Smokey the Magnificent

Made multi-grain bread for Helpdesk Man’s breakfasts; started foccacia for tomorrow’s lunch; made banana muffins for Mother. Made pasta with red wine sauce for dinner, made puff pastry and from thence, palmiers with my small sister. Hung out washing. Did two loads of dishwasher. Cleaned stove. Dressed self and snortlepig. Went to Mother’s and looked at someone’s photos of her trip to Disney World. Fantasised much about visiting there myself. Posted Suite article. A moderately productive day.

The puff pastry performed admirably, rising to glorious heights and flaking into as many layers as could be wished. The custard squares as a whole weren’t quite as successful, though. They tasted good, but I was unable to replicate the rubbery solidity of bakery custard squares. Instead it made a thickish custard that promptly squoze out the sides when I tried to cut them. Any ideas? Helpdesk Man suggested using gelatine and it may come to that, but I don’t quite fancy the idea. Maybe I could try doing a baked custard - they tend to be firm and cuttable. Sort of a Spanish flan deal which I then slapped between puff pastry and iced. It seems tedious though, and none of the recipes I’ve found suggest it. Maybe Firm and Upright Custard is simply not reproducible by the home cook, being comprised of chemicals too vile to name. I suspect that is the case… but I like Firm and Upright Custard. A conundrum.

Took the pig to Lollipop’s Playland on Saturday. It’s an indoor play area thingy with a ball pit, bouncy castle, tunnels and so on. The pig had a marvellous time, although much of it was spent in examining, dropping and laboriously finding again (and again and again) a number of large sequins which had presumably fallen off some child’s clothes. In between times she amused herself immensely by bouncing on the bouncy castle, stealing her aunt’s fries and trying to climb up slides in the toddler section (a vulgar and loutish practice of which I disapprove). When we left at the end I was surprised at her biddability, vaguely expecting a tantrum… and then we discovered she still had the sequins clutched firmly in her fat wee hand.

Right, well, this week’s challenge is to be productive. Because I have things to do, including sorting out some drearily soul-sucking matter with the IRD (turns out throwing away letters from them on the grounds that one is not really into taxes and finds the whole process sordid isn’t as sound a financial plan as one might think); binding a quilt; hastily making some summer tops for the snortlepig; and plowing through a huge number of books, DVDs and CDs lent to me by various folk who want them back. And I need to write more articles, of course. I keep getting behind on my Hair Care articles - once a week comes around more often than expected.

So anyway, I am reluctantly allowing myself no internet again this week, except for email and work-related purposes. Hopefully I’ll either do useful things out of boredom or read some of my borrowed books instead.

Question: If you were going to sing an a cappella medley of TV theme songs, other than Friends and Scrubs and Charles in Charge, what would you pick? It would need to be something that matched those three fairly well in tone, so not the Enterprise theme (which is weedy and pathetic anyway) or the lyricised version of M*A*S*H* or anything.

Today I made puff pastry, a feat I had only attempted once before in my short yet poignant life. It was Helpdesk Man’s idea: he wants me to learn how to make custard squares. Always the champion of my self-improvement, that man.

If you’ve never made puff pastry, I warn you the process is quite daunting. It requires, among other things, shaping the pastry into a Maltese cross, folding it into an origami crane and scoring a reverse swastika on the base, while throwing salt over your left shoulder and pounding the butter with the scapular of a virgin. I’m not sure mine is all it should be - I think I turned the pastry nor’-nor’-east instead of nor’-nor’-west after its second chilling and muffed the hospital corners - but we will not find out until tomorrow, because tonight the oven was occupied with making little punkin loaves for a coworker of Helpdesk Man. (Eagle-eyed readers may notice* that I made this same item last week for the same coworker. I did, but she omitted to pick them up through a technological malfunction and we ate them during the week. Such is life.)

