Bits:
Knitting my first pair of socks, veeerrryyy slowwwwwlyyyyy. Realising now that I really shouldn’t have just ignored the ribbing at the top, as they are clearly going to fall down ALL THE TIME, and also, the difference between 3.25mm and 2.5mm needles is far more substantial than those measurements might lead one to suppose is possible.

I have fallen off the wagon, cooking-wise – attempting to eat supper earlier has meant cooking things which are quicker to prepare, and thus inventiveness has been overturned by ease. I have plans, though – next week will see at least two new things being tried, methinks, as otherwise, boredom will set in.

I appear to have started me a set of dreadlocks. It’s astonishing what not washing your hair with commercial shampoo for about, er, two months will do for you. That, and the twist-and-rip method I came across online a few days ago. It’s not a complete birds’ nest, but it’s close. Ahem. There will be more order when I finish this twisting malarky, but my poor little arms get tired quite easily so I am taking it at a Methuselah pace. The big plus, though, is that I found a bead with a spiral on it and I now have it in my hair. Spirals. Beads. Hair. A combination that makes me squeak.

I have lots of projects in mind for the next few weeks: felted dress for the small girl courtesy of another old wool jumper discovered abandoned at the back of the wardrobe; fleece dress from sweater which had received similar treatment; trousers, with cord on one side and brushed cotton on t’other; autumn leaves made of felt for hanging-about-the-place-dustilyartistically purposes; pear wine, courtesy of two enormous bags donated by a friend.

In amongst this, the house is coming along – we now have a patio, paths around the house, drains, drainpipes, a water butt and a retaining wall, and this weekend we’re hoping to fill in the French drains with pea shingle while merrily stacking the woodstore (only a month later than planned, which is nearly a victory).

Bats:
The small girl appears to be losing the need to sleep in the day. Part of me thinks yay! about this, as it increases flexibility for what we can do when, but the other part of me is horrified – I had decided not to take on any more freelance copy-editing until the spring so that I could help Quercus by finishing off small jobs on the house (skirting boards, why must you torment me?) while the girl slept; sadly, that appears to be unlikely now. I think I’m just going to have find a new groove, frankly, so that I can manage to do things with her, but also to get some things finished in order to maintain our collective sanity. Yesterday she occupied herself quite happily for an hour on the patio, pouring water from a washing-up bowl into various pots and pans; I cleaned up and cooked dinner, talking to her through the open back door, and thought that actually, perhaps tiling with her around isn’t quite as crazy as I’d thought.

I’m also feeling more positive about the idea of having another baby, probably because my current baby is so clearly not a baby any more. She has a leanness to her, physically, which speaks of action, of activity, of movement, and of development; these are not the soft rolls of baby fat I see as I undress her for our bath each day, but the muscles of a small child whose constant zing and enthusiasm keep her moving nearly all the time these days. Also, of course, EVERYONE I KNOW IS PREGNANT, or so it seems, which does quite a bit to make me nostalgic. Not enough of a reason to have another baby, of course, but certainly I’m feeling more that adding to our numbers would be a Good Thing for lots of reasons, whereas before I couldn’t help adding ‘in theory’ in there somewhere.

I’ve been meaning to write here more frequently, but the stupidest thing has been stopping me – my camera, replaced about a month ago, is still stupid. It turns out that Kodak cameras have a problem with the operating system I use, and that there is no easy fix. Thus, getting pictures off the damn thing is a bit of an uphill struggle, and to be honest, the quality of the camera seems to be a bit of a bore too – where my old one was genuinely point-and-shoot, this one has focusing requirements bordering on the insane, and its most frequently displayed icon when on ‘auto focus’ is the one which means GET THE SODDING TRIPOD OUT – YOU HAVE AN ADVANCED CASE OF THE DTs. Not being a photographery person, of course, I have no tripod, and even if I had, using one would sort of miss the point of that sodding point-and-shoot approach I mentioned earlier. So, thinking of returning it. Anyone got any suggestions for a reasonably cheap alternative?

Right. I go, to ponder five pages of legal editing while thinking about what to have for dinner. And you? What are you up to this week?

Current preoccupations:

These shoes are fabulous, and I have been lusting after them, in one incarnation or another, for some time.

Equally, where does one go to find decent stripy tights or long socks? I had some lovely German tights the year before last, one striped like liquorice all-sorts and the other different shades of reddish-brown, yet this year, they are curiously absent from the interwebs in a manner which speaketh of bankruptcy. So, where next, I ask? What I want is long striped things, possibly black with a sage green or a nice plum-coloured pink. Is that too much to ask?

The small girl and I are going to make this tree thingy this afternoon, all being well. It looks like fun, and her glee at anything involving paper and sticking knows no bounds, so who am I to argue.

Before we do that, though, we’re going to check out a local farm which has recently started a self-service stall in its yard; driving past, I’ve seen beetroot, carrots, potatoes, free-range eggs and honey advertised recently, the latter prompting me to think of trying mead again. We made mead a few years back, and it turned out really well, but took an absolute age to get there… I’ve since read cheaty-quick-skivy methods (some involving cider, which sounds promising though highly cheaty…), and, frankly, being a cheaty-quick-skivy sort of person, that sounds about right.

I’m also gearing up to make the small girl a scarlet hooded cloak, for Chrimbol.* I have some sort of cranberry-coloured cotton velvet thanks to the wonders of Etsy, and the sewing machine and I have reached an accord recently, which has meant less of the throwing-things-in-frustration, and more of the actually-finishing-things-without-either-despair-or-murder-taking-place… So, hopefully I’ll have a bash at this quite soon.

How is it that despite owning lots of very nice strings of bells, I continue to covet more?

And why am I so obssessed with pumpkins?

See? This – this list of utterly lightweight and irritatingly delicous tangents is the reason why I never seem to get on with writing that book, or submitting that paper, or writing an article for a journal. Ahem. It is also the reason why I am continually afraid that someone, somewhere will realise, shortly, that I am in fact an idiot, and revoke my doctorate forthwith.

