“What became of the people we used to be?” (A terribly proper grown up dinner party)

I confess to having a soft spot for The Likely Lads – well anything featuring James Bolam can’t go far wrong in my book – but on contemplation my biggest soft spot here is for the theme tune. Oh what happened to you, whatever happened to me? What became of the people we used to be? Once upon a time parties were riotous affairs wending their way into the small (and oft large) hours of the morning with copious amounts of free flowing alcohol and that odd moment waking up afterwards and never being wholly sure who was in your house. My student days are long gone and a party now is more likely to involve a civilised dinner, conversations about the price of chickpeas and pensions, everyone off to catch their respective methods of public transport by 11pm, washing up done before bed and knowing exactly who is staying in your house. Middle age, it catches up with us all.

Those of you paying attention to my ongoing ramblings will have picked up that my housemate’s been away for a couple of weeks and I’ve been left to my own devices (largely remembering why I don’t live alone, i.e. I need someone to look after me to make sure I eat more than toast). So I decided to demonstrate my growing love of cooking by inviting some friends over for dinner. All well and good. In fact it all was well and good until 5pm on Saturday when I stuck a chilli coated hand on the rawly sensitive bit of skin between my nose and upper lip and spent the ensuing half an hour in the bathroom with my head under the cold tap weeping in pain. Don’t worry, I manned up, went back downstairs and valiantly continued to finish preparing my feast with a soggy bit of kitchen roll clamped to my face. I was halfway through doing my make up when the first of my guests arrived – lucky my friends are all quite used to me really and didn’t bat an eyelid over either this or the fact that my kitchen resembled the aftermath of a bomb explosion.

I’d spent a week or so poring over the various cookbooks stashed under our kitchen counter deciding what to make and settled on Mexican purely because you can make that in reasonable quantities (especially useful as my guest tally was variable right up until the last minute) and also because my Woman’s Weekly book of Mexican cooking had been left sorely unused since it was bought for me. I selected my menu, wrote out my ingredients list, pulled them together and undertook stage one of every successful dinner party: invite the Tesco man to cometh. He was a jolly nice Tesco man too, somewhat distracted by the fact that you can see quite a lot of stars from the doorstep of my corner of the metrop but we had a good chat as I unpacked the box about cooking and my previous chilli related disasters.

The Tesco man cometh: just as well, I wasn't ever going to manage to packhorse all that home by myself

The second stage is to then have to actually physically go to Tesco on the day to buy the few bits you forgot to put on the order and to replace to sour cream that died a sorry death when it leapt out of the fridge.

Okay, so 'going back to Tesco' translated as 'I completely forgot to order booze'

On return from my shopping mission it was time to get down to the cooking. So  I started with dessert, as you do. At New Year I acquired a copy of the Green & Black’s chocolate book and I was itching to bake something from it. So naturally when the lovely LondonBakes posted about these Celebrations brownies I knew what my direction was. They are seriously yummy although I have yet to perfect the art of baking a brownie right through – the edges were perfection but I got impatient and the middle remained a somewhat unset gooey mess that I shoved in some tupperware and ate the next day for breakfast and nearly made myself sick. Halfway through the cooking process I decided we needed more dessert and whipped up some fairy cakes, which I didn’t photograph because there was a teeny tiny icing disaster and it makes me sad.

Then I worked in a slightly more logical order and set about making the main course. I wound up making three different dishes for this for a sort of ‘pick and choose’ affair. There was a spicy sausage and bean stew (which I’ve just finished off for tea aided by liberal dollops of sour cream and cheese), chicken with black beans and pearl barley and vegetable fajitas. Essentially there was a lot of chilli and flavour kicking about.

However, my pizza de resistance came as the starter. It wouldn’t be a Mexican extravaganza without nachos, would it? No. And these were seriously good nachos if I do say so myself. I butchered the recipe slightly having realised that I’d screwed up by buying refried beans which was not what I wanted at all. Yeah, one of these days I’ll learn to read properly that day is not today. I gently friend some kidney beans, tomato puree and garlic up together, then mashed a couple of avocadoes to within an inch of their lives and chopped some beef tomatoes and red onions in a vague kind of fashion. Next step was to empty a bag of tortilla chips over a couple of plates and liberally sprinkle with cheese, pop those in the oven until the cheese melted then throw the beans, avocado, tomato&onion and sour cream over the top. They were properly yummy.

The pizza de resistance: nachos

We ate sitting on the living room floor, because that’s how we roll in this house. Well mostly I couldn’t be bothered to fight getting the table out of the back room… At quarter to eleven after a few hours of varied conversation and plenty of giggling my friends concluded they should be heading their respective ways home and so I waved them off from the doorstep wondering when my housemate’s next going to be away so that I can play at chef for the night…

Yummy scrumboes and scrummy yumboes

“…and time goes by so slowly”

It was back to the office this morning after twelve glorious days off. Standing on the station waiting for the train this morning in the blusteriest gale it felt like I’d never been away. It’s funny how work time goes so differently from not!work time. My watch strap broke before Christmas and I haven’t got round to getting a new one yet so I’m reliant on either my computer or my crackberry wireless device to tell me the time. Truth be told, I kind of like not having a watch it makes me feel like I’m less… trapped isn’t the word I want, but that’s the sentiment. Whilst I was up in Rural Derbyshire for Christmas I generally had no clue of the time unless I was looking for something else to watch on the old telly box or I’d gone to look for my crackberry to see if anyone was missing me (shallow, I know). It was nice.

