I can’t decide whether it’s just nostalgia or if I’m in danger of veering into rather morbid territory, but for some reason, ever since the immediate monumental crappitude of my mother dying had passed, I have found myself playing a small mental game about the ways in which my life, and the person I appear to be, would be recognisable to her.

This morning, I walked up a small Devonian lane, shutting the door of our house and stopping to look at our new door handle (which is of the brass beehive variety, and thus exceedingly pretty, to my mind) and the recently-cleaned foxy door knocker, to a car which is the next-to-current version of a car which Quercus drove when my mother was alive. Would our house be surprising to her? Yes, but only in that we are extraordinarily fortunate to have had it since we were twenty-six. Inside, I think she would be unsurprised, though delighted, by its hobbit-like nature. She would probably be surprised to see how practical we have become; she knew Quercus as a music student, not as wielder of chain, mitre and table saws.

I am wearing jeans (to work! horrors!), a sweater with the neck standing up against the gentle drizzle, and purple leather sandals, based on a pair I owned when she was alive. I am wearing silver spiral earrings given to me by Quercus the summer that my mother was diagnosed. I have a leather keyring which was my mother’s. I call to mind a day spent in Boscastle with her, before illness loomed on the horizon (in fact, just before, given that I’d already started university, so it must been the first time they came to visit; the return trip from that visit brought the road accident which started the process which would end in my mother dying of breast cancer, unrecognised until it was too late because her injuries masked the massing symptoms of her imminent doom. Gosh. That is still hard to write. And is it horribly wrong that even in the midst of this hardness, I note that this is a bit like the psychotic version of The House That Jack Built?), when the sun was shining and life was blissfully simple (though of course Sod’s Law being what it is, I didn’t realise this then, and I’m sure that I was full of teenage angst about something-or-other). We sat on a small wall together, and she said I looked like a pixie, a throw-away remark which I’ve often thought over since then, in moments when I contemplated a mirror which showed me a haggard vision of sleep-deprived bile.

In the car, an MP3 of David Bowie plays. This would definitely come as no surprise, and nor would the Jamiroquai I switch to later on.

My bag, which sports a fair-trade peacock on the outside, was probably not even designed, let alone in existence, when she died, but I don’t think its curly design would have failed to appeal, and nor would the felted purse lurking therein, rich in its bright spiral of colour but disappointingly underprivileged in fiscal terms. That probably wouldn’t surprise her, either.

In the back of the car, a small springy sheep lurches from the top of the window. Fastened to that bit you’re supposed to hang jackets on (who does that, incidentally?), he is there to distract the small girl when she’s imprisoned in her (German, which would also be no surprise to a woman who had a life-long affair with the Teutonic, and nearly married a German when she was eighteen) car-seat. She would not be surprised by the small girl; she it was who foresaw a ‘herd’ of small blonde children clinging to the legs of my dungarees. Not quite a herd, yet, but there’s still time.

As I get to work, a space I have inhabited for ten years in one form or another, I reflect that she’d probably be both surprised and pleased that I eschewed the London move which seemed the likely outcome for most of my sixth-form friends in favour of a life in which elderflower cordial-making goes hand-in-hand with lethal alcohol of unknown origin, rootled out of a hedge by friends, and with knackered cars which are constantly in danger of breaking down, and with a house of which gaffer tape has become an integral part. And with ancient clothes in danger of achieving listed status, and with stupidly uncommercial research projects, and with Quercus, and the small girl.

Strange though it may seem, this game is immensely comforting to me. My mother didn’t get to see my adult life, really, which had only just begun when she left, but she would feel a part of it, easily, inevitably, effortlessly, were she to reappear tomorrow, I think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So. There you go. And you?

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.)

Number of new MacBooks gracing our kitchen table: 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you?

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

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

Soon to come, internets and laptop permitting:

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

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

Dolls, the concocting thereof;

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

And you?

Quercus here again.

Well, that was quite a week! Many things have been fixed, or prepared, or done in some way. I had forgotten how everything takes 3 times as long as one thinks it might. I won’t list the rather long and tedious list of things that have changed, but think it fair to say that it’s been a productive week.

