Moved!
I forgot to mention that I have moved to impeus.com – visit me there!
Date and walnut cake, etc.
I made cake. Twice. It was nice both times. I will make it again. Here, for posterity, is what I did:
- Turn oven to 180°
- Soak 100g dried pitted dates in some Lady Grey tea (or just hot/warm water)
- Grease/line/otherwise prep a loaf type cake tin
- Cream 100g soft brown sugar with 100g unsalted butter. I love the way this looks like sand. I always want to make sand castles with it. But it wouldn’t work. Or help.
- Add 2 eggs and 2tsp honey, stir/fold it all in really good. It’s usually lumpy for me at this stage. Don’t know if that means I’m doing it wrong. Whatever.
- Sift 100g plain flour, 1tsp baking powder and a bit of ground cinnamon into the mix. Fold it in. It should start to look like cake mix about now.
- Drain dates. I drain into a cup and drink it. Even though it’s usually cold by now.
- Put drained dates in mixer with 100g walnuts. Blitz, but not too much.
- Chuck blitzed mix into cake mix, along with 100g cranberries (raisins would work but they are DEVIL’S FOOD so don’t give me this cake if it has raisins in)
- Stir up. Worry that there’s too much stuff and not enough cake.
- Put into cake tin in a cakey way.
- Decorate the top with pecan nuts. I like to COVER it, but in neat rows, so you can use the nuts as a guide for slicing. As in, one pecan width is a normal slice. Two pecan widths is a slice for me.
- Sprinkle on some chunky demerara sugar. Just for the fun of it.
- Bung in oven. After 15 mins, turn temperature down to about 160°.
- Bake for another 35 mins.
- Remove from oven. Cool (at least a little). Enjoy.
Here is a photo of the first one I made. It doesn’t have enough pecans on top. But it was still nice:
Date and walnut cake
The gamification of my working life
This is quite embarrassing, but I’m going to tell you anyway.
Because I’m such a lazy sod, and given the choice I could waste every hour of every day doing pretty much naff all, I make lists of things to do so I can focus, but more importantly get some kind of sense of achievement when I don’t piss the day away.
At work, for several years now I’ve used a page-a-day diary for this. I’ll write my list of things to do, and tick them when I’m done. This process has undergone several iterations in its evolution, and I’m going to tell you about them – even though it makes me sound like, well, like the geek that I am.
Colours are important. Green is for “new item”, blue is for “transferred from previous list”, red is for “must do today or else”. Once, black had a purpose, but I now can’t for the life of me think what it was.
Off-list achievements are still achievements. Write them on the bottom of the list and tick them immediately. Otherwise you’ll feel like you did NOTHING when it’s just not true.
Putting off tasks is inevitable, especially when you know they are going to suck. Increase the chances of actually doing some of the least attractive jobs by using many-sided dice, and committing to doing whichever item corresponds to the number you roll. Having a wide selection of dice for this helps if you have, say, 31 items on your list.
Sometimes a tick isn’t enough gamification to keep you interested. At the end of each day, tot up how many things you had to do, how many you achieved, and how many were postponed. These stats can help you gauge how effective you’ve been each day. Can you improve tomorrow?
Can I tell you a secret now?
I do this at home sometimes too. I’m never going to do housework by choice, so making a similar list helps things actually happen. It’s these home to-do lists where I get even more tragic.
Build in rewards by actually including things like “make dinner (3 ticks only)” and “have a bath (6 ticks only)” so you can both get a tick for doing something nice, and also enforce some actual achievement.
But some redundancy is required so a good to-do list item might be “get dressed”, or alternatively splitting things into several tasks like “strip bed” “wash bed clothes” “dry bed clothes” “make bed”.
Can I tell you another secret?
Today’s list include “get dressed” and “get showered” with no prerequisites. I still achieved neither of these things.
Slapper spaghetti
The particularly delicious Italian pasta sauce known as puttanesca contains olives and capers, along with tomatoes, anchovies, chilli and garlic. The literal translation of my current favourite meal of spaghetti puttanesca is of course “whore’s spaghetti” – though my usual recipe variant is a slightly cheaper version. Hence its new name of slapper spaghetti – I couldn’t think of a more tasteful version of “cheap hooker”, though I would welcome any suggestions.