On the cancer front, apparently Muv’s doctors have piffled to a halt with the vague consensus that the cancer is probably all gone and they may not need to remove the thyroid after all. Which is a bit of an anticlimax, but there can be worse things in life, like having your unsuspecting thyroid torn from its parent gullet.** Anyway I hope all is well; that is, I hope they are basing their she’ll-be-right attitude on Medical Science and not, say, a golfing tournament. (”Wait, didn’t we have Mother the Magnificent on the 19th? Thyroid thing. Curses. Wait… how much of that malignant cyst did we remove? Ehhh, it’ll do. She’s a tough nut.”)

*Or not, because I can’t remember if I actually blogged about it. I blog a lot in my mind, sometimes. It’s called, um, thinking.

**Sorry, Mother.

So the gluten-free week didn’t really pan out. We tried, but other than not actually serving bread at dinner it was all a bit of a sham. Without any medically compelling reason not to put chicken stock powder in the rice, who wouldn’t? Other than vegetarians and the kinds of classy Traditional Foods individuals who get around to making real stock, of course.

The domesticity angle was less of a dead loss; I semi-kinda-sorta deep-cleaned one day, and the floor actually stayed clean for some hours together. It turns out that the snortlepig is an enthusiastic domestic servant; she vacuumed and wielded the broom with diligence and intimidation, and at one point I came across her dutifully scrubbing the toilet. (Against all known house rules, of course, but what is one to do? She had both lids up and was using the toilet brush expertly. Surely one can’t be expected to discourage that sort of thing?)

So anyway, in light of last week, this week I will continue being domestic using a handy system I devised on Friday with a piece of paper and a spark plug. To wit, I left time management and decision-making in the hands of the gods. I drew a wheel on a piece of paper with categories in various spokes, like “Eat something healthy”, “Do something organisational” and “Read to the snortlepig”. I then spun the spark plug as the whim took me and followed its dictates. Don’t obsess about the spark plug, it isn’t important - one could as easily use a ballpoint pen or a human femur or whatever, it just happened to be what the pig was eating at the time. Anyway it worked, so I’m gonna do that again this week. K?

And now for the sixty thousand dollar question: Say that as punishment for your misdeeds you were forced to consume a date scone, one of whose dates was in fact a cockroach. Would you rather eat the one scone, knowing that the cockroach was interred in its depths; or eat a scone a day for a month, never knowing which one was infested?

Oh, and another thing. If you saw a Double Irish Chain quilt made with these fabrics, would you go “Ooo” or throw up a little in your mouth, or undergo any reaction between said extremes? It seems most Irish chain quilts are quite stark, with green “chains” and a white background, and I don’t like that; but I was planning to go for a softer look, with the background colours being the pale pinks and creams and the chains being green flanked by darker pink, with some kind of interestingly feminine, non-severe border with more dark pink in it. It’s for the snortlepig’s bed. I was thinking of doing a thicker lap-quilt to go at the end of the bed with the leftover fabrics, too, possibly with a scalloped edge so as to further offset the geometry of the Irish chain on the bedspread. Any thoughts? (Other than “Dude, you have fifty-eight sewing projects on the go as it is, have you the brainworms?”, to which I would not take kindly.)

Would you rather write the funniest book the world has ever seen, or the saddest book the world has ever seen?

Question the First: If you spend two and a half hours cleaning the house, make a nutritious dinner and then make custard from scratch for dessert, but forget about the custard and hop in the bath while it’s cooking, does the latter incident cancel out the former industry?

Question the Second: Why do all Bond women look alike, even those of different races? (We watched Thunderball tonight, a snooze-fest if ever there was one, and I spent most of it thinking there was one too many Bond girls, because the redhead looked brunette when her hair was wet. Terribly confusing, and when I did figure it out the plot didn’t make any more sense anyway. One has to admire a director who can make a big-budget underwater scuba battle, complete with circling sharks and bombs, drearier than a wet weekend.)