I think I should thank the Earthenwitch for actually upping and offing with the Witchling for a week, as it’s given me the opportunity to spend far more time than I would have done otherwise working on the chateau. I know that they have both been enjoying their time at Gwandma’s house (she is so called by the Witchling) and that they have had a chance to a) rest and b) visit ducks. Always a bonus. I have had a chance to lie in undisturbed this morning, which has been absolutely blissful. The week has seen me up at 5.30 and working til 7 or 8 in the evening; this comes of naturally being an early riser, I think. I do like the feeling of being outside stripping a door or something in brilliant sunshine, while everyone else is asleep. But today it was me who was asleep!

In other news, we are almost ready for the Witchling’s second birthday. Bless her, how can she be two?! I am sure pictures will be posted in due course of both beaming child and of presents. We have a couple of things we have made for her, and I’m particularly pleased with one of them. The other, from me, involved spending some time with a chainsaw in order to make it.

Right. Now I’d better toddle off to make the house look presentable again. Piles of tools in the middle of the kitchen – far simpler than putting them back in the shed every day. Can’t wait – I get my girlies back this afternoon!

Hello. Quercus here.

Well, now that I am all alone, or rather just accompanied by paws and claws, I have taken the liberty of hijacking the tiny white box to ramble about what’s happening here. It’s been very hot here, and spending all day outside has had a curious effect on my skin – I sensibly slathered myself in sun cream, but was unable to reach a section in the middle of my back, and forgot my legs altogether. The resultant blotches may take some time to fade. I have never been a very shirt-off type of person, but in this heat doing hard work all day it seemed like a good idea. Plus I thought the only beings around to see were the cats; Pyewacket turned up her nose in disgust and retired to the pile of sawdust under the chainsaw trestle, and Wixon is too stupid to form an opinion.

So far I have worked for three rather long days, getting up at 5.30 one day and working through until the light started to go. For my own reference and to make me feel good, I have so far broken up the concrete paths all round the house and moved them to the now even more enormous rubble pile outside the back door, despite the temptation to put it all on the Witchling’s newly -laid lawn, which would have been a damn sight more convenient, sanded the render off the porch woodwork, scraped, sanded and cleaned every window in our tiny house (all nine of them; this was actually rather a big deal as they were covered in render and I had to take all the casements out as I went, then reinstall them), cleaned and sanded the fascia / soffit boards, then painted them, dug out a gatepost which was a devil of a job, and started putting guttering up.

Gosh, I’m boring, aren’t I?! Possibly the most irritating bit of it was this morning, when I painted the fascia / soffit boards. Usually the Earthenwitch does painting, particularly when it’s fiddly bits, as she is better at it than I, but I had to do it this time as it had to be finished before the guttering went up. I had primered it the day before, so this morning hoped to do the first of two top coats. We had coughed up our life savings and plumped for a Farrow & Ball number called Railings, in exterior eggshell (well actually the Earthenwitch had sat on me while reading my debit card number out to the nice man on the telephone, leaving me gasping for air and for reeling from the realisation that I had just spent £48.50 [that's a lot of dollars, for our American readers] on 2.5 litres of gunky dark paint; Messrs. Farrow & Ball must be laughing all the way to their extraordinarily large piggy bank), and I had just begun to apply it, up at the top of a very tall and wobbly stepladder, when a bloke appeared round the side of the house. I came down, and he explained that he was a tree chopping chap doing the rounds for the electricity company, and that one of the poles in our garden had about 6m more ivy on it than was allowed. I was delighted that he was prepared to hack it about instead of me, so after a pleasant conversation about wood which they might chop and I might collect, I went back to my painting. The Farrow and Ball had grown a skin. It was OK though, as I stirred it back in. I went back up the teetering ladder and continued. Almost immediately our neighbour appeared, along with two year-old boy and aged hound, who proceeded to make his way indoors to polish off Wixon’s breakfast (much to his horror). They chatted for a minute, then disappeared just as another neighbour, who is an electrician, dropped by to talk to me about some work we need doing. The skin was forming again. I continued, only to be halted five minutes later by a delivery van with bits of house for me, and then again two minutes later by the neighbour / boy / dog, passing the other way. The last straw was when a building supplies lorry turned up with more stuff for us, and I had to pause to direct the chap craning sand over the hedge. Mind you, he was my favourite driver – an animated Italian, who gesticulates wildly and talks almost incomprehensibly while beaming in glee at everything you say.

