W is for Winter and Washing Lines

I quite like winter up to and including Christmas and my birthday, which is at the beginning of January, the celebrations, the burying yourself in the layers of clothes after the tortures of baring yourself all summer, the crisp winter walks. After my birthday though it’s just the pits. Nothing to look forward to, with all family celebrations (bar Mr. Lacer’s birthday and our wedding anniversary, both in the summer) in the a three month period between the end of September and the beginning of January. So come January 4th, I’m broke, bored and the only thing to look forward to is . . .  wait for it . . . the first day I can put washing out on the washing line. Forget the bulbs blooming, little tweetie birds building their nests, no, spring is the first day I can hang my washing out. You see, we live in a small flat, which I think I’ve said before and we have no space for a seperate tumble drier and not much more space to dry clothes. We have an old, unreliable, expensively tendered to, washer – drier. You’d think with the money we’ve had to spend repairing it we’d be better off buying a better model, but trust me, our kitchen is so small, to remove the washing machine completely so as to replace it would involve dismantling half of our kitchen just to get the damn thing out! So instead we have a washing machine that incontitently wets the floor on a regular basis like an aging labrador. The fact that it’s probably slowly rotting our aging floorboards I can just about forgive, it’s that it can’t dry clothes, despite it’s washer – drier design. So winter in this household means a bathroom piled to it’s maximum limit with drying clothes and overflowing laundry baskets, so when I can get that washing out on that line, that’s what I do, despite the fact that the washing line is slowly pulling over the shed, but that’s another story.

Not my washing line, but an interesting collection of T-shirts!

No encyclopedia of me entry tomorrow, as x and y are going to be a combined entry (I’m getting desperate!)

Cookbook Stand – Annabel Karmel, The fussy eaters’ recipe book – Ginger biscuits

How sad is my life, I’ve been spending most of this week excited that Annabel Karmel has a new cookbook released today, The Fussy Eaters’ Recipe Book. Both of my kids were brought up on home made, mostly Annabel Karmel, baby food and yet despite her assertions that babies brought up on homemade babyfood grow up to be unfussy children, funnily enough they are both still fussy but I love her recipe books. When my kids got older I graduated onto her family cookbooks and they’re just as brilliant. So basically, I was excited, although slightly apprehensive that it might just all be vegetables all dressed up as teddy bears etc. and I’ve got no truck for that. Anyway, luckily no teddy bears in sight in this book, although to be honest I’m not sure why this particular collection of recipes qualifies under the title of a fussy eaters’ recipe book, it looks pretty much the same as most of her other older children cookbooks. There’s a hidden vegetable tomato sauce recipe but then again there’s a hidden vegetable tomato sauce recipe in several of her other cookbooks. There are some pages of introduction about why it’s important to get your kid eating properly but considering as a parent you’re only likely to be buying the book if you’re concerned about getting your kid to eat properly it’s kind of preaching to the converted.  As a parent of two fussy eaters’, I wasn’t particularly struck over the head with inspiration on ways to get my two to eat their five a day. The book is full of lovely wraps, pasta dishes etc. etc. incorporating vegetables, but I know my two, I know full well they’d just pick the veg out. One dish in particular struck me as being particularly clueless with fussy eaters’, ‘animal pasta salad with multicoloured veggies’, my two are too clued up unfortunately to be swayed so easily with fancy pasta shapes and I just can’t see them going “Oh gee, look at those pasta shapes shaped just like an elephant, I’m going to wolf that pasta down soooo fast I’m not going to notice those great big lumps of brocolli”, yeah right. Same with the majority of the other veg recipes in the book, I know that they will just pick out the veg.

To me though the definition of a fussy eater is one that doesn’t eat their veg, although Karmel has extended that definition further by describing it really as a kid that just doesn’t really eat. So there are a wide variety of recipes, including some nice looking desserts and something that would have been very useful a month or two ago, a chapter on gluten free cooking (couldn’t she have included a dairy free chapter to?). Recipes I definitely plan on trying include ‘Yummy Vegetable and Cashew Nut Burgers’, ‘Annabel’s secret tomato sauce’, ‘cheesey courgette batons’, ‘carrot and cucumber salad’ (that’s just for me, I know no one else in the family will eat that), ‘salmon on a stick with stir fried noodles’ (possibly just for me, I’m a fussy eater as far as fish is concerned and would like to try start eating at least salmon, although no one else will), ‘kiddie carbonara’, ‘caroline’s lasagne alfredo’, ‘maple glazed griddled chicken’, ‘carrot bar cake’, ‘jamaican banana muffins’ and ’oat apple and sunflower seed muffins’.

I have already tried one recipe from the book out though, the ginger biscuits and it was not a good start unfortunately. I’ve been meaning to make Gingerbread men with Girl Lacer, having brought the cutters and everything. I was going to use the Tana Ramsay version but having noticed that there was a recipe in Fussy Eater’s, I thought I’d give that a whirl instead. The picture accompanying the recipe showed teddy bears, dogs, ducks etc. so I thought this must be an ok recipe to use my gingerbread cutters with. I knew it wouldn’t be though when me and Girl Lacer mixed up the dough, it was just too wet, but I chilled it in the fridge as instructed for half an hour. The consistency did improve on chilling, but there was no way you could roll it out and cut biscuits with it. So me and Girl Lacer made splodgy biscuits instead, they were nice, very chewy, but not really what you’d know and love as a gingerbread man type biscuit. The search for the ideal gingerbread biscuit recipe goes on (mine and the kids favourite snack).

Cookbook Stand – Nigella Lawson’s Naan Garlic Bread

I have so many of Nigella’s books that I have trouble remembering which book has which recipe, however I just about remembered last night, when I was in the mood for garlic bread to go with my shop brought Pizza Express American pizza. The naan garlic bread is in Forever Summer (I love that book, I love the way how it fights against the whole seasonal eating thing ). Anyway, I tend not to buy shop brought garlic bread anymore (whereas I will buy decent shop brought pizza, as I know from previous experience that my home made pizza bases are not that good!), buying garlic bread though fills be with a laze induced guilt as I know perfectly well how easy it is to make far nicer garlic bread in infinitely more variations at home. Name a bread product and you can turn it into garlic bread for a start, from good old french stick, to ciabatta, tortillas,even pitta and when I was a student, garlic sliced white bread done under the grill was a regular menu feature in my kitchen, thinking about it I’m sure even bagels would probably just about work if you were desperate, all you need fundamentally is garlic, a clove or two and plenty of butter, the possibility of some dried herbs such as thyme or oregano and/or a good parmesan or pecorino would also do wonders. so of course naan would work. In Nigella’s version, she mixes up some garlic and butter and smears it liberally onto some slashed naan bread, wraps them in foil and bungs them in the oven. This resulted in some particularly nice garlic bread last night as I was using Waitrose naan bread and they’ve changed their recipe for the better, so it was even more scrummy. And yes I know, I could have theoretically made my own naan bread, I’ve seen Indian Food made Easy after all but hey Heroes was on in 15 minutes!

Time

A random writing thought that I thought I’d jot down here for fear of losing it.

Time, it’s a funny thing. If you stand stock still and stare at the second hand of your watch sweep round that watch face, marking a full minute, it can seem like an eternity, you feel every one of those seconds. Yet if say you were in an exam, no where near finished and the examiner calls “Five more minutes left” it feels like you’ve had barely a chance to breath before the examiner calls “Pens down”. Who said time was constant?