Tag: children

Lamb sweetbreads with a parsley salad

Sam is on the mend, though still so fragile, poor mite – and so I had 20 minutes to myself this morning while my husband looked after both children downstairs.

Surfacing after a baby’s illness, (your ass entirely belongs to them as long as they are unwell), always reminds me of when I was out in Namibia with Raleigh International and every three weeks we would come back to base camp after being out on expedition.

You would unpick your hair from whatever hideous collection of clips, bands and sticks were holding it together and try and make sense of it with a hairbrush. You got actually clean with an actual long shower – with shampoo!! – in the showerblock. You dealt with neglected areas of your body – your toenails, fingernails, eyebrows, underarms. You put on clean clothes and weighed up whether or not to try to get the clothes you had been wearing for three weeks clean or to just burn them on the nearest campfire.

We would all unpack our bags and lay them out on groundsheets “Kit explosion!” we would all shout as karabiners and water steriliser sachets and walking socks and sunglasses went everywhere. I was reminded of that as I took everything out of the bag I had hastily grabbed in my flight to the Royal Free on Friday. I relocated my usual handbag and sourced from various corners of the house my wallet, my keys, lip balm, hand cream and put it in its usual spot by the front door.

A thing I did during this illness was to assiduously use hand cream. When your child is unwell an awful lot of hand washing goes on for one reason or another and your hands take the hit badly. I also have the regrettable and pretty awful habit of cuticle-picking. Pretty much at all times unless I am typing, I am harassing my cuticles. My husband hates is more than anything else in the whole world and thinks if I love them then I should stop. I tell him that it is compulsive, pathological – he says that I am just not trying hard enough. If we ever get divorced I am confident that he will cite it as unreasonable behaviour.

Anyway so if my hands actually get dry and there are bits of snaggly hangnail to actually get hold of then I can, within about 30 minutes or so, if I am anxious enough, reduce a finger or a whole hand to a bleeding, painful mess. A well-moisturised hand is harder to pick at but when there is an ill child somewhere I am likely to skip the hand moisturising part because I just can’t be bothered. Anyway this time I made sure there was a pot of moisturiser next to every sink and it made a real difference to the post-illness clear-up I tell you.

I suppose I was able to focus on this act and do it because I was less stressed by this illness than I have been about previous ones of Kitty’s. It is not that I am less anxious and concerned about Sam than I am about Kitty – it’s that I am so much less anxious and concerned about myself. I have given up fearing for my own sanity, my own free time, my own sleep, because there is no point.

The next thing I do is gingerly open the fridge and assess quite how big a shop I’m going to have to do to re-stock its ravaged contents.

My new butcher is closed on Mondays, so I can’t have the steak tartare tonight that I was thinking about having all weekend. But I can tell you about the sweetbreads we had the other week, which were terrific although I understand that this is useless to anyone who doesn’t live near a really good butcher.

I have written about sweetbreads before, but it was a long time ago and they are worth mentioning again. If you feel really squeamish about offal then I’m not going to force you to have these but to anyone inexperienced but curious, they don’t taste offall-y at all. They are very creamy and luxurious and it is good to eat the whole animal, not choice cuts – are you with me? (Though I draw the line at kidney.)

Lamb sweetbreads with a parsley salad

Some lamb sweetbreads
Flour
salt and pepper
large bunch parsley
a very small onion or shallot
lemon juice
capers

1 Rinse the sweetbreads and put them in a pan of cold, unsalted water, bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes. Set aside and leave to cool. Once they are cool enough to handle you can cut any very big sweetbreads in half if you want

2 put about four tablespoons of flour in a bowl and season heavily with salt and pepper then dust the sweetbreads in the flour and set aside

3 heat about 6-7 tablespoons of flavourless oil in a frying pan and get it nice and hot then fry off the sweetbreads for about five minutes (use a timer) until they are golden brown. you don’t have to worry about undercooking these as they have already been cooked in the hot water

4 For the parsley salad, chop up the parsley finely with the capers and a small amount of onion – add lemon juice, salt and pepper

5 This is also nice with a thin, crisp slice of sourdough toast

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Macho salad

A thing that surprised me after I got married is that people treat you differently when you’ve got a husband. I don’t know if it’s the same for men and I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I suppose the closest word that springs to mind is respect: you get more respect.

I didn’t realise that I wasn’t being treated with respect until suddenly I was getting some. Even though Giles and I were living together – even after he was my fiance, it wasn’t the same as saying “my husband.” Once you say to someone “my husband” something in their manner shifts. It is as imperceptible as any kind of prejudice, but it is there.