In the end the Farrow & Balls-up went alright, but took a lot longer than expected.

I have to say it’s very strange to be here on my own. I don’t really like it, although the heavenly bliss of uninterrupted nights (even if I do get up obscenely early) is enjoyable. But I miss my baby. Where is the little voice that demands “pruuuune” at the end of breakfast? Where are the tiny feet that run around upstairs? Where is the little bare naked baby who runs away at bath-time? And where is my garden helper? I miss her enormously. Oh, and I miss the Eathenwitch a bit too.

Right – I’m off for tea. Pizza again (gave up bacon sandwiches after eating nothing else for a day and a bit, and then being very sick; too much salt). Cheerio.

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.

I’m hoping to post the odd (probably decidedly so) picture of our house and the life we’re living in it as we crawl out from under the shadow of large-scale renovations and the general exhaustion which seems to go hand-in-hand (for us, at least!) with having a small child. Well, actually, we’re not quite crawling out (of either) yet, as we’re about to head into another phase of Big Work (this being finishing off the exterior and contemplating such lunacy as interior re-plastering [our ceilings are falling down; what can I say?]), but, like Mon, I like seeing snapshots into people’s lives beyond the words they choose to put up on the screen (hence this is also part of her Through the Keyhole series, which kicked off yesterday – do join in, as the more the merrier for those of us nosy enough to want to know if our kitchen is alone in its midden state; I think it’s a Saturday thing in theory, but I’m too shite to have managed it yesterday).

So here is what I see when faced with the kitchen sink (which makes me hugely grateful every time I come near it, for a multitude of reasons including [but not limited to] having a sink! a real ceramic sink! which isn’t stored under the piano in the dining room!, having taps! real, shiny taps! which give out water! wet, drinkable, clear, reliable water! [older readers may remember our well shenanigans... let us draw a veil over that], the fact that the sink is not piled full of washing-up waiting for my approach in order to adopt its darkest, most sinister laugh while it points out the lack of washing-up liquid because we have a DISHWASHER WHICH WORKS AND EVERYTHING).

The plants you can just about see are lavender, a tradescantia, an unidentified chap called only ‘small foliage’ by its garden centre vendor, and an obscenely pot-bound lemonbalm, found in this unhappy state (well, not really unhappy – perhaps mildly discontented?) because there is nowhere in the garden to put it, given that most of the space outdoors is still broken.  Which reminds me – I really want to put up some pics of the latest garden developments, which have given us some workable lawn space for the small girl to play in, and a rather nice wild plum tree which we hadn’t noticed, really, in the chaos which was there before we rotovated. That next, perhaps, though I’ll probably forget (again).

Here is a better impression of the view we get from this side of the house, which faces down the garden:

(This is not the garden, I hasten to add, but the field behind the garden. There. Glad we got that all cleared up.) The sunlight is stretched and lazy this evening, causing the shadows to reach far across the field as a storm-cloud blows over towards the east,  and it’s quiet here – all I can hear is the hum of the oven (the week’s granola, sourdough bread adventures, coupled with rhubarb crumble [and a topping I keep meaning to post here, come to think of it], baked taters and a ham with bayleaves and a herby cheese sauce, since you ask) and the birds telling us all about their troubles and joys (which now include two new feeders around the other side of the house, partly to redress the balance of the bird-free garden which arrived when the chickens departed). See the colour of that earth? Our walls are that colour, underneath their new clothing of lime, and someday, I hope to have a cob oven in the garden which won’t be rendered, to remind us of the earth which gave us our house.

Right. That din-din-din-dinner is calling to me, and as it’s now eight-thirty, I feel inclined to respond. Let me know if you’re posting pictures, and I’ll nosey mosey along to look at them.

