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Chilly? Just a trifle. Our central heating boiler is playing up. We have a Man coming to fix it (our former landlady had a stream of little Men who came to fix different things…and no, not those kind of little men, and definitely not wearing green either).
I have counted blessings as a way to calm down about it - we have separate gas so we can cook, we still have electricity for other stuff, we still have a shower that runs separately so can ablute, and so on. Feeling rather foolish not to know to do boiler servicing - but there again, the people we bought from didn’t tell us anything about it, parents didn’t mention it, etc. The back of the little on box seems to suggest the boiler was last serviced in November 1999…hmm…
Meanwhile, however, there is always food as a distraction. Today have had a shot at making a different kind of trifle for our small church group meeting on Wednesday. My manager has been on holiday to Switzerland, and came back with Lebkuchen. It was rather sturdy just for eating this afternoon, but with a little liquid soaked in, it should make rather good trifle.
I have started to experiment with different kinds of trifle, mainly relating to variants on the cake part. Today lebkuchen. On one memorable occasion, panettone, with a little rum on top - that one went down VERY well. Occasionally failed chocolate cake, sometimes cheap sponge on offer from the Co-op.
It’s not that I don’t want to spend money feeding guests. But I do like good leftover ideas, and trifle is as much a left-over dish as a create from scratch with wonderful sponge fingers kind of dish. In any case, I think the whole trifle sponge thing is really something you buy - a savoiardi biscuit, or something like that. I suspect macaroons would be good; I think brioche might almost work too.
My other innovation in the trifling department is different ways of soaking the sponge/cake bit - see rum reference above. Sherry - always good option. But was also rather pleased at using the juice from stewed fruit to soak through the sponge - success a few weeks back with brambles as the fruit content, and bramble juice turning the sponge a particularly exciting colour.
You could claim all this is just distraction. You’d be right, certainly tonight. It makes me grateful that we both go out to work, and can rely on someone else paying for heat, somewhere else, during the day. But it’s probably better than too much kicking ourselves, which is always a bit limited after the event. Plus, this way, it entertains people - and perhaps it even entertains you, dear reader, finding out about it, or considering your own cake and fruit creations for the future.
Feeling better? More than a trifle.
December 3rd, 2007
How to keep entertained on these long winter nights? You could write long Norse sagas - and with “Beowulf” in the cinema, your time could have come here - or go for a little low-level entertainment with some cutting and sticking.
Now lots of options for what you cut and stick. I’m not advising that you have to go full scrapbook mode. I got teased at home while growing up for constantly cutting things out of magazines - recipes in particular, but other things that were of interest. Probably back to the journalism side of being keen on lots of different things. This, coupled with a good old fashioned “this could come in useful” attitude, resulted in a lot of piles of newsprint, which finally made their way into scrapbooks.
So, card making, collage, papier mache…you name it. Cutting and sticking allows you to re-read your magazines or newspapers, end up with a larger pile of paper to recycle (for high inner smugness values), stick a few of them in a scrapbook, or bung them in a useful folder, and hopefully look at them again.
Trouble with cutting and sticking: are you really going to re-read the things you keep? This was the trouble before. How many of those recipes did I use? How many articles on nice white painted houses do you need for inspiration?
You can of course do the smaller version, which is editing what you’ve already got stashed away. Less cutting, more freeing up existing scrapbook pages, or the equivalent. But I probably shouldn’t be admitting to this degree of introversion.
Perhaps the really good side is the rediscovery. Kate Muir’s ode to the bacon butty van at the top of the Rest and Be Thankful. A particular recipe that you’ve done, loved, forgotten, and your heart leaps to see it again.
We are happy to reread a book. To listen to a song, time and time again. To put on a piece of clothing that makes you smile. Why not reread an article? Partly because there are so many of them, so many angles, so many tiny snippets to consider revisiting.
Anyway, come and retrieve me when you hear the scissors hit the floor.
November 27th, 2007
Bit lazy today - big lie in, but some activity later. We worked together to clear leaves from the lawn, put in a couple more bulbs, that kind of thing.
Quite a nice afternoon, even at the end of November. Made me think how rarely we are doing just physical stuff. Our jobs are so much about what our heads can do - with a spot of hand-eye coordination thrown in. Good at times to do something like stuffing leaves in a bin liner, so they can rot down.