That said, I have an idea for a novel, and after a conversation with Quercus the other night, I think I might actually try to write it down. Its main character has had a comfortable little space in the corner of my mind for the last decade or so, and I think he is beginning to find that his legs need stretching, and actually, he could quite do with a cup of tea. So, we’ll see. Maybe my current feeling that I should be writing something academic based on my thesis can actually be sublimated into a more useful project of a fictitious nature. Maybe it’s nostalgia, this academic stuff, anyway, given that I lived and breathed it for so long, and maybe fiction would actually give me the brainwork that I seem to crave (and fear) while letting me do something that’s always been on The List.

And you? What are your current preoccupations?

* Yes, this is yet another barbarous modification of the English language of the sort which is prolofic in the Earthenhouse.

So, there you are, full of good intentions and just about to write something constructive and informative and jolly and otherwise uplifiting and whatnot, when a bout of the east wind strikes, and you feel hacked off, and you retreat into your cave, where you stay, hacked-offedly, for a few weeks.

And then, the wind starts to shift. You can smell new things on the breeze, and you can hear new tales in the whispering of the leaves. The sky is changing with each passing day, and the nights are drawing in; already, twilight appears not long after supper, and a cobweb of stars which covers the sky is plain for all to see not long thereafter. All around, you see the fields, the hedges, the trees overburdened with fruits and fecundity (and what a delish word that is), and you immerse yourself in transforming the hedges which surround you into small crystaline pots of goodness, which you then eat, smugly, as the year progresses, and as those lazy sunshine afternoons become brisk with the quickening east wind.

There are vests to be knitted, and shoes to be made, of nut-brown leather and sunflower flashes of bright yellow. There are slabs to be laid, and pumpkins to be felted; nappies to hang in the late summer sun; hats to be discovered, and chairs to be waxed; first pairs of socks to be undertaken, with much trepidation, and peacock brilliance to be found in woollen form. Dragons take form on leftover wood, and rainbows appear next to them. There is action, movement, progress. And more jam than you can shake a big, gnarled stick at.

I’ve been struggling this summer with feelings that I ought to be doing more, being more, making more, creating more. Always the pressure to somehow exceed expectations, to juggle efficiently, to find time where none makes itself known. This pressure comes from me, from inside myself, and it’s something I think I’ve always known. Indeed, I think it’s the thing which has got me, in many ways, to where I find myself now. And the thing about that pressure is that it’s very hard to turn off. Near-impossible, for me.

Sometimes this is useful – finishing a PhD while pregnant and renovating a house? No problem – I’ll knock that off by next Sunday, and still have time to make cheese scones… – but at other times, it’s exhausting, and self-defeating, and just a downright pain in the arse. This summer, it’s mostly the latter, though I think I haven’t really noticed it until the last, say, two months.

So, I’ve been struggling to find the right words for this space, to explain myself without sounding either hideously repetitive or boringly downbeat. And I’ve failed at that, too, really, in that I’ve just taken the alternative option: don’t say anything at all, and just hope it’ll all go away. It’s coming to something when your own blog becomes a bit of a whatsit around the neck – a duty overlooked, a task ignored.

I think back to when we decided to stop having a television in the house, and the sudden ingress of time with which I found myself flooded.

What has helped me to dig my way out of this lovely little hole I’ve been burrowing away at for the summer months of this year has been cutting back on the time I spend online. It’s very easy for me to simply procrastinate away an entire hour or two online, without achieving anything beyond looking at some lovely things which other – less procrastinatey – peope have created, and thinking to myself a repeated loop of ‘that’s very cool – I must make one of them’, or ‘shite – I really should have done something other than this in the time I’ve spent online’, or ‘arses – I am utterly crap at management of time, and thus have nothing to show for today.’

So, cutting right back, spending a week with no time online at all, has really helped. It’s reminded me of all the things I can do, and do do, when I’m not time-hogging on blogs, or Facebook, or email, or somesuch nonsense. It’s also left me with a feeling of wanting only to dip a toe in, of avoiding previous bad habits, which seems to be helping longer-term.

Whinge, whinge, whinge. No more. (At least for now.) (Ahem.) Let us think only happy thoughts, with cheerful productivity thrown in, while I try to work out what it is that drives me like this, and why I feel that there are ‘right’ words, and ‘right’ things to spend time on, and, oh, so many other ways in which I drive myself (and others) insane.

Struggling to find time at the moment – camera not talking to iPhoto (tiresome), copy-editing (tiresome), lots of jams and pickled fruits and wine and frozen things (not tiresome at all), less time overall on the internet (tick; v. g.), knitting hats, scarves, legwarmers and cardigans for the small girl’s doll (also v. g.) = not much time spare. This should change later this week, I think; in the meantime, a few questions for the universe (and you, if you know the answer):

1. Why won’t my MacBook’s installation of iPhoto recognise JPGs as a valid format?

2. Where have I come across a reference to apple and sage jelly, and did it include a recipe?

3. Would Picassa circumnavigate the iPhoto problem?

4. Should I be attempting to be more proactive about nappies?

5. Why do I always find myself making jam when I haven’t got enough jars saved? And why do the jars I have saved always have labels affixed with the stickiest substance known to man?

6. Just what has taken place in that gallon of plum wine from the year before last which has made it taste so unholy?

7. Will I be less tired if I pull my finger out and go to be half an hour earlier?

Right-oh. Back shortly.

It’s no good – I’m still feeling a bit down in the dumps. Last night I ended up ranting about lost dungarees (two pairs thereof), a lost hat (which I knitted, last winter, and which I’m very attached to, not least as it’s the first hat I managed which really worked, and it involved Noro yarn), general housework dudgeon, and the overwhelming feeling of never managing to finish anything.

