Tag: house

Surrendering onions

I’ve been away. I know. I have noticed. Thank you for your patience during the disruption to your service.

I’ve been terribly ill, you see. Sick, so sick. Morning sickness it is. Was. It’s over now – sort of. I still get the odd billowing wave of it, bobbing up around my solar plexus but I’m no longer a drooping, greyish figure haunting my house. Urgh. I hate – hate – people who say that horrid thing to pregnant women – “You’re not ill, you’re pregnant.” Really? Because it feels an awful lot like norovirus to me.

Anyway I feel better now. And I had my 12 week scan – just one spratling, thank god, in the right place – and so I can start moaning on about being pregnant again. The other thing that’s happened is that I’ve finished putting together that book I was talking about. In the end it really wasn’t very much work, it was just impossible to do anything feeling so sick. Ten minutes typing, 1 hour lying down, ten minutes typing, one hour lying down. SO SO SICK. I got some pills off my doctor, The Beast, in the end. I just couldn’t take it anymore. But they only took the edge off, it wasn’t like I was bouncing out of bed in the mornings.

I honestly am still reeling from how awful it was. It just wasn’t that bad with Kitty. And I wasn’t that tired either. But for the last six weeks I’ve been wiped out, asleep from 1-3pm every day. Wiped out like chalk on a blackboard. And then wake up feeling like shit. Poor old Kitty. Or rather lucky Kitty – she has eaten biscuits and watched telly solidly for six weeks. But thank god for telly. Thank GOD! What would we have done without it.

I am trying not to think too much about being plunged back into a babyhood. I am trying to look on the bright side. I must have learned something since Kitty was born. It surely won’t be as awful as it was. I don’t want to go mad again, I really don’t.

It has to be different this time – for one, Kitty was brought home to a house that didn’t have any children in it. It was a grown-up house, really quite spooky in a lot of ways – silent and strange and unfit for a baby. These days it has a chattering lunatic nearly-two-year-old in it, dropping crumbs and kicking balloons and watching telly and running from one end of the house to the other for no reason other than youthful high spirits. The changing mat now has its own room, rather than squatting on the kitchen table. The kitchen extension means that everyone can slob about in the kitchen, rather than me being at the stove, running out every ten seconds into the living room to make sure everyone’s okay.

And maybe I’m different. Broken in, broken down. Resigned. Institutionalised. Used to that special sort of monotony you get with small children, so intense particularly in babies. My expectations from life are different now. I am surrendered, like onions.

Surrendering onions is a slow but pleasing task. It is what you do if you want very soft, aromatic, almost creamy onions (for an onion gravy for example, or a tangle alongside some sausages) and the trick is to cook them for a good 1.5-2 hours on the lowest heat on your smallest available burner.

You slice them into rings, reasonably thinly and scatter them in a pan with some oil – and butter, if you like. Then sprinkle over a generous pinch of salt and put a lid on and leave them. Do not turn the heat up and do not poke them about too much. Take the lid off if at any point the onions start to even think about sizzling. Towards the end of the cooking time, the onions will almost in a matter of seconds collapse into themselves – they will surrender. I can’t help but think of motherhood like that. But not in a bad way.

Mushroom Kale Lasagna Rolls

Lasagna rolls are delicious and make perfectly portioned meals. I usually fill them with spinach in my popular spinach lasagna rolls^[1] but have been thinking of trying them with kale for a while. I can’t think of a better way to eat kale! These were wonderful, everyone in my home loved them and I will certainly be making them again. Try them for meatless Mondays!

Sorry I haven’t posted much this week. Hurricane Sandy did so much damage here on Long Island, and we are still without power. Many of my friends and neighbors lost their homes and cars, so I am grateful for the temporary inconvenience, I know it could have been a lot worse. It may be a while before we get our power back, but luckily I have a small generator which gives us just enough power to keep our refrigerators on, and limited access to some internet and television.

There is certainly no short supply of food in my house, thank God so we’ve been cooking up a storm! It’s also the only way to keep the house warm as the temperature has been dropping and keep my sanity. If you make these, I would love to know how you enjoyed them!

Mushroom Kale Lasagna Rolls
gordon-ramsay-recipe.com
Servings: 10 • Serving Size: 1 roll • Old Points: 4 pts • WW Points+: 6 pts
Calories: 258.5 • Fat: 8.4 g • Fiber: 3 g • Protein: 11.5 g • Carbs: 30.5 • Sugar: 2 g
Sodium: 208 g (without salt)

Ingredients:

10 (9 oz dry) lasagna noodles, cooked
2 1/2 cups marinara sauce
5 cups kale, stems removed, chopped fine
8 oz mushrooms, chopped fine
1 tsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
15 oz part skim ricotta cheese (I like Polly-o)
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 egg, whisked
salt and fresh pepper
3 oz (10 tbsp) part-skim mozzarella cheese, shredded

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°. Ladle about 1 cup sauce on the bottom of a 9 x 12 baking dish.

Place kale in a food processor and pulse a few times until chopped.

In a large saucepan, heat oil over medium heat. Add garlic and sauté until golden, about a minute. Add kale, salt and pepper and sauté about 5 minutes. Add mushrooms to the pan, cook until soft, an additional 5-6 minutes. Adjust salt and pepper.

Combine cooked kale, mushrooms, ricotta, Parmesan cheese, egg, salt and pepper in a medium bowl.

Place a piece of wax paper on the counter and lay out cooked lasagna noodles. Make sure noodles are dry. Take 1/3 cup of mushroom kale mixture and spread evenly over noodle. Roll carefully and place seam side down onto the baking dish. Repeat with remaining noodles.

