Katyboo1’s Weblog

The children are downstairs, fighting over playing at being chefs.  Well, that’s not strictly true, Tallulah is fighting over being a chef and everyone else is getting along nicely and playing quietly.  That girl sometimes reminds me of one of those Japanese fighting fish, you know the ones they have to put in special tanks with non-reflective glass so they don’t kill themselves trying to kill themselves.  She has that devil may care warrior like quality, mixed with a bit of a death wish and about eight thousand mega tons of stubborness.  It’s a winning combination.  Or it will be when she gets old enough and tall enough to put me in a head lock!

The Spartans used to leave their babies overnight on a hillside.  If they survived they were allowed to be true Spartans.  If it were Tallulah she’d come marching back down the hill, throw the Spartans onto the hillside and sit inside with her feet up watching Corrie and eating rich tea biscuits.  The Spartans would quake before her mightiness.  She is Tallulah, and if you’re within a five mile radius of our house you will definitely be able to hear her roar!

I pity the man who she decides to marry.  I would say who decides to marry her, but I don’t really think that she’d be denied once she’d set her mind on someone.  She also has those lovely stalker like tendencies which mean that her love will be an ever fixed mark.

Moving on to less depressing subjects.  Given the amount of whinging I did a few days ago about my boredom with the world of cooking I would like to announce that  am very proud of myself because I did a marvellous chick pea and chicken stew yesterday.  It was still technically chicken and vegetables, but at least it was a more interesting rendition of the chicken and vegetables thing.  Jason even ate some of the chickpeas without mutiny, muttering about foreign food or railing against vegetarians and their ilk.  Today I couldn’t face any more chicken so I have branched out into pork steaks which I found in the bottom of the freezer.  I don’t really like pork, but today I like it because it didn’t once have feathers and a beak.  This is a good thing.  Trotters and snouts are infinitely preferable.  I don’t think pork is particularly healthy, but it’s what we have, and what I can be arsed to cook, and it’s better than Findus crispy pancakes or a divvy up and a whip round to Bucks’ Chippy.

I’ve decided to slow cook them in apple juice, mustard, honey and lemon with lots of onion and garlic.  This sounds very cheffy, but I like it because it basically requires me to find a large oven proof pot, throw in all the ingredients, bang it in the oven and ignore it for several hours.  I am just about able to do that today.  Anything else is beyond me.  The oven proof pot bit is essential I might add. 

I once decided, in an extremely chefelicious phase of my life to cook an asian duck stew that I found in a Nigel Slater recipe book.  It required all kinds of complex ingredients, including star anise and raw cane sugar and the juice of a thousand tiny ants from Bolivia etc.  I gathered all my stuff, bunged it in what I thought was my very oven proof casserole dish from Habitat and then promptly cracked it on the stove top, because the naked hob flame was too much for it.  It was at this point that the entire contents of my extremely lovely, and extremely expensive stew filtered through the myriad workings of the oven.  The rented oven that we had to hand back as good as new at the end of our tenancy.

As you can imagine, I was quite cross.  I was cross because my shoes were full of soggy star anise.  I was cross because I had wasted twenty quid’s worth of ingredients and we had nothing for tea.  I was cross because Habitat had sold me a casserole dish under false pretences, and I’d had it so long I couldn’t even go back to complain.  All in all, it was a very, very bad day.  I’m just glad I wasn’t being filmed.  I wonder if Nigel has ever filled his shoes with soggy star anise.  I expect he has.  He’d be man enough to admit it as well.  Delia would no doubt lie, and blame it on a researcher or something.  She’s mean like that…

It took me a week to clean the welded cane sugar from the internal workings of the oven, and another two weeks to find a casserole dish that would weather any storm and that didn’t cost the earth (i.e. not a Le Creuset one).  I don’t have anything against Le Creuset pans, in fact I rather like them (apart from the orange ones, which are a bit too seventies for my liking),  but there are two things about them that never fail to make me quail in the face of purchase: 1) they’re bloody expensive despite the fact that they come with a lifetime guarantee, and 2) they weigh more than a baby elephant. 