To wit:
- housework;
- hunts for something-or-other I’ve misplaced;
- sorting out what the hell to do about my mother’s piano (currently being ‘rented’, where ‘rented’ = the rentee isn’t paying the money, and nor is she returning my calls, and I’m worried that when I do finally manage to contact her, she’ll tell me she doesn’t want the piano any more, which leaves me scrabbling around trying to re-home it, which is, frankly, a daunting prospect);
- the copy-editing I’ve got to do;
- the tax return I need to complete;
- the huuuuge list of crafty things which my brain tells me must be done if I am to attain the status of A Good One (mother, wife, general human being);
- the tiling I started weeks ago, which I’ve yet to finish because the next bit involves a tile cutter and I feel as if I need a longer stint at it than the small person’s snooze allows.

ARGH.

I just want to clear the decks, start again, have some energy, and I’m not really sure where to start, or why I’m feeling this so aggressively at the moment. The small girl is sleeping more consistently than she ever has, and generally life is good, if rather disorganised. We even came up with a solution to me ending up doing the grocery shopping every week (which gets a bit dull after a while); it involves Quercus going once every other week, and us getting a delivery of shopping in the off weeks. The irony? I haven’t sat down and done the ordering part, which means it’s not going to happen this week. It’s partly lack of time, but I’m aware that it’s also partly lack of enthusiasm – the time I do have free is very short, and largely in the evenings, when all I seem capable of is sitting, lump-like, on the sofa. I was going to say ‘all I want to do’ there, but the truth of it is that that’s really not the case; what I want to do is spring, gazelle-like, into action, a flurry of knitting, baking, creative, productive energy.

The small girl’s bedtime routine is fairly settled, but I am struggling to keep on top of it, to keep things on track, and she is going to bed probably a half-hour later than is ideal for her; we are not routine people in that this is a pattern which has been largely developed by her, and which we merely facilitate because it seems to suit her (and us, normally), but a half-hour is a big deal when you’re only twenty-six months old, and I feel shifty that her teatime often seems to be a scrabbling of frantic realisation that I have yet to start our dinner off, which means an even later meal than normal, and I just seem to be disorganised all the time. I want to sit down with her, and talk to her, perhaps while knitting, while she eats; I feel very strongly that it’s important that mealtimes are convivial, relaxed and communal. Don’t get me wrong: I am always in the room with her, and I do talk to her (and she to me, increasingly), but I am not able to give her my full attention because I’m normally surveying the three hundred things which still need doing, or which I’ve overlooked earlier in favour of a short stint online.

Our evening meal has slipped backwards so that we rarely sit down before eight o’clock, which, for me, means a very short evening afterwards, and a going to bed which feels hasty and anti-climax-like because I feel cheated of a Proper Evening, one in which Things Were Achieved. Also, increasingly, we’ve been sitting there, watching some load of rubbish on the Beeb’s iPlayer rather than eating at the table, and that normally means that we don’t clear up the kitchen after eating, and a daisy-cutter effect is thus encountered first thing in the morning, which doesn’t exactly set one up for the day, shall we say.

So, my plan is that today, when the small girl sleeps, rather than either sleeping myself (which, tempting though it is, doesn’t actually help my mood, really, and is so short as to be almost worse than not sleeping, sometimes), I will devise a cunning and rapid dinner for adult consumption, and I will have a tidy-up around the house as well as thinking of something creative to do with the small girl when she gets up (it’s very wet here today, so our default of going for a walk in the fields is probably not on the cards). Once that’s done, I will sit and cast on something knitting-wise; perhaps having started a project, it will seem easier to pick it up and get on with it in the evenings.

I am also declaring a fatwa on both Facebook (which in lots of ways I abhor) and shitty televisual programmes; after all, we got rid of our TV for just this reason, and both felt much happier in its absence. It’s so easy to waste your sodding life away while sitting there, watching some bloater cooking something you’re not remotely interested in, for someone you’ve never heard of, in a restaurant the prices of which you find morally offensive, or to read the profile of some friend-of-a-friend you’ve either never met or can’t actually recall either way while pondering their intense love of poodle crochet classes and upscale wheelbarrow decorating. In short, why am I doing this? This is not what life should be about. It’s not a lesson I want to teach the small girl, and it’s certainly not helping me or Quercus. It’s procrastination on a scale I’ve not encountered since my PhD days, when whole days passed with only a sense of increased desperation to show for them, and when I came to realise that if I don’t do things, I only feel worse for it. And if I’m not happy, our whole house suffers for it: the cooking gets crapper (with attendant guilt), the washing mounts up, the bedtimes get later, and poor Quercus gets that slightly hunted look which speaks of ‘she cannae take nae more, Cap’n – she’s goin’ee blow!’.

So, today, I will rip that sodding plaster off instead of picking nervously at the edges, and by god, I will take control of things, and get the fuck on with them. No pissing about online (and no, blogging, which has a tangible and cathartic result, does not count), and no sitting there feeling sorry for myself, and no despairing over The State Of This Fucking Place. Just progress, and creativity, and thus Ordnung.

And you? What are your frustrations in life at the moment, and how are you going about overcoming them (or procrastinating your way around them)?

This morning finds Devon drizzling and grey; predictable, of course, given that we are hoping to go off adventuring tomorrow. Having had three weeks or so of hard work, something involving a pootle, tea and a scone and a walk somewhere other than the fields or woods on our doorstep is called for. Deluge notwithstanding.

Truth be told, I’m feeling a little bit flat. I’ve lost my oomph, and I just can’t quite recall where I saw it last. (Though I think it might have been somewhere in Cornwall.) It’s not terminal, and it’s not disastrous; I just need some time off, and a spot of fun, and probably to finish a few of the projects that I’ve got on the go. Do you ever find that you start a nice list of things To Do, feeling all goody-McTwo-Shoes about it, only to find that where the list once relieved all anxiety about its contents simply in the writing of it, it has now become something of an albatross, swinging around your neck and gently poking you in the backside with its long and angular beak? Yes, well: that.

