Aga Dundee Cake

A thing I find a bit frustrating about having people round is Shy Guest Disorder. You know what I mean, the sort of people who come in apologising for something, (it's never clear exactly what), and then when you put food on the table they sort of take a nervous sideways glance at it, as if you had just put a large stack of porn mags down.

They then say something like "May I just pinch a tiny bit of this?" Or "Can I steal a piece of bread?" or something else so defensive and insecure and insanely unintentionally pass-agg given then you have invited them to your house to eat your food that I find it difficult not to scream JUST FUCKING RELAX WILL YOU.

I confess that I used to be a bit like that as a guest until I had my friend Oz round a few times. Oz is the staggeringly handsome husband of my husband's ex-girlfriend (keep up) and also the owner of London's current best restaurant, Kitty Fisher's in Mayfair.

Oz will show up at your house, give you the sort of troubling bear hug that sends you reeling backwards into the kitchen, get a drink, pour everyone else a drink, tell a filthy joke, gaze into your eyes and tell you how much he loves what you've done with the place and then sit down at the table, shout "WOW I hope there's a lot of this because..." he will then lean over and snort your, his, everyone's dinner.

"Amazing," he will say, his mouth full, "immense. Is there any more." He will then get up and stagger over to your sofa, manspread, tell more filthy jokes, pour more drinks but then leave at a completely reasonable hour. Probably to go to a party in Hackney that's just getting going.

A guest like that is such a relief. It's so relaxing, as a host, to have someone round who is so enthusiastic and on your side with what you are trying to do, which is to have a dinner party. And since then that is usually what I do as a guest. Not the manspreading, but pretty much everything else. I am always the one leaning in, helping myself, starting, passing things. To sit there with your friends, in a totally informal setting and act like you're at an Edwardian tea party is mad and makes your host nervous. Doesn't the food look nice? Aren't you hungry? What's going on? WHY IS NO-ONE EATING?!

And it's a thing that is, as a host, very difficult to correct. I'm not sure what Oz does about it. I'd ask him but he's always at work and you can't get a table at Kitty Fisher's these days, doesn't matter who you're married to. But I suspect what Oz would do is just have a lot of people who are just like him round to eat - fellow scoffers and bellowers and eaters and drinkers. I've just got the wrong friends.

Except for my friend A- who has recently bought a house in the countryside and invites us there a lot I suspect because I am not scared of her Aga and she is. She glares at it, terrified, saying "I don't know what temperature it is?!" having not got her head round the fact that the top oven is HOT and the bottom oven is LESS HOT and that's all there is to it.

Anyway the other day I bullishly made a Dundee cake in a way I have heard tell of, which is to cook it in the simmering oven (i.e. the LESS HOT) oven for a long time, like 3.5 hrs. I have made Dundee cake in a conventional oven before and it didn't work very well, it came out very dry and just not nice - so I reckoned that having a crack at this couldn't possibly turn out any worse.

So I took Delia Smith's Dundee cake recipe and put it in A-'s simmering oven for 3.5 hrs, took Sam out for a walk, came back, messed about a bit, everyone had lunch, then at 2.30pm I got the cake out of the oven and it was freaking perfect and when it had cooled down at about 4pm we had it with tea.

A Dundee cake is a very good thing to have in the countryside as people drop round unannounced awfully often and there are no corner shops to run to for Fondant Fancies.

If you do not have an Aga then you cook this in a conventional oven at 170C for 1.5 hrs. But I can't promise that it will be as good.

Aga Dundee Cake

you will need:

1 Aga
1 18cm cake tin with a loose bottom (it is VERY important that the tin is 18cm - no larger, no smaller). You must grease this well all over with butter and line at least the bottom with baking parchment. You can get a very good Tala 18cm tin off Ocado.

225g plain flour
1 level tsp baking powder
150g butter at room temperature
150g caster sugar
3 eggs
2 large handfuls currants
1 handful sultanas
2 level tablespoons ground almonds
1 small handful mixed peel
glace cherries, to decorate (about 10)

Also, massive respect to me by the way for doing all this with only a rotor hand whisk, rather than an electric whisk.

You will NOT need to preheat your oven to any temperature, because it is an Aga, so it is always on.

1 Sieve the flour and baking powder into a large mixing bowl

2 Add the caster sugar, butter and eggs and whisk with your electric whisk OR if you are doing this with a hand whisk, add the sugar to the flour, then whisk the butter and the eggs together and then add and whisk in one spoonful of dry ingredients to wet at a time until you have a sort of batter then add this starter-batter to the rest of the dry ingredients and turn well together using a spatula until you have a good consistency. (Does that make any sense? I'm a bit tipsy, as I'm in the countryside and all they do is fucking drink here.)

3 Add to this the ground almonds, assorted fruits and mix to combine

4 Turn out into your tin and dot with the glace cherries. Do not push these too far into the batter or they will disappear completely while cooking.

5 Cook for about 3.5 hrs. You might want to decorate this when cool with a lemon icing. I certainly did.

This cake keeps exceptionally well and in fact is best cut into about 2 days after baking. But don't stand on ceremony! I chopped into it as soon as it was out of the Aga and chortled "What's everyone else having?" Because that's what terrific guests do.

Bircher museli for Charlie Potter

I had a very nice email recently from a reader seeking advice. My favourite kind of reader email, really - actually asking my opinion. It gives me licence to take a deep breath and just go on and on and on about what I think, which is the state in which I am happiest, as long-time readers of this blog will know.

Anyway the email went "Shall I take my 2 year old on a 7 hour flight to Montreal?" And my answer, which ran to several hundred words, was: "No." I guessed that if she was even asking me, she was really looking for a "no" answer anyway, she just wanted it validated by a dispassionate third party.

As I was writing my reply to her, hammering away at my keyboard (I do not type in a tapetty tappetty tap way, I HAMMMER THE FUCKING KEYS LIKE THEY HAVE DONE SOMETHING BAD - I always used to get complaints at work about it) some things became clear to me.

I ended up writing this paragraph:

"I’ve always felt like I had my whole life up until having kids to travel and fuck about and do whatever I want, and it’s not long now until my kids can both travel and appreciate the ride and have a good time. 

I don’t understand why some people *insist* that children shouldn’t slow you down and root you a bit. Why not? Why can’t we all just be still for a few years and then take off round the world and be wild and crazy once everyone’s a bit more grown-up? I find the pressure to continue on as you always did after you’ve had kids very oppressive and it pisses me off."

I didn't know that that's what I thought until I wrote that down, but now I realise that this is exactly what I think. I am probably over-sensitive to it, but I do feel under pressure to carry on as if I haven't had kids and it properly fucks me off. It's the thing I encounter most often that makes me most angry. Because the fact is that although my children are perfectly alright, I do not find them relaxing company. I cannot just drag them about with me and get drunk and not care and let them run wild because within moments Sam will have fallen down hard against something and there will be blood. Kitty will have found a pair of scissors. It's not relaxing, I don't like it, don't make me do it.

I recall my friend Max, who I think occasionally reads this from California where he now lives, declaring that he and his wife do not drink when they are in charge of the kids because if they were to let go in such a way, their children would be found "covered in nettle stings, being eaten by wasps". They are modern, cool and thoughtful parents and I have clutched this statement to me, like the Gollum with his ring, since hearing it.

There is a little saying that my husband once heard and was impressed by, which goes "don't compare the inside of your life with the outside of other people's". This works in two ways: first, don't think that other people are having a better time than you from what you can superficially deduce. Second: other people have a different experience of life from you, they are different people, they make it work in their own way.

