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.

Ever since I read Claire’s recipe for nettle soup I’ve been meaning to give it a go, but, predictably, I discovered Claire’s blog in the winter, when nettles were rather thin on the ground. So thin, in fact, as to be non-existent, except in their very stringiest, inedible-looking form. However, the world has turned, and spring follows winter, and here we are, with absolutely heaps of the wretched things. Well, I say ‘wretched’; I must say, nettle soup has rather changed my opinion of the humble stinger, and now I’m eyeing up the crop up the lane with greedy eyes and reaching for a pair of stealthy gloves. For some reason known only to the gods, I forgot about Claire’s recipe, and found instead a Woman’s Hour version which looked worth a go; of course, midway through I suffered a fit of the ‘that looks too grim even for me’s, and ended up changing the ingredient list a fair bit, so here, for your edible edification, is the result (and I would have posted a picture, but we ate it all).

Nettle Soup
Get:
1 large potato
1 large onion
Slug of oil
About half a carrier bagful of nettles, picking only the young ones (we used the tips)
2 bayleaves
1 vegetable stock cube
1 litre of water
1 tsp of Marmite (yes, I know: love it or hate it, but it’s handy in such situations)
6 cloves garlic (might as well be hung for the proverbial, what?)
A rather grubby-looking carrot found at the back of the fridge
4 sticks of celery
About half a mug of cooked rice which was looking sorry for itself in an overlooked pan
About ¼ pint of milk (I used goats)

Then…
Fry up the onion in a spot of olive oil, adding the carrot, garlic, potato and celery when the onion’s softened up a bit. Poke it all about for a bit, then realise that washing nettles might be helpful. Approach bag, armed with gloves, and gingerly remove said stems before waving fairly hopelessly under tap while small daughter (optional) shows alarming interest in eating main ingredient raw. Hope this interest does not persist. Realise onions now perilously close to catching fire. Turn hob down and sling in nettles before adding water, stock, Marmite and rice. Boil the lot for about fifteen minutes, adding bayleaves when they catch your eye.

When you’re happy that the potato is done, bung in the milk and don’t boil it if you want to avoid, ahem, odd-looking particles floating about the place. Remember, though, that should this, by some bizarre twist of fate, turn out to be exactly what happens, you are going to blend the results to within an inch of their lives. So, er, blend. And eat. And marvel.

Next up: what goes with it. Which, given that it takes much longer to prepare, should really have come first, but hey – let’s not get picky, shall we?

Spelt Bread
Find…
5 cups strong white/spelt flour
1 cup oats
2-3 cups warm water
Dollop of sunflower oil
1 tbsp quick-acting yeast
Pinch of salt
1 tbsp honey

Then…
Get the yeast started off in with about a cup of warm water and the honey; I normally use a Pyrex measuring jug which I stick in the airing cupboard (which, now I come to look at it in the cold, hard light of day, is rather revoltingly covered in dough, courtesy of a yeast explosion which took place, er, some days ago) (why do I admit these things? ). (Of course, if you’re using one of those yeasts which you just sling in, then press on; I’ve got a tub of stuff I’m using up which isn’t quite that compliant.)

While that’s doing its thing (i.e. getting about an inch of foam on the top of its little self), pop the flour and oats in a large bowl; as soon as the yeast’s ready, sling in the warm water and the yeasty liquid, along with the oil and the salt, and mix it all up using a nice wooden spoon. Or a nasty one. I’m not particular. (As it happens, my current favourite is a smallish spoon with one edge burned to a flat line – doubles as a spatula thus. Normally, though, I pseudily prefer arbutus spatulas, which Quercus and I bought on Cortes Island, where, if the gods could only see their way to helping me work out how I’d earn a living in such a situation, I would happily move tomorrow.)

You should find yourself with a very stretchy, elastic sort of dough which wouldn’t be up to any of that kneading malarky. Leave it in the bowl, put a cloth over it, and stick it in the warm spot identified earlier to rise for about twenty minutes, after which knock it back to its original size with the aforementioned spoon and put it in a LARGE BREAD TIN. I cannot stress the LARGE sufficiently, I find – three attempts at this bread I have made, and all have exceeded even my expectations on that second rise, leading to the shameful state of the airing cupboard. (Which also looks like a dog’s dinner anyway, in the usual airing-cupboard-chaos manner, of course.)

Second rise should take about another twenty minutes, and then in it goes, at about 200°c for somewhere between forty minutes and an hour, et voila! Scoffage, of a crumpetty and highly addictive nature.

(This one is based on Sophie Dahl’s ‘Musician’s Bread‘, which I liked, but couldn’t get to stop sinking in the middle a little on cooking; I think the ratio of water to flour is simply a bit out in the original, hence the tinkering. If anyone has done Miss Dahl’s recipe and NOT had this happen, however, I would love to hear from you.)

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.

Lordy-me, I’m having a blogging slump, it appears. It’s not that I’ve nothing to report, and more that I’m not finding time to do it. I honestly don’t know how so many delightful bloggers find time each day to sit down and post things which not only consist of more than the written equivalent of the twin fingers of derision, but are well-thought-out and eloquent, complete with pictures and illustrations. It’s depressing. Or, rather, it would be, if I didn’t enjoy reading such pourings-forth.