Haven’t got much done with the garden since coming here. Sometimes that’s hard. Much of what’s in the garden has to fend for itself really. But one thing I’ve managed to do is clear leaves each autumn to make leaf mould. Today I was able to use some from two years ago, which was definitely nicely rotted down. I could even mulch a couple of things! How good is that?
“It is enough // to crumble the dark earth, While the robin sings over // Sad songs of autumn mirth.” [John Clare]
As much as anything, I’m grateful for days where doing something simple…is enough.
November 25th, 2007
I’m ready for next year.
This doesn’t mean I’m doing away with Christmas (although an interesting T2 article on doing without it, and music (it being annual No Music day today), for a limited period of time, in order to enjoy them more on getting them back).
A few years ago, I started my Useful Notebook option. Up til now, it’s tended to have been bought in Italy on holiday, while Esselunga had their fun covers with different fruit and veg (John Lemon and all that - lemon in JL shades). Today I braved the student union shop at Glasgow Uni, and got my notebook for next year.
Hard to choose. I could have saved rhinos buying one notebook, or used recycled tyres or drinks cartons with another. I’ve ended up with something called a Pukka Pad, which rather sounds like I’m only allowed to use it for comments relating to Jamie Oliver. However, it will do the trick for what I need.
This notebook, it’s a place of Lists. Move over Robert Crampton… I don’t have bike ride stats in (one of his Lists), but it does come in handy for noting what we’ve bought for people’s birthdays and Christmases, measurements of gaps that require furniture or shelves, that kind of thing. I’ve also used it as a place to write a bit of a diary of what we’ve done on holiday, as it’s quite nice to remember where we were when, what we saw/did, etc.
The notebook also started out as an exercise in perspective. I started the first one in 2002, having come out of a difficult six months or so before, with the view that if I thought about life differently, it might well mean I felt differently about it. (Does it ever. Fast forward to the counselling course and all that.)
In the dark days of November, and feeling a little low at the moment, it’s not bad thing to start the new book, with a sense that there will be good things in 2008. In fact, I’m sure of it - it’s one of the Big Birthday seasons that runs in both sides of the family every few years, when there’s various birthdays ending in 5 or even 0, so lots to celebrate. I’ll have been living in Edinburgh for 10 years straight (97-98 being a year teaching abroad), to add to the 4 years before that.
Lists, notebooks, they are open to interpretation. You could see it as ‘all that stuff I did’, or ‘all those things I can’t manage, and feel bad about’. I did have a separate task book, more reminders really, and have stopped using that - felt too bad at all the stuff that wasn’t happening at home, when in fact it was fine, and there was loads going on at work. At the moment, there’s a certain amount going on in both camps - for which three cheers.
But as the thirties move on, life blurs a little more, separate years are less distinct in the memory. It’s nice to note a few things, be clear where I’ve been at a certain stage in life. Noting well, and noting the good. Thankfully the memory takes over, and helps shine up the good, down play the bad. The notebook helps us remember how it felt - and how much has happened since.
November 21st, 2007
You know the signs. Interest in gardening, cardigans, family history…among the list of signs that you are getting on. (Some of us have liked cardigans for a while, but we won’t dwell on that.)
Perhaps one of mine is an interest in a little more tradition for the weekend, or something to mark the fact that the weekend is a time to slow down. I’ve probably already written about my cooking phases, and the fact that roasting chicken in different ways is the current focus. So here’s my chance to champion the Coop, and their chickens that are organic, reasonably priced, and even better, delicious!
But alongside this, starting to think about ‘oven economy’, and how to get best use out of the oven when it’s on. Last weekend and this, trying to do some baking while the oven’s on. I wouldn’t claim to have this sussed - and in fact, the aim is to get a double oven so I can only have the appropriate bit on when I need it, or cook things together at different temperatures.
I know that in the past, there were different days for different household tasks. Washing day, baking day, etc. I don’t know that I’ll ever get as far as a fixed baking/cooking day (and I certainly don’t want to have a washing day - three cheers for washing machines!). But I certainly agree with Nigella et al that there is something soothing about cooking various things together.
It allows for a different rhythm to part of the week. How much of the rest of the week allows me to do one kind of activity (apart from sleeping, I suppose) for more than an hour or so? Life at work can get very fragmented - certainly felt like this last week, settling back in and going from task to task, or even bits of tasks, before being pulled on to something else.
