insignificant; I have modest needs) has already been taken no matter how instantly I respond. My only conclusion is that people sit at the message board like vultures, picking off the best carrion and leaving only the bones for those of us with lives, jobs, stuff to do.

But these folk are not the object of my real irritation. It's the folk setting up home and having babies and asking for *everything* they might need, including the stuff that I don't have because the baby doesn't *need* it and I'd rather not participate in the rampant consumerism and the manufactured needs marketed to us from every angle once we're up the duff. Today there was a request for a bumbo, a super-duper baby seat that gets the tiddler upright as soon as their little head can be held up properly for a while at a time. Now fine, they're 30 quid and they're used for only a couple of months, so we should be trading them, not buying brand new and sticking up the loft til the clearout that takes it to landfill, but really, freecyle? Sure, if it's offered, well count your lucky stars if you get it, that's great. But Is this not what eBay is for?

Another recent ask was for a tumble drier, which got my goat til I read the requester was disabled, and somehow that pushed the right buttons and I didn't feel irked any more (though now that I'm thinking about disability living allowance and charities and suchlike I'm reviewing that. We'll see where I get to).

But the people asking for all-sorts for a new baby, when so much is offered, just cheeses me off. You can get stuff so cheaply all over the place, it's almost disgusting. So if you don't want it new cos your principles won't allow, you can get it secondhand from the charity shops and do two good things for the price of one. Everything you can't find there you can find pretty cheap on eBay, and you can respond to the many, myriad offers on freecycle. Or there's the newly launched SwapShop Yahoo! group that's moderated by the same damn people in our neck of the woods. I just think the ask is greedy, and belies a kind of sense of entitlement displayed by so many people having babies. If you're having a baby and it's in the least possible way planned, heck even if it's not, you've got several months to figure out your situation and find the few essential odds and sods. And so little is essential. Including the baby.

I mean, weaning cubes? I just bought two two-packs of ice cube trays for a grand total of two pounds from woolies. And I'm gonna keep them forever out of landfill and others' wanting hands, just on bloody principle.