I have a list of crafty things that I want to do – and yes, I do want to do them – but very little is actually happening on them. This is partly because I’ve chosen things that I don’t really know how to do (a cabled jumper, for example, is probably not quite the best way to ease myself back into knitting after a summer-long break), partly because I’ve been doing quite a bit of freelance work recently (and that normally happens when the small girl is asleep, a precious hour which I could otherwise devote to such fun activities as, you know, cleaning, or making dinner [which, actually, is a fun activity for me, not least as it encourages me to get through those 52 Recipes in 2010, but still... Sometimes I just want to do something selfishly crafty, even if said selfishness is eventually destined for, say, Quercus or the small girl]), and partly because I’m a little lacking in the old organisation/motivation department at the moment.

I’m trying to avoid procrastinating, which means I’m spending less time online – I know that one of my worst habits as a PhD student was the pissing away of hours reading blogs in which I felt only limited interest, purely because my A-list had yet to update, so at least having experienced the crappitude that comes from having wasted a day, I know that I feel rather better – despite short-term crabbiness – if I just get on with things, rather than putting them off while glumly reading t’inter. So, I have started knitting a rather exciting hat for the small girl, with prompting from Ally, who donated wool and a kick-off, and I have drafted a new list (because obviously lists are my thing… ahem…) which is radically shorter, changing the original list to a list intended to cover autumn, rather than, well, now. I’ve also added some easy wins – lengthening the small girl’s felted dress of last winter, making some more felt acorns for her, getting up to thirty on the recipes challenge – which should spur me on a bit.

I’ve come to realise since finishing my PhD that I do seem to need Things To Do, to work towards, to achieve, rather than just being able to pootle through the days in a blithe and carefree manner. I think Coffeeslut‘s comment that I might be ‘unsuited to being / perceiving [myself] to be stationary while the world moves / seems to be moving on around [me]‘ is probably quite apt; I need activity, and organisation. Here’s to autumn coming, and with it, a new sense of vigour.

Happy Friday, interwebs: it is nearly time for a lie-in.

How is it that for about four years, we lived with one functioning cupboard and the driftwood larder (Quercus’s first attempt at cupboard-making) and we seemed to have everything stored, if not sensibly, then at least accessibly, without any particularly noticeable oversights, yet now, we have acres – no, hectares of storage, of glorious oak cupboards, and we’re filling them up within six months of their completion? Where has all this stuff come from, I ask? Do I really need six mince-pie trays, given that I normally only use two of them? And how do I come by EIGHT round cake tins of approximately the same size and style? One, two or even three I could understand, but EIGHT? That speaks of more than a momentary lapse of concentration, doesn’t it?

Anyway.

One of my favourite things is cupboard reorganisation. I’ve been rejigging things about a bit ever since Quercus finished our cupboards, and I think I’m just about happy with where everything lives, despite my intense puzzlement about the quantity of detritus we appear to have had stored in the sheds. I knew there were more cups and plates and things, but I hadn’t realised just how much baking crap I have. It’s… interesting. I suppose it’s the result of inheriting lots of bits as the aged parent prepared to move house; he doesn’t bake, and thus handed all the things that were my mother’s over to me, and then, as they came in dribs and drabs, I shoved them somewhere convenient and forgot about them, not noticing the very plural nature of those dribs and drabs. Well, at least if it turns out that the answer to the universe is, in fact, a pie of mince, I will be well prepared.

Part of all this unearthing has been rediscovering old recipes that I love, and baking things I remember making with my mother when I was small. Just as I can recall sitting on our counters and handing her things from the cupboards while performing minor physical miracles in avoiding bashing my head on the wall-mounted storage, now I see the small girl sitting in front of me, swiping dried fruit from the various bags and boxes which live in the larger Dried Fruits storage box (fortunately without the physical miracles, as our kitchen is large enough to avoid wall units, a personal loathing of mine), and covered in various quantities of flour, sugar and sunflower oil.

All this baking requires the right clothing, clearly…

So last night, I made her her first apron. A very kind friend recently donated various swathes of fabric to our cause, and in amongst them was a rather nice upholstery-weight brown, which now has a few buttons added, and some red thread, and a wooden heart. I think it’s probably going to be EEEEnormous on her because I sized it by gawping at some dungarees of hers which were kicking about after she’d gone to bed, but hey – room to grow, or something.

And now the bit where I have to wait to give it to her, because we’re out with friends this afternoon, so I must learn me some patience. Remind me how that works…? I’ve never learned thus far… I do love making things for her, and I also love the feeling of surprise that I get every time something actually works out – after years of being utterly crap at sewing, it constantly amazes me that I can do this, and it may even work. Long may it last, both the feeling, and the making.

And you? Any works-in-progress at the moment?

I’m mid-camera change at the moment, and have thus yet to do battle with the outgoing camera in order to try to extricate some pictures from its grubby mits, but I just wanted to say how very exciting it is to watch our workshop coming together at last. It’s about two years or so since we worked out detailed plans for where it would go and how it would be built, and now, watching it actually take shape, I realise how nice it’s going to be. It’s not quite your average shed in that it’s HUGE, and so far its frame has been put together using free and recycled wood. Eventually, it’s going to have waney-edged boards for walls (the planks of wood with the curved edges of the tree left in place) and shingles (wooden tiles) for a roof; it’s a very Quercus structure, in short.

Yesterday we* clambered about on it, putting up the first two roof trusses, and slotting the beam which forms the apex into place. Ridge pole, I believe. It was interesting; there were Very Big Nails involved, and a lot of up-and-down, but very little swearing or getting cross; Quercus and I work pretty well together, and fortunately I don’t seem to drive him quite as demented as his mother does, which is reassuring. I’ve got pictures of various stages of it thus far; the floor supports are in place, and the walls’ studwork, and now two of the zillions of roof trusses are up – the overall impression is of an ark, frankly.