Most days in Rural Derbyshire, you just have to accept that the weather knows better than you

Back to Rural Derbyshire though… I spent nine fabulous days at my parents’ basically doing very little outside of familial obligations (which largely entailed entertaining the small members of the family, something not to be sniffed at). I watched a lot of really bad TV (up to and including possibly every episode of The Professionals ever plus various lousy man films) and some not so bad TV, knitted a lot, went for a few glorious walks that involved going up, up to the top of the world when the weather allowed and sporadically wandered into the kitchen to do a bit of cooking. I’ve decided that my 2012 aim is really to get over my love-hate relationship with cooking and turn it into a love-love relationship, I don’t want to see it as a chore/means to an end any more.

A classy start to Christmas...

At 9am on Christmas morning I was drinking an unset champagne jelly, eating toast and making a pavlova whilst trying to not mention that the last time I made mereingue I’d been in Guides. I am, mes chums, Klassy with a capital K. Oh yes. Thing was, Christmas Eve my poor mother had followed Delia’s champagne jelly recipe to the letter but the dratted things just would not set so twenty four hours later we reluctantly returned to the drawing board. “I’ll make pavolva” I said blithely at around half past eight looking up vaguely from my new book of baking recipes, clearly still half asleep from having crept in at midnight from the pub.  I’d made mince pies a couple of days previously, in comparison how difficult could a pavolva be? Erm, a little is all I’ll say on the matter. Luckily, mereingue – like pastry – doesn’t have a hissy fit if you feel the need to keep opening the oven door every five minutes to poke at it. On the plus side, it all turned out fine (hurrah for Good Housekeeping, say I) and it was jolly yummy.

 

 

 

 

 

So I had seafood with trimmings for Christmas dinner, I kid you not. It was ace. Basically I’m not that giant a fan of meat and I’d already had two turkey dinners before Christmas – you see where I’m going? I have been known for my Christmas dinner previously to just have trimmings, no meat no alternative at all (these were mostly in my teenage vegetarian years – the vegetarianism fell by the wayside when I moved to France for a year). In recent years I’ve made a token gesture to the turkey and had a tiny couple of pieces but… well, seafood is frankly vastly more fun. Christmas dinner was eaten at Favourite Auntie’s house, cooked in Favourite Auntie’s Aga and washed down with a vast quantity of vino. It was ace.

My festive knitting was limited to two (fairly big) projects: a blanket for my Big Nephew and a cardigan for myself (yes, the grey Fair Isle cardigan I’ve been going on about for ages). A couple of years ago I knitted my mother a mitre squared blanket which my Big Nephew is now quite attached to so he’s getting his own so my mother has a chance of reclaiming ownership of hers. I love mitre squares, they are terribly soothing and a 60 stitch one takes approximately one episode of West Wing to knit. What could be better? My cardigan currently has a back, one front and half a sleeve; I’ve found that, as usual, my concentration span has completely hit the fan since coming back to London.

 

 

 

 

Today has involved some pretty serious retail therapy to try and get myself over the shock of the return to the office. Actually, I think I consider books and yarn to be essentials in my life, new towels on the other hand I think make me some kind of scary grown up type and this bothers me. I may need an Allegedly Healthy Cookie to get over this. And, on the subject of resolutions (which we weren’t), tomorrow I must not sleep through my alarm and wake up too late to have breakfast because, much as I agree with Kathryn’s assertion that cake is breakfast, it doesn’t do my diet masses of favours… 😉

Guest post: by my bestest (I may regret this)

Darling readers, I may yet regret this… voici, je vous presente a guest post courtesy of my bestest who self confessedly knows little about ballet beyond what I babble at her. She does know about knitting and cake though. And she’s super duper. Her name is Bert, she can be found here. We’re off a vancances-ing to Paree in the morning and I am off to have a shower right now, hence my dubiousness about allowing her a guest post opportunity whilst I’m out of the room. Be nice!

BONJOUR all this is Bert speaking.

Ballet go twirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl bendy pointy stretchy twiddly twirrrrllllllllllllllllllllll and again non?  Ok maybe there is more to it than that.  I’m sure ballet mostly involves food, non?  Pas de bourree is clearly pass the butter and frappe and echappe are surely a new frothy coffee and let us not speak of entrees, which are tasty tasty starters.  I think fondu speaks for itself (cheez!).  I’m now off to saute some potatoes.  Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

P.S.  as a brand bass player their was once in a little brown book a pasodoble called The Ballerina.  I loved it then, and now it is my bestest in music form.