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 think I’ve finally decided the ol’ hair question, and I think (subject to change, of course, because I am hopelessly indecisive at the best of times, and this is, of course, no different) that I’m going to get my hair dreadlocked. I’m not certain, partly because the person I’d like to do it lives about ninety miles from here, and is currently limited in her transport options, having been let down a few times by public transport. I have decided pretty much for sure that I don’t want to risk having a go at it myself, courtesy of a few YouTube videos; after all, if I wanted to make a complete mess of my hair, I could just ignore it for a few months, et voila! So, I think getting someone else to do it is probably the answer, and you’d be surprised (or perhaps you wouldn’t) how few people there are around who do this sort of thing, particularly if you’re familiar with Devon and the south-west’s tendency to attract velvet-shirt-wearing types and the like. Sadly, Quercus doesn’t think he’s up to it in hairdressing terms, and the only other candidate has the nerve to live in Ireland… so that probably rules her out too, at least for the length of time my patience will hold out.

It’s funny, though – thinking, finally, that I actually am going to do this, after years of hankering after other people’s dreads and thinking I’d love to try it some time, has made me all the more interested in reading about other people’s experience, some good, and some bad. Some people have talked about the attitude of other people if you’ve got dreads (assumptions being that you’re into drugs, or a pikey [because having a static caravan, in a right state, in your totally destroyed garden doesn't give that impression at all], or that you never wash, or that you’re morally degenerate), and some have mentioned the practical irritations of finding the right shampoo or abandoning shampoo in favour of apple cider vinegar-based concoctions.

Mentally, I’ve been trying to think how I would feel about people judging me based on my hairstyle. Some of you might remember that the last time I mentioned this, opinions were divided, comments-wise, between ‘yay! for dreads!’ and ‘er – why would you want to do that?’, particularly in relation to the judgement people might form about me and the small girl. I’m not such a hopeless idealist as to pretend that these judgments won’t happen, but I do think that probably, if you’re going to judge me on my hair, it’s unlikely we’d get along particularly well anyway. I know it’s probably not always that simple, but seriously: we are talking about a hairstyle here, not a form of social terrorism, and I imagine that anyone talking to me for more than a second will form judgments about who I am, and what I do, whether I like it or not, and in ways that I may or may not agree with. For example, a colleague recently assumed that I was vegetarian (again). Yes, this is something which happens often, and no, I have no idea why: I think I’ve written before about how it’s possible to look like a vegetarian, and I’m still no closer to answering that, other than the fact that, for most of the people I’ve asked about it,what prompted their assumption was normally either to do with my perceived eco-consciousness, or with the way I dress. Of course, the assumption that I don’t eat meat isn’t a remotely offensive one, and, indeed, it’s not far from the truth in that I don’t eat very much meat, and I try to buy free-range organic meat when I do eat it, and I love love love vegetarian cooking (as most of the recipes here will testify). But it’s still one based on appearances, and I suppose that means it probably goes deeper than just thinking about what someone does or doesn’t eat; my colleague also assumed that I had been to Glastonbury at least once, and that I’d be the person to ask about how to make your own wine. So, no matter what I do with my hair, my appearance seems to give off a dreadlocked vibe, as it were, and surprisingly conservative friends have been all for the idea of a dreadlocked me. (Either that, or I have some very polite friends!)

Practically, I’ve been experimenting with the latter having realised some time ago that shampoo was what made Quercus’s hair more than normally crazy (he’s fine with the sort of eco alternatives, but ‘standard’ shampoo – just no, in so many ways); so far, I’ve tried bicarbonate of soda and a rinse of apple cider vinegar and essential oils, and the results were pretty good in that my hair didn’t need washing half so often, and smelled really delicious in the meantime. I still need to fiddle with quantities, mind you, as a couple of times I’ve ended up with a rather clogged feeling to the ol’ barnet – too much bicarb? Hard water? Soft water? Should I be trying baking powder instead? – but the overall effect is rather good, I think, and my hair behaves much better between washes than it does when I use shampoo (which makes it static, oily-looking far more quickly and prone to that fly-away rubbish); the shift from washing hair every day to washing it once or twice a week has not proved the challenge I’d assumed, in that I haven’t wandered about looking as if I’ve dipped my head in a chip-shop, and this bodes well, methinks, for the once-a-week washing epic which dreadlocks – and their attendant drying – might entail.

Gosh.

And there was me thinking this would be a quick post.

