In slightly more detail:

• I’ve cast on the child’s placket neck sweater from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts (that was Knitted Gits first time); I have some rather lovely Rowan wool in, worryingly, a shade called ‘Rage’. Does this indicate the shape of things to come, I wonder? Probably, as I’m relearning the magic loop technique for this sweater, and wishing – so, so wishing – that it was just knitted flat. And on BIG needles, rather than 4mm ones, which seem rather piddling after the 9mm variety I used for the last knitting I did. Anyway, we shall see. I really hope that I find my knitting zen; I think that despite my professed love of winter, I am finding the stultification of a very wet, muddy January a bit of a bummer, technically, and as previously discussed, I need to achieve things if I am to avoid feeling a bit shit, really.  I’m also hoping to kick off the hourglass sweater in the same book for myself (the first thing I’ll have knitted for me! all me!), but am a bit dismayed at the concept of 15 skeins of Noro anything; approx. UK price for that would be somewhere over £100, so I’m going to be attempting to come up with an affordable – hopefully tweedy-looking – alternative. Any suggestions? I would love to just use up some of the stash I’ve accumulated since I started knitting, but as ever, nothing is the right size, or the right quantity. Typical, no?

• Why do I keep seeing knitting things I want to do, but which always call for either a different sort of wool or a size of needle which I don’t yet possess? Also, as an aside, how is it possible that I don’t now own at least one instance of EVERY SIZE of needle, given the vastness of my inherited/purchased collection?

• I find the prettiness of my circular needles rather distracting. I keep finding myself wandering off, mentally, and completely forgetting how many stitches whatever particular form of torment I’m engaging in at the present moment I have actually done. This has lead to an interesting border to the bottom edge of the sweater. (I’ve now frogged the blighter and started over.)

• I have submitted my tax return, though I hope to all that’s holy that the calculation is wrong; it’s over £100 more than I’d estimated. Fortunately, I’ve got a week to speak to someone about it before the deadline, so if it’s out, I can hopefully sort it before simply stumping up. Sodding, sodding student loans.

• Today, I declare to be a baking day. This morning, the small girl is at a toddler group with Quercus brandishing craft supplies in line with the theme of shopping; this should mean that she probably wants a reasonably quiet afternoon, and baking is our default activity at such times. I’m itching to try something new, though; cake suggestions, anyone?

• Preschool: the pros and cons thereof. Please discuss. At present, the small girl goes to a toddler group once a week, and we meet up with friends who have similarly-aged children probably most weeks, so she gets a reasonable quantity of socialising, but, left to our own devices, our rhythm is pretty home-centred. Lots of people we know are now looking at preschools, or, indeed, have had their infants merrily toddling along for the last few months; are we doing ours a disservice by not following suit? I can’t imagine leaving her somewhere on her own at the moment; she is going through a particularly mother-centric, well, life, really, although she is confident with people she knows reasonably well, and will quite happily toddle off with some of our friends and so on. I don’t want to push her into something for which she isn’t ready, but at the same time, I do think I underestimate her sometimes, so I am wary of being simply selfish in my desire to keep her with me, all the time. Ahem.

• Wet, dank, grey. That is Devon this morning.

And you?

So far, December has been very cold, from the outset. The night before last brought a beautiful hoar frost, covering the land in a blanket of icy crystals which didn’t leave even in the brief midday sun. The small girl and I walked to the top of the hill along the lane, to see reindeer and to look at Christmas trees, which, thankfully, appear to be half the price they were last year. I’m trying to make sure that the cold weather doesn’t prevent us going out and about as much as ever; it may now involve snowsuits, mittens and wristwarmers over the top, but the small girl’s ride in the sling was clearly good fun, and she loves to make observations about what we see as we walk, enjoying the superior views afforded by my towering… 5′ 6″. Ahem.

In between our forays into arctic survival, we have mostly been baking and making. So far, six jars of apple mincemeat, with, rather conveniently, no ingredients bought beyond what we happened to have in the cupboards. (This probably testifies more to the strange contents of our kitchen than to any particular fortuitousness…), several batches of gingerbread and Chrimbly Scandinavian-style biscuits, nine red fleece hearts to hang on the Chrimbly tree, when we get it, and three moosibous (somewhere between a moose and a caribou, these felty critters are now lining up on the shelves, complete with antlers, bells and the odd button nose). Still to go: lots more felt hearts, lots more biscuits, cake, puddens, and various crafty bits about which I cannot speak for fear of Prying Eyes. (And yes, I am looking at you, Quercus.)

Oh yes: before I go wittering on, has anyone out there perfected The Ultimate Chrimbly Biscuit? I am thinking of something along the Pfeffernüssen and Lebkuchen line, with spices and whatnot. We’ve tried a few recipes this year (and I wrote my own recipe a while back, when I was blogging as Kitchen Witch; I’ve meant to add my archives from that site to this, ever since I started here, yet have I done it? Have I buggery. This means I will have to go through the hideously long text file version to find the sodding recipe. That’ll teach me) but I’ve yet to find The One Biscuit To Bring Them All And In The Gluttony Bind Them.

The ice was about an inch long on some of the ferns; just beautiful.

Holly leaves, with cinnamon, orange zest and whatnot. Lovely smell, but recipe was a tad disappointing as the biscuits were a bit on the dry side, despite adding extra milk, and a bugger to roll out as a result.

I’ve never been particularly sure about this lamp, which is in our garden; it always looks a bit out of kilter to me, with its nineteenth-centuriness, against our blatantly-older-than-that house, but it does do a good Narnia line in this sort of weather, so I think I will get over it.

This morning it is bright, sunny and cold once more, though the magical dusting of yesterday has now gone, and apparently it’s going to be warmer this weekend. I love winter; this time of year is my favourite. I do hope we’re not about to have a bout of warm-and-wet, though, because that is all sorts of crap in my view. Let’s stick to the cold and bright, please, weather gods.

In about a week, it will be ten years since my mother died. I can’t quite believe it: an entire decade of this alternative life, this strange, skewed existence which still seems off-balance to me sometimes despite the passing of time. I have decided that December 14 will now be the day when we get our Chrimbly tree. I don’t want to wallow, and I don’t want to dwell on the fact that my mother isn’t here to do this with us, to meet the small girl, to watch us grow, together. Rather, I will spend my time with a small girl for whom Chrimbly and the midwinter is so very exciting, this being the first time she has really taken note of what’s going on, and I will celebrate the going-on of life rather than its disappearance, inevitable, inescapable, ineffable. This small girl of mine has done what no amount of counselling, or thinking, or mourning, or distraction, could do, and she has done it without even knowing she was doing it, never mind trying – she has flipped the coin, making me the mother, and recasting my loss in a new role. I am now the mother, and in so becoming, I feel in charge of myself, grown-up in a way that I thought I had lost forever when my mother died. So, here’s to the healing powers of mincemeat, and of cake-baking, and card-making, and present-plotting, and cold walks in the crisp frost, and reindeer who live at the top of our hill.