I had thought that our recent two rounds of building work were so trouble-free because I was better with builders, more honest and upfront and less apologetic. But I think the fact was that I had a husband. Not a boyfriend, not a live-in lover, but a husband. God only knows why it makes a difference, and maybe it doesn’t make a difference to everyone, but it made a difference to me. It’s so sad and fucked up, it says such awful things about us, as people – but I think it really might be the case that if you are married, everyone just backs off.

And I exploit it, shamelessly. “Oh” I hoot grandly but politely down the phone to anyone who’s asking for anything “my husband makes all the decisions like that. I’m afraid I simply couldn’t possibly talk to you any more about it or all the cotton wool in my head will catch fire from the friction of my three braincells rubbing together.”

It’s a terrific laugh.

Having children is more complicated when it comes to respect. Day to day, as A MUM, you get no respect at all. You’re just a nuisance with your fucking buggy and whining, pissing, shitting, puking baby/toddler. You’re in a shit mood. You very occasionally forget to say thanks when someone holds open a door because you’re in the middle of a Technicolor daydream about murdering the bus driver who was a bit mean to you just now, and you then form the basis of that person’s lifelong prejudice against mothers. “I once held open a door for this woman with a buggy,” they will say at dinner parties, “and she didn’t EVEN say thank you. I don’t know what’s wrong with women once they’ve had kids. It’s like they think they’re so special.”

It’s also tricky between women who do have children and women who don’t. You can connect, and get on and laugh at each other’s jokes. But there’s a gap there. When you are with another mother, you can get out a packet of chocolate buttons and aggressively bribe your child with them. You can stick Peppa Pig on for 2 hours so that you can sit down and bitch hard and in peace about someone else’s new kitchen extension. You can shriek “Christ another poo? What the hell is wrong with you?” to your child. You can get ever so slightly tearful because child #2 just nodded off for 20 mins in the buggy on the way home and so won’t do it’s lunchtime nap today.

You can do all that without suspecting that the child-free woman is sitting there, looking at your walls covered in scribble, or floor studded with Play Doh and ancient peas going: “Fucking hell, get me out of here,” or “Fucking hell if I had kids I wouldn’t do it like this.” Even if she is not thinking that, she might be and that causes the faintest of discomforts, like someone, not far away, playing clusters of wrong notes together on a piano.

Another mother, even if her parenting methods are completely and totally anathema to yours, will rarely, unless she is a total monster, judge you too badly for it. I mean, she will judge you, because that’s what we all do – we’re either starry-eyed with admiration (“her house is so tidy, she is so organised“) or we judge (“I don’t know how she can live like that.“) But it’s done so internally, quietly and subtly that no-one will notice, not even for a millisecond. The most powerful and detectable thought other mothers have is usually: “Whatever works for you, man.” And that is, in its own way, a sort of respect.

But society, in general, likes MOTHERS, when they are not in the way, or moaning on about being tired, or expecting anyone to admire their revolting, dim children. If you’ve got children, somewhere, then that’s a good thing. And the more you have the more people defer to you on everything. I mean, up to four children. Five or more children and people assume you have some sort of addiction.

The greatest thrill I get these days is when I am out in town without Kitty, looking extremely pregnant and I come across someone who assumes it is my first child. It might be someone with a baby, or a toddler, or just a random person who wants to acknowledge that I am up the duff (which is fine). “You all ready then?” they’ll say. Or the mother will say “you’ve got all this to look forward to.” And then I smile sweetly and say “It’s my second”. It is the female equivalent of pushing up a shirtsleeve to reveal a tattoo on the forearm that reads “légion étrangère”. Maybe it’s because I have a horror of being vulnerable, being patronised, of being weak, which could probably do with another six weeks with therapy. Or maybe, deep down, we all just want a bit of respect.

Food needs respect, too. And a thing that rarely gets any is salad. We have started eating in this house for dinner a thing I have named Macho Salad. I may have got this phrase from somewhere else, but I don’t know where. But anyway, macho salad is what it is. And what it is is a salad that will do for an entire dinner, that a man would not be ashamed to be seen eating.

It consists of assorted leaves, meat or fish, some sort of thick dressing (probably made partly with mayonnaise, or blue cheese) a good scattering of firm beans – like soya beans, maybe some shards of parmesan? Nuts and seeds (sunflower is good), avocado? Chopped or quartered egg? And of course a scattering over the top of croutons, for crunch.

Last night I made one that consisted of 3 chicken thighs roasted for 45 mins (the fourth was eaten by Kitty for her tea) and chopped, a bag of mixed leaves plus dainty strips of beetroot, cucumber, a dressing of mayonnaise, olive oil, lemon, vinegar and a lot of salt, avocado, soya beans, croutons and sunflower seeds.

We ate it while watching Friday Night Lights, feeling very butch. But then we ruined it by having an alcohol-free beer apiece. Because you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.