It’s all very well in the young, limber years when I am practised at dragging round a two and a half stone baby on one hip whilst rebuilding a dry stone wall, but what happens when I’m a decrepit old lady with osteoarthritis and have to phone for the AA when I want a jam jar opening?  What am I going to do with my vintage Le Creuset then?  I won’t even be able to EBay the bloody stuff because I’ll never be able to get it down to the post office.  They’ll find me, slumped under my panic button and half a ton of iron ware, dead as a door nail.  Not that they’ll have post offices by then, because they’ll all be turned into branches of WH Smiths (what is going on with that?!!!)

Right.  Civil war has broken out downstairs.  I can hear Tallulah shouting: ‘Because you won’t help me and I asked you nicely, I am just going to have to hate you now!’  She is obviously one of the Cavaliers, because of the hair.  I believe she may well be about to rewrite history and give the round heads a jolly good drubbing.  The only people that will be pleased about that are Charles I and Tallulah.  It’s perhaps that crucial time in the afternoon when mummy must intervene and give them individual tasks to do, preferably on different floors of the house.  Or even in different houses.  I sometimes think that if I were ever to come into money I wouldn’t bother with the usual mansion.  I’d just have a row of houses and we could all live in separate ones.  I might consider underground tunnels or a system of interconnecting doors.  Essentially it would be like living in a hotel, but with all your own rubbish around and no chocolates on the pillow.  It wouldn’t cost ninety pounds a minute to ring your mum to say you’d got there safely either…

After several minutes on the naughty step contemplating her navel, Tallulah has now grudgingly conceded that she might just try to behave like a member of the human race instead of an alien uber shrew.  She is going to finish tidying her room and then make it messy again by having a tea party for one of her dolls, known as ‘Petsy’.  Apparently Petsy is sixty, eight, five, which is very old, and warrants a huge bun fight for that very reason.  Oscar and Tilly have retreated to the top floor where they are playing together quietly in a darkened room, hoping that Tallulah will have forgotten all about them and not make them join in her ‘play’.  Playing with Tallulah is a very serious occupation and must be approached with much limbering up and mental exercising.  Ear plugs and a hide like a rhinoceros are also good qualities to have during playtime.

Watching Tallulah playing with people, or even, on those rare occasions when I’m feeling weak willed, playing with her myself, always makes me think with great sympathy and guilt of the horrible torture my friend and I used to put our pet cat through when we decided that it should join in our games.  We used to pin it down and dress it in baby clothes and then try to incarcerate it in the pram while we took it for a nice walk.  It would invariably fight like the devil and eventually make good its escape, taking several yards of skin and a knitted cap with it.  Cat, I realise that you are somewhere in cat heaven laughing your tail off, but I would just like to apologise to you.  I am sincerely sorry for the misery we put you through.  It is only now that I appreciate your predicament fully.  I often feel like running away from Tallulah and cowering in the hedge.  Most people do at one time or another.

Tilly and Jason watched Ocean’s Eleven last night while I was out tripping the light fantastic with Our Andrea.  It is one of Jason’s favourite films, and he likes to watch it in times of deep moral crisis.  As he was looking after the children alone I can see why he reached for it (infinitely preferable to a bottle of gin).  Tilly was very impressed.  I could tell that when I got home to find a note on the kitchen table.  It read, and I quote: ‘Dad, meet me at ten, in the volt (sic) of the Belagio (sic), Tills x.’  Bless her. 

I know he would if he could.  In fact, he would like nothing better.  I caught him perusing hotel rates in Vegas and wondering if we could fit another week onto our already stupendously long holiday a couple of days ago.  Sadly, the answer is no, not unless we win that 95 million on the lottery.  Even Jason has been impressed enough by the sheer size of the numbers to buy tickets.  He tells me that he feels lucky.  Hopefully not in a Clint Eastwood kind of way.

Tilly was telling me all about how great Ocean’s Eleven was this morning over breakfast.  Tallulah, as the world’s top expert on Las Vegas, was incredibly annoyed that she had been excluded from watching the film because of her bed time.  She spent the entire walk to school lobbying me for permission to watch it this weekend.  I have tentatively agreed, although the thought of introducing her to the idea of staging a glamorous heist, now seems somewhat fool hardy.  I shall only have myself to blame if I have to spend every weekend for the next thirty years visiting her in chokey.  Thank God I’m good at cakes…