Monday morning:

- Bright sunshine and hard frost.

- Small girl’s starry quilt finished in time for the first proper cold weather (pics to follow when I finish changing cameras; have I ranted recently about how much technology has pissed me off lately? Broken or useless in the last few months: microwave, kettle, toothbrush, two digital cameras, external harddrive; it’s just not funny!).

- Several new recipes to add to the stash (sweet potato and lentil burritos, butternut squash and rainbow chard lasagne, stuffed pumpkin).

- House full of clothes needing either washing, drying or putting away (why oh why have we no decent line outside? Winter sun may not be either frequent or particularly warm but it beats the hell out of dank indoor set-ups, with the exception of the wonderful Victorian airer we have on a pulley system…).

- Hair cut on Saturday and now the mirror shows me someone else; can’t do the things I normally do with it very successfully, and yet don’t like it just down… Time, I guess, will solve that one!

- Small girl has been quite cross for about a month now, and Quercus and I are definitely noticing. Teeth? Virus? Chickenpox? All considered, but nothing conclusive.

- Gingerbread forest baked on Friday; eaten by Saturday evening.

- First pieces of flat felt made, one with stripes and one with spots. Again, pictures to follow once I sort the camera issue.

- For some reason, I appear to be savagely bad-tempered lately. Not sure why; maybe I’m catching it from the small girl (or maybe she’s catching it from me). The house is really getting me down, and I long to have the spare time together that ‘normal’ people seem to get at weekends, rather than the ships-that-pass-at-mealtimes experience that our weekends normally seem to be. I know that the things we each do are valuable, in some cases vital, but that doesn’t make it easier when you get to Monday and just feel flat because the weekend was… blah. Quercus is working to finish the workshop at the moment – the cladding is nearly done, and then he’s got a door and two windows to make before he can move our vast collection of tools in – and I’ve been tidying up things like gate-painting, crack-filling, kitchen tiling and whatnot. I can see progress, and yet the rest of the house is so dusty, so cobwebby, so mouldy (in places), so chaotically full of STUFF that just won’t fit anywhere else because our storage is virtually non-existent, and all I seem to do is half-finish a job while the small girl sleeps only to break off and do something else when she wakes, because otherwise we spend ALL DAY doing housework, which doesn’t seem particularly fair on her, despite her relative patience in such scenarios. (I find she tolerates me doing things like that for a long time, but we often end up with a period of relative meltdown later in the day; it makes more sense, thus, to go for a walk together at some point, even though the laundry mountain will only mock me for such weakness.) What I need is four hands, a forty-eight-hour day, and professional help. I just never seem to be able to keep up with all the things I’m supposed to be doing, and our house is the dustiest, mouldiest place I have ever lived, so here, more than anywhere, I really want to keep things clean. (Insert mild rant about possible reasons for developing asthma here.)

So where are you this Monday morning?

Isn’t it funny the days that turn out to be successes? Today, I have mostly been accustoming myself to a new (steroid) inhaler, courtesy of my doctor, who is now firmly persuaded that my recurring cough and general tight-chested shitery is caused by an asthmatic reaction to either a virus or an infection. So, I now find myself the proud owner of a grey-blue inhaler, a brown inhaler, and the excitingly-named Aero Dynamic Device, which, somewhat disappointingly, turns out to be a spacer designed to improve the inhalation part of the inhalers. Ho hum.

On top of this, it’s been wet and windy here today – proper persistent rain, too, not the sort of shall-I-shan’t-I misty business that you can largely ignore as you go about your daily. It’s going to stay like this until Monday, apparently, too. Getting colder, as well, and last night there were high winds; this morning showed lanes with a snow-like dusting of autumnal leaves, together with some small branches which were dislodged as we slept by the clever north wind.

Oh, and over last weekend the washing machine, not in its first flush of youth, decided that door-opening is really not included in its job description, clamping its poisonous self shut with a fervour normally associated with some sort of religious order. So, it’s now in the middle of the kitchen floor, still plumbed in but about four feet in front of its normal cupboard hidey-hole; Quercus cunningly hid our dishwasher, the microwave, the dustbin and the washer in the oak cabinets he built, because we both find kitchen Stuff irritating, visually, for the most part, and this is great, except for when you need to retrieve said item for some reason. In fact, in the case of the washer, it’s more than normally troublesome to retrieve the damn thing because the slate flooring doesn’t go right to the edge of the room, while the cupboards do, meaning that the sodding washer slips down a bit as it goes back, and is a complete bastard to get out, thus.

So, the house is chaotic and untidy – kitchen surfaces covered in quinces (still about a hundred to go, I should say; I am trying to put off making quince cheese until I am feeling resilient enough to cope with the sodding chopping of the blighters, and, worse, the passing through a sieve bit, which just makes me want to run for the hills when I think of it after my rosehip encounters earlier this year) and bread-making detritus, to say nothing of the kitchen table, which is currently home to my gargantuan sewing machine (which is a pig to move, as it’s cast iron and thus weighs something akin to a battleship, fully laden), a host of paperwork, the latest edition of Permaculture (which has a really good recipe for HOT SOUP in it), some random wax crayons, two large pieces of fleece acquired for a small girl’s winter quilt and at least half a ton of general crappery besides this shaming list.

Yet, despite this, I feel happy. It seems that ‘happy mess is better than miserable tidiness’. This week has been quite a challenge; I have struggled to adjust to medications which make me a bit shaky* and a bit worried;** the small girl has been a bit under the weather and consequently rather inclined to a whinginess which is not her norm; I’ve been worried about taking more time off work after the disastrous winter of last year; as ever, we are not quite where I’d hoped in terms of finishing off things in the garden/on the house Before The Weather Closes In.

But set against this, I have made a gallon each of quince wine (and I used our German steamer to get the juice, letting it cook out all day long on top of the stove – thus, smug-makingly eco-friendly), pear, elderflower and lemon wine and grape, apple and sage win; I have sewn two pairs of toddler trousers without swearing once; I have made three loaves of bread; there are two sets of saltdough decorations drying by the stove (including some fantastic pigs, made using the spotty rolling pin I mentioned in my clay dough post – they look just like those Gloucester Old Spot chaps – because obviously, nothing says ‘festive’ like, er, saltdough pigs); there is a newly-finished autumn farrago (felt leaves, blanket-stitched, hanging on embroidery thread with wooden beads separating them; pics to follow at some point, as I quite like the overall effect while suspecting that I ought to do more than six or seven leaves; my enthusiasm waned after what felt like the five-zillionth blanket stitch) hanging up in the book room.***

Not a bad week, then, on balance. And balance is what’s needed, I think.

Oh, and a quick aside: if you’d like to take part in the postal parcel paraphernalia which came about in my post on doughs and whatnot, please drop me an email: earthenwitch [at] gmail [dot] com. I’m thinking of one or two bits, possibly crafty, possibly edible, possibly local to wherever you happen to be, but nothing valuable or seriously time-consuming.

