Waitrose Food Illustrated lied. I may have to take it up with the editor. January 09's Lancashire Cheese Straws were alleged to take 10 minutes' preparation and 10 minutes' cooking. Lie. A single egg yolk was deemed sufficient to bind 200g flour, 100g butter and 100g cheese. Another lie. With the rolling and breaking and moistening and re-rolling, 17 cheese straws somehow took 40 minutes to prepare and almost 15 minutes to cook. I was planning to make a second batch, but I abandoned that idea as the dough crumbled for a second time and all my edges feathered. Still, they looked ok, they tasted reasonable (a bit dry; short, maybe. I don't really know what that means), and they all got eaten. Along with:
Feta filo parcels. Fresh filo better than frozen - frozen a little floury. Easy to make but a bit on the dull side. Currently seeking new filling ideas. Comments, please.
Spanish tortilla. Served in cubes, which surprised the half-Span guest. Thanks, Rebato's. Nod to Marina for the prep tips. (Marina's (Spanish) way? Nothing like the Good Housekeeping way. No turmeric, for starters. Yes, she was as confused by that as I was.).
My staple salsa. Too chunky for crisps; best eaten with a spoon.
My staple guacamole. So long since I catered, I almost forgot how to make it. Fortunately had bought lemons... I belatedly remembered the lime. Not sure I actually tasted the guac. Boo.
Tyrell's ready salted hand-cooked crisps. Never tasted.
Sainsbury's 'mozzarella cheese straws' - mozzarella in their 'Signature' (TM) crumb. Awful. Oozed on heating, tasteless and rubbery mozz.
Sainsbury's 'garlic and cheese bites. Still in the freezer.
Crostini with pesto and roasted tomatoes. Yummy, easy, but the ciabatta not toasted enough.
Chocolate sandwich cake, with raspberry jam. I'm so over the jam filling. Back to buttercream for me.
Chocolate cornflake cakes. From the Woman's Own Cookery Book, 1968. Quadrupled the quantity; made 24 bigguns. Delish. Steve asked how old I am, 12? Killjoy. (He's from Manchester. Says it all.)
Dates stuffed with marzipan (resembling hot dogs) like my mum used to. They look so anachronistic, I was quite embarrassed. But people liked them, clearly didn't remember them from the 70s and it meant Flesh had a little more to eat than the plain ciabatta that was otherwise the only thing I had bothered to concoct for a vegan.
Not a bad spread, I think, but the table was in the corner, and people sat rather than milled, so it was hard to nibble without someone constantly offering plates around. Always happy to fulfil a stereotype, our American friend, S, ignored everyone else's reserve and the lack of plates and napkins and asked for a napkin so she could carry more back to her place on the sofa.
I stupidly didn't buy any soft drinks, but had invited a clutch of drivers and a room full of parents of under-ones, so I forced booze onto most of them, or they made do with water.
Next time, I will ditch the ready mades, find more stuff I can make the day before (5 hours in the morning was not long enough), remembere the soft drinks and I might try these cheese straws instead.
Thursday 29 January 2009
How green am I?
OK, another post inspired by Fleshisgrass. This time more triumphant than last, I hope. Though almost definitely much more smug. But with a dash of embarrassment, and humility; we have a baby, for goodness sake; we ain't that green.
We do, however:
Compost municipally, therefore composting much more than we could domestically. I really don't throw any organic matter - save for baby excretions and chalk and woodpulp nappies - in the bin. They'll take everything but animal bones, and we don't have those in the house.
Use washable nappies. And second-hand ones, at that. (OK, not all of them were second hand, but give a girl a break).
Flush all our baby's excrement down the loo. People don't know it's illegal to put poops in landfill. That's not why I don't. But we plop the poop from the disposables we use at night time as well as the washables we use all day down the loo. It's bad enough we're chucking a 'biodegradable' nappy a day into a place it can't degrade, without sticking the effluent in there too.
Buy ecover laundry liquid and washing up liquid in bulk, and re-fill. It's more expensive (yup), but I'm just that bloody selfless. We have tried the cheaper of the reuseable washing balls on the market, but they may have given me a minor skin irritation. To my shame, I have bought soap nuts, but for that reason, I'm a bit scared to use them.
Re-use bags, like, all the time. I have one of Flesh's unbeloved 'fey' onyabags, a parachute nylon shopper that folds up tiny and clips onto your bag-bag, and we routinely use the bags for life for our big shops and any placky bags we come across as bin bags.
