To my Mum on Mothers’ Day
It’s Mothers’ Day on Sunday and once again I’m on the other side of the Irish Sea. So here, then, are a few things I’d like my Mum to know. And if you’re a Mum too, put your feet up, have a glass of champers (any excuse, eh?) and have a great day.
So Mum, here are a few thank yous that I owe you. I probably owe you more than a few sorrys too – for sleepless nights, teenage tantrums and other broken, borrowed or generally ruined things over the years, but hey, let’s concentrate on the positive. Firstly, thanks for all the years of being cook, nursemaid, chauffeur and teacher. Thanks for letting me bake cakes, make dodgy quiches and generally wreck your kitchen. You’re an inspiration (and I still need to call you to find out how to get a runny boiled egg!). And thanks for every lovingly prepared dinner (rice pudding..mmm!), every perfect present (and the odd dodgy Christmas jumper!), every birthday cake, every shopping trip, every shared bottle of something cold and white; for hours of listening, for every phone call, letter, postcard, email and visit, for every wonderful holiday, every day out, every game, every time you helped with homework, every kind word, every time you’ve kissed it better, every plaster, every frantic dash to A&E (both mine and my children’s!) every thoughtful deed and every prayer (even though I’m a total heathen). Then there’s the thanks that I owe you for sometimes having to tell it like it is, for every midnight lift given, every pound spent, every puppy, kitten and hamster, every time you said yes when you wanted to say no (and every time you had to say no even though you wanted to say yes).
And thanks for every snorty, belly laugh you’ve given, every tear you’ve shed, every hug, every time you’ve been on my side, and for being my biggest fan (and sternest critic!), most devoted reader and loyal supporter. Thanks for setting a good example (and a sometimes hilarious bad one), for being the coolest Grandma, and the best Mum a girl could wish for. In your own words, though none of us are perfect, we do what we can. I love you, Ma. Have a great Mothers’ Day x x x
Martin Dwyer
Just a little aside for the foodoholics amongst us…check out Martin Dwyer’s amazing website. His recipe section is huge, varied and very useful; he taught me how to poach an egg properly, how to make marmalade, and his chicken with garlic, lime and thyme is to die for. Enjoy!
Gag Reflex
So it’s a little-known fact that most of the occupants of English Towers will do anything for money, myself included. This manifests itself generally in all sorts of silly bets and dares; Friday evening being a typical example. #1 had a friend staying for the weekend, who commented on the fact that #2 managed to extract one single lettuce leaf when encouraged to add salad to his fajita. ‘Ahhh’, commented Hubby, now tucking in to a tin of prunes ’that’s ‘cos he’s a salad dodger’.
’No I’m not’, grumbled #2, ‘I’m very healthy. I like apples and carrots and peas and…er…’
‘See’, says Hubby, satisfied he’s won that battle, ‘told you’.
‘I can eat anything’ says #2 huffily (and somewhat dangerously), ‘I just choose not to’.
Ohhhh dear. I could see it was going to go downhill, that evil glint in Hubby’s eye temporarily blinding me and making it difficult to see my fajita.
‘Right then’, says Hubby, ‘I’ll give you a tenner if you can eat a prune’ (queue dramatic gagging from #1 and his mate: ‘no waaaay!’)
‘Er… right, then’, says #2, his bravado fast evaporating and ignoring my warning looks, ‘I will’.
Well, more gagging, retching, over-acting and near-vomiting I haven’t seen since Dean Gaffney was on ‘I’m a Celebrity’. The bloody thing went round and round his mouth, accompanied by much gurning, for so long, I actually felt sorry for the poor, misguided child. At one stage he was going to swallow it whole, pip and all, rather than risk actually having to chew it. Anyone would think he was in the jungle forcing down kangaroo testicles, rather than a humble dried fruit.
Finally, it was swallowed, and everyone held their breath to make sure it didn’t come back up. Now a rather fetching shade of green, triumphant but nauseous #2 held out his hand for the cash.
‘There’, says Hubby, handing the money over and giving a tenner to #1 too, ‘it’s from your Grandma, she sent it over today.’