Once upon a time it was people who wanted their children to stay up late, to be free and relaxed and hippyish about everything who were on the margins, who were looked down on by other, stricter parents. Now I feel like it's the hippies who are taking over the world and those of us who choose not to go raving with our kids or bithely take them on very long flights or move across the world with toddlers or go sail across the world with them or whatever, are the ones who are judged. I say that's how I feel, but I am obviously the world's most defensive and paranoid person, so maybe just forget I spoke.

Now: bircher museli. I don't really know how the cropped up in the world or where it's from or what it means but I think Donna Hay (also a mystery to me) has had a lot to do with it.

What you do is soak oats in apple juice overnight and then apply all manner of exotic mixings and toppings to it and then you eat it in the morning and find it freaking delicious.

The huge benefit of this is that in the morning you don't even so much as have to get a bowl down for your breakfast, you just remove the pot of museli from the fridge, get a spoon and dive in. I did think that the application of apple juice to oats in a domestic context would be rather revolting but in fact you don't especially taste the apple juice (I used really basic kids' plastic apple juice from Waitrose) and it softens the oats and makes them all, just... completely delicious basically.

Anyway this is a very basic recipe for a bircher muesli, for a really echt one I think you are supposed to add grated apple, but I don't want to grate apple in the morning and I'm not sure if you add it the night before that it might not go brown and unappealing. I think it might be okay, but I've got a few experiements still to do with this.

Alright so:

1 glass
about 2 tbsp oats
enough apple juice to just cover the oats
probably 3 large dollops of plain yoghurt
maybe 1 tbsp of granola to cover the top
some runny honey to drizzle over the top

1 Layer the oats, juice, yoghurt, granola and honey on top of one another in a fetching glass last thing at night
2 stretch some cling film or foil over the top and put in the fridge
3 go to bed
4 get up, get your muesli out of the fridge and eat it

This post is dedicated to Charlie Potter, who is, apart from my husband, the best man to sit next to at a dinner party because he is very interesting and chatty and lively and asks your opinion about things.

This is very rare. If you are a girl, you often find that men at dinner parties (or anywhere else) don't ask you what you think because they don't give a fuck and they don't laugh at your jokes because they don't think you're funny. Charlie always laughs at my jokes and said to me once: "I don't know... what do you think?" and I was so stunned and taken aback at being asked that I missed my opportunity to let go and have a massive rant and probably let myself down rather.

Anyway Charlie does some job and works hard and I imagine often doesn't get time for breakfast, so this recipe is particularly appropriate for him. 

Courgetti and bolognese

Now that my kids are set square on the path of growing up, we are none of us stuck in a non-speaking, non-walking hell, no-one is pregnant, no-one is postpartum, I can feel myself regressing, going backwards, getting younger.

When you have a baby you explode outwards. Sometimes quite literally. But also metaphorically. All your stuff explodes outwards. Your neuroses, your anxieties, your life, your everything goes KAPOW out into the world. Everyone talks about you and what you are doing. Everyone compares notes going "She's really freaking out," or "She's really bossing it," or "She's just so relaxed!" or "She's just SO uptight." None of it is complimentary - not really. It's all a total diss. Even if you are doing well, everyone with more or older kids will look at each other and transmit via ESP those awful, awful words that we have all thought: "You just fucking wait." Yes it's all fine now but wait until you've all got pneumonia. Or until your husband goes away for 3 months. Or until your eldest turns into a horrible bully and constantly pronks kids over the head at nursery all the other mums hate you.

You are so exposed when you have a baby - any baby, no matter what number it is, no matter what you do with it, no matter what it's like. It's like airing your dirty laundry every time you so much as take the buggy up the road to post a sodding letter.

But now... now I feel it's all being sucked back in. Sometimes quite literally what with my weight having gradually, like a feather floating down to the ground on the lightest of breezes, settled back to normal (though I doubt I will ever escape that feeling of everything being too tight round my middle). I feel smaller, lighter, more youthful. I don't think this change is visible to the naked eye - I think to everyone else I still seem the same careworn, knackered, grumpy old mum in crappy Aasics trainers and mostly shit hair. To my husband I still seem the same neurotic bag of nerves, to my children I am the same snappy, capricious lunatic. But I don't feel so old anymore. I don't feel so explody-outwards any more. I feel more private, I feel less like the Ancient Mariner, compelled to grab the nearest person and tell them how awful my life is, how totally up shit creek I am, how every aspect of motherhood and wifehood is impossible.

The downside of this is that I don't really feel like I have very much to say any more. But the upsides are many and varied.

For example, the other morning I didn't have anything to do. For the first time in many years - no work, no admin, no housework. My husband always says that when you have nothing to do you must try as best you can to enjoy it because any moment now the sky will fall on your head.

So I took his advice and decided, as it was a sunny day, to go for a walk on the Heath. I would go for a really long one, I thought, just miles and miles and miles and get lost like I used to before I had kids. So I walked and walked and then I discovered that when I walk for a long time - like over 10 minutes - without a buggy to push and lean on, I get a cracking lower back pain. By the time I had gone over Parliament Hill and reached Swain's Lane I was actually quite stiff.

I immediately rang my friend M- who lives nearby, to beg her for tea and a sit down. "I am off my face on diazepam" she said.

"Ok." I said. "Are you having a nervous breakdown?" "No it's my back," she replied, as if she were some sort of cipher, or avatar, some kind of alternative me.
"Come round though!" she said. "But we will have to talk in my bedroom."

I went round and there she was, resplendent in bed, bra-less in some sort of magnificent kaftan. The curtains were half-drawn and she had the day before spilled some very dusky Serge Lutens scent on the floorboards so the place was reminiscent of a restrained opium den. I sat on the nursing glider in the corner and we talked about our periods for an hour, having the sort of free and frank gross-out conversation that I cannot remember having for ages. Not for years. It felt more like bunking off at school than bunking off at school ever did. (Not that I ever really bunked off properly, you understand - being such a craven shitty little square.)

It was the most genuinely young I have felt in a long time. I wasn't worn down by that nagging sensation that I always get in the back of my mind whenever there is a baby somewhere needing to be worried about.

It is with this youthful zest for novelty and excitement that drew me, when I returned home, to unpack a "courgetti"-maker that my husband brought back for me from America last year.

I'm very late to courgetti, though I've always thought it looked like a perfectly good idea - you use a machine (or just a sharp knife and a lot of patience) to cut courgettes into very thin strips, which you then use as a sort of spaghetti substitute in order to banish yet more evil carbohydrate from your life.

We had it the other night with bolognese sauce, which I haven't eaten enough of in the recent past as I am so terrified of pasta, and it was terrific.

I followed the Hemsley sisters' instructions with the courgetti, which was to sauté it in a lot of butter for 3 minutes before serving, which worked very well. Do use a timer for this because 3 minutes is longer than you think it is.

We ate this with a bolognese sauce, which I won't give you a recipe for because if you don't know how to make a bolognese sauce by now then I just can't help you.

Recipe Rifle goes shopping: Spring Fashion

The problem with all fashion, no matter who you are or what you do, is trying to make it work for you - for who you are and what your life is like.

There are also levels of fashionability. I simply do not have the kind of personality that goes well with high fashion. I'm just too much of an awful piss-taker to go about in a neon scuba top and a hat. But I also think it is important to change the way that you look, to modernise. You know all this. I've written about it before.

My particular problem with any kind of fashion, any year, wherever I am is that is has to be practical. It just does. I cannot wear slithery dry-clean only fabrics because they will attract butter and Marmite stains out of thin air. I cannot wear heels because there is enough discomfort in my life without adding sore feet to it. (And often I will need to break into a run - or at least a fast trot - at short notice.)

I also cannot wear mini - or even shortish - skirts because I do a lot of bending and sitting on the floor and I do not want to show everyone my knickers. But I also cannot wear maxi skirts because I will trip over them or get them caught in buggy wheels or they will just generally get tangled up in my legs and drive me fucking nuts.