Turn our noses right up at nappy sacks. Heavens above. Is there nothing we stupid breeders won't buy as baby necessities? Well, (shock!) chez nous, we don't wrap our nappies! Unless we need a change when we're out, when mummy always has a stash of bread bags or supermarket veg bags or newspaper supplement bags. Or just puts the dirty nappy (shock!) unwrapped in the bottom of the buggy. Heaven forfend.
Use a Sigg bottle; like Flesh, because it won't photodegrade and saves the money, plastic, energy and pollution associated with the bottled water I would otherwise consume by the gallon, out and about.
Re-use and recycle aluminium foil. Obsessively.
Wash and re-use plastic freezer bags. Obsessively.
Make the baby's food in bulk and freeze in portions.
Strive to throw as little food away as possible.
Buy as few new clothes as I can bear. In 2008 I think I bought: one pair of maternity trousers (taking the total to two), 3 nursing bras (different sizes, as my boobs scaled down), two summer cardigans, two pairs of jeans, one summer top, a winter jumper and 2 winter cardigans, one work shirt. On top of that I bought a pair of canvas shoes, Terry bought me some winter boots, and Babs bought me some replacement slippers (she was sick on mine and I went without for 6 months) for Christmas. This is a short list compared to some, yet it does make me feel guilty.
Dress the baby almost exclusively in hand-me-downs and second-hand clothes; buy organic cotton when I do buy brand new.
OK, pillory me. I could try harder. Nothing on here is particularly ground-breaking, or inconvenient. Furthermore, I have neglected to mention the bad things I do, like occasionally driving to the supermarket, and heating all the rooms in the house most times the heating comes on. I could override Terry and get curtains for the two rooms without, and keep more heat in that way. I could remember to always turn off the laptop at the wall (d'oh).
I'm going to think of the things I could do better, and try and do them better. I need to curb my shopping habit and my generally acquisitive nature. I will get back to you.
We do, however:
Compost municipally, therefore composting much more than we could domestically. I really don't throw any organic matter - save for baby excretions and chalk and woodpulp nappies - in the bin. They'll take everything but animal bones, and we don't have those in the house.
Use washable nappies. And second-hand ones, at that. (OK, not all of them were second hand, but give a girl a break).
Flush all our baby's excrement down the loo. People don't know it's illegal to put poops in landfill. That's not why I don't. But we plop the poop from the disposables we use at night time as well as the washables we use all day down the loo. It's bad enough we're chucking a 'biodegradable' nappy a day into a place it can't degrade, without sticking the effluent in there too.
Buy ecover laundry liquid and washing up liquid in bulk, and re-fill. It's more expensive (yup), but I'm just that bloody selfless. We have tried the cheaper of the reuseable washing balls on the market, but they may have given me a minor skin irritation. To my shame, I have bought soap nuts, but for that reason, I'm a bit scared to use them.
Re-use bags, like, all the time. I have one of Flesh's unbeloved 'fey' onyabags, a parachute nylon shopper that folds up tiny and clips onto your bag-bag, and we routinely use the bags for life for our big shops and any placky bags we come across as bin bags.
Turn our noses right up at nappy sacks. Heavens above. Is there nothing we stupid breeders won't buy as baby necessities? Well, (shock!) chez nous, we
Use a Sigg bottle; like Flesh, because it won't photodegrade and saves the money, plastic, energy and pollution associated with the bottled water I would otherwise consume by the gallon, out and about.
Re-use and recycle aluminium foil. Obsessively.
Wash and re-use plastic freezer bags. Obsessively.
Make the baby's food in bulk and freeze in portions.
Strive to throw as little food away as possible.
Buy as few new clothes as I can bear. In 2008 I think I bought: one pair of maternity trousers (taking the total to two), 3 nursing bras (different sizes, as my boobs scaled down), two summer cardigans, two pairs of jeans, one summer top, a winter jumper and 2 winter cardigans, one work shirt. On top of that I bought a pair of canvas shoes, Terry bought me some winter boots, and Babs bought me some replacement slippers (she was sick on mine and I went without for 6 months) for Christmas. This is a short list compared to some, yet it does make me feel guilty.
Dress the baby almost exclusively in hand-me-downs and second-hand clothes; buy organic cotton when I do buy brand new.
OK, pillory me. I could try harder. Nothing on here is particularly ground-breaking, or inconvenient. Furthermore, I have neglected to mention the bad things I do, like occasionally driving to the supermarket, and heating all the rooms in the house most times the heating comes on. I could override Terry and get curtains for the two rooms without, and keep more heat in that way. I could remember to always turn off the laptop at the wall (d'oh).
