Girl Lacer’s Birthday Party

Girl Lacer had a lovely birthday party yesterday. It did my tiny shoe box flat proud, ten adults / children fitted in just fine. It was just a small party, more lunch and playing really but for Girl Lacer’s first ever party it was a success. We had pass the parcel and we made party masks. Food was sandwiches cut into the shape of stars and hearts (easier with marmite than ham), Organix crisps, salad, cocktail sausages and number 4 cut out biscuits and buttermilk birthday cake from Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess. The cake was in the shape of a castle. Next year I think we’ll have a bigger party in one of the local halls but it will still be fairly, I think the term these days is, ‘retro’, i.e pass the parcel, pin the tail, musical statues, things like that.

We live in quite an affluent area and I remember when Girl Lacer was smaller sitting in the toddler group listening to other mummies talking about what they did for birthday parties, the entertainers hired etc and I thought what have I let myself in for? I like Anonymom‘s take on birthday parties, which can be found here and here, although from the sound of it birthday parties in the States are a little different from the ones over here, from the parties Anonymom describes the unifying theme seems to be food and they seem to be held at restaurants. Now I do remember McDonalds birthday parties when I was a kid but do they even do those anymore? Around here it’d be social suicide to invite someone elses child to a fast food restaurant, even though we all probably take our own kids to McDs, it’s officially a thing to do ‘when you’re just to tired / rushed to cook’, certainly not a place to have a party! You generally have to be so careful with the minefield that is ‘food and other people’s kids’; food intolerances / allergies, parental fears on food colourings, general fussiness. At Girl Lacer’s party, most of the food was casein (cow dairy protein) free – the ‘buttermilk’ cake and biscuits were made with soya spread, goats yoghurt and goats milk, this was for Boy Lacer, I made sure there were gluten free options for one of my mummy friends, the crisps were low salt and there were no food colourings except for a few cake decorations. But after all that, you know what the kids would have been just happy with, the low salt crisps and the cocktail sausages; they ate those like a hoard of hungry locusts but other than those, they were just happy playing, so food at least here, is not the key to children’s parties. Anyway, here’s to retro at home / your local community hall if your house isn’t big enough to hold parties!

Of course though when the kids are older, then I think meals out on your own with your friends in Italian restaurants come into their own (got fond memories of those).

Boy Lacer’s first ever complete sentence

 (This was a few nights ago)

“I need a book”

A boy after my own heart.

Debrief

It’s been the end of a very busy day and I haven’t even left the house, my feet are hurting (I have pes cavus - (christ I’ve just checked the answer.com definition of that, describing the feet of pes cavus sufferers to look like claws is a bit extreme, I have images now of me with hen’s feet, which I don’t and I know I never will, don’t worry)) and I can run a 5km race without my feet hurting (I’ve had surgical correction) and yet a busy day in, doing you guessed it, my old nemesis housework, makes my feet hurt like the bad old days. Thank goodness I’ve been back on the Flixonase, otherwise I’d be sneezing my head off to with the amount of dust bunnies I’ve been diving in. You see it’s Girl Lacer’s birthday party tomorrow and I am mad, certifiable, as I have let Girl Lacer invite 3 of her little friends round (I was hoping for just 2 initially!), plus their mums and associated siblings if they’re not in school, so that’s 4 adults, 4 3 – 4 year olds, 1 2 year old and 1 baby then tomorrow, in my chaotic little shoe box. So I’ve spent the whole weekend tidying and cleaning like a mad woman. It doesn’t look too bad now but I know ironies of ironies that they’re going to wreck it all within about 10 minutes and I have work tomorrow evening (a tuition client coming here), so the living room will need to be back in a presentable state for that.

I’ve been trying to prep for that to, I’ve been an idiot as usual and although I’ve known that this tuition date fell on the same date as the party for 3 weeks now and that I shouldn’t leave my tuition prep for the usual last minute, of course I did. So I’ve been trying to fit in little bits throughout the day, at first it was a relief to be able to just sit down and write something, even if it was about limestone but after a while it got rather depressing. You see I know this particular tuition client reasonably well, I tutored him through KS3 and now I’m tutoring him through GCSE, but the GCSE science syllabus has changed this year, for the utter worse, it was so depressing looking through notes I used with GCSE students last year, seeing how much it had completely changed. As the common line goes, it’s now science for the pub. I have no idea which dimwit thought this whole thing up and they’ll be wondering in a few years why even less people are going on to do science A-level and then on to do a science degree. A nation needs its scientists and by disrupting their education at such a key early stage with this rubbish, we’re only shooting ourselves in the foot. Anyway I’m a bit worried, considering my student has exams soon, whether he’s covering the right stuff and quickly enough at school, from what it seems he’s done so far. It’s all very well complaining that the new syllabus is pants but they’ve still got to cover it if they’re going to make the grades.