Ladle 1 cup of sauce over the noodles in the baking dish and top each one with 1 tbsp mozzarella cheese. Put foil over baking dish and bake for 40 minutes, until cheese melts.

Makes 10 rolls. Serve with extra sauce on the side.

References

^{^} spinach lasagna rolls (www.gordon-ramsay-recipe.com)

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Breaded scallops

Before we got married Giles would, every so often, disappear off to have lunch with a friend, huffing and puffing as he bundled out of the house, always in a fluster, worried he was late, barking on about how he didn’t want to go and god why did he agree to have lunch with anyone when he’s so busy… the last thing he would say to me, as he returned for the fourth time for some forgotten item, was that he’d be home at 3.30pm and we’ll have beans on toast tonight and watch an episode of whatever boxset we had on the go.

And then, without fail, he would go on a massive bender and not come home until 4am, calling at various points in the evening to say that he was just about to get in a cab, and then turning round and going back to the bar for another two hours before ringing again. “No really I am this time… I got distracted by that bloke, you know, that one with the face… I couldn’t find a cab… I’m coming.. on my way… [muffled] one gimlet please, Geoff…”

I used to get incredibly pissed off about it. It made me feel like such an idiot. And also, when he rang at midnight to say he was getting in a cab and then still wasn’t home by 2am, I would worry. Wouldn’t you? My husband never tells lies usually – there was no reason why I wouldn’t assume he was telling me the truth about the cab. I didn’t have a problem with him going out all night – who cares? – but why not be honest about it and I’ll make plans, too? Once or twice I’d even made him a nice dinner and had it waiting when I’d get phonecall no.1 of the evening from him, declaring that he was just getting in a cab and the dinner would sit there sadly until morning.

It took me a long time to get my head round how my husband really didn’t think he was going to go on a bender, even though it would have been obvious to undiscovered pygmy tribes that that’s where he was headed. I didn’t understand how he could genuinely actually feel like he didn’t want to go out and yet then, after merely spying a corkscrew tucked into a waiter’s apron, find himself weaving his way home at dawn, usually having lost his shoes but with his pockets stuffed full of £50 notes, which he’d won on Blackjack, somewhere – he could never remember where.

In the morning, he would tear at his hair and tremble and shriek about what an awful time he’d had, how terrible he was feeling and how he was never, ever going to leave the house again. Wretched confessions rolled out; he’d passed out on the stairs, in a ditch, in a doorway, he woke up and someone was taking his photo with a bloody iPhone, he spoke for hours passionately to that awful bloke with the face.

He was reformed, changed. It was over between him and late nights. And then it would happen all over again.

After a good year of this sort of nonsense, I realised that the thing to do when Giles had finished his work for the week and was off out for lunch of a Friday, was to ignore his protestations that he’d be home at 3pm, make up the spare room, dig out some takeaway menus, pick a film to watch and settle in for a nice night in on my own. Once I went out with friends without telling him, got reasonably drunk myself, came back in the small hours and was STILL in bed before he stumbled in.

He’s much better about all this since we had Kitty. But the thing is, unless my husband goes on out a bender every so often, he goes a bit mad.

He will claim, over and over again, that all he wants to do is bath Kitty, make dinner, watch something on the telly and go to bed and read his book. But after a straight 6 weeks of this, he starts to lose it and fray round the edges. If he was a parrot, he would start pecking out his feathers. He becomes catty, stroppy and unmanageable. He mopes about the house like a depressed King Kong. He starts wailing “Are we just going to go to bed at 9.30pm every night for the rest of our lives??”

At which point, I send him off out of the house and tell him not to come back until morning. Like on Thursday, when he left the house at 12.30pm for lunch and didn’t come back until 3.30am. He’d had strict instructions to sleep in the spare room but he decided that this was not on and so came in and got into bed, waking me up. Then he woke me up further at 5am when he needed to wee, battering the door jamb with unsteady shoulders and stepping heavily on both outward and homeward journey on the really creaky floorboard that we both hop over in the night (when sober).

The next morning he was as contrite and pliable as a feverish child, his eyes trembling with pain as he tried to recall exactly what happened to him between 8pm and 3am. “And I think I’ve lost my black jumper,” he said, sadly. “I’m sorry I’m such a terrible person,” he added, wringing his hands together.

And just like that, he will be good as gold for at least a fortnight. Tee hee.

But when he is not on a bender, or revving up for a bender – and is instead feeling uxorious, he often cooks for us. I am a terribly resentful cook, finding the whole thing an awful drag as I do it all the time, while my husband revels in it, when he has the time to do it, and cooks generously and imaginatively.

Anyway the other night he made us a starter of breaded scallops, which he found in Nigel Slater’s fast food and they were really great

1 clove of garlic, crushed
finely grated zest of one lemon
3 tbs chopped flat leaf parsley
75 room temperature butter
black pepper
1 quantity of scallops – about 3 handfuls small ones?
1 beaten egg
fresh breadcrumbs or medium matzoh meal would work just as well
butter and groundnut oil for frying

1 Mix the garlic, zest and parsley into the butter and season with black pepper

2 Dip the scallops into the beaten egg and then roll them in breadcrumbs

3 Heat some oil and butter in a pan until you have about a cm in the pan. Heat until hot and then fry off the scallops for about 3 mins each side. Set aside

4 Chuck out the oil and butter and then heat your garlic/parsley/butter concoction and spoon over your scallops when midly frazzed and melty – about 30 secs.

Eat and wash down with an Alka Seltzer.

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gordon ramsay scallops