In no particular order:

I hadn’t planned to go off on a cooking extravaganza, but this morning I found myself with some time where the kitchen wasn’t completely full of sawdust (the construction of a bench seat has started, which means cutting and chopping and planing and sanding, and that’s just to find the screwdriver), so I thought I’d have a bash at this Armenian soup recipe I came across in the very lovely and long-time favourite Cranks Recipe Book by David Canter. As ever, though, I ended up chucking quite a few things in which weren’t in the recipe because I hadn’t got quite what was called for… Nonetheless, the end result was very eatable, and went thusly:

Armenian soup
Ingredients
A mug of red lentils
About ten unsulphured apricots
A large diced potato
A large onion, peeled and diced
About ten cloves of garlic, badgered a bit with a knife
Pepper
Coriander (ground and leaf)
Marjoram
A good squeeze of lemon juice (manky half-lemon found in fridge sufficed)
Cumin
A large pinch of cayenne pepper
About two pints of vegetable stock

Then…
Sling the lot in a pan and boil reasonably briskly for about twenty minutes to make sure the lentils aren’t going to kill you, then turn the heat down and leave it to mellow until, well, you remember that pans are not supposed to glow in the dark. Blend it when you’re sure that to do so might not mean scalding liquids making contact with predictably bare arms, then scoff the lot with some nice bread and butter. And no, the apricots aren’t at all weird, even though you thought they would be. What? That’s just me?

I am doing things other than cooking, I hasten to add; in fact, joy of joys, I’m at home full-time for just over a week thanks to the miracle of bank holidays and timely annual leave, and during this time we’re hoping to Finish – Once And For All – The Kitchen. Lots of irritations to sort out finally, like skirting boards and seating and painting here and there, and we’re hoping to get the tiles sorted too, which will be nice as they are sick-makingly lovely multicoloured handmade numbers from a Mexican fair trade co-operative. It’ll be so nice to finish something.

In other news, I very much fear that the small girl is working steadily towards stopping daytime sleep. She stopped sleeping in the morning just before she was one (and then resumed it when I went back to work and it was Quercus on morning duty, albeit briefly), and while I felt that that was awfully little not to have more than one snooze, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about. Seems like the afternoons are going that way too; it’s getting harder for her to drop off, or so it seems, and this afternoon we ended up going out for a puddle-jumping walk in the pouring rain instead, before catching a late forty winks mid-afternoon. I dunno. It feels very much as if she’s changing her rhythm at the moment, and we have yet to work out quite where it’s headed, so there have been some unusually-timed snoozes, and some interesting walks, and some ‘now? really?’ moments, but, for the most part, it’s all good.

And you?

Last night I came up with the following, thinking of both Karen‘s ‘Pimp My Menu‘, and the 52 Recipe thing I am having a go at:

I Just Can’t Call It A Medley
Ingredients
A slug of olive oil
An onion, chopped vaguely
About half a bulb of garlic (oh yes – we likes garlickyness, we does)
One large aubergine, diced roughly
One large courgette, ditto
A tin of tomatoes
A stockcube (Kallo, in our case)
A small glass of ginger wine
A large sprinkling of fresh thyme

Then…
Chuck the onions and garlic in a reasonably capacious frying pan with the oil, and fry them until they’re, well, fried. Add the aubergines and give them a few minutes’ head-start on the tomatoes, which go in next, together with the thyme and the stockcube. Poke that lot around for a few minutes, and then whack the ginger wine in. (I think a spoonful of honey and some ginger cordial would do this quite nicely, likewise sweet white wine and dried ginger, or preserved ginger plus sauce. I also think that mushrooms would be a rather nice addition.) Sizzle that lot up for a few minutes, then sling in the courgettes for about three minutes, depending on how crunchy you like ‘em (we basically eat them hot, but not cooked), before popping it into large bowls and scoffing the lot.

I need to develop a larger aubergine repertoire; normally, they’re stuffed with mushrooms and cheese, or part of Moussaka, but this was nice because it was quicker by far than either of these. Next up: aubergines parmesan, courtesy of Cranks.

