Smokey the Magnificent

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.

…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?