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Aargh! One of my key excuses for not tidying has bitten the dust.
People have been on at me to dejunk – “just throw it away!” It’s in boxes you’ve never looked in. Boxes that have moved house at least twice, unopened. You can’t possibly need when you haven’t needed it in all this time.
Ah, I have traditionally retorted. Amongst the junk are pearls! Things I will indubitably need again even if I have not needed them recently. For example – killer example – my GCSE, A Level and degree certificates!
Only of course, this week, I found them. I knew roughly where they were and I put my hand on them as soon as I started looking.
By my own logic, almost everything else can be thrown away. Oops.
My backup excuse is wastefulness. It would be terribly wasteful to just throw these things away! Starving Children in Africa! My junk could be useful to someone… if only I had time to sort it out properly… catalogue, sort and file… Save / Bin / Charity shop / Freecycle…
Re-assure me of this: it’s normal, right, to keep every edition of every magazine you subscribe to in varying states of pile from “neat” (magazines you no longer subscribe to, often because you didn’t get around to reading one before the next one arrived, sometimes still in their plastic wrappers) to chaotic (the Private Eyes that arrive 25 times a year for the last twenty years…). People don’t subscribe to magazines just to throw them away when they are read…? Do they?
Thank heavens I never got into a daily newspaper habit.
I’m excited about the idea of supperclubs, underground restaurants and the like – the idea that for one night only, or very few nights, you host a restaurant for paying strangers in your house. How cool is that?
I heard about it first, I think, somewhere on the internet, and then it was cemented in my mind by a feature on Woman’s Hour which led me to circling the block and being late for leafleting so I could listen to it all.
“That sounds cool,” I thought. “Maybe I could do that in my house, once I’ve tidied up a bit?”
Would it be scarier than Come Dine With Me? At least if you fail and massively suck, only a few people find out. And you can close the bedroom doors and not have anyone rifling through your things. Or even going in the massively dusty, cluttered rooms.
There was a list of supperclubs on a website somewhere that I perused. And there seemed to be none in Notts! Or at least one, but with a “we’re no longer hosting events for family reasons” caveat on their website. I later also found someone who hosts afternoon teas for six on Friday afternoons in the South Notts area. But apart from that, no-one at all in the whole East Mids! An opportunity, I thought.
So when my friend, the vegan blogger Cat of Stripes started talking about wanting to host a couple of pop-up restaurant nights, I put our house forward as a venue. We’ve set a date – the last weekend in November – and we’ll firm up all the rest of the details closer to the time.
(NB – if you’re a vegan (or even if you’re not) and you want to sample the Stripey Cat’s cooking – do please drop me a line and I will start a list of people to get back in touch with closer to the time when we actually start selling tickets. By all accounts, the price is going to be pretty bargainous.)
My discussion with Cat of Stripes led to me signing up to a group on Ning and starting to read MsMarmiteLover’s blog, something I hadn’t previously discovered. A few weeks later a plaintive email arrived begging us to consider buying the book, to which, after a few further weeks of hemming and hawing and counting pennies, I acquiesced when on the internet with my guard down ((read – drunk. Apparently even when blotto my fingers can type in my Visa card details without getting it out of my wallet))
And in the last few days I have been reading it. It’s a mix of recipes Kerstin Rodgers uses at her own events, prefaced by some really interesting tips and suggestions for hosting your own supperclubs. And she makes it sound such an awful lot of fun. There’s no glossing over the hard work or personal sacrifice – in her case, she’s emptied so much of her house to make room for chairs and tables that she’s moved sofas and TVs into what was supposed to be her boudoir – and of course you should spend several days cooking for each event.
Rodgers doesn’t seem to have the CHAOS problem we do at the moment. If she did, her first word of advice wouldn’t be “First of all, just do it. Go on, play restaurants. Take the plunge.”
But thinking about doing it might even be just one more prod to start the massive house cleansing we need.