ARGH.

So, that was the frustration just seeping out there. Largely, it’s frustration at being made to feel like the bad person when actually it’s not me (us) who is (are) the evil whatsit, but someone we considered a friend. Yes – it’s the caravan’s latest saga. Now we have its owner’s phone number, and we’ve been trying to get him to fix a date for its removal, having offered him three weekends when we spoke initially nearly a month ago. Two and a half weeks passed, and we’d heard nothing; a phone call revealed he had yet to speak to the person he’s relying on to move it, and, as long-term readers may have already guessed, that person is not normally someone to whom I would go in a tight spot, timing-wise, unless EVERYONE ELSE HAD DIED.

Why yes, since you ask, I am feeling a little irritation about this.

So, I had a twenty-minute conversation with the caravan owner’s very agitated, very pregnant (38 weeks) significant other tonight, during which she strongly implied that we are complete arseholes who’d walked all over the person we once considered a friend, using him for all he was worth and generally being arseholes. Did I mention the arseholery? Oh, and making merry with their caravan for however long we’ve had it, free of charge and without a care in the world, before turning around at very short notice and issuing edicts about its removal.

I can’t even be bothered to get into the many ways in which this isn’t true, but what really gets me is that said thought-to-be-friend allowed this situation to unfold without setting the record straight, and now here we are, with me having to be mildly unpleasant (i.e. persistent in something they would rather we didn’t persist in – getting a date settled for moving this sodding caravan) to a woman who is about to give birth.

I’m so pissed off I could spit.

Well, technically, that should take the form of a question, really, which is where I hope that the wonders of the internets will kick in. Yesterday afternoon, the small girl and I, armed with a large bowl of hot soapy water and myriad balls of coloured roving, sat down to make some felt balls. (Much to my intense amusement, this caused the shrieking of ‘fat bells! fat bells!’ on the part of a certain diminutive person of my acquaintance, all the way down the stairs from the big bed where we had slept, all the way through the sitting room and past the previously-sleeping cats, and all the way around the kitchen as I got bits and bobs ready for us.) We have some gorgeous 100% wool roving dyed with natural dyes, thanks to a trip to the Yarner Trust‘s Christmas fair back at the start of December of last year, and by gum, we are not afraid to use them.

Well.

Hum.

‘Fear’ is, of course, not quite the right word, but I confess that ‘trepidation’ might do rather well. For it seems that I am a bit crap at felting, dear reader: we took little chunks of the roving (and in some cases, rather large chunks may have been bandied about before making their way to the cats’ tails), we dutifully dunked, and rolled, and pressed, and dunked, and rolled, and whatnot, and finally I ended up putting them in some old tights, separated by rubber bands, and washing them in with a load of towels, to try to finish them off. The instructions we were following said that they would begin to sort of firm up, and the edges would be less woolly, and lo! there would be felt balls (or fat bells, depending). And… there were, sort of. But the edges are a bit wonky, and there are sticky-out bits which beg to be pulled at which speak of a short future and then lots of fluff. Where am I going wrong?

The other part of the project went quite well, though – I have long hankered after making my own felted dreads for hair-wearing usage, rather than buying the hair-band variety you get in pleasantly rainbow-coloured shops specialising in patchouli and patchwork, and with this in mind, I bought a few strands of rather lovely Colinette yarn (the name of which escapes me, but it’s gorgeous dark shades of blue with the odd flash of bright green, pink, red and yellow; I know – it sounds repugnant, but honestly it’s divine) and set about it with the water and the rubbing and whatnot, and this morning I sallied forth wearing said dready hairband thing in the birds’ nest I once called my hair. Verily, I am much pleased with it. The only thing is that next time I might twine two threads together to make the resulting felt a little more standy-uppy of its own accord; the chaotic works so well in this context, I find, and it does answer at least some of my brain’s constant demands for dreadlocks (a desire I have yet to resolve one way or the other; I still love dreads, and every time I see someone with them I think ‘oooh yes’, but then I think of the messy roots which seem inevitable, and I still have concerns about the whole washing issue… and on wears the long day).