Anyway, recent activities have included the acquisition of a reclaimed pine table for our kitchen, which genuinely feels like a kitchen now, and which has really changed the way we’re living in our tiny house to an extent I hadn’t anticipated. It’s so nice to have space for the small girl to toddle about the place without having to think about table saws and screwdrivers as potential weapons in tiny hands. We’ve even got space for a rug where she can sit and explore some of her recent haul from her grandma; she is loving the extra space, and we are breathing out, collectively.

We’ve also made quite firm plans for what this summer will be. So far, it looks like Quercus will take parental leave from his job in order to spend a concerted block of time on the house – three weeks to finish the outside of the extension, which includes drainage, guttering, painting and various bits and bobs of things like fixing lime render where frost came too soon for us. It’s going to be another busy year, but I’m trying to stay upbeat about this; the loss of the chickens has hit me harder than I’d imagined possible, to be honest, and I am struggling to find the optimism which normally buoys me up on even the greyest of days. Partly, I think that’s why I’ve not been writing here very frequently; it’s not that I have sunk into the slough of despond, but I do feel that it’s very wearisome to read yet another depressing ‘oh shit’ post, and it’s probably only going to hack me off further to write such witterings. So, I’m holding my metaphorical tongue until such time as I have more cheery tidings to impart.

I’m also conscious of being rather very behind in the 52 Recipes in 2010 stakes. I started late – I think it was April – but still, I think I need to be cooking something new every single day from here to 2011 at this rate. I’m going to try to get two new things in this week as a bid to turn things around, mood-wise. I’m reasonably cheery, I suppose, and I just need to remember that, and develop it, all of which is hard when the small girl is teething molars, and waking quite frequently, so we’re knackered, as usual. (It’s all so boring, sleep deprivation, yet utterly overwhelming from time to time, I find.)

Current preoccupations:

Children, the number, timing, and nature thereof;

Cooking, and the need not to repeat oneself ad nauseum;

House work, as in cleaning and painting windows, drainage, fixing gardens et al;

The physical self, and why my body wants either chocolate or sleep ALL THE TIME.

Tell me nice things in my comments box, please. (Inspired by DW, whose “I need to hear nice things” post made me smile.)

I’ve been meaning to post lots of exciting things about lots of fascinating subjects, but, er, well, I’m brain-dead due to lack of sleep and a particularly un-scintillating copy-editing job which finishes today, so all I can come up with is the very lovely loaf recipe which I tried out yesterday, in need of a little something to distract from the aforementioned copy horrors. It’s a Cranks recipe, and I can honestly say that, other than the peanut butter and apple soup (which was never really going to work, was it, and if I’d read it in any other book, I wouldn’t even have paused for thought before damning it as the very worst sort of heresy), they are all fillers and no killers (see what I did there?).

So, here goes.

Spiced banana and apple loaf
Ingredients
1 apple, cored, peeled and grated
2 small bananas, mashed
Zest of a large lemon
2 oz sultanas (mixed dried fruit would work well, too)
1 lb of strong (bread) flour (I used a wholemeal spelt I just happened to have kicking about)
2 oz dark brown sugar (I probably used four, if we’re honest, because my hand slipped when sticking it in the bowl)
1 t(b)sp of mixed spice, cinnamon, nutmeg etc.
1 tsp quick-acting yeast
¼ of a pint of warm water

Then…
Pop about 4 oz of the flour in a bowl with the water and the yeast, and stick it somewhere warm to get nice and frothy. While that’s doing its thing, mash the bananas in with the grated apple and the lemon and the sultanas. When you’ve achieved a suitably frothy yeasty concoction, sling that in with the fruit, and add the other ingredients to form a dough-like consistency. Knead it for a bit, until it’s nicely formed, and then into an oiled (or silicone) bread tin with it, and off to a nice warm place to rise for about an hour. (Because I was using antiquated yeast and bread flour damp enough to have lumps, mine didn’t rise masses, but hey – let’s not judge.) Stick the oven on to about 200°c, and bake the blighter for about thirty minutes. As with ordinary bread, it’s done when it’s brown on top and sounds hollow when tapped in a peremptory manner on the base.
V. nice with a spot of butter on it, and works extremely well as toast. The funny thing is that, unlike many other banana-featuring recipes of my ken, this one hides its banananess extraordinarily well – you wouldn’t know they’d even been near it, never mind having moved in, wholesale.

Coming in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future:

- fat bells (and more dready loveliness) – a more successful experience, so thanks to all who commented on our first attempt;

- another ginormous-needles-make-fast-work knitted cardigan for the small girl, just, predictably, as the weather gets warmer;

- ponderings on when to sit and think about things, and the advantages and disadvantages thereof, and when to just get the fuck on with something and hope for the best.

In no particular order:

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

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

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

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

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

And you?

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

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

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

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

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

However.

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

Ours goes thusly:

Pizza

Wossinit?
Base:

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

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

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

Beg, borrow or steal…
Sauce:

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

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

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

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