So what oh what is the solution? Last summer I spent the whole thing in shorts, boyfriend jeans and Birkenstocks. It worked fine, it was all extremely practical and washable and I was pleased with how it went. It wasn't a very "pretty" look but I wasn't feeling especially pretty, what with my husband out of the country for weeks on end and Sam a) not walking and b) crying all the time.

Anyway I've been spending some time thinking about this because when I think about World Debt it doesn't get me anywhere. These are the results of my thoughts about spring fashion.

For my feet I have invested in a pair of clogs by Lotta from Stockholm, recommended to me by @emfrid, a friend of this blog, whom many of you know and admire. I got the pair with the lowest possible heel with a closed toe so that groomed feet are not essential. I say "invest" - they are only £56.60. Apologies for hilariously small picture ripped off their website.... for a closer look see lottafromstockholm.co.uk.

I know what you are thinking... you are thinking "clogs... clunky... unflattering... noisy... actually in fact not that comfortable?" All this is wrong. They are perfectly flattering - in as far as "ugly shoes" can be flattering - no more or less flattering than a pair of Birkies, they are light, not heavy, have a ridged rubberised sole - perfectly okay for breaking out into a light trot but possibly not an emergency dash. And they go with everything - with jeans, with skirts, with shorts - everything. They would even go with a tight leather skirt. I recommend them to you! Plus, their customer service is absolutely outstanding.

I also got a pair of white trainers by Superga, £45. Converse are over. Give yours to a charity shop.

In terms of jeans, I will still be wearing my Acne boyfriends from last year because they are just so freaking comfy but I have also got a pair of ripped-at-the-knee Leigh jeans from TopShop (£40) because I like the fact that because of the rip, there is no straining at the knee and they don't go baggy. I can't abide a baggy knee.

Absolutely everyone takes the piss out of me for these, even Humphrey, who is 4 years old, and a friend of Kitty's from nursery: "WHY HAVE YOU GOT HOLES IN YOUR TROUSERS?" he said the other day. "IT'S FASHION, HUMPHREY," I barked back. He seemed satisfied with that answer. My dad took the living piss, too, but then I lectured him about modernism and he looked amused and then subdued. Anyway I will be having the last laugh come Spring when everyone is scrambling for a pair and they've sold out - even in my dad's size.

I also freaked out the other day in Hennes and bought a pair of low-waisted bootcut jeans. YES I KNOW!!!!!!!! They're so out of fashion that they're back in again. I don't want to do flares because see above in terms of practicality but if you think back to 1996, boot cuts are basically in between straightleg and flares. It's a nod to the flare without the full-on commitment, which is the story of my life. I don't really suit skinny jeans - it's not that my legs are fat, it's that my calves are too skinny and without the balancing-out effect of a slight flare towards my foot my legs look horribly sausagey. I've been walking around with these sausagey legs for years now thanks to the hateful skinny obsession. So I am happy as a clam that bootcuts might be on the way back in. These are on sale for £15.

I have been wearing the same white knee-length cotton summer dress for 6 years now and I love it and will still be wearing it this summer (with clogs or white Supergas, do you see what I am getting at here?). You have a similar dress skanking about in the back of your wardrobe right now, I'll bet. Dig it out. But I could do with another summer dress, so I got this thing off Asos for £22. Crucially it is machine-washable, patterned (so's to hide all that marmite) and long enough so that I can sit cross-legged at a picnic without anyone having to have memory-replacement therapy.

It is also FLORAL and FLORAL is big this summer. At least so says Dolce & Gabbana in their hateful La Mamma Mia show or whatever it was called where the models all bounced around with toddlers and babies. I don't know why this show made me angry but it did. I think it was something to do with the propagation of the "sexy mama" myth. Italian mothers have a million black-clad fat Nonnas in the kitchen who do all the heavy-lifting with the kids so that their "sexy mamas" can go back to sipping espresso and dancing across palazzos in their stupid mini floral dresses and impractical sandals!!!! We do not live like that in this country and I am furious about it!

Another completely easy-wear item that will drag you instantly into SS15 is a denim shirt. Just get one. Do not worry that it is boring or that you will look like everyone else - it's a lifesaver. You can wear it on its own or worn open like a very thin jacket over a t-shirt or a dress or something. The best ones are from J Crew (Keeper Chambray shirt below, £78). On warm days you must roll the sleeves right up above the elbow in the American style, not below the elbow in the British way. It's all about detail, friends.

Last of all - the spring jacket! I resisted the pink/yellow/bright coat trend because I just thought I'd look a dickhead, but I fell in love with this jacket from Zara, £59.99. I didn't mean to! It wasn't anyone's fault! It just happened. This is great if you, like me, have got broad shoulders. Jackets don't do terribly well on me as a rule because I look like I've got this tiny pin head on massive shoulders - like tennis ball in the middle of a scaffolding plank - but this is a kind of unstructured style that doesn't emphasise them. It also looks that impossible thing: smart-casual. You can wear it with a t-shirt and jeans and a jazzy necklace, (shoot me, someone take me outside and shoot me), and look really very smart.

The only problem is that when I bought it I somehow managed to get it out of the shop with the stupid security tag still attached, so now I have to traipse all the way back to get it taken off. (Thank God I kept the receipt.) Why does shit like this always happen to me.

Profiteroles

I was in an absolutely foul mood the other weekend - pretty much all weekend. My husband would say "how could you tell?" because he thinks I am always in a foul mood, even if I am smiling, wearing a yellow top and handing him a plate of food. I suppose as far as he's concerned even though I might look alright and normal I could suddenly turn at any given moment - I can switch in an instant, like a pirate captain, driven insane from the heat and the rum. He is not entirely wrong.

Anyway I really was in a bad mood. I have, recently, genuinely been counting my blessings in a really excellent and mindful way and finding very little to complain or be annoyed about: the children are okay - (not ill, both walking and talking, sort of sleeping on and off), I have written and published two books, Spring is round the corner and so on. But the other weekend I just lost it. The children were both driving me insane with their constant bloody falling over and wailing and breaking things and spilling things. Just fucking pull yourself together you stupid clumsy ninnies!!!!

I am not proud of myself. But the fact is that small children are often very annoying, especially if you are trying to get them to do anything other than eat Nutella toast in front of Bing Bunny. If you are trying, for example, to get them both dressed for a cold trip out to the zoo you have to find patience in a really Zen place not to lightly chuck both of them out of the window before you've even located their trousers.

Just to illustrate, often when I am dressing Kitty, reaching round her from behind to make it easier to push little wiry legs through leggings, or do up a bright green zip, Kitty will give a little jump and headbutt me in the nose or elsewhere in the face. Occasionally in the throat.

Why she does this insane little hop at the most critical and dangerous part of my getting her dressed I do not know - I have asked her, but she just looks at me with her massive eyes and says nothing. (Huge-eyed silent staring is Kitty's absolute number 1 tactical move. There's nothing you can do about it). Anyway all I know is that if I don't say firmly "Do not jump," as I am getting her dressed, then she will.

There are a million things like this that the kids do - if you give them a cup of water - any water, anywhere, any time, they will fumble it and spill it (which is why they are only allowed 2cm of water). If there is something on the floor within 10 yards of Sam, he will fall over it and land on the floor on his chin and cry until Tuesday.

Unless you respond to something she has said Kitty will say it over and over again: "But then the octopus has the green one one. The octopus has the green one on. The octopus has the green one on. Mum. The octopus. Has the green one on. The octopus has the green one on. Mum. The octopus has the green one on..." Doesn't matter if you're trying to talk to your husband, or you're reading Sam a story or having a quiet moment in the WC. If you do not acknowledge that the octopus has the green one on, that's all Kitty will say for the rest of the weekend.

