This, laydees and gennlemen, is my stunningly attractive cousin, Moon (gorgeousness runs in the genes, see?), doing something with a Beluga.  And no, I don’t know what a Beluga is either.  Any snorty remarks along the lines of ‘which one is the whale?’ will be severely dealt with.  Now, Moon, if you’d like to come up and stand at the front of the class and tell us exactly what you’re doing here…

So I was pootling about in the kitchen this afternoon, then.  I was going to make gingerbread, but then I’ve made about 300 recently and was idly wondering what else you can do with black treacle.  So I thought I’d make some flapjacks with black treacle, maple syrup and cashew nuts (no method to my madness, just what happened to be in the cupboard).  Anyhoo, digressing.  So I turned on the extractor fan and holy bloody freeoly, all hell broke loose - there was banging and scraping and thudding and all manner of commotion.  So I turned the fan back off and stood for a moment, wondering if I’d imagined it all.  And then, because it’s the kind of girl I am, I turned it back on again and there, sure enough, was the banging, clattering and, if I wasn’t very much mistaken…flapping. 

Now I must admit to a teeny weeny sulky and wholly unbecoming tantrum about this bloody extractor.  We’ve lived in all sorts of houses and had all sorts of kitchens and finally we had a chance to choose our own.  We took a very long time and several long journeys to various kitchen places to secure the Oven of My Dreams.  The OMD is a shiny, stainless steel beauty, complete with gas hob with wok burner (I’ve ALWAYS wanted one of those).  The kitchen fitter thought I was quite mental when I said I didn’t want an electric hob (there’s no gas supply here) and we were going to fuel it with gas bottles.  And when we came to picking the extractor, I wanted one of those sweeping glass and stainless steel ones which was breathlessly ordered and then a lot less breathlessly sent back because it didn’t fit in the hole between the two eye-level cupboards.  Well, I was a bit miffed to say the least, but I settled on a very nice Indesit one and no, it doesn’t match, but hey - if that’s the worst thing I have to worry about then I’m very lucky.

Where was I?  Oh yes.  So a quick check outside confirmed that when a hole was drilled through the wall for the extractor fan, one of those little grille things was never screwed over it (in fact, I have a vague recollection of being told to order one.  Oops) and some sort of very cross bird had moved his family in.  I didn’t manage to see him, not being 8′ tall and all, but he sounded less than pleased.  Now what?  Do I just not use the fan at all?  Or will I have to uproot my little feathery lodgers?  Oh dear.

In other bird news, our House Martins are back.  We love them.  They’re the noisiest, messiest little f*ckers  - the bird world’s very own gang of teenagers on scooters, if you will.  They squawk and flap and argue and throw stuff about, and leave a terrible mess all down the front of the house, but, well, when we viewed the house and saw them whizzing overhead to their little nest in the eaves, it kind of sold it for us.  They may be tiny blue yobs, but they’re our tiny blue yobs and we love them.  I’ll try and get you a photo but they’re very fast.  Oh and yes, the flapjacks turned out just fine, thank you for asking.

Oh the weeping and wailing, the gnashing (or should that be ganaching? Mmmm… ganache…) of teeth, the tantrums, the moaning, the groaning, the unfairness of it all.  The house has been reverberating to the sound of near-teenage unhappiness for a good 48 hours now.  All the ceilings have new cracks due to excessive upstairs stamping and hormonal stropping about.  Every door has been slammed, every request is met with melodramatic sighing and shrugging, and melancholy hangs about the eaves of English Towers like a bad smell (mind you, that could be Bert).

And the source of all these histrionics? The font of our misery?  The X-Box has broken.  Oh yes, the small grey and white, addictive little electronic babysitter has fought its last fight, taken its last Daytona corner… zapped its last alien, if you would.

Oh, I did my bit.  I placated, I fiddled with wires (let’s hope nobody tells him I don’t know what the hell I’m doing), I jiggled HD leads (whatever they are) and turned it off and on again.  I phoned Hubby, received telephone instructions, jiggled more wires… And do you know what?  He was right.  It was broken.