So, anyone out there with any advice on the alternatives to shampoo? Any experiences of dreads? And any thoughts on the whole appearance/reality dynamic?

Right. Back to the ginger wine, now, then, as we all have stinking colds, and GW is my drug of choice in this situation – bugger the paracetamol: pass the alcohol!

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.)

In lots of ways, I want to get that last entry further down the page, metaphorically and literally.* This afternoon the small girl and I went to visit our remaining two hens, Nutmeg and Cobweb, who are currently on holiday with e. We had a very nice time, despite the origins of the reason for our visit, and the hens are clearly doing fine; Nutmeg is even laying still. Cobweb, of course, being an Araucana, is completely mad still, but then that’s nothing new. Anyway, the small girl enjoyed feeding them, and talking to them, and a resemblance to various of our other hens didn’t hurt, although we have explained to her that part of the reason for the chickens’ holiday is that we are worried that the fox might come back to visit, and that foxes and chickens can’t be friends. It’s been a tough week, and having the aged parent here didn’t really divert attention from it so much as highlighting another area of life which is far from satisfactory, to wit: the relationship between AP and small girl, or lack thereof. (That’s a whole nother post, but basically he doesn’t seem to know quite what to make of her, and she, as a result, is a little stand-offish, which creates a wholly inaccurate impression of who she is, normally, with people who really know her.)

Anyway, that is a rant for another day, and for now, I’m happy to see our hens still standing, and OK, and alive. Quercus and I are still miserable about what happened, and the garden is horribly quiet without the chooks about the place. We had had them for three years, and seeing the place without them is just wrong. I think we are tentatively agreed that we will have some more hens while we live here, though we have yet to work out which changes we’ll make to make the run more secure (and, of course, how we can make me less forgetful; I feel unspeakably guilty, predictably, and I think I will full-stop, to be honest, when I think about what happened). I think we’re both prepared to go quite some way to try to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, whether that means an automatic chicken gate (which sounds rather like a bizarre political scandal, doesn’t it?) and electric wiring, or just tonnes and tonnes of ordinary chicken wire, or a moat and guard dogs and machine guns on watch-towers or what. But I feel better in my head when I think that this is not the end of the line for us as hen people, so we’ll continue to work out the details while I try to sit on my hands and not push Quercus before he’s ready.

We’re also trying to use what happened with the hens as an incentive to sort out the garden. A few weeks back, we tidied intensively in one half of it, before rotovating and sewing a mixture of grass, clover and camomile; it’s getting quite green out there (though let us not speak of the insanely healthy-looking rhubarb which has survived this ordeal, having played dead for several months prior to our decision to just cut our losses with it…) and it’s made us appreciate how nice it would be to have outdoor space that didn’t involve old nails and rusty bits of ex-roof. A garden, one might call it; I hear these things are catching on these days. So, it looks like our plans are changing from focusing entirely on the inside of the house, to sorting out the rest of the exterior work and creating a garden, not least for the small girl to have somewhere nice this summer. Hopefully, part of this will be creating a secure space for some more hens. And then retrieving our two from e.

In other news, next weekend we are getting a dining table, bringing us dangerously close to civilisation! In the kitchen! There will be pictures! We are going to Quercus’s mother’s for this, and a weekend away seemed like a rather nice idea given that we’ve had a week of horribleness. So, Weald & Downland here we come.

* And thanks for the sympathy on my last post; I really appreciated it, and it did go some way to stopping me feeling a complete and utter arsehole.

This morning I came down to find that five of our seven hens had been attacked by a fox. Quercus had to kill our rooster, whose neck was clearly broken but who had lived anyway, and four of the hens were already dead. We have sent the remaining two to live with e, who has lots of hens and from whom two of ours originally came. I feel just horrible about the whole thing; there are feathers everywhere and I feel physically sick when I think about poor Pepper’s horrible fate. The worst of it is that I forgot to shut the henhouse up last night; I think they came out very early and that was when it happened. I know it’s dramatic-sounding, but I shall never forgive myself for it. And yes, I know it could have happened to either me or Quercus, but it happened to me, and I feel just awful. I don’t know if we’re going to get more hens, and, if we do, when we might do it, but for now, we’ve a lot of clearing up to do and a small girl to lie to.