(I now realise that this post would make a lot more sense with pictures, and will endeavour, small-teething-person permitting, to rectify this sad oversight this very afternoon.)

So, lovely readers, has anyone out there got any tips on how to improve my fat bells, please? I’d like to make a large jar of them, some multi-coloured, some single, as one of the small girl’s birthday presents (she will be two – TWO! – on June 1; where has the time gone?), but these first efforts aren’t terribly toddler-proof, and being me, and thus utterly poxy, I like to do things properly or not at all. Suggestions in’t comments box, please.

In a rather half-arsed manner, I have been attempting to take part in Karen‘s ‘Pimp My Menu’ project. I say half-arsed, because so far my part-taking has consisted of thinking ‘oooh, what a good idea’, and making an ill-suited chocolate cake. (Though this is the bit where I throw dirty-yet-mildly-vindicated looks at Turquoise Lisa, who is no better than I am, with her packet curries and her biscuits.)

However.

Here beginneth a new phase. Karen’s idea was not just to try out new things, but also to revisit old favourites passed over in recent times because of laziness/habit/short-term memory loss, and in that spirit, I have been revisiting pizza. Ahh, pizza: champion of sofa-dwellers the world over. Also, I learn, pretty good for small people to poke at (the dough, that is).

Ours goes thusly:

Pizza

Wossinit?
Base:

10 oz self-raising flour (As an aside, does the US have this? All my American recipe books say things like ‘all-purpose flour and baking soda’ or something similar.)
A good slug of olive oil
A fistful of oregano
A fistful of garlic, either chopped and fresh, or dried and powdered
Enough milk (be it goat, cow or soya) to achieve a workable doughy texture (I think mine was about half a pint, from memory.)

Then…
Whack the lot in a bowl and mix it with your sticky little paws. (If they weren’t sticky when you began, they certainly will be very shortly.) Oil a nice greedy-looking tray (ours is about fourteen inches long, and, say, eight or ten wide), and pummel the resulting doughy concoction into submission; the thinner the base, the shorter the cooking time to avoid doughy hell, and the crunchier the results. It is shaming to confess that I now rather like the squareness that our tray results in, and even pass over our round (and specially designed) pizza tray thingy.

When you’ve reached a suitably flattened look, or, rather, when the base is suitably squashed but you live on, courtesy of a glass of red wine, turn your attention to the sauce (and lay off the other sauce, at least temporarily, if you are to avoid burning the aforementioned sticky fists on something warmer than you’d like).

Beg, borrow or steal…
Sauce:

A slug of olive oil
A chopped onion, of the large persuasion
A tube of tomato purée (or a tin of tomatoes, drained and probably de-seeded if you want to be all particular about it)
A stock cube or two
A good wodge of oregano, mixed dried herbs, garlic powder and whatever other herby things suggest themselves
A teaspoon of honey, to take the edge off the acidity
About a half-pint of water, to get the consistency right

Then…
Sling the onions in a pan and fry them for a wee while until they begin to capitulate, before chucking the rest of the stuff in. Stir at will, while prancing around the kitchen to the dulcet tones of Spiro‘s Lightbox (this last bit is optional, I hasten to add). Realise that one’s small girl is dancing too, and laughing at you while she’s doing it. Cook the sauce for about ten minutes or so, to make sure the onion’s not too crunchy.

Spead the sauce on the base, and then chuck on whatever you fancy, really; our favourites seem to be cheese (obviously), red onion slices, courgettes cut into large chunks, sweetcorn, more cheese, and pepperoni, with sunflower seeds sprinkled on the top for added crunch. (Sunflower seeds are my favourite addition to the top of most things; I love love love them on top of hovel pie, a lentil-based version of cottage pie which we ought to eat more often, and which might form the next part of this menu-pimping malarky, come to think of it.)

