Tag: everyone

Ham and cheese croquettes

You know those times when you actually feel, despite everything, quite organised? When the house seems reasonably tidy – old sandwiches do not fall out of jigsaw boxes etc – babysitters have been booked in advance for important events, everyone has enough clothes of the right size, one’s phone is charged and you know what everyone is having for tea tonight. That feeling?

I am having the opposite of that feeling. I feel like I am in a vortex of vague, a fog of ummmmm. I look at the clock and I am baffled as to how it’s that time already, or Oh Fucking Christ it’s only 8.20am. I look in the freezer for food for Sam and realise it’s all gone. But didn’t I only just cook up a massive batch of thingy to put in here? I sit down to do an Ocado order and realise I didn’t bring my shopping list to the computer. So I get up to go and find it but then the doorbell rings, and I deal with whoever it is and then I shut the door and turn and I find myself in the hallway wondering what to do next.

So I stand about humming a bit, eyeing some cobwebs in high, far corners and then remember “The Ocado!” and dash to my computer and sit down… now *pat pat pat* where is my little list…. it’s like this all the time. I feel drunk, unsteady on my feet – what is that bloody pile of junk doing there, still? – I feel like I am slurring my words but I’m not. I can’t describe where things are, I forget what month we are in, what day it is. I’m like Johnny 5, but not alive. Show me a rorschach and I will say “Who’s going to clean up that fucking mess, then? Me?!”

Meanwhile Kitty, on holiday from nursery, sits in a corner with no pants on “doing stickers” with a painless nosebleed that has gone unnoticed by everyone including her and she has smeared a scarlet streak across her face from nose to ear. My stomach lurches as I pluck out wet wipes to dab at her face while she claws me away. Tiny sticky ballerinas, flowers, bumblebees are scrunched in the crevices of her tense restless grubby hands; a pirate swings crazily about, scaling the rigging of her fringe – a bear holding a briefcase is plastered to her vest.

I smell, again, that faint but unholy stink in the air that everyone has decided is a dead mouse under the floorboards. They look at me accusingly. Why have I allowed the mouse to die and decompose under the floorboards? What am I doing to rectify this situation?

What have I been doing? What it feels like I have been doing for the last three years is tidying up the kitchen only for it to be a total fucking dump the next time I look at it. WHO IS MAKING ALL THIS MESS???? Is it me? Is it Sam who now wants to feed himself with a spoon and is actually quite good at it but also dumps a reasonable amount on the floor, too? Is it my husband, who is back from America briefly before he goes again on some day in the future, the distance away from now a thing I cannot possibly compute? Who is it? WHAT IS HAPPENING???

I think it is a combination of my husband being back from America and Kitty being at home from nursery. Neither of them are particularly troublesome on their own but I am the lightning rod, the buck stops with me. The tiny cogs that turn and make up their lives – that’s me, too. Loo roll, toothpaste, lunch, clean pyjamas, clean pants, shoes in the right place, a rucksack with water, snacks and spare pants to take to the zoo. Me. Enough detergent to wash the pants. Me. Dinner tonight, me. So one extra person around during the day, let alone two, means about 4,000 more cogs to attend to.

I don’t want to sound like a martyr, it’s fine, I don’t mind doing it, but I don’t seem to be able to do it properly. The thing is that when you spend your life dealing in tiny details, (“are there anymore bulldog clips so I can close this just-opened packet of pasta?”, “mum can I have another sticker page?”, “could you post these letters if you’re going up the road?”, “can I have some water?”, “we need a babysitter for Thursday”), you live your life in five minute chunks. And when you do have an hour alone, you so expect to be interrupted any second now with a request, an emergency, a doorbell, a phonecall, that you cannot settle to anything. You rack your brains to think of what you ought to be doing right now and you cannot think. You just cannot think. You stare out of the window at the sunshine and then turn back to the clock and it is fifteen minutes later. Fuck!

Then just as your husband walks in the door with your three year old a cold hand squeezes your heart as you remember that you forgot, on your little sally up the road for a few things, to get anything for lunch.

My husband comes off worst at times like this, as husbands tend to, and while he was back briefly from America I have him a series of panicked dinners that were so terrible that I really felt quite sorry for him and guilty, even though my husband will eat anything.

Then he went away again and Kitty went back to nursery and Sam, sensing that it was his role, now, as man of the house, to shake things up a bit, decided to go from slurping down any sort of puree you danced in front of his nose to eating only an assortment of exciting and complex finger food, the catch being that he is not especially brilliant at eating it.

