Tag: husband

Anchovy butter

I think I may have run out of things to say. This is a bit worrying as I’m supposed to be writing another book. I’ve actually got to write this one, as well, from beginning to end. All brand new.

Yet as I sit here, watching the delightful April snow falling outside my window, drinking a Frijj chocolate milkshake and luxuriating in the Aeron desk chair I have stolen out of my husband’s office next door, I find that I have nothing to say.

There’s just nothing on my mind. Actually that’s probably not true. I’m thinking about those Philpott children, who, when they were pulled out of the fire, turned out not to wear pyjamas to bed. They wore their underwear, or jeans, or their school uniform. I mean, I’m not thinking about it in some kind of Earth Mother I-love-all-little-kiddies type way, it’s just been bothering me.

What else. I’m still pissed off about being pregnant, but I can’t possibly go on about that anymore, because even I’m bored with thinking about it. Anyway, the end is in sight – May 8 is my due date – and with any luck the little sucker will be early. so that’s getting on for exactly a month. Four weeks. I can do that.

The thing I’m not really thinking about, which I thought might bother me more, is that Kitty’s sleeping has gone completely up the wazzoo.

I’ve never really talked about Kitty’s sleeping before, which is unusual in any parent who writes words down for a living because normally all they can think about is how their flipping kids keep them awake all night. But Kitty always slept fine. More than fine. Freakishly fine. She went to bed at 7pm and didn’t make a sound until 7am the next morning.

This was not a thing I was going to actually say out loud to anyone, because who the HELL wants to know that someone else’s child sleeps okay?!?! (I didn’t even want to hear about how well other people’s kids sleep when mine was still sleeping.) You only want to hear that everyone else’s kids are the spawn of Satan too and that on reflection you don’t have it that bad.

Anyway ha ha ha the joke’s on me, because since Kitty turned 2 she’s basically woken up once or twice a night every night. Sometimes, like right now, she’s bunged up and can’t breathe, which wakes her up and at others she’s just wailing in her sleep (I know because I lumber in like an elephant, hair standing on end, having heard a bloodcurdling wail, only for her to be lying down, the wail subsiding to gentle snores). And sometimes she just sits up and chats loudly “Ooo! It’s all dark! Where’s my sock? What’s that noise? OH! the GRAND old DUKE of YORK….” Sometimes I am already awake with my charming gestational insomnia, sometimes she wakes me afresh. It’s always delightful, either way. (It isn’t.)

But the interesting thing is how quickly you get used to it. How being slightly under-slept all the time becomes normal. A lack of sleep or broken sleep used to be the thing that frightened me most about having children but now it’s happening to me, I find that it really isn’t that big a deal, despite a lack of sleep being terrifyingly ageing. But this has only opened up a new and exciting shopping venture for me in the anti-ageing creams aisle of Boots.

The only genuine downer is that now during the week my husband sleeps in the spare room so he’s not all broken and baggy when he’s trying to work and he then takes over from me at the weekend. And I quite miss him. Even though he snores.

Speaking of my husband, he made the most amazing thing over the weekend, which you must try. It was an anchovy butter, which I know for some of my picky-eater readers is probably about as appealing as eyeball stew or chilled monkey brains, but for anyone willing to give it a crack it is not some yucky fishy horror, it is just incredibly, like, I don’t know what the word is – I suppose savoury is it. It’s just very savoury and terrific. And I am really not that crazy about anchovies so you can approach this with confidence.

We put it all over a lot of purple sprouting broccoli but you could have it on any leafy green veg to liven it up or it would also be absolutely terrific on steak, a firm white fish like halibut or on french beans.

“the thing to be careful with is not to dollop in onto greens and leave it, because then the butter melts and you are left with an unsightly brown mess sitting atop the veg (as i discovered), so whack it on top of purple sprouting or french beans where it looks all nice, then toss it in,” cautions Giles.

It’s also very simple and very flexible in terms of amounts.

So take about:

100g butter at room temperature
1 tbsp capers
1 fresh red chilli, no seeds
5-6 anchovies

Then the easiest thing to do is chop everything except the butter up together and then mash the butter into this spicy mix using the side or a knife or a spatula.

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Coffe and hazelnut pissed cake

Stop me if you’ve heard this one already, but I only learned how to drive quite recently. I was 28 I think. Or 29. It was an absolutely ghastly experience. After a certain age, one doesn’t really have to learn new things and it’s such a relief because learning new things is awful – it’s mostly why having a baby is so horrible. I would sweat and shake before, during and after every lesson I had and used to weep and wail about how much I hated it to Giles at least twice a week.