Although I feel content, generally, with the sort of things we eat, it’s always nice to come across new favourites, so I ask you, lovely readers, what am I missing out on that I should be eating EVERY SINGLE DAY? What can motivate me to lurch out of the rut that we normally inhabit, lovely though that rut might be? There’s nothing like a new recipe to look forward to…

This last weekend, Quercus’s mother came back to visit, and, many hands making if not light, then lighter-than-it-would-have-been-otherwise work, we succeeded in dragging ourselves back from oblivion and into some semblance of order, for which read: we rotovated about a quarter of our garden.

Now, that probably sounds like fuck-all, but when you think that said chunk of ex-verdant botanical delight was actually:

- largely covered in lime render;

- wood pile (by which I mean about four tonnes of large logs, waiting to be chainsawn [chainsawn? chainsawed?]);

- home to three bins, two dumpy bags (previously filled with sand, a goodly portion of which had made its way all over the grass, completely obliterating any resemblance to plant life of any sort), a host of assorted pieces of timber, some dead-or-dying potted plants which had also been rendered, mostly, and an old cement mixer;

- also home to Jerusalem artichokes, which are so incredibly hardy as to have grown through three feet of solid Devon clay around the other side of the house; this side, they were just large sticky-stalky bits, having been ignored for over a year, but there was a nice deep pit there too, where we’d bothered to rootle some of the artichokes out at some point;

- full of stacks of old tyres, in which we grew (well, planted and ignored) potatoes, beans, herbs and chard last summer…

… you’ll perhaps see that this was quite a clean-up. I can’t believe how nice it looks out there – it’s just bare soil for now, but we’ve put down a mixture of clover, camomile and straight grass seed, and hopefully a month or so of leaving it to its own devices (provided we get some rain reasonably shortly) should make for a nice place to lounge around in uncharacteristically civilised fashion later in the year. I am debating doing some planting with the small girl – we have seeds kicking about for tomatoes, rainbow chard (which I love love love for its colours, and for the ongoing nature of its production, and for its hardiness in warding of the rampaging snail population, the vast majority of which seems to live in our garden) and possibly some flowers of some sort (though equally I’d like to do amaranths again); part of me thinks we should just focus on getting the house sorted (we have ambitious plans for the rest of this year… for a change), but part of me knows that in order to remain sane, I seem to need to reaffirm my connection to the physical world of creation. Wow. Sorry about that; a phrase that wanky doesn’t normally succeed in passing the bullshit warning lights which inhabit my brain, but that one snuck under the radar somehow, probably by shouting about knitting and waving a ball of wool at my brain as a distraction technique.

Ahem.

Anyway, wanky or not, I do find that I am at my happiest when I’m achieving things; getting this swathe of garden sorted out felt like a very positive thing indeed, and not least because in order to get the lawn area roughly level, we broke open both of the plastic compost bins which live in the chickens’ area. Having grown up with parents whose approach to gardening was a cyclical crash-and-burn experience (in which the hedge got to twelve feet and Dad started to feel that perhaps the time had come to get out a large pair of scissors), I still find it miraculous that you put all those peelings and hen-cleanings-out and odd bits of card and whatnot in a large plastic box and then some time passes, and then? THEN YOU GET COMPOST OUT OF IT! It’s witchcraft, I tell you. And our bins are both empty now, so the witchcraft begins once more.

So. Tyres of veg, of flowers, of bits and bats, and possibly tomatoes in the greenhouse (if I can be bothered to get in there and clean it up; it’s a right state, having been neglected for over a year, and we’ve been letting the chooks in there for the last few days to begin to get a grip on the creepy-crawly population…). Anything else that small children might particularly appreciate growing, chaps?