*The Ventolin inhaler seems to cause slight trembling for me. I don’t think that I can just not use it, though, realistically, at the moment.

**The steroid inhaler has a list of side-effects which scares me, frankly, as it includes things about bone density and stunted adolescent growth; I have a longer-term plan to ditch this thing when I’m over the hump of this infection, and try improving my general health with more swimming, more garlic and much more chilli and ginger consumption, because anything involving ginger gets my vote, obviously. I have a friend who runs a healthfood shop who has suggested a variety of things including Holy Basil, salt pipes (?!) and elderberry syrup; she attributes my wheezy tendencies to our mould-ridden, dust-festering cob house, and thinks that when we’ve finished the internal plasterwork, thus stopping (hopefully) both dust and mould, things will improve. I really, really hope she’s right; her dire comments about the steroids and breastfeeding did not fill me with optimism.

***I know, I know – it sounds deeply pretentious, but I am trying to get away from calling it the dining room, given that we, er, don’t dine there anymore; I dislike ‘play room’, and there are more books in there than toys… so… Does that let me off? (No. I know. It doesn’t.) And if it doesn’t, then have you a suggestion which covers a room used for storage (understairs cupboard), piano, crafty things (knackered old chest of drawers), books, toys, and general walky-throughness?

It was Quercus’s birthday yesterday. I had smugly knitted him some wristwarmers, and I’d also managed to cajole the sewing machine into creating two pairs of pyjama bottoms for him. (Nice pyjamas for men seem to be a bit of a hen’s teeth thing, here at least, and after realising that anything approaching acceptable in fabric terms seemed to translate into sums of money which were anything but, I ordered some rather nice brushed cottons from the disturbingly cheap Croft Mill.) Much to my astonishment, the results are wearable, and quite appealing, and Quercus is either delighted with them, or a very good liar. (Let’s hope either state persists.) The complete works of the Mighty Boosh, a book about clouds, some Horace Silver and a ginger cake shaped like miniature gourds later, and I think it’s safe to say that this birthday was a good one. And that’s before I get started on the celebratory quince pie I made for afters, of which more anon. (I might also post the ginger cake recipe, as it was surprisingly successful given that I realised halfway through its concoction that I had run out of eggs, and Quercus was out, and the small girl was asleep upstairs, so my options were rather limited. Cue: the Inadvertantly Vegan Ginger Experience! Catchy name, no?)

We also managed a walk by the sea in the closing light of the afternoon; it was surprisingly calm, and the sun was just glorious, despite brief showers. It is extremely civilised living within a half-hour of lots of Jurassic coastline.

(Lengthy aside: the only slight fly in the ointment was that I appear to have picked up some evil chest infection thing. I didn’t really write much about this at the time, but last winter was officially not fun in terms of being ill. I think because we were getting so little consistent sleep (the small girl often waking several times a night, very rarely sleeping an entire night through and waking earlier than seemed strictly civilised), coupled with having rather a lot to do (work, house renovation, freelance stuff, childcare, the need to appear to be a functioning adult etc), my immune system just buggered off and left me to it, saying something along the lines of ‘well if you’re not going to have a holiday, I certainly am!’.

Result: 42 days of sick leave in one year.

Yes.

That’s FORTY-TWO DAYS. About a month of that was the point where my GP said ‘you need a break; here is a certificate for three weeks – kindly get some sleep and try to get yourself sorted as you have had TOO MANY ANTI-BIOTICS TO BE ENTIRELY SANE’. Obviously, it’s fair to say that the people I work with were not exactly delighted by this absence, and I felt utterly rubbish about it, not least because the whole time I was off, I felt terrible. Hacking cough, tentative adult-onset asthma diagnosis because of SO. MANY. INFECTIONS. The whole nine yards, and all that. Then, in the summer, the small girl seemed to hit her stride, and her sleep has been much, much more consistent since about May, overlooking teething and the odd glitch. As a result: one day off sick since then. Now, however, I’m worried that perhaps that diagnosis of asthma wasn’t as wide of the mark as I’d hoped; I thought that I just kept catching things, and they were ending up as chest infections because of those postcards from Rio that my immune system used to remind me of its existence. I picked up a cold last weekend, thought I’d cleared it, yet here I am, wheezy and tight-chested with a cough which sounds like that of a heavy smoker. I wish I could just crawl back into bed and stay there until Wednesday, but the thing is, I really, really don’t want to take more time off work. I’m into a new year now, as it were, and I don’t want to blot my copy-book so early in the winter. So, my plan is just to hope that it’ll bugger off shortly, leaving me fine and not wheezy and distinctly un-asthmatic. In the meantime, I’ve asked for an inhaler prescription. Woe. Woe is me. Anyone with tips for easing a wheezing chest (rhymes! see? recipes, pictures, AND RHYMES! Don’t say I never give you anything), please share.

Ahem.

Back to the birthday.

Quince pie. QUINCE PIE. In fact, QUINCE PIE!

Like this:

Runcible Pie

Take…

Filling:
3 large cooking apples;
2 quinces;
a very goodly sprinkling of sugar (for which read: half a truckload);

Pie itself:
about a pound of shortcrust pastry, i.e.
12 oz (in this case) self-raising flour (yes, I had run out of plain, and yes, I was determined anyway);
5 oz margarine/butter;
4 oz icing sugar;
enough cold water to form into a decent wodge of pastry.

Then…
First, bugger about assembling pastry while remembering fondly the days when your mother had A Mixer Which Did All This For You. Congratulate self on green nature of doing it by hand, and swig more sloe to ease cramp in hand. (That’s my excuse, anyway, and I am sticking to it.) Pastry sorted, stick in fridge to cool. Retrieve it after about twenty minutes (or, er, rather longer, if you completely forget about it while gorging yourself on quince pulp), and line an eight-inch greased pie dish with it, leaving about a third aside for the pie lid. I then blind-baked the case, as we had the oven on for dinner anyway, for about twenty minutes at 180°c.

Then peel, core and chop the apples and quinces, and pop them in a pan with about an inch of boiling water. I was amazed at the speed with which quinces discolour; two minutes after peeling, they were already very brown, so putting them in water as you go is probably the way forward. Cook them gently, lid on, for about twenty minutes, until the apple is completely pulpified and even the quince is looking a little mollified. Poke suspiciously at the quince, removing a small section with an inappropriately cumbersome utensil. Ingest said morsel, and come to terms with the need for SUGAR! yes, SUGAR! immediately. Turn head right way round and drink gallon of sloe wine to recover from after-effects of sourness. Bung in about eight tablespoons of sugar, stir until dissolved, and test, gingerly, sourness levels. Decide acceptable, and have at the lot with a masher, as the quinces don’t break down as much as the apple.

Pour the resulting gloop into the pie case, and whack on your rolled-out lid. Whole lot then goes in the oven for about another twenty-five minutes at 180°c.

THE QUINCES. I cannot stress the loveliness of the quinces.