Oh god I'm being so mean, I must stop it. Don't encourage me! No I really must stop now or I never will. It's not their fault that they are so small and annoying. My own mother has made it plain that I was exactly the same.

It was probably me, anyway - not them. I was extra tired because last week I went completely mad and had TWO dinner parties. We have not had a single one for at least a year and then two. Mental. I say "dinner party", we had people round for dinner, twice. And the thing about my life is that it is totally survivable - even enjoyable - as long as I am asleep, sober by 10.30pm absolute latest. If I am up twatting about with friends and then fussing with the dish washer and clearing up and then in bed at midnight I am an absolute monster for days afterwards.

So the solution is: no more dinners - only lunches or brunches. And I can't say I'm especially sad about that. I'm sure my kids will be delighted.

It does mean though that you don't get as much of an excuse to cook mad and unneccessary things, like these profiteroles, from Jane Hornby's absolutely terrific, brilliant and essential baking text: What to Bake and How To Bake It. If you are starting out baking, or want to give someone as really, really useful baking book, give them this. It's a really properly friendly, lovely thing. Jane loves you, she cares about you, she wants you to make nice cakes. It's just great. Buy it!

These profiteroles are definitely a faff to make, but they work, if you feel like making them.

As usual, this is not Jane Hornby's exact recipe

Chocolate profiteroles
Makes enough for 6

For the pastry

125g plain flour
1 tsp sugar
pinch salt
85g butter
240ml water
3 eggs

For the chocolate sauce

200g dark chocolate (personally I thought this was a bit bitter, next time I will use 100g dark and 100g milk) cut into small bits
150ml double cream
100ml milk
1 tsp vanilla paste or extract
pinch salt

For the filling

300ml whipping cream

1 Sift the flour, sugar and salt together on a piece of baking parchment (you need to whoosh the flour into hot butter later all in one go, using the parchment as a funnel)

2 Put the butter and water in a pan and heat it gently until it has melted. Once the butter has gone, turn up the heat until it is at a rolling boil. Get a wooden spoon ready and then whoosh your flour into this as soon as you reckon it's boiling and start mixing hard, off the heat. It will go lumpy and then smooth out. Stop beating when the dough comes away from the sides of the pan.

3 Let this cool however you like - on a windowsill or whatever. But wait for it to cool.

4 Beat the eggs together in a measuring jug. Put the dough in a bowl then add the egg a bit at a time and beat it in - you can use an electric hand whisk for this (I do) or a bowl mixer or whatever if you are Nigella.

5 Preheat the oven to 220C (fan 200C) and then line a baking tray with baking parchment. You can either spoon or pipe the dough onto the tray. The blobs ought to be about walnut-sized. If you get any big sticky-up bits, you can smooth them down with a wet finger like they do on Bake-Off.

6 Bake for 10 mins, then turn the heat down to 200C (fan 180C) and cook for 20 mins or until golden brown and crisp. Once cooked, cut each 'role lengthways but not all the way through. Leave to cool. You can leave these for 24 hours if you like. Fan oven owners are at a rare advantage here as fan ovens dry absolutely everything to a desiccated husk, which is in fact the effect one is after with these.

7 You can fill these shells with the whipped cream up to 2 hours before you want to serve them - any longer and you run the risk of them going soggy.

8 To make the chocolate sauce bring the cream and milk to a simmer in a pan, add the chocolate, vanilla and salt, then take off the heat and stir until smooth.

I tried to assemble these in a beautiful pyramid (see pic) but it was a dreadful, nervatious faff to do, so my advice is to fill them with cream, put three or four in six individual bowls ahead of time and then on serving, dribble over the chocolate sauce.

Laotian fried pork

My photos will all be crap iPhone photos from now on because we were burgled and my camera was stolen. SAD FACE

I fell to talking the other day to someone about Sam's sleeping. Specifically, about how he still wakes up once in the night at 21.5 months (i.e. NEARLY TWO YEARS OLD). He wants a bottle and also needs his nappy changed as otherwise it leaks all over the bed.

They were shocked. Their mouth hung open. "You're up once a night. EVERY night?" They knew how well Kitty has always slept, how ferocious I was about it, about her. They were genuinely stunned that I was up once a night. It was as if Gina Ford herself was standing there shrugging her shoulders going "Yeah, it's not the end of the world."

I found myself in a metaphorical corner, on the back foot, stuttering, making excuses of the sort that I used to not be able to stand in other parents - about how it was cute when their kids came into bed with them so they couldn't say no, or about how they couldn't drop this breastfeed or that breastfeed because it was their special time with them or whatever. I would dismiss them as weak minded -in Victorian times they'd have been sent to a loony bin with a diagnosis of water on the brain.

But here I am, now, defending my continued co-dependency on this once-a-night thing I've got with Sam. Wake up, totter up to his room, new bottle, nappy change, a pat on the head and then back down to sleep.

I have tried to stop it. On five separate occasions I've let him scream his head off for hour in the night for about two or three nights, when I had failed to appear for this bottle-nappy tryst. It does work, for about a week, and he goes quiet all night and I feel sad but also victorious. And then it starts all over again, he wakes up and cries in the night and I, surprised and unsuspecting, give him the thing I know that will make him go back to sleep. Five times I've done this horrible ritual of letting him cry. And although it's said to be the thing that absolutely, definitively works - which offsets the horribleness of it, it doesn't actually seem to work, not long-term. Advocates of it say "it's just three nights - three bad night and then you'll all be sleeping all night and it will be worth it". Sam disagrees.

And the thing is, I'm not tired. I mean, of course I'm tired, we're all tired. We're all dying here,  but I'm just not tired enough to be driven to extended sessions of letting Sam scream his head off at night. I just don't want to listen to it any more. I don't want to have to grit my teeth through it any more. I'm done, finished. I can't be arsed. I feel, with Sam now walking and talking and suddenly being - just between you and me, very charming and easy -  like I've just finished my A Levels. So to ask me to sort out this once-a-night thing is a bit like now asking me to fill out a long tax return or sit an S Level when what I really want is to sit under a tree with a pint of cloudy lemonade and a bag of Hula Hoops, reading Riders.

There's more. I have always felt mildly fraudulent as a parent when all I had was one child who slept like a log. There was a real lack of authenticity about me. Don't get me wrong, I was grateful - and also absolutely and entirely terrified of sleep-deprivation, but still... there was something so real, so tough and so admirable about those women who had non-sleepers or bad sleepers, who just fucking did it and got through it. The fact that Sam wakes up once in the night and I can just cope with it - specifically because, I think, of my former crippling sleep-deprivation fears - is a perverse mark of pride.

This person made me feel bad and judged and a bit ashamed at first but then I looked at the true fear in their eyes of being woken up at night and I thought back to how I used to be - so, so scared of losing even 15 minutes' of sleep. I saw that same look, I recognised it for what it was and I thought: "Oh, grow up."

In my quest for everything to taste a bit like takeaway, here is a delightful fried pork thing, which is mostly aubergine and courgette, very easy to make and particularly good with Esther's Takeout Broccoli (q.v.)

Laotian fried pork
For 2 with leftovers

150g minced pork
1 aubergine
1 courgette
2 cloves garlic
4 tbsp oyster sauce
3 spring onions
1 red chilli
pinch sugar
pinch salt

1 Chop the aubergine and courgette up into cubes and fry in some groundnut oil until collapsed - about 10-15 minutes. Remove to a bowl

2 Crush or grate or slice the garlic and add it to the empty pan and cook gently until it has coloured. Then add the pork mince and cook over a reasonably high heat until the pork is rubbly and dry

3 Chop the spring onions and the chilli and add these and cook for a few minutes, then throw over the sugar, salt and oyster sauce. If you're using a decent oyster sauce it won't itself have an awful lot of sugar and salt in it so you can be fairly generous with your "pinches" of these.