Doing my motherly bit, then (and nothing at all to do with the fact that I’m considering echoing several lifestyle choices in the animal kingdom and eating my firstborn child) I popped in to PC World and a polite enquiry quickly got me pointed in the direction of TechGuy (no really, that’s his title).  TechGuy had that ‘Comic Book Guy’ air of grown up geek about him (unkempt, slightly mad hair, wonky glasses), but seemed friendly enough, so I pressed on with the symptoms: overheating, cutting out, and finally, conking out completely showing just a red ring around the on/off button… TechGuy nodded sagely and a knowing smile crossed his shiny face: ‘ahhh yes’, he said knowledgably, pausing for dramatic effect before adding ‘you’ve got the ring of death’.  ‘Oh, so nothing drastic then?’.  Missing my stab at humour, TechGuy  hurried to assure me that on the contrary the ‘ring of death’ is, as the name would suggest, completely fatal to the X-Box.  Happily, though, it’s apparently a known fault and a phone call to Microsoft would herald a UPS courier to whip away the minger and return us a fresh one within two weeks.

Off I toddled home, then, and a quick chat with a very chummy chap at Microsoft (‘ahhh yes, the ring of death…’) confirmed that we are, indeed, entitled to have the offending article removed and a spanking new replacement delivered.  So that’s that, then.  #1 waits every day for the courier, his little nose squished happily against the window (in the meantime they’ve organised a hostile takeover of Hubby’s PS3 - potential trouble brewing there) and contentment and equilibrium have returned once again to English Towers.  Mind you, that bad smell’s still hanging about…

What is it about Heinz tinned soups?  They’re actually pretty disgusting - I mean, how do they get that gelatinous texture?  It doesn’t bear thinking about.  And the mushroom flavour, which is #1’s preferred choice, is frankly revolting.  Too creamy, oddly grey in colour and, well, mushrooms don’t really taste like that, do they.  And then there’s the tomato flavour.  It’s bloody orange, for goodness sake.  If there’s a power cut you could just crack one open and bingo - you’d all be able to see by the luminous orange glow emanating from the tin.  But hey, on a lazy Saturday afternoon, sometimes only a tin of soup will do (I favour Baxter’s curried vegetable and lentil one personally) and I often whip up these little beauties, which are actually more scone than bread, to dunk in a revoltingly bad mannered way, into the bowl.

8 oz self raising flour

1 1/2 oz butter

4 oz cheese

1 egg

1/4 pint milk

So put your flour into a bowl, season generously with salt and pepper, then rub in the butter just like you would for, say, a crumble or whatever until it looks breadcrumby.  Grate the cheese and stir into the flour mixture with a fork until well blended (you don’t want big lumps of cheese).  Then measure out your milk in a jug, add the egg and whisk until combined.  Pour slowly into the floury cheesy mixture, mixing until it just comes together and makes a soft dough.  You can reserve any leftover egg/milk mixture to brush onto the top before baking.

So tip it out and give it a gentle knead just until it comes together in a nice ball.  Flatten it out until it’s about 2″ thick and vaguely circular and then just divide it into six or eight wedges.  Brush with the leftover milky mixture and bake at 200 degrees for about 15 minutes.  Eat warm with your weirdly gelatinous soup, or with a nice salad, or with cheese and pickle…mmmmmmm…

By the way, if you’re having a posh dinner party, these are amazing made with, say, half and half cheddar and parmesan and a sprinkle of chopped rosemary, or with snipped chives and a teaspoon of mustard, or any other flavourings you can think of.  Chopped sundried tomato and fresh basil would be lovely with a fresh tomato salad.  Much easier than baking bread rolls and with a lovely soft texture.

Courtesy of me Ma, a few fruity photos for you:

So there’s not much progress to report on the toothbrushing front.

No, Bert….you see, you’re supposed to… oh never mind.

Fellow blogger K8 the Great  recently did a fantastic piece on the trials and tribulations that us laydees suffer to become hair free - or at least less hairy than we were before.  Now I ummed and ahhhed about telling you this, wary of the fact that I’m constantly giving you far too much personal information and one day you’ll just all bugger off because either a) I’ll go over the top and you’ll be too disgusted to come back , or b) You’ll know absolutely everything about me and won’t need to read any more.  But what the hell.  I was swayed by the fact that I told J (in confidence, natch) about this and she told me I HAD to blog about it, but to say it happened to a friend.  Then there was a pause.  ‘Oh hang on though’, she said, ‘then they’ll all think it was me.  You’ll have to fess up’.    So here I am, then, baring my soul once again just to extract a cheap laugh out of you. 