There is a sense of peace from doing these things that permeates into the start of the week. Knowing that there is more ‘already done’ for the next few days makes it easier to deal with that unhappy bump back into Monday mornings.
Maybe the nicer side of getting older is realising that there are certain patterns to life, and that we can choose which patterns help us, which to take on as our own. Alongside this, our concern about what others will think starts to wane. So hurrah for cardigans, Sunday roasts, and slippers…
November 18th, 2007
Dear Mr Fischbacher,
I am not trying to nick your song lyrics - in fact I listened to them again last weekend. But I need to overcome my fear of gardening. I know that the seeds may be seedy, but I fear I am weedy (the grass certainly is) when it comes to getting on with planting things.
This might otherwise be entitled ‘Missing the bus and visiting Poundstretcher (again)’ - there’s a rather convenient shop near the bus stop I use when heading home after work. Rather than stand at the stop for the next 14 minutes (bus comes every 15 anyway), I nipped in, and came out with lots of packets of seeds.
I am actually thinking of them for a friend as part of a Christmas present. But they had multiple types of seed in each packet, including a Mexican one with seeds for peppers and chillies, a Chinese one with pak choi…you get the picture. If I combine my love of things international with my devotion to food, it might get me back to the soil.
Even better…they turned out to be a bargain! Each packet was meant to be 99p, but for some reason, they sold them to me for 49p a packet. I now have 15 varieties of seeds for £2.45! All of which should help if a few of them fall on rocky wocky soil, or that kind of thing.
Spoke to my gardening friend at work, who informed me that I can also plant garlic and onions at this time of year, plus broad beans. Not a fan of broad beans, but the other two, always useful. Garlic, I’m told, is as easy as taking individual cloves of garlic, sticking them in the ground one by one, pressed down by your thumb. You could even mark out a bat shape if you wanted them to be particularly effective, I guess. (I decided to pass on jokes about staking them out.)
Hopefully, now I’ve got your interest in my gardening potential, you can reply, and shame me into planting them.
And for Mr Fischbacher’s song writing talents…find out more about what happens when seed falls on goody woody soil: www.fischy.com (It’s a Noisy World album)
November 16th, 2007
Now for once, this post isn’t about food. Caught you there!
Sunday does seem to be a day for comfort food versions of TV though. One of the Channel 4 repeats channels had wall to wall recent Jamie Oliver episodes - everything to do with the veg you’ve just grown (so I guess food does come into the picture again, unsurprisingly). Equally, there’s this newish channel called Dave which shows lots of episodes of QI (hurray) but equally doesn’t stint on Top Gear (can do, but less what I’d choose to put in).
Nothing like Sunday night for a travel programme, and as that nice Mr Palin has done his stint in Eastern Europe, it’s over to Charlie Boorman and Ewen MacGregor to get down and dirty riding motorbikes from the north of Scotland to the tip of the African continent. More swearing than on PalinTV (though there may be a certain amount off camera, one would anticipate), but also some heart - Ewen going off camera when affected by how many children face living in areas with landmines, on the Ethiopia-Eritrea border.
Our regular comfort food TV for a Sunday - West Wing repeats - have been moved over to a Saturday slot. The things they do when they hear you’re out of the country, eh? They even mucked about with the TV format in the Saturday Times TV section, which has until now been one of the clearest to read. Lest it be said that we spend all our free time watching TV, I would note that a good TV guide makes it much easier to work out what you DO want to watch, rather than channel hopping via the selection onscreen.
Dan’s version of comfort food TV would probably have to include black and white Sunday matinees, as a result of spending time at his uncle and aunt’s while younger. Not a bad investment when you grow up and discover that knowledge of black and white films offers a certain level of trendiness…or so we are still led to believe.
For those of a certain era, surely the testcard would have to be the final option in comfort food TV (though Dan has also watched Open University programmes put on at very late/very early times, another of those store cupboard staples of programming).
Whatever your meat (or poison), hopefully such stuff allows you to be suitably soothed on a Sunday night that you can face the week ahead. So far, so good.