The bark is still on part of the wood because it came free from a local sawmill, so hadn’t been processed because they wanted to get rid of it. We’re going to treat it to help it remain solid against the wet Devon weather, but the wood chaps estimate it should last for twenty years or more even untreated.

That green amorphous blob is the table saw, hiding under a dumpy bag because the weather, despite the blue skies here, has been so unpredictable for the last month or so that you just never know when it’s going to tip it down suddenly… Gives an idea of scale, too – the apex is about eleven feet up.

See what I mean about the ark-like quality? It’s even more this way now that all the roof trusses are in place; more pictures to follow now that I am once more be-camerad.

In other news, pumpkins. Well, specifically, Hooligans. Quercus’s mother has grown a packet of these, and brought down a large bag of the upshot, which is to say, about ten little pumpkins of a most aesthetically pleasing nature. I chopped the lids off, whipped out the seeds and that odd stringy bit in which pumpkins seem to specialise, and in went a rather pleasant combination of cheese, lentils, beans and brown rice.

I’m hoping they keep well; we have another five or so to go, and next time I’m wondering about a nut, mushroom and brown rice thing for the stuffing business…

Stuffed pumpkins
Ingredients
Some pumpkins (!)
An onion or two
A large lump of cheese
About a mugful of lentils
About a mugful of beans, barley, split peas – whatever comes to hand, pulses-wise, really
Quite a lot of garlic
About a mugful of brown rice
Some herbs – I used basil, sage, parsley, thyme and oregano
A slosh of Tabasco
A stockcube
A couple of eggs

Then…
Boil up everything bar the pumpkins, the eggs and the cheese in a large pan, using enough water to mean the end result is a sticky-ish stodge, rather than something needing draining – you want to eat all those herby bits and bats, rather than watching them disappear down the plughole. When you’re sure the pulses aren’t going to poison anyone, remove said pan from the heat and grate in the cheese. When the resulting even-more-sticky mass has cooled a bit, mix in the eggs.

Carve off lids for the pumpkins and take out the seedy bit. I stabbed the sides a few times because, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and dobbed a little bit of butter on the edges here and there before filling the cavity with the cheesy lentil mixture and putting the lid back on. (Because I am greedy of a generous disposition, the lids were more sort of squodged on top than actually replaced, but this, I found, led to an agreeably crunchy collar of cheesy loveliness around the edge of the lid when cooked.) Pop the filled pumpkins on a tray, with a tablespoon or two of water to help the skins cook, and a few little dots of butter on their lids. Cook them at about 180°c for about an hour; they went very nicely with some opportunist baked taters, and some steamed courgettes. Having only encountered pumpkin in either a soup or a pie context prior to this, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it tasted quite strongly, and that its texture was rather like potato; I’d thought the filling would serve largely to disguise something a tad on the unspeakable side.

After this, a nice sit-down and a cup of tea is called for, as is a large slice of tiffin, which became my poor-man’s-Rocky Road yesterday when I realised that I simply wasn’t going to find proper marshmallows, as opposed to the ghastly Flump-style aberrations. So, I took this route:

Tiffin
Wossinit?
100g dark chocolate
2 tbsp honey
100g butter
A large pinch of cinnamon
A drop of Angostura bitters
About half a mug of sultanas
About half a mug of roasted walnuts
100g ginger biscuits, with a few digestives thrown in because I could

So…
Melt the chocolate, honey and butter together; I tend to ignore that whole ‘gently’ malarky and just blast the bastard in the microwave because I have no patience, and so far it’s worked just fine. When you’ve got a gorgeous silky mix of chocolate with which you’d quite like to just retire quietly to the shadows, spoon in hand, resist this temptation, and take out the resulting frustration on those biscuits, damn them. Pop them in a small bag and bash the blighters until they are fine crumbs. (Take that, you… you… biscuit!) Add in the nuts (I think pine nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds or really anything crunchy would work equally well) and the sultanas (which, likewise, you could replace with any sort of dried fruit you fancied, I should imagine), and then pour on the melted chocolate mixture. Mix it all in thoroughly, then turn it out into a 20cm square tin you’ve lined with something like foil or baking paper (which makes for a rather easier turning-out manoeuvre later on) and stick it in the fridge to set. When you want to cut it into pieces (assuming you get that far), whip it out and let it warm up a tad so it doesn’t crack when you cut it, and bingo: chocolatey stickiness of a rather pleasant, deeply un-labour-intensive nature.

So, pictures of woody bits to follow, and also of pumpkins, in theory, at least. Anyone got any other pumpkin recipes worth sharing? I’d love to see my pumpkin prejudices trounced once and for all.

* For once, not the Royal We which means Quercus, but both of us; positioning timber which is that heavy is simply not possible single-handed unless you have better access to your site, and probably quite a few lengths of rope for levering things.

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?

In between the bouts of navel-gazing which I do so, er, well, the small girl and I have also been baking. At the moment, the small girl’s favourite activities are mostly house-related – she cooks, bakes, cleans, and does the washing-up. If I had known that one could expect a reasonable return, in housework terms, on the investment in small people before the age of three, I’d've had a brace of them years ago.  Anyway, obviously this cooking-baking-cleaning is to be encouraged, not least because it means we do lots of things together that I really enjoy doing (though the cleaning… not so much), and on Sunday we managed to make our first batch of genuinely joint-effort cheese biscuits.  Viz.:

First we create the bedlam. Note presence of Nutkin, inveterate chef extraordinaire.

Then we spend at least half an hour washing it all up, many, many times.*

Then we sit back and marvel at what we’ve made. Not least as our child-friendly biscuit cutter set includes a star, a moon, a flower, a heart, and A PIG. The mind boggles.

Then we flog our wares to an unsuspecting Quercus.