‘Whaaaa?’ says #2, ‘I was going to get the tenner anyway?’
‘Yup’, says Hubby, ‘but here ‘s an extra two quid for the entertainment’.
Cruel. Cruel and heartless. But kind of funny. Kids, eh? Who’d have thought they’d be so much fun?
Nat’s Chocolate Twister Buns
On meeting a Yorkshireman once, J uttered those immortal words: ‘ooh, I LOVE your puddings’. C has never let her forget it. In the same vein, therefore, if I bumped into Frank Lampard, I’d let him know how much I like his buns (Chelsea buns. Stop it.) So this morning, for your delectation, I present the best recipe I’ve tried in a long time, a delectable choccy kind of Chelsea bun. And it’s not just the fact that the end result is fabulous, it’s also the fact that it’s really fun to do some hard core beavering in the kitchen occasionally, filling the house with delightful bakery-type wafts of sweetness, and underlining your worth as a Mum, wifey and all-round good gal. These lovely buns are the creation of Nats over at Eire Rules, who generously gave me carte blanch to go ahead and do what I like with the recipe. In the end, though, it’s so perfect, even I couldn’t fiddle about with it. Here goes then:
For the bread dough:
650g strong white bread flour
1 ½ tsp salt
5 ml honey or sugar
15 ml oil
7g sachet instant yeast
400ml warm water
For the filling:
200g dark chocolate, finely chopped
100g melted butter
Sprinkle of crunchy brown sugar
So combine all the dry ingredients, bung them in the mixer, then mix all the wet ingredients in a jug and pour them onto the dry. Mix with a dough hook for 5 minutes, or knead by hand for ten minutes (much better result).
Bung your dough into a bowl, cover with clingfilm and a clean teatowel and leave somewhere warm for 45 minutes until doubled in size.
Thump heartily with a clenched fist to knock down the dough, then roll out into a large rectangle. Brush the dough generously with the melted butter and sprinkle on the chocolate, then roll up and cut into 2cm slices. Place your slices on a baking sheet and leave them somewhere warm again to puff up and double in size.
Finally, brush with the remaining melted butter, sprinkle with the crunchy sugar and bake for 15 to 20 minutes at 200 degrees C. Tuck in, and do the ‘we’re not worthy’ bowing thing to Nats. Yum.
Catwalk savvy, me
So once again the spindly carb dodging lollipop ladies of the catwalk have been strutting their stuff showing us what we should be wearing this Spring/Summer 08 season. And talk about diverse. If the fashionistas are correct, there’s going to be some seriously vomit-inducing outfits being sported around our streets. So trends then:
BRIGHTS: Basically, you can grab anything revoltingly eye-wateringly loud this summer and you’ll be ‘on trend, dahling’. Sonia Rykiel went with bright orange and black polka dots, Mark Jacobs went acid yellow, and Celine went with shocking pink.
ARTY: Hand painted looking graphic prints are big. Basically, grab a toddler (make sure you ask first if it’s not yours), arm him with a paint brush and let him loose on your favourite dress. Then just lie and say it’s Gucci.
SEE THROUGH: Chiffon, floaty fabrics, little glimpses of flesh and soft ruffles are all de rigeur. Fendi went with a white see-through shirt dress accessorised with an enormous pair of ‘harvest festival’ (all is safely gathered in, geddit?) pants underneath. Mmm, sexy. Or maybe keep this look for the boudoir so as not to frighten the horses.
DRESSES: Yep, if you want to be ‘on trend’ you can go for the grecian, pleated look, or copy the likes of Hermes and Valentino with a one-shoulder number. Fifties strapless creations with ruching and bows were big too. Make it brightly coloured and you’re even trendier. Admittedly you’ll look a bit silly on the bus but hey, us girls suffer for our art.
PRINTS: The bolder the pattern, the better. Think huge flowers, monochrome stripes and and even lavish embroidery. Where’s that tablecloth…?