I'm going to think of the things I could do better, and try and do them better. I need to curb my shopping habit and my generally acquisitive nature. I will get back to you.
Wow, where did January go?
Blimey, this month just disappeared in a daze.
Recently, I hypothesised to myself that parous women have memory problems (there's a link goes here to an observer news item) for a while post-natally not because we're wired to remember nothing but our babies, or because we go wibbly-brained in the puerperium, or because we're chronically sleep-deprived*, or any other scandalously patronising reason, but because in the absence of work, or school, or other regular activities involving temporal patterns and temporal conventions, and travel, and down-time, and head-space (the vital processing / consolidating type), it's very hard to get events and memories into any sensible order. My head is, post-partum, just in a bit of a jumble, all the time. There's nothing to add order or delineation to my memories. I remember conversations (well, snippets), but can't place when. I don't link things that happened in a day with things that happened the same evening. Weeks are a bit of a blur, and I can't remember what days things happened on, or what I was doing last Friday, say. To me, this is all about temporal signposting. The days have lost their particular meanings - Mondays and Fridays can be interchangeable now; though I have the 'no Terry for 5 days' and 'Whoo hoo, Terry for 2 days' thoughts/feelings - but that's not the same as the Sunday evening terrors and Monday misery and Friday pub elation that were with me week in, week out, for, ooh, 20 years. Not since Babs and I had very regular daily activities when she was 4-16 weeks old, and I knew what day it was by what we were doing, have I really felt part of the world. When my dad died, our weeks changed. I'm not sure how much the two things are related; I just know that after the few weeks of back and forth to mum's I felt wrong, and I worked out that it was that I had no pattern namore.
Anyway, it's now the end of January, and I remember thinking back in September about going back to work on Jan 13th and how close it felt, and yet now Christmas feels like miles away and January has been a blur despite the temporal signposting of work (part-time maybe doesn't make the difference). I don't know, but possibly because, with all the other things going on -
writing the thank you letters
getting cards out (almost) on time to my 8 friends with January birthdays
dispatching ex-tenant
dealing with remaining tenants' anxieties
fixing up flat
angsting about (not) finding new tenant
sorting out house rental
finding new childcare at very short notice
negotiating the childcare contract
writing a coursework assignment
going on more course dates
re-acquainting myself with the MOSES project
likewise the Safety Culture project
sorting out dad's tax return
catering and hosting a little party
oh, and keeping the household going with shopping and cooking (nod to T for some good cookin' for a whole week of early hometimes) and laundry and the occasional bit of cleaning
- I haven't really had the head-space to process, let alone consolidate things.
Anyway, suffice to say, it ain't because I've had a bloody baby.
* Babies do sleep, y'all; and you know what? You can train them: to sleep at sensible times and to stay in bed (going back to sleep) for decent durations.
Recently, I hypothesised to myself that parous women have memory problems (there's a link goes here to an observer news item) for a while post-natally not because we're wired to remember nothing but our babies, or because we go wibbly-brained in the puerperium, or because we're chronically sleep-deprived*, or any other scandalously patronising reason, but because in the absence of work, or school, or other regular activities involving temporal patterns and temporal conventions, and travel, and down-time, and head-space (the vital processing / consolidating type), it's very hard to get events and memories into any sensible order. My head is, post-partum, just in a bit of a jumble, all the time. There's nothing to add order or delineation to my memories. I remember conversations (well, snippets), but can't place when. I don't link things that happened in a day with things that happened the same evening. Weeks are a bit of a blur, and I can't remember what days things happened on, or what I was doing last Friday, say. To me, this is all about temporal signposting. The days have lost their particular meanings - Mondays and Fridays can be interchangeable now; though I have the 'no Terry for 5 days' and 'Whoo hoo, Terry for 2 days' thoughts/feelings - but that's not the same as the Sunday evening terrors and Monday misery and Friday pub elation that were with me week in, week out, for, ooh, 20 years. Not since Babs and I had very regular daily activities when she was 4-16 weeks old, and I knew what day it was by what we were doing, have I really felt part of the world. When my dad died, our weeks changed. I'm not sure how much the two things are related; I just know that after the few weeks of back and forth to mum's I felt wrong, and I worked out that it was that I had no pattern namore.