4 Add the aubergine and courgette back to the pan, stir for a bit, maybe add some water from the kettle if you'd like it with a bit of a sauce.

Eat and think to yourself "he'll grow out of it eventually".

Where's Sammy's foot?

Esther's takeout broccoli

You're supposed to be looking at the broccoli here

I once went to a talk by Irma Kurtz - where and why now escapes me - about getting old. She said that as you get older it's important to change your mind about things. "I try to address one of my prejudices each year," she said, "and try to change my own mind." Otherwise you get stuck churning out the same old boring opinions year after year and you start to be the person no-one wants to sit next to.

Since then I have always sought to change my prejudices about things, to change my mind, to move on, to modernise.

Only the other day, for example, I discovered that a really serious prejudice in my hair care routine was majorly holding me back.

I've grown my hair really long. Like, very nearly crazy cat lady long: it's down to my bra strap now and I'm wondering how much further it can go. I've only got so much time left to have really long hair, you see, and there are no more babies coming along to yank on it, so I've really gone for it. I've gone full mane. It's absolutely the anti-"mum" haircut, it's totally time-consuming, totally impractical.  It's my declaration of independence. It's my Braveheart scream of freedom.

I have historically been shy of hair product as my hair is so horrible and greasy - I've been frightened that I will make it go sticky and lank with too much "stuff" on it. So I've applied a tiny blob in terror and then wondered why my hair doesn't end up like it does at the hair dresser's.

And I've always dried my hair on a "medium" heat because I read in J17 once that a very hot hairdryer will cause you to have split ends. Split ends! Whatever happened to them? They seemed to be the scourge of the world in my teens - now never mentioned anywhere. Anyway so I always dried my hair on the "med" hot setting with a tiny slick of hair product and gone about looking pretty ordinary.

Then I noticed that my hairdresser, who is called Nadia and works at John Frieda in Mayfair, goes completely loony with the product and dries my hair so hot that I sometimes worry that my ears are going to frazz off. And my hair always comes out a cross between Gisele and Liono from Thundercats. (Although being similarly covered in spots, I will always be a dead ringer for Cheetarah. HA! Whatever.)

So I have started using three - yes three - pumps of Keratase Serum Oreo-Relax to my hair and drying it super-fast, super-hot and it looks phenomenal. Every. Time.

And all rules that apply to life in general also apply to cooking. So do this thing with broccoli, which takes normal broccoli and turns it into something you'd find in a really decent high street Chinese or Thai restaurant - and change your mind about it forever.

Esther's Takeout Broccoli

3 florets of broccoli per person
1 tsp runny honey
2 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp groundnut oil

1 Take a wok or a large frying pan and get it really hot then douse it with some groundnut oil, wait 30 seconds and then tip in the broccoli.

2 Stir this about until the edges of the veg are turning brown and black, then turn the heat down to a medium (in this instance, it is necessary) and add your honey and soy. Muddle all this around for another minute and then serve.

TA FUCKING DAH. You're welcome. 

Tuna melt muffins (for Claudia)

Doesn't look much here but STAGGERINGLY tasty

I am always a bit shaken up by Christmas and New Year. It's something to do with the weight of expectation vs the result, which is worse times a million when you have little kids. When you are childless you can just laze about watching Christmas specials, which will make you feel Christmassy as hell, but as a parent of very little kids, it's not so simple. They still don't really get it - and you're still changing an awful lot of nappies, which at times can get in the way of conjuring up that Christmas feeling.

My main issue was the fact that I ought to have been lazing about watching Frozen. But Kitty is the only four year old IN THE WORLD who doesn't want to watch Frozen on repeat. I just adore Frozen. Adore it. I'd marry that reindeer in a heartbeat. And everyone loves Let It Go, surely?! (Except some hardcore refusniks who get upset about Elsa's sexy new ice dress.) I know, I know. I am a lamentable cliche.

I watched the other day Idina Menzel singing Let It Go on some Christmas special country channel on YouTube and she was nattering on about how the song is about having a special power and then letting everyone see that special power and I was like "Whut? No, Idina, Let It Go is about being weird." The ice shooting from the fingertips thing is a metaphor for freakishness. We're not mutants! You're not living an instalment of the X-Men franchise!!

I don't flatter myself into thinking that I'm such a bloody weirdo, so unique and special. I'm probably just a drudgy pedestrian normalton. But, still, everyone has probably felt pressure at some point, or even now, to be a thing that they are not. Or to construct some kind of socially-acceptable patina. And the fact is that at the long drawn-out end to a "best" friendship a few years ago, I got an email from her telling me that her friends all thought that I was "weird" (but she was friends with me anyway - why wasn't I more grateful?).

I was a bit shocked at the candour of the statement, but it's not like I didn't vaguely know. It wasn't a surprise, it was a bit like unexpectedly catching sight of yourself in a mirror - you feel a bit taken aback, but not terminally so. Though that's not to say that it didn't hurt my feelings. So although I don't think I'm some kind of magical being, I suppose it has been objectively observed that I'm not quite mainstream.

Let It Go makes me recall the acute relief of not having to be in that friendship any more, not having to present myself to those friends despite knowing, somewhere in the back of my mind that they said baffled things about me behind my back about what I said and did (if they deigned to discuss me at all).

Let It Go also makes me recall the relief of not being at university anymore, where everyone was so nice. Currency was niceness. Everyone was so lovely. Except me. And although I quickly after my first year tried to be nice all the time rather than horrible and snippy and mean the damage was done. My reputation as a Not Nice person was pretty much sealed. I spent the next two years trying to be nice all the time and it felt like constantly wearing clothes that were ever so slightly the wrong shape. After I left I could relax into my actual self, not a horrible person trying to be nice all the time, or a genuinely nice person, but something in-between.

Let It Go makes me recall the relief of getting married to someone who has never wanted me to change a thing about myself, the way I dress or what I say or the way I do my hair. He doesn't make me go out when I don't feel like it or see people I hate, or have a lot of dinner parties. He doesn't want me to go bloody ski-ing. He rants and raves about how bad I am at paperwork, how sloppy and lazy I am at my tax and at invoicing for work - but that's a genuine practical issue, he's not trying to get me to change myself in a way that others have.

More prosaically, Let It Go makes me recall the relief of taking off a pair of uncomfortable high heels after a party, or taking off a tight party dress, or of the feeling I get after I've dropped Kitty off at nursery after both children have behaved like complete monsters all morning, or of jumping into a swimming pool in a hot place having not been on holiday for an entire calendar year. It's just a great song, is what I'm saying and I wish Kitty would watch the fucking film.

Anyway, look, this is a perfectly mad thing to blog about, but I need you to know about these tuna muffins. I made them a few months ago for Sam's lunch, because toddler lunches are a bit of a pain - one doesn't want to do loads of cooking, but he's not really old enough for a sandwich yet - so I turned to Annabel Karmel for ideas and found these.

Sam wasn't really that bothered by them - he sort of ate them but was also happy with a bit of rice and butter and some carrot sticks.

I, however, fell on them like a starving wolf. They were the closest thing I have ever made in my kitchen to a McDonald's cheeseburger in terms of tang and moreishness. I have them for my lunch at least once a week. It's pretty much the one day a week I do actually eat lunch as there's this sort of shimmery dress with a kind of cloak thing I bought online that I'm hoping to squeeze into by next Christmas.

