Smokey the Magnificent

As some of you may know, I’m a vague, lazy adherent to Traditional Foodism, aka the Weston A Price Foundation system of nutrition. Of late I have decided to step it up a notch, and thus rashly made a pledge in the presence of my online peers to:

• eat fish twice a week
• eat organ meats once a week (and a tablespoon of liver hidden in a largeish lasagna counts - what am I, Wonder Woman?)
• eat yoghurt five times a week
• and consume chicken broth in some form three times a week.

Fish twice a week is a tad pesky, as I don’t drive and only go to the supermarket once a week. I might have to buy frozen, which is problematic because Helpdesk Man once violently hurled after eating some frozen fish - and even though I’m pretty sure it was coincidental, it causes him to view all iced seafood with a rheumy and skittish eye. I cannot blame him, really. I ate a kebab once with little bits of carrot in, and - well, we shall not speak of it. Anyway, apparently fish roe is the most nutrient-dense form of seafood, followed by shellfish, but I simply cannot bring myself to look a mussel in the eye, and the snortlepig made friends with some at the supermarket the other day (”Bath! A having a bath!”), so fish it is. Fissssssh.

So, yup. Tomorrow the lawn-mowing man will be upon us with his claw outstretched for the taking of lucre, so I have to get up early in the morning and walk the piggie to the butcher’s (not as terrible as it sounds). Helpdesk Man is away on Monday nights, so… let’s see here…

Monday: Pasta for dinner, go to butcher’s in morning, get cash out for lawn-mowing man, make hot cross buns for in-laws. Yoghurt for breakfast. Get Helpdesk Man to charm the chappie at work into putting free bus credits on my bus card, which is running out (he thinks the snortlepig is cute in the face - v handy, thrift-wise). Chicken soup for lunch. Try to finish knitting the snortlepig’s other wristlet.

Tuesday:  Yoghurt for breakfast. Go into town and buy wool to knit this top for the snortlepig. Get library books. Stop in at supermarket on the way home and buy fissssh. Fissssh for dinner. Wait, smeg. Mum’s homeschool choir is having its first performance at a rest home, and I am expected to attend for reasons of dubious usefulness. Do the shopping in the afternoon, then. Or whenever the performance isn’t. When is it? Then my choir practice at night. Gotta make something. Something bananoid, gotta use them up. Yus. Defrost gravy beef and liver.

Wednesday: Yoghurt again. Make something crockpoid with the gravy beef, incorporating a minute, token amount of liver. Soak rice. Chicken soup for lunch.

Thursday: Shopping with sister-in-law. Buy fish! Eat fish. Red fish. Blue fish. Have rice with the fish, cooked in chicken stock.

Friday: Date night with Helpdesk Man, a concept that has become laughably meaningless of late, but which will probably involve eating steak on the couch and watching the A-Team while the snortlepig kicks us in the face. Must ask Helpdesk Man what he wishes to eat sometime before Thursday, so as to buy it from the supermarket again. Yoghurt again - by this time, gut is teeming with iridescent life to the point where we will probably cancel Saturday altogether in order to sprint a half-marathon.

Wait. On Friday my practically-nearly-only-brother-in-law will be staying the night in honour of Easter. I shall have to ask my sister what he eats. It better not be fisssh.

At some point during this whole protein-laden debacle, I should also finish sewing the snortlepig’s spotty winter top, query a couple of print articles and write a few more for the web. And clean the light shades, on which flies have rudely throomed. Also experiment with a sugar-salt-water syrup, which tonight I used on my hair admixed with henna as a moisturising agent, but which needs to be more scientifically tested next time I wash it.

K.

Of the three candied bacon ice cream eaters, one was enthusiastic, one mildly so and one not. So there you have it. I’m not sure I’ll make it again, partly because it was rather labour-intensive; but I might make candied bacon next time I go on a hike, ie. in about ten years.

My article about FAM is done and handed in. Woot.

Today I just fulfilled a long-put-off vague desire and made panna cotta. White chocolate panna cotta. I’m not sure about it. I like custard and milky things and white chocolate, but on the other hand the simplicity of the recipe makes ot starkly apparent that it is basically solidified milk. We will see.

More excitingly, I am trying my hand as a conductress this afternoon. Well, a semi-conductress. Like silicon. Or silicone, I suppose, being the feminine variant. Never mind. Anyway. My mother has started up a homeschool choir, and I will be doing vocal exercises at its inaugural meeting today at church. The choice of location was fraught with politics, as Mother did not wish the choir to be exclusively for Christians; but there are too many kidlings to have it at someone’s home and our church has a very decent piano. The decor isn’t that oppressive - no gold eagles or stained glass or anything - but we will see.

What’s more of an issue is the songs. In case you have never interacted with homeschooling parents en masse, they tend to be - how shall I put this? - intense. “Live and let live” isn’t necessarily their motto. “This isn’t a hill I want to die on” is not something they say a lot. “Meh” is not in their vocabulary. Confronted with an innocent peanut butter sandwich, the average homeschooling parent will immediately wrestle five moral/ethical/ecological issues out of it, ranging from disadvantaging peanut-allergic children to objecting to the non-organic nature of the bread*, and will probably call for its immediate ritual incineration. On a good week, letters to the local paper will accompany the process.

The upshot of all this is that finding neutral and inoffensive songs for the 5-16 age range is a very, very difficult task. Mother has stated at the outset that Christmas carols will be part of the programme, but otherwise she wishes to avoid religious songs (otherwise what will happen? The Catholic mothers will want their little angels to sing Ave Maria, that’s what’ll happen. In the chapel of a Reformed Baptist Church. And we don’t even want to think about that.) Which leaves… what?

Do Re Mi, pretty much. Double Trouble from the Harry Potter films? Vetoed due to witchcraft. Blackbird by the Beatles? Vetoed due to drugs and immoral living. Anything from the Disney canon? Vetoed because, well, it’s the Disney canon. Puff, the Magic Dragon? Vetoed because, obviously, it’s a metaphor for getting high. Somewhere Over the Rainbow? Mother, nervously: “I’m not sure… it does have witches in it…”

To put this in perspective, Mother knows a homeschooling lady who pulled her children out of a children’s choir because one of the songs was entitled “We Love Chocolate”. Can you spot the issue? Here it is: We do not love chocolate. We love Jesus.

This promises to be an interesting afternoon.

*Plus, the owner of the store at which the bread was purchased has dubious political views. And we shouldn’t be eating non-Essene bread anyway; or, perhaps, we shouldn’t be eating grains at all, because humans were designed to forage for raw fruits and nuts only, but not in an evolutionary way.