Friday to Monday: Ten Happy-Happies
1. On Friday afternoon, the small girl and I made our second batch of cheese biscuits. Once more, she did the washing-up.
2. We also racked wine into clean demijohns, adding sugar and a lemon while we were at it. I’m not sure it’s entirely legal, making wine with the aid of a two-year-old, but it was certainly good fun.
3. I got to sleep until eleven on Saturday morning. SLEEP. Did I mention that raveled sleeve of care malarky? Consider mine knitted, at least temporarily.
4. Quercus’s mother, while deeply irritating in many ways, arrived on Saturday, and brought with her (like the car-journey game) four nearly-completely-prepared casseroles, some dark chocolate buttons, four bottles of red wine of the sort we tend not to buy because we’re broke, a packet of geranium-flavoured giant chocolate buttons and a bag full of wooden bits and bobs for small person amusement purposes. She Is Not All Bad.
5. We have had a cloth-nappy weekend; the small girl, catching sight of a stray which had so far escaped being atticked, said ‘fluffy nappies! I like a wear one of them!’ and there has been no looking back since. So far, no rash; we’re still using disposables at night for fear of tempting not only fate but all sorts of urine-related gods, but it feels extraordinarily nice to hear a small girl saying ‘a blue nappy! wiv stars on it! I show Daddy!’, and to know that not only is this meaning we’re using fewer disposables (and thus emptying the bin far less frequently), but also we’re getting a bit more use from the cloth nappies, which I really loved, and the small girl is more aware of, shall we say, various processes taking place.
6. I took the small girl for a walk in one of the many fields around the Earthenhouse yesterday afternoon. While we were walking down the lane to get there, she said ‘Granny pop out of bed!’. On closer examination, this turns out to be a name for convolvulus; it’s so nice to find she’s picked up things like this. Her vocabulary now includes daffodil, sunflower, oak, beech, ash, root, stump, dandelion, daisy, elderflower, rosehip, acorn, cob nut, conker and field.
7. When I was a small child, I had a rather ugly white painted chair, sized accordingly. Said chair came to us when the aged parent moved north, as part of his cabinet reshuffle, as it were, and has sat in a neglected corner of the ex-dining room (if so small a room can be said to have neglected anythings) ever since. Yesterday, I pounced on it, sanded the blighter to within an inch of its life, paint-stripped the tight corners where I couldn’t get either the sander or sandpaper in, and then waxed it into oblivion. It looks completely different; proper wood colour is rather nicer than chipped white paint, and the seat itself is made of a piece with really nice grain, previously hidden under all that horrid paint. What’s more, said small girl likes it, which is probably the best bit of all.
8. For a long time, I thought ratatouille was a repugnant concoction of things which, unpleasant enough on their own, became truly repulsive in combination. My, how times have changed. Last night marked Ratatouille No. 2, and it was successful enough to mean large quantities being eaten by the small girl, and some being frozen for the hereafter, while Quercus and I were fit to burst.
Ratatouille
Ingredients
A tin of tomatoes or six large fresh ones
An aubergine (large, in this case)
Two or three onions
Two or three courgettes
Some mushrooms
Some herbs
Some Tabasco
Some brown sugar
Some garlic (by which I mean ‘a lot of’)
A good sprinkle of black pepper and some paprika
Slug of olive oil
Then…
Chop the onions reasonably small, and dice the aubergine. Sling them into a large pan with some oil, and give ‘em a good fry until they are nice and soft. Sling in the rest of the ingredients (having diced the mushrooms), poke them about suspiciously with a wooden spoon, pop a lid on and retreat for about twenty minutes or so, leaving the pan simmering reasonably briskly. Swig wine. Realise Some Time Has Passed. Return to find pan gently overflowing condensation on to the hob, causing a rather nice smell. Heap piles of brown rice into a bowl which makes your portion look less greedy, add a few ladelsful of the ratatouille, and grate a spot of sharp cheddar on the top.
9. I have 16,000 words of proofreading to do; for this, I am getting over £200. While the work is tedious, the money – the MONEY! is coming at a very good time, bearing in mind the digger hire we’ve paid for recently.