I have ended up making for him the sort of dainty dinners that Giles would fall and weep with gratitude to receive from my cirrhotic hand. The other catch is that Sam will only eat it if I have fucking chewed it once first. Yes you heard me. Any challenging mouthful he points at me like “fucking chew it you mother then give it to me”. He looks at me intently, flaring his nostrils, the tips of his fingers quivering in anticipation, high on power, while I chew his bloody food and then hand it to him.

Anyway I don’t care. It goes against my entire parenting facade to do this, but there’s no-one to see.

The other thing that I have been doing while my husband is away again is trying to get both kids to eat the same bloody thing, which is harder than it sounds. But tonight they had ham and cheese croquettes with broccoli on the side, which went down really well and I recommend them to you.

I am grateful to Becky B for suggesting this to me.

Ham and cheese croquettas
makes about 6

(I’ve got no idea how echt a recipe this is, I just made it up. It works fine but the croquettes come out quite fragile – there might be a trick to making them a bit more solid but I don’t care what it is so don’t tell me.)

here we go

2 potatoes smaller than your closed fist
a handful of cheddar, grated
2 slices cheap ham, diced
garlic granules (if you like) or a very tiny amount of freshly squeezed garlic
about 25g butter
fresh breadcrumbs or medium Matzoh meal
1 egg, beaten
oil for frying

1 Chop, boil and drain your potatoes for 20 mins. Pass through a masher or a potato ricer. My husband got me a potato ricer for Christmas but I only used it for the first time yesterday and it’s AMAZING.

2 Mix the potato immediately with the butter, cheese and ham, season with the garlic and salt and pepper (depending on how you feel about giving this to kids) and then leave to cool down a bit.

3 When cool enough to handle, shape into sausage shapes, roll in the beaten egg, then in the breadcrumbs then fry for a bit each side until golden brown. There is nothing raw here that needs to be cooked, except the egg but, really, come on, so just until they’re brown will do.

Give them to your kids and watch them VANISH like a magic trick. No pre-chewing required. Then stop starting every sentence with “Has anyone seen my….?” because it’s annoying.

Incoming search terms:

Salmon courgette noodles with basil

You wouldn’t know that I get any negative comments on this blog. Because I delete them.

It’s my blog, I reckon, and I am queen of it and if I don’t want to read shit about myself, let alone publish it, then I don’t have to. Plus sometimes I think there’s something a bit tell-tale and needy about publishing mean things – “Look everyone!! Look how MEAN she was to me!” I’d rather just take the bad stuff on the chin – read, delete. Move on.

But, if you are curious as to what the negative comments I get DO say, they say “God stop moaning,” and “Why did you have kids then?” or “What did you expect?” or “You sound like a spoilt whinging child.”

I absolutely hear all that. I do – I hear you, haters! Loud and clear! I can see why you feel that way. Why DID I have children, then. Or at least, why did I have another one?

1) It’s not awful, it’s fine once you get used to it. It gets you outside. It gives a shape and a movement to your day, to life. Your own children are fascinating. They say idiotic and hilarious things, you get to revisit colouring in and stuff like that. There is a frisson of excitement at the possibility that your child might be useful to society – they might do something about world debt, or discover a cure for cancer, or just sweep the streets very efficiently.

But having very small children is also like being an Olympic athlete. You cannot do it unless there are people around you saying “Go for it, dude.”. Writing about it and getting support back keeps a spring in my step. In turn, I say what you might be thinking but cannot articulate because you are too fucking tired. I am your coach, your support boat, the bloke with the ringside towel and the weeny stool – and you mine.

2) All my life I’ve been the person who stayed behind. If there was a walk to be walked or a hike to be hiked, or shorthand to be learned or a rave to be raved or a game of hockey to be played or a ditch to be dug or a field to be sown, I was the one who opted to stay home and clear up, or make lunch. Or just not go.

As the do-ers set off, I always felt smug. Ha ha, I would think. Suckers.

But after about half an hour I was always bored. And after an hour, going crazy. After two hours, I would think – where ARE they? When are they coming back? I am lonely and fretful, unable to settle to anything, jumping at small noises. And now feel stupid for staying behind. They will be back soon. Any time now.

The do-ers would always be back a good hour after the latest I thought they would be back – and they were never really back. The experience had changed them – they were no longer the same people, they had moved on, especially in relation to me. They had had a joint experience, whether it was good or bad, and I had not been part of that.

I had dodged it out of laziness and fear, out of a desire to keep my life the way that it was (i.e. sitting about in my pyjamas in the warm) rather than offering myself up for a period of discomfort in order to put my comfort into perspective, or in order to learn something, to add something, to experience something. When the do-ers came back as far as they were concerned everything was just as it was – all the comforts, all the joys. The difference was they had enriched their lives and I had not.