Slaver, slaver.

Still to come: that vegan gingeriness, apple, grape and sage jelly, quince cheese and apple butter recipes, together with elderberry delight and quince cordials. Recipes, that is. (I will get those sodding 52 Recipes in 2010 done, dagnammit.)

And you? What has the weekend held for you?

That slump I mentioned has hit me again. I feel a bit pissed off, truth be told. Last night, I even ranted about a situation at work, when I was at home – that may not sound particularly unusual, but it’s a near-golden rule for me that work stays at work, and when I close that door as I leave the office, everything to do with it gets locked in, in a sort of academicky Pandora’s box manner. Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that I have just realised yet again the importance of encouraging one’s life in the directions which matter to one, rather than spending time worrying about why other people’s directions don’t seem to matter to one, and whether or not they ought to, and whether, in fact, one’s own direction is actually a lack of direction and so on. In short, I had a moment of wondering if I’m not a bit sort of lacklustre because I don’t seem to be splendidly career-motivated; my conclusion was that for some reason, I don’t and never have judged success by income, and that I think I’d rather I stayed that way.

I sometimes feel that I’m not really pushing myself. That I ought to try harder at work, and make myself a likely candidate for promotion, or for another job, or for leading a project of some sort. I look around at the people I work with, most of whom are very lovely, and I see a new generation of colleagues now in their mid-twenties who are super-keen to use that language, to ‘move things forward’, even, gods forbid, to ‘blue-sky’ something. I just can’t do this. I couldn’t, even when I too was a twenty-something just-started-and-look-at-my-shiny-suit-type person, insofar as I ever was. For me, the compromises feel too great. You can think your own thoughts, but don’t share them. You can see things are ridiculous, but don’t admit it. You can all know the open secret – that the system sucks in lots of ways, and creates extra work in others – but don’t mention it. It’s maddening, and so is the expectation that you’ll want to do this forever, that when people answer ‘I am a so-and-so’ when asked what they do, that answer really does explain what they are, that their job is who and what they are, and hope to be, and have become. My job is none of those things. It is a thing I do to earn the money which pays our bills, for now. Surely it’s better to be happy and hard-up than it is to be rolling in money and miserable; I look at people I know who work sixty-hour weeks and never see their children and just wonder why they do it, given that it appears (at least to me) to do little more than funding a new car and lots of trips overseas.

Is it something missing in me? Did I just not make the queue when it came to the doling out of ambition? I don’t know. I do have ambitions, but mine just don’t seem to be particularly in line with what you might expect of a university graduate who went to private school and has mysteriously managed to accrue three degrees in the decade since leaving. When I was a teenager, I sort of thought I might try working in London, living somewhere predictable like Turnham Green while commuting into the city and reading the Guardian. I do read the Guardian sometimes, but that’s where the similarities end. I think I always knew, really, that I’d be happier living in the middle of nowhere, with a large and chaotic number of pumpkins growing in a small and ridiculously over-planted garden. But sometimes I see myself through my father’s eyes, and it seems to me that the path I’ve chosen is perhaps not what he’d expected or wanted for me; married to a man he thinks only serves to exaggerate my tendency to vegetarian* shoes and mad hair and strange houses in insane locations, my job is a very small part of my life, really, where his was, for some three decades, a defining part of Who He Was, and I think that puzzles him. He thinks I should try for a proper academic career; publish some articles, if possible, and try to write the book which might follow on from my PhD thesis, while I, I struggle to motivate myself to do things other than making bread and ogling quinces while working out what knitting abbreviations mean and wondering whether that circle that the small girl has drawn might constitute her first drawn thing. And because, while I am aware that it is perfectly acceptable to do these things and to feel this way, I cannot utterly divorce myself from the expectations I have experienced first- and second-hand since it became clear that I wasn’t actually as daft as I look, I sometimes find myself measuring my progress thus far, and thinking that there ought to be more. More purpose, more reason, more progress.

It spirals around, it does, this cycle of slightly beligerant – defiant – assertion of Self as Mother, Creatrix, and, er, general cook-and-bottle-washer, and Happy That Way, thankyouverymuch, versus the rather shame-faced version of Self which admits to not having pursued its career as zealously as it might have done, and which perhaps ought to feel more motivation when offered encouragement for academic writing, and which ought to have plans which include pensions and all those other things which, well, aren’t bright, colourful bags of stardust which possibly involve bells, and which I thus can’t actually identify. The latter is not Who I Am. The former is much closer, I think, embodying as it does the things which I genuinely believe to be important. Yet I continue to judge myself by the standards to which – I think – others feel I ought to aspire. It’s madness, really, because I don’t even know that people think these things which I am so sure they must; well, apart from the bit about the mad hair, because my dad did recently spend an entire day with me having double-pointed wooden knitting needles poking out of my hair without passing comment because, he later confessed, he thought it was some sort of statement.

Perhaps the time has come to paint a spiral on the wall in the kitchen. The last time I felt a bit at sea, painting a spiral was just the ticket.  It reminded me of what’s important, every time I looked at it; those things are still important – our house, our babe, our shared life of colour, of tinkling bells, of valerian in the oil-burner and bread rising all over the sheets in the airing cupboard. In short: bugger the rest of it – inner whatsit is the way forward. ‘Only connect’, said E. M. Forster, and I think he was on to something.

Ahem.

In other news, I’ve been back on the bread-baking bandwagon. This time, tomato and herb spirals, which went like this:

Tomato and Herb Spirals
Get…
2 mugs of strong flour
About ¾mug of warm water
1 tbsp runny honey
1 tsp Marmite
1 tsp yeast
Large fistful of herbs
About 3 tbsp tomato purée
More flour as needed to stop oneself sticking to the wall courtesy of the resulting dough

Then…
Whack the lot in a large bowl, and knead it all together until it forms a nice elasticky sort of glob. At this point, sling in more flour until you can actually manage to remove your hands from said dough without needing either the assistance of a passer-by or surgical tools, and continue kneading until the extra flour is worked in. You’ll notice the dough is a rather pleasant shade of sunrise – pinks and yellows – but don’t get distracted by this for too long, or you’ll find that stickiness returns. When you’ve managed to get a nice workable dough, pop the bowl in a warm place to rise for about forty minutes.

Retire, armed with a cup of Lapsang Souchong.

Some time later, retrieve dough from its resting place (the airing cupboard, in my case). Rootle it out of the bowl, and give it another good knead before dividing it into small lumps the size of half a fist, roughly. Technical, non? I like using scissors to divide it, because, well, they are so very snippy.

Take each little fisty whatsit and roll it into a sausage, then curl it around to form a spiral, and pop it on an oiled tray. When you’ve got a smug-making tray of these little delights, it’s back to the airing cupboard. This time, I left them to rise for about an hour and a half, after which into the oven, at about 180°c, for about twenty minutes, or until they’re getting to sunset shades rather than sunrise. Whip ‘em out, and eat them warm with a spot of butter and a handy ‘here’s one I prepared earlier’ bowl of soup.