So there’s something just horrific about going to have a bikini wax.  First up, I always seem to get the girl that’s about twelve.  It’s bad enough having to lie on a bed with your legs contorted behind your ears while some random stranger tortures you by ripping out your nether-hair (or ‘lady garden’ as J calls it), without it being a lithe and wide-eyed young stick insect doing the ripping.  You can almost hear her thinking ‘ohhhh, so THAT’s what I’ll look like when I’ve had two children - I’m keeping my legs crossed, like, forever’.

Anyhoo, digressing.  I decided to spare myself the embarrassment and go for one of those home waxing kits.  Basically, you get a pot of wax which you just microwave until it’s runny, smooth a dollop onto your hairy bits, wait a min until it hardens, then rip it off along with all your unwanted stragglers.  Easy.  Except the stuff is so bloody sticky, you end up with great sticky strings of goo attaching themselves everywhere.  I managed to stick the spatula thing to my thigh, then drop it onto the bath mat, then when I picked it up there was a big sticky string of gloop attaching me to the bathmat which then got stuck to my shin, and another attaching my boob to the sticky patch on my thigh…. And finally, just when I was getting the hang of it, the stuff had got so hard it needed microwaving again.  And that’s when it happened.  I forgot it. 

In my defence, Bert was doing that rather anxious rushing to the door then rushing back up to me thing that he does when he needs to go out, so I took him out, and then I was wrapped up with putting my wellies away and then finally I registered that strange humming noise: the microwave.  Oh shit.  Well, the wax was certainly melted, in fact, it was completely liquid, along with the pot it came in.  My entire pot of bikini wax was now swimming around in the bottom of my microwave in a big purple and brown treacly mess, with the label floating happily on the surface. 

Oh.  My.  God.  I cannot begin to tell you how long it has taken me, with kettles full of water, spatulas, white spirit, an entire pack of kitchen roll and two pairs of rubber gloves (the fingers of the first pair stuck firmly together and refused to budge) to extricate the sticky, stringy pool of congealed mess from the bottom of my microwave.  At one stage, I brushed my hair out of my eyes and ended up with a big blob of the stuff hanging from my eyebrow.  God, who invented such evil, vile-smelling goop?  I bet it was a man.  I reckon it’s what the Saxons used to tar and feather people. 

Still, looking on the bright side, my microwave is now gleaming, I did manage to get my bikini wax done first.  And, as I pointed out to J, at least my knickers won’t fall down any time soon.

So cleaning, then.  What a totally pointless activity.  I’ve been considering this fact recently as Hubby is away (miss you, darlin xxx) and in his absence, I have inherited the role of ‘only person who ever bothers cleaning the telly’.  Hubby was always top man for this job as, well, he’s the only person who really gives a shite.  And it’s his telly, and it’s bloody enormous and new-fangled and techno-fabulous (Imagine a huge great black patio door on a stick with lights all round it), and nobody else really dares touch it.  He’s a bit like Bert with his bone.  If you even look like you might be headed towards it, a low rumbling grumble will develop somewhere in the direction of Hubby, and said person will quickly divert and pretend they were just wandering over to look at the sheep out the window.  The trouble is, the bloody thing attracts dust like you wouldn’t believe.  Hubby has a special chamois leather thing, the sole purpose of which is to keep said new-fangled techno whatnot sparkling clean.  I, on the other hand, sprayed a bit of Pledge on it (not the screen, I’m not THAT stupid) and pushed it around a bit.  And now the dust has congealed into long streaks of sludge and looks ten times worse.  Bloody cleanliness.  Bloody telly.

And then, while we were out the other day, Bert decided he’d add to my woes and knock over one of my vases of birthday flowers.  They were in the bay window behind the sofa and looked very pretty.  When we came home they were at an odd angle and Bert was strangely not very happy to see us.  Instead of silly jumps and mad wags and attempts at face licking, he scurried into the kitchen in that well known greyhound manner known as ‘better scarper, I’m in the shit’.  The water from the flowers, being a week or more old, was nicely green and smelly and, mixed delicately with all the dust bunnies behind the sofa, had created an interesting pool of grey-green sludge.  Well, that was the final straw.  Shamed by my second pool of sludge in less than a week, I decided there and then to do some cleaning.  So basically, then, I’m completely knackered.  I’ve hoovered, mopped, dusted, cleaned out the fridge, chipped all the crusty toothpaste off the taps and even moved the office around so that my desk is by the window, giving me a fine view of the cows on the hill that goes down to the lough.  I should point out here that my kitchen was spotless already - I can’t work in a yicky kitchen - and my beautiful, wonderful, gorgeous, shiny oven cost us so much money that I feel duty bound to remove even the teeniest speck of ick in case Hubby decides I don’t need it and takes it back to Harvey Norman.