I always seem to have a store cupboard staple meal that I’m obsessed with at that particular time. A couple of years ago it was oven baked lamb chops with cherry tomatoes & balsamic vinegar (since chops freeze well and I discovered an almost foolproof method of defrosting them quicklyish).
This year, it is slapper spaghetti, so called due to the omission of olives and capers from the traditional puttanesca. Sometimes I do put the olives and capers in, since they are very tasty – but I have to admit to olive jar mould paranoia if its been more than a week since the jar in the fridge was first opened. I wish they did smaller jars, or that I was less of a skinflint and would fork out for the nicer ones from the deli.
The recipe shown here is what I do for myself. I have only ever cooked this for one, as Neal thinks he wouldn’t like it. He always wrinkles his nose up when I get the anchovies out. Incidentally, while I’ll be having this for my dinner tonight, he’ll be having Sugar Puffs.
Ingredients
* Wholewheat spaghetti, because its just better than plain spaghetti
* A good couple of handfuls of cherry tomatoes (a small punnet, or 2/3 of a normal one)
* 3 or 4 garlic cloves
* 4 or 5 anchovy fillets
* Chilli flakes & ground black pepper
* Freshly grated parmesan (non-traditional given the anchovies, but VITAL I think)
Method
If you are using tinned anchovies, use the oil in the tin. Heat it up (or a good glug of olive oil if not) in a saucepan. Mince/grate/crush your garlic, and add to the pan, along with the anchovies (chopped). Stir about a bit. The anchovies should sort of disintegrate a bit. Don’t cook this too long, you don’t want it browning really. This is the point you’d put the capers in if you were being purist.
Slice your cherry tomatoes in half and bung into the pan. If you don’t have cherry tomatoes, about three ish normal sized tomatoes would do fine, chopped up. The liquid from the tomatoes oozes out and makes the sauce go saucey. What I like to do here is turn the halved tomatoes cut side down, then squish them into the pan. This doesn’t really matter though, I think I just do it because it’s quite satisfying. Chuck in the chilli (about a pinch or two) and grind in some black pepper. Somewhere between now & serving is where you’d put the olives in if you were making this properly. You’d also add oregano, but I prefer rosemary.
At this point, realise you should have probably put the pasta on to boil already. Using wholewheat dried pasta takes about 12 minutes (Consult the packet. Really. Then sort of assume it lies and check obsessively from about 4 minutes before it suggests). Of course if you’re using fresh there is no need to worry here, and you probably have plenty of time to clean up your chopping board & things so the garlic and anchovy implements don’t stink.
When the pasta is ready (you will of course have been stirring the sauce fairly frequently to ensure it doesn’t stick/burn), drain it, and chuck in the pan with the sauce. Stir around a bit to get it all mixed in to the pasta and away from the sides of the pan, then tip onto your plate or into your bowl. Grate some parmesan all over the top. Or, if you’re like me, take in a bowl containing a couple of hundred grams of freshly grated parmesan so you can keep topping up your dish.
Eat. This should really be enjoyed with a glass of red, but I’m not allowed any wine at the moment.
How To Make Pancakes. Or: why I can’t follow instructions
I like to think I can make tasty dinner. That given a set of ingredients I can make something good. That I know my food, and that on any Masterchef taste test that I would come out on top. I like recipes, I like watching food programs on TV, I like flicking through recipe books and browsing recipes online.
However, I suck at following recipes. One of my favourite dinners of last year was a balsamic-soaked, oven-cooked lamb dish with mmmmcrispy fat, unctious cherry tomatoes, garlic, aubergine and (usually) rosemary & chilli. Maybe one day I will post the recipe. However, the loose recipe that I now use was originally based on a Jamie Oliver dish. A Jamie Oliver sausage bake.
Anyway. Last week I posted a recipe (of sorts) for pancake soup. I worked out/imagined/made up how to make this dish after having eaten it in a restaurant (there are basically three ingredients, it wasn’t hard!) What I neglected to mention is that I don’t know how to make pancakes.
Well, clearly I DO know how to make pancakes, insofar as that you form some kind of relationship between a frying pan, some hot butter and some batter, then take the result and add something like lemon and sugar, or nutella, or onion and spinach, or whatever floats your boat. What I really mean is that every single time I have to be reminded of the ingredients and proportions for the batter.
