Know Your Onions

Everyone is home, all objectives have been achieved, nobody died and I have won several gold mama stars today.  This is officially the win.

The snow has now stopped, but the ground is freezing hard, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t get more snowfall overnight.  The clouds are looking rotund and suspicious.  I am hoping there is enough snowfall for them to cancel school, but not enough for the log man not to make his excuses again.  He has actually called me this evening to say he will be round at 9.30 in the morning. The last time I had a call like that he appeared forty eight hours later looking remarkably unrepentant.  He knows I need him and his logs.

Bastard.

In other news I have discovered a new obsession.  It is not entirely new to be fair, it is more of a recurring theme.  There is a larger theme, and there is a theme subset, actually.

I have this thing about food.  It is no suprise to you, I am sure.  I am known for embracing my dinner with enthusiasm, and sometimes other people’s dinners if I am feeling snackish at the time.  As well as fitting in my three square a day I am also a constant grazer, and a voyeur in other people’s pantries. My mum has a pantry.  It is an excellent place, and at least twice during every visit, even if I am only passing through, I am drawn to the pantry to browse.

I love a good pantry.  When I have the house of my dreams it will have a pantry.  A big one, with one of those marble topped tables in the middle, and a meat safe.  I do not know why I want a meat safe, but I do.  It is the sort of thing one should have in a pantry, along with a metric tonne of biscuits.

Anyway.  My long standing food obsession is with filling my house with food.  I do not pack away tinned goods in case of an apocalypse, like my paternal grandmother used to do.  You will find no twenty year old tins of Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie lurking under the mattress in my house, along with a score of tallow candles and a thingy for picking stones out of horse’s hooves.  Bugger that.  If there’s going to be an apocalypse I’d quite like to be burned to a crisp instantly please.  I really do not want to come round having mutated into a flesh eating psycho zombie with eyes like boiled eggs, and the thought of having to go head to head with Tina Turner in a whicker colander gives me the shudders.

No. My food thing is about worrying that we might not have enough food to eat if I were suddenly called upon to whip up dinner for six the day after tomorrow.  It has something to do with feelings of social inadequacy, and that if my fridge is not bulging at the seams and I do not have jars of tamarind paste handy, when Jamie Oliver comes round, he will shout at me for having a crappy store cupboard.  That must not happen.

Consequently we spend a small fortune on food, and I rarely run out of things.  Mostly it is all good. Sometimes things go slightly awry with my internal culinary pack rat though, and it all starts to get out of hand.

Now is one of those times.  Christmas doesn’t usually bother me. It is in fact, the one time of the year, food wise, when I really don’t get too stressed.  Because what we eat at Christmas only varies slightly from what we eat during the rest of the year, and because we are curmudgeonly old bastards who rarely invite anyone round, I do not have to adjust my food shopping requirements much.

This year that has all gone out of the window and I have spent the last few weeks adding things to my weekly shop and squirrelling them away.  The utility room is now like a miniature Ocado depot, and it is getting so crowded in there that it is now beginning to spill over into the hall.  I didn’t really have a true grasp of what I was doing until today, when I realised I have so many boxes of shortbread, tins of Quality Street, boxes of chocolate biscuits and Panettone, that we will be eating them until next September.  The children are hysterical with delight over it all.  I am rather concerned.

I did wonder whether my finely tuned psychic radar might be picking up news of an impending apocalypse subconsciously, but then dismissed this idea.  If this were true I would be more likely to be investing in a hotline to Ray Mears and spending what spare time I had left digging a latrine for when the water supply goes down, than buying Carrs Water Biscuits and a case of assorted red wines.

No. I am putting it down to the extremely cold weather we have been experiencing recently.  It is probably just the next stage in my hibernation cycle.  The one I’ve never had to get to before because it’s not been this bloody cold since about 1978, the year my chillblains got so big my mum had to cut the toe out of my trainers so that I could actually have a pair of shoes to wear for the school disco.  Oh, the humiliation.

So there’s that, which is the main obsession.

The subset obsession happens quite often, and is when I get fixated on buying one particular item repeatedly.  I do not do it knowingly.  It is more like I suddenly develop an amnesia type blind spot about whatever the item is.  Once it was apricot jam for example.  By the time I woke up to what I was doing we had eight jars of apricot jam.  There were only two of us at the time, and neither of us were particularly fond of apricot jam. It took years and some cunning gifting ideas to get rid of that jam.

This time it is pickled onions.  Now I love pickled onions at any time of year, but they also remind me particularly of Christmas.  My parents always used to make their own pickled onions and pickled cabbage, and every Christmas when there was a party and we had a buffet, there would  be an awesome array of pickles to tuck into. Yum.

I went out shopping today and came back with two jars of pickles.  One was a jar of pickled shallots from the farm shop.  The other a jar of baby silverskin onions and pickled garlic from M&S to try.  When I got home I opened the fridge only to find myself confronted with pickled onions, pickled shallots, pickled silverskin onions and pickled silverskin onions in balsamic vinegar.  I looked on my Ocado order for next week. I have ordered pickled onions.

Crap!

I am the only one who eats them.

It is a good job they are a preserve, right?

I cancelled the onions from the Ocado order, despite my misgivings (I might NEED them).

Later I was chatting to my mum on the phone and telling her about my onion obsession.  Her reaction was:

‘Oh God! You’re not pregnant again are you?’

Which immediately sent me into a blind panic.  I have had cravings for pickled onions during all three of my pregnancies in the early stages.  Not only was this not good because UE and Jason did not want to kiss me, but it also gave me raging heart burn.

Still, then I remembered that I could not possibly be (I am not going to spell it out) and cheered up a lot.

I’m going to celebrate with an onion sandwich.

Because that’s not at all weird.  Not like all that other obsessive stuff.

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