Anyway, it's now the end of January, and I remember thinking back in September about going back to work on Jan 13th and how close it felt, and yet now Christmas feels like miles away and January has been a blur despite the temporal signposting of work (part-time maybe doesn't make the difference). I don't know, but possibly because, with all the other things going on -
writing the thank you letters
getting cards out (almost) on time to my 8 friends with January birthdays
dispatching ex-tenant
dealing with remaining tenants' anxieties
fixing up flat
angsting about (not) finding new tenant
sorting out house rental
finding new childcare at very short notice
negotiating the childcare contract
writing a coursework assignment
going on more course dates
re-acquainting myself with the MOSES project
likewise the Safety Culture project
sorting out dad's tax return
catering and hosting a little party
oh, and keeping the household going with shopping and cooking (nod to T for some good cookin' for a whole week of early hometimes) and laundry and the occasional bit of cleaning
- I haven't really had the head-space to process, let alone consolidate things.
Anyway, suffice to say, it ain't because I've had a bloody baby.
* Babies do sleep, y'all; and you know what? You can train them: to sleep at sensible times and to stay in bed (going back to sleep) for decent durations.
Friday 2 January 2009
Christmas Crocker
Well, Christmas passed without major incident. Flesh and M and little Weaver came for dinner and vegan mince pies on the 20th, in a nice boozy evening that involved Christmas bubbles and ended with us taking a hundred photos and me, Flesh and R practising photo faces with varying degrees of ineptitude.
On the 21st, Terry's sister and her family came over an hour earlier than expected, as we were finishing lunch and trying to coax 'just a little more, please' into Babs. They were invited 'after lunch', but when I asked if they'd eaten (stupid, stupid me) R said no and threw me into panic, since we had nothing in. They ignored the mince pies I put in front of them as we all had tea, and I finally cornered Terry in the kitchen and hissed at him to address the lunch situation. Thank god, we had bread in because F&M had stayed over and so Terry had been out for bread for breakfast. Sister agreed to sandwiches but for someone so direct was bizarrely vague about what she wanted, then laboriously picked out all the cheese in her cheese sarnie; niece didn't like any of the options I ran through, so sister told us she'd be happy with bread and butter. Well, sorry, but no-one comes to my house and has only b&b and water. Fortunately she does eat tuna and sweetcorn, so we rustled up a sarnie for her too and while they ate 3pm lunch I tried not to feel uncomfortable about our apparent rubbish hospitality. Babs handled all the passing and the prodding very well but was very happy to go off for an afternoon nap. Although the conversation was fluent (sister is very talkative, unlike father), it was still a taxing afternoon and I was very relieved when they left.
On Christmas eve we took the baby to be weighed, because I was convinced she'd been eating better and must surely have put on more in these three weeks than the pitiful 100 grams in the fortnight before. Well, my mistake: no weight gain whatsoever. So our 10 minute pop was an hour long visit, as they made us see yet another health visitor to tell me something different from the health visitor before. (Conclusion: lack of continuity means lack of tailored and meaningful advice. No single health professional has a real grasp of our habits, routine, or my efforts to get more food into the baby; since they don't read each others' entries in my hand-held notes they don't even get to build up a picture that way. They recommend vitamins almost every time I visit, as though lack of weight gain equals lack of nutrients. She'll eat broccoli for breakfast, for Christ's sake, and she eats better than we do.) To be fair, we did get some reasonable tips: give water when she wakes up at night to reduce the reward and feed her from our plates so she'll eat more, but they did nothing to stop me worrying, in fact they probably made me worry more.
Mummy arrived in the afternoon with fish pie for supper. After a smoked salmon and bagel breakfast we opened pressies on Christmas day until Babs was overwhelmed enough for us to decide to hold stuff back for boxing day, and then we cooked. Terry pulled off a yummy and seriously meaty meat-free stuffed cabbage with mushrooms and chestnuts. I wished I hadn't decided lunch would be at tea-time and was a bit stroppy by the time we sat down at 5 o'clock when I should have been on the sofa for two hours already; the same old bloody red wine/onion gravy was a bit disappointing given it was a special occasion and the potatoes were just a touch too floury to be brilliantly crisp roasties. But, in our usually meat-free household, we had fantastic pigs in blankets - Waitrose perfectly seasoned and traceable pork chipolatas wrapped in their similarly traceable streaky bacon - and Crocker-tastic stuffing balls: seasoned pork sausagemeat combined with the fantastically packaged Kraft (R) Stove Top Stuffing Mix from - where else? - me dad's house! Feeel the quality.
On Boxing day mum and I spent the morning making feta filo parcels (surprisingly easy), vegan sausage rolls and hot spiced nuts, then we all went to join Flesh and M and their families at their house, which meant more pass the baby and yet more confusion for poor Babs. She did a very good job of holding it together while being thrown around by over-enthusiastic wannabe grandparents and had a nap with her new alligator on Flesh's bed.