So. For prosperity. This is how you make batter.
Ingredients
1 pint milk
4 eggs
8 ounces plain flour
Method
Whizz until thoroughly whizzed. Try to be patient and leave it a while, because the pancakes are always better if you have left the batter for an hour or so. Probably something to do with the milk soaking into the flour granules or something.
I have to either consult a post-it note if I’m lucky enough to have not lost it since the last time I made batter, or call my mum every time. I’m yet to find a way to get such a simple thing to stick in my head, despite how neat it is.
So, apparently, three simple ingredients in particularly nicely neat proportions are clearly too complex to stay in my little mind.
Incidentally, an ounce of flour is EXACTLY equivalent to a heaped tablespoon. It is. I subjected my mum’s assertion to rigorous scientific testing and can confirm that each tablespoon of flour I added to the bowl incremented the readout on the scales by precisely 1.0 oz. I found this slightly disturbing, until Neal pointed out that an ounce is probably defined as “the weight of a tablespoon of flour.”
When feminism is a dirty word
Labels have uses. How else would I know which lever arch file to put my cash audits in every week? Which button on my telephone calls HR, and which calls the FD?
Labels for people certainly also have uses, but arguably not for those being labelled.
To take some obvious examples, you have your common or garden extroverts, your pensioners, your racists and your blondes.
Some labels are subjective. Some are difficult to escape from (male, female, child, old giffer). Are these useful? With aspects of discrimination due to many of these theoretically forbidden by law, it makes sense to question what they mean, if anything, and thus why legal protection may be required.
The kind of bullshit prejudice we should be fighting is engrained in society. The outrageous pink prettifying that girls are subjected to growing up. The profiling in security and policing which mean some poor asian and black kids are routinely pulled over. The way we talk to aging grandparents in the same sing-song, babying tone usually reserved for children under 3. Biological determinism and evolutionary psychology trying to tell us who we inevitably are.
This is why I actually feel a little hurt and disappointed by recent vitriol against feminists by someone who until recently identified as one herself, and whose views and constant calling people on their careless use of language and dismissal of many issues around sexuality I always find refreshing and important.
Elly has always been one to shout out on behalf of trans people, sex workers, perverts and men. I feel like now I should make some half-arsed, inarticulate attempt to shout out on behalf of feminism.
The problem is, everything Elly cites as vile behaviour by these feminists is, indeed, vile. Julie Bindel’s desire to shoot and kill researchers working with sex workers and. Bidisha’s “girls’ team” to take two current examples. Feminism is as broad a category of people as any race, gender or occupation though, encompassing huge variation. Feminists are people too, and yes, many people suck.
Let’s call out bullshit when we hear it, and try to highlight hurtful and hateful behaviour when it inevitably rears its ugly head. But let’s not dismiss feminism as a whole just because some of them behave in a narrowminded and nasty way sometimes. People from all walks of life do. Including me and you. It’s just that we tend to react a little more measured when we’re called on it. Right?
The gender of parenthood
The proliferation of “mother and baby” clubs gets to me sometimes. Its as if fathers don’t exist. I could understand an attempt not to alienate single parents (or homosexual parents) through constant references to mother and father, but what on earth is wrong with just referring to parenthood. How (apart from the miracles of baby-growing and breast feeding) do mothers and fathers differ so fundamentally anyway?
Resources specifically aimed at fathers are horrifyingly patronising. They seem more like guides for moronic aggressive thugs, not fathers. It must be pretty oppressive looking to them for some useful advice as a man, and coming across such negative assumptions about your intelligence and empathy level, and your aversion to domesticity.
Having said that, while I find the materials aimed at fathers horrifying, Neal always comments on the patronising tone of information presented to new mothers. Language suitable for 5-year olds, no big words, information for morons.
A recent documentary on BBC4, Biology of Dads, purported to explore the importance of fathers in the lives and upbringing of their offspring, with the obtuse finding that “the role of the father in bringing up their kids is far more important than previously thought.” I want to call bullshit here for a number of reasons. Firstly, surely the popular discourse is more along the lines of Children Must Have Two Parents of Different Genders. How else to explain the demonisation of single parents and/or gay parents? I’m not sure who is suggesting that fathers may as well not bother, just squirt and go since they’re not needed beyond conception.