Annbel Karmel's tuna melt muffins
Serves 1

1 english muffin
1 tin tuna, the smallest tin you can find in the shop
1 handful finely grated cheddar
1/4 small spring onion, chopped
1 tablespoon sweetcorn - defrosted frozen is fine
3 heaped tsp ketchup
1 tbsp mayonnaise
pepper

1 Cut the muffin in half and lightly toast under the grill. I said lightly.

2 Mix together the tuna, mayo, ketchup, spring onion, sweetcorn and about 3 turns of the pepper grinder then spread it on the inner face of the muffin. Top with cheese and put under the grill until the cheese is bubbling and the edges of the muffin are dark brown

3 Eat, while sending plates and chairs and pot plants spinning around the kitchen using your special powers. No singing allowed. 

Christmas decorating

I often read a blog called "Cupcakes and Cashmere", which is written by a gloriously Californian control freak and tells you how to do your nails, how to "braid" your hair, how to make teeny tiny sweeties or lovely brunches or "style" your coffee table. Style my coffee table!? A problem I never knew I had! Whoop!

The blog has taken quite a ribbing online, most notably from The Huffington Post (those killjoys, unless you are Sarah Koenig you're dead meat), who declared that blogs like Cupcakes are "bad for women". I see where that sentiment comes from, but do you know what's bad for women? WOMEN ARE BAD FOR WOMEN. As in, we seek this stuff out. We like pretty things. We are competitive. We fucking love it. Sorry but it's just a fact.

For my part I am really relieved that Cupcakes and Cashmere exists. I am visually inarticulate and inept. Given a choice I dress as if I have fallen out of a bin and my home decoration would extend to my best clippings from the paper plastered on the wall with wallpaper gum, interspersed with "Torso of the Week" shots from Heat. And Garfield cartoons.

However, at the same time I think it's nice to have a presentable house and to deck your halls with some seasonal stuff. But I need to be told, or at least to be inspired. So I fall on Cupcakes and Cashmere like some sort of information-starved castaway. The author, Emily Schuman, may be a presentation and marketing genius, selling old rope and getting paid per item that she puffs but I don't care. I think her interiors advice is brilliant and she collects interesting things.

Anyway this year I am pleased with the way I've done my house - and when I say house I mean my ground floor, because who decorates upstairs? - though it is not how Emily Schuman would have done it because she lives in LA so her house is exclusively white and gold with colour "pops" (this is affectionate teasing, you understand).

I've gone more this year for a Germanic, Mittel-Europe Victorian thing in Kentish Town.

I always hesitate to buy Christmas decorations in the manner of huge glittery deer, 1ft high "Christmas trees", star-shaped wreaths etc because I feel like a fucking mug, so most years roll round and I look in our box of paltry Christmas decorations and think "God, is this it?" 

So from now on I will allow myself 1 (one) mid-sized Christmas decoration per year. This year it was that fellow, above, the Nutcracker, from the Nutcracker. If you've never read the Nutcracker (as I hadn't until this year) do have a skim through. Christmas decorations - mouse kings, candy canes, the nutcracker doll - will all suddenly make sense. 

Anyway I've noted a theme in my humble bag of decorations, which is a) red b) white c) green d) "old" e) "unbreakable". So that's what I'm sticking with. I think picking and sticking with a style is probably my biggest challenge in life, mostly because I've got no idea who I am, or who I want to be. Emily Schuman doesn't have this trouble. She likes these kids of clothes, this kind of sofa, this is her kind of style. 

I've also always wanted to put together a Christmas food table, crystallised and mythologised in Nigella's Christmas as "The Welcome Table". Again, I didn't want to have to spend 40 billion pounds on this (neither should you want to) and managed to put something together using old bits I had round the house and using mostly fresh food and foliage begged off the florist down the road. 

I remember reading a piece in a magazine about having different heights and levels to the table. I didn't quite manage that, but I did put some grapes on a cake stand, which I thought looked quite nice and was in the spirit of the advice. 

Some detail from my Christmas table:

Note how I have really embraced cliche here. I want eye triggers that say "Christmas" - hence the Stilton, the mince pies, the clementines, the walnuts, the holly, the candy canes. Really not subtle. But mega-festive which is all that matters. 

Gingerbread

Apologies for the unforgivably crappy piping here - I was listening to Serial at the same time and so was distracted 

Gingerbread is the most terrific stuff. It is easy to make, easy to handle and then takes and keeps a good, clear shape when cut and baked. Not all doughs are like this. It explains why gingerbread is used to make the men, the houses and so forth - you can cut and re-roll without too much heartache.

Anyway if you have a big tub of excellent Christmas-shaped cookie cutters lurking about somewhere and fancy it, this is a really good dough to get creative with.

Alas, I do not have any novelty biscuit cutters, only 1 single rather lame star-shape, but I do so resent giving over space in my kitchen to something that is only going to be used once a year. The star-shape gets a good year-round work-out.

This quantity of dough makes easily enough for an entire class or a healthy contribution to a bake-sale, even if you cut out your shapes reasonably thick.

This recipe is from the much-maligned and misunderstood Celebrate by Pippa Middleton. The thing is that Pippa Middleton did not write this book. Of course she didn't! How could she have done? And whoever did write this book is a fucking good cook and deserves to be recognised as such.

So here we go:

130g butter
100g dark brown sugar
6 tbs of golden syrup
350g plain flour
1 tsp bicarb of soda
2 heaped tsp ground ginger
large pinch of mixed spices

1 Melt the butter, sugar and syrup together in a medium pan over a low-ish flame until melted, about 5-10 mins, then take off the heat.

2 Sieve together the plain flour, the bicarbonate of soda and the spices and then add the dry ingredients to the wet about a third at a time and mix together. This will look frighteningly sloppy for a dough, do not fret! It will become dough-like upon chilling.

3 Remove the dough to a bowl and then chill for 30 min.

4 Roll out using a bit of flour to help you along. Cut and bake at 170C for about 10 mins, but do a few tester biscuits first. Regular readers of this blog will know that my oven is a monster and burns the shit out of everything so even though the instruction was to bake for 12-15 mins, my biscuits only needed about 8 mins.

Go NUTS with the icing when cool and do a better job than I did.

Boxing Day Buffet

A more onerous task than a Boxing Day Buffet I can't really imagine. But for many of you this year, it is a reality.

How do you feed many people, of wildly different ages with basically zero prep time? Because the day before Boxing Day, if you hadn't noticed, is a bit busy and there's not terribly much time to get anything done.

The answer! Is the same answer as in every mass-catering question and that is: a LOT of very few things. So, an ENORMOUS quantity of a single meat dish. An ENORMOUS quantity of a single vegetable dish and an ENORMOUS quantity of a single carbohydrate. Do not faff about with one quiche, one pie, one of this sort of salad one of that sort of salad. You will go completely crackers.

What I always recommend to anyone who asks me is:

1 A glazed ham
2 Jamie Oliver's Winter Coleslaw
3 Mini baked potatoes (by mini I mean about the size of a five year old's fist - not actually tiny, but not a giant Spud-U-Like jobby)
4 You could also have a coronation chicken dish, depending on how many people you've got coming. Everyone loves coronation chicken and they won't have had it yet in the year (probably).

You must have alongside this ham a wide range of pickles and condiments and for pudding, something chocolatey, like brownies. Out of a packet if necessary.

But how the holy hell are you going to get all this together in time for lunch on Boxing Day?? Not a thing can be done on Christmas Day, after all!

No, quite. What you are going to do is make the ham, the coronation sauce and the brownies on Christmas Eve. The ham can absolutely sit about until Boxing Day - that's what hams are supposed to do. The brownies will be fine in Tupperware. There is a VERY good Coronation Chicken recipe on this blog.

Pick whichever glazed ham recipe you fancy off the internet - Delia has a nice one, as does Gordon Ramsay and Jamie. I've always been a bit scared of the number of Scotch Bonnets Jamie recommends for his jerk ham but he's right about most things...