I’m thinking of switching to having the date for my post titles; you know how it is – some mornings, you just can’t assemble your random thoughts into the sort of order which a single title would cover, this being just one of those. Maybe I could add subtitles. Or is that too complicated?

Anyway.

Firstly, I’ve managed to whack my way through another ten or so new recipes in recent weeks, meaning I’ve got the smallest glimmer of a hope of completing 52 recipes in 2010. This weekend, we tried a lemon and lentil soup (v. g.), killer peanut butter fudge cookies (so good I am lusting after them now, at a distance of ten miles), and a mushroom and nut loaf which was really rather excellent. All keepers, definitely.

Secondly, our workshop now has a roof. Well, it has a protective layer of stuff fastened down with battening; the stuff can be a roof in its own right for three months, but within that time it will gain its fircone-like shingling, meaning it just becomes a part of the belt-and-braces approach to weatherproofing which Quercus has opted for with this project. The waney-edged boards arrive soon, so the walls will be clad, and before we know it, we’ll be reclaiming our stuff from a neighbour’s garage and there’ll be one less element of chaos to cope with. (At the moment, Quercus’s car forms a mobile shed – the boot is full of circular saws, chainsaws and brushcutters. As you do.)

Thirdly, Quercus’s mother departs the province today, after a stay of ten days. It’s been OK-ish – we had several near-misses in terms of open warfare when she wouldn’t leave something alone (to wit: ambitions for life, jobs, babies, childcare, living without money, What The Neighbours Think Of Us and The Situation With My Father), but it could have been worse, and by my standard measure of success (no-one died) we passed with flying colours. That said, the sheer quantity of time we’ve spent with her this year has made me think a bit. We’ve all found it really difficult having her about for so long – probably eight weeks this year – in part because we are ungrateful fuckpigs, but mostly because she is genuinely the most difficult person to get on with that I have ever met, which, coupled with extremely irritating personal habits (‘Morning Has Broken’, out of tune, ad nauseum, at six-thirty in the morning would be hard to take for anyone, I think, as would the continual use of ‘spend a penny’ when you go near a bathroom – woman, you are GOING FOR A WEE, like anyone normal), bring us close to the brink every time we’re together, and, what’s more, our normal tolerance levels haven’t really recovered from her first visit, back in March, letalone the recent and prolonged blows-upon-a-bruise visitations.

We have fallen into the habit of asking her to visit at Christmas, preferring to take our medecine at the start of the time off we get rather than for the New Year. We have yet to actually articulate this invitation this year, and she will shortly be off to Canada for about three weeks, meaning we’re going to have a longer break than we’ve so far enjoyed from each others’ company (because I’m sure we piss her off as much as she does us), so I wondered if we ought to get it in before she goes. But then… At the moment, the idea of her coming here at Christmas fills me with dread.

The thing is, while I can tolerate her, and manage her, and, with the odd flash of white rage, bite back the things I’d like to say (while restraining my arm from its murderous fumbling for the nearest heavy object) and so on, Quercus finds it much, much harder. She makes him so cross that he sometimes physically removes himself and goes for a very irritable walk, just to wear off the anger. He rants, nightly, about the many ways in which she is impossible. Worse than that, his relationship with her makes him feel immensely guilty: that he doesn’t get on with her better, than he isn’t more forthcoming when she’s around, that he can’t be himself with her, that he knows that NOT being himself probably makes it worse, that he can’t bring himself to be the person to whom he thinks she would react better, that he longs for her departure as soon as she arrives, that she tries very hard to help us, both physically and financially, that she can be very thoughtful yet still he feels as he does.

I feel a few of these guilts myself – she does a lot to help us, and she’s the only member of our joint families who does (though lordy me, when someone reminds you of this and actively asks you for thanks or praise, it doesn’t help, does it?). But the thing I feel mostly is that I worry that every time she comes to see us for a significant event, that significant event gets rained on slightly. The small girl’s second birthday was a good case in point – she was vile about something-or-other, and we had a very tense few hours while she got over whatever it was that had caused the vileness. Last Christmas she was so rude the very first evening she arrived that Quercus determined to ask her to leave if she hadn’t cheered the fuck up by the following morning. Does it always have to be like this? Apparently so. I’ve taken to challenging her head-on about the things she does, sometimes, i.e. ‘we seem to be at loggerheads here; have I said something to upset you?’ Sometimes this works, sometimes it causes only teenage flouncing.

It’s been better, though not unfailingly so, since the small girl arrived. Prior to her appearance, most visits included at least two threats to go home, while we are now down to a batting average of one or so, with only moderate use of guilt thrown in. So far, she has only taken her irritation with us out on the small girl once or twice, and she has only done something which we felt was openly not a good idea once, when she was trailing a small child, howling, up and down the lane to the car, to pack her things, rather than waiting ten minutes so that one of us could take over and she could just get on. The small girl didn’t understand what she’d done to warrant being pulled about, chided and ignored in equal parts; the simple answer was that we had asked her grandma to look after her when her grandma hadn’t wanted to, and it would have been rather easier if said grandma had just said no – the resulting child meltdown took far longer to sort out than we’d gained in child-free time.

It’s a difficult thing, letting the dynamic between the small girl and her grandma evolve without stepping in too often. I don’t want the small girl to pick up the habits of her grandma’s which drive us to distraction, and nor do I want her to see how annoying we find the woman. I had no relationship with my grandparents – two dead, two uninterested – and I do want my daughter to have a better sense of where she comes from, of her wider family, than I had; two people did not form a big enough support network when my mother died, and I have never felt more keenly the lack of siblings near my own age, or grandparents, or uncles and aunts, than I did at that time. But are irritating people better than no people at all? Sometimes, I am not sure. It’s a sort of ‘if you can’t be with the one you love…’ scenario, really. And the small girl does love her grandma, despite her quixotic nature. I suppose I just hope that she comes to see how irritating she can be (thus maintaining our sanity!) but loves her nonetheless, with the distance of a generation, with more ease than we have managed.

And in the meantime, here I am, busily contemplating pregnancy and babies and how that would alter our family as it stands, and what role Quercus’s mother would have in that shift. It’s a bit sticky, frankly. I still long for the huge family dinners, with ten people crammed around a ridiculously small table, or Sunday mornings with fourteen children of varying ages destroying the counters while assembling a very sugary breakfast, or midweek evenings with the stove lit and lots of people watching something entertaining on DVD, or winter walks with several dogs, a few antiquated relatives trailing sticks about the place and a riot of children poking streams, chasing cats and generally being beastly. Fun. Friendship. Respect. Laughter.

I don’t know that there is an answer to The Problem of Families, and Relatives In General, is there? Except one involving wood alcohol, anyway.

Anyway. On to less sticky things. Or not, as the case may be.