It’s a funny thing, really, that getting up ten minutes earlier should make for a better morning when mostly, what I’d like to do is sleeeeeeep. Still, though, that’s what I’ve discovered since going back to work after nearly a month – ten minutes makes for a much more peaceable morning. Time to have a cup of tea before pushing off to work, even.*

This morning in particular I found myself pondering about the many aspects of my life in which I am more than normally fortunate. Last night, the small girl slept through the night; anyone following my recent ‘woe is me!’ posts about sleep, the lack thereof, will know what this means. So, that was the first lucky bit.

The second good bit was that, had the small girl woken in the night, Quercus would have gone into her, settled her back down again, and staggered back to bed; he is a very lovely man indeed, and I am constantly delighted by how lovely he is with the aforementioned small girl. The third smug-making thing was that our morning started, as do most mornings, with me going into the small girl’s room, extracting her, warm and stretching, from her bed and returning to our big bed for a drowsy feed, which normally finishes when she breaks off and demands ’round and round!’, the cue for tickling and general baby tormenting to begin. (Though I should add that this session is probably responsible for her new bathtime behaviour – the nerve! The nerve of it! – which consists of chasing me around the bathroom shrieking ‘tickle! tickle!’ while attempting to catch MY TOES. Now that, THAT was not in the plan – !)

Fourth good thing: when I left for work, the small girl was far more interested in the idea of Quercus reading her Julia Donaldson’s excellent Tiddler than she was of me departing. Fifth thing the lucky: I get to leave work at 12.30 because our working arrangements allow us to share looking after the small girl at home, rather than using a nursery. (I do think lots of people could do this, but just don’t think of it, that said; I have colleagues earning far more than we do who express amazement at how much my husband must earn in order for this to work. Not so, my friend, not so.) Sixth thing: walking into my building at work, I could see right across Exeter, with the cathedral tower rising against a crisp and slighty misty morning, and the pale lines of Dartmoor in the background. Seventh thing: fresh coffee with crushed cardamom – gingerbread in a mug, I tell you.

And you? What’s good where you are?

* I used not to be a morning person AT ALL, but somehow these days, I really enjoy being up before everyone else. I think this process started when Quercus’s job meant that he was leaving for work at 6.30 or so; that’s probably seven years ago now, but it introduced me to the quiet of the day, when I used to sit at the kitchen table working on my MA coursework while watching the city wake up through an indecently large Georgian sash window.  Now, I look out of small-paned windows which we chose ourselves, and which are fitted into the walls of a building which Quercus built; the surroundings have changed so much, but the quiet calm of those first few moments have not.

THANK GOD THERE IS NOTHING ACADEMIC HAPPENING, THOUGH. There. I said it.

Shhh.

Quiet.

Lean in closer, and don’t say a word.

*whispers*

I’m contemplating trying our cloth nappies again. It’s been months since we abandoned them, and the other day I happened upon them while up in the attic, rootling my way through boxes of kitchen paraphernalia which hadn’t seen the light of day since, well, probably 2005. There they were. The nappies, that is. Not the kitchen stuff. Though that was there too, of course. Ahem. Yes. Nappies. Now, some of you may recall the succession of traumas which were visited upon us during our time as cloth-nappiers. There was the nappy rash. And then – oh – there was some more. And then? Just for fun? A bit more of that ol’ rash malarky. And did I mention the rash? And of course, accompanying the rash, there were the creams. And the liners. And the lotions. And the camomile tea-soaked wipes. And the washing-powder changes. And the white vinegar, and then the not white vinegar. And the nappy-free time, and the hourly changes.

Oh, how we laughed.

And now, BECAUSE I AM INSANE, I find myself wondering (as a good friend of mine once did regarding his intense hatred of salmon) if this time, things could be different.

Of course, it’s probably idiocy of the first order to contemplate such a step, but you know, it really galls me that we have about two hundred pounds’ worth of nappies just sitting in the sodding attic, while each week I go and buy sodding disposable nappies (albeit the ones with a sop to the eco-conscious amongst us) from the supermarket, only to chuck them into landfill a few days later. They are very convenient, I’ll admit – quick to change, slim-fitting, and easily wrapped up using their own tabs when you want to chuck them – and, thus far, they are the only thing which has meant the small girl is rash-free. She does still get sore from time to time, but not in the skin-peeling, sunburn-resembling manner we started to think might be inevitable when we were using cloth all the time.