First thing Boxing Day morning you bung a chicken in the oven, take it out, leave to cool, then strip and add the sauce. If you could bear to, you could also do this in the dying moments of Christmas Day and leave to cool overnight.

Then you make the coleslaw, which is incredibly easy, just an assembly job - the original recipe is here: http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetables-recipes/the-best-winter-veg-coleslaw/. It's truly a wonderful thing, this coleslaw - not at all like the sloppy, mayonnaise-y coleslaws of your youth. It also brings a much-needed freshness and crunch to the general Christmas food-paintbox of stodge, brown things and sugar.

[A note: you don't have to have a grating attachment on your whizzer to do this, but you must have at least a Japanese mandolin or you're a bit stuffed.]

THEN, 45 minutes before you want to sit down and eat, prick a lot of smallish Maris Pipers (allow 3 per person) and put in them the oven as high as it will go.

It is vital that you time everything to the potatoes. They must be fresh out of the oven, piping hot and desirable as you call everyone to lunch.

There is something for everyone here, trust me. Even for vegetarians - what is better than a baked potato with a lot of butter on it? And the coleslaw is out of this world, any vegetarian who complains about that needs to be booted out onto the street. Peace to the world and love to all mankind was yesterday, suckah.

Who doesn't love brownies? Serve with fruit and cream if you must, but everyone will be happy just stuffing them in their gobs with both hands. Do NOT try to be original with some kind of yucky lemon pudding or a meringue or something. People who like pudding like chocolate pudding above all.

Just don't let the kids catch sight of the brownies before time or it's game over.

Best crunchy crackling and a Christmas pep-talk

My husband has discovered a way of cooking pork belly that produces the lightest fluffiest, crunchiest crackling ever. I think he stumbled upon this by accident, though he claims to have known about it all along, but I swear I've never had crackling this good in the past. Anyway, I'm not going to press him on this issue because if you corner my husband, he comes out swinging, which is enough to give anyone a fright.

Okay so what you do is take a goodly portion of pork belly (about 500g), score the skin in a diamond pattern and then rub a lot of sea salt into it and leave this to sit at room temperature for 1 hour or more.

Then you put it in on a greased baking sheet or tray or pan or whatever and put it in a pre-heated oven at 140C for 3 hours. Then when that time is up, you turn the heat up to absolute top bongoes and cook it for another 30 mins. Then you rest it for 20 min. And the crackling bubbles up like packing noodles, only in a much more delicious way. Try it!

I have started doing pork belly this way for the kids, which turns out to be very easy and cheap as you can put the belly on when the youngest one wakes up from its nap, take both out for a saunter, then it's ready when you come back. I use about 250g for them and cook it for only 2 hrs with a 20 min blast at the end.

They turned out to like it quite by accident. I was doing something with some leftover belly and Kitty ran into the kitchen looking for scraps - this is quite a common occurrence - and I handed her some of the crunchy crackling as she is a fiend for anything crunchy and she dug it. Sam by now wanted some of the action because whatever Kitty is doing, he wants to do, too. My experience is generally that once children have eaten and enjoyed something once, usually in some sort of situation where they have "found" it or "stolen" it - rather than presented it nicely on a plate - they're all set for it. So once a week they get pork belly 3 ways, which is some crackling, a bone to gnaw on like the animals they are, and then some of the actual pork either alongside, or mixed into, fried rice. It's a welcome change from sausages.

Pork belly 3 ways 

Now, Christmas. DON'T PANIC! It's going to be okay. You do know what you are doing, I'm sure and you're only feeling panicked because you're a bit of an hysteric and like making a fuss. It's alright! I don't mean that in a pejorative way - I do the same thing myself.

I mean, this is unless you actually don't do much cooking and really don't know what you are doing, in which case, why on EARTH have you offered to cook Christmas lunch you absolute, total crazy?

I'm not cooking Christmas lunch or dinner this year, so I'm not feeling especially uptight about it but if I were cooking Christmas lunch what I'd be doing round about now is buying and watching Jamie's Christmas on DVD - as I have not been smart enough to record it off the telly in previous years. There is also, I see, an extended collection available on Amazon, a 6 DVD bonanza! Tricky not to buy it really. I may have even bought it already in a drunken stupor - delightful things that I have always wanted seem to mysteriously arrive at this house in brown boxes approximately 36 hrs after I happen to have had that extra glass of wine.

So don't panic if you don't want to. It's all about making lists. Just make those lists, get those deliveries in and roll with the punches. But to my mind, a bit of panic is good. Keeps you on your toes. Just don't mix panic with booze because it will make you look old and mad.

Coming up: what the fuck to do for a Boxing Day Buffet.

Stay with us.

White fish with coconutty leeks

The most extraordinary thing has been happening to me over the last few weeks. I have been feeling, for the first time in my life I think, broody. I know! I know! The madness of the thing. I have spent the last four years bitching and moaning and complaining at length about pregnancy and babies and small children and then just as Sam lets up, stops being quite such a staggering life-destroying, joy-seeking missile, I start to think "Hmm, maybe it would be nice to have more children?"

I have been regarding myself in this moony phase with some wry, critical distance. Enjoying your life again and enjoying your children as they are in their current phase after some years in the wilderness, is not the same as wanting another baby. I think it's easy to confuse the two feelings, thinking that this must mean that you want more.

Feeling that Sam is just too insanely adorable with his little fat legs in their corduroy bags and his chubby little feet and his tiny baby voice and his hopeless baby speech "Dis?" "Bobo?" "Cuggle mama?" "Dada gone??" is not the same as wanting another baby. I want to preserve Sam just as he is, in aspic. I want time to stop because he is so sweet, so good at sharing - still doesn't understand "mine", yet, he's not a hitter or a biter, not really throwing tantrums yet - it's all just too perfect. He's just a Platontic little boy-toddler and the idea that this is all going to go at some point is just awful. So the instinct is to reach for another one, to chase after the dream, blindly, at any cost.

I'm pleased that I'm having the feeling, though. There is a general narrative in this family that I am a cold, unfeeling strange automaton trying to pass as a real human and occasionally I think that the narrative might be partly true. So to experience this genuine gut-feeling is quite a relief.

And then last night Sam woke up at midnight, fussed and wailed and drove me mad until 2.30am when he then vomited all down himself and all over his bed.

As I stamped back downstairs from the nursery to my bedroom in a rage, having finally settled Sam to sleep, slammed myself into bed and punched my husband in the head for breathing a bit loudly, I saw again the madness of it all, the relentless tyranny of babies and allowed myself a wry smile about my "broodiness" in the darkness. It was a genuinely soothing thought, having just cleared up a lot of puke and changed a full set of bed linen, (which always rattles one's nerves a bit, no matter how much experience you have), that at least I wasn't also pregnant, at least there wasn't also some three month old somewhere. Nice try, Mother Nature! Find some other sucker.

I can't believe I haven't shared this really great recipe with you yet, for coconut fish and leeks from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's new whatsit "Light and Easy".

It's very easy and employs raw coconut oil, which is supposed to be very good for you. This, plus the curry paste listed below, are available from Waitrose.

So here we go, for 2. This is not exactly how Hugh does it, but it works very well all the same.

2 fillets of any firm white fish you like
1 70ml can of coconut cream or milk
1 tablespoon of Free & Easy mild curry paste (absolutely delicious curry paste, the best I've ever found)
1 large or two small leeks, chopped
salt and pepper
raw coconut oil (it comes in a jar)

Preheat your oven to 200C

1 Lay your fish fillets on some foil on a baking sheet and season with salt and pepper

2 Melt 2 tablespoons of coconut oil in a pan and then when melted drizzle a little over the fish fillets. Parcel the fillets up loosely in the foil and put to one side.

3 Put the chopped leeks in the pan with the rest of the coconut oil and cook gently until slightly collapsed - this takes about 10 mins. Then put the fish in the oven and cook for 20 mins. If you are having this with rice, probably stick the rice on around now, too.