Lemon and Lentil Soup
Get hold of…
3 potatoes, diced
2 carrots, chopped
2 chopped onions
A goodly wodge of garlic, chopped
A slug of olive oil
A generous handful of herbs (parsley, sage, oregano, basil – whatever comes to hand)
A large mug of lentils
About a pint and a half of water
A stockcube
3 mugs of spinach/chard/sorrel/greens of some sort you can’t quite identify, which probably won’t kill you
The juice of two lemons, squished rather inefficiently with your hands
A spot of salt and pepper

Then…
Into the pan with the onions, garlic, carrots and taters, and fry them in the oil for a bit, until they start to capitulate. Whop in the lentils, water, herbs and stockcube, stick on a lid and boil it all up until the potatoes soften, at which point, in go spinach and lemon juice for another ten minutes or so. Make sure it’s all cooked through; take off the heat; blend to avoid wierdly stringy bits of spinach in soup context, which would be Just Wrong.

Cookies and nut loaf to follow.

So. After that depressing little wander through the familial labyrinth, tell me nice happy things (including the recipe for healing such maternal discord) this instant, gentle reader, in the box of commentage below.

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?

À la manière de Blue Witch, a Friday Question: if you were a shrub, which one would you want to be?

Myself, I quite fancy being a ceanothus. I ask, you understand, because we’re starting to think about things we’d like to grow next year, and at this point I have to remind myself that there are things besides vegetables which would form a rather nice addition to the ol’ botanical kingdom – I love the mock orange, for example, and the pieris, despite my tendency to incline towards rainbow chard and beets. The idea is that perhaps if we think of various plants we’d like, we could pull our fingers out and grow them from seed, rather than buying them as fully-fledged plants.

So, what would you be?

In other news, stuffed courgettes (from the toe-curling cookbook I mentioned in my last post) are very lovely indeed, particularly with the addition of walnuts and potatoes; having friends round for an afternoon of chatting, eating, and fillling each others’ watering cans (if you are under three, that is) is also pretty good.

Less good?

The impending arrival of Quercus’s mother, who has only been gone for two weeks, and who will be with us for another ten-day stint. Not that I don’t appreciate the help, which is lovely and super-useful for Quercus, who is otherwise almost always single-handed on the house work, but still – ! Ten days. I mean… TEN DAYS. It’s quite a while to have anyone stay, particularly when your house is small and they are, well, a little challenging, personally-speaking. I have a plan, though: provide lots of food. And wine. I know – not the world’s most thrilling idea, but still, if an army marches on its stomach, I feel fairly sure that my mother-in-law does likewise.

It could be worse: at the end of this month, I am due to go and see my father, for the first time since he moved north. He’s been in his current house for nearly eighteen months, and I feel on the one hand a bit shifty about not having been before, and on the other, rather ‘well, what did you expect, given that you bought a house five hours’ drive from us, with no spare room, and filled it full of lunaticly annoying people?’. I will attempt to stick to the former attitude, though the latter keeps popping its head above the parapet when I least expect it. He seems relatively happy, or, I should say, as happy as you can be when your younger step-daughter has tried to kill herself in recent memory and is now seeming oddly compliant and happy following months of therapy regarding gender reassignment, while the elder continues to frustrate with attitude and lassitude. Juuuust the ticket if you’re inclined to the Old School Of Parenting, the one which goes something along the lines of ‘Put Up AND Shut Up’.

As you can imagine, I am not completely at ease with the idea of the impending visit. For one thing, there’s a five-hour drive, probably at night to see if the small girl makes a better traveller when it’s dark. And then there’s the old sod’s wife. Who in lots of ways is lovely, but my, she presses my buttons in terms of annoyingness. She advises, you see, when advice isn’t sought, needed or welcome; she just can’t seem to help herself. And she calls me, and always has done, by a shortening of my not-obviously-shortenable first name which is generally reserved for people I actually love, as opposed to people I am stuck in a liftshaft with, metaphorically. And let us not speak of the constant eulogies to which the small girl and I will be subjected: the wife is brilliant, the wife is artistic and SO PRACTICAL, and look at the tiling she has done, and didn’t she design this well, and have you seen the dress she made for herself when she was only eighteen months while dandling fourteen Romanian orphans on the other knee and speaking fluent French? And that’s before you get on to the daughters, who are both, depending on the time of day, musical geniuses destined for great things, incredibly talented artists, thoughtful, caring and helpful, and probably culinary greats too, come to think of it.

I think the worst of it is that I can stick the wife and the step-daughters, but what I find really hard is the person that my father has become since he’s been part of their family. He’s sentimental, fractious and distant most of the time, interspersed with moments of savage resentment and suppressed anger about the various bits of his new life which haven’t gone quite to plan (and there have been, ahem, quite a few). It’s not quite the happy new start that I’d hoped it would be when I decided to just Not Say All Those Things I Thought, when he announced he was getting married, and sometimes I wonder if I did him no favour in being what I hoped was tactful.

Urgh. This has turned into a bit of a rant. Let us draw a veil over it, and return to plants. Plants. Yes. Them. So, courgettes, then:

Stuffed Courgettes
Ingredients
For the courgettes:
Four large courgettes
Several onions
A big chunk of garlic
Some parmesan
Some ricotta
Herbs
A stockcube
Some ground almonds
Some flaked almonds
Some chopped walnuts
A slug of olive oil

Then…
Top and tail the courgettes, cut them in half lengthwise and scoop out the flesh from each half using a spoon. Sling it in a frying pan with some oil, some chopped onion and a few herbs, and give it a few minutes to cook through before adding the rest of the bits and bats. A handful of each of the nutty bits should do it, for those finding this recipe frustratingly vague; it’s vague only because it departs considerably from the original recipe because I couldn’t find half the things in the right quantities in the cupboard, and of course I hadn’t planned in sufficient detail as to have bought the things I’d need in advance. So, you’ve got a cheesey, nutty sauce with onions, garlic and courgette flesh, basically, with some herbs and a bit of stock thrown in for good measure. When it’s all heated through, pop the courgette shells on to a large tray, and heat the oven up to something suitably diabolic – 200°c or so should do it. Fill the shells with the cheesey mix, and drizzle a bit of oil over the top before cooking them for about twenty minutes. Which just leaves you time to make…

The sauce:
A tin of tomatoes, or about six fresh ones
An onion or two
Some garlic
Some herbs
A stockcube
A spoon of brown sugar
Some herbs
A slug of Tabasco
About five small potatoes, chopped into quarters

Then…
Fry the onion and the garlic up together, and then sling everything else in, basically; the taters take a little while to cook through, for that strange ‘there’s something other than water in this pot! I protest in the strongest terms!’ reason. When the courgettes are done, pour the sauce over the top, et voila: scoffalicious.

This last weekend, we realised that it had been some months since we’d had a proper day out which didn’t involve calling into a DIY shop of some sort, or going to visit someone who might be getting rid of indecent quantities of timber, or genearlly ferreting out something to do with building/demolishing/re-rendering some part of our vast empire. So, we determined to rectify this sorry state of affairs forthwith, and buggered off to Cornwall for a proper miniature holiday. You know: like a real holiday, but, er, shorter. And without accommodation. Or, in fact, being away for more than, um, a day. But still – a change is as good as a whatsit, and all that, and a change we did indeed manage.