The recipe we used was from Hugh Fernley Whittingstall‘s The River Cottage Family Cookbook, and was very successful, though we added A LOT more flour than the recipe indicated before the dough was vaguely workable.  The best bit, mind you, was getting to use the most excellent rolling pin set that LQS bought us the small girl, from the Early Learning Centre. They are all sorts of fabulous, and far nicer colours than on the ELC site. My favourite is the one with spots, which leaves a sort of crater-like set of circles and spots on the dough, making the moon-shaped biscuits we cut out very entertaining.

The original recipe has these as cheese straws, but we liked shapes better. It ended up  as something like this:

Cheesy Biscuits
Ingredients
150g grated cheese (we used strong cheddar, and ignored the ‘finely’ indication on the grating instructions)
100g butter (we used a soya replacement)
About 150 – 200g plain flour (the recipe thinks 100g, but that was just a sticky unrollable mess for us, perhaps because of the soya margarine)
A goodly sprinkle of chilli powder
The yolk of an egg (and very nearly the white, and the shell, in our case)

Then…
Bung it all in a reasonably large bowl and mangle it about the place until it forms itself into a nice ball of cheesey loveliness. Cover the entire universe in flour, then roll out the dough to, well, anywhere between half an inch thick and about three milimetres (why yes, I do think in feet and centimetres – how did you know?) before bashing the ol’ cutters through it as if there’s no tomorrow. Pop them on some trays, and stick in the oven at about 200°c for about ten minutes or so; HFW reckons twenty degrees higher, but our version looked like burning on the edges at that temperature, so we took the coward’s way out, rather than keeping our eagle eyes on them, and just turned the heat down. They lasted all of twenty-four hours, and I’m only surprised they were around that long, frankly, given our cheese-hoovering natures, as a family.

We also gave a vegan recipe a run for the first time over the weekend. I say ‘for the first time’, which is not to say that we’ve never eaten vegan food before, but that this is the first time I’ve used a recipe which was avowedly such, and the conclusion I drew was that, rather like my experiences with Cranks recipes, it was brilliant not least because the vegan bit was incidental to its general stuffaliciousness. It was this macaroni cheese, and yes, most of the reviewers are right about it.  I’m not writing the recipe out in full only because we didn’t really change anything, other than to approach measurements of ingredients with a blithe spirit which scorns the use of such mortal concepts as scales; I probably used twice the quantity of vegetables for the sauce, and I added a stockcube to the water in which they cooked. Definitely going into the repertoire, though, that one.

And before I forget, please to be noting of the tileage which is encroaching on the background of the picture. in which the small girl is washing up, above.  I started tiling this weekend, having had the tiles sitting in our bedroom (as you do) since, oh, the dark ages; so far, I’ve managed three rows, about halfway along the big wall behind the counters, but I have lots of sticky bits still to go, including tiling around the sink and – I shudder to think of it – the tap. But they’re ridiculously gorgeous colours, them there tiles, and I’m pretty pleased with the way they’ll look eventually. Plus, I can disguise any ineptitude in my tiling with the phrase ‘handmade’ and ‘artisan’, given that the tiles vary in size by as much as half a centimetre, and haven’t got a straight edge between them. Ahem.

It’s been ages since I’ve had a working laptop, a spare half-hour, an internet connection, and the will to do something more active than staring at my navel for some time, but finally, that moment has arrived.

So, here is a quick round-up of the things we’ve been doing lately, which includes, of course, the small girl’s second birthday (June 1). I can’t believe my girl is two – it seems as if she has been a part – a defining characteristic – of my life always, yet at the same time, it’s but a blink of the eye since I was marvelling at the feel of her moving about inside me, watching the odd outline of, well, who knew what appearing against the side of my ever-expanding belly as she made herself that bit more comfortable.

We spent the week preceding her birthday at Quercus’s mother’s house, where the small girl enjoyed herself chasing about in a remarkably tidy garden while I sat beneath a copper beech tree and sewed things, including a dress (below) for the small girl made from dyed fabric we bought for table coverings at our wedding dance (I still have nearly a bolt of that fabric left) and various (slightly abortive) dresses for the doll I was making her for her birthday. (Ye gods, who knew that making dolls’ clothes would turn out to be such a dark art? I thought I was on the home strait when I managed to stitch on the doll’s head without putting it on back to front or something; let us not speak of the giant backside I created when I inadvertently over-stuffed the body section without realising that actually, all that spare fabric wasn’t spare, but was supposed to be the whole of the torso, not just the legs… Um…)

We arrived back in Devon, armed with a grandma who was going to help with both small person amusement and various delightful building-project-related tasks, to find that our absence had given Quercus the time to undercoat all the external woodwork, dig large trenches for drains to go around the outside of the house (we’re using this perforated pipe stuff which is supposed to take moisture away from the base of the cob walls; given that cob is just earth and straw, really, we don’t want to be adding too much water, as living in an earthen house is one thing, but no-one wants to live in a mud pie), fit guttering and downpipes to the extension, clean up the roof with a pressure washer (the lime got everywhere when we were rendering), re-hang the front door, sand it back to its original wooden state, fashion a small oak bed from the off-cuts left after building the kitchen cupboards for the small girl’s new doll AND clean the house virtually top to bottom. Many, many bonus points were awarded, needless to say.

Her birthday itself was wet, unfortunately, but we managed a nice little walk aboot, and there was much cake-eating (apple and vanilla, with lemon icing and two rather natty candles with little stars on them), present-opening and wrapping-paper-flinging. She is still getting used to having new things to play with; we tend to find that things are often put to one side for several weeks while one possession occupies pole position, and then later a regime shift takes place. Bluebell, the doll being tucked into Quercus’s oak bed here, has just come into her own after I caved and bought some gorgeous dolls’ clothes from the Bishopston Trading Company in Totnes (where I spent a very happy day ambling about with L-Q-S and her River Man, over from Ireland for a brief tour of various parts of England, including an as-usual lovely lunch in Willow, probably my favourite eatery ever); the clothes are exactly the right size, and are just as lovely as the full-size clothes the BTC churns out. Mostly, though, I am stupidly grateful that, for once, I bought something, and it just worked, and it didn’t need adjusting, replacing, returning or otherwise translating AT ALL. (Even if I have got just a slight hint of maternal guilt at not producing these things myself, all the while dandling the babe on one hip, weaving a few lentils into my own reusable sanitary towels and whistling the odd bar of all four parts of a Stravinsky string quartet).