4 Add to the leeks a tablespoon of curry paste and stir in, then add the coconut cream or milk. Cook this very gently all together for 20 mins until the fish is ready to come out of the oven. The curried leeks might need a bit more salt.

5 Serve the fish flaked onto a bed of leeks and rice.

Croque Monsieur fingers

I've been too happy to write anything recently. Before this, I was too miserable to write anything, now I'm too happy. My life is too much like an advert for ... something. Cashmere socks? Sometimes, some mornings, I wake up of my own accord because it's 7.20am and both children are still asleep, having slept all night without waking me up. This is a miracle. This has not happened for an entire calendar year. And, I can enjoy it because I'm not and - let's face it - not going to be pregnant again. This is it, this is my life now. It's actually okay again.

Up until quite recently my life was fucked because I was pregnant with a toddler or I had a baby and a toddler or Sam was such a living nightmare. Now Sam is absolutely the opposite of a living nightmare. He is a delightful little boy. And you know that's true because I would say - I have said - if he was not being delightful. I actually look forward to the mornings, now. I do not look at the clock from 3pm onwards willing each minute to pass quickly so that I can get Sam in bed and have my arms to myself for a few hours. I resent the arrival of my excellent and only-until-1pm nanny. I look forward to the weekend rather than dreading it like a looming tax return.

I used to tell myself that the nanny was completely essential so that I could get on with important things (like hiding from shrieking whining Sam) and now, to my slight disappointment, I realise that the nanny actually is essential so that I can get on with important things (like work and admin) rather than sitting about all day cooing at Sam, repeating his baby words back to him, snogging his face off and generally being nauseating and repulsive.

And an awful capricious hypocrite. It turns out that my love for my children is conditional - on them not crying and screaming all day long. If you do that, I will turf you to the Romanians. Smile and we're all friends. I am not a good person.

BUT I NEVER FUCKING SAID I WAS.

I no longer hate everyone without children. I no longer hate everyone with older children than mine. I no longer hate anyone whose children sleep. I no longer hate EVERYONE. I love everyone! I have made Kitty a birthday card for the CBeebies birthday shout-out whatsit, due to be posted more than the requisite 4 weeks before the big day. I have decorated my house really quite elaborately for Christmas and the houseplant I bought at the end of my last post is still alive. (Unheard of).

Anyway look have a recipe for these Croque Monsieur thingies, given to me by a chef called Robert. These are really good for toddlers as you can batch-assemble them and freeze them and get them out in the morning to defrost then fry them off for lunch. Totally delicious.

Croque Monsieur fingers

Some Crusts Away! bread (their exclamation mark - get it from Ocado)
Mild cheddar and gruyere
Sliced ham
milk
flour
butter
salt and pepper

How many you make of these is up to you. But what you need to do is make a quantity of very thick white sauce (or béchamel - see the How To Make A White Sauce section of this blog if you are new to this) and then use it to sandwich your Croque Monsieur together.

1 So make the béchamel using about 50g of butter, which is about 150ml of milk and approx a tablespoon of flour, add a handful of cheddar and a handful of gruyere to your sauce to flavour it and salt and pepper if you like.

2 Then leave the béchamel to cool for about 20-30 mins.

3 To assemble your fingers, make a sandwich from a slice of ham, some cheddar, and spread some  béchamel on the inside of both slices of bread. Close the sandwich, butter both outsides, wrap in cling film and freeze.

4 Take out a sandwich first thing in the morning then at lunchtime, unwrap from the cling film and fry each side for about 4 mins until golden brown with the cheese slightly melty. Cut into three.

Feed to your toddler while singing "Can't Smile Without You".

Little idiot fatty Sammy baby boy *gibber* *faint*

Overnight rye buns

Sam is a changed child. In three weeks he has gone from a deranged, clingy, screeching non-eating, non-sleeping lunatic devil toddler, to a perfectly alright 18 month old. He started walking properly, you see. Not stagger-stagger-collapse-wail - but really walking about. Sometimes, when really on a roll, not even wanting to hold your hand.

Before Sam could walk, in those long, dark, awful days when he would just sit on the floor and shriek, I would tell everyone - or just mutter to myself "When he can walk, it will be better. When he can walk, it will be better." I clung to that truth, willed it, wished it to be so. Somewhere, in a dark place, was the thought that maybe walking wouldn't improve things - maybe he was just a little jerk and would be forever this albatross, this non-eating, non-sleeping albatross. Round my neck. Forever.

But then, O Lord, praise praise be - I was right! He walks. He eats. He sleeps. He SMILES!! Hallelujah! Rejoice! Rejoice! Calloo - callay!!

Pirate Sam - walking so fast he's just a blur

Now, in the morning, I can come downstairs with him and just let him roam about while I make a cup of tea. He will sit with me and eat a few bites of my breakfast. He will potter about with his toy brush and my copper saucier, humming to himself while I read the paper.

When we all leave the house together, I put on all their shoes and sweaters and whatever on and then stand at the front door and shout "Come on! We're going!"and out scampers Kitty in her pink glittery high-tops and then a few seconds later Sam staggers into the hallway in his stout little trainer boot thingies, clomp, clomp, clomp - wobble - clomp, clomp - wobbbbllllle - clomp clomp.

And I am a changed woman. I no longer stamp along my little local high street in an unspeakable mood, snapping "I had an awful weekend," at Freddie, my butcher and weeping on the shoulder of Matthew, the coffee shop owner. I smile, I brush my hair, I make polite chit-chat, I light candles in the evening. I have carved a pumpkin in preparation for Hallowe'en. I bought a new houseplant.

The world suddenly seems a bright and beautiful place. So hopeful.

I think.... I am.... happy.

And what better way to celebrate than by taking Kitty - at large this week on half term - to a delightful little baking school called Bake With Maria - (www.bakewithmaria.com). Normally I absolutely refuse to do anything like this but this place was a 15 minute drive from us, on a Tuesday at 10am during half term. How could I say no?

Maria Mayerhofer is smiley, lovely, patient with small children and enthusiastic about everything - and as we made a simple loaf of white bread I saw plainly and clearly what I've been doing wrong with bread all this time, which is 1) I add too much flour because I am freaked out by how sticky the dough is and 2) I don't knead it for long enough.

Two such simple things!

Anyway the bread was all well and good but it was these overnight rye buns that really caught my eye. I've got a real thing about breakfast. I really, really like it - like that disapproving sister in Magic Mike. And what you do with these buns is put together the dough (no kneading required) - stick it in a bowl in the fridge overnight, then scoop out the dough in the morning onto a baking tray, put it in the oven for 20 mins and you have fresh bread. Fresh freaking bread! And now Sam doesn't require literally constant attention his every waking moment, I can do stuff like this!

HIGH FIVE THE WORLD!!!!!!


Overnight Rye Buns, from Bake With Maria

150g dark rye flour (Waitrose!)
200g strong white flour
4 g dried yeast
4g runny honey
5g salt
290g water
50g natural yoghurt

1 Mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl with a spoon - it is a very wet dough so don't go in there with your hands, just go for it with a metal spoon until it's all combined.

2 Stretch some cling film over the top of your bowl and put it in the fridge overnight

3 As soon as you hit the kitchen in the morning, get your oven to 200C and once it's hot put in a roasting tray with some boiling water in it - about an inch deep.

4 Grease well a baking sheet or tray (I use that Lurpak spray stuff - it's fab). Dip a wet tablespoon into the dough and scoop out a goodly amount and plonk it on the tray to form a bun and then repeat.

5 Bake for 20 minutes

Eat with butter, jam - whatever - at your leisure, in your kitchen. Maybe with the paper?

BFF