The morning we spent getting lost finding our way to Pencarrow, a large stately house between Bodmin and Camelford, while the rain attempted to move from spitting to tipping. We realised about an hour’s drive from home that we’d come out armed to the teeth with a full change of clothes for the small girl, food, drinks, a flask, a nappy-changing bag and even a spare pair of shoes and jeans for me, but we’d completely forgotten coats for ourselves; fortunately, Camelford smiled on us, and a charity shop provided a fleece for Quercus while a hardware shop had a surprising range of lightweight rainproof jackets. We managed a picnic – despite having forgotten mayonnaise or butter for our otherwise bare bread – under overcast skies and walnut trees laden with green bombs, and the Pencarrow peacocks are as lovely as I remember them being when I went there as a child.

From Pencarrow we went to Boscastle, for a walk on the cliffs, around the valley, and through the village itself, for most of which the small girl slept in the sling on my back, waking just in time for tea and scones at a riverside eatery. Her initiation into the greatest of British traditions, fish and chips, took place later in the evening, at long past small-person bedtime o’clock; one of my enduring memories of this time will be of us sitting on the giant breakwater on the beach at Westward Ho (!), passing chips and morsels of fish to a small girl wrapped tightly in her father’s fleece, while she grinned at the wind in her hair and commented on seagulls approaching.

It’s astonishing the difference that one day off can make. We’ve all felt a bit like new people since Saturday, and we’ve all been much happier for it. There’s always something we should be doing, or somewhere we should be tidying, or something that could do with a wash/change/paint/sand/drill, and it’s not that everyday life hasn’t got lots of carrotty lovelinesses of its own, of course, but rather that sometimes, in order to appreciate them, it helps to be able to view them from a distance, I find; the carrots of proper daytrips are thus many and varied, in that you have a good day out, which is a carrot in its own right, but then you have the side-effect carrot of recognising your daily life carrots too. Gosh. What a lot of carrots.

We have determined to make these days off, these steppings-out from our daily lives, a more frequent happening, if only to give us time and space to remember how good our life together is, and how lucky we are to live as we do, in a place we love (even if it does drive us demented sometimes), with people who make us happy (and, er, demented).

So, talking of carrots, which we weren’t, really… I’ve been at the 52 Recipes malarky again, with the following:

Saffron-braised carrots with broad bean pilaf

Ingredients
For the carrots:
About eight large carrots, chopped as you fancy
A large pinch of saffron
A mug of veggie stock
A large onion, peeled and chopped
A generous sprinkling of cumin, coriander, parsley and thyme
A rather more timid sprinkling of Tabasco
Giant wodges of chopped garlic, so indecent in quantity as to make numbers futile
A slug of olive/sunflower oil

Then…
Basically, sling the lot in a pan, bring to the boil, and simmer for about twenty minutes or so, lid on in an attempt not to curry the entire house. (Or, you know, curry away: I myself quite like the smell of tandoori pillows at bedtime.) (I think some chard or spinach would add to this rather well, and possibly some potatoes too.  Otherwise it is rather… carrotty.)

For the pilaf:
A mug of broad beans
A large mug of brown rice
2 red onions, chopped
A handful of sultanas
A handful of pinenuts
A handful of chopped unsulphured apricots
A sprinkling of cumin

Then…
Boil the broad beans briskly for about five to ten minutes, drain, and park somewhere.  Sling rice, onions and cumin in a pan and add boiling water to cover the rice; bring back to the boil on the hob, put a lid on and switch off the power, and the residual heat should do the rest. Sling the rest of the ingredients – including the beans, because who would forget the beans? The beans which are part of the title? Not me – oh no – in for the last ten minutes or so before you eat, and there you go. The carrotty bit over the top of the rice goes really well, though Quercus tells me it’s lacking something. By which he means SAUSAGES.

(I’m spending a week cooking dinner from Cranks Fast Food by Nadine Abensur, because I’ve had the book for about eight years, and have only done the stuffed courgette recipe so far, because I find the writing style so off-putting, and, frankly, so deeply pretentious as to be quite toe-curling. Then there’s the fact taht every recipe in it seems to revolve around cumin, tabasco, tamari and something else that a delicatessen in Kensington might be able to order for you, but which your average supermarket probably hasn’t heard of. So, I thought I’d give it a bit of a blitz, to see if it’s worthy of its shelf room. So far, I like the recipes well enough, though I find myself changing ingredients here and there, and ignoring half of the method; the jury’s still out on its long-term residence here, though.

On the menu this week: stuffed courgettes; green beans, tomatoes and garlic; Boston baked beans; herby gnocchi (with a radically different sauce from the recipe one); something to do with pasta and, probably tabasco and cumin. Wish me luck… )

(Image courtesy of The Salty Spoon, because I have that very casserole dish, and because my camera, now six, is in the process of dying a slow and painful death; anyone got any recommendations for cameras which don’t break the bank?)

So, I’ve managed to notch up another four recipes in the last couple of days, which, frankly, is about right if I’m ever going to succeed in packing in the fifty-two new recipes in one year. Granted, I started late, but still, somehow I’ve lagged behind a bit recently, and the result is that I think I’ve only got about ten done, with forty-odd to go in under half a year. Ahem. That should prove interesting.

Anyway, of these four, I think I probably liked the spinach thing the best. It goes like this:

Spinach thingy
Ingredients
A wodge of fresh spinach, probably about eight large handfuls (chard would also do really nicely in this, I think, or amaranths)
Two large onions, chopped
A splosh of olive oil
About three cardamom pods, de-seeded
A pinch or so of ground cumin
A good handful or two of sultanas
A large sprinkling of toasted flaked almonds

Then…
Onions and oil in a pot, and fry. When they’ve softened a bit, add the spices, poke about, and then just chuck in the spinach and sultanas. Let the spinach wilt down, and pop the almonds on top. Stick in capacious bowl; retreat; scoff.

Spicy beans and Algerian cous-cous*
Ingredients
Black-eyed beans, a tin thereof
Chopped tomatoes, about ten thereof
A large sploosh of Tabasco
A large pinch of cumin
About ten cloves of garlic
Some marjoram

Then…
Stick the lot in a pan, bring to a nice bubbling simmer, and attempt not to rub your eyes with tabasco-ey hands. When the beans are cooked through (about five minutes or so, if you’re using tinned), you’re done. Yes, that quickly. Meanwhile, sort the cous-cous…

Algerian cous-cous
As much cous-cous as you think your greedy family will eat
About ten unsulphured apricots, chopped up
Zest of two large lemons
A veggie stockcube
A goodly knob of butter
A vigorous grinding of black pepper
Some parsley

Then…
Whack the cous-cous in with enough boiling water to cover it (I find that most packets ask for too much water, and suggest cooking for too long), pop in all the other bits and bats, mix it all abooot, stick a plate over the top and leave it to do its thing. (I also find this true of pasta, rice, bulghur wheat and that other grain which currently escapes me – boiling water, bring back to the boil, turn heat off, wait about fifteen minutes and it’s done.)