“Just fucking do it,” he would say. “Don’t fucking quit like you quit everything else. Grow a backbone.”

I know that sounds mean but I am actually terribly tough, while simultaneously being a basket-case (if you can get your head round that), and that’s the kind of management I respond to best, alas. Just as, occasionally, if my husband is being a bit of a weed, I will say “Come on. For God’s sake pull yourself together – you’re an Englishman.” There really is no answer to that.

Where was I. Oh yes, driving. God MAN ALIVE I LOVE IT. Brum BRUUUUMMMMM!!! Out of my way, suck-ahs! It helps that my husband purchased, on the birth of Kitty, a shiny black BMW family estate that goes incredibly fast. It is designed specifically to go for long distances at Def Con II, very cheaply (it is a diesel) and I have, in my time, overtaken a convoy of boy racers in neon cars at 140mph while wearing a gilet and boot-cut jeans, without breaking a sweat. Don’t tell the filth!!!

I have racked up many miles in my beloved car in the last 16 months, but I’ve never done a really long drive. So when my very dear friend from school, Izzy, announced that she was getting married in Norfolk I said to Giles “You stay here with Kitty – I’m going to take the beemer to stretch her legs up to Great Snoring.”

(A Twitter follower tells me that a Mr Gotobed once lived in Great Snoring and I choose to believe her.)

The wedding was marvellous. Izzy looked like a goddess and laughs like Sid James. In the days leading up the event I was terribly worried that there would be a lot of frightening people from school there who would all look at me and say “Oh hii Esther [scoff, chortle, snort] what are YOU doing here…????” but in fact it was just all my old mates, and we sat about and were mean to each other and bitched about people who weren’t there and smoked fags in a twilight field.

I raced back to London the next day in my rocket car, worried about Giles and Kitty alone together – even though I had been sent a series of picture texts, which showed what a rozzlingly brilliant time they were having together without me.

But of course they were: now Kitty is really walking she’s a piece of piss and just bumbles about the house without needing any entertainment, (for now). Just incidentally, the most surreal experience you can have happens when your child has just started walking and ambles into a room you are in. And you see them out of the corner of your eye and you’re like FUCK JESUS CHRIST THERE IS AN ESCAPED CHIMP IN MY HOUSE oh no, no it’s my daughter, phew calm down everyone.

That evening, still recovering from the 3-hour-each-way drive and feeling rather smug at having left Kitty with Giles, successfully, for 24 hours, I got pissed and decided to bake a cake. The other week I made the most amazing pudding by layering leftover banana bread with Haagen-Daaz Dulce du Leche ice cream, (buy it nowit is amazing), strawberries and Pedro Ximenez sherry and have henceforth decided that one must have a cake on the go at all times for emergency puddings.

So I thought I’d give my old coffee and walnut cake another go. But I didn’t have enough butter. Or any walnuts. So I boinged drunkenly around the kitchen like a pinball, richocheting off walls and singing “Tell Out, My Soul” trying to find substitutes to the ingredients I didn’t have.

Incidentally, the bride Izzy would have been proud of my crapulence; I can tell you for a fact that she spent no fewer than three hours in the pub after school every day, (including Saturdays as Westminster is technically a boarding school), and got A+ and “Excellent” in red pen on everything she did. Needless to say I slaved away like a terrified spod and was still totally average at everything.

Anyway I learned this from my drunken cake excursion:

it is not ideal to substitute vegetable oil for the ground nut oil you don’t have, to sub for the butter you don’t have either. Not ideal. But possible. There is the merest hint of chip fat about things if you use straight veg, rather than ground-nut oil, but it’s possibly less noticeable if you don’t know that that’s what you’re tasting.

So, what you do with this cake is weigh out the eggs (2 or 3 – or even 4, depending on how big you want the cake) and then mix with the same weight of flour and sugar and butter (and coffee and other stuff – see “Coffee and Walnut cake” for details). But I only had 60g of butter, so I made up the rest in vegetable oil. Like I said – not perfect, but totally fine in a dire/drunk cake emergency.

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gordon ramsay ribeye recipe

Onion and gruyere tartquiche

My husband and I have been at each other’s throats recently. It happens sometimes and there is usually a period of a few days when we simply cannot exchange a civil word.