Question the Third: Why, after twenty minutes of searching, did I finally find the snortlepig’s other boot curled up inside Helpdesk Man’s laptop under the bed? Why would it be there?

Question the Fourth: Anyone know a mnemonic device to remember the difference between infra- and supralapsarianism? I always get them confused. I did, however, learn one yesterday for remembering the difference between stationery and stationary, not that I have a problem in that regard anyway. BA, innit. But according to the IRD lady, “E for envelope”. (”And A for automobile”, mused I immediately, being of quick-witted and of sharp mind.) Cunning, no?

So Deb tagged me as a Kreativ Blogger - and I’m with you on that, Deb, I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. Here we go, then. Deb’s blog is Green V-Neck, a literary endeavor I am happy to endorse because a) her header contains the phrase “foundation garment” and b) just this week she blogged so eloquently about her child throoming on her Blackberry to its ultimate destruction. Plus, she tagged me and them’s the rules. And we all know if you ignore memes, ten of your love ones will die. (And what with the cancer thing and my sister getting hit by a car the other day*, this is no time to take chances.)

Seven Things I Love:

1. Vanilla essence.

2. The high note Tracie Thoms hits at 2:58 in this song:

3. That feeling you get when you really, really really need to finish a book but it’s too late at night and you can’t keep your eyes open, and when you wake up in the morning you try to reach for it before your eyes are open, and grudge every minute of extra sleep you need in order to keep reading. I haven’t had that for a while, unfortunately; used to happen all the time when I was a kidling. Of course I’m currently reading “More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology From the Open Hearth to the Microwave“, which, while in fact very interesting in its own way, hardly inspires the sort of die-hard fanaticism that afflicts one as a youth discovering The Princess Bride for the first time.

4. Job 38-42.

5. Maple syrup.

6. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

7.

I’m here supposed to pass the meme along to my seven favourite blogs: but you know, I’m not entirely sure I have seven favourite blogs; I don’t read any on a fanatically regular basis, and those I do are mostly big swanky ones like Pioneer Women who probably eat memes for breakfast. So, tough. If my loved ones perish, they perish. ** (Should I read more blogs? Is this like the thing where websites tell you you can win a trip to Tahiti if you sign up ten of your friends, and you count them up and realise you can only summon about six who would greet you in the supermarket with anything approaching genuine enthusiasm, and four of them you haven’t been in contact with for a year and might possibly have had a baby in the interim, you think you recall hearing from your sister who knows these things, even though she lives on the other side of the world and wasn’t in their class at school?)

*Sprained her ankle, apparently. Not the same leg she recently broke by tripping on a pebble on the beach while getting lost trying to find the ferry; the other leg, because a car “wasn’t there and then suddenly was”. I have sympathy, because I’m a noble and beneficent person, but at times I start to wonder if the gene pool is trying to tactfully crowd her out.

** Sorry, Mother.

I put some closeup photos up on Craftster also.

…is to atone for my housewifely and culinary deficiencies of last week, occasioned by The Quilt, as a pre-emptive strike against Helpdesk Man running off with a large Swedish masseuse. So lots of cleaning - my sewing room is a sight to behold - running a bunch of long-overdue errands, and so on. I also need to make some mooshy foods for Mother, who is now allowed to eat but not to chow down beefsteaks. And just to mix things up, Helpdesk Man and I are going gluten-free this week. Not for health reasons, particularly; mostly because I got a book on gluten-free cooking out of the library, in fact; but if it should give us an extra twinkle to our toes and shinier spleens, so much the better. (Or not, actually, because giving up bread and baked goods would be a heck of a nuisance.)

I also need to catch up on my Suite hair care articles and try to do something with sister-in-law before her infant makes its appearance. It will be a busy week, I think. Plus I need to finish the snortlepig’s winter top before the weather heats up unduly; and oddly, making The Quilt has inspired me to finish a flimsy I made for the snortlepig’s changing table before she was born. You’d think I’d be put off quilting forever, but no - the free motion quilting was fun, or would have been if I hadn’t been doing it at a frantic hundred miles an hour and snapping needles into my eye, and I even enjoyed the binding process.