So I haven’t been able to do any ‘proper’ writing today and although I don’t write (fiction) daily anyway, not seemingly much difference then but actually that’s all I’ve wanted to do all day (that and read). There’s a new assignment on Susan Hill’s writing course and it’s a challenging piece of writing based on writing a character who is about to, is in the process of or has just been on Dragon’s Den. Luckily I like Dragon’s Den (although I don’t watch it religiously), I like it for the human drama rather than the actually business side and for being able to call the people idiots for when they’re foolishly asking the Dragons for some ridiculously large amount of money for a 10% share in their business that currently operates out of a shed. Anyway, when I read the assignment I thought, argh haven’t got a clue but I love the way how when you get more practiced into thinking about stories your mind begins to work on them by itself as whilst I was doing the housework I guess my subconscious was working away on an idea and I think I have something to write now (I guess housework has a use then).

Staying with writing it’s Motherhood Monday Fiction Meme time again tomorrow, I’m not sure I’ll be doing it this week, well I certainly won’t be doing it on Monday anyhow, although my brain was brewing up an idea for that one to when I was fishing under the beds where all lost toys go, so I may join in a little later. But I thought I’d still post the link because it’s worth a look at.

Finally, in this debrief, before my head hits the pillow (any second now, thank god for laptops), I have also been cooking, well you have to with birthday parties don’t you. I’ll talk more about the food when I report back on the party itself but let me just say, I have a homemade castle cake sitting in the fridge at the moment with some rather dodgy icing (why do cakes have to be iced anyway, always too sweet and yucky in my book), that will be the last time I let Girl Lacer look too closely at the cakes in Waitrose, she saw their castle cake and wanted one, needless to say my castle cake, not quite the same, so I hope she likes it (I spent long enough icing it!).

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Slightly late on the bandwagon, but I thought I’d read some of the Booker shortlist and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid was the title that most appealed to me, I have Darkmans to read next, funnily enough the winner, The Gathering by Anne Enright doesn’t really appeal to me although I suspect I’ll read it, if anything because apparently the final sentence is the best final sentence the judge (or is it one of the judges?) has ever read.

But back to The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I loved this book, it has such a lovely, authentic voice. The main character is from Lahore but goes to college in America and then works in New York, which I noticed from the author bio he had done to, which brought upon a ton of writery paranoia that perhaps I should be writing stories about housewives in South West London instead of pinning my hopes on a story set in Ancient Egypt. I loved the way how the story was told, the main character narrates his story to a nameless American in a Lahore restaurant and it becomes apparent that the American has some part to play in the story, that the story is not yet complete. The story finishes at the brink of a possible confrontation and leaves open questions about exactly how much of a fundamentalist the main character really is.

I thought the story was quite sympathetically told, I wonder how popular this book is in the States?

Girl Lacer’s Birthday Cake

It was Girl Lacer’s birthday yesterday (hence no post, we were out all day at Legoland, having a complete blast, even seeing fireworks at the end). Anyway I carted birthday cake and all there and this year it was chocolate cake as requested by Girl Lacer, in fact it was as specifically requested by Girl Lacer to be “chocolate cake you can cut into slices and that is not too chocolatey so that daddy can have some”, so I made chocolate cake.

Now a bit of back story here, I read at least two food magazines a month (Delicious and BBC Good Food) and I tear out the recipes and . . . never usually cook them but I was going through my collection of torn out recipes(which are just randomly stuffed in a cupboard, Flylady would be cross) the other day and came across the following recipe, Chocolate and Berry Tray Bake, which I remember being from Delicious’ Junior Cook section in a feature about kid’s cooking party. I thought it looked pretty in the picture. Note those two facts for future reference, it’s a recipe for a kids cake (and therefore shouldn’t be too rich) and it looked nice in the picture.

So, I made it and the first thing that annoyed me is that I’m pretty sure there was at least one error in the recipe and errors in recipes just bug me! It called for 225g of chocolate powder, now even a full jar of Green & Black’s Chocolate powder is smaller than 225g! I’m used to recipes calling for chocolate powder to measure it in spoonfuls not jar and a half-fuls! So I’m sure that was an error. Anyway I didn’t have enough so I just used the remains of my current jar which was (I measured it) 80g. Anyway I continued on and came to the part of the recipe where you had to push the frozen berries into the cake mixture, you couldn’t really push them in so that they were covered in cake mixture, so they sort of sat on the top, it didn’t look like that in the photo so I hoped the cake was going to rise or something. So the cake went in the oven for the required 45 minutes, it was not ready then and required an extra 10 minutes but eventually it was just about cooked, although I wasn’t too convinced about how cooked it was in the middle with the amount of fruit in the middle of the cake. The cake also looked nothing like it did in the picture (even taking into account the lack of toppings and candles) as the cake was domed and the fruit still visible (mmm thinking about it maybe the recipe had specified to much frozen fruit to). But it was the birthday cake I had, so off it went to Legoland with us.