Here’s my newly cleaned and repositioned desk.  And now it’s not covered in CDs, newspapers, magazines, cookery books, phone bills, electricity bills, receipts, lottery tickets (3!  I might well already be a millionaire) and various pages of my book (how’s that proofreading coming on, J?) you can see it’s made of wood.  Who’d have thought it, eh?

Little Italian interlude today then.  Hubby’s away so we’ve been stuffing ourselves with pasta (which he hates) and all thoughts of a Sunday roast were quickly discarded as we were all suddenly overtaken by an inexplicable need for lasagne.  This, by the way, contains #1’s tried, tested and patented recipe for tomato sauce, which is the only one that his brother will eat, considering that English Towers enforces a strict ban on sauces in a jar (ew).

#1 is a bit of a whiz in the kitchen.  Being older, his problem is less the safety aspect (#2 is permanently trying to separate his digits from his hands) but more his penchant for odd ingredients.  Still, if you don’t mind the odd peanut butter, chocolate and jelly baby muffin for breakfast, you’re quids in.  I’m keen that by the time they have to fend for themselves, they’re more than capable of making a few basic recipes in order to stave off any yearning for Pot Noodles.  #1 is a big pasta fan, and taking into account his little brother’s hatred of lumpy sauces, has created this easy sauce: which works for everything from pouring over penne, to making pizza.  You can even add some vegetable stock and a couple of cans of butter beans or chickpeas and make it into soup.

For the ‘bolognaise’ sauce:

1 large onion

1 clove garlic

1 tin good quality tinned tomatoes

Handful of basil leaves

Generous pinch of dried chilli flakes

Salt, pepper and sugar to taste

So first slice the onion, finely chop the garlic and fry gently, along with the chilli, in a pan with a splosh of olive oil, adding a sprinkle of salt until soft and slightly golden.  Leave to cool while you open the tin of tomatoes, then blitz them until smooth in the blender.  Add your onion and garlic mixture, plus the basil leaves and blitz again.  Of course, if you’re normal and don’t care about lumps you can omit the blending bit and add the meat straight into the onions.  Back to the pan, then, bung in a little olive oil and then add your mince, frying until brown.  Then add back the blitzed tomato sauce and add salt and pepper and sweeten to taste with the sugar.  Let this bubble away while you make the cheese sauce.  If it seems a bit thick you can always add a bit of beef stock (remember the pasta will absorb some liquid).

For the cheese sauce:

1 fat slice butter (about 1oz should do it)

About the same quantity of flour (a heaped tablespoon I’d say)

1/2 to 3/4 pint milk

Handful grated Wexford mature cheddar

Handful grated Grana Padano (my current fave) or Parmigiano Reggiano

Plus, obviously, a pack of dried lasagne sheets

Melt the butter on a low heat and add the tablespoon of flour.  A little whisk is indespensible here - whisk it until it makes a lovely smooth paste.  Now you can start gradually adding your milk, stirring all the time to make a smooth bechamel sauce.  The amount of milk you need will depend upon how thick you like your sauce.  Just judge it by eye.  Now add all but a little smidge of your cheeses (reserve a bit to sprinkle on top). 

Now gather up all your bits and pieces (steady) and in your lasagne dish (deeper is better than wider, I find, as you can create more layers).  The trick here is to start with a thin layer of cheese sauce, then just layer it up with lasagne sheets, then cheese sauce, then bolognaise, then lasagne, then cheese sauce, then bolognaise.  Finish with a thin layer of cheese sauce and sprinkle on your reserved cheeses.  Bung it in the oven at around 180 degrees for about 20 minutes and serve with a fresh green salad, some garlic bread and a big smug grin.

So here’s one for all Bert’s greyhound laydees: a full frontal, no-holds-barred gynae shot.  Woohoo!  Honestly, he’s such a strumpet.