Apart from this, the house is now once more a golden colour all over – part of the latest wave of Sorting Things Out included fixing the render caught by the hard frosts last January, and adding a coat of limewash. That coat needs to be wrapped in several more coats, and quite possibly hats, scarves, mittens and muffs, of limewash before we’ll be happy that it’s as weather-proof as it’s ever going to be, but hey, at least it’s a step in the right direction. The tricky thing is that we need dryish weather for limewashing, but not of the baking hot August-like variety we’re experiencing at the moment. It was twenty-five degrees this morning by ten o’clock. I mean, that seems a tad on the hardcore side to me, but then it’s well-known that I’d probably be happier living somewhere where ice proved a viable building product. (Blame it on having fair skin; it’s hard to get enthusiastic about weather which requires either the donning of something nice and sun-proof, like, say, A WARDROBE, or the frequent and lavish application of substances which greatly resemble axle grease. Oh, fair skin – why? WHY, I ask? English Rose? My arse. My family has Swedish roots, but that hasn’t helped my sodding skin tone, any more than my father’s black hair and olive skin did. Weedy little genes he must have, that’s all I can say.)

So. There you go. And you?

Number of new MacBooks gracing our kitchen table: 1

Number of shiny British pounds spent bringing about this happy state: not going to be thought about

Number of shiny British pounds about to be made by shameless flogging of iPod bought for £20 courtesy of Apple deal in shop: probably about £130

Number of hours spent in frustrating discussions about wireless router: mind-numbingly plural

Number of loaves of bread baked this week: 6. Six. SIX.

Number of presents currently scattered about the house in happy toddler disarray: approx. four billion

Number of cats snoozing, complete with muddy paws, on newly-waxed oak bench seat: 2. That’s eight paws, and forty claws. FORTY CLAWS.

Number of mothers-in-law currently entering their third – THIRD – week of residence: 1. Thankfully, they don’t tend to be a plural phenomena.

Number of hair-pulling insane discussions with afore-mentioned legal maternal relative: lost somewhere in the first twenty-four hours

Number of blog posts fermenting in Earthenwitch brain, or remnants thereof: 3, including dolls, cooking, and exterior painting of windows and doors which has greatly reduced the pikey appearance of our house.*

And you?

*Is it horribly anal of me to find it almost hand-clenchingly wrong to write a number, i.e. a numerical character rather than the word, followed by punctuation? Or, indeed, to use numbers rather than words full stop?

Laptop broken! Insanity setting in! Fear for future of self and family but getting blighter looked at on Friday so keep things crossable crossed please. Not least as replacement is something like £700.

Soon to come, internets and laptop permitting:

Birthdays, and smugness thereof courtesy of handmade presents and the rather excellent reception said goods were accorded;

Cooking, the doing much thereof, with recipes to boot;

Dolls, the concocting thereof;

Cob houses, and the large trenches appearing around them (or, er, it, specifically, it being our cob house in question).

And you?

I’m off to West Sussex for a week, with the small girl. We’re abandoning Quercus to his fate, which is to work on the house and finish various things off, in favour of an extra pair of hands to entertain personages of a diminutive stature (his mum), in favour of tidy gardens with sprinkler systems which are just asking to be played with, in favour of growing tomatoes in need of pollination help in the form of being rattled about each day, in favour of SOMEONE ELSE DOING THE COOKING. In short, it’s a sort-of holiday which gives Quercus the space to work without worrying that he’s causing utter chaos for the rest of us.

Other things: sourdough bread. Well. The small girl and I used Hugh F-W’s recipe, and though we followed it to the letter, I was surprised that the resulting loaf wasn’t more… well, different. Admittedly, given that I wasn’t using organic flour because I hadn’t got any, I did end up having to boost the starter with a scrap of yeast – could that be why, to all intents and purposes, it seemed an awful lot like, well, normal (in a homemade context) bread? I’d love to give it another go, as I hear all sorts of good things about sourdough, and so far, while it was nice, it wasn’t exactly the revelation I’d hoped for. Suggestions? Recipes? Pointers? In the meantime, I’ve been making that spelt recipe I posted a while back quite a lot – the only problem I have found with it is that, I think because of the ratio of water to flour, the top tends to flatten off during baking; I need to fine-tune quantities and rise time, I think, but the crumpetty texture is intriguingly beguiling. Crumpbread. I mean – !

Still other things: it’s the small girl’s birthday in a little over a week. She will be two on the first of June, and I have no idea quite where that time has gone. Last week, she cracked (if that’s the right verb) her first pun – a small fish finger-puppet was stuffed down her dungarees while an enormous grin formed on her face, and she then said, giggling so much that it took me a minute to work out what she was on about, ‘fish it out! fish it out!’. She is increasingly chatty, day by day; a friend told me that a two-and-a-half-year NHS check-up includes the questiof of whether a child has a vocabulary of c. 200 words – I should say that the small girl’s vocabulary now extends to something like 500 words easily. She speaks in phrases of up to about six or seven words, and often offers words I didn’t know she knew. Her company is a delight in so many ways, and we are having tremendous fun together, more-so than I’d ever imagined possible at this point. I’ve been making a few things for her birthday – so far, a small mattress, with washable quilt and pillow covers to go on a little wooden bed which Quercus is making for her various soft toys, and a set of napkins with a table cloth to supplement the tin tea-set we’ve bought her – and this week, while I have the unusual luxury of childcare in the form of the much-loved Grandma, I’m going to try my hand at making a Waldorf doll. I’ve never done this sort of thing before, but I’ve armed myself with various supplies, internet tutorials and ‘The Children’s Year’, which I read about here and couldn’t resist, so keep your fingers crossed that I don’t mangle it too badly, and if the results aren’t too horribly unexpected, I may even go so far as to post a picture.