SKIRTS, SKIRTS, SKIRTS: Go bonkers: prom-style full skirts, little a-line numbers, layers, tiers, ruffles: you name it. High waists are trendy. Oh and shorts are really in – even cocktail shorts, imagine that! The only cocktail shorts I’ve ever worn is when I’ve spilled my ‘Gin Sling’ down me. Heh.
HIPPY: Think Joss Stone before she got that revolting purple hair. Diane von Furstenberg and Ben de Lisi both had versions of those huge, maxi dress things in mad colours, and Stella ‘don’t mention the stepmother’ McCartney had them in hippy paisley prints teamed with wedges. That’ll be me falling over a lot, then.
And finally…
ACCESSORIES: Anything goes here, peeps: mad hats, enormous coloured sunglasses, headscarves, and tons and tons of bangles. Oh dear.
So to sum up, then: dive into your wardrobe and fish out anything floaty, acid bright, shocking pink, electric blue, high waisted, boldly printed, short, long, embellished, ruffled, floral, sheer or hand painted. As for me, I shall be nodding to the trend for brights with my pink wellies, and seeing as my jeans are already embellished with muddy dog paw prints, all I’ll need to do is accessorise with my bobble hat, which luckily takes in the current headwear trend, and my ski jacket, which being black and white is obviously dead on, what with fashion’s ongoing love affair with monochrome. Pah. Easy, this fashion stuff.
Broadband, baby!
So this is exciting: I’m on broadband! Hubby’s mobile provider has come up with this little white doofer that plugs into the laptop, and if you balance it precariously on the bedroom windowsill at exactly the right amount of centimetres to the right of the dressing table and ensure that Venus is fully aligned with Pluto whilst silently praying to the God of Wireless Broadband, reciting the alphabet backwards and clutching your lucky rabbit’s foot: BINGO! The little blue light flashes, and we’re miraculously transported into the 21st century! I do appreciate that the little white doofer with the flashing light probably has a proper name (73? Thrifty?) but I don’t care, because it only bloody works!
Admittedly, trying to blog on a silly laptop keyboard, teetering precariously on a windowsill and sitting on a little stool has its drawbacks but hey, broadband is broadband. I’ll be able to load Isit’s little video clips and actually see the photos that people send me too!
And Bert gets to stretch out on the bed and keep an eye on me while I type! Ah, technology. I wub it.
Tangerineness
So it was sunny again yesterday. Imagine: sunny! In Cavan! I sat outside and watched hoards of small boys kick a football about on the lawn while I read a magazine. I love a magazine. I’m quite picky, I don’t like all that crap about ‘what Posh thinks about David’s biceps’ but I can’t walk past the magazine section in Tesco without nabbing a Good Housekeeping (what? It’s the recipes), a Red, or my all-time fave, Eve. I’ve even started buying Irish ones, but there’s something in there I don’t get at all. What’s with the huge section at the back where they put in a sort of social diary thing, with pictures of people grinning over glasses of champagne? It’s like: ‘here’s Bertie Ahern hobnobbing with some orange woman at the opening of the first toilet stall on the left at some huge shopping centre’, then ‘oh, look, and here’s Rosanna Davidson (random orange ‘model’ and daughter of that bloke that did Lady in Red’), sharing a joke with…surprise!… an orange woman at a charidee event to feed poor orphaned ‘You’re a Star’ contestants at McDonalds’. Now I know that it’s less relevant to me because I don’t recognise anybody, but I mean, where do all these orange women come from? There must be a factory somewhere in South County Dublin churning out hundreds of identikit orange women with long blonde hair, perfect white teeth and cleavage, purely to frequent the back pages of Image Magazine or Irish Tatler. Now you know me, I’m a great advocate of intervention for the sake of self esteem, whether it be from a few foils or even some cosmetic dentistry, but blimey, girls, step away from the Fake Bake already!