I was the sucker, not them.

And so when it came to children, I was not going to be the sucker. I was not going to hang back in my pyjamas while everyone else set off with Kendall mint cake in their pockets and a stiff upper lip. I was not going to sit about twiddling my thumbs while everyone else raged over their shorthand or got their faces splattered with mud or put their feet down rabbit holes and fell in burns. I was not going to wait and wait and wait for everyone else to return, only to realise that the people I was waiting for were never coming back.

It was not the fear of missing out, you understand – I absolutely know what it is to miss out. I spent 30 years missing out. There was no fear involved: it was cold, hard understanding of what happens when you opt out. If I opted out of children I would opt out of a certain kind of family life that I would not like to be without. I would opt out of grandchildren. I would opt out of that shared experience, which is exhausting and traumatising – but not constantly. Not fatally. I would be left at home, in my pyjamas, not enjoying my book or my bath or my free time, but worried about where everyone else was, fretting that I had made a terrible mistake until it was too late to do anything about it.

And dealing with two children under 3 is nothing compared with that sort of existential crisis.

3) I did, in fact, know exactly what I was letting myself in for because not only do I have 5 nieces and nephews, my little sister was born when I was eight. I might not act like it but I think little tiny kids are always delightful and engaging, even when they are being horrible and whiney. And I know, because I watched my little sister grow up, that they are very small and difficult for such a short time, relatively speaking. In the grand scheme of things, the really hard bit is the equivalent of a long-ish Sunday afternoon walk up some hills in the rain when you’re a bit hungry.

But then you get back to the house and there are scones and a hot bath and everything’s ok. And children get to four years old and they are staggeringly brilliant fun. Nobody’s in a nappy, nobody needs a bloody sleep at 1.30pm. Everyone understands bribery etc. They have little friends…

And don’t get me started on grandchildren. I am already planning to be No 1 Granny with the campaigning cunning worthy of Napoleon. I feel sorry for the woman whose daughter marries my son. I really do. (“Noooooo!!! I want Granny Coren! I want Granny Coren!” – HA HA HA). I may still be writing this blog, except it will be called Recipe Dribble and include mostly recipes for soup.

Ok how about some food, yah? Not soup. This is a thing I cooked recently that was surprisingly nice and excellent if you’re on a diet.

It utilises a thing called Slim Noodles, which are like Zero Noodles mentioned in my previous post but vitally these things are AVAILABLE ON OCADO!!! So from now on until I weigh 9 stone again, (I am 10 stone 5 now), every evening meal will feature these. There are only 7 calories per pack. SEVEN!

This is based on the principle of my Asian Baked Salmon but I have used a different marinade because just between you and me I was getting bored of the Asian-ness of the old one. That’s not racist!!

Salmon courgette noodles with basil
for 2

2 salmon fillets
1 handful basil
2 spring onions
1/2 handful mint
some light soy sauce
1 clove garlic, peeled
1 tsp chilli flakes
1 courgette, diced into 2cm (ish) bits
1 packet Slim Noodles, or two if you are feeling wild

Preheat the oven to 200C

1) Put the basil, mint, spring onions, 2 tbsp soy sauce, garlic and chilli into a whizzer and whizz

2) Put the salmon fillets on a strip of foil long enough to make a little parcel and then paint the salmon with your basil paste

3) Put this in the oven for 25 mins

4) Meanwhile fry off your courgette die in some hot groundnut oil over a medium flame. When they are tinged dark brown and starting to collapse (about 15-20 mins) sprinkle with salt. Then drain and rinse your magic noodles and add them to the courgette. Turn in the oil for 3-4 mins and then shake over some more soy sauce.

5) Plonk some noodles in a bowl and then scoop chunks of salmon off its skin and arrange artistically on top.

Eat and try to ignore the nagging feeling that someone, somewhere, is having more fun that you.

Celebrating Memorial Day

I want to wish everyone a happy and healthy Memorial Day, and as usual, ask you to take a few moments in between bites of whatever grilled goodness you’re enjoying to remember all the chefs and cooks that serve so bravely feeding our troops in times of war.

I’ve said this before, but it’s the thank-you emails I get from our servicemen and women stationed abroad that I find the most inspiring of all. To be able to provide these heroes with a few moments of entertainment makes my otherwise frivolous existence seem a little less so. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America!

Photo above is from our No-Bake Cheesecake Flag Cake video.
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