My main gripe with the program though was the dodgy research used to “show” the findings. For example, measuring fetal heartbeat while the father is talking to it, ooh, an inch from the belly, in comparison to when the mother speaks, at least a foot higher up. The different proximities of the mouth in both conditions are too variable to even bother seeing if there is a difference. Plus, you can’t neglect to notice that occasionally daddy’s voice will be speaking in a different room, different building, different country even. The fetus can’t escape mum’s voice – its there all the time. Maybe any change in heart rate can be explained by it being a different voice to the one it hears, what, 18 hours a day.
In another observation, we watch a father play with his son for a few minutes, observing the type of play (“rough and tumble” we are told. Looked remarkably like playing with a 2 year old to me. And cars) and the language used. Dad talks away as if he’s chatting to a mate. The kid doesn’t understand most of it but it listens really good anyway. We are told that this helps building vocabulary. After the allotted time, in comes mummy and out goes daddy so we can observe the difference. What happens? The kid wants daddy back because they’re not done playing yet. Mum is obviously hurt and tries desperately to get the poor kid’s attention by showing toys and saying such intelligent gems as “look!” “here!” “ooooh!”. That’ll help vocabulary. Thus, dad play is good, mums may as well not bother. Just change its nappy, wipe its face and give it some dinner, eh love?
Obviously this study is flawed, but it left me worrying that if both myself and Neal talk to our kid like an actual human being (I always feel self conscious talking to other people’s kids because I can’t bring myself to baby them) will it get overwhelmed by too much “fathering” and miss out on “mothering”?
It sounds like a stupid worry, but will it end up missing out because I’m not much of a girl? What if it wants its hair doing nice? I’m not the mama to do it. Will the cars and engines and computers and dinosaurs and trains give it half of a childhood? No chance. Since when did growing a boy that cooks (and builds robots) or a girl that builds robots (and cooks) become a crime?
Boiling pancakes?
In Innsbruck once we spent hours driving round looking for a hotel. Our usual default option of cheap and cheerful etap hotels didn’t extend to Austria, and we certainly hadn’t done something so sensible as research or book an overnight stay. Our travel habits tend to be less than predictable so that is usually impossible or inadvisable anyway. By the time we eventually found somewhere, several arguments later, we were grumpy and very, very hungry. Austria had thwarted our usually infallible “if you were a hotel, where would you be?” approach to navigation.
Looking at the menu in the hotel restaurant I was starting to get even more grumpy. The waitress had clearly clocked my foul mood and given me the English menu, and the starter choice was either some fat drenched deep fried monstrosity, or…. I kid you not, pancake soup. The concept struck me as ridiculous and stupid – though I’m happy to accept that my frame of mind was likely to blame for that.
When it turned up, it was basically chicken stock with strips of pancake floating in it, along with some chopped chives. Glistening gobs of some kind of oil (probably butter or chicken fat) floated on top. And, it was delicious.
It turns out that this is a classic Austrian dish called Frittaten Suppe, traditionally made with leftover cold pancakes – by which I mean proper pancakes, the skinny flat ones we make in Britain, not the chubby American version.
What follows is a recipe written in a similar style to how I tend to follow and/or interpret recipes, so bear with me.
Ingredients
1. Pancakes, preferably a few hours old at least, but I’m sure you can make then specially. I imagine it would be ok anyway but chilling them first may be a little more purist. Make them with butter!
2. Chives, preferably freshly snipped from the plant.
3. Chicken stock or broth or soup or similar. Ideally clear like consomme or perfect homemade stock if you’re more blissfully domestic than me. I bet vegetable stock would be more than adequate, especially if it has lots of celery flavour infused into it. Just don’t use a nasty tin of nasty soup.
Method
Roll up your pancakes. Maybe use one per person. Or two. Two or three would probably be best and most generous, but it depends on the pancake:broth ratio you’re after. Obviously.
So, take the rolled up wodge of pancakes, and slice across thinly to give you several skinny strips, say half to three quarters of a centimetre wide. Place these in the bottom of your bowls.
Heat your broth/stock/soup through, and when happy that its ready for consumption, snip in a good lot of chives. Season if appropriate. Pour this liquid into the bowls on top of the pancake strips.
Enjoy. If your experience is anything like my first Frittaten Suppe then expect your mood to raise dramatically.
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