1. So it turns out Mother has papillary thyroid cancer. We’re all being terribly British about it, and apparently if one insists on having cancer this is a good kind to have; but still though. She comes back from hospital tomorrow, but goes back in in two weeks to have iodine splashed round in her throat and her thyroid removed. Father and my small sisters are more or less drowning in church-made soup, and the snortlepig is becoming very confident at striding around hospital corridors.

2. Sister-in-law’s baby shower was yesterday, the preparations for which involved much panic and angst. I stayed up until 1AM the night before, quilting in a frantic fashion; got up at 8 to begin again, and finished the accursed thing seven minutes before the woman herself arrived to pick us up. Not a pleasant experience. One would think that quilting was a pleasant and tranquil experience, allowing one to relax and bathe the item in a warm vibesy glow of love and contentment. Not so. I swore like a sailor, broke four needles, jammed two more deep into my thumb and felt, during the hairiest moments, a great oneness with Stalin and Hitler. If inanimate objects do indeed absorb karma, the poor kid will grow up with an unexplained psychotic twitch.

Fortunately the baby shower was a success. Sister-in-law liked the quilt, and one of her friends even asked if I made them to sell (fortunately Mother-in-law, who also sews, interrupted sternly with a well-timed homily on Recouping Costs of Time before I could respond with the sort of pithy epithet only the events of the previous twenty-four hours could craft). My quiz went down well, even if sister-in-law worryingly insisted that the third stage of labour was breastfeeding; all the guests brought gluten-free food, for the sake of said s-i-l, so she didn’t miss out on any good eats; and nobody’s guesses as to the size of her tummy were so outlandish as to cause offense. Unfortunately, only one person signed the roster for making her a meal after the baby was born, and that was me. Do I simply move in circles with an overabundance of casseroles?

3. I have added “Write or edit fiction for 15 minutes” to my Points system challenge thing. Having been on a big non-fiction kick of late, both for reading and writing, I feel I should get back into the swing of things before I wake up at the age of eighty going “When I grow up I wanna be a novelist“. Incidentally, I am currently up to 173 points or thereabouts. Finishing the quilt gave me ten… a woefully low figure, entirely underrepresenting the time and mental anguish the proceeding cost, but I decided on the figure when the quilt was still in its early stages, and it would be unprincipled to inflate it after the fact. One has one’s morals.

4. Speaking of points and such, the chappie who was supposed to make my steampunk spice chest is proving woefully slack in getting the plans to me. Last I heard his father was in hospital, and he promised faithfully to get me the specs by the end of the week; but that was a few weeks ago and I dare not nag him via email, in case I found out I was Harassing the Bereaved or something.

5. Watched the movie version of Rent last night. Quite, er, something. I liked “Seasons of Love” and played it triumphantly for Helpdesk Man today, who started humming along and informed he used to sing it at school. Nobody ever lets me know these things… it’s little wonder I was 15 before I discovered Star Wars. But that is a dark story for another time.

6. Would you rather down a pint of watery gravy or find a live cockroach in your ear? I thought this one was obvious, but Helpdesk Man informs me he’d go for the cockroach. All the saner people I know say gravy - including Mother, who pointed out that having been fed strawberry-flavoured diabetic moosh through a nasogastric tube for a week, watery gravy would seem by comparison manna of the gods. (Incidentally, according to a book I read about the life of Mrs Beeton, during the eighteenth century cooks were much plagued by the love of their masters for gravy. Apparently the gentry insisted on more gravy than the average joint of meat could produce, and got very offended at the notion that gravy was a finite commodity limited by the juices of the beast in question.)

7. Well, would you rather never be able to eat steak again, or have to eat chicken at least once every day for the rest of your life?