Ham and Cheese Muffins and General Chit-chat

Just to prove I am still cooking (I haven’t done a cooking post for a while – that’s because cooking when you’re meant to be on a diet is pretty dull) but I made these tonight.

They’re the ham and cheese muffins from Tana Ramsay’s Family Kitchen, which I have to say I cook a darn sight more from than the couple of her husband’s cookbooks I own. It’s a simple recipe, basically a savoury muffin with ham and cheese, I’ve cooked it before and it always tastes delicious, however it’s been one of those recipes that have gone back into th metaphysical recipe cupboard, never to be used (until tonight) since we worked out that a lot of Boy Lacer’s problems were due to cow’s milk (sigh, I so miss making macaroni cheese and lasagna, yes I know you can make cows milk free macaroni but it’s a hassle and also more expensive and as for the lasagna, well my favourite, guaranteed to work lasagna recipe involves a tin of condensed cream of tomato soup which well, contains cream). Anyway I decided to dust down this recipe tonight, having to go to the hassle of dividing the ingredients into two bowls, a ‘normal’ bowl and a ‘cow dairy free’ bowl (I used Pure instead of butter and hard goats cheese and goats milk) and making sure I wasn’t going to mix anything up or contaminate anything, I made 6 between me, Mr. Lacer and Girl Lacer and 6 for Boy Lacer (he does have some luck).

All this hassle was because Boy Lacer finally has a psych appointment tomorrow, even though he is now alot happier than he was when he was referred back in November and the appointment is at 11am and is for an hour, so I am desperately hoping the appointment is on time because even if it is it’ll only give me 50 minutes to get Girl Lacer to nursery (who by the way after her morning milking her cold for all it’s worth, was so much better she went to nursery absolutely fine this afternoon). So with a very rushed lunch in mind I thought the ham and cheese muffins would be perfect.

Other than that, may I urge you, if you’re at all UK based and interested in making sure that Shakespeare is taught to our children in a way that is actually interesting, to check out the RSC’s campaign and add your signature, as they so rightly point out, Shakespeare was a dramatist and should be studied as such, not dryly, as purely words on paper. I just hope that when my children get to Shakespeare in school it’s taught by someone who believes in the RSCs principals. Oh I’m getting more and more excited about seeing Hamlet in August.

Oh and one more absolutely final note and on the more immediate future, me and Girl Lacer have just signed up for our first race together (she’s 4), we’re doing the Sport Relief Mile, in central London in a couple of weekends time, she may very just run faster than me.

Milking it

Girl Lacer is currently in my bed with a man cold (click here for a very funny man cold video on YouTube). The problem with Girl Lacer is that she milks everything, she very famously (well famously for this family) was seemingly at death’s door the day before we were due to go on a big family day out to meet some friends for a party, back then we weren’t as aware of her milking tendencies, so we had thought if she had been soooo ill the day before, no way could we do the long distance trip the next day, so we cancelled and guess what, she was as right as bouncing rain the next day. I had no doubt she was ill that day, just as she is today (everyone here has coughs and colds), just as she is probably ill most of the time she milks it (oh look who’s just emerged from the bedroom looking a lot better now that the main source of sympathy has gone to work) but everything for her is always on 100% drama queen setting, it’s the same when she hurts herself, most of her 4 year old friends, if they fall over they’ll hardly ever cry, she falls over it’s the end of the world. So the problem is, when she’s ill or hurt herself it is very very hard to tell when she’s very ill as opposed to ill or whether’s she’s very badly hurt herself and I’ve told her this countless times (and yes I’ve told her the story of the boy who cries wolf countless times to). Last time she hurt herself badly, she’d been playing with a friend and they both collided heads, her friend barely whimpered, Girl Lacer of course screamed the place down, I checked her over, nothing seemed wrong, so I thought she was doing her usual thing. I took her home, still screaming and I was getting exasperated and I was going “It’s just a little bump, no need to cry”. We got home, still screaming, so I checked her ear again, it had changed for the last time I had checked it about ten minutes before, to the most ginormous cauliflower ear I had ever seen, it a multicolour range of hues of red and black, no wonder she was screaming, but considering her behaviour had been on the same level as a minor scraped knee, it was a little difficult for me to tell! She has to grow out of this behaviour though, eventually she’ll be at school and I’ll be working to and if me or Mr. Lacer keep on having to take a day off because she can’t handle a minor cold, our employers will not be impressed.

This morning we were meant to be going into town to buy some trimmings for her school’s latest hair-brained idea, well apparently it’s an annual hair-brained idea apparently, I just wish they’d given us more notice, it’s World Book Day on Thursday and we had a letter home from nursery yesterday saying ‘dress your child up as their favourite book character for this Thursday’s World Book Day’. I had been hoping (and pretty convinced) that Girl Lacer would say her favourite book character would be Lola from Charlie and Lola,

She loves Charlie and Lola and looks (and acts) pretty much like Lola anyway, so it wouldn’t have been much of a push, just some butterfly hairclips and one of her Charlie and Lola tops. But no, I don’t think being Lola was challenging enough, she wants to be a gingerbread man, she does like the story, likes eating them but personally I blame the latest Skoda ad with the gingerbread family I caught her looking at. So I have to make a gingerbread costume now, a quick search on the internet I found this homemade costume, which was very cute, but scaling it up for a 4 year old would perhap involve too much brown felt and I’m not sure all that velcro would stay in place. So luckily she has some brown trousers and a brown long sleeved top, so that plan had been today to buy some black buttons and some white wiggly trim (Girl Lacer has been quite specific about how she wants it), to sew onto the trousers and top (and hopefully won’t leave too many marks when I take it off) and I’ll make her a cardboard gingerbread face. But currently the little invalid is back in bed (who isn’t actually showing any symtoms other than a slightly snotty nose), whilst Boy Lacer (who also has the cold) is happily chatting to himself in the living room and Mr. Lacer (who also has the cold) is happily at work.