Meanwhile we got to try the infamous vegan cheesecake, which was good but very sharp; M's dad made me laugh and laugh as usual (makes me feel like a young child and he's the funny uncle); M's granny was good value as only deaf and slightly batty old folk can be; and we got to make off with some decent leftovers for supper. Perfect.
So that was baby's first Christmas. Hopefully next year we'll get Terry's dad as well as my mum, and maybe uncle monkey & mj might make it too. That way it won't pass without incident, I'll get to revert to tradition and cry on Christmas day, and we'll get some decent - turkey - gravy.
On the 21st, Terry's sister and her family came over an hour earlier than expected, as we were finishing lunch and trying to coax 'just a little more, please' into Babs. They were invited 'after lunch', but when I asked if they'd eaten (stupid, stupid me) R said no and threw me into panic, since we had nothing in. They ignored the mince pies I put in front of them as we all had tea, and I finally cornered Terry in the kitchen and hissed at him to address the lunch situation. Thank god, we had bread in because F&M had stayed over and so Terry had been out for bread for breakfast. Sister agreed to sandwiches but for someone so direct was bizarrely vague about what she wanted, then laboriously picked out all the cheese in her cheese sarnie; niece didn't like any of the options I ran through, so sister told us she'd be happy with bread and butter. Well, sorry, but no-one comes to my house and has only b&b and water. Fortunately she does eat tuna and sweetcorn, so we rustled up a sarnie for her too and while they ate 3pm lunch I tried not to feel uncomfortable about our apparent rubbish hospitality. Babs handled all the passing and the prodding very well but was very happy to go off for an afternoon nap. Although the conversation was fluent (sister is very talkative, unlike father), it was still a taxing afternoon and I was very relieved when they left.
On Christmas eve we took the baby to be weighed, because I was convinced she'd been eating better and must surely have put on more in these three weeks than the pitiful 100 grams in the fortnight before. Well, my mistake: no weight gain whatsoever. So our 10 minute pop was an hour long visit, as they made us see yet another health visitor to tell me something different from the health visitor before. (Conclusion: lack of continuity means lack of tailored and meaningful advice. No single health professional has a real grasp of our habits, routine, or my efforts to get more food into the baby; since they don't read each others' entries in my hand-held notes they don't even get to build up a picture that way. They recommend vitamins almost every time I visit, as though lack of weight gain equals lack of nutrients. She'll eat broccoli for breakfast, for Christ's sake, and she eats better than we do.) To be fair, we did get some reasonable tips: give water when she wakes up at night to reduce the reward and feed her from our plates so she'll eat more, but they did nothing to stop me worrying, in fact they probably made me worry more.
Mummy arrived in the afternoon with fish pie for supper. After a smoked salmon and bagel breakfast we opened pressies on Christmas day until Babs was overwhelmed enough for us to decide to hold stuff back for boxing day, and then we cooked. Terry pulled off a yummy and seriously meaty meat-free stuffed cabbage with mushrooms and chestnuts. I wished I hadn't decided lunch would be at tea-time and was a bit stroppy by the time we sat down at 5 o'clock when I should have been on the sofa for two hours already; the same old bloody red wine/onion gravy was a bit disappointing given it was a special occasion and the potatoes were just a touch too floury to be brilliantly crisp roasties. But, in our usually meat-free household, we had fantastic pigs in blankets - Waitrose perfectly seasoned and traceable pork chipolatas wrapped in their similarly traceable streaky bacon - and Crocker-tastic stuffing balls: seasoned pork sausagemeat combined with the fantastically packaged Kraft (R) Stove Top Stuffing Mix from - where else? - me dad's house! Feeel the quality.
On Boxing day mum and I spent the morning making feta filo parcels (surprisingly easy), vegan sausage rolls and hot spiced nuts, then we all went to join Flesh and M and their families at their house, which meant more pass the baby and yet more confusion for poor Babs. She did a very good job of holding it together while being thrown around by over-enthusiastic wannabe grandparents and had a nap with her new alligator on Flesh's bed.
Meanwhile we got to try the infamous vegan cheesecake, which was good but very sharp; M's dad made me laugh and laugh as usual (makes me feel like a young child and he's the funny uncle); M's granny was good value as only deaf and slightly batty old folk can be; and we got to make off with some decent leftovers for supper. Perfect.
So that was baby's first Christmas. Hopefully next year we'll get Terry's dad as well as my mum, and maybe uncle monkey & mj might make it too. That way it won't pass without incident, I'll get to revert to tradition and cry on Christmas day, and we'll get some decent - turkey - gravy.
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