Anyway, my point in all this really wasn’t the orange women, it was the whole fake tan thing. I noticed yesterday, during the aforementioned garden lolling, that I’m quite pasty at the moment, which is unusual for me. I had to pop (I say ‘pop’ when I really mean ‘drive 40 minutes’) to the shops anyway to pick up some stuff for C next door (yes, she’s home from the hospital at last) and I loitered for a long while in the fake tan section, worrying about being taking the plunge and being Satsuma coloured. Oh. I forgot to say that boys, you can look away now as I’ve finished talking about leggy blonde models and there’s product-talk coming up.
So there on the shelf was something called St Tropez Everyday. Reader, I was wary. I had a friend back in the UK that got one of those St Tropez things and you can’t wash it off for something like 8 hours, so she had to come and get the kids from school looking like an Oompah Loompah. Not a good look. But this was just a body moisturiser with a little extra help. So I took the plunge. And do you know what? It works! Admittedly I didn’t put it on my face, but my knees aren’t streaky, my feet aren’t carroty and my legs are smooth and, dare I say it, lightly bronzed .
So there you have it. Rush out and get yourself some St Tropez Everyday. Ain’t no tangerines in this here town y’all.
Oooh, comfy
Had to share this one with you. Do you think that’s called a sheepyback?
Fruit and nut Swedish Chef flapjacks
You know how you get little bits of leftover cereal that nobody seems to want to finish? Well, for some reason these really annoy the pants off me. Half the time I go to finish them off (even though I hate them – thrifty, moi) only to find they’re all cardboardy and chewy. This, then, is usually the time I make flapjacks. I have a sort of dustbin approach to flapjack making – anything remotely edible that can possibly be thrown into a flapjack recipe gets hurled into the mix in a kind of Swedish Chef approach to cookery. Works for me.
Fruit and Nut Flapjacks:
6 oz butter
4 oz brown sugar
4 tablespoons golden syrup
8 oz rolled oats
4 oz random leftover cereal
Handful of sultanas or chopped dates (dried cranberries are lovely too)
Handful of almonds/brazil nuts/hazelnuts/whatever, roughly chopped (I like big pieces in mine)
Melt the butter, sugar and syrup in a saucepan. If you used quite granulated sugar you’ll need to stir well and melt it into the mix.
Mix all the other ingredients in a large bowl, then just pour over the butter mixture and stir well. Don’t do it the other way round, there’s not enough room in the saucepan. Press it into a buttered cake tin (worth putting some greaseproof paper in the bottom that overhangs – makes it easier to get out) and bake at 180 degrees, whatever gas mark (you know the drill) for about 15 – 20 mins. I did mine in an oblong cake tin and it was slightly too overdone at the edges after 20 mins so check after 15.
Cool completely before removing from the tin and slicing, otherwise you’ll end up with granola. Enjoy with a cup of tea and ignore complaints of child who doesn’t like sultanas. Heh.
A proper magic moment
This evening we went up to a farm a little way past Lily the Lovely Lamb Lady’s. The farmer’s wife had rung I the Dog Lady and told her that she’d seen our little blue greyhound and was pretty sure it’d been sleeping in her barn. Funny, because another farmer on the other side of the valley told us yesterday that she’d been sleeping in his barn. So unless there are little blue greyhounds multiplying overnight, this girl is covering some serious ground. We drove up to check it out, had a chat with the lady and came up with a plan for tempting her into a barn with some stinky sardines.
On the way back, the sky grew suddenly dark over the next hill, and all of a sudden there was possibly the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life: starlings. But not just one or two, not even ten or twenty, but hundreds and thousands of them, all swirling and dancing in the dusk in one enormous twisting tornado. Hubby and I were completely entranced and sat with our mouths open watching this amazing display. They swooped and funneled in a way that made it seem like they were just one giant, undulating cloud, every so often gleaming as they caught the retreating sun, swirling down almost to the ground before twisting their way back up. It was kind of like watching that blob of coloured oil in a lava lamp. We got a picture on Hubby’s phone, but it didn’t do them justice at all and then all of a sudden, they funneled and swirled down to the ground, and, like a genie returning to its bottle, were gone. Magical.
Oh, and did you know that the official name for this gathering is a ‘murmeration’? Nope? Well you do now.