November 11th, 2007
Back to Edinburgh yesterday, after a couple of weeks’ holiday. The crunch of coming back is not so bad, although the quality of greyness this morning made me realise why some people decamp abroad for the entire winter…Admittedly, we’ve been spoiled, with quite a lot of sunshine and heat in the south of France, followed by sunshine and warmth in the north of Italy.
Decided we’d have the weekend at home, so doing a certain amount of pottering. This has even gone to the lengths of clearing out dead spices from the kitchen cupboards. Not so exciting, but it makes me realise my ‘anticipate exciting food by buying herbs and spices’ habit needs to be checked up on every now and then. Thankfully none of it was crawling out of the cupboards by itself, but our bin will smell of a weird combination of flavours for a little while, no doubt.
I guess that when we’ve been away, it’s nice to get to know one’s home again, and pottering about helps in this. Seeing it all with fresh eyes also helps for clearing out stuff that you’ve been putting off doing before going away (if not for months before, I suspect).
One aspect of taking stock is to think about doing something with the garden again, rather than looking out the window at it, feeling tired, and going off to do something else. Having been inspired by our friends’ veg patch, and having rediscovered a few pots for growing things on window sills, perhaps I’ll start small over the winter, and actually get some gardening done in the spring.
One exciting discovery today was what’s on offer for food digesters. Rather than leaving it to me and Dan to digest everything (ha, we’ll give it a try), you can get bin things for the garden which allow you to get rid of food waste, even bones, fish skin, etc, rather than bin it. This immediately suggests an end to our kitchen bin getting smelly, a surge of interest in cooking roast chicken regularly, and provides a further incentive to create a new bit of the garden in front of our shed, where it gets the most sun. I suspect in practice it will involve prevailing on my mum and Dan’s, who actually know what they’re doing in the garden, but it’s another reason to feel positive about the garden.
Talking to Dan’s mum on the phone today, aware that I have less of a sense than usual of what will be waiting for me when I get back to work, now that there are new colleagues to return, potential to give away a further chunk of work when I’ve tied it up, and some new activities in investigating staff learning for the wider team I’m part of. Maybe it will mean I genuinely can have a bit more time at home too, plan for things, rather than work always dictating what’s possible in my home life.
Taking stock. Moving on to making stock tomorrow.
November 10th, 2007
Fog has set in today, thickening by the minute as I ate my breakfast banana. (Yes, I also do brunch bananas, and other alliterative fruit.)
This was really just a chance to write about fog, or ‘pea soupers’ as they were called in London in the 19th century. Given all the pollution then, a fog mixing with it could be very nasty then. A bit like photochemicals and sunlight in LA these days, but without the stovepipe hats.
Equally, a chance to play with formats for titles, ’Of Mice and Men’ being the original.
But fog might equally describe feelings about work. We have a new team structure. New colleagues ready to get going. And how is it meant to work? Unclear.
To go for another title, not so much a need for ‘parting the waves’ as thinning the fog. The trouble is, I’m less prepared to accept it all than I used to be, or to put myself forward to do the fog thinning.
The other thing is that with these new colleagues, work load is going down (or is meant to be), which suddenly allows other vistas to open up in what has been called (at times laughingly) my home life. This is not because I don’t want a home life incidently - in fact, the distraction from work is all the greater because there has been so much time away from doing my own thing.
Maybe it’s a chance for yet more cooking (back to the peas and soup). Or blogging. Or writing other things. Or maybe just time to see where the wind’s blowing, so to speak.
October 24th, 2007
I can’t let this splurge of Dan-posts go by without saying how much I love our new bathroom. That it was assembled with great care by Olly and Artur in August while we were in Poland shouldn’t make you think I wasn’t appreciative then. The time that has passed hasn’t dulled my enthusiasm. It is a joy to behold.
That Alison and I chose all the things to go in it and designed it to within centimetres shouldn’t detract from how chuffed we are with the result. I’m used to planning and designing something in two dimensions, but it’s the first time that I’ve used that architectural training to take a plan into 3D. I must say, it’s pretty good.
So, if you want a peaceful bath in a boutique setting, bring your Moulton Brown toiletries and we’ll supply the hardware (bathroom) and software (Egyptian cotton towels) and you can enjoy light green reflective tiles and recessed dimmer lighting. Or if you want a similar look, we’ll let you have our list of suppliers. Pictures to come soon. Maybe.
October 20th, 2007
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