I still have a birthday crown to make, using up some felt I’ve had kicking about for aaaages, and hopefully I’ll get through that in the coming week as well. Oh, and possibly some trousers for the small girl, and a summer dress, given that we are having improbably summer-like weather (I won’t go so far as to say that it is now summer, as this is Devon, which is in England, which makes really virtually any mention of the s-word the kiss of death in terms of ongoing, settled warmth without some hideous drawback, like rampant humidity or thunder or some-such appealing meteorological phenomena). Let’s hope the sewing machine continues its current mild manners, or the small girl’s vocabulary may be subjected to some developments I would rather postpone until at least, say, three.

Other, other things (ahem): the orchards which surround Earthenhouse are in blossom, and it’s a real sight to behold. Acres of careful rows of little stumpy cider apple trees, all weighed down with millions of dusky pink flowers, and humming with bees (some of whom live in hives at the back of the fields). The small girl and I rather like walking between the rows, surrounded by the busyness of said bees and the fragrance of the trees. The best bit, of course, is when Pyewacket and Wixon come with us too – other people walk dogs, but not us: we have walking cats.

(Since you ask, which you probably didn’t, the bonnet is made from a scrap of Kaffe Fassett’s lovely ‘Roman Glass’ fabric, because it is just tooooooo good. The colours! The circles! The – *passes out*)

I leave you with news that the caravan has finally departed the parish, after nearly a year of worrying, chivvying and general bollocking about with both its owner and the one-time friend who arranged its appearance here. We are not missing it, unsurprisingly, and I am still boggling at the situation, to say nothing of the fact that we still have a few things belonging to the one-time friend which, I imagine, he may at some point want back, but which he (apparently) can’t be arsed to come and get now. Irritating, but not eight foot by twenty, so surmountable, in the general scale of things.

Right. See you all on the other side, and have a lovely week.

So, I asked for nice things, and lo! nice things there were. Firstly, there was this extraordinarily nice parcel which winged its way to us from Claire at Whispering Acres. Look at all that loveliness. Approximately half a ton of felty goodness, complete with a very nice book indeed, together with some beautifully hand-dyed fleece and a rather very lovely hand-felted flower. Gosh, is all.

And then there were lots of lovely people coming out of the woodwork to tell me that I’m not a heinous arsehole, and that there are lots of lovely things cracking off in lots of lovely ways. (Yes, I am over-using the term ‘lovely’. No, I do not care. Yes, this shows an uncharacteristic lack of savagery. Blame it on the pastis.) Also, my very excellent chicken clock arrived this week – it has a pendulum foot which moves with the tickingness, and a chickeny face which could not fail to charm. Well, it charms me, anyway, and it serves as a reminder that, while we haven’t got hens just now, we are still Hen People, and, when the time is right and we have found the right set-up for keeping the laying ladies safe (and for giving them two areas of pasture, so we can rotate between seasons as Cheryl mentions here), we’ll have more hens, and we’ll reclaim our existing hens (who are living it up at Purple Towers for now).

Also rather pleasant was this evening’s dinner, which warrants a 52 Recipes entry, methinks. Thus:

Veggie Casserole with Herby Cheesy Dumplekins*
Wossinit?

For the casserole:
2 large onions
2 large carrots
2 parsnips
A fistful of garlic
About eight large mushrooms (or as many as are mouldering at the back of the fridge)
A slurp of olive oil
About a pint of veggie stock
A few bay leaves
About ¼ pint of white wine
A couple of tsp of cornflour

For the dumplekins:
4 oz self-raising flour
About 2 oz cheddar cheese
A fistful of fresh parsley
A knob of butter

Then…
Chop the parsnips up, coat them in a drop of oil and whack them in the oven to roast on a suitably incandescent temperature (I think I went for about 220°c, and that took about twenty minutes) until they’re roasted to destruction perfection (which = destruction minus approx. thirty seconds, in my experience).

Meanwhile, chop the carrots, onions, garlic and mushrooms up, and sling them in a pan. (I misguidedly used a rather large number, which meant that dinner looked a tad impoverished; note to self: smaller pan looks far more greedy-indulging). Fry that lot up with the slurp of olive oil for a few minutes, putting the mushrooms in last because of that thing they do where they appear to bring a pint of liquid (each!) to the party.

While that’s cooking, start on the dumplekins, so-called because they were far too small to be dumplings, but were clearly second cousins to that noble beast. So, pop the flour and parsley in a bowl, rub in the butter and then add the cheese. About four spoons of cold water should make a workable dough; divide that into about a dozen or so little lumps and form them into balls.

At this point, realise the parsnips have caught fire, or – no – wait – there can be smoke without fire, particularly if you last used the grillpan in about 1603. Rescue parsnips. Add the stock and the wine to the casserole pan, and cook until you’re no longer swooning from the alcohol fumes (oh, that’s just me?), before mixing up the cornflour with some cold water and slinging that in to thicken the sauce a bit. Boil it all up until you’re happy, and then throw the dumplings in, stick the lid on, and leave it to ferment on a low heat for about twenty minutes.

Finally, chuck in the parsnips, and scoff surprising quantities of this while attempting to balance the warring demands of wondering if you put in enough cheese, while knowing that to add more would be dangerously close to obscenity.

* This is loosely based on a recipe in Nadine Abensur’s Cranks Fast Food, a book which details, in my experience, food which isn’t really fast, but hey. The recipes are delicious, but often seem to call on stuff which I just haven’t got, and can’t even find in various supermarkets, so I end up going off on a tangent, which is why I say ‘based on’ in this case. However, the book’s well worth a look, and not least for such delights as the stuffed courgettes recipe. No, really.