Great steaming heaps of this, the beans and the spinach, and you’re in for a minor feastette, without having broken the bank. (Apart from the tabasco; that said, in this particular instance, it is perhaps possible that the aforementioned sauce actually made its way to the car stuffed inside the small girl’s jumper, unbeknownst to me, and was thus, er, free, and only discovered on our return home. Let us draw a veil over this unfortunate criminal turn of events.)

When you’ve wolfed that lot down, you may find your mind wandering off to places sweet and sugary. That being so, my research tells me that a sticky bun might present a very valid conclusion indeed.

Sticky Buns
Ingredients
1 lb strong flour (I used half wholemeal, and half white)
1 tsp quick yeast
4 oz sugar
½ pint milk (I used soya)
4 oz butter
2 eggs
About 6 oz mixed dried fruit

Enough icing sugar and water to make up the right quantity of water icing; in our house, that means about two gallons of it

Then…
Pop (most of) the butter and (all of) the milk in a pan together and warm it gently until the butter melts. Leave that to one side to cool for a little while. Stick the flour, yeast and (most of) the sugar in a large bowl, and beat in the eggs. When the milk/butter has cooled a bit, pour that in, adding the fruit, and mix it all up into a nice sticky dough. Leave it somewhere warm to rise for about an hour and a half, then whip it out of the bowl, add enough flour to make it a kneadable substance and roll it out to about, oh, an inch in thickness. You’re looking for a long thin rectangle here. When you’ve found one (ahem), sprinkle a bit more fruit on, adding the remaining sugar and dotting a few knobs of the remaining butter about the place, before rolling the rectangle up along its longest side, as tightly as you can manage so that you get a really good spiral bun. This quantity made about twelve for me.

On to an oiled tray with them, and back to rise for another twenty minutes or so (or a half-hour if you forget all about them…) before they go into the oven at about 180&deg c for another twenty-minutes-or-so stint (keep an eye on them; some of mine caught a bit where they were near the back right of the oven, which is always the hottest bit in mine). When they’re lightly browned, whip ‘em out and leave them to cool on a nice wee tray. (As someone who is contemplating The Move From Nappies, I shouldn’t really be bandying about the concept of trays and wee, but hey: I live for kicks.)

While they’re cooling, rediscover your rather attractive but long-forgotten icing sugar (a natural pale fawn colour), and realise that it has long since abandoned the dust-like form it once preferred, in favour of that of small-to-medium rocks. Spend the next half-hour bashing the buggery out of it, and forcing it through a most unsympathetic (and thus deeply bouncy) sieve. Add far less water to the unpromisingly small quantity of sugary dust you end up with than you would ever think likely, and behold! water icing. Pour it over the now-just-warm buns, and, if you can, leave it to set a little bit. Alternatively, stuff them down with most unseemly haste, licking your lips, fingers, spoons, bowls and worktops when no-one (who matters) is looking.

* Which is probably about as Algerian as my wheelbarrow, but hey, I approximated, based on the coalition offered by several recipes.

** Oops. I forgot the rice recipe. It’s basically a load of chickpeas, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes, onions, saffron, brown rice, tabasco, garlic, carrots and leeks, all boiled up together over a very low heat for a very long time, with a gorgeous marmitey stock with tonnes of herbs. It’s quite a good ‘un, really. Anyone fancies the sound of that, I’ll pull my finger out and post it properly. If not, it will slide quietly into gentle oblivion.

Yes, this does represent a pathetic and probably doomed attempt to catch up to my target in 52 Recipes in 2010 terms; somehow, a breaking laptop appears to have knocked me off kilter blog-wise, and it’s taking me a while to get back on the horse, not least because I now feel I have such a backlog of things – really important things, like the small girl’s BIRTHDAY and the progress we’ve been making on Earthenhouse (which is significant and immensely cheering, since you ask) – that I don’t quite know where to begin; as I’m not posting from my laptop, though, I haven’t got access to photos, and, really, what’s a birthday post without pictures? Hence, this post, as an ice-breaker.

Ahem.

Perhaps it’s a response to a week spent at my mother-in-law’s house, where salad = lettuce, tomato and cucumber, sliced, and plonked on a plate with a jar of mayonnaise handily to one side, but this last couple of weeks has seen us jumping on the salad bandwagon in a hitherto unknown manner. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that we don’t eat salad, it’s just that Quercus and I tend to prefer our salad with pretensions, and eating lots of plain lettuce went some way to reminding me just why that is: without dressing or bits and bobs to encourage me, lettuce and I suffer from a mutual lack of interest. So, instead, here are some of the things we’ve been noshing our way through lately.

Lentilmus
Ingredients
A large mug of lentils, red, green or puy, boiled until they won’t kill you, with
A stock cube of some variety (unknown, in this case, as all the bloody wrappers look the same)
Probably six cloves of garlic, chopped
A handful of herbs
About 3 tbsp olive/sunflower oil
About 2 tbsp mayonnaise
About 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
A good sprunkle* of black pepper

Then…
Boil up the lentils, herbs, garlic and stockcube until the lentils are soft but not mushy. Drain them and leave them in a colander to cool off a bit, before chucking the other things in, mixing well, and bingo! A lentil-orientated version of hummus.

Pasta Stars
Ingredients
As much cooked and cooled pasta as you fancy (we had some tiny stars bought yonks ago in a French supermarket)
Chopped tomatoes
Chopped basil
Grated courgette

Dressing:
2 tbsp natural yoghurt
1 tbsp mayonnaise
2 tbsp sunflower/olive oil
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
Good sprunkle of black pepper
Squirt of tomato purée
Splosh of water

Then…
Sling dressing ingredients in a small box or bottle and shake maniacally until you realise that a spoon may be called for. Stir, resentfully. Resume shaking. Give in, resign self to small yoghurty bits and pour over pasta, tomatoes and courgettes, kidding self that pepper disguises all errors.

Coronation, er, Salad
Ingredients
About half a mug of leftover pilau rice
Chopped onion, tomato, apricots, cucumber etc.
Oh, and pinenuts
A daring tablespoon of mild curry powder
2 less darings of yoghurt
A slug of olive/sunflower oil

Then…
Mix it all up into a large sticky mess, wonder what on earth you’re doing, realise it actually tastes delicious despite visual misgivings, and scoff the lot.

Other current salady infatuations include adding grated apple to everything, and ditto sultanas, chopped unsulphured apricots and sunflower seeds. And you? What’re you stuffing down gleefully as the salad season gets under way?

*Sprunkle, n: An inflation-linked sprinkle. Origin: colloq., Devon. (Ahem the second.)

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.