But…

But…

BUT – ! (If you’ll forgive the pun…)

I hanker after cloth backsides again. I didn’t mind the washing rota (although they do take FOREVER TO DRY, it has to be said, and I do think that tumble driers are probably anathema when it comes to the eco-contribution the cloth nappies make), and I loved the way they looked when she was trolling about in them.

(Is it sharing too much to say that what’s prompted this longing, in part, is the decision to buy some cloth sanitary pads? [Isn't that a grim phrase, by the way? 'Sanitary pads'. Shudder. Any better alternatives will be greeted with a friendly - yet not too firm - handshake and a smal piece of flapjack, the recipe for which will follow reasonably shortly, or, at least, as soon as I finish gorging myself on the aforementioned.*] Yes, it probably is sharing too much, but hey – them’s the breaks. I think that the cloth nappy experience just made me realise how many of such pads one buys, each month, only to chuck and find you’ve run out at just the wrong time the next month. So, washable ones, given that we still use washable wipes for the small girl, seemed like a natural progression.)

Has anyone out there found that an utterly irrational improvement was found after a long break from such nappies? If so, please do let me know; there is no reason to suppose that a second go would be anything other than a repeat performance, yet still I hanker…

* Don’t even ask about the exercise/eating regimen. I’m not gorging, honestly, but the last month has been an utter joke, exercise-wise. I shall do better, and retire to flagellate myself in the meantime. Hmm. Flagellation as a form of calorie-burning. Has promise, no? No. You’re quite right. No.

A while back I made some passing reference to chocolate malt cake, and I may even have gone so far as to add that I’d post a recipe at some point. Foolish me. Those words sealed the fate of that recipe for at least a month, as I then promptly went away for a week or so, and had a general melt-down. Well, meltdown over, I now present said recipe, along with an apology for its being so long in coming. I know what chocolate and malt means, gentle reader, and I don’t mess with such power lightly.

Chocolate Malt Cake
Ingredients
Chocolate and malt. Ha. Had you there, didn’t I? But seriously…
2 mugs self-raising flour
2 large-ish eggs (in my case, three smallish blue ones, I think)
½ mug dark brown sugar
½ mug malt extract
¼ mug cocoa
¼ mug sunflower oil

Yes. I used mugs. Not cups. BECAUSE I AM GREEDY.

Then…
Sling the lot in a large bowl and beat the buggery out of it. Pour the resulting shiny happy mixtureness into an oiled loaf tin (or a smug-inducing silicone one which requires no such fiddling) and cook in YOUR NEW OVEN WHICH HEATS UP IN ONE NANOSECOND AND ISN’T COVERED IN A MYSTERIOUS FILM OF OIL for about forty-five minutes on 180°c.

All clear?

You know you’ve crossed a few lines when you find your garden full of an unholy mixture of pallets, static caravans and knackered old cars with only one lock working. (Let us not speak of the repair bills we’ve forked out this year on Quercus’s sensible car, the car which replaced the avowedly not sensible Citröen CX, which cost a fraction of what this bastard replacement has needed; it is all the fault of said “reliable” replacement that we have had, in the last few months, variously, a multi-coloured Ford Mondeo, a Peugeot 405, a people-carrier thing, and several other semi-buggered courtesy cars from the garage up the road.)

But when you then find yourself contemplating – seriously, I might add – the purchase of a van, you know you’re in trouble.

Yes folks: it looks like we’re going to sell the bollocking car and replace it with a van, size, description and specification thereof yet to be decided. I suppose it’s merely a part of accepting that generally, cars were not designed to haul tonnes of rubble about the place, and, in an ideal world, their lives don’t include queries about just how much timber you can get in the front, or whether the axle can take a concrete lintel without complaining.

We are pikies. It’s simple.

Some day, I really must rediscover the concept of a garden.