So the all important taste test? Well, even with well less than half the recommended chocolate powder, the cake was still very very rich and chocolatey, too chocolatey considering it was in a kids cooking section in a magazine. I don’t think with the amount of fruit in it the cake cooked properly in the middle and although the cake is getting eaten (mainly by me) we’re just working our way round the edges. And thinking about it I’m really not sure berries and chocolate cake work together full stop anyway! So overall, a bad cake.

Thankfully though Girl Lacer is having a little birthday lunch with her friends on Monday and I’m making another cake for that (sigh it never ends) and this time it’s a tried and tested Nigella Lawson recipe . . .

Bill Granger’s Potatoes with Onion and Pancetta

I’ve just cooked Bill Granger’s Potatoes with Onion and Pancetta from his latest book Holiday. I didn’t follow the recipe exactly as it called for onions cut in wedges, but the only onions I had were frozen ready chopped, I also didn’t have the finishing touch of parsley but the recipe even it’s basic form is absolutely delicious.

It’s basically finely sliced new potatoes, pancetta and onion (I used my frozen stuff) fried in butter and olive oil in a frying pan, the first 20 minutes gently under a lid and the final 20 minutes with a slightly fiercer heat without the lid on to get a delicious golden colour. So as you can see it isn’t the quickest of dishes (with me the absolute maximum preparation and cooking time has to be half an hour) but I had the chance to spend a little longer in the kitchen today as we’ve been waiting in for a parcel and oh it was worth the extra time (I was about to say extra effort but it wasn’t really).

Cooking something new for the kids is always a risky business, as they’re highly suspicious of new stuff, so I tempered the arrival of this new dish with a side order of rice cake, which they both like, however they both dived into the potatoes, even Boy Lacer who’s normally highly suspicious of any potato not in the form of a chip, crisp or waffle, so I was shocked to see him grab an immediate handful of the potato, bypassing the beloved rice cake and even going “mmmm” in appreciation! Ok now I know fried potatoes, onion and bacon arn’t the healthiest of things, but this recipe makes delicious winter comfort food and has had the added bonus of getting my kids to try something new, even getting Girl Lacer interested in how I had cooked it, so all in all definitely something I’ll be cooking again!

Grrh at Flylady plus Boy Lacer stuff

No post yesterday, I did think about it but I’d have only of whinged, so I thought I’d save the whinging for today instead lol. Regular readers (if I have any) may recall that I managed to successfully follow a whole month of Flylady babysteps about a month ago and the result was a reasonably tidy house however in the last month I have slipped again big style and now thanks to Flylady I not only live in a messy house but I’m also constantly mentally kicking myself because I know a tidy house is possible, however the Flylady plan is just so regimented and I just don’t do regimented.It all came to a head yesterday when I wanted to take the kids shopping but Girl Lacer (who owns two pairs of shoes) could only find one of each pair of shoes. Now I suspect even in a tidy house Girl Lacer could just as easily loose her shoes, somehow she’s perfectly content to take one shoe off in one room, then the other one off in another room but an untidy house does not help. I’m constantly reminding her to keep her shoes together but it doesn’t always help. So I was nagging Girl Lacer to go and find her shoe, about which she wasn’t keen and she was instead going “Ok I’m not going out”, I was trying to call her bluff (christ I wouldn’t leave her, she’s only (nearly) 4) by continuing preparing to go out and then I realised I couldn’t find my keys. So I was a right one to nag. Eventually I did find them and Girl Lacer went out in her wellies. When I got home that day I spent the rest of the day tidying up and have done quite a lot today to.

Now onto Boy Lacer stuff; more physio today, despite taking his first unaided steps a couple of weeks ago he has since stopped, however the physio did get him to walk a few steps unaided today. What was nice though was that they were praising how good he was with shapes, always nice to hear good things about Boy Lacer! Other than that Boy Lacer is descending more and more into being a complete and utter 2 year old and is turning into a right stroppy so and so, with his favourite word being “no” which he says to pretty much everything in the manner of the travel agent character in Little Britain who always says “and the computer says no”