10. This morning, the chap I car-share with was waiting for me in the lay-by where I pick him up; normally, I wait five minutes or so for him, and that few minutes costs me any chance of a good space. Today, easy.
And you? What’s happy-happy in your life today?
What made the difference in the ratatouille recipe that you suddenly like it? Apart from mushrooms and sugar, it’s just what I do and always have. It’s about the only summer veg thing that I freeze as I only really like fresh vegetables and home-frozen ones just used to take up space ready to be chucked out and replaced with the new crop the next year.
Just an ordinary day here. I’ve a letter to write to someone deeply annoying, so I’m putting it off for now and listening to music, drinking coffee and deciding to hoover the carpet instead. Not actually hoovering the carpet, you notice. I nearly made a cake, being quite in the mood, but bore in mind all I ate over the weekend and decided not to risk it. In short, I’m easing myself back into work very gently.
1)I got a new teapot over the weekend… for free! It is brown-y black and has words like “tea….refresh….hot” written on it. I have used it ad-nauseum all weekend.
2)I have bought a TotSeat for my friend in Aus, who has just given birth – they are a wonderous invention and I hope she likes it.
3)We are going on holiday in a week. A whole 2 hours up the road to the Lakes. Camping with the doglets in a nice quiet field…yay!
P.S. Love the idea of Small Girl getting excited about coloured nappies etc and showing her Daddy!
Oh dear. Does this mean the small girl can now identify more plants than I? Yes, yes I believe it does.
Happy making:
1) My house is beeyewtifully clean AND sparkling and has stayed so for several days with only ONE nagging comment on my part. I do believe in miracles.
2) We drove for a while and got OUT of the filthy city and found lovely cool mountains with green, and aspens, and ripening wild raspberries, and mule deer, and elk, and dozens of very darling chipmunks. And lo, it was not only good but quite soul-healing.
I love ratatouille though am not at all sure one should put mushrooms in. .
) Happy about carrots, beans, courgettes and beetroot from the garden; if only I could find time to cook the latter. Happy and excited to have accepted an offer on the house and had one accepted on a new one; sad to leave this house ‘cos I love it and my two youngests were born in it.
Am intrigued (in an earlier post) by the nickname your stepmother uses. Wondering if it is what we call DD2.
Generally happy to be home here, although we had a fabulous hol. Not so happy about C being back at work or about the heaps of laundry. But we are off again on Weds so not so bad! (but to the outlaws, so not so good
Mixed
A happy day? Oh yes…
We had two of CG’s friends over for the day so they all played in the woods all morning, CM made yummy pizza and I made yummy soup for our lunch, then we all went to look at the Oats being Combined, over the road, later, while they played I prepared chutney ingredients and CM made yummy Almond Cookies.
Which were scoffed along with home made bread, butter and assorted jams by the 3ravening children at afternoon tea time…
After the friends had gone home CG and I had a lovely hour doing embroidery, she has not tried this before and has already started on a very good sampler and was most pleased by the whole process.
I have now (just!) finished potting the chutney (courgette, plum and tomato) and have just emptied the dehydrator for today.
Am so glad you are having nice times AND earning some money!!
Z: I think the big thing was that the versions I’d eaten before involved copious quantities of peppers, which, as far as I’m concerned, are one of the vilest substances known to man. I should have thought to try it before, just leaving out the bits I thought suspicious.
Easing yourself back into work gently sounds like a very good plan.
OverWyreGrower: teapots! TEAPOTS! Always good, particularly with an impending holiday.
Megan: I envy you your beeyewtifully clean house, oh so very much…
Lisa: the thing with the mushrooms came about largely because of the aforementioned loathing of peppers.
And you’re moving! Woo! Though I completely get the nostalgia that you’d feel, leaving a house where your babes were born. Still, new things, new places, new horizons.
Compostwoman: that sounds like a very lovely day of activity indeed. Let’s hope there are many more to come before autumn arrives!
We used to call convulvulus flowers “grandfather pop out of bed”, and we’d do the “action” too, where you squeeze the bottom of the flower and the flower pops out
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