But before we get there, we are Having People Over. Half with this crazy idea in mind, and with some pressure to have a Wake – a last hurrah for our former councillors and our former staff – I volunteered to host an Afternoon Tea, which will ultimately be for 10 people (six former councillors, three former staff – and enough leftovers to feed P when he gets home!) We’ll see how that goes. Baby-steps, as Fly Lady would say.
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Last month’s Olive magazine syndicated a Telegraph article with a chocolate icecream recipe.
It’s basically frozen blancmange.
Whilst that might not sound appetizing at all, the chocolate icecream is pretty awesome. I found it ever so slightly grainy but my companion ((as they say in restaurant reviews)) didn’t. It is very chocolaty and tastes every bit as good as the Co-op’s “indulgent” Belgian chocolate icecream. Whilst the recipe might call for “high quality cocoa”, Bourneville did me just fine.
Three further points to make about it all:
a) it can be made with all the stuff I just have in the house. Cornflour, cocoa powder and sugar are all things that live in the cupboard. And then a little story about the milk: we now have a milkman, through MilkAndMore.co.uk who is broadly excellent and whom I would have no hesitation recommending. However going back to milk deliveries – and only every other day at that – has occasionally meant running out of milk. So I have got in the habit of having a handful of cartons of UHT milk in the back of the cupboard for emergencies. I actually don’t like UHT – it tastes funny to me. (My mother thinks that it’s the cream that tastes weird and that skimmed UHT milk is OK. I don’t agree) However, UHT milk is better than no milk at all in tea. But the other time to use UHT is if you are boiling it. So it makes no difference to use UHT in sauces, yoghurt, cocoa etc, and it is fine to use it in this recipe, making it a truly storecupboard recipe, for me at least.
b) it looks instantly variable and augmentable for other versions of the icecream. That Sicilian orange flavouring that Dan Lepard made me buy would zhuzh it up into Choc Orange; similarly a splodge of peppermint flavouring sends it to Choc Mint. Add cocoa nibs or coffee beans or chopped nuts for some crunch or marshmallows to make it into rocky road. Addition of a big spoon of espresso powder could switch it to mocha. Moving beyond chocolate, I wonder if you could get away with making this in other flavours entirely? You could use the instant coffee instead of the cocoa rather than in addition to, for a mocha, adding coffee beans again for crunch and even a spoon of ground coffee for mouth feel. As with the blancmange, you could infuse the simmering milk with any number of whole spices: vanilla beans, cardamom pods, cloves, cinnamon sticks, lemon peel… in combination or alone for a clear pure taste. How about a version with the oh-so-trendy, ouch-my-bank-balance matcha powder for green tea icecream? And so on!
c) it looked to me as if you could easily double the quantities and still have it fit neatly in our icecream maker.
d) serves 10? does it buggery. We rationed ourselves to a single scoop eaten slowly, rather than troughling our way through the whole pot at once. I think you could get 6 scoops tops out of that barely-a-pint recipe.
In the grand scheme of things, not a lot of people know the rules MPs are subject to when it comes to using parliamentary stationery.
If you were an MP with a boatload of postage-paid envelopes, you could probably abuse them with impunity, and send them out unsolicited to 95% of your constituents without getting any redress.
But there is one group of people who are much more likely to know the rules: people who work in politics. A subset of those are councillors. And if you are really keen on getting shopped to the House authorities, who best to try it on with but councillors of an opposing party?
So, in the run up to Lib Dem Spring conference, Labour Shadow Minister John Healey wrote a letter to 295 Lib Dem council group leaders with party political content, and was duly shopped to the authorities. It was the on the issue of the Health bill – and from the same John Healey who went to the conference hoping for a massive dust-up and appeared a little surprised at the mature discussion he witnessed. He has repaid the cost of headed paper and pre-paid envelopes, and when he was slapped on the back a second time, also managed to cough up the cost of lasering the letters.
After a fair bit of ill-tempered arguing, which appears to boil down to Healey saying the rules shouldn’t apply to him because he is a front-bencher, the shadow minister was ultimately ordered to apologise to the House.
And the moral of the story? a) don’t break the rules and b) don’t break them in front of a group of people with a ready made motive to dob you in!
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