I, of course, think it’s because my husband is a fucking arsehole. And he maintains it’s because I’m such a cold, horrible bitch – times a hundred at the moment because I am pregnant and therefore “barely able to tolerate” his presence.

In actual fact, these rocky patches are so short and intense that it feels more like some sort of bad planetary alignment.

But the bad cosmic voodoo is not helped by the fact that we are both irritable shitbags and very good at saying very mean things to each other. Sometimes arguments are like an arms race, us firing the very horriblest things we can at each other, he culminating in something about me being boring and fat and me asking him if it isn’t time he went to see his shrink.

I, of course, think it cannot possibly be me. I am not grumpy, I am just bravely tolerating the horror that is pregnancy. But after a period of quiet reflection, I think maybe I do play a part in these marital breakdowns.

On paper, I probably come across as reasonably chatty. But in real life I often don’t say terribly much – I am conversational in bursts but most of the time, I am quite quiet. And I sulk. And fume.

I live in my head quite a lot, I suppose, whereas my husband lives his life out loud. He could never, for example, have an affair and keep it secret because at some point, while emptying his brain out through his mouth, he would just confess it.

So if I do something annoying he will tell me in plain language what I am doing that is annoying, (coughing, clearing my throat a lot, leaving the car unlocked, interrupting him, blatently glazing over while he is talking etc), whereas if he does something annoying, (leaving me to clear away his cereal bowl, not understanding that giving Kitty her lunch or tea ALSO involves wiping down the bloody highchair), I don’t say a word – I just rage internally about it. And it’s not impossible that this rage, suppressed, translates itself to frostiness and unpleasantness.

Marriage is played out so much in the domestic sphere, especially when you have children, that is it very difficult not to focus and obsess about small matters, like cereal bowls and irritating coughs. I often fail to take my own advice in these situations, which is to think immeditely about the nice things one’s husband does that cancels out the need to wipe down a highchair.

Like how my husband does bathtime, on his own, every night. I’ve always taken this for granted but I am now aware that other men do not do this. Some because they can’t because they work long hours, but some because they just don’t want to deal with the screaming and the bending over and the sweat and the toothbrushing and so they magically manage to walk in the door at 7.20pm every night.

I also never see a bill for anything, I live an entirely paperwork-free life untroubled by insurance, tax, mortgages or credit card statements; someone else looks after the garden; I haven’t taken out the bins or touched a recycling bag for 5 years; I get to give birth in any private London hospital of my choosing.

And there’s me moaning on about the occasional cereal bowl. I think Giles is right. It’s not him: it’s me.

So to make amends I made Giles a tart. Not a tart though, really, in the end – much more of a quiche.

I felt terribly grown-up making this because it felt very French, very accomplished. Like one really ought to know how to talk to the Queen, get out of a sports car and make a quiche.

It was also the first time that I have successfully blind-baked something and I am NO LONGER AFRAID!!

It was an onion and gruyere tart and it was absolutely terrific and I really recommend it – especially if you are racking your brains for good mass-catering buffet lunch solutions as we stare down the festive season like it’s the barrel of a shotgun.

Onion and gruyere quiche
make about 8 picnic-sized pieces

1 23cm flan tin. Ideally with a removeable base but don’t fret if not. Most flan tins are 23cm, but this is reasonably important so if it looks to you at a vague guess like much BIGGER or SMALLER, then you might have to think again
1 packet shortcrust pastry from the excellent and life saving Jus-Roll
3 large onions, sliced as thinly as you can
200ml double cream
3 eggs (I know, rather a lot)
salt and pepper
200g gruyere, grated
50g parmesan, grated
some thyme leaves – maybe 10?
50g butter

Preheat your oven to 180C

1 Cook your onions on your lowest available heat setting with the butter and a large pinch of salt for TWO HOURS. I know this is a long time, but you just put it on the thing and forget about it.

2 Roll out the pastry and lay it in the flan tin. Trim the excess and then line with paper and then baking beads or beans or whatever. You can ALSO use cling film for this. I was worried that it would melt but it doesn’t. Use a triple thickness of film to line the pastry and then pour in the beads.

3 Bake this for 15 mins then take out the paper/film and beads and cook for another ten minutes.

4 Mix together your now gloopy sticky onions with the double cream, beaten eggs, cheeses, pepper, (the onions will already be quite salty), and thyme leaves.

5 Pour into the pastry case and bake for 30 mins.

Really delicious with a winter coleslaw or any kind of cold, sharp salad.